#i <3 statistics and graphs

[the-butternut-tree]

i think that along with the fun stuff they do on the app, spotify should email you all of your statistics from the year complete with graphs and where you ranked in top listeners for your top artists

[drawfee-bit-locator]

I don’t know if you know how to make video compilations, but you should make a video that’s a compilation of all of the bits you’ve found for people! That would be so cool! Have a nice day!

I have considered it before, it would be an interesting compilation considering that most of the requests I get are very niche and specific, too bad video editing is my biggest nemesis and mortal enemy

If someone else wants to make it you have my permission (and please tell me I wanna see it)

[sprinklecipher]

Ace Attorney Characters' Prominence In Game Canon vs In Fanfic

I got curious about how the amount of "screen time" Ace Attorney characters have in the games relates to how much fan fiction is written about them, so I crunched some a bunch of numbers related to characters' total in-game dialogue and how often they're tagged on Ao3*

*I acknowledge that neither of these are perfect measures of how much focus the series or fanbase puts on these characters, but they’re the numbers I can get :)

AA Characters With Much More Prominence in Fanfic (vs Canon)**

Here's a table of dialogue/tag totals for the 20 characters with the highest ratio of Ao3 tags to overall game dialogue:

**excluding characters with literally no dialogue

(LOTS more data below the cut)

A lot of the characters in the previous table have very little dialogue, so if you limit to characters with at least 500 words of dialogue, you get this:

(“Karma” is Manfred and “von Karma” is Franziska, btw)

AA Characters with Much Less Prominence in Fanfic (vs. Canon)

On the opposite side, here's the data for the 20 characters with the lowest tags: dialogue ratio:

Characters with Most Dialogue in-game vs Most-tagged Characters

Here’s some more tables, with the first showing the 20 characters with the most in-game dialogue and the second showing the 20 most-tagged characters:

Of note, Kristoph just barely sneaks into the top 10 most tagged AA characters (despite only having the 48th most dialogue), Manfred von Karma is the 16th most tagged character (vs 69th-most dialogue), and, most dramatically, Clay is the 20th most tagged character despite having less than 50 words of dialogue and a dialogue rank of just 165th!

On the flip side, the Judge doesn’t make the top 20 most tagged characters despite having the 4th most dialogue, and Justine Courtney / Verity Gavèlle is only the 109th-most tagged character despite being in the top 20 for dialogue (although the timing of the data collection played a big role for her in this data, since I pulled the numbers fairly shortly after the AAI Collection was released, and, glancing at Ao3 now, her total tagged fics has since increased nearly 7x since then)

Graphs!

For good measure, here’s a couple graphs that show the major characters’ Ao3-tag vs game dialogue data (including vs excluding the main protags, respectively):

The trendline basically gives an idea of the “expected” number of tags for a character based on how much dialogue they have: characters who are under the line have fewer Ao3 tags than expected based on how much dialogue they have, and characters who are above the line have more tags than expected. The further the character’s point is from the line, the farther away the number of tags is from what’s expected (like the poor Judge is VERY underrepresented lol)

Also, for any stats nerds reading this (hi!), there’s statistically a very strong correlation between characters’ in-game dialogue totals and how often they’re tagged on Ao3, R2 = .85, p < .0001. The main protags (sorry, Athena!) are driving a lot of that, however, so if you exclude Phoenix, Edgeworth, and Apollo, it drops down to just R2 = .39 (which is still a fairly strong relationship, all things considered).  

Data notes

For the dialogue totals, I included total dialogue across the mainline AA games (AA1-AA6) and the Investigations duology, but didn’t include PLvPW, since that has its own fandom tag in Ao3. The dataset is one I put together pulling from the AA wiki transcripts

The Ao3 tag data is as of 1/18/2025 (it took me a little while to write this up lol) and is for canonical character tags only

For the curious, here’s the whole data table in Google sheets

Note that there’s tons of identity shenanigans that goes on in AA that made it so that I had to use my judgment a bunch when deciding how to calculate the dialogue and tag totals, so if there’s an alter-ego-type character (or similar) that doesn’t show up in the data set, most likely I grouped their counts with the “base” character they’re associated with.

[mr-ladystardust]

reading my psychology maths textbook and realising, perhaps for the first time, that I know nothing

[caramelmochacrow]

hello im back from school and man picking universities and deciding what your future holds is rlly fucking scary. (his older sister was deciding universities) also i love my innate ability to make schedules in a few seconds in the shower.

[desiree-uk]

DXVK Tips and Troubleshooting: Launching The Sims 3 with DXVK

A big thank you to @heldhram for additional information from his recent DXVK/Reshade tutorial! ◀ Depending on how you launch the game to play may affect how DXVK is working.

During my usage and testing of DXVK, I noticed substantial varying of committed and working memory usage and fps rates while monitoring my game with Resource Monitor, especially when launching the game with CCMagic or S3MO compared to launching from TS3W.exe/TS3.exe.

It seems DXVK doesn't work properly - or even at all - when the game is launched with CCM/S3MO instead of TS3W.exe/TS3.exe. I don't know if this is also the case using other launchers from EA/Steam/LD and misc launchers, but it might explain why some players using DXVK don't see any improvement using it.

DXVK injects itself into the game exe, so perhaps using launchers bypasses the injection. From extensive testing, I'm inclined to think this is the case.

Someone recently asked me how do we know DXVK is really working. A very good question! lol. I thought as long as the cache showed up in the bin folder it was working, but that was no guarantee it was injected every single time at startup. Until I saw Heldhram's excellent guide to using DXVK with Reshade DX9, I relied on my gaming instincts and dodgy eyesight to determine if it was. 🤭

Using the environment variable Heldhram referred to in his guide, a DXVK Hud is added to the upper left hand corner of your game screen to show it's injected and working, showing the DXVK version, the graphics card version and driver and fps.

This led me to look further into this and was happy to see that you could add an additional line to the DXVK config file to show this and other relevant information on the HUD such as DXVK version, fps, memory usage, gpu driver and more. So if you want to make sure that DXVK is actually injected, on the config file, add the info starting with:

dxvk.hud =

After '=', add what you want to see. So 'version' (without quotes) shows the DXVK version. dxvk.hud = version

You could just add the fps by adding 'fps' instead of 'version' if you want.

