#little bird can be grian coded in every different way

[activate-shadow-of-the-window]

Little bird, where are you going? / I forgot to catch your name

Little bird, where are you going? / Would you mind if I came too?

Little bird, wait a moment / I only just found out your name

Little bird, stay a while / Or at least take me along

Little bird, stay forever / I’m better off because you came

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A Mumbo and a Grian and a totally normal relationship concerning crime and conformity

-

Lyrics from The Arcadian Wild’s “Little Bird”

[sandboxwritings]

you know what its late and im too tired to think of words anymore so im just gonna post this wip here and go to bed

enjoy!

If there was one thing that was not on Grian's New Years' bingo card it would be growing wings. In fact, if anyone had so much as suggested it as a possibility to him he would have laughed them off, assuming it was the prelude to some strange prank. And yet, here he was two weeks into the new year with what were undoubtedly wings sprouting to either side of his spine, connecting to his shoulder blades in a way that they should not be able to.

That wasn't the only strange thing happening to him either. For one, he's lighter. Not in a diet-culture-fad or hitting the gym to meet that New Year's resolution that'll fade out in a month or so, he is just literally lighter. Less dense? Like the amount of physical space he takes up is the same but his mass is…less? Now, Grian is far from an ornithologist but he was able to quickly learn that bird bones are hollow and he does not like the implications that has for him and his new feathered existence. It does, however, mean he can jump higher, which is kind of fun to test out whenever he's taking the lift to and from his apartment unit.

It also means he's a bit more fragile than he's used to being.

Now, one might be asking, shouldn't a person who has strange growths go see a doctor immediately? And the answer is yes! Of course, and in Grian's defense, he did do that! It's not his fault that the hospital was overflowing with people at the time, most of which were in much more dire straits than he himself was and so he elected to turn around and go home. He would just go back. . . later. Eventually. He swore he would. Maybe.

Surely it would resolve itself.

That was ten days ago, before Grian's new wings had become more distinct and feathered and had only barely been strange misshapen lumps on his back. And in those ten days the entire world had changed.

An emergency notice had been sent out across the city, played on every news broadcast in the district, an alert sent to every cell phone registered to the local area code. Some strange bacteria had been discovered in the water ducts that fed into every reservoir across Hermitopia and it should be avoided at all costs. Citizens were instructed to limit skin exposure and refrain from drinking any sources of unsealed water. Stations were set up across the city to provide clean, filtered water in the meantime while the contamination was dealt with.

It was too little, far too late.

While Hermitopia was effectively put on mass lockdown, Grian's wings continued to fill out. He was almost glad for the shelter in place orders as it meant no one saw the process of his strange, wrinkly-skinned chicken wings double in size day after day. No one saw him nearly scratching the things bloody while the pin feathers grew in. No one was there to see him standing in the middle of his living room and struggling to activate muscles that hadn't existed days ago. No one else was there to look on in awe as he finally stretched both fully feathered wings out for the first time, touching wingtips to diagonal corners of the room.

Just over three weeks into the New Year, Hermitopia holds a press conference. It plays on every device from the heart of downtown to three cities over. As many have already come to realize, the contamination was more than simple bacteria in the water. It was a chemical agent, a biohazard, that was capable of adapting to and changing different forms of matter. Particularly, it changed living matter down to the DNA. Irrevocably.

The city weeps. There is fear and panic. Questions fly about what this means, what comes next, what do we do? Social media forums explode with speculation and rumors. Friends and family hold one another close amidst the chaos of a changing world.

Grian turns off his phone, sits outside on his tiny balcony, and looks at the stars. He feels the wind ruffle his feathers, feels the way it tugs at his skin, pulls him toward the edge. He flexes new muscles that support new, fragile bones.

Spreads his wings.

They say there's no better way to learn to fly. . . right?

And he jumps.

