#work vs fun

[silentsundown]

This Strangerville story is really a great respite for me.

It's a much-needed recreation, and an opportunity to, for once, express how I feel more than what I think or a concept that has come to mind. Besides, writing in English and not in Russian (still love doing it, but it's still a bit hard for me, although WAY easier than a couple years ago) is a nice way to unwind. I have been writing solely in Russian for two years now, with barely any break. Mostly the same story. Got sidetracked twice and accidentally deleted the very first 30k partial draft of it once. Needless to say it's a tough one to write, but I want to finish it still. Just later. Life isn't so short. I have way enough time.

I was myself a military brat with a stay at home parent (mother though) and the marriage wasn't ideal. I'm not really recreating my parents through the Sigworths, but I noticed how much of my own stuff I pour into my characters. My novel's characters are much based on spirits that were incarnated as historical figures of Kazakhstan and the topics are based on ideas that I have, something very mental and spiritual, exploring and making sense of the bond I have with each of them (planning to make 12 of these novels), possibly exploring our past lives together, and my author avatars are never the narrator or even truly the main character, but one that "triggers" the spiritual work, and frequently dies, is dying, or at least disappears. Their influence is in the background, but they only get a twinge of spotlight and then die. Like a firework flying to the sky, exploding in a beautiful star, and then the fires dying out as the ashes fall down.

This Strangerville story, on the other hand, even if it's based on EA's storyline, is really mine. Every character, be it Aiganym, Beatrice (who will be future novel characters) or even my version of the Sigworths, have mostly me inside of them. I haven't really written and poured my actual feelings in a written work for a long time. It feels good to take a break from work and actually play. I have no job, but I work, internally and creatively, so damn hard. Writing in your third language, even if you love doing so, is hard. I work so much and play so little. Maybe that's why I burned out creatively, whether in art or writing, and the Sims is my way to keep being creative while keeping it less serious.

Maybe I shouldn't take everything as work... and allow myself to play more. I take everything as a duty, as a dedication, a vocation, almost religious vocation, but hardly ever truly let loose and have fun. I love what I'm doing, my work in Russian, but I feel I pressured myself too hard, trying to make it right, publishable, first draft, second draft that I was working on before I broke down and played TS4 again. Even within my relationships I was working so hard, and then burned out. I'm a jobless workaholic, kinda, I feel. It keeps me from feeling like a useless waste of space and resources. Funny, I was telling my person, who drowns herself in university work, that she was a workaholic, but we're not so different. I'm just a different kind of workaholic.

This is my opportunity to have fun. I deserve it. I think so, at least.

[suntails]

reality

[rvbyaoi]

HELLO RVB NATION. here is all of the Complete Seasons downloaded since rooster teeth took it off youtube. thumbs up!!

[akiacia]

the myth of eros and psyche

[painfully-unoriginal]

okaaayy

[scificrows]

The feed ID doesn’t need to say anything other than what everyone else’s says, just name, gender, and…” She trailed off. She was looking at me and I was looking at her. - Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot art I used is the official cover art from the French edition of ASR)

[friendofcars]

I finished my data analysis for POV distribution in TRC! Figure captions are in the alt text. Other observations, discussion of the analysis and results, and some supplemental figures are under the cut. This is perhaps the most self-indulgent project I've worked on <3

Other observations: I went into this analysis with the hypothesis that each of the four protagonists would have the most chapters and/or pages in the following pattern: Blue for TRB, Ronan for TDT, Adam for BLLB, and Gansey for TRK. This mostly held true, although Blue had more chapters and pages than Adam in BLLB. This trend was more significant in terms of page distribution compared to chapter distribution. Mean chapter length differences were infrequent and did not follow the expected pattern, although I did see trends towards shorter chapters for antagonists not grouped into "all others."

There is a relative lack of back-to-back chapters for the same POV character, although this does occur in all books (twice for Blue in TRB; once for The Gray Man, twice for Adam, and six times for Ronan in TDT; five times for Blue [two of which are back-to-back-to-back], once for Gansey, twice for Adam [one of which is back-to-back-to-back], and once for Greenmantle in BLLB. I mention all of this to say that in TRK, this occurs once for Ronan, once for Blue, once for Adam, and thrice for Gansey- but in one of these instances, Gansey has SIX chapters in a row. Nine of the chapters from 48 to 58 are from his POV. The Raven King indeed!

Analysis notes:

For each book, I counted how many chapters each POV character had and how many pages each POV character had. Page numbers are based on the UK paperback editions of the series. In the figures, I show raw # of chapters and pages, as well as the proportion of chapters and pages attributed to each POV character over the total number of chapters or pages. I also compared POV characters’ pages/chapter ratio and tested for differences in mean chapter length with a one-way ANOVA with multiple comparisons.

