#seriously just use numbers

[cronengirly]

Okay so I'm FINALLY getting around to marathoning the Saw movies (something I'd planned to do before Saw X released last year but never got around to) and something has really irked me about the naming convention of these movies.

Saw is maybe one of the best names they could've landed on, having that level of brand recognition for such a simple title is incredible.

For the first SIX FILMS they managed to maintain that level of straightforwardness. Saw II, Saw III, etc. Just plain old Roman numerals. Kept with the simplicity of the original title, left no room for confusion.

Then they made Saw 3D, also known as Saw: The Final Chapter. Pro-tip: if you want to guarantee your film will have a sequel greenlit, put "the final chapter" in the title. I can't think of a single franchise that actually ended on their "final chapter." Looking at you, F13. You had a final chapter AND a final Friday.

Then they made Jigsaw. Sure, fair enough. It's not as snappy as the old titles but it gets the point across.

Then, Spiral: From the Book of Saw. That's a fucking spinoff title if I've ever heard one. And considering we already have a Final Chapter, you'd think it's safe to assume that Jigsaw and Spiral *are* both spinoffs, outside the main numbered sequels.

Except the next film is Saw X. Meaning Saw 3D, Jigsaw and Spiral are actually Saw VII, VIII and IX respectively.

I really find these systems annoying. As a rule, if you need to Google the correct order to watch a series in, something has gone horribly wrong

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*tries to organize my thoughts*

*remembers i'm not in school and therefore beholden to neither heaven nor hell nor any man's grading system*

*joyously shredding & tossing all my carefully arranged 3x5 mental notecards into the air like so much beige confetti. raising my arms in victory, cheering raucously until i accidentally inhale bits of homemade confetti*

(*coughing up itty bits of paper like a cat evicting a hairball with a firm understanding of tenants' rights*) wait wat happens next

[lover-of-mine]

No, but you can try to twist things all you want trying to justify Eddie being little miss haunting the narrative, but the thing is, neither one of the three there has agency. The writers are making a deliberate choice to insert Eddie in the middle of that relationship for absolutely no reason and you seriously think it means nothing? Or it means that the showrunners need writing tips? Oh come on.

[laurrelise]

i gotta be so honest if you liked five x lila before season 4 fine i guess, i really can’t see it at all but everyone is entitled to their own opinions so we can agree to disagree.

however, i can’t imagine supporting it AFTER season 4 came out when its completely clear that it was never an “appealing to the fans” sort of thing.

i hate to break it to you, but steve blackman and the rest of the terrible writers for season 4 weren’t listening to you guys and “doing what the fans want”. they were being fucking weird.

no matter how you put it, aidan gallagher being freshly 18 when they came up with the idea for five and lila to get together (and possibly even much, much earlier than that???) is seriously fucking creepy. steve can say “we decided five needed a love story this season” all he wants but it’s clear, and it has been PROVEN, that this has been planned for a while. and it’s seriously gross.

everyone is entitled to their own opinion. i firmly believe that, and i will genuinely go on to preach it.

but i hope its obvious and understood that writing this terrible plotline into the show was clearly for shock value and for the satisfaction of the gross adult men who all put their stamp of approval on it.

[not-poignant]

My only criticism about UTB are that the chapters are too short. 😭

So, something wild is that I used to write much longer chapters and The Ice Plague taught me that this was just...really bad for folks commenting or interacting on chapters.

Like I have written chapters in the past that were over 12,000 words. (Heck, the chapter at the end of The Ice Plague is a Beast).

They're a pain to edit properly, and sometimes in retrospect I'm frustrated with how much I tried to put in the longer chapters. I know for a fact I did this with both Game Theory and The Court of Five Thrones because I was really embarrassed at how long the stories were getting, and I somehow thought if I compressed everything into super long chapters no one would notice (lies). It's actually my plan to break those chapters up.

I thought about giving this question a really quick answer like 'well you can always write longer ones for yourself if you want' - but the reality is that chapters that are 2.7-4.5k long for me personally, seem to get the most folks looking at the work and reading the work. I don't know why, I wish I could explain it, but I can't. I'm going to assume this isn't a joke anon though, because it reads like an actual criticism and it's one I've had before.

Anyway, now even if it changed, where shorter chapters didn't engage readers at all, I've realised that a chapter with an average wordcount of 3-4k is actually a pretty good spot for editing and also a pretty good spot for betas as well (presenting betas with around 50k+ sometimes of writing to read per month for years on end is insane actually).

Do you want to hear something wild, anon? I write unusually long chapters by serial standards. And I break with all the rules and conventions of written serials because of that.

