#i have all the data now to make it look readable.

[antimony-medusa]

How To Set Up An Ao3 Exchange

One of the first things I say whenever anyone asks me about running exchanges is that if you have more than about 30 people in the exchange, do NOT try to match it by hand. That is so much work and takes so much time. Use Ao3's matching algorithm. And people say sure, and then they look at how Ao3 works and they go uhhhhhhhhhh I think we can make a google form work. Because google forms are reasonably intuitive to make work, and Ao3 exchanges are— not.

But the thing is, once you understand the underlying logic for Ao3 collections, they are not that bad, and seriously I can't overstate the benefit of having Ao3 do the matching for you. That's like the difference between 80 hours of curating data as it comes in and then matching it (what happened with hand-matching 325 people for holiday exchange), or 2 hours of double-checking the matching (what happened with matching 125 people for 48 hour exchange). You have to put in extra work to get an Ao3 exchange set up, but it super pays off in the end. So! Here is an intro to how Ao3 exchanges work on the back end. This explanation assumes you know how to sign up for an exchange because I've posted ones like that before, for example, here.

Let's get into it.

THE COLLECTION

The first thing you want to do is set up your exchange collection. If you go to your right-hand drop-down menu, you click on My Collections.

That brings you to every collection you have ever made, and you go to to the right and click "New collection".

That brings you into the back end of the collection. You want to go down and put in a name for the collection that will be the url (so no spaces), a display name, an email for the collection to email when something happens to the collection (this will be public, so use a fandom email), and a basic description.

There's places there to do custom icons and headers, but those are optional, but you can go in and make your exchange pretty later if you want!

We are still in the "setting up" stage of the exchange, so once we go to preferences, you want to select all the tick boxes and make it look like this.

Moderated means that you'll have to manually approve things to be added to the collection (not absolutely necessary but can keep out trolls, and it also means that you can manually check that gifts meet minimums before you let them in to the exchange), Closed means that no one can submit things to the collection yet (once you open your exchange you de-select this), Unrevealed means that any works in the collection will show up as "mystery works" and not be readable (so you keep it unrevealed until the posting date, so people can post early but not spoil the surprise), anonymous means that all authors will be anonymous (this depends on if you have an anonymous portion of your exchange, so it's optional), "show random works" just means that you get a selection of different works when people visit the collection at different times, "send a message to the collection email" is optional but is useful for moderation (like if you're checking people off a list when their gifts get delivered), and "type of challenge" you want to be set to "gift exchange".

and then on this page the only other things of concern are places where you can put in an FAQ, a description and some instructions, but those are all optional! I normally host the FAQ on tumblr, so I just say "go check the tumblr at [link]".

And then you hit the submit button.

Now we get into the nitty-gritty.

First up is some optional stuff— you can add in the times that you're going to do things! This is useful for communication, but not necessary. We're still setting everything up, so you do not want Sign-Ups to be open, that is only selected once you have everything ready to go.

Then scrolling down, you get to Requests and Offers.

This is where you specify the absolute minimum ships or characters that you want people to give you to sign up. 10 is the maximum Ao3 allows, so I always set it to 10 for both "allowed", which is the maximum the site will allow. And required is the low number. I usually set it to a minimum of three, to make sure someone doesn't sign up with "i will only write one ship" or something. This way, people will have to do a minimum of three separate requests and offers.

The "requests visible" is part of the back end thing, and it's up to you if you want to select it or not. If you keep it unselected, the only person who will be able to see requests is the mods, and eventually each person will see their assignment. If you select it, people will be able to browse everyone's requests and both maybe target offers so they can write for a specific person, and be able to find treats (extra bonus gifts) to write for people whose requests they like. Each side has its own benefits or negatives, it's up to you which ones you want to go with!

And here we get into more of the matching info! Let's look at Request Settings.

Now this is what the settings would look like for a multi-fandom exchange. The "details/description" box you want to make mandatory because that is where people will put their DNW and their prompts (and you absolutely want to make sure everyone has a DNW), and the url is an optional one which lets people link an off-site letter on google docs or dreamwidth.

Fandom allowing up to three fandoms means that people can do crossovers if they want (or tag a request something like 3rd life/hermitcraft), and if I wanted to say that people had to request 3 separate servers I would say "must be unique" but I'm okay if people sign up with three Dream SMP relationships in this idea hypothetical exchange, so I'm not selecting the unique button.

I'm ignoring the characters button cause that's extra complication, the only other thing I want to look at is the relationship button. A minimum of 1 ship per request (and there's a minimum of three requests), and let's say you can go up to 20, so people can request LOTS of different ships. I did select "must be unique" so someone can't sign up with the same ship three times. The "allow any" button is off, which means that I will have to select relationships that fit under the fandom that I selected one up, I can't request Shubble/Niki Nihachu (Origins), and put it with a fandom request for Hermitcraft. This has set it so that the absolutely minimum someone can sign up with is 3 relationships (3 requests * 1 relationship each), and the absolute maximum is 200 relationships (10 requests * 20 relationships each).

Requests will look much the same, except I am not putting down details/description or a URL, because I'm not letting people submit requests about what ship they "really" want to match on, they are going to be equally matchable to everyone they offered. Some exchanges will let you submit a requests DNW, but honestly that is so much extra work for the mods, I would not recommend it unless you think it's necessary to stop people from dropping their gifts later.

Okay, so now we take a brief digression into a tag set.

THE TAG SET

Okay so basically a tag set is an extra set of sliders that lets you fine-tune your exchange. If you do not use a tag set, when people sign up they will be able to use every canon tag on the archive, and only canon tags. Which is a LOT of tags, but when I ran an exchange without a tag set there were multiple times of hitting non-canon relationships or tags. But it's also a definite extra complication, tag sets are extra fiddly work and they are even less intituive. If you just want to go without a tag set, skip down to the matching segment. If you do want to avoid hitting people signing up with non-canon tags, keep reading.

I'm gonna say right off the bat that tag sets are the single most like "oh I am getting into the GUTS of the machine" part of running Ao3 exchanges, but if you can make them work they can super streamline both the sign-up (for your participants ) and the matching process (for you).

Oh boy, tag sets. Here we start getting into how exchanges start squeezing the interface to make it do what we want it to. I'm using a tag set, so first I clicked on the "tag set" url there and I made my tag set, and then I came back and selected its name from the drop-down menu on the collection. I leave all the tick boxes open, because selecting them will again restrict you to canon tags, and we specifically want to be open to noncanon tags both because of issues like "ijevin & tiny tim" not being a canon tag, and because the way MCYT tags are wrangled and made canon does not work for how the exchange machine reads information. We specifically want a collection of non-canon tags tuned for our needs. More on that later.

So, I started a new tag set, and I'm over there on that screen, looking at it. What does that screen look like?

Okay so, part of the appeal of a tag set is that your participants are able to specify the difference between "Rendog & InTheLittleWood" and "Rendog/InTheLittleWood". You don't have to worry about people getting undesired shipping, because people were specifying if they wanted shipping when they signed up. You can reduce a great deal of people getting matched badly by using relationship matching, because most of the time even if people want a Tommy-centric fic, there's a pretty big difference between people who want "Tommy & Technoblade" and "Tommy & Dream". By specifying who you want the gift to be about, you remove a big hurdle of matching right away. That's why most exchanges run on relationship matching.

However, if there are 37 people on a given server, that's something like 2,600 possible combinations of people if you include both romantic and platonic, and that's before you start getting into trios, and that's just way too many tags for the mods to enter manually. So what you do is run a nomination period, and for a week or two weeks you go to all your participants and you go "do you want to sign up for this exchange? Nominate the tags you want to use now! If it doesn't get nominated, it can't be used!" And then people head to the tag set to nominate.

So, on this page, you want "visible tag list" to be selected, because you want people to see what's already been nominated so they don't duplicate, and you want "currently taking nominations" to be selected because you will be taking those nominations instead of doing them all yourself.

So you have to set up limits on those nominations.

The point of taking nominations is to make matching easier, so people normally use the same fandom and relationship limits as they are going to use on the sign-up, to make sure there aren't dozens of tags in the tag set that nobody's using, just cluttering up the space. It also helps stop the issue where someone sees a tag in the tag set, goes "oh man I love that ship" and signs up, but its an extra tag that no one intended to offer, so they don't match to anyone. That's why sometimes people keep the amount of tags that can be nominated low, I've seen people limit this to 10 tags, or even 7, so that's up to you.

And you save, and now when you link your participants the tag set, they will have a "nominate" button.

They will hurry over to press that button, and then they will see a page that looks like this.

This is a thing where you absolutely want to give your participants detailed instructions, because what Ao3 will try to do is auto-fill people's nominations with canonical tags. WE DO NOT WANT CANONICAL TAGS. CANONICAL TAGS ARE THE ENEMY OF EXCHANGES. CANONICAL TAGS ARE THE ENEMY OF MCYT EXCHANGES IN PARTICULAR.

Remember back when we clicked the button that says tags have to be unique? The canonical tag for Philza & Technoblade doesn't have a server on it, and people might want to be requesting that relationship for SMPEarth, Dream SMP, Origins SMP, or arguably even QSMP. If you only have the canonical tag, people can only request a specific dynamic once, for one server. And that is a problem for every situation where people interacted on multiple servers, and with the network of overlaps that is Empires/SOS/3rd Life/Hermitcraft and DSMP/Origins/SMPEarth/QSMP, that's going to lead to unhappy participants. So you tell people to nominate the ship and also "disambiguate" it, and add the server in parentheses. And then all your participants will hit the button to submit, and you will go into the "review nominations" button, and you will let those tags into the tag set.

Now I just distributed the tag set to a couple friends, so let's look at what this looks like behind the scenes.

Brace yourself, it's gonna be wild, but I believe we can get through it.

Now here is a perfectly standard look at tag set nominations after a few people have gotten into the tag set. This is why they pay tag mods the big bucks.

As you can see, there are a few things to be gathered. The first things is a bunch of people used the canon tags (because that's what Ao3 tries to get them to do), someone else nominated an x-reader ship, we have one tag there twice (spelled differently), and the tags are Piped (they have both the person's tax name and the username). (You can let tags in that are Piped, but I find that it makes the tag set harder to read, and usually exchanges are character-focused unless you're writing video blogging rpf anyways, so I ask people to submit tags unpiped, using usernames.) And for the tags that were nominated in a way that I want (unpiped, and disambiguated so they're unique), Ao3 is trying to get me to use the canon tag. But I don't want the canon tag, I want a unique tag, with the server on it, with no pipes. So.

So were I moderating the tag set, after a few minutes it would look like this.

That's going through and disambiguating the tags (adding the server, which I could tell because of the fandom it was nominated under), removing the piping and using the usernames instead of tax names, and then re-ordering the names so they're alphabetical so people can find them on the list later, rejecting the x-reader tag, rejecting the duplicate and allowing the one that's spelled correctly through. Amazing. I have tags that I want to use (I did some other tags that were ready to go in other fandoms as well). I hit submit. Am I ready to go?

No, because tag sets are the most complicated part of exchanges.

I open up my tag set, and if I scroll down to "Unassociated characters and relationships" there are a bunch of tags that are are lost, Ao3 doesn't know where to put them. This is because we very carefully made unique tags that have not been wrangled anywhere, and Ao3 said "i don't know where these go" and shoved them all together in a garbage bin at the bottom of the page. So we have to manually go in to associate them to the right fandoms.

You hit the Edit button on the tag set, and scroll down to the bottom, to "tag associations", and start selecting where tags go.

Honestly this is a great time to be listening to a stream or a podcast or something, and then you have the tag set open in another tab so you know what all the unassociated tags are, and you just go down the list like a databasing machine. It is not hard, cause you disambiguated each tag with its own server, it's just time consuming. Note. This is why people go in and accept tags regularly during the nomination period, because if you do this all at the end you've got a BIG job ahead of you.

So, you turned on your VOD playlist and you associated all your tags, and all the tags are where they are supposed to go. You have a beautiful tag set.

But wait, you say, looking at this beautiful tag set. Some of those tags look at little different. What is the "Dream smp and only dream smp" that a couple of them have?

Well.

You see.

Ao3 designed tag sets to work a certain way, and nobody uses them that way. It turns out that "Quackity/Wilbur Soot (Dream SMP)" is a wrangled canon tag, and the system goes "ah, I know where this goes, this is a sub-tag of the major tag, and the top-level tag is Video Blogging RPF, so it goes under Video Blogging RPF, as all MCYT tags do. I am very smart. I have stuck this Dream SMP tag under Video Blogging RPF. I am a good machine". And then you go AUUUUUUUUGH, and then you turn up the podcast a little louder, and then you sit down and you delete the old tag and you write out a new tag that the system doesn't know what to do with, and it goes uhhhhhhh and sticks it in "unassociated tags" and then you go in again and you manually associate it into the right server.

It's not hard, it's just time consuming. Shouting at the tag set like STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO as it helpfully tries to stick dsmp tags in SMPearth and you wrestle it out of SMPEarth and into the right fandom bucket.

Deep breath moment. Honestly that's the most fiddly part of a fiddly process, so if you can get through this you're absolutely golden.

Anyways. You got clean disambiguated unique tags, and then you associated them in the right spot, and then you found the ones that got sorted to the wrong spot and you associated them yourself, and now you have a beautiful tag set ready to go. It's a thing of beauty. Shed a tear. Your participants can select from anything in this tag set, and you know they want to use these specific relationships, because they submitted them to you. What next?

THE MATCHING

Okay. You have your tag set set up and it's accepting nominations. Your participants are filling it out right now. You go back to your collection. it's time to tell it how to match.

This is the "minimum number to match" pane, and this is the minimum numbers to make a successful match. You want 1 for Fandom, and 1 for Relationship, and that's it. People will show up to the machine as a viable match as long as they have submitted a fandom and relationship that matches someone else's offered fandom and relationship.

