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felassan · 4 years ago

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player.

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded.

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #morrigan #solas #video games #queen of my heart #mass effect #lgbtq #jade empire #fenris #the Fenaissance #alistair theirin #lul #fav warden

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annathetrickster · 7 years ago

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part 4 of my thoughts on FE4, covering chapter 3.

spoilers under the cut obviously.

so first a bit of backstory that will help explain whats going on up to this point;

in chapter 2 we helped lachesis defend nordion, and rescued eldigan who was being held captive after his unsuccessful attempt at negotiating peace. unfortunately, in the process we also conquered most of augustria (think of it as the state, and nordion one of its many cities/castles). eldigan was obviously unhappy about this and told sigurd he’d have one year to sort out the mess and get them back on their feet and under their own rule.

TLDR: we had no choice but to take over a bunch of land, and now we’re trying to get them back to being self governed.

a lot of this game is politics so i can understand if its hard to follow for most of you.

so even though eldigan said we’d have one year to sort things out, and he opted to let chagall live (ugly guy who locked him up), chagall decided that he’d rather attack us even though we’re apparently almost done restoring the peace.

its about time deirdre opened up more. she’s usually so formal with him even though they’ve been married for a while now. i wonder if something happened between them.

OHHHHHHH SHIT

they fucked.

no idea why, but i completey forgot about seliph and julia while playing this so this still surprised me quite a bit. still, its very interesting to see deirdre finally go from calling him ‘milord’ to ‘my love’ now that they’ve done the deed.

its time.

its worth noting that changing class doesn’t reset your lvl, so you stay whatever lvl you are and just gain additional stats. pretty interesting way of handling class change.

right so onto the map.

as far as difficulty goes, this one seems like the easiest one so far. my main concern is the desert area towards the north of the map since i don’t see any way to access that part of the map, but we’ll cross that currently non-existent bridge when we get there.

and just like that a wild ship appears.

im a total sucker for the whole “girl who’s normally tired of a guys shit ends up actually liking him” deal. its part of why i ship inigo and severa so much.

take notes guys: flowers are old news. want to impress a girl? get her a 12 might weapon capable of attacking up to 4 times in one round of combat.

and now she feels bad for being so rude to him. lex seems like a genuinely nice guy tbh.

so it took me a few tries but i think we’re just about ready to seize the castle. this chapter so far has definitely been the easiest yet. you really just had to defend your base for a good few turns but once thats taken care of taking the castle is fairly simple.

again, chagall is the ugly guy who imprisoned eldigan and he’s only still alive because eldigan thought it’d be totally cool to let him live and we’d be able to work out a peaceful solution, even though he literally already tried that and it got him locked up.

he goes on to tell sigurd about how his father, lord byron, is a prime suspect in the murder of prince kurth (the prince of grannvale, which is basically the state sigurd’s castle/city, chalphy resides in), and how theres rumors that both he and his father worked together to murder the prince. this is obviously just more of sigurd being setup to fail by the higher ups since his father and prince kurth were very close.

also tailtu was there and she apparently wants in the holy man’s pants.

1 down, possibly 2 more to go.

shanan: deirdre no

deirdre: deirdre yes

so deirdre gets abducted by this cloaked figure who’s been manipulating everything behind the scenes. earlier in the game, i believe around chapter 1, he mentions something along the lines of wanting to ‘resurrect the dark lord’, and that in order to do that you need deirdre. the exact details of what he said are hard to remember atm but there’s definitely some heavy NTR implications with what he said earlier in the game, as well as him mentioning ‘cleansing’ the slate of her life for her ‘true husband’.

im sure more will be revealed as i progress through the story. as for seliph, he’s still with shanan.

eldigans patience with this guy is incredible. remember he had the chance to kill him last chapter but eldigan opted to let him go, even though he locked him up.

hes about to ride against his best friend all for the sake of honor, loyalty to his country, and his own pride. he reminds me a lot of camus actually in that both are loyal to an extreme fault. if battling against his best friend is whats best for the future of augustria then he’s willing to lay his life on the line for that cause.

great idea, because that totally went well the last 10 times.

top 10 photos taken seconds before disaster

and there it is.

the source of all the headless horseman eldigan memes you’ve probably seen

eldigan fucking dies.

not only does he die, but the way he’s killed is extremely dark compared to other games in the series. its not enough chagall wants him dead, he wants him decapitated, and humiliated. even though all eldigan did was what he felt was best for the future of his country. pretty heavy stuff.

so how is eldigan as a character? basically camus is his closest comparison. both of them have extreme loyalty towards their country, and while eldigan might not have the added complexity of a love interest, i think the fact that he pays the ultimate price for his unyielding loyalty makes him every bit as good of a character as camus is.

rip in pepperoni eldigan. press F to pay respects.

another handsome sailor moon villan appears

also wyvern emblem is a thing

apparently they’re dracoknights, interesting to learn that this is the first you see of them, and not FE8 with the ability to class branch pegasus knights or wyvern riders into them.

of course dracoknight emblem is not match for finn emblem.

