#how to make pie chart

[codenewbies]

CSS Pie Chart

[cinnamolore]

my hill to die on and rock to throw is truly the mischaracterization in shipfic for haikaveh and ratiorine, SPECIFICALLY for between kaveh and aventurine

[allfillernothriller]

Welcome to Unhinged Hours, a series of posts that will be tagged as such in which I will overshare my cringiest and most awkward thoughts because I've no self-control over my need to vent. And who knows. Might help someone else.

Don't mind the dubious syntax and weird grammar.

[cw brief mention of abuse]

When I was 17-19, I was mortified to discover I was attracted to (much) older people. During my early twenties, the majority of my crushes were in their thirties. I knew the age gap was too big and I was too young, so I did nothing about them and naively thought this was something that would fix itself with time. I thought "at least I know I find people in their thirties attractive so I just have to wait to reach mine and date people my age then" (lmao good one past me). Well. As I'm inching ever closer to said thirties, it's more and more evident that the issue clearly did NOT fix itself, those old crushes are nearing their forties and I haven't stopped carrying them in my heart. They're attractive in new ways. When I look at pics from back when I first developed a crush, I find that my current 27yo self isn't physically attracted to their 32yo self I was originally attracted to anymore. And I know for a fact that 21yo me wouldn't have found 38yo [redacted] hot. But current me is still attracted to current them (38yo [redacted] is indeed very hot). And you might wonder what's the issue here, so lemme tell you. I've been frequenting online feminist spaces for a decade. I've read countless accounts of teenage girls and young women who were manipulated and abused by older partners. I've read an inordinate amount of warnings, the gist of all of them being “don't date older folks during your formative years, don't believe them when they call you 'mature for your age'”. And let me be crystal clear — I still think it's relevant and infinitely important to relay those accounts and protect girls and young women, and help them spot red flags and predatory patterns. It absolutely is, I am not blaming feminism for my existential struggles. I am simply giving you context. The thing is, I've internalised this as “don't ever pursue older folks, period” (which is a completely different thing, I knew that then and still know it now but couldn't help it) and as a result I've been lugging around self-inflicted guilt and shame for years (and don't I love the internalised biphobia that adds to it when the person happens to be a man /s). And these crushes I've been telling you about? They're one-sided! They've never expressed any interest, so that's always been a safe situation for me, but did that prevent any self-loathing from taking root in my brain? Course it didn't! I can't seem to shake the feeling that there's something wrong with me and I've grown tired of this. Scolding myself over human emotions is getting fucking old.

That brings me to today's crisis — at which point in one's life does it get easier to accept? How old is old enough to stop caring about the age gap? When will I stop blaming myself? How do I drop the guilt?

Because if it was "just" the fact that I'm still swooning over the same people (who are now soon-to-be 40), that would be too easy, wouldn't it? But nooo I just had to go and get a new crush on someone who's already in their forties. Where does this end, please?

(You might've noticed that the overuse of the word 'crush' and choosing to focus on the physical aspect of attraction here is a poor attempt at a euphemism. I mean some of them are simple crushes, as for the others... past a certain point, still calling them crushes is just denial on my part. I'm basically fooling myself.)

“This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you've got a moment, it's a twelve-storey crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour porterage and an enormous sign on the roof saying 'this is a Large Crisis'.” (Blackadder Goes Forth, ep. 6)

[age-of-moonknight]

“Moon Debt,” Moon Knight (Vol. 9/2021), #20.

Writer: Danny Lore; Penciler and Inker: Ray-Anthony Height; Colorists: Le Beau Underwood and Scott Hanna; Letterer: Cory Petit

[prowl-autism-extraordinaire]

about to be real autistic on main

[foone]

Here's an idea which I don't know if it would improve Tumblr, but would be interesting at least and i think that so much I would like this feature to be added retroactively.

1. First, you should be able to change your vote at any time before the poll ends.

2. There should be a graph that shows how answers changed over time. Like a stacked line graph? Or an animation of a pie chart?

3. Polls should be allowed to run forever.

So you could have polls that have been going for years and continually shifting the current winner.

Like, fandom ones that can evolve over time and get different answers as the community evolves.

Anyway I think I should try making that second one, the graph thing, real. Cause I could do that myself, just write a script to grab the answers every 5 minutes and have a weeklong poll.

You might could even see on the map when you reblogged that poll again! Because probably a week long poll would slowly die off... Then regain steam when it gets reblogged again!

Might be fun. I'll have to so this.

