#FUN WITH NUMBERS

[posts-for-my-wife]

I’m not breaking any new ground here, but it’s obvious that the peak of novelty New Year’s Eve numerical eyewear was 2000-2009

10/10 for legibility, visibility, and typography

for years now, this industry has been stubbornly clinging to an idea that has become too cumbersome. if you will indulge me, I will now rate 2023’s new designs:

5/10 best I can say is “it gets the job done.” it does clearly read as 2023, but the typography is bad & the visibility leaves much to be desired.

2/10 happy 20?3, i guess. they started with a decent font, but these are illegible and everything about the eyehole placement sucks.

6/10 hear me out: this is an okay compromise. it’s a cop out, sure, but it’s a viable alternative. it satisfies the basic requirements of legibility, visibility, and typographical acceptability, yet it lacks all whimsy. this feels like when you don’t do a project the way the teacher intended but you pass anyway on a technicality. this isn’t school, though, so i’m failing this design.

1/10 come on, guys. if you’re going to use the top of the 2 as an eyehole, at least use a font with a more open design, perhaps something art deco. at least when you look in the mirror with those LEDs directly in your line of sight, you won’t notice how bad the glasses look.

7/10 now we’re getting somewhere. like the first design, it uses the 3 as the second eyehole but it does so without compromising the shape of the number. unfortunately, the lack of outlines does negatively affect legibility and there may be some visibility issues for the left eye.

9/10 this is as good as it’s gonna get, folks. an actual graphic designer was clearly involved here. the typography is appealing, the color works, visibility looks good. nicely done.

-1000000000000000/10 :(

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[oakandgumtrees]

Okay, but how many WORDS of fic are there? A proposed method for estimating total word count for a set of fics on Ao3

Some statistics are really easy to find on Ao3. Some are harder.

The word count of an individual work? Easy. The word count of a group of works? You have to add it up manually.

Or do you?

(Note: All statistics in this post are from data gathered on the 28th-29th July, 2023, and will be out of date in the specifics. My focus is on trends.)

If we only had an average

If we knew what the AVERAGE (or mean) word count for a group of works was , we could simply multiply by the number of works, and we'd have the total!

But we don't have the average.

We do, however, have the ability to sort a group of fics by word count, do some arithmetic to figure out what the middle item in that list is, and check that individual fic. (E.g. in a list of five fics, what is the word count of the third-longest work?)

This is the median - surely that's going to be close to the average, right?

Unfortunately, no.

Wordcount Georg is an outlier adn is difficult to count

You know that one MASSIVE fic? The one that's, like, half a million words, and a hundred chapters, and it's still going?

You thought of one straight away, didn't you?

Well, it turns out a LOT of fandoms have that fic. Or several of them.

But they're usually very few compared to a much LARGER number of very short works. Take the MCU fandom. When I checked, only 1% of MCU fics were over 100,000 words - and 25% were under 1000 words.

The median is usually close to the average when the distribution of a set of numbers looks like this:

But the distribution of the length of fics in most fandoms looks more like this:

In that sort of distribution, the median and the mean can be a LONG way apart.

A median can still tell you a lot about the most common kinds of fic. But it's going to completely miss all those super-long outliers, and if you want to find the TOTAL word count, you need those.

Counting things the cheating-cheater way

I would like to propose a method I've been calling 'multiple median estimation'.

Here's how it works:

Sort your fics by word count, then divide the list into chunks. Ten percent of the total number is often a good size.

Find the fic in the middle of each chunk to get the median word count for THAT set of fics.

When a chunk has a median SUBSTANTIALLY bigger than the previous chunk, break it up into smaller pieces, and repeat.

Once you have all your medians, multiply each one by the number of fics in that chunk, and add together to get your estimated total.

Let's see how that pans out across a few different fandoms...in part 2!

[sarcasticdolphin]

Elisabeth fic stats part 2

So as the year is over I decided to update my spreadsheet from earlier this year. And the numbers are in.

(Data set is Elisabeth das Musical fics in English on Ao3 as of 1/1/2024):

Average: 3391 words per fic.

Median: 1314 words per fic.

Mode: 0 words per fic.

Total Words: 1258426 words.

Total Fics: 370 fics.

So there were more words written in 2023 than in 2022, but not by much. 316739 words in 2022 and 352541 in 2023. (I counted the drabble fic as 100k to 2023 and the rest to 2022, which is roughly correct).

Congrats to all of us that wrote fic this year!

[laf-outloud]

I love numbers because it gives me a clear idea. So thank you for making the list.. Not just for the convention ones, I love it when you make them for Walker as well.

You're very welcome! I like numbers because they're objective. Interpretations of the numbers may be subjective, but at least everyone's working with the same data!

Fun little tidbit... I hated my Statistics class in college, lol!