This is a minimum viable exchange. You're ready to go. As soon as your tag set is done (or immediately if you're not using a tag set), you're ready to go back and open your exchange to sign-ups.

Congratulations!

FURTHER TWEAKING

HOWEVER. There is more that you can do. For example, do you want to allow people to request or opt into NSFW? There's an easy way to do that! First thing is you go back to your tag set, and you scroll down to the "ratings" section that you've been ignoring.

You select G and E, and that way, if people are opting into explicit that means they're okay with NSFW, and if they only select G, that means they only want a non-explicit piece.

Then on the collection you switch the requests and offers sections to include a place to specify a rating.

You want them to definitely specify at least one, and if you maximum allowed is 2, people can opt into both and say "i'm good with whatever"!

Then you scroll down to the matching section, and you tweak that to make sure that people will match on Fandom, Relationship, and at least one Rating.

Bingo. You now have a toggle to turn NSFW on and off.

But a lot of people like to match by TYPE of gift too, specifying if they want art or fic or playlist or web weave etc. How do you do that? Ah, at this point you are master of all you survey, and you can make tag sets do absolutely anything you want. You go back to the tag set and you scroll down to "characters".

Now we were matching on relationships, so the character box is unused. And it lets you put in your own tags. So what you do is you start to add in custom tags.

And then you go back to the Collection settings, and on the requests and the offers you go in to the "characters" section and you say "must select at least one, can select up to six".

And then, you guessed it— you go back to "minimum number to match" and you set that "characters" tab to 1 minimum, 6 maximum. Now people who specified that they wanted Art can be matchable to artists who Offered Art. You have unlimited power, the world is at your fingertips.

There's even more customization that you can do, too! There's "additional tags", which is entirely custom tags you add yourself, that can be anything from specifying if people want fluff or horror or hurt/comfort etc— with the recursive exchange we used it to specify the works people were recursing— I'm considering using it for holidays with the holiday exchange. You can let people opt in or out of major archive warnings by selecting "archive warnings" as a thing that's in the tag set and that you're matching for. Once you understand how the underpinnings of how the machine works, you can wrestle it into almost any shape you want.

So. Whew. That's how exchanges work, under the hood. When I say that this is significantly easier than hand matching the holiday exchange, I ask you to picture just how complicated hand matching gets. Go forth! Thrive! Set up exchanges if you want! The world is your oyster!

Feel free to message me if you have further questions.

[theminecraftbee]

hermit horror week day 4: season 7 or taken over

Xisuma slowly blinks at the console logs for the server again. He's very tired; he's been collecting blackstone again, and it's very tiring, collecting blackstone. He's been building a lot of pretty houses, and stocking a lot of shops, and he hasn't had time to look at the console much recently. He probably shouldn't be now, because he's tired, and tired people make mistakes.

He makes a lot of mistakes; he's silly like that. A big derp. It's why he has to be careful, since he's been tired so much lately. He definitely shouldn't have the console open.

It's just, earlier Impulse had a question, since his moss farm kept lagging, and Xisuma thought it would be easy enough to try to find the root cause of. And he did find the root cause of it--Impulse's farm is too fast and his storage simply doesn't keep up with the amount of moss--but there's... some other things...

He blinks again at the dates on the server files. The last edited dates. Slowly, he clicks again on his own player data, and tries to make sense of what he's reading. Files like this, they aren't really meant to be that human-readable. It's--well, it is mostly json, so it's mostly human-readable, actually, but a lot of it is still encrypted, for player safety, which would. Maybe explain what he's looking at? He thinks? He's--well, he does have root access, is the thing, because he's the admin, but he still shouldn't be able to look at any player willy-nilly.

He's a little too much of a derp to be trusted with that. He probably shouldn't even be looking at his data! It's just. That last edited date. Xisuma doesn't edit his own player data. That way lies madness. He's, uh, pretty sure he knows some people who went a little mad doing that. So the fact of the matter is--well, it's not the only file that's been edited recently, he tells himself. Just because it's a lot of memory files that seem to have been edited, as well as access permissions--that's... normal enough for a new season, right?

He's...

He doesn't notice his other self walk up behind him.

"Oh, hey Xisuma. You finished gathering materials for our next build, then?" Evil Xisuma says. All of Xisuma's hairs stand on end.

"I mean, I've gathered enough to get started," Xisuma says.

"Pity. I was really hoping you'd manage to get everything. I thought maybe we'd finish today, but I guess we can't now."

"I--you're right. I'm really sorry."

"No, no, don't worry, don't worry, my friend," Evil Xisuma says. "We probably couldn't have finished today anyway, even if you said you'd try for it."

Xisuma's heart is in his throat. "Sorry, my head's just been. You know how I am. Silly me, forgetting things."

Evil Xisuma shakes his head. "It's awfully lucky I came back this season. Think of all the important things you'd be forgetting without reminders!"

Xisuma looks down and away.

"Gosh, and now you're... playing around in the admin console?"

"Oh!" Xisuma says. "It's, er, nothing really big..."

"Can I see it?"

He barely resists the urge to close out of his player data and hide that's what he'd been looking at. He doesn't know why he wants to hide it. It's not like--well, if Evil Xisuma got mad about it, it would be... right, wouldn't it? Because, well, Xisuma knows full well he shouldn't be looking at or editing his own player data. Editing your own data is the way to madness, and Xisuma, well, he's been so tired lately. He could easily accidentally hit a button. He could easily accidentally hit delete. He has root access, after all.

His heart is in his throat again. He shuffles his feet. "Sure," he says, finally. "I, er, I promise, I wasn't doing anything. I just noticed the last edited date on, uh, files that aren't automatically created by the system? And I thought, gosh, that's weird. I'd only been in there to check on Impulse, really, after he'd had some lag issues. I was just finishing up. It's nothing--the date's weird, though, right? That's all I was noticing."

He watches Evil Xisuma's fingers scroll through all of Xisuma's data. It's not quite fast enough that Xisuma isn't sure he's reading it, and suddenly, Xisuma feels very small.

Finally, Evil Xisuma hands Xisuma's tablet with the admin console open back to him. Xisuma looks down, and Evil Xisuma has closed out of the player data again.

"You just forgot the last maintenance date," Evil Xisuma says.

"Really?" Xisuma says.

"Oh, yeah, for sure. You're so tired lately. You silly derp. You've just been forgetting things easily. You should really get more rest!"

"Oh, but then we won't finish our projects," Xisuma says.

"I guess we wouldn't," Evil Xisuma says back.

"It's just--it's. Most of the time, access permission for player memories isn't edited during maintenance, and I just--I don't remember putting your name down?"

"Why wouldn't you?"

Xisuma tries to think.

"I don't know," he says finally, small, unable to meaningfully articulate anything about what's wrong with it. "I guess it only makes sense, if I'm forgetting things so easily."

"Exactly! Gosh, we make a good team," Evil Xisuma says, and he smiles at Xisuma. Xisuma crookedly smiles back.

"Yeah, we do," Xisuma agrees.

"Don't pull that out again unless I say so, okay?"

"Okay," Xisuma agrees automatically, and then he knows he will not. It makes sense. If he was upsetting himself over nothing like this, why, imagine what he'd do if he could open it whenever? He'd just constantly be upsetting himself!

"Now, my friend, let's return to building the Evil Empire."

"Let's!" agrees Xisuma, and just like that, the entire encounter slips from his mind.

[dreamcatcher-roulette]

Since I enjoy collecting things (big surprise) this year I've been working on collecting every Dreamcatcher music show performance in a quality that doesn't suck ass (aka not the seven pixels that YouTube compresses the official uploads down to). It went pretty well!

Pseudo research report under the cut (because I'm a massive nerd).

Scope

I started this project with the goal of collecting a full set of "music show performances". I didn't realise quite how ambiguous that definition is. After some deliberation I settled on the following as constituting "regular" performances:

Show Music Core

Inkigayo

The Show

Show Champion

M! Countdown

Music Bank

Simply K-Pop

Everything else I classified as misc. Most notably I left K-Force Special Show in the misc category despite there being quite a few performances on that show in the early days. This mostly came down to how I'm storing the files — I've organised the regular ones by era, but the K-Force Special Show performances frequently happened in between comebacks making them difficult to sort in that fashion. That and difficulties in ascertaining whether I do actually have all of them.

Methodology

The first step in collecting anything is finding out what you need to collect. I was surprised at how difficult it actually is to get a complete list of all of a group's music show performances. There are some fan sites which do a good job of presenting a lot of well categorised individual links to Dreamcatcher's appearances but I was hoping for something more "from the source" (aka the music shows themselves) and ideally machine readable to cross check that nothing is missing, since, for example, a collection of links to all official Inkigayo performance uploads is not a list of all Inkigayo performances (some never got official uploads). I ended up finding /r/kpop's music shows wiki fit my needs the most. The information is all in tables and sorted by music show and date which what I wanted.

Unfortunately, the main tables of /r/kpop's music show wikis only list debuts and comebacks, so I had to index and search all the individual pages to find what I was looking for. This involved spending a couple of afternoons opening up nearly 2,000 tabs of Reddit* and then downloading them using the SingleFile browser extension (Reddit rate limits you quite harshly and so I had to open a bunch of tabs, check they loaded, wait, and then repeat, which slowed it down a lot). While maybe a little overkill I did this for multiple reasons. Firstly, Reddit's search sucks, and I didn't trust it to find all instances of what I was looking for over so many pages. In contrast Everything's in-memory file content index beta is really good. But secondly, this is much more extensible, and now I can find any other group's performances as well (between 2017** and 2023).

*Reddit does not archive Simply K-Pop well at all (which caused some initial confusion), but the official Arirang website works fine as an alternative (albeit one that is somehow even slower than Reddit at opening new pages).

**Reddit's music show wiki pages start right before 2017. This is very convenient for a Dreamcatcher archivist, but, unfortunately for me, curiosity got the better of me and I did venture further out into the unknown. For 2014-2017 I have some scattered archives from various official websites, Twitter accounts, and Korean catch up services. I'm less confident in my music show data for this period in the general case but because the rough start and end dates for the two Minx promotion cycles are known I am confident enough that all the gaps I have in there are genuine gaps and that I'm not missing a performance date.

Once I had my wishlist I then had to go out and, you know, find them. And figure out what "best quality" actually means. I learned a lot about video encoding against my will. I also learned that HEVC is fucking haunted. When multiple sources were available I ranked them as follows:

2160p HEVC > 2160p h264 > 1080p HEVC (one weird edge case I didn't know what to do with) > 1080i h264 > 1080i MPEG2 > WEBDL (usually some kind of web livestream or online catch up service recording) > YouTube

Which I represented in my spreadsheet as:

This should be mostly uncontroversial, however, there is a slight complication in that the 4k broadcast copies are not all native 4k but often upscaled from the 1080 source (I can't find specifics on this as the information, if publicly accessible, would be in Korean, and there is only so much Google Translate can do, but the technical broadcasting details probably aren't public to the extend I am interested in regardless so I'm mostly basing this off information gleaned from secondary sources). As far as I can tell there exist two "grades" of upscales: one of which is upscaled by the network before being pushed out to a UHD channel, and one of which is upscaled by the end user by either recording a HD channel in 4k or running an existing recording through an upscaler. Traditionally upscales aren't very desirable due to providing no real material benefit you couldn't get from playing the 1080 copy on a 4k display yourself. Or, for people with an archival mindset like myself, because ones that actually look a bit crisper introduce "magic" pixels which may or may not have ever existed. See below for an example of this taken to the extreme (note the faces):

No one wants that, right? AND YET SOMEONE THOUGHT THAT WAS SUCH A BIG IMPROVEMENT THEY DELETED EVERYTHING ELSE, AND NOW IT REMAINS THE ONLY COPY I CAN FIND. Monsters!!! Anyway.

While upscales usually aren't desirable, I did come around to the idea that the network upscales deserve their place at the top of the list. There are a couple of points working in their favour: one is that they are, presumably, upscaled much more directly from the source, allowing them to avoid some of the data loss that being encoded into 1080i h264 and then upscaled would cause. The second is that quite a lot of them are encoded directly into HEVC, which makes the confetti and flashing lights look noticably smoother than the regular deinterlaced 1080i copies. Also, finally, as a touch of personal preference (especially in the case of 4k h264 where the second point doesn't apply), these do come pre-deinterlaced which is nicer for my chosen method of playback. Although some of those points apply to non network upscales too, the "impurity" of them far outweighs any benefit in my eyes, as I have more faith in whatever the network standard is than some random person on the internet trying to "fix" a file.

So how did I tell the difference? Also a frustratingly difficult problem, one which applies not just to spotting fake upscales but also to finding real TV recordings instead of lower quality catch up service clips. For the 1080 copies one of the biggest things was that the TV broadcast copies (unfortunately) always come through in 1080i. 1080p is suspicious. It means something has been touched (although sometimes in a way that is forgivable when nothing cleaner exists). File sizes are also a good sanity check. A single song in h264 should be in the 200-400MiB range, MPEG2 is 400MiB+. (For reference YouTube, and other inferior WEBDLs, usually come in at under 100MiB). This is a good reminder of why size does not always equal quality, because, in this scenario, worst to best is 100MiB < 450MiB < 250MiB.

On the 4k side: Music Bank, Show Music Core and Inkigayo are currently broadcast on UHD channels with a UHD variant of their channel names in the top right, which is a good indicator that something was recorded from a UHD source. (Although I've found 1080p copies recorded from UHD channels, so the presence of the logo doesn't mean no downscaling has occurred). Recent "4k" M! Countdown, Show Champion and The Show recordings, in comparison, appear identical in channel watermark to the 1080 copies. This and the fact that the only 4k copies I've found are from a source known to dabble in AI upscales means that I'm not going to trust these are genuine without further proof, and this was the main category of files which I decided against adding to my collection. (Note that The Show was in the past the only show that was broadcast in 4k, first on UMAX UHD and then on SBS F!L UHD, it is only recently that that seems to have stopped (or, no one has been recording it)). I paid less attention to the 4k file sizes than for 1080. 4k HEVC seems to come in pretty reliably at just under 1GiB, but 4k h264 is all over the place due to I think some differing quality profiles between uploaders (a range of 1GiB to nearly 3GiB). The latter is annoying because it means I can't figure out what the "true" recording should be, but I did develop an internal ranking of the trustworthiness of sources which was the tiebreaker when two differently sized 4k h264 recordings existed.