The current professional advice in writing serials (for profit) is to write chapters that are between 500-1500 words long. Maybe 2000 words at a maximum. To which I was like 'are you fucking kidding me?' Lol - But research has broadly indicated this is the best ratio for rapid release in serials + retaining engagement. I personally couldn't do it (as a reader or a writer!)

There is actually a weird kind of psychology behind the chapter length though, both like, for me and what is realistic for my workload as a writer, but also for readers too.

It's actually just more likely that folks who get 10k chapters aren't going to comment, or send anon messages, etc. because they get mentally fatigued faster and more profoundly on longer chapters. It might feel more satisfying, but ironically, it ends up looking like the story is doing really badly. So for me it was about finding a sweet spot, both in terms of what felt natural and right for the story, what actually helped find a sweet spot for folks commenting, and what felt good for editing and keeping the prose tight as well.

[slyandthefamilybook]

I think we need to have a serious re-evaluation of what "leftist" means bc there ain't no fuckin way authcoms are on the same left as me lmao

[lizasweetling]

Love this open as an infiltration tactic, but also wow. This guy?? is Just?? Planning to stay???

like there's clearly at least one person still here, so, what's with that???

[berryevilpoptart]

Well I sure hope all those who did not vote for Harris (either abstained completely or voted third party :::coughs:::jillsteinisagrifter:::cough::: feel really fucking stupid right now as they are the reason we are in this mess.

Not the maggats, they were always going to be stupid and hateful — and we had the numbers to beat them, we did it in 2020 — no it’s these idiots who do not understand how government works and thought using their votes for protest was a good idea. It wasn’t you dumb twats! Now your single issue is going to be even worse and it’s 100% your fault. Full stop. We warned you.

[drummer-from-down-under]

Happy anniversary to my favourite episode of my favourite show!!!

[yabagofmilfs]

i hardly ever remember the stats page exists on ao3, but when i do i like to giggle about how many more private bookmarks there are on my fics.

don’t hide your light under a bushel, baby!

[keelanrosa]

started reading the cass review because i'm apparently just Like That and i want everybody crowing about how this proves sooooo much about how terfs are right and trans people are wrong to like. take a scientific literacy class or something. or even just read the occasional study besides the one you're currently trying to prove a point with. not even necessarily pro-trans studies just learn how to know what studies actually found as opposed to what people trying to spoonfeed you an agenda claim they found.

to use just one infuriating example:

Several studies from that period (Green et al., 1987; Zucker, 1985) suggested that in a minority (approximately 15%) of pre-pubertal children presenting with gender incongruence, this persisted into adulthood. The majority of these children became same-sex attracted, cisgender adults. These early studies were criticised on the basis that not all the children had a formal diagnosis of gender incongruence or gender dysphoria, but a review of the literature (Ristori & Steensma, 2016) noted that later studies (Drummond et al., 2008; Steensma & Cohen-Kettenis, 2015; Wallien et al., 2008) also found persistence rates of 10-33% in cohorts who had met formal diagnostic criteria at initial assessment, and had longer follow-up periods.

if you recognize the names Zucker and Steensma you are probably already going feral but tldr:

There are… many problems with Zucker's studies, "not all children had a formal diagnosis" is so far down the list this is literally the first i've heard of it. The closest i usually hear is the old DSM criteria for gender identity disorder was totally different from the current DSM criteria for gender dysphoria and/or how most people currently define "transgender"; notably it did not require the patient to identify as a different gender and overall better fits what we currently call "gender-non-comforming". Whether the kids had a formal diagnosis of "maybe trans, maybe just has different hobbies than expected, but either way their parents want them back in their neat little societal boxes" is absolutely not the main issue. This would be a problem even if Zucker was pro-trans (spoiler: He Is Not, and people who are immediately suspicious of pro-trans studies because "they're probably funded by big pharma or someone else who profits from transitioning" should apply at least a little of that suspicion to the guy who made a living running a conversion clinic); sometimes "formal" criteria change as we learn more about what's common, what's uncommon, what's uncommon but irrelevant, etc, and when the criteria changes drastically enough it doesn't make sense to pretend the old studies perfectly apply to the new criteria. If you found a study defining "sex" specifically and exclusively as penetration with a dick which says gay men have as much sex as straight men but lesbians don't, it's not necessarily wrong as far as it goes but if THAT'S your prime citation for "gay men have more sex than lesbians", especially if you keep trying to apply it in contexts which obviously use a broader definition, there are gonna be a lot of people disagreeing with you and it won't be because they're stubbornly unscientific.