The DXVK Github page lists all the information you could add to the HUD. It accepts a comma-separated list for multiple options:

devinfo: Displays the name of the GPU and the driver version.

fps: Shows the current frame rate.

frametimes: Shows a frame time graph.

submissions: Shows the number of command buffers submitted per frame.

drawcalls: Shows the number of draw calls and render passes per frame.

pipelines: Shows the total number of graphics and compute pipelines.

descriptors: Shows the number of descriptor pools and descriptor sets.

memory: Shows the amount of device memory allocated and used.

allocations: Shows detailed memory chunk suballocation info.

gpuload: Shows estimated GPU load. May be inaccurate.

version: Shows DXVK version.

api: Shows the D3D feature level used by the application.

cs: Shows worker thread statistics.

compiler: Shows shader compiler activity

samplers: Shows the current number of sampler pairs used [D3D9 Only]

ffshaders: Shows the current number of shaders generated from fixed function state [D3D9 Only]

swvp: Shows whether or not the device is running in software vertex processing mode [D3D9 Only]

scale=x: Scales the HUD by a factor of x (e.g. 1.5)

opacity=y: Adjusts the HUD opacity by a factor of y (e.g. 0.5, 1.0 being fully opaque).

Additionally, DXVK_HUD=1 has the same effect as DXVK_HUD=devinfo,fps, and DXVK_HUD=full enables all available HUD elements.

desiree-uk notes: The site is for the latest version of DXVK, so it shows the line typed as 'DXVK_HUD=devinfo,fps' with underscore and no spaces, but this didn't work for me. If it also doesn't work for you, try it in lowercase like this: dxvk.hud = version Make sure there is a space before and after the '=' If adding multiple HUD options, seperate them by a comma such as: dxvk.hud = fps,memory,api,version

The page also shows some other useful information regarding DXVK and it's cache file, it's worth a read. (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk)

My config file previously showed the DXVK version but I changed it to only show fps. Whatever it shows, it's telling you DXVK is working! DXVK version:

DXVK FPS:

The HUD is quite noticeable, but it's not too obstructive if you keep the info small. It's only when you enable the full HUD using this line: dxvk.hud = full you'll see it takes up practically half the screen! 😄 Whatever is shown, you can still interact with the screen and sims queue.

So while testing this out I noticed that the HUD wasn't showing up on the screen when launching the game via CCM and S3MO but would always show when clicking TS3W.exe. The results were consistent, with DXVK showing that it was running via TS3W.exe, the commited memory was low and steady, the fps didn't drop and there was no lag or stuttereing. I could spend longer in CAS and in game altogether, longer in my older larger save games and the RAM didn't spike as much when saving the game. Launching via CCM/S3MO, the results were sporadic, very high RAM spikes, stuttering and fps rates jumping up and down. There wasn't much difference from DXVK not being installed at all in my opinion.

You can test this out yourself, first with whatever launcher you use to start your game and then without it, clicking TS3.exe or TS3W.exe, making sure the game is running as admin. See if the HUD shows up or not and keep an eye on the memory usage with Resource Monitor running and you'll see the difference. You can delete the line from the config if you really can't stand the sight of it, but you can be sure DXVK is working when you launch the game straight from it's exe and you see smooth, steady memory usage as you play. Give it a try and add in the comments if it works for you or not and which launcher you use! 😊 Other DXVK information:

Make TS3 Run Smoother with DXVK ◀ - by @criisolate How to Use DXVK with Sims 3 ◀ - guide from @nornities and @desiree-uk

How to run The Sims 3 with DXVK & Reshade (Direct3D 9.0c) ◀ - by @heldhram

DXVK - Github ◀

[locusfandomtime]

Doing the maths: Grian's failure at getting a mending book

lots of talk about maths and probabilities below the cut! but there's a graph and simple explanation at the end if you want to get the gist of it and are bad at maths.

(I am still young and learning maths, critique/advice always welcomed)

What are the odds of getting a mending book in Minecraft?

(I am assuming Grian has been doing all his fishing with Luck of the Sea 3)

The probability of a mending book is actually a bit annoying to estimate. The Minecraft Wiki lists fishing up an enchanted book as 1.9% chance. This is for ANY enchanted book. The Minecraft wiki talks about how the chance of an enchantment being selected is calculated. Mending has a weight of 2. Using the table, mending has a probability of 2/135.

However, Grian is looking for any book with mending, not just a pure mending book. Additional enchantments are calculated in a different way, involving RNG, which means it won't be as easy to model. Due to this reason, I'll just be using the odds for a pure mending book throughout.

TLDR: a mending book has a 0.028..% chance (2/135*0.019*100)

Grian's Data

According to this screenshot, Grian has used a fishing rod 5679 times. This number may not be fully accurate, as it includes the times he's fished other players, rather than just fished for items, but it is a good estimate.

To help visualise this data, with a median waiting time between catches of 17.5 seconds, Grian has spent over 20 hours fishing so far! He may have a problem.

Is this statistically significant?

Hypothesis testing (p-value approach):

H0: p = 19/67500 (the null hypothesis - he has no mending books because of chance)

H1: p < 19/67500 (the alternate hypothesis - he has no mending books due to different odds)

5679 trials, 0 mending books

X ~ B(5679, 19/67500) (binomial distribution, 5679 tries with a probability of a mending book being 19/67500, where X is the number of mending books)

p(X=0) (what is the probability the number of mending books being 0)

p = 0.2021473392

Now, the point at which data becomes significant is subjective. For instance, you *could* get a million heads in a row flipping a coin, it's not impossible, but at a certain point, you can begin to say "okay there's something not normal about this". For this approach, the closer the p-value is to 0, the more evidence there is against the null hypothesis . The p-value here is far above a significance level of 0.01, or 0.05, or 0.1. There isn't a clear line between significant/non-significant, but this is answer is quite a bit far from 0

With this, I cannot reject the null hypothesis.

Personal conclusion: this is not statistically significant, Grian is just unlucky.

Are other values statistically significant?

Gem's proposed 9000: results in a p-value of 0.079... more significant than Grian's number but I don't imagine Mojang would be too concerned. As said though, it's all subjective.

I am bad at maths, what does all this mean?

Here is a graph, showing what number of mending books you might have after 5679 tries. The height of the bar represents the probability of getting that amount. The numbers at the top are the (rounded) numbers I used in my calculation

The pink column is 0 mending books - like what Grian has! As you can see, it is less likely than getting 1 or 2 books, but not too uncommon to happen.

End conclusion: Grian has bad luck. Like, not as hilariously bad as he thinks, but still bad. If he keeps going, chances are he will get a mending book, but I think he should probably stop fishing because at this point he has a problem.