I prioritised collecting existing cuts where applicable (although many were not cut nearly as meticulously frame perfectly as I would like) but there were quite a few where I had to cut them out of full broadcast recordings myself. There were also instances where only the main performance was saved in 4k leaving interviews behind. In those cases I decided to keep the highest quality available for the bits in which it was and store the other segments separately.

Results

Alright, the fun stuff! I have successfully catalogued:

317 Dreamcatcher music show performances

34 Dreamcatcher miscellaneous appearances

46 Minx music show performances

16 Minx miscellaneous appearances

Those links go to mostly complete YouTube representations of what I found with exceptions listed in the descriptions of the playlists. You can also of course find a published version of my beautiful spreadsheet here. Finally, if you've made it this deep I would like to just quietly tell you I'm more than happy to share the originals, but please message me privately as I don't want to publicly host questionably copyrighted content on my good and morally upstanding posting images of dreamcatcher photobooks blog (for legal reasons the entire existence of this collection is a joke).

Honestly I'm pretty happy with the completeness of the collection after my first pass. The list of ones I would consider "missing" (aka not good enough quality) is:

It's almost all Simply K-Pop, which makes sense as it seems to not be archived with the same enthusiasm as the others. The missing M! Countdown, meanwhile, does kind of hurt, since it's ruining an otherwise perfect run. I'm out of ideas for now but am not going to give up on it forever, I have seen evidence that proper recordings exist, so I'm sure they have got to resurface eventually.

As can be seen in the breakdown for this section the percentage of MPEG2 recordings is also a pretty major victory, with the vast majority being h264:

For Minx things look a bit worse:

But then again I hadn't been expecting much to begin with. To be honest, watching all of these to check quality did drive me a little insane. There is a reason I don't own Love Shake and Why Did You Come To My Home, and it's not purely the irresponsible financial decision, it's the thought of spending that much money on something I actually really don't like. Watching Minx performances is amusing for a little while, but man, am I glad Dreamcatcher exists instead.

It's also evident that people were holding to completely different standards even just a few years earlier, as this is where all those MPEG2s in the overall numbers are hiding:

Future Work

While I'm confident I've successfully catalogued the "music show performances" as defined in the scope, I know there is still much more to be discovered under Misc Appearances, as those were filled in not via a predefined wish list but just by what other recordings I happened across in my search for the original goal. The obvious next step would to be a little more systematic about finding out what I'm missing in that category by scouring some Dreamcatcher specific archives, but because I've already exhausted the full collections of my two main sources of recordings I'm not confident I would uncover many more performances outside of YouTube in that way, which isn't really that appealing.

I'm probably more likely going to do something about my performance outfit images collection which has been slowly but steadily increasing over the years. I'd like to put them into a proper searchable database alongside performance dates, which would have a similar effect of cataloguing the missing performances, but with the visual element that the spreadsheet lacks.

But then again, I also might not :)

[autumnalwalker]

Heads Up Seven Up Tag

Thank you for the tag, @kahvilahuhut.

Passing the tag to @blind-the-winds, @ceph-the-ghost-writer, @talesofsorrowandofruin, @a-crows-corner, @meerawrites, @aestatismors, @cljordan-imperium, and an open tag for anyone else who wants it.

From the next Empty Names main chapter (with one extra line since this took me so long to reply to):

“What did you learn?” Ashan asks. 

“Nothing.  Not yet,” she hastily amends at the sight of an elegantly arched eyebrow.  “Data’s all been collected, yeah.  But it’s still processing.”  She gestures to the loading bar that’s appeared on the screen. “Going to be a bit for the computer to translate it all into something human readable.”

“Is that normal for using a computer, or is this supposed tattoo on the back of my neck truly so complex?”

“A little of both?  But mostly it’s because I scanned a whole bunch of extra data while I was at it.  Once it’s done we’ll have a full physical and metaphysical baseline for you that we can use for comparison if you ever get sick, injured, or cursed or something.  Should make the healing process easier, having a save state to restore your body back to.  Could probably even duplicate the enchantments on your robe if it ever gets lost or damaged.”

A flicker of… some emotion… crosses Ashan’s face.  Impressed?  Bemused?  Annoyed?  Offended?  Did she say something wrong?  Is talking about replacing a wizard’s robes some kind of taboo?  Or is she reading too much into it?  Once again Lacuna silently curses herself for being so incompetent at reading people.  It doesn’t help that whatever the expression was came and went so quickly, like a tiny ripple subsumed by a great lake.  Except the Great Lakes are large enough that they probably have all sorts of waves and currents so probably not a good analogy for Ashan’s -

“Do I have something on my face?”

Oh goddess she did it again; zoned out while facing in someone’s direction so it looks like she’s staring.  She spins her chair back around to keep the creeping redness in her face toward the computer monitors and away from Ashan.

“No.  Nothing on your face.  Well, other than makeup, obviously.  And that’s fine.  Perfect even.  I was just thinking hard.  About a thing.”   Did she just call his makeup perfect to his face?  Someone kill her now, please. 

[the-girl-from-dres]

The Amazing Digital Circus Post like... #7 I guess??

Something that's been on my mind since I first watched it is the use of the term 'abstraction' for when someone "reaches their breaking point", so to speak.

You see, I am quite certain there is more to abstraction that Ragatha thinks. (please read I spent way too long on this)

This is because in computer science -highly relevant to a digital circus- 'abstraction' has a very specific meaning.

Abstraction means to hide away unnecessary detail to the user so that they can more easily understand the important stuff.

The most commonly given example (at least here in Britain) is the London tube map.

This is the original 1933 map of the London Underground. It clearly displays all the stations and the lines they're on -and therefore the trains a person would have to take to get from one place to another. It's clear, concise, and has all the neccessary information.

This the map that the London Underground had beforehand -from around 1908, I think. Notice that all the same stuff is there (mostly), but it's a lot harder to read -there are lines and streets everywhere and names squished into awkward places. This is because there's a lot of information here that a commuter simply doesn't need. All of the London surrounding the Underground is here as well, and this means the Tube lines need to be shown as they actually exist relative to London -this is stuff someone just looking to get to Eastcote station doesn't need to know, and makes it more difficult to figure out how to get to Eastcote station.

If we go back to the 1933 map we can see that the rest of London has been removed (with exception to the river Thames) and thus the lines (and the Thames) can be laid out in a different, more readable way with much more orderly lines that allow the names of (and routes to) stations to be easily discerned. That unnecessary data -London itself- has been abstracted away, so that the user can more easily process the relevent data.

So what does all this have to do with The Amazing Digital Circus?

Well, it means that this: (abstraction creature by 0Liiver btw)

Is probably more than just a strained clown losing his mind. Rather, there's likely something more afoot. It is entirely possible that whatever it was that Kaufmo brought to the proverbial table was considered to be unnecessary, and thus, he was removed so as to not give unnecessary information that would hinder some user's access to the relevant information.

Of course this has implications. What is this 'user'? Is it Caine? Is it us, the audience? Or someone -or something- else entirely?

What qualifies as 'relevant' information? Was Kaufmo simply not making a good performance? (Maybe his jokes really were bad)

Or perhaps, the inverse is true. Maybe he had information too relevant to the other characters. Perhaps he had found a way to leave or had come close to it, and as a result it was deemed necessary to hide that information from everyone else?

These are some of my initial thoughts of the ramifications of this particular way of looking at Abstraction, more stuff may come to mind soon, but for now this just some possible speculation this could lead us to. I suppose we have no choice but to, in the words of the venerable Neil Gaiman, Wait and See™

[chevvy-yates]

WIP Wednesday

Been tagged by @morganlefaye79 thx! <3

I tag: @imaginarycyberpunk2023, @itzsassha, @medtech-mara, @therealnightcity, @humberg, @pinkyjulien, @hydrasshole @kharonion and @elvenbeard as always: no pressure!

— VP

No plans atm other than preparing and thinking about sth for Arki as his birthday follows up next. Also promised I'll take some pics of Enzo and Jay as i couldn't make it in time for Enzo's bday. So I don't have much to add other than what I sneak-peaked last week that will be posted when I feel ready to push the button in my drafts (some pics are already months old again …). All other VP ideas are on hold as I still would liketo play the game a bit longer and only do random pics in between — but I need to solve first my problem I have with Thyjs' save data that is crashing when wanting to watch the deathshead BD in Judy's van. I want to look into it on the weekend because before I hop back into my bigger VP ideas I plan to get every oc into Phantom Liberty start and have them skilled a bit because that also motivates me to actually play the game from time to time and helps me to describe their fight style in the rp story. If I can't solve it I'll try Vijay next and see if he crashes too at the same point or not as I remember he's not far away from the Scav mission either. Then last I can try is Jay but he needs to get through the entire prologue first which will take me a weekend as well.

FIC/STORY/RP

Once I get Vijay's npv, @nervouswizardcycle and I can finally start taking story pics as well, though I believe she might just wait until she gets her new pc for that. I have overworked "The Golden Demon of Kabuki" text some months ago so it is a better readable fic now. I will place it into layout as soon as the needed pics are done. Then I'll see what happens next. Probably try and get ch2 ready.

I've said enough now, let's give you another snip-bit:

CORPO PARTY RP SNIPPET (my part only):

He noticed that Vijay says something Ry can’t concentrate on since he’s busy staring the redhead down and trying to see through him, but sees V starts walking and so he follows. They walked a bit further away leaving the red-haired man alone, Vijay pleased to stay and wait until they would come back to him. Once they were far away enough, Ryder turns around and raises his voice with a certain gnarl in his undertone “I leave you alone for almost an hour and you take the next best chance to shove your tongue down the throat of one of those Corporats?!” “Ry—” Vijay starts but Ryder is not done and so he hisses dangerously. “ON A JOB!? — Seriously V!” Scharfenberg shifts his weight to one leg, breathes audibly through his nostrils, crosses his arms and waits for V’s explanation.

Somehow Steyr finds it funny because he knows Ryder exaggerates it as always. Nonetheless Vijay feels a bit embarrassed as well because he knows Ry is also right. He should behave in a certain manner here but he is bad at being a Corpo. “Calm down man — Part of the job now,” V answers and gives him a stupid smirk. “You weren’t in reach. Had to escape from that escort chick otherwise I’d have blown cover. Unlike you I dunno how to friggin’ corpo. Dunno how to even pronounce my fuckin’ fake name either. Stainback von Kra– Krawnee–” “Steinbach von Kranichstein!” Ryder repeats fast in exasperation. 

They’ve practiced it a few times before and V still wasn’t able to pronounce it right. “Yeah whatever!” Vijay gestures with his hands. “But uh— Arki happened to—” “Oh, it’s ‘Arki’ already?!” “—chill a few feet away from me, so I took the chance to escape and, yeah — he’s my fiancé in disguise now as long as we are on the job here. He’s the dude from the Afterlife weeks ago, ‘member? Could help us out on this.” Ryder raises both eyebrows, his mouth opens a bit and he feels how Beast wants him to yell at V yet he -tries- to stay the calmest he can be. “Afterlife red haired rando? Supposed demon — your fiancé?! Alter Vadder! Tell me this is a joke!?” Ryder throws both hands in the air and makes a few steps as if he wants to walk away now and curses further in German “Ich glaub, ich bin im falschen FIlm!” He wasn’t in the wrong movie, though. “Chill, bro. I’ve got it under control. All good,” Steyr tries to calm his friend. “V, you know he’s a—” Scharfenberg starts but stops abruptly as he realizes something now that doesn’t make much sense to him. Wait. Afterlife merc rando— a true Corporate? How’s that fitting in? “He’s what?” V raises an eyebrow at that. “Forget it!“ “M‘Kay, if y’say so.” V crosses his arms, not satisfied about Ry’s answer.

“Just don’t like to get into a fucking mess,V!” Scharfenberg spits his sentence out rather inappropriately. Judging by V’s face however Ry notices it is meant seriously, so he facepalms with an angry growl as Beast already tells him to just flip the switch, turn around and kill some of those poor dancing souls behind him. “I’m not riding us into a mess. I bet he can help us to klep the info we here for.” Ryder gets immensely fidgety, looking into every direction trying to ignore the voice as best as he can. He fiddles out a menthol cigarette, lights it up and takes a few long puffs inhaling it deeply into his lungs as he walks up and down glad that Vijay waits until he’s done. The least V could use was having Ryder in a critical state on this job, so V gives his best mate time to clear his mind.

“Fine— But we’re not done talking about this!” Ryder states as he throws the smoked up stub on the bottom to rather aggressively put it out with his double varnished fine shoe. He doesn’t look amused about the fact that his best friend obviously seemed to know this dude named Arki already better than he thought. Steyr must have kept this info from him for whatever reason and he doesn’t like it at all. But since it is not part of the job right now, he accepts this now changed situation. So he takes another deep breath and says under gritted teeth “Let's get back to your new flame then, see if he can be of help as you predict and brief him.” Vijay gives him a thankful gaze. He knows it’s not easy for Ry to control but he managed well enough not to raise any suspicion and V does feel guilty too for not telling Ry he knows Arki already better than he might think. They would discuss it later. But now back to business. So they walked back to the redhead who was awaiting them back where they left him, enjoying a cigarette.

[pretensesoup]

How to Publish a Book, pt 2

Q: I'd like to do a print book too, not just an ebook. A: Do you realize that if you do a print book, your mom is going to read it? And the book has sex in there? Like, explicit gay sex? Like it says the word "cock" right there on the page.

