#is anyone even reading these?

[a11eya]

kirishima shoots up like a weed during his years at UA and in the years after.

by the time he’s well into his career as a pro hero, he’s taller than all of his friends, taller than most people he knows. (not as tall as fatgum, who’s still a good 45 centimeters above him—but maybe he’s okay with it after seeing how many times fat’s bumped his head on doorframes.)

kirishima’s taller than you. he knows you like the height difference, knows because you like it when he bends down to kiss you, when he puts his arms around you so you’re wrapped up in him. but there’s one downside about your height difference that he doesn’t have the heart to tell you about.

for dates, you spend a lot of time getting ready—doing your makeup, styling your hair, picking out your clothes. he likes to hangout with you as you get ready, admires the skill it takes for you to do all these things to end up looking so nice. he always makes sure to tell you how beautiful you look.

but once you’re both out the door and walking to your destination—he stops being able to see all your hard work.

he can only see the top of your head, really. your shoulders, some.

“sorry,” he tells you once this fact slips out one night as you’re both taking a walk around a park after dinner. he looks at you with worried eyes, biting his lip.

you stare at him for a long moment, blinking rapidly, then slap a hand over your mouth as you burst out laughing.

he’s relieved, if not a little confused, as you move forward to hug him tightly, still laughing.

“if anything, i’m sorry about the view,” you tell him, grinning, looking up into his face.

he shakes his head, saying earnestly, “no, no! the view’s great! the top of your head is very cute. but it’s, like, 5% of you, so! i wish i could see all of you at once, always.”

you snort, smiling. you reach up and grip the front of his shirt, tugging him down towards you gently.

“c’mere, you. only you would call the top of someone’s head cute,” you say, then kiss him.

[phleb0tomist]

tumblr users will have the most inaccessible, unreadable, low contrast, flashing carrd you can possibly imagine, with a dni full of insider acronyms with no translation and numerous link buttons labelled with cryptic captions, and then go ahead and put “ableists dni and kys!” on that carrd

[jerich0two]

Jazz cat! (Lest we forget who my favourite is)

Been seeing a few posts with overlord-era Husk playing the saxophone and I am ALLLL for it. This post is for ME. I am the demand for Jazz Saxophonist Husk Content. If only I knew how to draw a sax... or someone playing one... oh, well!

[carouselunique]

Minuette! Someone requested her for the sketch sale so I decided to do a few sketches of her because she is my beloved!

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post

[stil-lindigo]

the machine.

a comic about being a 'creator' online.

creative notes:

[mroddmod]

she’ll be alright because she had you.

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

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

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[lygma-nygma]

Being a batfam fan is funny because people will make a post like “here’s my headcanon-“ and it’s just something that’s directly canon to the story then post about major canon events and get everything wrong.

[supertaliart]

I went a little off the rails for a power-point-party, so I thought I'd share. Don't come at me about canonicity. Also yes, I spent hours using illustrator to make pose-able vector mando'ade.

Review from my friend: "I feel like I actually learned something?"

[rubikor]

would you hold my face softly and tell me it will be alright?

[danceswithsporks]

Gonna post two ficlets tomorrow for 12 days of batchmas cause ya know…Christmas. Lol

[saltedbiscuiit]

Silly 15!skk comic that I sketched awhile ago and dont remember what compelled me to draw this

[thatexygurl]

there's so many things in tsc that just come at you all at once, so it's hard to focus on just one thing to break down, but the most glaring thing that stood out to me is how hard it is to really put someone back together. especially someone so shattered that it's nigh impossible to glue them back and pray they don't crumble under your ministrations.

if jean is neil's foil, then jeremy is andrew's direct antithesis. whereas andrew is a steady bedrock because he's been broken too many times to know how to weather the storm, jeremy is too soft hands and an even softer soul. he cares and cares and cares. so empathetic and so gentle it almost breaks your heart. you pray for the impossibility that jeremy can survive knowing the truth because if he doesn't, then what hope does jean have? so you pray he can be steady too. that he can weather the storm as well. that he will not break when knowing that just under the surface lies shark-infested waters.

but then you remember the beginning. "even knowing everything could go completely sideways, you'd make that choice every time"

in every other universe, jean has not survived. but in every other universe, he did not have the trojans.

[ilovereading5252]

Dpxdc promt

Every single corpse, skeleton, or other human remains that was not properly buried under their own name, murdered and/or had unfinished business in the whole of Gotham (including the bay) gets up and claws themselves out of their dumping ground. The living watch in horror as green glowing zombies swarm the streets and start to gather at Gothams cemeteries…

There they each get a green “hello my name is…” name tag and a (actually rather professional looking) complaint form from one of the floating tables, fill it out, search for a free spot, lie down and stop glowing.

Danny (who would tell you that he is not a necromancer) is just glad that now all these shades can finally stopp bothering him about solving their problems.

[fanfic-gremlin-ft-trauma]

happy birthday to one of the greatest fics of all time <3 ( @bisexuallsokka , thank you for writing this masterpiece.)