[physalian]

You don’t have to pay for that fancy worldbuilding program

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

I can easily see which characters belong to which factions and how many I have named and have to keep up with for each faction

All names are in alphabetical order so when I have to come up with a new name, I can look at my list and pick a letter or a string of sounds I haven’t used as often (and then ignore it and start 8 names with A).

The strikethrough feature lets me keep track of which characters I kill off (yes, I changed it, so this remains spoiler-free)

It’s an easy place to go instead of scrolling up and down an entire manuscript for names I’ve forgotten, with every named character, however minor their role, all in one spot

Also on this page are spare names I’ll see randomly in other media (commercials, movie end credits, etc) and can add easily from my phone before I forget

Also on this page are my summary, my elevator pitch, and important character beats I could otherwise easily mess up, it helps stay consistent

*I also have on here not pictured an age timeline for all my vampires so I keep track of who’s older than who and how well I’ve staggered their ages relative to important events, but it’s made in Photoshop and too much of a pain to censor and add here

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

*3/30 Edit to update this chart to its full glory. Column 3 is a cumulative count. Most of what I write breaks 100k and it's fun watching the word count rise until it boils over.

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

—

Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

—

I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

Now you have one less excuse to sit down and start writing.

[tarotwithavi]

About Your beauty/vibe

How to choose a pile?

Close your eyes and take a deep breath and ask the angels to show you the right pile for you and open your eyes. The first pile that catches your attention is the right pile for you.

Masterlist

Paid services

Pile 1

Hello pile 1! Welcome to your reading! You have the dreamy kind of beauty. You know when you look at someone and you just get lost in them? That's the kind of beauty you have. You may have water placements in your chart, especially Pisces and cancer. You may have soft features that make you look younger than you actually are and sometimes people may mistake you for being the younger sibling (if you have siblings) . I also see that you have the kind of beauty that people want, what I want to say is that people go after soft looking soft looking individuals because it's easier to approach them. Some of you may have a cute nose. And you may have some baby fat on your face. People feel as if you're always Hiding a part of yourself and they feel as if you're able to see the things they can't. You have otherworldly vibes to you and your beauty is unexplainable. I'm also getting that some of you may go through constant changes, you may like to try different styles. Your beauty is the perfect example for the balance of masculine and feminine features. You can look both masculine and feminine. Some of you may be gender neutral. I'm also getting that a lot of people have crushes on you. But I also see that people around you may try to copy you or tell you that you don't look good because they are envious of your beauty. Some of you may have face piercings or you're thinking of getting one. I'm also getting that a lot of people want to wife you up.

Pile 2

Heyy pile 2! so first thing first I get heavy Virgo, Capricorn, Sagittarius and Scorpio vibes from this pile. I see that you guys don't like to socialize much and like to stay at home. And I'm also getting that even your neighbours rarely get to see you. You have the air of mystery surrounding you. So we can say that you have mystical beauty. You have the perfect balance between friendly features while also having nonchalant expressions. People don't fear approaching you but they are also aware of their boundaries. I see that you may have a resting B face but not entirely? Like your face may get soft around certain people like your friends or people you're comfortable around. You appear tough to people who don't know you and a cutie pie to the people who know you. But still there's a side to you that not a lot of people know about. And you'll rather not share this side of you. You have plump lips, a pretty nose and cat eyes. You may have a big nose And PRETTY HANDS. People notice your hands a lot, you may have some kind of jewellery that you always wear. And I'm also getting that you have THE MOST ELEGANT WALK. For some you may walk fast or walk like a model unintentionally. And I'm also getting that your beauty screams richness. People may ask you if you come from a rich family or if you're rich when you're literally wearing thrifted clothes. You have really demanding energy. It's like you know what you want and how you want it. I'm also getting heritage, like you a certain facial feature that comes from a rich background.

Pile 3

Omg pile 3, you're literally the sweetest. I don't know why but I keep hearing "hands cold but heart of gold" . People may misunderstand you. Heavy air energy in this pile. You are unconventionally beautiful. Your features are outside the norm and they all work together to give you a unique beauty. Many may not like to hear this but I see that in the past people may have considered you not attractive because of your features but right now your features seem to be in trend. Now you'll see everyone wanting to be like you. I'm also getting that some of you may have been through a glow up recently and now you're an entirely different person. I also see that somehow deep inside you , you still think that you're not attractive but let me tell you trends are gonna come and go but the real deal is your vibe. I can assure you the energy I'm picking up from this collective is heavenly. Outer beauty may fade but a beautiful soul doesn't. You come off as someone who doesn't need people. You're really independent and confident. I see that some of you may have a really pretty beauty mark on your face that you used to be insecure of. Another message I'm getting for this collective is that the things or features you used to be insecure of are going to be the reason you'll feel proud and confident. People are left speechless by your beauty. There's something about you that attracts people like a bee to a flower. I see that we can say that you have unconventional beauty. Keep working on yourself and you'll attract the people. Do you wear some kind of cap or glasses to hide your face?