Q: Yeah, she's like 77, she knows that sex exists. I've made my peace with this. A: All right, here we go. Publish on Demand books in some number of easy-ish steps.

There are a bunch of options for POD publishing now. IngramSpark, KDP, Draft2Digital, Lulu, etc. Other websites like Barnes & Noble will let you set up paperback publishing but outsource the actual printing to IngramSpark (IS). I think a bunch of these services do. IS is also slightly better if you want to have bookstores sell your book, have it in libraries, etc., because most bookstores won't order from Amazon, for obvious reasons. For Dionysus in Wisconsin, I've done both IS and Amazon, letting IS distribute to anywhere that isn't the Zon.

OH, IS allows preorders for paperbacks while the Zon doesn't.

First, you're going to need to write and edit the book. We went over this in pt. 1. Please refer there if you have any questions on this step. Okay, here is the exhaustive list of what to do once you're ready.

1. Decide what size the physical book should be. Look around your house at books in your genre and select the size that is most pleasing to you. This is called the trim size.

2. If you uploaded your text into a typesetting program like Atticus, tell it your trim size, preferred typeface size, line spacing, and margins and have it spit out a pdf. Otherwise, set Word up with those specifications. KDP has a helpful site where you can calculate the correct inner margins for your number of pages, while I think somehow IS just requires a .5" or .625" margin for all sizes (this doesn't make sense; I assume you just have to fix it after seeing a proof?). The book's gonna be exactly the same, so just do the same thing in both places.

Okay, one thing I couldn't find any guidance on is what size to make the typeface and line spacing. I wound up going with 11 pt typeface and 1.4 spacing. I figured this out by printing out the first page of my book, cutting it out at the correct size (5"x8") and comparing it to pages in similar books until I found one that looked readable and pretty. Anything from 10-12 is probably fine, also 1.1-1.4 spacing, but keep in mind that small/densely spaced typefaces will make your text look more intimidating. Someone on Mastodon said 1.5 spacing looks like a student paper, which I also agree with.

There are loads of websites that detail what typefaces to use for what types of books. "Look at your genre and try to match" is reasonable advice here too.

3. You need not just a cover, but a spine and a back cover. Books are three dimensional objects!

If you hire an artist, they should just be able to provide a wrap-around cover that is appropriate dimensions (again, KDP and IS both have templates), but if you're doing it yourself, I suggest laying out the entire cover on one large sheet of paper/canvas and doing your art like that rather than trying to photoshop together various pieces, unless you are really, really good at color leveling etc. You're gonna want to make sure that you have at least 300 dpi. Make sure you use open access typefaces or that you have rights to use them, ditto for any images you collage into stuff.

GIMP is a great free photoshop alternative. ImageMagick is a free image manipulation program that is incredibly powerful. I had to use ImageMagick to flip my cover file into CMYK and create a PDF. The command you want is this:

magick "inputfile.png" -colorspace sRGB -colorspace CMYK "outputfile.pdf"

4. Submitting your file for stuff: copyright here, LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number) here. Neither of these is obligatory, but both are cool in their own way. LCCN is a way for Library of Congress to pre-catalog your data (creating a stub record in OCLC) so that if a library acquires your book, it's easier for them to get it on the shelf. You need to submit your request for this PRIOR TO THE MONTH OF PUBLICATION. However, you don't need a final manuscript to submit, just a summary of the book. Also, note that you can only retroactively submit your MS for copyright registration for THREE MONTHS after publication, so decide now if you want it. And yes, everything you write in the US is automatically copyrighted, but having a certificate to prove it is nice in a court battle. Also also, you WILL want a finished copy of the text to submit when you make this request, or else you will have to submit two printed copies. By MAIL. So you have to GO OUT OF YOUR HOUSE TO THE POST OFFICE. UGH. (Technically, you are requested to send in a print copy for the LCCN program too. I don't think that's obligatory, but am I gonna pass up a chance to have my book fully cataloged by LOC? Fuck no.)

5. OKAY, assuming you got everything done, now you need an ISBN.

Do you really? Kind of. If you're only publishing on KDP, they'll give you a free one. But you can't reuse it if you try to also publish on IS. The reverse is also true. Technically, the entity that assigns the ISBN is the publisher, so this makes Amazon/IS the publisher of your book. Also, it makes editions slightly weird (technically, it's supposed to be one ISBN per edition). ANYWAY, in the US you buy ISBNs through Bowkers. Don't let them sell you barcodes or any of that garbage. Just buy your ISBN(s).

Sometimes, people report putting in information in KDP and then having the ISBN rejected as "in use" when inputting it into IS, so do this next part all at once. First, assign your ISBN to your book in the Bowkers database. Then assign it to your book at IS and save as draft. Then assign it to your book at KDP and save as draft.

One other note. If you have set up a business to be your press name (mine is Winnowing Fan Press, because the main character's name is Ulysses and I am a GIANT NERD), that will be set up as your publishing house in Bowkers. You won't have an imprint unless you specify one. (An imprint is like a special line of books, so Harlequin has a "digital-first" imprint called Carina Press that specializes in LGBT+ romance, because why would you publish LGBT+ romance in paperback first, ugh.) BUT Amazon will ask what the imprint is for your ISBN and it will be THE NAME OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSE. Why is Amazon using the term differently from everyone else? I DON'T KNOW. JUST GO WITH IT.

6. Upload all your files. Look at the previewers/e-proofs to make sure everything looks okay. Panic and reupload them five times with minute changes.

7. Set a price.

For real at this point I hope you're done making changes, because you suddenly have at least three versions across two different sites to update if you suddenly decide to add a credit for your author photo or something. (cough)

How to set a price the easy way: look at other similar books in your genre (your comps) and just set your book to that price (hopefully you aren't losing money that way).

8. You can order a physical proof at this stage. But if you want author copies, you're going to have to publish your book, meaning it becomes publicly available. I think that if you get through the KDP screens and hit "publish book," it goes live. So...save it as a draft; don't hit the go button until you're ready. IS meanwhile lets you make it available for preorder.

Deadlines: Try to get everything done and uploaded by five days before your planned publication date.

@tryxyhijinks I think that's everything. Wow, I'm tired now.

[kitkatt0430]

Customizing FanFicFare on Calibre

I have another adventure in #ficArchiving for those interested.

So you’ve set up Calibre with the FanFicFare plugin and have been downloading fanfic. But you may have hit some snags. Fics with higher ratings come with age check/adult only warnings. Some fanfics are locked to the archive so that logged in users are the only ones who can access it. Fanfiction.net is hit or miss thanks to its use of Cloud Flare - and it’s mostly a miss. And probably some other issues too.

It’s time to dig back into FanFicFare’s configuration settings and start making some changes to the personal.ini file used to override the defaults.

First, you’re probably wondering what the personal.ini file even is. So open up Calibre, head over to the FanFicFare menu, and select the Configure FanFicFare option to reach the configuration modal. you’ll want the second tab on the left, labeled personal.ini. You’re probably not feeling all that enlightened by the screen that greets you, but at least now you’re in the right place to see what the file I’m talking about looks like.

Now the FanFicFare FAQs page doesn’t outright define what the personal.ini file is, but it does a pretty good job of eventually putting it into context the more you read about how FanFicFare works. But, essentially, the personal.ini is a file that will allow you to personalize the way FanFicFare accesses fanfiction and downloads it by redefining specific variables or adjusting code snippets. These personalized settings can be applied to all the fanfiction archives FanFicFare can access - which is a lot - or set up changes that affect only a single archive.

If you want to know what the default settings are, you can click the button to open the default.ini file. This file gives a detailed rundown of all available options and what the current settings are both on the universal (all archives) level and on the single archive level, since every site will work a little different with how the data is scraped and how FanFicFare determines which data is relevant and which isn’t. There’s a lot of information in the default.ini file and while it can be interesting to see what all those options are, don’t feel like you need to read through the whole thing right now.

Let’s switch over to the personal.ini file now. It should look something like the example.ini provided on the FanFicFare GitHub repository.

Much shorter and more readable than the default.ini file and all the options are currently commented out since you haven’t actually set any personal settings yet. You can probably already see the answer to fixing the first scenario I noted at the start of this tutorial, explained in the comments near the top of the example.ini file.

(Note: I'll be coloring code snippets in this color here to differentiate them from the rest of the post since tumblr doesn't do code blocks.)

If you’re having trouble accessing age restricted content, then you can uncomment #is_adult:true in the [defaults] section by removing the # at the start of the line.

If you removed all the commented code in the defaults section and leave only your personalized changes, it would look something like this:

[defaults] is_adult:true

Click the OK button on the personal.ini editor to provisionally save the changes and the OK button on the configuration modal to apply them. If you don't hit the OK button in both places, then your changes will not actually be saved and you'll have to go back and make them again.

Now if you test downloading a fanfiction from Ao3 that’s rated M or E, you should see it download correctly this time. Because this change was made in [defaults], it applies to all fanfiction archives; if you prefer you could set it on a per archive basis like so:

[www.tthfanfic.org] is_adult:true

Of you could have it set at the [defaults] level as true and override it as false on a per archive basis.

[defaults] is_adult:true

[www.tthfanfic.org] is_adult:false

Alternatively, if you want to make sure that the setting cannot be overriden, you could add it to the final override level like so:

[overrides] is_adult:true

Okay, so there’s one setting down, more to go. Now let’s talk about archive locked fanfictions.

Head back into the FanFicFare configuration modal and pull up the personal.ini editor again. Let’s say there’s a fanfic you want to read offline, but it’s locked to the archive. You can only read it if you’re logged in and FanFicFare can’t exactly log into your account. Or can it?

Actually, yes, FanFicFare can log into your account to download archive locked fanfiction. Now, you might be feeling a little - understandably - wary about handing your login credentials to FanFicFare’s personal.ini file. What happens to them once they’re in there? Are your accounts still going to be safe?

The answer is, yes, your accounts will be safe. The login information is only used when logging directly into the site using a headless browser on your computer - a headless browser meaning that it’s never visible on screen. Because of this, the actual login data and any associated login cookies created stay on your computer. Beyond the actual login process, the username and password information never go beyond your computer and remain entirely secure. To revoke FanFicFare’s access to your account, just remove the username and password from the file.

The plugin itself does not back up your personal.ini file outside of your computer nor does the plugin log any information from that file externally. So adding your log in credentials to the personal.ini file is currently quite safe.

Since a username and password are likely going to be unique for every site you have an account for, this is a setting you’ll want to add on a per archive basis only. When you add that data, it should look something like this:

[archiveofourown.org] username:<putYourAo3UsernameHere> password:<putYourAo3PasswordHere>

[www.tthfanfic.org] username:<tthFanficUsernameHere> password:<tthFanficPasswordHere>

Now click OK on the personal.ini editor to save the changes and OK on the Configuration modal to apply them. If you test downloading an archive locked fanfiction from Ao3 now, FanFicFare should be able to do so using your username and password to log in first. If it goes wrong, reopen the personal.ini file and verify the username and password are correct. Then double check the archive url, making sure to compare to what’s used in the default.ini file to ensure that FanFicFare is associating the username and password with the archive correctly. Also make certain there is no extraneous space between username: and your actual username or password: and your actual password.

Huzzah! At this point most fanfics requiring age checks or archive access are now available for you to download and manage using Calibre and FanFicFare. There will be exceptions, however. And the biggest one? FFnet.

Since moving to Cloud Flare, FFnet has kept it’s protection settings pretty high. When reading on the site directly, no doubt you’ve noticed there’s often a Cloud Flare redirect going on and sometimes even an ‘are you a robot’ check. Even the Internet Archive has trouble managing to back up anything from FFnet - most of the time it just… can’t. Similarly, FanFicFare struggles to download off of FFnet with it’s default settings. More often than not, you’ll see it fail with a 403 response in the logs when a download job completes.

But there is a way around this using FanFicFare. It’s not the prettiest solution, but it does get the job done.

The first thing you want to do is identify what your default browser is. If your default browser isn't Firefox, I recommend making it so specifically because Firefox is a good browser that is highly customizable and respects your privacy.

The reason why you want to identify your default browser is because we're going to be setting up some options for pulling fic data from the browser cache. There's a pretty good tutorial for this on the FanFicFare GitHub, which I'll be referencing here.

Head back into your personal.ini file and we'll do some more doctoring. First lets get that browser cache setting assigned.

[defaults] is_adult:true browser_cache_path:C:\Users\YourUser\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ZjwI7Fo4.default\cache2

Under [defaults] you'll want to add the browser_cache_path as shown above. I'm using the windows example for the Firefox cache from the FanFicFare tutorial here, but you'll want to fill in the actual path from your own computer. Make sure that information gets saved to your personal.ini and then we'll be making the next set of changes.

Now that FanFicFare knows where to find your browser cache, you want to have it start pulling fanfic data from FFnet from there. But you don't necessarily want it doing that for every archive, right? So we'll be making this changes for just FFnet.

[www.fanfiction.net] use_browser_cache:true

With this setting saved, FanFicFare will pull any cached data for the fanfic you're wanting to download from FFnet. Which is great - but only if you've already got every chapter for that fic in your cache right now. Otherwise it'll still try to go grab that missing information itself.

So the next settings you want to add for the FFnet archive is use_browser_cache_only:true and open_pages_in_browser:true. It should look like this in your personal.ini:

[www.fanfiction.net] use_browser_cache:true use_browser_cache_only:true open_pages_in_browser:true

Now FanFicFare will be grabbing data from the browser's cache and only the browser's cache and, so that you're not having to go open every single page before downloading, if there is missing data in the cache the FanFicFare will open the page in the browser which will allow it to pull that fresh data from your cache.