also, im not sure how advised this is, but out of all the characters ive gotten so far this is my main force.

sigurd

finn

quan

ethlyn

lex

ayra

sylvia

lachesis

i tend to favor smaller armies in the main series games and prefer to have a handful of OP units vs a bunch of mediocre ones so we’ll see if i can continue that strategy going forward.

meanwhile all the other characters just kind of hang around the castle. mostly because im way too lazy to drag them along on these ungodly maps.

its time

E҉̳͎̟̖̼̙̞̀n҉̫̩̪͎̮͞t͏̖̯̫̻̫̖̳̱̦e̩̫̟̰̤̙ͅr͎͇̠̼̻̥͔͘͟ ̵͓͟͝t̶̨̢͇̟h̡͉̲̗̱̫̜͔e̜͕ͅ ̼͈̠̖͈̻̩V̥̙̩͔͜ͅÓ̵̠̪͖̗̱͖͍̟Ì̮̬̞̰D̪̯̮̖

gotta say, so far this is my favorite sprite by far. his class is great knight unlike finn and quan who are duke knights. the sprites in FE1-8 just have a certain charm that the newer games can’t match. even with fully rendered 3d models.

ok, several things to point out here;

how does he know eldigan died? we were literally halfway across the globe when he was killed, and we’re currently outside the castle, whereas eldigans body is presumably inside. unless of course he literally has his head on display or something extremely gruesome to that effect.

“youve murdered countless innocents, and eldigan” >implying eldigan isnt innocent?

this guy literally killed your best friend, possibly has his head on display, and the worst you can come up with is something you’d find on a negative yelp review?

i’d really like to see both him and marth just drop an F bomb once in a while.

#let sigurd say fuck

and finally this annoying fuck is dead.

oh boy, not only does he have to face his best friends lifeless body but now he’s about to learn his wife was abducted. i would really hate to be sigurd right about now.

not that shanan is in any easier of a position. imagine telling someone like sigurd you failed to do the one thing he told you to do. as kind and compassionate of a leader he is, he would still be an extremely imposing figure for shanan.

you had one job.

given the heavy NTR implcations, probably getting banged out by some other guy right about now to “resurrect the dark lord”.

after some pretty heavy storyline developments, the second castle is taken, one more to go.

so after all thats happened with eldigan, deirdre, and sigurd we’re kind of forced to care about this nameless character who is now the commander of a group of pirates after their boss died/was killed. she’s been telling them not to pillage and loot but they refuse to acknowledge her authority because she was just some girl their captain found rather than his actual daughter, and they’d rather do whatever they want (as pirates tend to do) than listen to her.

personally i find it hard to suddenly care about the well being of this character after eldigan literally gave his life for his country, and no one knows what happend to deirdre, but apparently the castle must be taken so here we go.

you’ve heard of horse emblem, now get ready for.. pirate emblem

“i know we’re pirates and we’re capable of traveling across water and all, but lets all invade this country through this one fucking bridge where we can only cross one at a time. single file everyone, mind your manners.”

then we have these guys to deal with who somehow ended up on the other side of the map before the bridge was placed.

this guy being a holy man is the only way he has the patience to deal with her tbh.

seriously why wait till now to give him such a powerful weapon, what is with this game and holding out weapons until you’re 80% done with the chapter.

so to put in perspective what you have to go through if you want to recruit tailtu, as i mentioned she starts at the upper left corner of the map and the hoard of pirates from earlier will chase bridget forcing her to retreat west. keep in mind: the only way to progress through the chaper is to seize the castle where we defeated chagall, meaning sigurd needs to be all the way down there. unless you’ve played this game before you have no real way of knowing whats going to happen next and therefore no way to prepare for the shit ton of pirates who will make their way west in an attempt to kill bridget.

sure you could check the wiki and preemtptively place your units near the bridge, but even then unless you have cavalry movement you still have to chase after them pretty hard and keep bridget, tailtu, and claude out of danger. so again this would be another case where you’d have to reset the original game and try the whole chapter all over again if you want to recruit any of the 3.

thankfully we have the wiki and an ungodly amount of patience and i was able to save all 3 of them, even though ill probably never use either.

auntie ayra took care of all the pirates pretty easily so aside from running away from pirates with tailtu and bridget, this chapter was probably the easiest so far.

again, im not sure why we went out of our way to take this particular castle, and its not really helping sigurds case as a traitor. unless im missing something, the pirates had nothing to do with us as far as i know.

so after we take the pirate castle langobalt (pictured) shows up and apparently has orders to arrest sigurd who is being branded a traitor. another random guy (presumably his advisor) admits that it was langobalt himself who murdered prince kurth and is framing sigurd for the crime.

of course we knew sigurd was innocent already, but we didnt know who exactly killed the prince.

in a rare moment of weakness, sigurd actually loses his cool which is to be expected really. his best friend died, his wife kidnapped, and he’s about to be arrested. how would anyone not lose their cool at this point.

well that is going to do it for chapter 3. to recap, eldigan fucking dies, sigurd and deirdre have a child (seliph), deirdre gets kidnapped and possibly NTR’s sigurd unwillingy or otherwise, some pirate stuff happened, and sigurd is about to be arrested so he’ll be laying low in silesse for the time being.

overall the story sure took an interesting and very dark turn pretty quickly so im definitely looking forward to seeing what happens, especially with deirdre.

thanks for reading and thanks for your patience with me getting these posted.