© tarotwithavi all rights reserved

[spinningalbinoturtle]

Thanksgiving headcanons for the Lotr crew

Its hosted in Rivendell but Elrond lets people extend the invite to others so everyone comes

Sam is in the kitchens from 6am cooking a million things-he also brought several side dishes premade

Frodo is all over the decorations and setting the table but he also made some cookies

Arwen is also very particular about this particularly the table

She has made a seating chart which she hopes will minimize squabbling

She has also set some ground rules like no dissing on your child’s interracial marriage (for Elrond and Thranduil)

Bilbo helps Sam cook in the morning but then he starts drinking around midday and doesn’t stop til he is dragged to bed by Frodo and Erestor

While Elrond is hosting he doesn’t do much just sits around and judges

He and Thranduil will be breaking Arwen’s rules

Thranduil and Gloin out drink Bilbo. They are having a silent drinking contest which has not been spoken of. Each one just decided to out drink the other

Thranduil wins cause he drinks like three bottles of a wine a day

Gimli and Legolas are just trying to avoid their parents

Thankfully Arwen sat them at the opposite end of the table

Unfortunately near Elrond who asks several awkward questions about how elf/dwarf sex works (he’s curious from a medical standpoint)

Bilbo drunkenly tells them how he had a dwarf boyfriend once so he totally understands what they’re going through at which point Frodo cuts off his wine supply

Frodo is actually trying to slow down Bilbo’s drinking all evening but with little success

Elladan and Elrohir have bonded with Merry and Pippin who introduced them to pipeweed. The four of them are stoned out of their minds and consequently eat more than everyone else. Arwen doesn’t understand what’s wrong with her brothers.

Aragorn is in charge of the turkey. Its excellent

He is mostly trying to hide from Elrond the whole time

Boromir tries to assist him with helpful turkey roasting tidbits but Aragorn would rather just do it himself

Eventually he assigns Boromir to the stuffing- its actually not bad

Erestor keeps Elrond occupied, they hang out and play chess in the middle of all the chaos

Glorfindel is the guy who is just ready for the holiday season to start

He keeps pestering Maglor to play Yule carols but Elrond’s rule is not until after dinner

Gandalf sits around and smokes and occasionally yells at Pippin. He takes turns hanging out with Bilbo and getting him drunker, hanging out with Elrond and Galadriel

Galadriel intimidates everyone no one knows where she was before or after dinner

Celeborn brought lembas rolls and cranberry sauce

Faramir makes a mean pumpkin pie

He’s just happy to be included. He fangirls over all the elves who indulge him mostly

Eowyn is enjoying watching the antics. She can’t cook for shit so she doesn’t bother to help with that but she does help clean up

So do Merry and Pippin but only because Gandalf forced them

Eomer brings “traditional Rohirric appetizers” and its smoked horse meat. Pippin and Sam are horrified to learn this.

Everyone has their favorite: Sam’s is obvs PO-TAY-TOES. Frodo likes cranberry sauce. Merry inhales stuffing. Pippin loves rolls.

Drunkest in order of most to least would be: Thranduil, Gloin, Bilbo, Gimli, Merry, Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn (but you can’t tell), Eomer, Eowyn, Glorfindel, Sam (he would’ve drunk more but he was busy cooking), Elladan, Elrohir (they’re so high they don’t drink much) Arwen (not a big drinker), Frodo(alcohol fucks with his anxiety so he just has one glass of wine) Faramir (who’s a teatotler cause he thinks if he did drink he’d become an alcoholic).

Lots of songs are sung before people start to retire for bed

Legolas and Gimli have sex really loudly between their fathers’ rooms to annoy them

Galadriel shows up around midnight and helps finish cleaning up

The clean up crew includes Eowyn, Merry, Faramir, Pippin, Gandalf, and Legolas and Gimli. They have a great time.