This does, however, mean that FanFicFare will no longer be running headless for this specific archive. It will pop open the new pages on your default browser on your screen and effectively take over your browser for the short (or possibly long for fics with lots of chapters) amount of time it takes to download to cache every piece of data FanFicFare uses to build the ebook. You can still do whatever you were doing - as soon as the page FanFicFare opens finishes loading you can close it as that data will now be in the cache for the plugin to use - but it is going to be a pain. Best to not expect to use your computer for anything else when downloading off FFnet at this point.

However, we're not quite done yet. At it's usual speed, FanFicFare is a bit fast for CloudFlare and you're going to want to keep an eye on it to make sure if a robot check happens that you have enough time to click the little checkbox before FanFicFare declares this venture (downloading a fanfiction) a failure.

slow_down_sleep_time is a variable that takes integers (numerical values) and essentially puts a delay between opening the new page, accessing the cache data, and then moving to the next page.

[www.fanfiction.net] use_browser_cache:true use_browser_cache_only:true open_pages_in_browser:true slow_down_sleep_time:10

With the slow_down_sleep_time here set to 10 seconds, it's a short delay between the plugin telling the browser to open the page and declaring that it cannot access the necessary cached data. It should be enough time to allow you to manually bypass the robot checks if necessary while not turning the download process into a ridiculously lengthy endeavor. At this rate a six chapter fanfic will take about a minute to access every chapter before it moves on to the process of wrapping all that data into an ebook, which isn't really that bad. The longer the gap between the plugin opening new pages in the browser, the less likely FFnet is to assume you're a robot - so you can go for a shorter gap of you want but know you're more likely to get periodic checks that way and if you're not monitoring the process then it's also more likely to fail (and you'll have less time to click that little checkbox).

Alright, save your settings and give downloading off FFnet another try. If you're downloading a fic you just finished reading, you might see nothing happen at all while the job runs in the background. Or you might see it access all the chapters for the fic in your open browser.

As mentioned, not the most elegant solution out there, but it does get the job done. If you're wanting the metadata to auto-fill for you or specifically to track unfinished works as they update, then this is still going to be the best solution for downloading your fanfics. If you're okay with filling in the metadata yourself and aren't looking to track the fic for new updates, then there are other options that will be discussed in future blog posts.

Those three are the issues you're most likely to run into while downloading fanfic, but not the only ones. The FanFicFare FAQs are pretty useful for figuring out what may be going wrong with any issues you may run into and can direct you on how to request new features or report any bugs you might encounter.

[duckbang]

Two Dots

Two dots form a line. Two electrons form a bond. Two people form a friendship.

It gets a bit more complicated after that.

Three dots don't make two lines. They can make three, or they can make one. But three electrons don't form three bonds. They form a free radical - well, they can make two bonds in certain circumstances, look at diborane, but banana bonding is weird… it isn’t exactly a three electron bond either. Three people still form a friendship, but it can be tilted, and as they say, three is a crowd.

Where the laws of gravity devised a smooth dance between two planets, between three it is chaotic loops of who will be kicked out first. With three comes the chaos that two had successfully covered in its simplicity.

There were three of us. Me, my brother, and my sister. And well, there is our dad - single and adoptive- and our honorary aunt, who has no relation to our dad apart from friendship. But the three of us were together from the start, since before we met the adults we call family.

We're not three anymore. We could be, we still talk to each other, through telepathy if not face to face. But we aren't together anymore. My brother and sister live together, in a remote, almost inaccessible location. One could go there, but the trip is harsh and not at all forgiving. I live with my dad and aunt, helping them with work.

But right now I stand on a stage, to give an interview with the news stations, one that is not related to dad's research but to my own. I started out helping with his work, but over time my interest deviated to researching animal behaviour within and without their herds (or flocks, or whatever the groups of specific animals are called). There's a hierarchy in both pack animals and lone dwellers. It is challenged often, but the top boss is the top, and not easily defeated. No matter how hard the planets try, they can't make the sun revolve around them. (Well, in a way, the sun does revolve around them. Its the pack leader’s job to make sure their pack is safe. Its a position that comes with both power and responsibility.)

My aunt stands to the side of the stage, hidden by the curtains. I glance at her before turning back to the press. My latest paper created a buzz, for reasons I don't quite understand. It was obvious, wasn't it..? "I simply find it surprising that no one has written anything about it yet, so after detailed research I decided to do it myself," I say in response to a question.

It took years to get enough data. 

"You taught a gryphon how to write with a pencil."

The gryphon in question is, of course, the brilliant silver and earth coloured beast sleeping on the stage, unbothered by the lights and noise. I met it in the beginning stages of my research, when we were scouring out the dry canyons the species calls home. Gryphons aren't pack animals, they prefer to stay alone, but at the same time they're not territorial and let other members of the species prowl and hunt in their area. Mine was a youngling at the time, possibly separated from its mother, because gryphon parents do not look for lost children. I decided to take it in, a decision I have never come to regret.

"It has been known for a long time that gryphon intelligence is comparable to, if not exceeding, human intelligence. It should not come as that great of a surprise," I point out gently. 

Their body design is different from humans, but with specialised tools and lots of practice and explanation it was able to hold a pencil, and with a few more months of work it managed to write it's name on a large sheet, and it was readable.

Maybe that could be a strategy used to help children with learning disabilities, I muse, but don't say it out loud. It's not my area of expertise, but maybe I'll bring it up with a teacher later. Journalists are not good people to discuss things like this with. 

My sister's presence makes itself known via a slight pressure on the back of my head, silently asking if I'm free. Wait, I tell her. Not right now.

I feel her nod as she retreats further into the back, enough that I can focus, but she's clearly interested in what I'm doing. I don't blame her. I'll never get bored of my job either. 

"Look at it this way," I say in response to a question I didn't entirely hear, "Gryphons don't see other members of their species as threats. They challenge each other for territory, yes, but they share their resources. The hierarchy is more of a gradient than a stepcase, with the largest and oldest member of the species usually at the top of it." And its often hard to tell who that is, it took me close to a year to find the leaders of the respective areas I focused on.

Even mine, who had started off obeying commands without question, had become more assertive as it grew older and larger. And now it is bigger than me, our mutual understanding and the gryphon nature being the only things keeping it obedient. Still, it was smart, and would refuse to do a task if it sensed that the job would harm someone, friend or stranger. 

My brother's presence curls around in my subconscious as I keep speaking, curiosity and warning intermixing as he decides to not detract my attention and talks to our sister instead. "Gryphons have been seen to treat even those who hurt them with compassion and kindness, and it is only in extraordinary situations that they seriously injure anyone. We could certainly learn something from that."

A babble of indignation meets my statement. “Humans are perfect,” they say, furious. “We don't need to learn from dumb animals.”

Both of my siblings bristle on hearing them.

I do, too, but keep my composure as I narrow my eyes.

"Humans have often killed each other over minor misunderstandings. Is that what you call perfect?"

No species is perfect. Human capacity to understand and adapt our behaviour is unmatched, so it gives us more avenues to grow. It is a shame that even 'simpler' animals like dogs, then, outmatch us in understanding, cooperation, and compassion.

Once, before I started working as a researcher, before we started living separately, the three of us decided to follow a pack of wild dogs to see where they would go. We were old enough to be trusted alone by then, and with school being on vacation we didn't have anything to worry about. So we packed our bags with enough food and clothes to last us a week and set off behind the pack.

It was an interesting experience. But what stood out to me most then, and even now, was how they made sure no member of their pack was left behind, and if one was injured they would slow their pace considerably so it could keep up. Gryphons don't do that, but they're not exactly social species. That was the incident that kicked off my interest in behaviour research in the wild, instead of trained behaviours in the lab.

Sure, my gryphon knows how to write, but it is a lab animal. I taught it mainly just to see what would happen, as with the landshark we taught to buy groceries.

I should probably take up researching dogs behaviour again, but for the foreseeable future Gryphons have a chokehold on my research. The latter is also what I tell a reporter asking what's next for my work, and after answering a few more questions and dodging those about my family, the conference moves on to some other scientists I forget the name of. But I'm free to leave or stay now, as I wish. I decide to stay, finally getting time to talk to my siblings who've been waiting for about an hour now.

It must be serious, if they decided to wait. 

So, she projects, amusement laced in her voice, You know how two dots form a line?

I don't have the patience for this, I decide immediately.

Well, I was thinking, and you can't have a combination of points that makes exactly two lines, if you want to connect all of them. Two dots form one line, but three form three, or one, and four form four or three or one, and so on, but no assortment makes two. That's weird, isn't it?

I thought you hated maths? my brother replies.

Get to the point, I tell her as I take the complimentary lunch box the organisers had so thoughtfully put together. Is the number of lines really that important?

I do, I was just thinking. And well... There really isn't any point. I just thought it was weird.

And here I thought it was something serious, I think. Unfortunately they pick up on my thoughts.

Aw, you worry about me? my sister teases as I settle down to eat.

Not if you keep being annoying like that, I respond. My brother laughs at that.

With that sorted out by tracking down a mathematician or two who were free to talk to my sister and giving them her address - which, again, directed them to an almost inaccessible area, and with my gryphon finally awake enough to fly us back to our home, I decided to finally head out of the conference hall. The sky, already orange and pink from the setting sun on one side and fading to the deep blue of night on the other, cloudless and the air without much in the way of wind, stood perfect for flying. My gryphon's wings reflected the fading light of the sun as we rose into the air, turning to gold from silver and the deep browns gave it a brilliant shaded look. It was a work of art, through and through. 

It takes two people to form a friendship, two souls for a connection. I know it's silly, but I've never felt more connected to anyone more than my silver and earth gryphon. Even my siblings, and we can talk to each other through telepathy, never made me feel the same way as simply being with my gryphon does. I ruffle the soft feathers on its back, feathers that almost look like fur from a distance, so soft and small. I have never regretted bringing it home with me, even if it does challenge me for my bedroom sometimes. 

I space out during the flight, almost falling asleep to the beating of its heart and the occasional flap of its wings. There's no danger of falling, my gryphon is a graceful and careful flyer. As such, with the last rays of the sun dipping below the horizon and the only thing lighting up the sky being a pale twilight, I doze off, trusting my friend to keep both of us safe. 

[standardquip]

4 years of running BentoVid & RICE (an extremely long & meandering retrospective about survey data) This is an entry that's part history about the fanvid server I run that hosts a [now] feedback event [then contest] called RICE, and part data analysis from 4 years of pre-RICE survey data and one post-RICE survey from a particularly "problematic" year of the event. Read the entry as it was intended on dreamwidth by clicking the link above, or expand the cut tag and hope the html I pasted into tumblr displays correctly. [edit: it doesn't, but it's readable if you don't care about line breaks.]

Preface

Or, the time I accidentally influenced an entire industry through a survey question (click to read more) In 2015, I created a website called fursuitreview.com (FSR). Fursuits (one of a kind whole body animal costumes) are expensive and it was hard to keep track of makers that didn't have huge followings. I didn't want to run a review page, but only two existed prior to mine. One had died completely several years before, and the other one updated so infrequently it was almost useless (it, too, eventually died after FSR took off). The other two pages were a victim of putting too much work on themselves. The first had several questions reviewers had to answer and assign points. The moderators would average all the points for each review and give the overall review a score out of ten. This ensured consistency in the scores across all reviews. It was an amazing system but it would simply take too long to do myself (plus I'm terrible at math). Both sites were not actually sites - they were user accounts on furaffinity.net (and sometimes tumblr or livejournal) - which required write-ins to copy a big block of text and hope they got the format right (they rarely did, which meant moderators would have to correct it). FSR started out on furaffinity, but very quickly moved to a wordpress website. I thought very carefully on how I would keep manhours and costs down. I decided to not have any user accounts at all, nor would I bother with a numbered rating system (I instead went with a "positive / neutral / negative" system because that's really what everything boils down to anyway). I devised the least amount of questions I could in order to pry the information I wanted out of fursuit buyers when they wrote in. This resulted in two sections: wear satisfaction, and visual satisfaction. Each section had several sample questions to help guide the writer. "Wear satisfaction" was like, do you like how it fits you? how is the ventilation? how is the vision? Visual satisfaction was questions about looks.

Example screenshot of the FSR "wear Satisfaction" questions from 2020+

When people submitted a review, I would read over them all and make sure everything was copacetic before publishing it. Back then (before 2020), I was a one-man operation so I read literally every single review coming in. I noticed that some writers would mention lining in some of the fursuit parts. Most parts are unlined - it's just faux fur and the backing of that will be up against a wearer's skin. Lining is unnecessary and can ultimately make the costume much hotter - but it does make everything look really nice and marginally more comfortable to wear. After a few of these, I added "Does the item have lining?" to the list of sample questions.

Does the item have lining?

Surely nothing bad could happen from such an innocuous question!! (upside down smiley face goes here)

I must take a break here to mention that I had no experience doing literally anything that FSR required to run. I had bought 3-4 fursuits and thought it would be nice to keep track of my opinions of them. Everything else, from coding a website to writing survey questions, I had taught myself. I had some very very basic wordpress experience from a personal roleplaying character wiki wordpress site for myself, but that was it. FSR was a learn by doing experience. And boy, was it an experience. Writing, reading, reviewing, editing, customer service... FSR had me dealing with it all, and I'm surprised it gained as much traction as it did throughout that process.

So, needless to say, I had no idea what "survey bias" was.