For most measures, in cases where chapters had multiple POV characters in sequence, I divided the chapter by # of characters. For example, chapter 44 in TRB starts with Adam, switches to Whelk, and ends with Blue. This chapter counted as 1/3 chapter for each character. In BLLB, only the prologue contained multiple discrete POV sections (Persephone, Calla, and Maura) and Piper only had her POV featured in the epilogue so I grouped these two chapters as “All Others” and excluded them from statistical tests. For TRK and TRC, I did include the "All Others" category in the analysis. (“All Others” includes chapters/pages with ambiguous POV (Kavinsky’s text in TDT- are we reading it from the sender or the recipient’s POV?), mixed/omniscient POV (the Gray Man’s tarot reading in TDT – we get internal thoughts and feelings from multiple characters), and in TRK, any character aside from Blue, Gansey, Adam, and Ronan.)

In figures that represent raw counts of chapters or pages, the dashed horizontal line represents the expected number of chapters or pages per POV character if the distribution was equal. The p values on these figures represent the results of a Chi-square test to test whether the actual distribution of pages or chapters was different from an equal distribution.

For the pages/chapter ratio data and the Chi-square tests, I did not apply this calculation and counted each discrete POV as a full chapter because I needed counts and sample sizes to be integers for the statistical analysis (Gansey having an n = 8.5 was not making GraphPad prism very happy with me). I had to do a bit of rounding to the nearest number which was not ideal, but I did this as little as possible. (There is probably a workaround for this, at least for the ratio data, but I am not a statistician). To at least approximate what results would look like without the skew towards a lower pages/chapter ratio, I also ran the ANOVA only with chapters containing a single POV character, which is why you’ll see two figures for the pages/chapter metric for each book (except for BLLB).

I am considering p values < 0.05 to be significant; I have included non-significant p values on some figures to provide additional context. If there is no p value on a given figure, you can assume I found no significant differences amongst POV characters’ chapters and/or pages in my analysis.

If you have questions about the analysis please let me know! :)

Supplemental figures: TRK data shown for all unique POV characters (these figures do not have captions in the alt text; the four on the left depict distribution of chapters and pages across the 19 different POV characters in TRK; the vast majority of the chapters and pages are attributed to either Blue, Gansey, Adam, or Ronan. The two figures on the left show mean pages per chapter for all characters, with no clear/statistically significant trends across the data. The demon's chapters are noticeably short.)

[bigkickguy]

enforcer and executor are my arknights favs

[marshmallowgoop]

I combined footage from my Detektiv Conan Blu-ray with audio from my Case Closed FUNimation DVD and made an HD English dub clip compilation for Episodes 57-58, "The Holmes Freak Murder Case."

[worstloki]

Love seeing fics from 2012 that make Loki a vindicated blorbo and Thanos the main villain for the Avengers. They were correct

[dumbnotstupidfuck]

my fave way to put the canon dynamics of husk & alastor and val & angel into a human au is alastor and val stepping into their respective situations and essentially saving their lives

alastor steps in when husk gambles away his money and fails to repay the debt he owes a mobster and val finds the disowned black sheep of a mob family coked out in a gutter on the verge of an od.

instead of any kind of literal contract, angel and husk just have to live with the fact that these two horrible people saved their lives and will hold it over them forever

[skneees]

i heard its laundry day on chorus

[mayugoo]

Ive barely had time to do proper personal art (outside of doodles) cuz ive been so sucked into college work lately, but heres a ramona sketch page i managed to do ♪

[fishfingersalad]

Caboose is the kinda guy to own a billion different pets, many of which are rescues. You just know he has a pet tarantula that he lets free roam in Church's room (her name is fluffy and Church despises her), and a carpet python that Tucker hates ("Get your slimy fucking snake away from me!!!" "He's not slimy! Snakes don't have slime. Are you thinking about a snail maybe?"). He also has several crabs and a catfish. And his chinchilla, of course.

In a similar vein I think Doc has a pet axolotl or two.

[cienie-isengardu]

Mortal Kombat 1 Behind the Scenes AU: Scenography (1)

[Cage’s Mansion] [Waiting for Liu Kang] [Special Bonus] [Grandmaster’s commentary] [Climbing scene] [Madam Bo’s Inn] [Cage’s Mansion 2 (fire extinguisher)] [Medic] [Shang Tsung’s sad face] [Smoke's Fall]

[just-sticks-and-beats]