[phanchester]

since there are so many data nerd phannies i decided to make a compilation of all the spreadsheets i could find - lmk if i missed any or if you want me to add any additional details <3

last updated: 30/06/24

actively updating spreadsheets

dan and phil uploads from 2021-2024

dan and phil’s upload schedule from all their channels with days and dates

amount of days in between videos in each channel

pie charts of days of the week they upload

made by @ahappydnp 

everything dan and phil related

all of dan and phil’s video links from all their channels from all their accounts (including super amazing project, snapchat, vine, tiktok and more)

all of dan and phil’s radio shows, including reuploads and playlists, as well as the dan vs phil, fan war and internet news if available for each show with misc clips and written recaps

all of dan and phil’s liveshows, including some written recaps and the app where it was originally posted

all of dan and phil’s vyous including the question they were answering

all of dan and phil’s collaborations and video features (even if they were in the background), including the channel they were originally uploaded on 

all of dan and phil’s interviews

all of dan and phil’s merch, including originally shop links and links to the phandom wiki which has further information

all of dan and phil’s professional photos as well as some fan photos, including the event, photographer and platform

the dates and statuses of each of these videos (lost, archived, unlisted or public)

made by @stillarchivingdnp

dan and phil 2024 upload stats

each of their 2024 videos with channel, upload date, upload time in uk, length, sponsor and editor/s (if applicable) with an accompanying colour-coded calendar

(for amazingphil videos) whether dan featured and (for dapg videos) whether it was gaming/talking and who tweeted it

interactive part where you can see the time period between two videos

averages, maximums and minimums for times between uploads, upload times and runtimes with accompanying graphs

percentage of videos with other editors, with pie charts for all channels and each channel

made by @dnpbeats

all or nothing: dan vs phil season 2

all of the games for season 2, with the year they played them and the results with and without all or nothing coming into play

how often all or nothing came into play and who suggested it

the general impact of all or nothing

made by @organized-chaotic-disaster

dan and phil saying “i love you”

when dan and/or phil said ily

the video and timestamp from when they said ily and whether it was prompted

pie chart of dan or phil saying ily

made by @ahappydnp

games where one of them decides the winner

date and link for each video

overall winner with the winner for each round

breakdown of the amount of times each of them have won each round and the percentage phil has won

made by @dnpbeats

dan and phil 2024 upload schedule

upload date for each video, with the day of the week and approximate time it was uploaded in cst, including the most common and second most common upload day for dapg

days between each upload, including the longest gap, shortest gap, average gap and first and second most common gap for dapg

a colour-coded calendar displaying the upload schedule for dapg and amazingphil

made by @kat-aa

completed spreadsheets

all or nothing: dan vs phil season 1 with a great accompanying document with further details and analysis of the data

all of the games they played, with the year they played them and the results with and without all or nothing coming into play

how often all or nothing came into play and who suggested it

the general impact of all or nothing

made by @organized-chaotic-disaster 

youtuber tours

(not necessarily dnp but it includes them!)

120 different tours, including the creators, names, dates, countries, links (if available) and producers (if applicable)

each tours’ venue capacity range, average and total attendance

individual tour show breakdown with city, state, country and additional notes

data on each venue’s capacity, number of tours, and which youtuber went to each venue

data on each country’s amount of shows, broken down into states and cities

made by @stillarchivingdnp 

gamingmas 2023 schedule

all gamingmas video titles from 2023

the time each video was uploaded in gmt

made by @cactuslester

spreadsheet screenshots in posts

listening trends in all or nothing

scatter graph for the correlation between track number and number of listens

analysis of the data

made by @serendipnpipity

analysis of dnp’s letterboxd ratings and movies with part 1 and part 2

(pt 1) rating distributions for all the movies they’ve rated, including details about which movies one rated higher than the other, and which movies they rated the same

(pt 1) a list of their five-star movies

(pt 1) a list of movies one logged but not the other

(pt 1) cute little misc notes about the specific movies and dates

(pt 2) ratings broken down into genre, studio and franchise with accompanying bar charts

made by @philsrosesweatshirt

views on post-hiatus dapg videos after specific time frames

i believe this is a work of progress!

video titles with the dates and months, along with details of whether they were sponsored or had external editors

view count after 24 hours, 48 hours, 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 months and 6 months

made by @goldenpinof

favourite dnp tour song statistics

years phannies started watching vs the year they joined the phandom represented in a bar graph

favourite dnp tour song in a donut pie graph and a bar graph

favourite song vs year joined represented in a bar graph

made by @serendipnpipity

terrible influence: the tour trailer video analysis

all the videos that appear in terrible influence with additional notes

the list sorted by date, view count and channel specifics

timestamps provided for each clip, both in the video and where they appear in the trailer

made by @emojackolantern

[bogkeep]

being in aroace education mode has me all fired up...... one thing i talk about a lot when given the opportunity is Deconstructing How We Think About Relationships - in short, if we put all of our relationships with other people into a pie chart the 'romantic partner' slice is likely to be a very small slice but gets a disproportionate amount of Relationship Infrastructure compared to other categories, such as vocabulary, rituals, attention and narrative scaffolding - entire systems such as dating / finding "the one" / break-ups / the relationship escalator, etc. on the flipside, 'friend' is such a vast category consisting of a plethora of different relationship, all ranging from Friendly Acquantaince to Extremely Close Childhood Friend You Share Everything With, but we have a lot less language and structure for how we think about these relationships even though many of them can be deeply important and intense to us.

