#mod sarah

[dragonagecompanionsreact]

As payment for my April Fool's Day pranks.

Bonus:

[sims4t2bb]

Good morning, I noticed that all the links to the creator "enjatoki" in the package growing togheter are down. I don't know if the creator removed the links or if it's a problem with the site. Could you check??? Thanks

Hello and good morning! Yes, enjatoki's Tumblr appears to have been deleted (we answered a previous ask about this back in October).

Mortire at GOS collected a number of files over at the @sims2packrat; find that post here. It includes the Well Traveled Shelves from Growing Together but not any of the other objects.

If anyone happens to have the rest of the Growing Together pieces by @enjatoki, please share them! ♥

[classicslesbianopinions]

one of the funniest things about the ninjago antigone poll is the amount of people saying that everyone knows mr lego but no one knows antigone. like this might be a generation gap or something because im 26 but i had no idea lego had made a tv show to advertise their ninjago kits until this poll and i have been autistic about greek myth since i was a child 💀

[the-blorbo-project]

Blorbos at Conference!

Long time, no update, but this project is moving forward! This weekend, we're at a conference hosted by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, or SCMS, presenting as part of a panel devoted to fan studies.

Why do panels matter?

First and foremost, it's a way to get research before a bunch of other researchers while it's still in progress. This helps catch poorly formed ideas, surface new good ideas, and share what's coming up with the fan studies research communities. It's also good for our humble PhD student CVs!

The Findings

Of course, the most interesting part is what, actually, we're presenting, AKA the findings! They're a work in progress, and the hardest part is the coding (talked about here). Therefore, I'm focusing on what I could do deep analysis on relatively quickly. (note: these images don't have image IDs because I summarize them below, but they're graphic representations of what I talk about in the text).

The majority of survey respondents were young: about 39% were 18-22 and 32% were 23-27. A further 17% were 28-32, about 8% were 33-37, and then it got progressively smaller from there. Shoutout to all 3 respondents who were 63 and over! So glad you're here.

In terms of social media usage, most people used tumblr - unsurprising, since that's where we got our most traction for the survey. Discord was the second most likely. Part of a later analysis will be seeing if these terms are more likely to be used by different age groups or on different platforms, which is cool.

Almost everyone surveyed had heard of these terms. Blorbo was the most-used and meow meow was least used, but very, very few respondents had not heard of these terms at all. This may be in part due to how we used them in our survey recruitment, since we did want to find people who knew what these terms were so that they could define them for us.

These numbers slope slightly down because something broke when we imported them into NVivo (a coding software) and frankly I don't understand it well even when it actually works, let alone when it breaks.

Here's a little visual of the terms you suggested for characters. Unfortunately, NVivo crashes every time I try to exclude words from this word bubble (like "term"), so it's not as clear as I'd like it to be, but there are some interesting ones. Particularly interesting are the cluster of gendered terms; husbando and waifu, malewife, sexyman, boy, girl, etc. I want to do some analysis of this because it parallels some preliminary coding results. Y'all also really find your blorbos scrunkly/skrunkly/scrungly, huh?

I also want to figure out how to tell the visualizer that "glup" and "shitto" go together, because "shitto" all by its lonesome over there is cracking me up.

Qualitative Findings

Like I said, the coding is...so far from done. That's mostly due to some Ao3-author levels of life disruption from both of us. BUT! I can tentatively say a couple of things:

There are notably clear definitions about these terms. We weren't sure if there even really was a definition of "blorbo", but it clearly refers to a very specific kind of one-true-character. By contrast, comfort characters are associated with experiencing positive emotions, and meow meows are more likely to be evil or morally grey (but you love them though).

Unsurprisingly, your characters make you happy. We're distinguishing between general positive emotions, attachment, relatability, and one-true-character belovedness. Also sexiness, but that (surprisingly) hasn't come up that much.

There are a couple of ways in which darker themes come up. Villains remain beloved, but a recurring theme is also using tragedy or trauma in fiction as catharsis.

Finally, there's a lot of playful and tactile language. "Rotating him in my mind" really is that common.