Also Zucker is pro conversion therapy. Yes, pro converting trans people to cis people, but also pro converting gay people to straight people. That doesn't necessarily affect his results, i just find it funny how many people enthusiastically support his findings as evidence transitioning is… basically anti-gay conversion therapy? (even though plenty of trans people transition to gay? including T4T people so even the "that's actually just how straight people try to get with gay people" rationale for gay trans people is incredibly weak? and also HRT has a relatively low but non-zero chance of changing sexual orientation so it wouldn't even be reliable as a means of "becoming straight"? but a guy who couldn't reliably tell the difference between a tomboy and a trans boy figured out the former is more common than the latter + in one whole country where being trans is legal but being gay is not, sometimes cis gay people transition, so OBVIOUSLY that means sexism and homophobia are the driving factors even in countries with significant transphobia. or something.) anyway i hope zucker knows and hates how many gay people and allies are using his own study to trash-talk any attempts to be Less Gay. ideally nobody would take his nonsense seriously at all but it doesn't seem we'll be spared from that any time soon so i will take my schadenfreude where i can.

Steensma's studies have the exact same problem re: irrelevant criteria so "well someone ELSE had the same results!" is not exactly convincing. This is not "oh trans people are refusing to pay attention to these studies because they disagree with them regardless of scientific rigor", it's "one biased guy using outdated criteria found exactly the numbers everyone would expect based on that criteria, i can't imagine why trans people are treating those numbers as relevant to the past criteria but not present definitions, let's find a SECOND guy using outdated criteria. Why do people keep saying the outdated criteria is not relevant to the current state of trans healthcare. Don't we all know it's quantity over quality with scientific studies. (Please don't ask what the quantity of studies disagreeing with me is.)"

Steensma also counted patients as 'not persisting as transgender' if they ghosted him on follow-up which counted for a third of his study's "detransitioners" and a fifth of the total subjects and. look. i'm not saying none of them detransitioned, or assuming they all didn't would be notably more accurate, but i think we can safely treat twenty percent of subjects as a bit high for making a default assumption, especially when some of them might have simply not been interested in a study on whether or not they still know who they are. Fuck knows i've seen pro-trans studies which didn't make assumptions about the people who didn't respond still get prodded by anti-trans people insisting "the number of people claiming they don't regret transitioning can't possibly be so high, some of the people who responded must have been lying. (Scientific rigor means thinking studies which disagree with me are wrong even if the only explanation is the subjects lying and studies which agree with me are right even if we need to make assumptions about a lot of subjects to get there.)"

and this is not new information. not the issues with zucker, not the issues with steensma, not any of the issues because this is not a new study, it's a review of older studies, which in itself doesn't mean "bad" or "useless" -- sometimes that allows connecting some previously-unconnected dots -- but the idea this is going to absolutely blow apart the Woke Media, vindicate Rowling and Lineham, and "save" ""gay"" children from """being forcibly transed""" is bullshit. At most it'll get dragged around and eagerly cited by all the people looking for anything vaguely scientific-sounding to justify their beliefs, and maybe even people who only read headlines and sound bites will buy it, but the people who really believe it will be people who already agreed with all its "findings" and have already been dragging around the existing studies and are just excited to have a shiny new citation for it.

the response from people who've been really reading research on transgender people all along is going to be more along the lines of "……yeah. yeah, i already knew about that. do you need a three-page essay on why i don't think it means what you think it means? because i don't have time for that homework right now but maybe i can pencil it in for next semester if you haven't learned how to check your own sources by then."

[selfship-confession-box]

to be quite honest. shipping with CANON (not headcanoned) exclusively gay/lesbian characters as someone of the gender they are explicitly not attracted to is a form of erasure and lowkey homophobic. 'just make them bi' is a bad take. bi people are amazing and valid but not everyone is bisexual??? 'theyre not real' is a bad take bc representation matters and i feel like that doesnt really need to be said. obviously the character isnt real and isnt offended but gay/lesbian selfshippers can see how much you dont gaf abt their identities. gay people exist in real life too!!! homophobia is still so acceptable in fandom spaces and its kinda wild.

Actually this one gets to skip the queue because we just had another anon push their luck about this. I WAS originally going to leave this in queue but now feels like a better time to nip this in the bud.

This is the LAST thing I'm saying about this topic because frankly it's the majority of what we've been getting recently and it's exhausting. All future asks about this topic WILL be deleted. AS STATED ABOVE. DO WHAT YOU WANT FOREVER. YOUR EXPERIENCE IS YOURS AND YOURS ALONE.

TAKING POTSHOTS AT EACH OTHER IS NOT A CONFESSION.

THAT'S CALLED BEING AN ASSHOLE.

k thanks bye

[unproduciblesmackdown]

bloodsong of oh shit....oh fuck

[duffmckagans]

trying to decide if i should post like chapters 1-3 together or really do it one by one

[seaofreverie]

Starting a challenge tomorrow where I listen to one TMBG album a day chronologically until my epic journey starts

[izzy-b-hands]

Said I was gonna spend today relaxing before work tonight