[slliest-clownmari]

Hello again! For the month of June we decided to don our best Icarus costumes because we flew directly into the sun on this one! Extra long disclaimer this time. If you're interested in the technical side what we did and how it went wrong, or want to see the raw numbers, that'll be at the bottom of this post!

Disclaimer: There were two major errors during collection. The first one resulted in five people's views not being collected for the first half hour of the event.  These people were SMajor/Noxcrew, ItsFunneh, Squaishey, ASFJerome, and Mefs, amounting to about 56k views when added back. The second error left a 45 minute gap in the data where nothing is collected. While these are major errors general trends are still visible and neat to look at!

TL;DR: MCCP21 peaked with 627.4k viewers a little more than thirty minutes into the event. 65.4% of those viewers were watching the Pink Parrots, and 87.9% of those were watching Technoblade. The second most watched team was the Lime Llamas at 16.9% of viewership, 77.6% of that coming from Wisp.

For easier viewing of the graphs, check out the Google Slides version! Total Viewership Over Time

The event peaked with 627,421 viewers at 8:33PM which was during Sky Battle. Looking at the trend of the data, this statistic is unlikely to have changed if the missing 45 minutes had been counted, especially seeing how the peak of MCC14 was also easily in the first hour.  Data collection began about an hour before the event's official start at 8:00PM and ended an hour after the event's end at 11:08PM.

Viewership by Individual Over Time

A fun game you can play with this graph, sans the labels, is guess which one's Technoblade! So far everyone I've shown the unlabelled graph to has guessed correct.

Three people went live after the official start time of the event at 8:00PM, those being Technoblade, Grian, and AyChristeneGames. Four streamers had gone offline prior to the end of 20vs20 Dodgebolt at 11:08PM. Twenty of the 24 participants had gone offline within 5 minutes of the event end. This is in sharp contrast to MCC14 where it took 15 minutes to have half of the 36 participants to go offline. MCC14 participants were also more likely to start streaming well in advance of the event. (For context, only Twitch data was collected for MCC14.) This is probably a cultural difference between Youtube and Twitch.

Viewership by Team Over Time

The viewership drop off after a team fails to reach Dodgebolt is a lot more severe this time, and you don't really see the two teams who did get to Dodgebolt get a boost either. Best guess is this is because MCCP21 was non-canon so nobody really cared who won the whole thing if their favorites didn't make it. Another observation: Pink Parrots has a much more severe dropoff during the Bird App Poll than everyone else. Unseen here is the viewership increase when Wilbur's fire alarm went off :(

Viewership Breakdown at Peak by Individual

So, not the most diverse viewership. The most watched person at peak in MCC14, Tommyinnit, only had 21.1% of total viewership. Even if you combine that percentage with the runner-up Dream's numbers, you only get 38.4% of viewership going to them. There is not a single team from MCC14 who captured nearly 57.5% of the viewership. The most they could do was 39.9% (Green Guardians). Absolutely insane degree of domination.

Top Five (Unrouned) 1. Technoblade (360.8k) 2. Wisp (82.2k) 3. Grian (45.5k) 4. ItsFunneh (44.9k) 5. Joey Graceffa (23.5k)

Bottom Five 26. Burren (78) 25. SeaPeeKay (333) 24. Spifey (403) 25. AyChristeneGames (498) 26. InTheLittleWood (521)

Wisp's numbers were so hugely different from last time (0.1% to 13.1%) that I actually sought out people who watched him to confirm he really had over 70k viewers. He did. This probably has to do with having fewer big names to compete with and being on a team with Tommy and Tubbo. Plus, he’s more familiar to the Minecraft community than Joey Graceffa, so fans of Tommy and Tubbo would be more likely to watch Wisp to see their faves. This isn't meant to belittle Wisp or to attribute his viewership entirely to Tommy or Tubbo; MCC is an unfair measurement of the usual popularity of a creator.

Viewership Breakdown at Peak by Team vs Survey Data

The predicted viewership graph was generated using data from a poll I ran on Tumblr and a poll run by u/Epic_Ninja_Dude123 on r/MinecraftChampionship.