[mikelogan]

LETTERBOXD STATS TEMPLATE PACK by tj @mikelogan Includes 11 separate and completely customizable .psd files + 3 font families

Header with date and statistics Weekly graph Milestones Genres, Countries, & Languages Themes & Nanogenres Breakdown Top Cast Top Directors Most Liked Review and/or List Highs and Lows Ratings Comparison

WHAT YOU NEED*:

Basic gifmaking knowledge Including: layer masks and clipping masks

TO USE:

PLEASE GIVE CREDIT BY LINKING BACK TO THIS POST PLEASE DO NOT REPOST/CLAIM AS YOUR OWN REBLOGS ARE APPRECIATED FEEL FREE TO TAG ME IN ANY SETS YOU MAKE WITH #USERTJ

MEDIAFIRE DL | MEGA DL MY LETTERBOXD

*A FEW NOTES:

All graphs are completely customizable using layer masks. For all the bar graphs, I find them easiest to edit using the rectangular marquee tool to select the proper area and then using your brush tool. For the pie charts, I had the best luck using the polygonal lasso tool to select the slice I wanted to mask. All the information used was taken directly from my Letterboxd stats page. I believe there are a few sections only available to patrons of the site, such as the Ratings Comparison. The only parts I left out were the lists integrated into the stats page and the Crew & Studios section. The fonts included in the folder are the exact ones used by Letterboxd, so you could always use them to create your own templates for those if you want to. I have no issue with anyone using these templates to help create their own, but please give proper credit. Making these took literal hours.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR PROBLEMS WITH THE TEMPLATES, PLEASE SEND ME AN ASK OR A MESSAGE AND I'LL HELP HOWEVER I CAN!

[zoloteh-volossya]

BG3 Fanfiction Statistics, Part 1

I’ve seen some discussions of BG3 fandom trends floating around tumblr that spoke from experience but lacked hard data to refer to. As a fan of Baldur’s Gate 3, fanfiction, and graphs, I therefore thought it would be neat and illustrative to go through AO3 and document some of the statistics this fandom.

I did a similar exercise back in January and posted the results here. However, I was a bit unhappy with this analysis – it was missing some data that I consider to be relevant, I didn’t end up discussing the results much, and I only posted it to reddit. Most discussions for the creative side of fandom seem to happen on tumblr, so I made this account to post it here.

I will try and be as transparent as possible when discussing how I obtained and processed this data. A copy of my spreadsheet can be found here and contains all of the data I will be discussing. Most of the data I feature in this essay will be presented as graphs. Below each graph I will discuss the patterns shown in the graph and provide what I believe to be some relevant and/or interesting number values. If you want to see all the numbers, please refer to my spreadsheet. If you don’t care about the numbers and/or my thoughts about them, feel free to skim through and just look at the charts!

A note before I start – I gathered this data between July 21, 2024 and July 24, 2024. It is out of date as of my writing this and will be even more out of date by the time you read it. However, I believe the general fandom trends will hold up over time – the same patterns that I observed in January are largely still present in July.

Due to the tumblr post image limit and my preponderance of graphs, I will be breaking this behemoth of an essay into two parts:

General Fandom Statistics, the Player Character, and the Women

The Men, a Character Comparison, and a Pairing Analysis

We are currently in part 1. Part 2 can be found at this link. The rest of part 1 is below the read more because this is very long.

GENERAL FANDOM STATS

This information was found by looking at the side bar when browsing Baldur’s Gate fics. Therefore, this data set includes fics from the previous two Baldur’s Gate games. However, given that the games were released in 1998 and 2000, respectively, most of the fanfiction for them was likely posted to FF.net and the error from including what little fic for them was posted to AO3 is likely small.

At the time of my data gathering, there were 31,043 Baldur’s Gate fics on AO3.

RATINGS

To the surprise of nobody in the BG3 fandom, Explicit fic is the largest category, at 38% of all fics produced. It’s followed by Mature (24%), Teen and Up (20%), General (12%) and Not Rated (6%). Not all of the Explicit and Mature fics are necessarily horny – those warnings also apply to extreme violence (hello, Dark Urge). But let’s be real, most of them are tagged that way for sex.

WARNINGS

Speaking of extreme violence, let’s take a look at the warnings used for fics in this fandom.

Just about half (50.2%) of BG fics have no warnings at all. About 17.6% have warnings for graphic depictions of violence – lower than I would have expected, honestly, for a video game that features as much murder as this one does (at least, how I play it...). About 5.4% of fics feature a warning for rape, 4.7% feature major character death, and 0.5% feature underage sex.

CATEGORIES

AO3 allows users to select any categories from a list of possible options (F/M, M/M, F/F, Gen, Other, and Multi). F/M, M/M, and F/F are pretty self explanatory, Gen fics don’t focus on a relationship, Multi fics focus on a relationship between three or more people, and Other is a catch all for fics that don’t fit into any of the previous categories very well. For shipping with nonbinary (NB) characters, I have seen a variety of approaches. Some people select the category closest to the NB character’s presentation, some select multiple categories, and some select Other.

One very useful tool that I will be introducing here is the use of “otp:true.” When “otp:true” is entered into the “Search within results” bar while filtering tags, AO3 will only return fics that have just one pairing tagged. This filters out all fics that have background pairings or multiple focus pairings. Results with “otp:true” are typically solely focused on that particular pairing.

With all that explanation out of the way, the results:

We can clearly see that the most common category for Baldur’s Gate fics is M/F, with 43.3% of all fics featuring a M/F pairing. 36.4% of all fics feature a M/M pairing, 10.6% feature a F/F pairing, 11.7% are more General, 8.0% feature Multiple people in a pairing, and 10.9% are Other. These percentages add up to more than 100% because a fic can be tagged with multiple categories.

Things change a bit when you filter for “otp:true” and only include fics that focus on just one pairing. In this case, M/M predominates, with a whopping 46.0% of fics. M/F follows with 31.2%, F/F with 11.1%, 7.7% are General, 9.7% are Other, and 3.0% are still tagged as Multi (presumably for fics where the only pairing is a threesome or such).

CHARACTERS

As a last look at more general content before I begin a deep dive into looking at the various characters, I took a look at the 30 most popular character tags.

This was a surprise to me the first time I looked at it in January. In the previous two video game fandoms I was in that had a player character (Mass Effect and Fire Emblem: Three Houses), the player character was the most popular character tag in that fandom. In this case, though, Astarion has the most fics that feature him, and by a pretty significant margin (~5,000 more fics than Tav). He appears in 63.0% of fics. Tav is next, at 46.7% of fics. Then we have the rest of the six Origin characters: Gale (34.5% of fics), Shadowheart (23.7%), Karlach (20.5%), Wyll (18.6%), and Lae’zel (15.9%), as well as Halsin (15.8%) and the Dark Urge (15.3%). That they all are next to each other makes sense, as fics that focus on one character or pairing will often tag the entire ensemble. Lae’zel only showing up 16% of the time seems low, though, for a member of the main cast. To me, this indicates that not many fics are true ensemble fics that include all of the main cast.

