#but they’re not as easily accessible

[mando-abs]

Being sick again means I crave only one thing

I miss you babe

[akkivee]

the eng translation of ‘ichi-nii’ going from brother ichi to ichibro wasn’t on my bingo card ngl

[caliboron]

I’ve been collecting these htf blind box figures and it’s actually really fun I forgot how much I like collecting things

[apollos-boyfriend]

hi you seem to know about jaiden. do you know where the vod is of her last stream? i missed it, but it seems like there was a stream, and i can't find it

yeah! i have it right here :D all of jaiden’s vods go up as unlisted and i think she has to manually post them so sometimes she just. forgets

[vvrgo]

hey watching cal go through the wringer is incredibly fucking triggering just a heads up to any transmascs/dudes out there watching sex education this season especially in the uk

[m0tel6mxzzy]

really hate when technology is made the criteria needed to do any sort of work and then the ppl who make it mandatory don’t have any sort of plan for if it goes wrong

[hazzabeeforlou]

.

[victory-cookies]

fulfilling my true purpose in life by giving my kid cousin and her parents cartoon recommendations

[horatiomarissa]

This might be a dumb zoomer take because I certainly wasn’t working in ye olde days before computer charting, but medical records are one of those things that would just be easier if we recorded them analog. Like, try exporting information from PointClickCare to NetSolutions or try setting up an account on either of those sites and tell me *that’s* easier than just writing the shit down in a fuckin binder and then securely faxing it to whoever needs it.

[26labrd]

honestly my goal is to get good enough at french that i can translate and sub stuff related the 60s tintin films lol. there’s old promo videos and jpt interviews that i want to be able to understand and share

[ahhscheisse]

being embarrassed by how you’re living has to be one of the worst feelings

[ghostickle]

Saw a thing where instead of New Year’s resolutions they made bingo cards of things they want to do and I like that way more

[inkykeiji]

Hi clari this is a weird question but did you cut a scene from flawless? I swear when I first read it when you first posted it it had a beach scene. Is that true or am I crazy

hi hi!!! there was never a beach scene in the original piece! i think what you’re thinking of is actually a oneshot i wrote last august where reader + flawless tomura fuck in the ocean! it’s either that piece, or it’s the little strawberry moon prompt i wrote this summer, which begins at a beach. i hope this helps anon! <3

[love-me-love-my-weirdness]

Something that really sucks about being disabled is places say that they’re accessible but they aren’t.

I’ve been to places that claim to be accessible where

the ramp’s too steep

there are steps they didn’t mention because “it’s only two or three”

the doorways are too small

there aren’t any elevators to the top floor

the floor is too rough to easily push on

exhibits are displayed in ways that are impossible to see from a wheelchair

the doors don’t have a push button

tables/exhibits are put way too close together

the surrounding paths have no curbs

Without those things, it isn’t accessible. You can’t put a sloped piece of metal on your doorway and call that wheelchair friendly.

[quidam-sirenus]

I had to make copies for someone of a talk about how gay people are perverted and selfish that they were going to use for teaching material sometimes I hate working in the archives

[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.