[veliseraptor]

2022 Writing Stats

it's time for Fun With Numbers: Lise's Hobbies Edition, 2022!

So I keep a daily word count writing tracker so I can monitor my own writing pace/patterns, and sometimes it's fun to see what comes out of it at the end of a year. This data does not include writing I do on this blog answering asks/writing meta/etc.; it only includes any fiction I write (original or otherwise) and more serious/structured essay works. For the most part this tracker is meant to serve as a descriptive, not a prescriptive, tool - I use it to record rather than to set goals.

And now: the charts.

To start with, the basic graph of my daily word count in 2022:

This one looks pretty similar to graphs for previous years, though it did trend a little lower than historically. However, the big outlier there in October is the highest single-day word count I've had since 2019, apparently. I wrote 5.2k on October 24th, which (looking back), wasn't even a travel day, just a random Monday, so I have no idea what was happening there. My best guess was that I was hit with a whale of an inspiration boost for some reason, but I have no recollection of what it was about.

A quick look at data distribution shows that there were 56 days in 2022 with a word count of 0 (i.e. 56 days where I wrote literally nothing; actually fewer than I expected, and fewer than in 2021 when there were 67 zero word days). Altogether I wrote 388,095 words in 2022, an increase over 2021's historic annual word count low of 386,721. (I am making fun of myself here.) My average word count per day in 2022 was 1,063 words, which is roughly on par with last year's (more on comparative daily averages later).

Looking more broadly at the patterns month over month:

Obviously something happened in July and October where I lost my mind somehow, but I don't really know how to explain that. Neither beat out September 2021 as one of my most insane writing months on record (over 60k) or even approaching my all time high in November 2017 (63k), but still. They were probably the main factors in pulling the ultimate monthly average to just above 32,442 words, given the lows in June, November, and December. June was particularly dismal this year; it's the lowest word count in a month since I started tracking this in August 2016.

June was rough, you guys.

Now to compare 2022's final total word count to previous years overall...

While continuing to track lower than earlier data (2017 and 2018 in particular), the trend for 2022 held close to 2021 and within a reasonable range of 2019 and 2020. 2020's boost likely came from the several weeks of unemployment there in the middle, tbqh, so I think I'm looking at what's probably an approximate of my "typical" output in a year at this point in my life (hovering around the 370-420k mark). The overall yearly average for these past six years is 454,899 words in a year; for the past three it's 409,647 words. All told, between 2017-2022 I recorded having written 2,729,334 words.

To look at seasonality I graphed out the month-by-month word count total, graphed by year (this one's probably hard to read):

But I failed to note any significant deviation based on any particular month year over year. Total word count per month hovers around a median of 38,726 words per month.

Breaking it down more particularly to average daily word count per year, to see how my average pace day to day changed (or didn't) from year to year:

As seen with the overall totals for the year, the daily average roughly lines up, with 2019, 2021, and 2022 forming a cohort of similar range after the apparent outliers of 2017 and 2018. (It does make me curious what data would look like, had I been gathering it, for earlier years, particularly when I was in college.)

Finally, for a completely unreadable chart that shows the daily word count graphed for every year, including a line for the average across all years:

gorgeous. absolutely illegible, I love it. But it does arguably illustrate what I started this project to prove, which is the remarkably consistent up-and-down nature of my writing pace. Peaks and lows, at a slightly varying pace and with different levels for how high or how often those peaks show up, but it does tend to come back around.

You can see this more clearly when I cut the graph down to just show the line that averages out all six years:

Now if only I could internalize that better and stop panicking about how I've lost the ability to write every time I spend a few days feeling sticky and slow. It's a goal, anyway.

That's all I've got. Thank you and I'm sorry I'm like this.

[shoes--off]

CBS march madness

Speaking of that march madness vote on Twitter... I may have played around with notion a bit.

Stats from the Twitter post threads from CBS: Round 1 | Round 2 | Round 3 | Round 4

Battle stats

In round 1, Kasie (from NCIS) and Lucy (from NCIS: Hawai'i) had their battle score the most views. Logically, the % of people voting out of these views was much lower in % than most other battles; the Hetty (from Ghosts), Kasie and Lucy battles had the most % of all votes cast at 12.53%, 13.16% and 26.24% respectively. The Lucy R1 battle had more than a quarter of the votes out of 8 battles! Kasie was pitted against the next best performer, Hetty, in R2; their battle got 24.92% of all votes. The R2 Lucy battle continued overperforming, with 42.2% of all votes across battles.

In R3, once again the characters with the most votes battled each other, with the Lucy vs Kasie battle getting 67.85 % of all votes cast in this round. I assume the Twitter algorithm is responsible for the number of views; clearly, battles with NCIS franchise characters had the most. We can only compare the Kasie and Lucy battles until they faced off, and notice that the Lucy battles were getting more people voting among the tweet viewers.