After this block of main characters, we drop a bit to Gortash, who shows up in 7.4% of fics. He’s the most popular villain by far, followed by Cazador (4.7%) and Raphael (4.6%). Orin only shows up in 2.9% of fics and Ketheric is featured in only 1.1% of fics.

Jaheira shows up in 4.4% of fics, but her values may include fics from the earlier Baldur’s Gate games. Poor Minthara is the 16th most tagged character and only shows up in 2.5% of fics. Rolan (a tiefling NPC) shows up in more fics than she does.

Despite being featured in previous Baldur’s Gate game fics as well as BG3, Minsc does not seem popular – he’s #25, being tagged in 1.3% of fics.

One thing I did note was the comparative lack of focus on the overarching plot of the game in BG3 fics. I’ll use the Emperor as a barometer for this, as it’s inextricably interwoven into everything having to do with the Absolute, the mysterious artifact, and our protagonists’ immunity to it. Yet, it only appears in 535 fics of over 31,000 – approximately 1.7% of all BG fics. This tells me that there isn’t much engagement with the actual illithid plot of the game in most fics – at least not to the extent where major plot relevant characters are being tagged.

CHARACTER PAIRING STATISTICS

Most of my time for this analysis was spent collecting data for the various pairing tags. I went through the top 300 pairing tags by order of popularity (ending with Mystra/Cazador, of all things) and recorded how many fics each rating had and how many fics each category had both with and without “otp:true” applied. Coincidentally, this included all the pairings with 5 or more fics in them at the time – by sheer luck the 301st pairing tag had only 4 fics. I judged that I could ignore pairing tags with fewer than 5 fics without affecting the results of my analyses too much (also it had taken 4 days to get this far and I was tired).

However, a lot of authors tag their fics with both, say, Astarion/Tav and Astarion/F!OC. But for this exercise I’m not really looking at how authors refer to the Tav/Dark Urge/self insert character in their tagging nomenclature. I’m more interested in how many fics exist for, say, the pairing of Astarion and the player character.

To this end, I combined the numbers for Tav, Dark Urge, OC, F!OC, M!OC, NB!OC, Reader, and You for each character ship. In order to avoid double counting fics, once I had added the numbers for a particular tag I excluded that tag from all future counts.

[X]/PC = [X]/Tav + ([X]/Dark Urge with the [X]/Tav tag excluded) + ([X]/Original Character with the [X]/Tav and [X]/Dark Urge excluded) + ([X]/Reader with [X]/Tav, [X]/Dark Urge, and [X]/Original Character excluded) and so on.

This process dropped the total number of pairings from 300 to 162. However, it also introduces an error. Some fics ship characters with an OC who is not a Tav/Dark Urge/self insert. In condensing all pairings with original characters to the “PC” supercategory, I am ignoring that and counting their original character as a Tav/Dark Urge equivalent. Unfortunately, this is just something I have to live with in order to be able to make the data more manageable, as there is no way to tell which fics are using the OC tag to represent a Tav/Dark Urge and which are not on a mass data scale. I don’t think it will skew the results too much, at least.

I pulled out the top 20 ships for each major character in BG3 (Tav, Dark Urge, the PC, Shadowheart, Karlach, Lae’zel, Minthara, Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin) before and after I combined the player character tags into the PC supercategory. For each character, I then determined how much of each fic category (M/F, M/M, F/F, Other, Multi) they had, both for all of their pairings and for their pairing with the PC specifically.

Let's start by looking at the player character and its two representatives.

TAV

Tav is in 71 of the top 300 ship tags in the BG3 fandom.

Astarion completely dominates Tav’s ships, with a whopping 9,235 fics (1,839 otp:true fics). In fact, in order to be able to see the tiny little boxes that represent everyone else, here’s another version of this chart, this time with Astarion excluded.

There, that’s a bit more legible. The next highest is Gale, with 2,909 fics (652 otp:true) – less than a third as many fics as Astarion. Halsin comes third with 1,304 fics (207 otp:true) and Shadowheart is the first canon woman to show up, with 806 fics (132 otp:true). Astarion has more than 11 times as many fics with Tav as Shadowheart does. Karlach comes next, with 724 fics (186 otp:true). Raphael comes sixth, with 176 more fics than #7 Wyll who has 442 fics (100 otp:true). Lae’zel is #11 with 300 fics, under Gortash, Rolan, and a threesome with Halsin and Astarion. Minthara is the least popular main character to ship with Tav. She’s #15 with 146 fics (33 otp:true), and has fewer fics with Tav than Zevlor, the Emperor or Haarlep. In a marked improvement from the state of affairs in January, however, she no longer has fewer fics than Kar’niss.

Taking a look at the fic category breakdown, we can see that M/F and M/M predominate for Tav, while there is very little F/F. Dividing the values by the total number of fics, 59.8% of all fics and 50.2% of otp:true fics are tagged M/F, 35.6% of all fics and 34.9% of otp:true fics are tagged M/M, 7.6% of all fics and 4.4% of otp:true fics are tagged F/F, and 13.2% of all fics and 14.2% of otp:true fics are tagged Other. As the proportions of M/F and F/F fics drop when otp:true is applied, I assume that it is more common for M/F and F/F pairings to have background ships or be a background ship (remember that if it is not otp:true, we have no idea if the pairing with Tav is the pairing category being counted.)

THE DARK URGE

The Dark Urge is in 38 of the top 300 ship tags of the BG3 fandom, a bit over half as many as Tav.

While Astarion once again is the most popular character to ship with the Dark Urge (2,165 fics), this time he actually has competition! Gortash/Dark Urge comes in at a very respectable second place with 1,594 fics (about three quarters of Astarion/Dark Urge’s total fic count) and actually beat Astarion by over 100 fics once you apply otp:true (562 fics for Astarion vs 691 fics for Gortash). But after Gortash we once again drop down to numbers we struggle to even see on the chart. Gale is the most visible with 402 fics total (Gale has fewer fics total with the Dark Urge than Astarion or Gortash have with otp:true applied). After that we have a group of Halsin, Shadowheart, and Karlach, all with between 120-150 fics. No other pairing has over 100 fics.

Dark Urge/Tav (99 fics) and Dark Urge/Orin (87 fics) have more fics than Dark Urge/Wyll (83 fics) or Dark Urge/Minthara (80 fics). For Wyll, this is a sign that his pairing with the Dark Urge is not very popular (he drops from #7 with Tav to #9 with the Dark Urge). For Minthara, however, this is a significant climb in the rankings – she was #15 with Tav and #10 with the Dark Urge.