the line between romance and friendship is really blurry, maybe even non-existent, but it feels like the way we think about these categories is that Romantic Partner is this one very specific, formalised box of a category, while Friend is a vast and vague landscape where anything can happen - and it's on this free real estate we have built structures like Queerplatonic Partner. the concept has probably existed since forever, along with many other different types of relationships throughout time and cultures, but it's our current attempt at having a Word for it.

are you with me so far? i want to write a blog post about Deconstructing Intimacy.

just putting a CW here that i'm going to say the word sex a lot and touch on the topic of sexual trauma.

one of the very thorny things about This Whole Topic is that sex and sexuality is extremely political. we just do not live in a world where there's any neutral ground to stand on regarding sex. every demographic comes with a lot of assumptions and expectations and moral judgement tied to sexuality. some demographics are desexualised, some are hypersexualised, some are Both At Once, and in addition to that there's lots of stigma, moralizing, pathologizing, and lawmaking. just a whole mess.

so all of That makes it kind of impossible to fully Dethrone Sex. and by dethroning sex i mean stripping it of the baggage it's accumulated in our cultures. Sex Is A Thing You Can Do With Your Body (And Your Mind?). this does not have to make it any less or more meaningful to you than what it already is. what each person considers intimate is very individual. many people find hugging completely inconsequential and will hug anyone at any time, and for some people a hug is A Lot. For some people, sex is a very fun and casual activity, and for others it's Sacred and carries a lot of meaning and a very close bond. sex is intimate - it requires trust and vulnerability.

it is not the only way to achieve trust and closeness, nor the only thing that requires it.

whenever i take the bus somewhere, i trust the bus driver to take me there safely. i put my literal life in a stranger's hands, but it's a very casual affair i don't think about too much. it's not an act of intimacy, just someone doing their job.

i think the way we talk about sexual assault as the evillest most horribly irredeemably worse-than-death thing, and sexual trauma as a unique kind of trauma amongst traumas, is... indicative. and please do not get me wrong, SA is a horrible thing in every way. it's a violation of trust, vulnerability and personal space. it's an abuse of power. those are the things that make it so horrific - but it's not unique.

an abuse of power, a violation of trust and vulnerability, can happen in so many different forms. emotional abuse, non-sexual violence, medical abuse, et cetera - i don't think it's possible to place trauma into a hierarchy from least to most bad. trauma can be incredibly complex and it's different for everyone. if one day the bus driver on a whim decided to drive off a cliff, i think that would severely fuck up my ability to trust other people to drive me around. if i trusted someone with my innermost thoughts that i have never shared with anyone else, and they used them to be cruel to me, that would severely impede my ability to connect with others.

i just... don't think it does anyone any favours to separate sexual trauma from all other trauma - making it seem like sexual trauma is The Worst Trauma Possible You Can Never Heal From, and on the flipside, make it seem like Well Your Non-Sexual Trauma Cannot Possibly Be That Bad.

TRAUMA TOPIC ASIDE, i think the concept of intimacy has a tendency to get flattened into just the one kind. there are many, Many ways for people to be intimate, many activities that require some form of mutual vulnerability or physical contact, but it seems like we're just very used to placing Acts of Intimacy into the Sexual category. kind of like a venn diagram where the two circles are Sexual Intimacy and Non-sexual Intimacy that are largely overlapping. but what if, instead, it's more that Intimacy is a really big circle, and sex is just one of the circles within it?

the way i think this slots into the whole Relationship Infrastructure thing is that We Like To Categorize Things. if we see two people being very intimate in a way that's not explicitly sexual, it's tempting to think ah yes they are in love AND they're having sex, OBVIOUSLY, because they are clearly capable of having that level of trust and vulnerability together. but what if they're not? does that devalue their relationship? does it make them any less close? these are very chewy questions to ask even without bringing shipping discourse into it, and i would prefer Not To because sexuality is political and there is no right answer.