Additionally, I'm really interested in the role of gender. Many of you referred to your blorbos/meow meows as your guys, with some of you clarifying that it was "my little guy (gender neutral)". Others noted that most characters you'd seen people describe as blorbos or meow meows were men/masc. This did not come up for comfort characters. Analysis of the characters you consider exemplars of each definition will help flesh out this analysis.

Still to Come

SO much. Who are these characters? Is a specific character exclusively a meow meow, or are they also a common comfort character? What types of positive emotion are associated with each type? Are these character types or do they speak to a fan's individual (or a fandom's communal) relationship with a character?

Additionally - we didn't ask about neurodivergence, but many of y'all referenced it. I'm looking forward to exploring that as well.

That's all for now! I present this live in about two hours. If you're somehow following this account AND at SCMS, please come by!

[linked-universe-discord]

Hi, I heard there were extra short comics or pictures from jojo on the discord server. I joined, but I'm not sure how to find them. Can you help? Thanks.

Hello and welcome to the server! You heard correctly, we do have exclusive art from Jojo. We keep it in the top category of the server in a channel titled ⁠#jojos-server-gifts-2023. If you're still struggling to find it, navigate to our #help channel or ping any mod role and we'll help you find it!

[millennial-star-gazer]

So would A bad time or close I was born in December 1991 and with us we live in 2006 lol ? I was 14 years old and a highschool freshman . and if we’re talking the fall of that same year , I was in 10th grade and turning 15 . All this translates into the fact that I’m 31 and will be 32 at the end of this year .

Hopefully I didn’t make anyone feel too old lol 😅. How about you @genavere , @phoneboxfairy @acidrain1698 and @petri808 ? How old were you in 2006 😁?

You were alive in 2006? How old are you??

If you were born post 2006 you shouldn’t be following me I’m dead serious

[elliespuns]

He was meant to be a girl dad

[dragonagecompanionsreact]

I have no real updates other than I am currently playing Veilguard. My Rook is Aelia Mercar, elven mage Shadow Dragon, romancing Harding, and she stops to pet every single cat and dog she sees.

"Rook, do you have to do this for every single animal you see?"

"Yes."

[classicslesbianopinions]

so basically if anyone has the desire and funds to pull some ofmd fans during the ship poll style election fraud then now is the time to do it

PROPAGANDA UNDER THE CUT: [SPOILERS AND POSSIBLE TRIGGERS AHEAD]

ANTIGONE:

LLOYD GARMADON:

[sims4t2bb]

Hi, I just noticed ePSYlord on MTS just converted a bunch of ceiling fans!

Hello! Thanks for letting us know, the ceiling fans have been added to the database! 🤗

[classicslesbianopinions]

lmaooo people are saying that antigone voters are using bots or paid people to vote, they truly do not know the impact of a thoodleoo reblog

[the-blorbo-project]

So what's the analysis?

Part two of "what the heck is this research anyway" - coding! Part one is here. It's Mod Sarah writing again. Feel free to reply/DM with any questions and we'll do our best to answer!

Cleaning the Data

So first, we have to exclude what we can't use. Maria and I decided since we had so many responses, we'd only analyze completed ones. If someone indicated that they were under 18 or didn't consent, those responses also get excluded. That leaves us with just under 5,000 responses. From there, we do a process called coding.

Coding and Inter-coder Reliability

Coding is basically a fancy way of saying "hey, what is this person saying?". The tricky thing is that, unsurprisingly, two people can read the same sentence and think it means really different things (how dare you say we piss on the poor, etc., but also context for a phrase, interpretations, stuff like that). That means we have to establish inter-coder reliability. Do Maria and I, generally, think things mean the same thing?

To do this, we went through the responses and selected a subset - we did 75 - and read through them separately. When we read, we created codes, or short words, phrases, or numbers that represent the answer. For example, if someone said in the demographics portion "caucasian" and another said "white" and a third said "european white baybeee" (not real responses) - we determine if those are saying the same thing. Do we want to code European as a different racial identity than white? What about people who said they were mixed-race?

A note: this is easiest to demonstrate with something like racial identity, where there's lots of prior knowledge to draw on about how these categories function - although, of course, those categories are contested. When we get to the actual blorbo responses, things get way more fun. Do we have a code for "rotating him in my mind"? (Yes.)