But what’s really interesting to me is the fic category breakdown for the Dark Urge.

The Dark Urge has noticeably more M/M content than Tav does (47.0% vs 35.6% for all fics, 56.9% vs 34.9% for opt:true) and slightly more F/F content than Tav does (10.2% vs 7.6% for all fics, 5.2% vs 4.4% for otp:true), and correspondingly less F/M content. At 13.4% for all fics and 12.8% of otp:true fics, the proportion of Other fic stays just about the same as for Tav.

THE PLAYER CHARACTER

The PC is a combination of Tav, Dark Urge, Original Character, Reader, and You. The PC is in 64 of the top 162 pairings of the BG3 fandom (losing 5 pairings from Tav as I combined Tav/Tav, Tav/Dark Urge, Tav/Reader and so on into one PC/OC category).

The player character was involved in 76.0% of all pairings and 62.1% of otp:true pairings (that is, if you add up every fic for every pairing which the PC is in and divide it by sum of all fics for all BG3 pairings I tracked). This means that over three quarters of shipping in the BG3 fandom is with the player character. It’s not surprising, but it is notable – that’s a very large proportion.

Holy smokes, Astarion! He dominates the rankings even more than before. This time, I was curious to see how much. See below for a proportional representation of all of the PC pairings (note: because many fics have multiple pairings, this circle does not represent the total number of fics but rather the total number of times any pairing with the PC has been tagged).

Astarion composes a full 45% of all pairings with the PC, Gale is bit over 13%, Gortash is 7.3% for all fics and 11.3% of otp:true fics, while Halsin has the opposite trend with 6.3% of all fics and 4.9% of otp:true fics. Shadowheart, Karlach, Raphael, and Wyll all are between 2% and 4% (with Raphael once again beating Wyll). Lae’zel is down at #11 with 1.4% and Minthara is all the way at #16 with 0.9%.

Out of curiosity, I went through all of the PC’s pairings and sorted them by the gender of the person being shipped with the PC.

Oof.

85.7% of all PC ships are with men, 10.4% are with women, and 1.9% are nonbinary beings (Haarlep, the Emperor, and Omeluum). When you apply otp:true, 87.1% of the player character’s ships are with men, 9.9% are with women, and 1.3% are with nonbinary beings.

SHADOWHEART

Welp! Let’s take a look at that 10%, starting with Shadowheart.

If you add up all the fics for all the pairings that include Shadowheart and divide that by the sum of all fics for all 162 pairings I collected, you can see that she is present in 7.0% of pairings. Interestingly, this is true both for all fics and for otp:true fics. She is in 30 of the top 300 ship tags and 24 of the 162 pairings that remain once the player character tags are consolidated.

(I have shortened Shadowheart's name to SH and Shart in various charts to keep the labels from taking up too much room in the graph.)

Lae’zel/Shadowheart is in close competition with Shadowheart/Tav. When all the player characters are condensed into the PC, though, that gap widens.

Shadowheart has 980 fics with the PC, 694 with Lae’zel, 226 with Karlach, 111 with Gale, 61 with Astarion, 51 with Nocturne, 36 with Halsin, 26 with Minthara, and 21 with Wyll (her least popular ship with a main character, at #12). 7 of her top 20 pairings are threesomes – Aylin/Isobel/SH at #8 with 35 fics, Karlach/PC/SH at #9, Karlach/Lae’zel/SH at #10, Astarion/PC/SH at #13, Halsin/PC/SH at #14, Karlach/Wyll/SH at #17, and Gale/Lae’zel/SH at #18.

Lae’zel/Shadowheart has an unusually high number of otp:true fics – almost half of its total fic count. It seems more popular to ship Shadowheart with women than men – both her ships with Lae’zel and Karlach are more popular than Astarion, Gale, or Wyll and her threesomes with women have more fics than her threesomes with men.

The fic category breakdown for Shadowheart matches this expectation.

Boy howdy is Shadowheart fic gay! She has over twice as much F/F fic than M/F fic, just looking at raw numbers of fics. Looking at the proportions of her total fic count, F/F fic represents 71.4% of all of her fics, M/F fic is 35.2%, Other is 10.0%, and Multi is 18.8%. (These percentages add up to more than 100% because many fics tag multiple categories.) This also means that we can’t know that these numbers necessarily include Shadowheart – witness the numbers of M/M fics. All it means is that these categories were on fics in which a Shadowheart pairing was also tagged.

Looking at the otp:true numbers gives us a better picture of what fics where only Shadowheart is in a relationship are like (though this not necessarily an accurate idea of patterns for her overall, as less than a third of her total fics are otp:true). 76.4% of otp:true fics are F/F, 19.8% are M/F, 3.8% are Other, and for some reason 1.2% (9 fics) are M/M. Over three quarters of Shadowheart’s otp:true pairings are femmeslash.

Shadowheart’s fics with the PC character follow pretty much the same pattern as her ships more generally, albeit with slightly less F/F (likely from the loss of the relative behemoth that is Shadowheart/Lae’zel).

32.9% of her pairings with the PC have the M/F tag, 68.1% are tagged F/F, 11.3% are tagged Other, and 18.5% are tagged Multi. Applying otp:true, 25.7% are M/F, 62.6% are F/F, and 12.3% are Other (this likely includes a substantial portion of nonbinary PCs).

KARLACH

Karlach is present in 6.0% of all fic pairings and 5.4% of otp:true fic pairings. She has 31 ship tags in the top 300 ship tags, which condense down to 26 pairings when all player character stand ins are combined.

Her second most popular ship after Tav is with Wyll, though unlike with Shadowheart the pairing is not popular enough to give Tav a run for his/her/their money. Condensing all the player characters widens this gap significantly.

The PC is overwhelmingly Karlach’s most popular ship, with 890 fics. Wyll is second, with 327 fics – less than half as many. Shadowheart and Astarion follow with 226 and 157, respectively. Dammon is next, with 91 fics, and then Lae’zel has 65. She then has a number of threesomes, Minthara (#9 with 32 fics), and Gale (#11 with 18 fics). Halsin is her least popular pairing with a main character, coming in at #15 with 11 fics.

Surprisingly, for all that Karlach is fairly butch, her pairings with men are relatively more popular than we see with the more femme Shadowheart. The category statistics illustrate this clearly.

Compared to Shadowheart, Karlach has a lower proportion of F/F and higher proportions of M/F and Multi fics. F/F is tagged on 51.8% of her fics, M/F on 42.5%, Other on 12.3% and Multi on 27.7%. (Remember that fics can be tagged with multiple categories and that just because a category is tagged doesn’t mean that Karlach is involved in that category.) Looking at otp:true gives us a look at fics where she is the sole focus. F/F is 55.0% of her otp:true fics, M/F drops to 34.4%, Multi drops to 6.1%, and Other stays fairly high at 10.4%.