Weeks, possibly months, later, I was browsing twitter keeping up with FSR social stuff, when I came across a tweet from a rather well-known maker (I believe it was either beetlecat or beastcub) asking other fursuit makers why customers were suddenly asking for their fursuits to be lined. I wish I had a link to this tweet, but I no longer have a twitter account. (If you happen to find it, do link it in the comments!) It didn't hit me at first. I watched the thread and the responses roll in. As other makers replied, the sense of dread was very slowly overtaking me. Could FSR really have that much influence? Could just a single little sentence really cause so much strife? Yes, it did, and yes... It did. Once I connected the dots, I edited the sample questions. No longer is it simply "Does the item have lining?" Now it is: "If it is lined, what material was used? Does it absorb sweat appropriately? Does it make cleaning easier?" But I went through a few iterations before I got to that wording. I believe my first edit was something like "(Note: most fursuits aren't lined)", but that didn't properly imply that you shouldn't be asking your maker for lining. After this lining snafu, I had to go through all of my questions and determine what I was accidentally influencing, how that could change what customers ask of their makers, and if I really needed that information in the review to begin with. I also, finally, learned about survey bias, and took some time to read up a little more on how to craft survey questions. And, of course, I had to come to grips with the fact that, yes, FSR was big. And it had influence. My little side project was a staple of the community and people counted on it to make very expensive purchases. Maker reputations and business operations began to live or die by the reviews we pulled in. FSR got to be too big and too much stress for me, so I ended up giving full ownership of the site to someone else in 2022 or 2023 (it was a long transition and I'm not sure when the public announcement was made). However, as of today (31 March 2024), fursuitreview.com is still fundamentally unchanged from how I was running it - including the review form. Nowadays, I have nothing to do with the site. I couldn't deal with the stress and responsibility once it grew to be a community cornerstone. Unfortunately, history may be repeating itself with the project I replaced FSR with...

A brief history of BentoVid (and RICE)

I have been editing anime music videos (AMVs) since 2001. I took a hiatus from the community from 2009ish to 2018. Despite that, I still managed to make at least one video every year. In 2018, I tried to get back into the community and realized it had almost completely changed. Discord was a thing now, and it seemed most of the activity was on there. I joined a few servers, but long story short they all weren't great. In a fit of frustration and annoyance, I did the classic move of going "Screw this, I'll do it myself!"

Bender (from Futurama): Fine! I'll start my own chatroom with blackjack and hookers! I glossed over it, but this is exactly how FursuitReview.com also started.

BentoVid (called AMV Sashimi back then) was created in September 2020. Back then, I did have high hopes. I did "plan" (finger quotes) on becoming a large community, but it was like how anyone plans on winning the lottery, you know? You don't actually expect it to happen. I thought that realistically I'd get maybe 30 members and it'd be just a chill hangout spot. But in 2021, we reached the fabled 100 members. Then 200. We broke 400 this year. And outside the very first year, I didn't actively promote. BentoVid has grown purely from word of mouth since 2021. On the other side of Discord was an annual AMV contest related to a particular anime convention. I first joined it in 2019. It was... okay... But not great. 2020 went even worse. The contest was going through a transition period and had a coordinator that, to put it mildly, was not well-liked. The concept behind the contest (which had been running for several years - I think 2005? Possibly even earlier) was great though. It was a contest focused on peer review. All the editors that submitted to the contest were the judges and voted on the winner. It was a blind contest, so nobody knew who made what, but only people who submitted to the contest could view and vote on the videos. The feedback was cruel. People did not hold back. Still, it was helpful, and I excelled my skills a lot by participating. The contest's discord server, however, went unmoderated and the coordinator made some very bizarre decisions. Another "Screw it, I'll do it myself" event occurred. RICE - Rewards imagined by a community of editors - was born by taking that other contest and implementing all the feedback participants had been complaining about for years. February 2021 was the first RICE. I had never run a contest before. Just like FSR (from the preface story), this was a trial by fire. I made at least one huge mistake every year the contest ran. But ultimately people liked RICE, and word of mouth about it (and the server) grew ever faster because of it. I had taken efforts to specifically NOT advertise RICE outside the BentoVid discord server, but that didn't stop it from growing.

4 years of RICE survey data

Partly due to my inexperience and partly due to my history with FSR, I put out RICE feedback surveys at every opportunity. I am actually not that into data. I don't analyze this stuff and I have no particular interest in collecting data at every turn for random things. I just find feedback surveys somewhat convenient and useful for my purposes. Sorry to people who are into that! XD

Pre-RICE survey data from 2021 - 2024

I have a small survey when people submit videos to RICE. It has (mostly) the same questions every year. Vivafringe helped me go through the data, and here are the results. (links to a google sheet) 2021 - 2023, the optional survey was on the same page as video submission questions. In 2024, I finally realized google form sections existed and I put it on a totally different page. I went from a 100% response rate to 58%. What a huge difference! But still inspiring to see so many people went out of their way to answer regardless. Here's my personal takeaways: US vs Non-US I personally thought there were more international editors participating, but it seems to hover around 20%. Do people keep their videos a secret? It looks like most of the survey respondents actually do attempt to keep their videos secret from everyone. However, almost as many people admit at least one person they know who will also be in RICE knows what their video is. I honestly thought it'd be the other way around, with more people sharing betas before RICE, so this is actually pretty cool to see. Thoughts on blind judging This question was multiple choice with only one answer allowed, so they had to choose which meant most to them. Most people seem to appreciate blind judging, but don't go out of their way to keep themselves blind during the event. (~70% combined) A large minority of people admit that guessing who made what during the event is part of the fun for them. (~25%) One possible answer was that blind judging is never truly blind - interesting to note only one person ever selected this and it was in 2023. Main reason for entering RICE? Another multiple choice answer where they had to select the "main" reason. Most people join RICE because they like the BentoVid community. However, almost as many people join because they like peer review. I'm flattered! lol But, in all seriousness, I really expected those results would be flipped, with peer review outranking BentoVid. Categories A multiple checkbox question for which categories your submitted vid belongs to, according to the editor. I mostly only care about theme, coordinator's choice, and live-action. Theme has submissions starting at 18% in 2021 and gradually going up to 29% in 2024. 2023 is an outlier with 39%. Coordinator's choice is very low. 1 - 3 videos. This is mixed news for me. On one hand, I think it's great people don't feel the need to pander to me (or maybe they don't know how). On the other hand... Please pander to me! XD Live-action is something I would like to see more of... The discord server started out as an AMV server and its audience is still mostly AMV editors. But I really want BentoVid (and RICE, by extension) to be about all fanvids and vidding (Hence the name change from AMV Sashimi to BentoVid). Long story short, live-action vids are obviously a very small minority that get submitted (5 - 9 videos each year), but they fluctuate between years. If you like live-action fanvids and want to join an active discord server... Please join us! lol How did you learn about RICE? This question was a small text field people could write whatever they wanted in. No surprise people learned about it from inside BentoVid. Next highest was word of mouth-related answers like "discord," "another discord server" or "friends". A little interesting was when AWA or POE were specifically mentioned (two popular AMV contests), but this was only twice for each.

Post-RICE survey data

2021 and 2022 had a feedback survey, but it was just one text block that asked for comments. Very few people ever filled this out and it was not very actionable feedback. 2023 was the first post-RICE feedback survey with actual guided questions, and it's because 2023 was... quite the year.

Understatement.

What happened during 2023 RICE?

Remember the contest I mentioned that RICE was based on? While RICE was thriving, that contest was floundering. The other contest, which for the rest of this blog I will call "HOST," happens in September - October, while RICE happens in February - March. 2022 HOST was another transition year for them. The old coordinator ("Elder") took over the contest after so many complaints about the coordinator that succeeded them ("Junior"). As far as I know, everyone was happy with Junior's leaving, but unfortunately it wasn't pretty. We weren't kind to Junior. Bridges were burned. Elder had some great ideas on how to bring HOST back up to its former glory days. But, procrastination got the better of them, so the contest started out very poorly. Then, during the contest, they had an extremely public and embarrassing meltdown. A number of people withdrew from the contest because of it. A totally different person ("Kidd") had to take over mid-event. The discord server went through an emergency restructure so Elder didn't have any special permissions anymore. Kidd was an absolute gem and managed to run the rest of the contest on their own very smoothly (Kidd continued through 2024 and deserves accolades). But the already negative reputation of HOST definitely turned into a dumpster fire after that. It was no surprise that RICE got touted as a good alternative. I was expecting more RICE entries than the previous year but. Boy. I was just not prepared. 2023 RICE saw 56 editors and 76 videos. The prior year was only 32 editors and 45 videos. RICE does not scale well. Moreover, I was experiencing horrible health issues at the time and really should have delayed or cancelled RICE due to them. Consequently, some people did not have a good experience with RICE. I thought the entire year was ruined. I made a pretty involved post-RICE survey due to it. This survey was mostly questions with text boxes where people wrote exactly what they were feeling. This made the answers a lot more personal and detailed. I will not be sharing the raw 2023 survey data. The complaints were about:

Too many videos for too short a time period

Some people were rude in the discord when discussing categories

Some people attacked one of the people giving critique in a voice call

I tried to enforce [very badly worded] content restrictions very late into the submission window. This had editors unnecessarily scrambling to re-edit things and ultimately ended up with multiple versions of videos in the contest [which should not have happened and that is entirely on me]

To me, the responses of the 2023 survey looked pretty dire. I immediately made changes to RICE following them. While RICE had started out as an improved version of HOST, I also had wanted the goal to be rewards for BentoVid server regulars. That's why I really didn't want to advertise it outside the server. I also never pinged \@Everyone or made a special role to get updates about it. The intent was if you were around the server, you'd know it was coming, and that was that. I wanted the good peer review and critique so we could all improve. I also wanted to see amazing videos. But what I DIDN'T want - and was (surprisingly!) NEVER concerned with - was lots of randos who didn't care about BentoVid. I explicitly never posted about RICE on a-m-v.org (despite people asking me to), and I never mentioned RICE outside my own server until after 2022 HOST. And even then it was really only in DM or if someone else had brought it up first. I still try to not advertise RICE, but I'm not as tight-lipped as I used to be. Still, it's primarily in DM. But anyway, I'm rambling now - the point is that RICE grew outside of the BentoVid bubble. People were joining RICE who did not care about BentoVid as a whole and I had to figure out how to handle that. My previous RICE messaging of "feedback event but also contest!" was fine for BentoVid regulars. We mostly knew what we liked and understood eachother because we hung out all the time. But for people new to RICE and/or the server, they had no idea and came in with false expectations. My two main takeaways from the 2023 Post-RICE survey were: 1. Because of my health issues and the mass increase of participants, the Discord server went (essentially) completely unmoderated during RICE. Because RICE (and BentoVid) is usually closely moderated, many conversations/debates went on a lot longer than they should have (because no moderators stepped in), which caused a lot of stress for participants. 2. The messaging of RICE was conflicting and led people to false expectations. People were essentially expecting HOST but "run better." "HOST but run better" is an over-generalization of how RICE works. It's actually quite different from HOST, but without the context of being a BentoVid regular, one wouldn't have that information. The first would be solved simply by me being present. Myself and most my staff could not be present during 2023 (honestly I'm surprised RICE ran as well as it did without us. Speaks a lot to our community!). To deal with the second point, I decided to focus on clearing up and changing RICE's messaging. Clearing the messaging had a few purposes:

More clearly differentiate RICE from HOST

Discourage non-regulars from joining without being super exclusionary about it

Discourage overtly competitive people from joining RICE

Encourage feedback-orientated participants

Focus more on accessibility (as RICE already applied VPR to all entries, it made sense to extend accessibility in other ways)

I took the survey responses very seriously, and as such, rushed to make announcements of what the changes would be. I ended up announcing them the same month RICE ended - March. Proof here (that is a discord link). You can read the initial announcement there in the BentoVid server, but I ended up changing things even more, so here's the summary of what the changes ended up being:

Very strict content restrictions (slightly relaxed later)

Focus on feedback event FIRST (took out all mentions of "contest" and "best" on the website, replacing them with "event" and "most-liked" )

No cash prizes at all (previously it was a $175 pool)

More emphasis on what exactly the server culture is like and what you can expect (basically: RICE is stressful, it's full of server regulars, prepare yourself if you're new)

Permanent categories got permanent names (previously everything was able to be voted on and changed)

All winners only get one award (previously there were multiple designs and names made for each award)

We added CWs as well as VPRs into the RICE expectations

Everything possible was outlined on the website. I literally wrote out the schedule and everything that you could expect to happen, how it all worked, etc.

The fallout from 2023 RICE continued throughout the entire year. It seemed negative feelings regarding it rolled out into other issues BentoVid was having (behind the scenes, especially in the staff channels) and overall I was really not feeling great about RICE. I was seriously considering 2024 RICE being the last one I ever ran.

2023 Post-RICE survey analysis

During 2024 RICE prep (which started in October 2023), I went through the 2023 feedback again. I asked some vague questions to random people about how they felt about 2023 RICE, and their answers (most of which were not negative at all) really had me questioning my perception of the entire thing. I gave the 2023 post-RICE survey data to a friend of mine who used to analyze that kind of thing for a living (Vivafringe). I went through the answers and redacted personal information, summarizing answers if necessary, before giving it to him. As part of the analysis, I asked him a bunch of questions and he looked over all the data to answer those questions. Again, I will not share the actual data here (even anonymized), but I will share the analysis he provided. Full disclosure: Viva did participate in 2023 RICE.

Analysis of Negative Experiences

Did more people have a negative or positive time in 2023?

to answer this I didn't do any fancy analysis. I read the responses and just did a vibe check of "negative" (pretty clearly had a bad time), "neutral" (had some things they didn't like, but gave other positive feedback or just in general didn't seem like they gave a shit one way or the other), "positive" ("vars you're the best" type comments) I think "neutral" people, if you actually asked them, would say they had a positive time, but it's hard to say for sure anyway I rated 7/25 negative, 7/25 neutral, 11/25 positive notably a lot of people didn't respond to this survey and the non respondants were likely positive/neutral. So I don't think you should read those numbers and assume 28% of people had a negative experience the overwhelming complaint from basically everyone was too many videos for the time they had - 5/6 people with "negative" feedback were returnees - 2/6 of the people who wanted "competitive" contest had negative opinions. No real signal there I think

I said the complaints about the VCs were really bad though?