another way this flattening can be frustrating is all the times non-sexual intimacy is treated as Sexual By Proxy. let's say, for example, you're telling a story, and all forms of intimacy within that story get read as metaphors for sex, despite your actual intentions. there's nothing wrong with using metaphors for sex, especially since Sex Is Political and sometimes we gotta be clever about the storytelling - but it can get very messy if people read sexuality between characters who don't have that, especially characters between which it would be very problematic to portray that. we gotta be able to tell stories about all kinds of close relationships, and surely it should be possible without bringing freud into it at every turn.

intimacy is context-dependent, i would say. a moment of vulnerability can be platonic or romantic or sexual or maybe something else depending on a situation and all the factors involved. human connection is an boundless spectrum, not just a couple boxes.

did any of this make sense? they're just my Thoughts, i'm not a scholar on this i just

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[janmisali]

hi jan Misali! you might not remember me, and that's fine, I don't expect you to, but a while back I presented to you a spreadsheet analyzing the lyrics of "how do we know what's mainline?" I'm calling back in to say that i've done another thing, and this time i might have gone overboard...? TL;DR: made a spreadsheet of all the simple numbers from the results of "how many Super Mario games are there NOW?," it's at the bottom of the ask.

you see, I wanted to go back to the survey form to see if I could look back over my own answers purely so I could get the list of games you chose for the survey, because as far as video games only are concerned, it's a pretty damn comprehensive list! So I wanted to go over all of them to go in-depth on my own time.

WELL, I'm not sure if you intentionally made it this way or not, but the Form has a "view previous responses" button, giving me and presumably anyone else access to all the pie charts and numbers and stuff, but crucially this also gave the first 115 or so free answer questions to me. i hope you can trust that i did nothing with those. I was only there for the numbers.

what i used said numbers for was this: a spreadsheet that compiles the raw numerical data that was available to me (literally just the number of people who responded with each answer). I've also color coded it. However i did unfortunately input all the numbers myself. I am 99.9% sure the numbers themselves are accurate, although there may be one or two inaccuracies. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z-8VGt39SCcG1h3ZZt3d4mP6tF7-03261yXuKN6BBMA/edit?gid=2127805774#gid=2127805774

I was unable to see who answered in what way, so I can't determine what % of people answered both questions a certain way, but it should probably be enough to just see the numbers. maybe. i have no idea honestly. Your faq says "it would take about as much work as it took to make the video itself to get [the raw numbers] into a comprehensible format," so i hope this cuts out some of that work for you. not that I expect you to do anything with this, but it would be nice if you let this reach a wider audience.

:O

[concerningwolves]

The Writing Tracker and Statistics spreadsheet for 2024 is here!

What is it?

The spreadsheet is a way for writers who like statistics to track their daily wordcounts and writing habits (and also, probably, don't want to or can't pay to use software for this purpose). The idea is, once you've got the workbook set up and customised to your tastes, all you need to do is input your daily wordcount per project into one sheet and let the rest of the workbook populate from there. I originally designed this in late 2022 because I wanted a way to track my writing habits while also comparing how much original fiction VS fanfiction I wrote. It has since expanded to be more flexible, with a comparison function that's easy to adjust or scrap entirely, and a variety of other neat statistics besides. Key features include:

Line graph that displays your daily writing across the whole year.

Total word counts for each month displayed in stacked columns so you can see which projects you worked on.

Counters for your current daily writing streak and longest daily writing streak.

Pie chart to show which projects were worked on the most overall.

Ability to separate projects into "types" – i.e., personal and academic – and compare type totals each month.

Words-over-time progress charts for specific projects, with the ability to help set and track writing goals.

Daily and monthly averages.

You don't need to be a genius (or even fairly confident in using) Excel/Google Sheets to make this work for you. I've written up a detailed set of instructions that walk through each sheet and explain how to make a variety of changes, as well as breaking down how certain aspects work.

If this is something that interests you, follow the link below to my Payhip. It's a free resource; Payhip just gives you the option to leave a tip, should you feel like it and have the cash to spare.

Want to know more? Keep reading below the cut for a closer look at the features.

Daily graph to see your writing habits across the whole year at a glance:

Your top statistics: monthly and daily averages, top writing days, longest writing streak, current writing streak, and daily averages by month.

Monthly writing totals displayed in a stacked column chart so you can see which projects you worked on each month:

Clustered column graph to show one type of project compared to another, and a pie chart to show which projects you worked on most across the year:

Project-specific progress charts that show words over time, similar to the NaNoWriMo graph. (Plus, there are instructions on how to add goal lines to make it even more like the NaNoWriMo graph!)