In Karlach’s pairings with the player character, things change significantly.

It immediately becomes clear that the large number of M/F fics in her general pairings were largely due to her relatively popular ships with Wyll, Astarion, and Dammon. F/F dominates Karlach’s pairings with the PC with 64.0% (67.8% with otp:true applied) of fics, which puts her at just slightly less than Shadowheart. M/F is tagged in 28.5% of her fics with the PC (14.0% with otp:true applied), Multi is tagged 19.4% but drops to 1.2% for otp:true, and Other remains high with 18.0% of fics and 20.2% of otp:true fics with the PC.

Back in January, I noted that of the main cast, Karlach had the highest proportion of ships with nonbinary OCs. I didn’t track the breakdown of OC subcategories this time, but the high numbers in the Other category bear it out.

LAE'ZEL

Counting all fics for all pairings in which Lae’zel is tagged, she is in a mere 3.8% of BG3 pairings, though it rises to 4.5% when otp:true is applied. She is in 23 of the top 300 ship tags, a number that drops down to 18 when I consolidate the player character tags together.

Shadowheart/Lae’zel has twice as many fics as Lae’zel/Tav. Looking at the situation with the PC does not change this much.

Unlike any other main character, Lae’zel’s most popular ship is not with the PC but with Shadowheart. She has 694 fics with Shadowheart, 355 with the PC, 65 with Karlach, 26 with Gale, 26 with Wyll, 25 with Astarion, 16 with Minthara, and 12 with Halsin. She is in an unusually low number of threesomes – only 4. It’s notable though how skewed her numbers are towards women – a threesome with Karlach and Shadowheart has more fics than any of her pairings with a canon man. The various whole team multiship pairings, none of which have more than 11 fics, comprise most of the tail end of her ship list.

Speaking of the tail end of her ship list, what happens when we condense the player character tags is that Lae’zel does not reach a full 20 ships – she drops to 18 pairings. She has more than this, of course, but my methodology ignores all pairings with fewer than 5 fics (which means that my friend’s Lae’zel/Astarion/Tav fic is not counted). Therefore, Lae’zel’s 19th and 20th most popular pairings have 4 fics or fewer. I have represented these missing pairings with little :( emojis, because this is a sad state of affairs.

This is a symptom of a state of affairs in which Lae’zel is just not very popular in the AO3 side of BG3 fandom. Her most popular ship is Shadowheart’s second most popular ship, and the numbers crater after that. No Lae’zel ship other than Shadowheart and the PC has more than 100 fics.

Lae’zel’s most popular ships being women is demonstrated clearly by the fic category breakdown.

Wow! At a whopping 76.3% of all of Lae’zel’s fics and 88.9% of Lae’zel’s otp:true fics, Lae’zel has a higher proportion of F/F fic than Shadowheart. Granted, they’re both sizable portions of each other’s total F/F count. 26.1% of Lae’zel’s fics have the M/F tag, though this drops to a mere 7.1% when otp:true is applied. Other is tagged in 11.6% of fics but drops to 2.0% with otp:true. 18.1% of her fics are tagged Multi but this likewise drops to 4.4% with otp:true.

The pertinent question for Lae’zel is how much of her F/F count is due to her pairing with Shadowheart? How gay are her pairings with the PC?

The answer is... still pretty gay! F/F is not quite as dominant, with 67.3% of all her fics with the PC and 80.0% of her fics where only Lae’zel/PC is tagged – but 80% is a still a really high proportion! This indicates to me that a lot of the M/F in the “All Fics” chart likely does not involve Lae’zel. M/F is tagged in 33.5% of her fics with the PC, a number which is more than halved to 12.7% when otp:true is applied. 13.2% of her fics are tagged Other, which drops to 5.5% with otp:true – much less than for Shadowheart and Karlach. It seems either Lae’zel is not as popular for nonbinary OCs or that a large proportion of the Other tag is from mind flayer Tavs/Durges and people don’t write Lae’zel with a mind flayer love interest.

One other notable fact is that Lae’zel is the only female companion without any otp:true M/M PC fic. It could be due to her low fic numbers in the first place, but I prefer to think that Lae’zel fans are simply more fastidious about correctly tagging fic. It certainly fits her character.

MINTHARA

Ah, Minthara. Unquestionably the least popular of the main romanceable characters in BG3, her pairings only comprise 1.1% of all BG3 fanfic pairings, a number that rises to a whopping(/sarcastic) 1.4% of otp:true pairings. She has only 14 ship tags in the 300 most popular ship tags for BG3, a number that drops further to a mere 9 pairings once I’ve combined all the player character tags.

What’s notable about Minthara’s ship tags is the popularity of the Dark Urge relative to Tav. Minthara has 146 fics with Tav and 80 with the Dark Urge. This is a higher proportion than other main characters have. It may be because more people write her on evil routes (which likely disproportionately feature the Dark Urge) or because she has some very good lines for the Dark Urge and their Slayer form.

Another observation is the lack of primary non-PC ships. The other characters that I look at all have a major non-PC ship – Shadowheart/Lae’zel, Karlach/Wyll, Gale/Astarion, Wyll/Astarion, Halsin/Astarion. Minthara doesn’t really have that. Her most popular non-PC ship is Orin, at #5 and with a mere 45 fics. This is illustrated clearly once all the player character tags are combined.

The PC dominates Minthara’s pairings to an extent not seen with any other character, not even Astarion. She drops from 234 fics with the PC (65 otp:true) to 45 fics with Orin (26 otp:true), 32 with Karlach (16 otp:true) and 26 with Shadowheart (11 otp:true). Every other pairing has 16 or less fics. Tying into that, Minthara has very few pairings with 5 or more fics. She does not even have enough for a top 10! I have replaced her missing pairings with the :( emoji because this is sad.

Another notable thing about this chart, though, is how few fics Minthara has just in general. Lae’zel and Wyll, the other neglected companions, both have at least 500 fics with their most popular partner. Minthara does not even break 250. In fact, none of her pairings with someone other than the PC have over 50 fics.

Another interesting fact is that Minthara is the only character in this analysis to not have any threesomes or moresomes in her pairings with over 5 fics. She doesn’t share, it seems.

For some reason, Minthara has 8 ships with Councillor Florrick of all people. And it’s not all by the same author, which is what I would expect for a somewhat out there pairing. Presumably someone out there wrote a really good fic which then inspired others to play with the idea. In a small fandom like Minthara’s, one fic like that can make quite a difference.