Difference from predicted counts (Pred. % vs Actu. %) Lime Llamas: +9.1% (7.8% vs 16.9%) Green Guardians: +6.3% (0.9% vs 7.2%) Purple Pandas: -6.3% (6.7% vs 0.4%) Orange Ocelots: -5.1% (5.5% vs 0.4%) Red Rabbits: -4.1% (6.2% vs 2.1%) Blue Bats: -1.9% (2.5% vs 0.6%) Aqua Axolotls: +1.3% (2.5% vs 3.8%) Pink Parrots: +0.9% (64.5% vs 65.4%) Yellow Yaks: +0.5% (0.0% vs 0.5%) Cyan Creepers: -0.3% (3.2% vs 2.9%)

Standard Dev. for MCC14: 10.22 Standard Dev. for MCCP21: 2.89

Thrilled by these statistics!! The MCC14 survey had nearly triple the sample size (862) as this combined survey, but still ended up closer to actual counts. Real life proof of what they tell you in stats classes! A representative sample is the best kind of sample to have. Something I did not consider when using the survey for MCC14 is its source, a blog on Tumblr that talks heavily about Technoblade and Philza, which obviously biased the audience who took it towards the Pink Parrots (Philza, Fundy, Wilbur, JackManifold). Not a surprise we did better this time but really neat to see logic in action! lol

Another interesting thing about the survey: Reddit and Tumblr do vary a little in taste. It's easier to just show you:

What's missing? I chose not to calculate average/median viewership for the creators involved due to the large gap in data. It wouldn't be correct most likely.

So, how did you do this and how did you mess it up?

(I, the writer of this post, mostly do the analysis part of this project, not the programming. Apologies if any programmers are reading this and it doesn't make sense. :[ )

Our initial plan was do do just what we did to collect the MCC14 data but for YouTube instead of Twtich. (For MCC14 we used a Python program to request the viewership data directly from Twitch using their API.) This was much easier said than done. Unlike the Twitch API, which allows you to get stream information very easily just using a streamer's name, YouTube API doesn't have a "front door" way of getting this stuff. So, we went in the "back door."

First thing we had to do was manually collect the user ID for each participant. The next step is where the first error occurred: we needed to get our program to recognize the user ID as a user ID, which was done by writing a rule. This was stuff like how long the IDs were and what symbols were included in the IDs. We failed to include a symbol that was present in five of the participant's user IDs, so the program didn't recognize them as IDs and didn't run them through the part of the program which found the stream ID and collected viewer numbers. This is why that data was missing for SMajor/Noxcrew, ItsFunneh, Squaishey, ASFJerome, and Mefs in the first 30 minutes.

Another big way in which the YouTube API differs from the Twitch API is that YouTube has a quota system. Every action you can take with the API has a certain number of points connected to it, and you're only given so many points to spend a day per application. We thought we were only making one call to get viewer data for every streamer, but instead we were making a separate call for each streamer. That destroyed our quota pretty quick, resulting in the 45 minute gap in data collection. This problem was solved by moving our code into another application which granted us more quota.

This is an important lesson in testing your programs thoroughly before use!

On the bright side, the YouTube API is much more active than the Twitch API, which would update streamer numbers seemingly at random and not all at once. The YouTube API updated numbers roughly every 15 seconds and updated for all streamers, not just a few. That's why our graphs are higher resolution this time!

Here is the raw numbers: Click me!

Let's talk about next time

SO. Obviously this time around was not super ideal, which is partially on us for not testing more. (At least this was not the only scuffed thing about MCCP21. We were just being on brand, if you think about it.) However! Good news! The quota won't be a problem next time as MCC15 won't be Youtube exclusive.   We have already fixed the YouTube program we used this time around and have begun to merge the two. We might even be able to collect YouTube subscribers and Twitch followers by next time but we're focusing on making sure we get all the data next time.

Thank you all so much for reading! Again, any and all critique and questions are welcome! :]