[phoenixyfriend]

One of the insane things I've learned due to bingeing political and news media is why the US has such a high military budget.

Like, don't get me wrong, I still disagree with it, I hate the military industrial complex, I do not THINK we should be doing this...

But finding out that a number of countries have more or less officially contracted their emergency military responses to the US does make more sense. We aren't just the US's army, we're functionally the reserves for all of NATO. Europe gives us good trade deals in exchange for being able to borrow our gun guys.

Again, I don't AGREE with this. I'm just much less confused about the WHY now.

Unless I'm wrong about how the budget works, in which case, please explain using pie charts. I like pie charts.

EDIT: Also it's more than just Europe, some noteworthy others being Taiwan, Israel, South Korea, and Japan.

[ideahat-universe]

It's like Pokemon but mask off.

I like monster catching games and like with most westerners my first taste of the genre was with Pokemon. But it didn't end with Pokemon. A lot of people who fell in love with Pokemon rarely extended their interest to other titles. As a result many other members in the genre languished in obscurity. The most notable ended up being Digimon but Digimon never got a big piece of the pie, but when rpgs were having a monster catcher craze I jumped in.

Monster Rancher, Dragon Quest Monster, Digimon, Azure Dreams, Robopon, and even something completely off the wall.

And after playing that and many more I had my illusion completely shattered on how good Pokemon actually was.

Every game had a little something that Pokemon either dragged their feet on having or never had.

Robopon gives you the ability to customize and change your abilities based on whatever load-out you gave your Robopon. On a surface level this looks like something that makes the identity of your Robopon irrelevant but that's far from the case as items have to be compatible and certain levels of compatibility make moves more or less effective. But the most important part is acknowledging is that when this game came out Pokemon still had sparse, single use TMs and HMs that were permanent. Robopon allowed you to access to basically every move in the game, you just had to discover which combination of items on which Robopon enables it.

Dragon Quest Monsters 1 has a breeding system and mandates that you use it. Not only are bred monsters stronger than wild ones but carefully bred monsters can have unique and very powerful offspring and even if you settle on a specific monster and want it to be your main, the monsters have level caps that are less than 100 meaning that you'll fall off if you insist on holding a monster indefinitely.

Dragon Quest Monsters 1 came out a full year before Pokemon Gold and Silver came out and when that came out and had breeding as well, the differences were brutal. You were expected to wait out the egg hatching (as if running around in a circle was ever going to be a fun game mechanic), then your egg would hatch and the Pokemon would either be the mother in its base form or a not Ditto. But wait, it's even worse. Pokemon have breed compatibility that is obfuscated with vague terms and now instead of mixing and matching at will you have to consult an insane flow chart to divine who can make babies with whom and you just end up using Ditto anyways.

But the worst part is that outside of shiny breeding (and learning a couple of moves from the parents that can't be acquired otherwise) and getting baby forms you don't get anything special from breeding Pokemon because any random Pokemon can have the stats you're looking for meaning that catching Pokemon is going to be better than breeding in almost every regard.

Azure Dreams allowed you to fight with your monsters and your monsters followed you around in the over world. Two years prior Pokemon Yellow came out with the trademark mechanic of having Pikachu following you in the over world. But this feature would not consistently stay in future titles and it took till Arceus for a trainer to be ever slightly more involved in the fight than just standing and giving commands.

Monster Rancher sacrifices a lot of commonly loved mechanics in monster games in order to have the most definitive monster training experience. Monsters have to train via mini games and non-combat related activities.

Monsters get tired, they get sick, they eat, they have favorite and least favorite foods, they can get hurt, they can get angry, they can run away from home, they can cheat their training, and they can fight with or without your guidance. When you play Monster Rancher you will miss out on the exploration and the range of creatures but when you let your Pokemon get one shot because you didn't know the match-up and basically nothing happens to you or them you'll miss how Monster Rancher makes you care about the well being of the Monster and when you're in a cave or a patch of grass or a large body of water, grinding out experience by fighting a small handle of Pokemon over and over again (back then! I know experience gain is really easy now but back then) you'll wish you can just go to a real gym and exercise the experience you want.

Digimon World changes from game to game but the very first one for the PSone is THE game that screwed up how I felt about Pokemon's basic mechanics.

Digimon World 1 gave you only one Digimon to train and raise at a time and a couple dozen transformations but you could feed the Digimon, it has moods and behaviors, you need to discipline it, you can train it in combat or at a gym, you can adjust its stats, it can learn dozens of moves on top of a super move and Digimon are programmable. Intelligence isn't just a magic damage stat. The smarter your Digimon is the better it can comprehend specific commands and complex maneuvers, meaning that with enough training your Digimon can be told to do everything from evade oncoming attacks, go whole hog and do max damage, Defend from all attacks, or even conserve mana spending.