As can be expected, Minthara’s fic categories are pretty damn gay.

F/F is tagged in 79.0% of her fics (77.6% of otp:true fics). M/M is tagged in 21.3% of her fics (17.1% of otp:true fics), Other in 6.1% (4.6% otp:true), and Multi in 8.9% though it drops to 1.3% of her otp:true fics. With these numbers, Minthara is arguably the gayest major character in the BG3 fandom by fic count, though Lae’zel beats her when you take otp:true into effect.

This pattern holds true when looking at her ship with the player character. 77.8% of her fics with the PC are tagged F/F (73.8% of otp:true fics), 23.5% are tagged M/F (15.4% otp:true), 8.5% are tagged Other (10.8% otp:true), and 9.4% are tagged Multi (3.1% otp:true). The latter is a bit confusing given that she has no multiship pairings. It may include collections of Reader/[X] fics that include Minthara.

PART 2

Welp. I’ve run into the tumblr post image limit. For part 2 of this essay, which discusses Astarion, Gale, Wyll, and Halsin and then compares all 8 of the main characters against each other on a variety of metrics, see this link.

[hiiragi7]

i saw you talk about daylio in a server some time ago, and how you found it more helpful than sp and pk - could you talk a bit about how you use/d it, especially with tracking dissociation and other symptoms?

Hi there!

I used custom activities both for tracking switches and for symptoms & things that happened in the day.

Here is my set-up:

So, whenever we made an entry in Daylio, we could track 1. who was fronting; 2. what we were feeling; 3. what symptoms we were experiencing; 4. events that happened throughout the day. We could also write notes or attach photos, which we often forgot to do but is still a nice feature.

On top of that, you get a lot of useful information about each fronter over time. Influence on mood, fronting patterns, mood count, if they front more often during certain days of the week, what symptoms or activities they're associated with... it comes with a lot of data, it's extremely useful.

For example, here are some old statistics for one of my parts prior to final fusion, Sierra. Sierra was a depressed trauma-holding part who was most active when it came to dealing with serious or difficult situations, especially emotional ones, because she was very closed-off and numb. Due to her role, she was very prone to BPD-related splitting, age regression, and other trauma-related symptoms, which is reflected in the Daylio stats:

Tracking using Daylio was more helpful than any other app when it came to figuring out patterns and triggers with my DID. It used to be very difficult to figure out why we felt a certain way or why a switch happened or how our triggers were connected or what any part's role was - seeing everything visually with statistics and graphs helped us a lot personally.

Simply Plural has tracking features, but not nearly as many as Daylio, and symptom/mood tracking in Simply Plural feels a lot more awkward to me since it isn't made for it and having custom statuses for everything just felt clunky.

Pluralkit felt really difficult for me to use for tracking because there's not a lot of visual aspects to it (I do a lot better with visuals) and it isn't meant to be used for mood or symptom tracking.

I think that Simply Plural and Pluralkit work best for specifically system-related things, but not really for managing a CDD per se beyond the system aspect of it. CDDs have a lot more symptoms than just being a system, and for a while I had like... 5 different apps for trying to track everything CDD-related which was a nightmare. Daylio replaced all of those, I use it to track everything now.

[notsogoodangel]

Traffic Series: Who is the best player?

I was watching this video by Eddache in which he investigated who won the Wacky Races, in which he made a point to differentiate who won the most first places AND who is consistently the best player (such as who always came in second place), and I wanted to do the same.

This was very easy because, luckily, the Traffic SMP wiki (which I usually don't like to use) did give me the order of elimination for each season, so I didn't have to go through the last 2 to 3 episodes of every season just to do it. It was just a time saver.

Some disclaimers:

THIS IS NOT ABOUT KILLS, IS ABOUT POSITIONS ON WHO DIES FIRST. Kills require skill, but that is not as necessary as just surviving. Is a survival game after all. Plus there are plenty of graphs that show who has killed the most in a certain season across all seasons.

Originally I wanted to use the Nascar/F1/Mario Kart scoring system since it made the most sense, and is technically what inspired this investigation. The problem is that it doesn't give points after 10th-12th place, which wouldn't work for a game with 14-17 players.

Instead, what I did for the scoring system is that I put the number they placed (ex. Jimmy came in 14th), divided by the number of players in the season, and then divided those numbers by the number of seasons they have played. The reason why is because, for example, Mumbo placed 16th in a season but only played for 2 seasons, his number will be bigger than Jimmy, who has come in last every season and is, objectively, a worse player.

This is still not a perfect system because some players only have played once or twice, so I don't have enough data to truly reflect their average. Although the players who only played once or twice (Mumbo, Lizzie, and Gem), are about where you believe them to be.

Lastly, despite Double Life having pairs dying at the same time, I did give them individual scores. The reason is because there IS a real winner in that season, so I just used the positions they used in the wiki. I don't know why they gave them those positions, but I just used them for simplicity.

There are some ties, but what I did in those cases: I just chose who was on top based on another table I did, but didn't end up using because of the previous Mumbo-Jimmy problem. So, I will just use it as a tied break and fun facts!

ALRIGHT LET'S SEE THE RESULTS!!!!

PEARL IS THE BEST PLAYER!!!! SLAY QUEEN!!!

Here's the results in order:

PearlescentMoon

GeminiTay

Scott Smajor

Martyn Inthelittlewood

GoodTimesWithScar

Grian

impulseSV

RenDog

BdoubleO100

Ethoslab

Joel SmallishBeans

BigB/Bigbst4tz2

ZombieCleo

TangoTek

Skizzleman

Lizzie LDShadowLady

Mumbo Jumbo

Jimmy Solidarity

To be completely honest, I was surprised that Pearl is one of the best players. She is usually someone that people, players, and fans, don't tend to pay much attention to in this aspect. Like, THIS GIRL HAS NEVER BEING IN A PLACE LOWER THAN 4TH.

We know that Scott (3rd) is usually one of the last to survive and is almost a good luck charm for whoever he is allied with, or the players calling Martyn (4th) a survivalist and constantly considered a threat, and both know how to play the game VERY well, but people don't do that with Pearl.

What I was most interested was that middle section because we all knew that Jimmy, Lizzie, Mumbo, and Skizz are the worst players in the entire series. Everyone is very much aware of it, including themselves.

Who could have guessed that Grian is, statistically, a worse player than Scar. Grian and Scar have won once each, but Scar is consistently in 9th place aside from 3rd and Secret, while Grian is all over the place. He sometimes is on 4th, and sometimes he is 10th. Which is the same with Impulse, who he is tied with score-wise.

