I update our stats page today and re-tallied our total views count, which has become a rather lengthy process considering how many videos we have and the number of sites we have them spread across. We’re quickly nearing the 1,000,000th recorded viewing of our videos although I’m sure we passed that number a long time ago because we’ve only been keeping track since I started running the site back in August 2006 (Outpost: Coagulation Episode 1 was released in February 2005). Two of our videos have passed the 100,000 views mark (Leprechauns and Outpost: Isil Episode 1). A very large proportion of our views (about 770,000) are coming from YouTube on the shiruken343, Treeskunk Productions, or Machinima accounts. On our website alone, we’ve had about 35,471 total views and passed about 1.79 terabytes of data serving our videos to the masses. We’ve experienced a general increase in visitors to our website throughout the course of 2008 although our recent lull in episodes is mirrored in the current numbers of people visiting our site. Another fun stat that I just added is the estimated total time people have spent watching our videos. And it’s kind of astounding. People have wasted…err…spent approximately 11.966 years watching our machinima. For me that’s an astoundingly large number. If we have caused so many people to spend so much time watching our works, imagine how much time people spend watching videos on YouTube alone. And then imagine the potential all those minds could have collectively in doing something productive. It’s kinda unbelievable.

So that’s my review of our current stats, be sure to check out the pretty graphs here and our download counts here. Hopefully 2009 will be a good year and make sure you keep an eye out for the last episodes of Outpost: Isil Season 1 in late January. And be sure to have a Happy New Years!

- shiruken

We decided to go ahead and add some forums to the site again. Unfortunately our old theme no longer works in the current build of phpBB forums so I had to restyle one I found on the internet. You can see the forums here or by clicking on the new link in the navbar above. The forum has open registration and is pretty self explanatory, so if you feel like talking in there rather than in Wordpress blog comments, feel free to move your conversation over there. Of course, we don’t really care where you guys want to write but we thought the forums would be more convenient.

November 15, 2001: Microsoft released their enterprising endeavor into the videogame market with their Xbox console. Alongside the black behemoth were only a handful of release games, most importantly a game called Halo: Combat Evolved from a small game studio called Bungie. Seven years later Bungie and Halo have become household names and a multimillion dollar franchise that single-handily propelled the Xbox and Xbox 360 to the forefront of the gaming industry. For many people, Halo has only been known for a few years, predominately since the Halo 2 phenomenon. But for a select few, Halo has been a part of their lives for now seven years. I remember that night far too well because it began a long era of sleepless nights as my friends and I played the game into the earliest hours of the next day. I can’t even begin to fathom how many hours we spent shooting, fragging, capturing, and playing that amazing game. We can all agree that Halo had its problems (e.g. the pistol weapon balance) but represents what so many feel is the best game of the entire trilogy. It started the massive Halo machinima movement that began with a few people throwing together simple montages and films that eventually evolved into massive names like Red vs Blue. Now there are countless groups making videos of their own (many with lower quality than others) and even more people who enjoy watching them. Halo has brought a lot of people together into an amazing online community that has experienced incredible growth over the years. Treeskunk, and many other machinima groups, probably wouldn’t have had the chances if it weren’t for the likes of HaloTV and Halo.Bungie.org (Louis Wu) where our machinima could have an audience. We’ve all come a long way over the years, some more than others, but in the end, we can look back to that single game that caused it all and remember the good times we’ve had.

For some reason the first episode of Outpost: Isil (Rekindle the Flames) has had a massive jump in viewings on YouTube during this past week. Most of our videos average about 50 views per day but for some reason our first episode saw a spike up to over 1,000 views on November 7th, 800 on the 8th, and about 400 on the 9th. I have absolutely no idea why it’d do something like that or where the extraneous viewers came from, but hey, I’m not complaining. I guess people randomly like our video in mass quantities almost a year after it originally came out.

We at Treeskunk Productions support democracy. Therefore we are telling you to go vote. And to make your decision easier, you should vote for Freng for the next President of the United States. Unless you have a better choice of course. That said, make sure you get out and vote today if you can. If you can’t, then get your friends who can vote to go out and vote.

After all, we don’t want to have the same problems with voter turnout like the Elites did now do we?