Dragon Quest Monsters had this as well where depending on how they are trained they handle fights and understand commands based on your training or lack thereof.

Nothing like this really exists in Pokemon. When Reverend breaks Pokemon down to "press the button to receive dopamine." It's a joke but in reality, as a trainer you should be expected to actually train your Pokemon well enough to actually do things on their own. In real life every trainer for every sport expects the person they train to be self directing, when you do a coliseum match in Dragon Quest Monsters you can't give monsters specific commands so you have to rely on how you conditioned them to fight well beforehand.

A Pokemon Trainer should be able to be hands off, and have your Pokemon handle it on their own. If you have to tell your Pokemon what to do and when to do it, have you really even trained them anything?

And you might think this is a long diatribe on what is clearly a post about Palworld but my point is that I play the Monster Collector/trainer games and have been finding Pokemon lacking for maybe 15 years. So I look forward to and support the little differences that make other monster collection/training games better than Pokemon and Palworld offers a very unique experience when compared to Pokemon.

Let me break it down.

Pokemon slowly phased out regular real world animals in favor of more Pokemon but they often gloss over how because there are no normal animals and there's just Pokemon for everything, that Pokemon have to be the main product that's consumed and killed and that hundreds of Pokemon more than likely exist to just be butchered and consumed regardless of how sentient and sapient

many of them are. At the very least Pokemon have their own food cycle where they brutally murder each other to stay alive.

In Palworld you don't have that issue! It's a dog eat dog world, whatever you don't feel like capturing or keeping you thrash 'em and scrap 'em. The game has ragdoll physics so when you're done murdering the sheep and stripping it of its assets you can roll its dead body into a river.

Pokemon talks a big game about friendship and love and how you can't just treat Pokemon like emotionless weapons. However, that's exactly what players do. There's no consequence for letting your Pokemon get nuked so there's no particular care for their well being. Nine times out of ten you don't win because you love your Pokemon more. You win because your Pokemon out levels the opponent or they hard counter the opponent.

In Palworld they don't worry about that ethical dilemma. You know what? Your Pals are weapons and if you really want to up the ante, give them a gun! In the Pokemon world most conflicts are resolved with a Pokemon battle but in Palworld killing people is a team effort!

Gary may think he's smarter than you but is he smarter than bullet?

Throughout the games and the movies and the comics and even TV show what you'll notice is that actually Pokemon battles are a low priority for most Pokemon owners. A lot of people treat Pokemon as family members and pets but even more use Pokemon as a utility to solve everyday problems or participate in special contests.

Depending on the Pokemon game you are playing the side content can enable ways for you to treat the Pokemon like a friend and not like a living gun. There are even mini games that allow you to train your Pokemon towards a goal that doesn't involve just fighting the opponent but these things aren't added on top of each other with each title, they're swapped out. Never the same mini games, never the same friendship mechanics and in each game they are very shallow.

In Palworld you are expected to fight with your Pals but the main feature is putting your Pals to work at your base. Building and turning your complex into a well oiled machine. Not every Pal does the same job so you're invited to get many pals for many different tasks.

So in Palworld they are a pet, they are also a gun, and a hammer. But it's all a core feature and not side content and there's no pretense where you pretend that the creatures you control is not just tools to serve you and do what you desire.

Speaking of desire! Pokemon has Winked and nudged at the idea that Pokemon are occasionally more than friends and pets. There are an odd amount of Pokemon that are more human than monster and there's a redacted text log that says Pokemon and humans were mates and got married. It's hard to know just how close Pokemon are to humans without it being kid friendly or just extremely strange.

Palworld doesn't have that issue! In fact.

Here's Lovander! A Pal whose text entry more or less says that it's fucking everything that moves! It has only recently set its sights on humans, but that's not a big deal. After all, humans can be captured in Pal spheres like any other Pal. That's right game theorists! in Palworld humans are just Pals and are subject to the exact same mechanics.

It takes courage to say the quiet part out loud.

Now is Palworld the Monster Catcher game I've been waiting for? Kind of. It's in early access and if it adds more tasks and locations and objectives it could be quite good. Being completely unhinged and unethical is what makes Rimworld great. If this game can be modded easily, for 30 dollars. It's worth your time. Let's just hope that Craftworld was just a stepping stone for this and not an indication of the devs being more idea dogs than developers.