Fun fact: Etho and Joel, and BigB and Cleo, were tied in the other table that I didn't end up using, and that is reflected here in which all of them are VERY close to each other score-wise. So, if Etho is washed out/bad at PvP, Joel is, and BigB and Cleo are worse about it and shouldn't say anything about it.

Bdubs, Ren, and Tango are so interesting to me, because what do you mean Bdubs is better than half of the server???? How is Tango so bad he is under that big dip (He is 14th with 0.74, and Cleo the 13th is 0.56)!?! HOW DID I FORGET REN WAS 2ND PLACE IN LAST LIFE?!?!?! IS THAT REALLY MY WET PATHETIC DOG OF HERMITCRAFT SEASON 10?!?!

Also, here's the table with every place of every player and how many players were in any given season, for easier understanding:

PS: The winners of every season are the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th best players. It might help their overall average, but not fully because Impulse has the same score as Grian(6th), and has never won a game. As I mentioned, Pearl has never been a placed lower than 4th, and aside from Martyn and Scott hitting 10th and 11th, are always in the top half.

[catboybiologist]

Wait I fucked up, I'ma try again:

Since you know python what's the index for the first 3 items of a list?

Is this supposed to "test" me on zero indexing vs one indexing languages?

All you need to know is that I use both python and R, and R makes me want to punch drywall, in part because its 1-indexing and it makes SO many off-by-one errors if you try to use it for anything more complicated than just parroting the same fucking statistical test and graph generation commands over and over

If you need serious data manipulation, pandas is right fucking there.

[mcyt-archives]

Happy Anniversary, Hermitcraft 10!

In celebration of one year since Hermitcraft 10 began on February 3, 2024, I wanted to put out some statistics from the archiving team.

First, streams per month:

September through November have some of the lowest stream times, possibly due to TwitchCon and Wild Life both happening around then. Or the hermits just wanted to stream other things! There is a general downward trend throughout the graph, only brought back to life for that sweet December ad revenue.

The second chart I wanted to include is more just for my own amusement.

From February 3, 2024 through February 2, 2025, the hermits streamed Hermitcraft a total of 1596 times. Though not all stream, there were 27 total hermits.

Who streamed the most?

Behold: Your Tumblr sexyman, Joe Hills.

Responsible for 361 out of 1596 total Hermitcraft streams, 22.6% percent, there really aren't words to describe just how often this guy streams. A nightmare for the archiving team, truly, but a man of the people.

And that's all from me! I just wanted to pop in and shout out the anniversary of the season. To many more!

[evidence-based-activism]

Public Opinion on Transgender Politics

I found these public opinion polls and thought they may be interesting to others as well.

United States of America

The US public supports protecting trans people from discrimination, but does not agree with policies that deny biological sex [1]. These views have also become more restrictive over time (e.g., in 2022, 58% of all adults favored "requiring trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth”; by 2025 this rose to 66%) across both Republicans and Democrats.

An earlier survey [2], highlights Americans’ simultaneous desire for trans people's safety and societal recognition of biology further:

A YouGov survey [3] that inquired about specific policies highlights Americans’ views on rights protections:

36% more people support than oppose including trans people in hate crime laws

33% more people support than oppose protecting trans people from being fired on the basis of their transgender identity

22% more people support than oppose allowing trans people to serve in the military

They also document support for policies acknowledging biological reality, including:

31% more people support than oppose requiring trans athletes to play on sports teams matching their biological sex

21% more people support than oppose housing trans prisoners in prisons matching their biological sex

12% more people support than oppose requiring trans people to use bathrooms matching their biological sex

(See sources for more visualizations. Particularly source [1] and [3] for views over time.)

Britain

The British survey [4] did not ask about their views on protecting trans people from discrimination, but does go into depth about people's views of other common policies.

The following graph illustrates that, nearly across the board, Britons favor policies that acknowledge biological reality. Much like the USA, their views have become more restrictive over time, for all demographic groups (see source for visualizations).

Source Quality

Pew Research Center is the source for [1, 2], and they are one of the best known (and most accurate) opinion polling centers. They are nonpartisan and often used to verify other sources.

YouGov US is the source for [3] and YouGov UK for [4]. YouGov is lower quality than Pew Research (most sources are), but they are one of the few sources that do attempt to get a representative sample and use weighting procedures to improve the generalizability of their statistics. They are considered reputable. The main issue I've found is that their surveys can have a high proportion of "Don't Know/No Opinion" responses. In some cases, this may accurately reflect the participants’ views, but in others, it's a sign of insufficient engagement with the survey. This should be kept in mind when evaluating their work.

Conclusion

The majority of the public does not agree with policies that ignore biology. They do, however, believe trans people should be safe from discrimination.

References under the cut:

Americans have grown more supportive of restrictions for trans people in recent years. (2025, February 26). Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/26/americans-have-grown-more-supportive-of-restrictions-for-trans-people-in-recent-years/

Brown, K. P., Juliana Menasce Horowitz and Anna. (2022, June 28). Americans’ complex views on gender identity and transgender issues. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/

Orth, T. (2024). Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues. YouGov. https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/48685-where-americans-stand-on-20-transgender-policy-issues

Smith, M. (2025). Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25? YouGov. https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51545-where-does-the-british-public-stand-on-transgender-rights-in-202425

[olderthannetfic]

Hey, as someone who has never done statics before, is there a noob-friendly way to calculate how many kudos the average fic on ao3 has? Or does that statistic already exist somewhere?

I kinda feel it would be something like <50 kudos but that’s just me.

--

What kind of "average"?

One thing you have to consider is whether a straight average is misleading.

My guess is that many fandoms have a pattern where the majority of works have 0 or 1 kudos. Then there's some single popular fic with a gajillion kudos. Is an average of 3 kudos representative of that fandom?

It's like life expectancy. People are all: "Everyone in the Middle Ages died at 35!!! Wharrrrrrrgarbl!" Except they didn't. Shittons of people lived to be what we would consider a fairly normal old age now. The average was low because fucktons of small children died. If you made it past 5, you had an okay-ish life expectancy thereafter.

What you most likely actually want is a graph showing X stories with 0 kudos, Y with 1, Z with 2, etc.

You can use the Works Search to search by number of kudos. Currently, I'm getting:

How you choose to break it out really affects the vibe of the chart even if the numbers are all accurate. How you present numbers matters.

So decide what you're trying to say and make the chart brackets reflect that.

[statistical-distr-of-polls]

Following this account helped me better memorize graph shapes and types of distributions. It helped me pass the Statistics class that I needed to pass for my major.

<3

yay! I’m glad you got something valuable out of this silly little blog :D!