Anyway, after we do that independently, we have to meet and discuss our codes to make sure we're on the same page. That's inter-coder reliability. We did that last week.

Coding 2: Building a Code Book

Once we think we're on the same page, we develop a series of preliminary codes based on what we've looked at. Say we've decided to code anything that involves a tactile response to a blorbo as "rotating him in my mind" (we actually went with "manipulability"). We try and get an exhaustive list of codes based on our research intent, which was to build a "robust conceptualization" of blorbo/comfort character/meow meows/etc.

We hashed all this out last week, so we do have a list of codes, and it's really funny. We have a code for "wet". We had to distinguish between "guy" and "guy (gender-neutral)". I'm having a great time.

Coding 3: Now we Actually Code

At this stage, Maria and I have about 2500 responses each to code. We're shopping around for a software that will let us do it more easily - I at least did the preliminary coding in Excel and it was terrible. Large-scale data management will likely be post 3! P.S. Yes, one of us is reading every response. Yes, it's going to take forever. Look for more substantive updates end of December.

[millennial-star-gazer]

Hey guys, mod /@millennial-star-gazer /Sarah from @thenaluarchive here. Just wanted to let you know that you guys can also tag my individual blog in your entries but please make sure to tag @thenaluarchive or @allaboutnalu in those posts too . Don't forget to include to tag your works with thing like #naluweek2023 in the first five tags as stated . Oh and please be sure to follow the rules and guidelines for nalu week(Also found in the original post) . You can also reach out to me or the other mods on either blog here if you have any questions or concerns . Thank you and happy creating ! Can't wait to see what you come up with 😊!

July is on its way and you know what that means! Nalu Week is here! This year's event will take place from July 27th to August 2nd, with Nalu Day on the 26th acting as our free day

This year we are running Nalu Week in collaboration with @thenaluarchive and @weeknalu on twitter

Rules

Art, writing, gifsets, manga colouring, or any other fan work are accepted and encouraged

All works must be focused on nalu. Background ships are fine

Stolen, traced, or ai generated works will not be accepted

Use of official art is okay

You are encouraged to make use of the prompts provided, but by no means are you constrained to them. Feel free to interpret them however you want or disregard them altogether.

Tag your works with #naluweek2023 within the first five tags, or tag @allaboutnalu or @thenaluarchive so we can see and share your works

There is no cutoff or deadline; we will continue to share any nalu week works regardless of when they're posted.

Have any other questions? Feel free to send an ask, and we will do our best to help out!

Prompts Day 1. Anniversary Day 2. Family Day 3. Fears Day 4. Shenanigans Day 5. Gifts Day 6. Nostalgia Day 7. (New) Adventures

In need of inspiration, want to chat about Nalu Week plans or want to create alongside others? Join the allaboutnalu discord server! We will be hosting sprints for writers as well as featuring dedicated channels to both discussing and sharing Nalu Week works

From our team here, at the archive and over on twitter, we wish you the best of luck in creating your fanworks and we absolutely cannot wait to see what you come up with! See you in July!

Thank you to @nalunalu for providing this year's banner art.

[linked-universe-discord]

Does Raviolink count as Linkcest?

Hi, thanks for your question! Ravio / Link is allowed and does not count as Linkcest! Our Linkcest policy is specifically for relationships between Jojo's 9 versions of Links, as per her request. Other Link relationships like Ravio/Link and Vio/Shadow are allowed on the server as those fall under broader LoZ.

Our server policy is clear on kindness and emphasizes respecting differences so if you receive any negativity for ship preferences (or anything else) please do let us know so we can handle it!

[mod-jazzy]

AQUAPETS! Great personality, Cool originality! Give 'Em a snack! And they'll react! AQUAPETS! They respond to your voice! Make the right choice The ultimate pet anyday! AQUAPETS!

Aquapets! Each sold separately. You can collect them all!

Characters belong to @ask-mirage-mews | @askchimeknight | @ask-sarah-and-co @pokeaskzine | @thedailycampix

[genderfluid-culture-iss]

my gender is the cloud of glitter that follows Jareth around