The drilldown of the % of votes going to each character in each battle confirms that no character came even close to Lucy in any of the battles.

Character votes drilldown

TL;DR: not only did Lucy Tara win all the battles... it was a landslide.

[hebrewbyinbal]

Fun with #numbers counting to 10 in #hebrew or reverse them and you are ready for the next #countdown

[retrocgads]

UK 1987

[badolmen]

People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.

For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.

The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.

So yes, I’m going to pirate and support piracy.

Edit: if you are able, use $5 you would otherwise use for a streaming subscription to donate to a GazaFunds campaign.

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

Would like to add: minimum days means employers, unions and/or other laws can add more.

What does that look like?

Here in Germany, with a minimum of 20, I've got 10 extra atm because of contract stuff (11.5 at my previous job; most people I know get at least 5 added to the minimum 20), but I can trade in half my union negotiated summer bonus for 5 extra vacation days.

If I were legally recognized as (equivalent to or more than) 50% impaired, my employer would have to give me 5 extra vacation days on top of that. Which isn't too-too hard. e.g. needing storebought insulin would be enough to qualify. (The fines employers face for not having enough impaired employees far outweigh the costs of those extra vacation days. That same legal recognition also comes with special protections from termination.)

Someone working a full time, typical office job at our company could theoretically but relatively easily have

- 40 paid days off. You must legally plan some of them so at least 14 consecutive calendar days are not spent sick or at work, to assure you're actually getting rest from at least some of your vacation days.

- 11 federal/state/county holidays. It ranges from 10-14 depending on where your place of work is.

- 2 union negotiated set holidays; Christmas Eve and NYE, in our case.

- weekends off. Usually 2-3 of the aforementioned holidays fall on a weekend. It's not illegal to work Saturdays, but our particular contract runs Monday to Friday, and our employee representatives' council is pretty good at blocking requests for "voluntary" overtime "opportunities" on Saturday from our employer.

Which brings us to a total of about 100 days a year spent not working.

Of course, this scenario means this person most likely has some health conditions that add sick leave to those days. There's no hard limit to it, but pay starts getting lowered after 6 uninterrupted weeks' absence for the same diagnosis. If they're sick too often, an employer can try to argue it's hurting their profits, but they risk being spanked in the wallet governmentally and also getting bad press. As mentioned before, legal recognition of impairment adds protection from termination, making this even less likely for my hypothetical coworker.

If they're a parent, they also get (limited) parental sick leave when kiddo is sick. Because a kid deserves to be looked after when ill or hurt, and schoolchildren deserve to not be infected because some parents can't find childcare on short notice.

Should my hypothetical coworker have more than 8 overhours, those have to get paid out eventually... Unless they opt to have them traded in as extra days off.

And that's a standard year, without exceptional events like deaths in the family (union rule iirc, bereavement leave is 1-5 days depending on family relations), their own wedding (union rule, 1 day, must be on or adjacent to day of ceremony) moving house (union rule, 0-3 days depending on distance, must be on or adjacent to moving day), employment anniversaries (contractual, 1-3 extra vacation days for the year, depending on time spent at the company, iirc), giving birth/having a stillbirth/adopting a child (legal absolute minimum of 8 weeks starting at delivery/adoption date; usually more) or parental/family care leave (legality, several months, with a slight pay cut).

tl;dr: dear Americans, there's PTO you can't even imagine and the pretty statistics maps are showing you less than half of it.

I think adults need summer vacation. Like let's just close down all our jobs for three months and play outside. Please. I'm so tired.

[agnesandhilda]

yeah this is a self-evident biological hierarchy. that's why we have to enforce it with violence

[t00thpasteface]

i am unironically obsessed with adam west batman not only trying to be a good dad to robin, but actually succeeding. also love robin's insane energy levels and his ability to go from seething bloodlust to manic glee in record time. i think any superman worth his S would fit right into the family ^_^

[albatrossisland]

I have two fics, Heartless and A Light in the Dark, that are in this absolute slugfest over which one has the 5th highest hits of my stories this year.

First one goes up, then they're tied, then bam, come from behind has pulled ahead again, oh no, they're tied again ... and on and on.

Meanwhile, Alive is slowly creeping up to their numbers, so itching to be the dark horse that steals victory out from both of them.

[umblrspectrum]

i love learning cursive just to write text for exactly one character

[7lizardsinacoat]

SAY HI, PACK OF PIXIES!

Every time I rewatch A Court of Fey and Flowers (or let's be real, any campaign Aabria Iyengar is in or runs), I had more and more wanted to paint her. So I did. Truly one of my favorite and most inspirational DMs, and a fashion icon to boot.