inaris-mage-of-storms

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

Smoking is really uncool man. Only losers smoke.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

I think people no longer understand that "viewer discretion is advised" does not mean "vaguely bad content ahead," it means View At Your Own Discretion. As in, if you see the content going in a direction that is unsuitable for you in any way, it is your responsibility to stop viewing. Don't blame creators for your failure to listen to your own warning signs. Nobody is forcing you to finish the episode, the chapter, the sentence. That's all you.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

mumbo subbing for people in past life seriously brings out his mischievousness and im so obsessed this is kind of his perfect role. We cant let him have any personal stakes or he starts ripping out his own hair and screaming but if we just let him loose with a weapon in a busy mall hes ready to have a good time

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

If you have a friend that wants to vent to you but doesn't want solutions but you are a solutions-oriented person, may I suggest Silly Solutions (TM)? For instance, whenever my friend complains about the people at her job being dumb, I remind her that if only one of us had studied engineering, we could create a giant hippo robot with laser eyes to destroy them. It fulfills my need to offer a solution, doesn't violate her boundary of not wanting to problem solve, AND it cheers us both up!

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

—Andrea Gibson, "Good Light," Lord of the Butterflies

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

Lil count fWhip animation because today is fWhips bday

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

Every time I read one of those age gap posts the age where you're still helpless and being taken advantage of gets higher and higher, like 26 years old is too young to interact with older people what the fuck? I have lots of friends who were/are well into doing a PhD at this point. My dad had me at 26 years old. You're a whole grown ass person participating in society, you can vote and join politics, you can work, you can live in your own.

This smolbeanification has to stop, it's frankly embarrassing.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

“Scott is the watchers’ least favorite player.” Incorrect. Scott is the watchers’ favorite player. Problem is, the watchers treat their favorite players in much the same way as dogs treat chew toys.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

Not maintagging this cause I want to test the waters before getting dogpiled but surely I'm not the only person who's vibe on traffic!gempearl is gem trying very, very hard to make pearl worse while also not knowing the pearl that'll come from being worse isn't the pearl she thinks she'll get. Hello. Is this mic on. Gem wants the scary unhinged bloodthirsty scarlet pearl that she's heard so much of while not knowing that scarlet pearl never existed. She never did. Scarlet pearl was the result of other players reactions/memories of pearl while she was being actively ostracized by the rest of the dl cast. It was a title that overshadowed how lonely pearl actually was. Yes she did play into the character near the end but not before everyone else did the heavylifting of convincing themselves she was way more dangerous than she actually was. Gem's looking for a version of pearl that never existed

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

Cleo and Juppet! Wonder what they're talking about.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

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.

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Also very frustrating as a show producer in certain cultural arts when you are trying to advertise tge show and people feel like they're not allowed to come because theyre not from the culture.

Please come to the drag show even if youre cishet.

Please come to the bellydance showcase even if youre not Middle Eastern.

Please come to the Asian Festival if youre not Asian.

Please dance at the drum circle if youre not African.

If the event is being publicly advertised, you're invited. We want you to come if you intend to come respectfully. If you are asking 'am I allowed,' youre probably bot gonna be disrespectful. Please fill the seats. Cultural events have trouble with attendance sometimes because people who would be curious to go get shy about it. Please go to things that are curious to you. Your presence is not a burden.

I have yet to be kicked out of anything (unless you count the bathroom at a gas station that one time.)

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

the world gets a lot easier when you learn to be wrong without getting pissed or doubling down. saying, ‘you’re right, that makes sense, I was misinformed, thanks for telling me’ instead of going to war over something your ego’s latched onto will save you time, energy, and the embarrassment of sounding like a whiny little bitch

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

how the absolute FUCK am i supposed to live long and prosper in these conditions

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While we’re talking about censorship, I need everyone to stop playing this little amnesia game where we pretend not to remember what internet and fandom has looked like for the past 20 years. Weird and taboo porn has always existed, it used to be a LOT easier to access, and you won’t die if you look at it. We simply cannot continue placating the crazy mob of people who are scared of sex and love overstating harm, they’ll call you a pedophile literally no matter what, and they’ll roll around in their cognitive dissonance like a hog in mud when you point out that the other group calling you a freak and a pedo are the conservative alt right. Fucking exhausting being a fag and a pervert in 2025.

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

what you learn from hobbies:

consistent practice opens up whole worlds of skill that you couldn't imagine

making mistakes in the process of learning is not only natural, it is also essential

activities that you enjoy can give you more energy back than you spent on them

wow everything is so expensive

[inaris-mage-of-storms]

hmmm