I count 4 people that complained about the vcs my takeaway from reading this is basically: - moderate the vcs from now on, advertise them as critique/nice/whatever (you already are doing this but just saying I agree) - if you get 76 vids again, give more time to watch stuff I don't know how you solve chat getting tense, that was another common complaint

Category drama? Context: some people were very vocal about RICE needing fixed categories like typical AMV contests

I read the category stuff and broadly classified them as wanting "fixed" cats, "unfixed" cats, or "neutral" as you might expect most people didn't give a strong opinion on it, 10/25 were neutral 5 people wanted fixed, 6 people explicitly wanted to keep things as it was now (unfixed) if you read "neutral" as support for the status quo, which I do, I think the way you're doing it is fine. especially because a lot of the fixed cat people (3/6) had negative experiences and won't be here this year

I expected a smaller turnout for 2024 RICE. All I was really hoping for were more editors than in 2022 (which only had 32). Editors in 2023: 56 Editors in 2024: 43 (+3 more if we count DQs) A 17 - 23% loss, depending on how you count this. My thoughts: 1. That's not that bad, to be honest 2. If we treat 2023 as an outlier, 2024 is an acceptable and expected amount of growth from 2022. 3. One of the main complaints in 2023 was that there were too many videos, so 2024 numbers are more desirable in this context.

Other data collected from 2023 RICE

While I was mostly concerned about the negative experiences, I thankfully had the foresight to ask some other questions about RICE that gave us some valuable data.

Kollab vs frame.io = kollab wins by landslide

Direction for rice: contest vs feedback = 15/22 say feedback

Will you make an account on a website to do rice stuff? 12/25 say no

basically everyone answered the "what does rice do differently" question with "the feedback is a lot better". So a way to make rice better is to streamline process for providing feedback.

How long people spend on RICE vids:

10/21 (of the people that responded) started working on their rice vid 1 month or longer in advance

the competitive people ("A contest where the best of the best wins") seem kind of in the middle, time wise. 3/6 spent less than 1 month, 2/6 spent 2 months exactly, 1 didn't respond.

there were 8 newcomers, but basically same conclusion. 4/8 started more than a month in advance. 3/8 took a few weeks

Google docs & PSVs RICE offers a google doc with video information instead of trying to put it all in a filename. We also offered detailed VPRs and CWs, and, in some cases, alternate versions of videos that are more friendly for photosensitive users (called PSVs).

3/25 people said they used the VPRs.

18/25 people used the infosheet

4/25 used the CWs

3/25 used PSVs

What about 2024 Post-RICE survey data?

I collected that. This blog entry is already the size of a novel so I'll put it in another entry, I guess. Stay tuned! (Don't hold your breath though) I will exit this entry with the following results from that survey: If you participated in 2023 RICE, what would you say your overall experience was? 15/18 answered overall positive 2/18 said they did not participate in 2023 1/18 said neutral 0/18 said overall negative If you participated last year (2023), would you say your experience THIS year (2024) was: 9/17 answered overall better than last year 7/17 said about the same as last year 1/17 said did not participate last year 0/17 said overall worse than last year Your overall 2024 RICE experience was: 17/18 answered positive 1/18 said neutral 0/18 said negative 0/18 said boring 2024 RICE had 43 editors and 62 videos.

[killing-time-w-kaz]

Sometimes I look back at my language learning attempts and wonder why I keep doing this to myself. I picked a field where knowing at least two dead languages and three modern ones is normal. I don’t do well with learning new languages beyond the elementary level.

And now I’m finding myself listing the languages I need to work on or learn to stay afloat in archaeology. And it’s stupidly long. Not stupid in the sense that languages are stupid, but stupid in the sense that I am a Fool for thinking I actually have the time or energy to learn them.

But because I am most confident in English, Spanish and Russian, I find German, Portuguese, French and Italian to be readable. I am not fluent, but I can stumble my way through museum signs, menus and the abstracts of academic papers. And I’m dreading learning Ancient Greek and Latin. Those are hard. I’d rather tackle modern Greek, which shares similarities with the Russian Alphabet (Cyrillic is derived from Greek letters). I also might as well learn Hebrew and Aramaic/Akkadian at some point, because I’m tired of hunting for translations of documents. And im tired of not being able to access academic work that is written in Hebrew, German, French and Greek. Like those papers have all the good information, and the papers I can find in English only have summaries of the data. Ugh.

And every time I travel or study a new region, I end up learning that language too. Badly might I add. I wish I had my linguistics friend’s brain for languages. It would make my job so much easier.

[hms-tardimpala]

writing pattern game

Rules: Share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able and see if there are any patterns! (from most recent to least recent, starting from the top)

Thank you so much for tagging me @jaynovz!

I'm going to tweak this a little and use my two current WIPs as they stand, because otherwise all the fics would be from the one fandom I wrote for and am no longer in, and I think it's more interesting to study patterns over several fandoms.

Marriage of convenience bagginshield (working title)

Bilbo hadn’t seen Thorin in days – since Oín had declared him fit to walk and work – when he was summoned to the throne room one evening.

2. Schrodinger's WIP (working title)

The pub smelt of beer, sweat and smoke.

3. You Say I'm the Worst

Danny signs the report, closes the file and sighs, stretching in his chair.

4. All the Way Home

Danny sulks in the Governor’s jet.

5. Who can grow me a new brother?

Matt looks sideways at McGarrett while Danny tells an anecdote of his time in the Newark police.

6. Share Your Address

If Danny learned one thing in nine years of partnership, it’s that, given two options, Steve will more often than not choose the one that’s bad for him.

7. Punch-drunk

Steve is really making it hard for Danny to stick to his resolutions, isn’t he?

8. Status Quo

In Danny’s opinion, it isn’t a big deal.

9. Hold on to me as we go

Wo Fat smiles.

10. Fake it till you make it

Steve swipes the data relative to the case from the smart table onto the screens.

--

I expected this to yield no results, but there are patterns here indeed! So it appears that I like to do an establishing shot that gives the reader an immediate idea of where they are and who is in the scene, as well as who is the POV character. Most sentences here are short, which is pretty representative of my overall style. And the sentences that are not establishing shots are POV-focused, they're in the character's head and give the reader the tone of the fic by showing what the character thinks. (and apparently I loved to start my H50 fics with Danny, but ultimately, they became Steve-POV most of the time)

--

Let's study the latest, because I think it does the job very well (despite not having been written as a first fic line, it's just the first line of the scene that comes first chronologically in this project):

Bilbo hadn’t seen Thorin in days – since Oín had declared him fit to walk and work – when he was summoned to the throne room one evening.

What does it tell you?

Thorin was wounded and recovered, and a throne room (where he has authority) is mentioned. So this is set in Erebor and post-canon, and it's an He lives!AU

the POV character is Bilbo, and he seems out of the loop

what you don't know yet is that Bilbo and Thorin are married in this fic, but what you do know is that they don't see each other and

Thorin "summoned" him. Not very husbandly, now, is it? Reads pretty estranged and formal, no?

Now you know the situation and you can guess that the meeting in the throne room will be the action of this scene.

I'm really happy with this one because it's simple, it looks bland, but it tells you everything you need to know and I always prefer efficiency and readability to beauty.

If you feel like playing: @narastories, @septemberskye, @nijinskys, @eveningalchemist

[vergess]

Sorry to burst into your asks like this, but I'm really interested in the exocolonist datamining-can you tell me what/where to find the file you looked through?

So! Number 1 thing!! You never have to apologize for asking me to talk at great length about something I love. I am extremely autistic. This is one of my favourite kinds of social interaction.

Now then!!

I play on linux, so all the files are just out there in the open and most of them are plain text files with custom file endings.

I don't know what the file structure looks like on windows, but since the game seems to have been written in java, probably basically identical. Assuming nothing is encrypted on windows either, I would say this game is the most beginner friendly for data mining I've ever seen.

So for me, the files are in ~/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/Exocolonist/Exocolonist_Data/StreamingAssets/ and then in the Data and StreamingAssets folders.

On windows, that would be in your steam folder, then steamapps/common/Exocolonist/Exocolonist_Data/StreamingAssets/

You can also just right click on the game in steam, and go to Manage > Browse Local Files. That will open you to the main Exocolonist folder, so you'll navigate to exocolonist_data/StreamingAssets/

The data folder is where you will find the bulk of the writing for endings, character profiles, cards, card abilities, etc. If you want to modify how much a particular card is worth, view the full names of characters you only see mentioned briefly, etc, this is the folder you want.

The Stores folder contains the actual "gameplay" parts, in the sense that the buildings, locations, jobs, combat calls, etc are in it. That includes mid-game dialogue!

There's also a specific file in Stories called 'unimplemented memories' that shows the specific coding syntax for modifying the game, to ensure any changes you make look and play correctly!

Between that and save files being basically plaintext with a button on the 'load game' menu that will take you directly to them in your file system you you can edit them even easier, this game is a GREAT choice for learning more about how to datamine or mod a game. Everything is so straightforward.

I mean, the code is fully commented, with all human-readable variables and methods. That's insane! I didn't even code shit that tightly when I was in school, actively being graded on it!!!!!!!!

The endings are all written out in Exocolonist - endings.TSV. I mean that's. That's SO straightforward!! You can open TSV files in any spreadsheet editorfor a more visually pleasant experience, or in a plain text editor if you're hardcore for the sake of being hardcore.

Oh, save games are actually located in your documents folder (I think?) on windows, and in the home folder on linux. The folder is helpfully called "exocolonist/save_games" so it's very simple to find. You can edit your save files (which end in .JSON) in any plain text editor. For windows, I like notepad++ since it will automatically color code the formatting. For Linux, I use Kate but any of the ones that come pre-packaged will do just fine.

Some of my favourites so far from fucking around where I don't belong:

The "releasing endorphins" card you get for distracting Tangent from her Big Government Project by fucking her is called "TangBang" in the data. This is, to me, the single funniest phrase on earth. I can't stop saying it.

Unimplemented Memories contains tons of non-canonical filler text including gems like:

"Git outta me bloody face, ye sodding nullshite!" Vace yelled, as Rex blew him another kiss.

~set bg = pinup_tammy_saved WOW you saved Tamtam! Tammadammadingdong lives!

Anemone Enhancement: Scaly lizard lady. > facts

marz: "Ho ho ho welcome to _my_ bridge which _I_ am totally the boss of." dys: "Ug Marz this place smells funny." marz: "He who smelt it dealt it, Nerd."

But, most importantly of all, the dog-like creature that tries to kill you/Anemone in the opening sequence??

Is named Doggo.

[dunnedora]

Local girl has breakthrough: her code finally seems to work (90% of the time)

So, for those of you following me who are archaeologists, you may be aware of the ADS (Archaeology Data Service). It’s an invaluable resource, containing data on a huge range of sites, and providing a repository for vast amounts of UK grey literature and site archives!

You can also download the site data to do your own analysis! (Woo!)

Well, you can do that, but there is one tiny, slight, almost unnoticeable error that probably doesn’t matter anyway (/s)

You see, when you query the site data, to show, e.g. sites with “Iron Age Weapons”, it splits the two terms, so it’ll show you all of the sites with both weapons, and Iron Age finds.

So the data ends up full of garbage.

Woo! I’ve got 646 sites I can plot on a map, except a bunch of them are like, Roman sites where they found 1 Bronze Age arrowhead (a weapon!) and a single Iron Age potsherd (an IA find!). Yay.

So I, being a really sensible young woman who doesn’t get distracted by ancillary nonsense all the time, have to spend hours and hours of my time patiently sorting through every single site to remove all of the ones that, in fact, do not contain Iron Age Weapons from my Iron Age Weapon dataset. (This is only mildly soulcrushing and only 90% of the reason my essays keep end up being late). 

BUT NO MORE!

I’ve finally developed an R script that will do (90%) of the job for me, and it’s only taken 3 years of being sick of this nonsense! (What do you mean I should have been writing my essay that’s due in a week?)

So, first, we have to combine all the data downloads into a single file (it only lets you download data for 50 sites at a time for some reason).

Then, we can tell R to look at the ADS webpage for the site, where we can find the site’s various artefacts, and their associated periods! (Obviously I did this properly, and not with a hackjob of RegEx searches through HTML code, she says, lying). This isn’t included when you download the site data, for... reasons?

And now we’re sorted!

Except for the 75% of sites on the ADS that don’t have each artefact matched with its period on their webpage. (They tend to list periods in one box, listing every possible date for parts of the site; and the finds/structures in another, without specifying their period.)

So now I need to get R to open up the ADS page, then find the link to their source, open that webpage and begin scouring that page for any reference to the stuff we’re looking for. The ADS sources its site data from a wide range of sources, so we need to make sure that the code can find all of those, and then parse them properly. Some of these aren’t machine-readable, so I’ll still need to do those by hand.

By far the most common source for this data is an old English Heritage service called Pastscape, which gives summaries of research from the actual literature. Except this isn’t designed for machine-readability, so we’re back to hacky RegEx to pull out every reference on the pages for the “Iron Age” or for one of the thousands (by which I mean about 30) different terms for “weapons” that might be used!

Previously, I had just left it there, letting it pull out those references, and then making me respond to whether or not they were what I was looking for.

But Now I Have Fixed It!

It only took... several hours.

So now it can look around in adjacent blocks of code for the relevant context for the random word “dagger” and see if it’s actually come from the Iron Age! And then dump it in a csv file with all the other information I need!

And then I can use another function I made to fix up the rest of the data and clear up the garbage!

And then another one to extract the OSGB grid references from the horrible long text strings that the ADS calls “location data”! (I was going to also make it convert these to WGS84 Lat/Longs, but it turns out my old Bionic Beaver installation is missing dependencies for the most common spatial analysis modules, so I’ll just bulk convert these online)!

This is going to speed up this type of analysis so much it’s unreal! :) <3

...it’s a shame that this is my last essay that is likely to use ADS data for anything :D (d’oh!)

