#Stat spread

[loveisinthebat]

Peep the stats

[space-blue]

IRL Character sheet

I was chatting with friends about our various neurodivergences today and one friend in particular is staying over because life is kicking her in the shins, so I started drawing this and asked what else should be on our spectrum checker and she deadpaned 'existential dread' so here we are. Did one for each of us, but you can have your own template for personal convenience lol

That's me, drawing this as I lost the plot twice removed on what I was supposed to do! weee

Vincent insisted his recent Gortash obsession did not qualify as fandom brainrot, just brainrot, because he, and I quote "brainrots on his own". I have failed multiple times to get him into fanfic.

The template:

I hope you can appreciate the scientific accuracy of the thing

[itsheckinwes]

What are y'all's autism IVs? Feel free to nab this and fill it out >w< If anyone wants a custom one of these or some edits to this one lmk!

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Game night results (from this poll)

Character selection inspired from extraterezi's post!

[burr-ell]

it's always funny to me to see people describe percy as high int low wis because uhh.

this was him at level 10

his int and wis are the same and not only does he not have low wisdom his score gets him a +3 to wisdom-based throws and checks

he has good wisdom guys. he's just Like This

[riacte]

Alright I love love love Skizz but why did people for FALSE & Skizz instead of False & H???? What???

It is because False gets overlooked even in a False centric poll. This is a pattern. Also sorry for using your ask as a vent post lol.

I love Skizz and his energy, I think he's awesome with people, he is certainly good at the whole "duo thing" buuuut this is not a Skizz duo poll. Or even a Hermitcraft duo poll. It is a False duo poll. I think people voted for Skizz because of Skizz, not False, or even Skizz-False. Like yeah it was funny when Skizz held False hostage in the charity event. But are people voting for moments like that or do they just like Skizz in general?

This was also what I was trying to see with the False MCC poll— 17 is of course iconic as a whole, and especially for Grian, and I would definitely rank it very high in a Hermit MCC poll (possibly right behind Blue9, sorry Orange10). But False had better performances in 29 and 10, and 9 had better chemistry than 17 because she didn't really get spoken over in 9. Or 10 and 29. (Whereas in 17 it was a Thing enough for Pete to mention it afterwards apparently.) 17 has cool False moments of course— SG the one I remember the most— but people don't really bring that up. So did people vote for 17 in a False centric poll because they liked False's performance in 17 and overall team chemistry (things related to and influenced by False) or because they like 17 in general?

It is not that deep but also seeing False's diminishing relevance in the mainstream HC fandom over the years is kinda... disappointing. Someone who's never watched a hermit on MCCReddit will mention False Supremacy. HBomb's chat loves False. Like I don't even know what happened?? False has been posting regularly, always have, she does her builds and collabs and pranks and infrastructure, she won the first event of the season, outsiders love her, and...? Like don't we love our slay cool #girlboss queen of hearts? Or does she need a different fanon archetype now? The mischievous prankster? The silly wet cat? The healer type who loves animals and gives them stupid names? The competitive warrior? Would you still love me when I'm no longer the designated girlboss of the group or whatever

Like ok yeah this is me being bitchy and a gatekeeper and False isn't even the most underrated hermit and she gets her share of love in fanart and stuff but yeah I've noticed the decline. You've got Redditors mentioning Empires people in the crossover in response to someone asking about Empires but not mentioning one hermit who was actually also in Empires. You've got people talking about "Hermitgals" but they replace False and Stress with Lizzie. You've got the fallout of Demise 2. You've got Redditors talking about Rendoc in relation to Ren like his only relevance is being Doc's friend/collab buddy when False exists and she's his favourite hermit. And you've got the False duo poll. Won't even go into the view counts/ sub counts because that's depressing for what feels like at least a third of the hermits (Cubfan you deserve way more). Doesn't feel good.

Back in 2020/21 she got shat on and her achievements ignored by some DSMP fans and now the same thing is happening but it's worse because it's from some HC fans. The call is coming from inside the house. And once again False isn't even the most overlooked hermit. For example Iskall STILL gets horrific hate comments about how he doesn't "deserve" to be a hermit because he plays VH more.

Hermitcraft is popular. I wish the other third of it is more popular.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Arguing with someone on my city's subreddit who is insisting that crime is rising, and when I pointed out that it's actually falling he insisted that "compare crime now to ten years ago and it's WAY up".

I've been digging through crime stats all night for this argument, and he just keeps repeating that "I can tell you've never been the victim of a crime" and "compared to ten years ago crime is up!" (it's not). And then I opened another thread and he's top comment there, advocating for putting teenage car thieves in jail for 20 years "and crime will drop WAY down!". I hate everyone.

[jackslesbiansubconcious]

Me rn:

[ftmwillz]

this photo is making me . insane. his LATS

[dailydegurechaff]

Today's Daily Degurechaff is… little guy rating

[madgirlmuahaha]

I just want to shake Clamface Cunthead like a damn magic 8 ball and scream in her face:

Stop killing your clerics!!

[celerydays]

I hope you had an awesome birthday!! Here’s a present for ya ✨

Your MC is so pretty! I hope I did her justice 🫶

KERI. KERIIII. KERIIIIIII!?!?!

I'M LITERALLY SCREAMING AND BANGING MY FISTS ON MY DESK RIGHT NOW AHHHHH 💖

THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I love and adore this to bits, she's perfect 😭 My MC looks so dang cute in your style, I'm meltingggg just looking at her!!– 🥹🫠💕

And I did have a really wonderful birthday! Thank you for making it even better with this amazing gift! 🥺💗

[pinacoladamatata]

i'm cookin

[girlbob-boypants]

Any competent druid when that dude from BG3 says he couldn't control the "beast within" and impulse wasted a wild shape charge cause some twink was naked

[lyricalapple]

Went through the Wyll Ravengard tag on a whim and I'm slightly obsessed with him now