[kawaiiers]

This is the worst article I may have ever read. It lies right from the get go. First of all, of course, it's not easier to use, definitely not for me. But I'll get to that point.

"The website looks a bit different — it’s simpler; less cluttered; and, hopefully, easier to use." Yes, because it's "less cluttered" it's harder to use. It's harder to find something that was right there from the get go, in the open! Ctrl+F exists for a reason and now it's been rendered useless. I have no idea why on desktop, where You have all the space in the world, You would hide language changing and other useful links. I get doing it on a phone screen, it's tiny and hard to use, but a desktop screen is exactly the opposite. On desktop You can open multiple links at the same time, You can find links easily and there's enough space to show them. Hiding items just makes me click more and ergo lose more time!

"After three years of development" lol just lol

"The new design is the culmination of years of research, dozens of consultations with movement groups and volunteers, and thousands of points of feedback from Wikipedia readers." Who? Your mothers?

"The updated interface improves readability by reducing distraction and clutter and making pages easier to read" Oh, so people with bad ADHD, I guess. I don't see how a person with a normally functioning brain would have problems with a single sidebar.

"It introduces changes to the navigation and layout of the site, adds persistent elements such as a sticky header" Claim to make the site more user friendly, yet add a sticky element. HILARIOUS. Sticky elements are a million times more distracting than a normal sidebar xD Not to mention they're ugly and annoying all hell. But yes, it's more comfortable to use, ofc

"Our data shows that these changes improve usability, and save time currently spent in scrolling, searching, and navigating – all of which adds up to an easier and more modern reading experience, so that more people will love reading and contributing to Wikipedia." I HAVE made an account on wikipedia after the change indeed. To change the layout back to the good one. Using the new wikipedia every time i use someone else's computer or open it in incognito feels like being skinned. Slow, terrifying and painful.

"In the future, we plan on continuing to listen to our audiences and adapt and improve our experiences based on their needs" youtube talk. Translation: "we plan on making the site more hard to use because we love mocking our userbase"

Anyway modern UX drives me off the internet so I guess it's a good thing after all

[uboat53]

Do anti-abortion states actually care about women and children, what does the data say? (Spoiler: "no")

All right, time for another one of my crazy data sets. One of the arguments you see pretty consistently from those who are pro-life is that they come to their beliefs through deep care for both children and pregnant women. With Roe v Wade officially having been struck down today I thought I'd take a look at the various states, their laws regarding abortion, and the actual status of children and pregnant women in those states.

There's going to be a lot of data and charts here, but if all you're interested in is the overall conclusion you can just skip straight to the Conclusion where I'll do a full wrap-up.

State Abortion Laws

First of all we need to categorize the states. Luckily, some journalists have already done the hard work of figuring out where the laws of each state stand, you can check out their work here:

For our purposes, I sorted the states into three categories. Those labeled "Yes" have laws that specifically make abortion legal, those labeled "No" have laws that specifically make it illegal, and those labeled "Maybe" are a bit of a muddle. I should note, however, that states in the "Maybe" category are likely to change now that the Roe v Wade, though not all in the same direction. Here's a graph with the number of states in each category as of this moment:

Population Statistics

As important as the number of states, though, is the number of people in each state. We often forget, when discussing political issues, that these issues affect real people. So here's the percentage of the population living in states of each category:

Population data was gathered from Wikipedia, specifically, here:

State Poverty Levels

So now that we have a rough idea of how many states fall into each category and how many people are in those states, it's time to start analyzing them. The first thing I want to look at is the poverty rates. This, I think, is an important metric because it tells us two things. First of all, the poverty rate is a measure of how much we care about individual outcomes but, secondly, the poverty rate also indicates the level of opportunity available in a state. A state with high poverty is a state where a person born there has less opportunity to succeed in life.

So, given that, let's take a look at the average poverty rates of the states in each category. As you can see, poverty rates actually have a pretty strong correlation with abortion laws:

This data is fairly widely available as it's collected by the US Census Bureau and I took this from the source that presented it in the easiest to read fashion, Wikipedia:

State Child Poverty Levels

Now, poverty rates don't directly relate to children and pregnant women, so I think it's worth focusing a bit more specifically. One might imagine that, even in an area with high poverty, a state might take special care of children and that child poverty might not be as bad. Unfortunately, this is not the case, child poverty rates are worse than standard poverty rates in nearly every state and the gap between states that protect abortion and states that ban it is about the same:

Again, this is widely available data collected by the US Census Bureau and I took it from USA Today because they had the most readable chart:

State Education Rankings

Beyond poverty rates we can also look at education. Education represents an investment in children as well as their opportunity to succeed. A state might have high poverty levels, but providing a student in poverty with a good education is one of the best ways to help them escape poverty, even if it results in them leaving the state and not contributing otherwise to its statistics. One might think that states interested in the well-being of children would do well in education.

Unfortunately, states that restrict abortion do much, much worse than other states in this regard. In fact, this was the single biggest gap in anything I looked at. You'll also note that, contrary our previous categories where "Maybe" states were midway between pro and anti abortion states, they look more like pro-abortion states here. Here's the average state ranking for each category of state:

Rankings for this category were taken from US News & World Report, generally considered to be the gold standard in the ranking of schools and education. I specifically looked at K-12 education instead of higher education because higher education tends to be mobile across state lines. Here's the source:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

Infant Mortality Rates

All right, onto the next category, infant mortality rates. I find this category particularly relevant since, if the intended purpose of anti-abortion legislation is to protect children in the womb, then it seems sensible to expect that you would want to protect them after leaving the womb as well.

On the contrary, though, this category is the third-worst of all of those I measured, with infants in anti-abortion states about 30% more likely to die than those in pro-abortion states. You'll also note that this is the reverse of our last category, in this one the "Maybe" states look similar to the anti-abortion states. Here's the data:

This data I took straight from the CDC website itself because it was convenient there.

Maternal Mortality

Moving on from children to pregnant women, one of the most important statistics is maternal mortality. We often forget that, until the advent of modern medicine, childbirth was one of the most common ways that women died and it's still disturbingly common today. Simply put, pregnancy can be very dangerous.

However, that danger can be mitigated with proper health care, prenatal care, and birth care. One might think that states that justify their opposition to abortion by stating their care for pregnant women might, therefore, have lower rates of maternal mortality, but one would be very wrong in this case as well. In fact, of all the categories I looked at this was the second largest gap I found between pro and anti abortion states. Here's the actual data:

Again, this is widely available data collected by the CDC and I took it from Wikipedia for my usual reasons:

Teen Pregnancy

Next we turn to teen pregnancy. This is, to my mind, another key indicator as teenagers who get pregnant are more likely to fall into poverty and less likely to have access to health care. A state that cared deeply about children and pregnant women would go to significant effort to prevent teen pregnancy.

As usual, though, the states that most tightly restrict abortion are also the states with the highest incidence of teen pregnancy:

Again, this is widely available data collected from government agencies and I took it from Wikipedia because it was convenient:

Rape

One common, and one of the most widely accepted, reasons for women to have an abortion is rape. One might think that, in the world before Roe was struck down and abortion could not be made illegal, that one of the best ways to reduce abortion rates would be to reduce rates of rape with the added benefit that this would generally improve conditions for women.

Of course, states with strict laws against abortion also do poorly in this category. Now, rape is a notoriously difficult crime to measure due to really poor reporting rates and enforcement, so I've actually run this twice with two different data sets. The "Maybe" data is also a bit skewed because Alaska is a massive outlier with a huge rate of rape, so definitely take that column with a grain of salt. Here is the data, though, flawed as it may be:

Anyways, here's the two sources of data that I used. As I said, this one is difficult to measure so any specific data is a bit suspect, but there does appear to a clear trend in the metadata.

Transition: Data to Analysis

All right, so I've basically looked at every broad indicator I could and the results were fairly consistent, the states that restrict abortion the most are also the worst states for women's and children's well-being. I'm going to do a quick summary of each category, then I'm going to talk a bit about some strange outlier states, and then I'll go ahead and wrap up.

Summaries of Each Category

Average Poverty Rate: The difference here is fairly obvious, states that restrict abortion more tightly have over 21% more poverty on average than states that protect abortion. Child Poverty Rate: This one's actually slightly worse, though I don't know if it's statistically significant. States that restrict abortion have over 23% higher child poverty rates on average than states that protect abortion. Education: This one, unfortunately, isn't really quantifiable, I could only find rankings for this one. Still, the difference between pro and anti abortion states is pretty massive, but take it with a grain of salt since the difference between all of the spots could be just 1/10 of a percent or the difference between any two spots could be double. Infant Mortality: This is the first kicker for me. If you actually care about the unborn fetus you'd think that you'd continue to care once it came out of the womb. Instead what we find is that the states with anti-abortion laws have drastically higher rates of infant mortality than states with pro-abortion laws. Maternal Mortality: This one is the second kicker for me. If you really care about pregnant women you'd care whether or not their pregnancies kill them. This is the widest quantifiable gap with women in anti-abortion states being over 36%(!!!!) more likely to die from their pregnancies than women in pro-abortion states. Teen Pregnancy: Another example of how much people care about women is teen pregnancy. Teen pregnancy will completely derail the life of a teenage girl resulting in massively higher poverty rates, lower education rates, and worse outcomes in just about every category you can measure or think of and states that restrict abortion have over 16% higher teen pregnancy rates than those that protect it. Rape: Again, one might imagine that if your goal is to protect women then rape would be a key thing you'd want to address. This one is hard to measure for reasons I mentioned earlier so I won't deal in specific numbers, but the clear pattern remains here: states that restrict abortion are worse places for women when reading broad trends in the data.

Of Special Interest

While putting together this data set I did come across a few things that piqued my interest. Here they are if you, too, are interested.

Variation in Maternal and Infant Mortality: Obviously there was a huge gap in maternal mortality between pro and anti abortion states, but the variation from state to state is also pretty insane. The state with the worst maternal mortality (Georgia at 46.2 per 100k) has more than ten times(!!!) the maternal mortality rate of the state with the best maternal mortality (California at 4.5 per 100k). Basically, we have some states that look like the advanced democracies of the western world and other states where you would literally be better off giving birth in third world countries like Cuba and Mexico. You see something similar when you look at the infant mortality rates. We'll toss out Vermont which has virtually zero infant mortality but we still find five states with infant mortality rates under 4 per 100k (CA, MA, MN, NJ, and NY) and another two on the cusp (OR and RI) and every single one of them is a state with pro-abortion laws. Basically, pro-abortion states look like the UK in terms of infant mortality while anti-abortion states look like some of the former Yugoslav Republics. It's bonkers. I'm extremely thankful that my wife gave birth to my daughter here in California where both of their chances of dying are ridiculously lower than in some other states. Poverty and Rape: One thing you start to notice really quickly when you look at the statistics for poverty and rape is that they're fairly well correlated at the high end. You also start to notice that the states near the top of those lists have one thing in common: high populations of Native Americans. I think there's a fairly good argument to be made based on the data that we have largely failed our tribal populations in terms of economic opportunity and law enforcement. Teen Pregnancy: Teen pregnancy is an interesting one to look at in that there's actually not a massive variation from the top to the bottom. Anti-abortion states do worse overall, but even many pro-abortion states still have relatively high rates of pregnancy. Colorado, on the other hand, is a huge outlier here with a teen pregnancy rate that's almost half that of the next best state. You might also know that one of the biggest differences between Colorado and other states in this regard is that Colorado has a program offering free or low cost IUDs (one of the most effective forms of birth control) to all women and allowing those under 18 to make birth control decisions independently. It certainly seems to work. Utah: I have to mention Utah because it's a pretty consistent outlier on the anti-abortion side of things. With the exception of its higher than average rate of rape and its infant mortality rate which is only slightly below average, Utah actually looks very good in all of the categories I measured here. Some anti-abortion states were better than pro-abortion states in a category or two, but Utah was the only anti-abortion state that consistently measured highly, higher than most pro-abortion states, in categories of well-being for women and children. We probably should check in on them because they're doing something right.

One Final Check

Okay, based on the data I've put together here I think it's fairly clear that states that have anti-abortion laws are generally worse for women and children than states with pro-abortion laws which calls into question the oft-stated rationale that opposition to abortion stems from concern for the well-being of pregnant women and their children. One thing, though, I did want to check, is whether those poor outcomes were actually the fault of government leaders, the same ones who supported and maintained the abortion restrictions, or whether they might simply be outside of their control. After all, we do see pro-abortion states, New Mexico being a significant one, that suffer very poor outcomes for women and children.

To check into this I decided to investigate the legislative agendas of the various anti-abortion states and compare them to the legislative agendas of the pro-abortion states. After all, what separates a bad outcome from a truly bad outcome is whether or not you try to do anything to make it better.

Well, I looked into it and… nope. The legislatures of anti-abortion states are not focused more on improving the health and well-being of women and children any more than pro-abortion states. In fact, if anything it's the opposite. The legislatures of pro-abortion states are spending a lot more time and passing a lot more bills trying to alleviate poverty and improve health outcomes than the legislatures of anti-abortion states.

Conclusion

So yeah, that's the ballgame. Here's a summary of what we've determined here:

States with anti-abortion laws do significantly worse on average in every measure of health and well-being for women and children than states with pro-abortion laws, about 20% worse in every single category I could think of to measure. And it gets even worse when I take out the hard to measure category of rape!

Even worse than that, the legislatures of states with anti-abortion laws are spending significantly less time and effort to increase the health and well-being of women and children than the legislatures of states with pro-abortion laws.

Given this we can say with relative certainty that the majority of people who oppose abortion do not do so out of concern for the well-being of women, their pregnancies, or their children. True concern is shown by actions and outcomes and both of these are clearly lacking in the case of those who pass and maintain anti-abortion laws. Based on the data we have gathered here we can say with a good deal of certainty that those who support abortion rights are likely to be significantly more concerned with the well-being of women and children.