#thoughts #fire emblem #54462 #death mention #NTR (implied)

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because-its-important · 7 years ago

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what’s the most annoying question to ask a nun* in 1967?

tl;dr - In 1967, a very long survey was administered to nearly 140,000 American women in Catholic ministry. I wrote this script, which makes the survey data work-ready and satisfies a very silly initial inquiry: Which survey question did the sisters find most annoying?

* The study participants are never referred to as nuns, so I kind of suspect that not all sisters are nuns, but I couldn't find a definitive answer about this during a brief search. 'Nun' seemed like an efficient shorthand for purposes of an already long title, but if this is wrong please holler at me!

During my first week at Recurse I made a quick game using a new language and a new toolset. Making a game on my own had been a long-running item on my list of arbitrary-but-personally-meaningful goals, so being able to cross it off felt pretty good!

Another such goal I’ve had for a while goes something like this: “Develop the skills to be able to find a compelling data set, ask some questions, and share the results.” As such, I spent last week familiarizing myself with Python 🐍, selecting a fun dataset, prepping it for analysis, and indulging my curiosity.

the process

On recommendation from Robert Schuessler, another Recurser in my batch, I read through the first ten chapters in Python Crash Course and did the data analysis project. This section takes you through comparing time series data using weather reports for two different locations, then through plotting country populations on a world map.

During data analysis study group, Robert suggested that we find a few datasets and write scripts to get them ready to work with as a sample starter-pack for the group. Jeremy Singer-Vines’ collection of esoteric datasets, Data Is Plural, came to mind immediately. I was super excited to finally have an excuse to pour through it and eagerly set about picking a real mixed bag of 6 different data sets.

One of those datasets was The Sister Survey, a huge, one-of-its-kind collection of data on the opinions of American Catholic sisters about religious life. When I read the first question, I was hooked.

“It seems to me that all our concepts of God and His activity are to some degree historically and culturally conditioned, and therefore we must always be open to new ways of approaching Him.”

I decided I wanted to start with this survey and spend enough time with it to answer at least one easy question. A quick skim of the Questions and Responses file showed that of the multiple choice answer options, a recurring one was: “The statement is so annoying to me that I cannot answer.”

I thought this was a pretty funny option, especially given that participants were already tolerant enough to take such an enormous survey! How many questions can one answer before any question is too annoying to answer? 🤔 I decided it’d be fairly simple to find the most annoying question, so I started there.

I discovered pretty quickly that while the survey responses are in a large yet blessedly simple csv, the file with the question and answers key is just a big ole plain text. My solution was to regex through every line in the txt file and build out a survey_key dict that holds the question text and another dict of the set of possible answers for each question. This works pretty well, though I’ve spotted at least one instance where the txt file is inconsistently formatted and therefore breaks answer retrieval.

Next, I ran over each question in the survey, counted how many responses include the phrase “so annoying” and selected the question with the highest count of matching responses.

the most annoying question

Turns out it’s this one! The survey asks participants to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the following statement:

“Christian virginity goes all the way along a road on which marriage stops half way.”

3702 sisters (3%) responded that they found the statement too annoying to answer. The most popular answer was No at 56% of respondents.

I’m not really sure how to interpret this question! So far I have two running theories about the responses:

The survey participants were also confused and boy, being confused is annoying!

The sisters generally weren’t down for claiming superiority over other women on the basis of their marital-sexual status.

Both of these interpretations align suspiciously well with my own opinions on the matter, though, so, ymmv.

9x speed improvement in one lil refactor

The first time I ran a working version of the full script it took around 27 minutes.

I didn’t (still don’t) have the experience to know if this is fast or slow for the size of the dataset, but I did figure that it was worth making at least one attempt to speed up. Half an hour is a long time to wait for a punchline!

As you can see in this commit, I originally had a function called unify that rewrote the answers in the survey from the floats which they'd initially been stored as, to plain text returned from the survey_key. I figured that it made sense to build a dataframe with the complete info, then perform my queries against that dataframe alone.

However, the script was spending over 80% of its time in this function, which I knew from aggressively outputting the script’s progress and timing it. I also knew that I didn’t strictly need to be doing any answer rewriting at all. So, I spent a little while refactoring find_the_most_annoying_question to use a new function, get_answer_text, which returns the descriptive answer text when passed the answer key and its question. This shaved 9 lines (roughly 12%) off my entire script.

Upon running the script post-refactor, I knew right away that this approach was much, much faster - but I still wasn’t prepared when it finished after only 3 minutes! And since I knew between one and two of those minutes were spent downloading the initial csv alone, that meant I’d effectively neutralized the most egregious time hog in the script. 👍

I still don’t know exactly why this is so much more efficient. The best explanation I have right now is “welp, writing data must be much more expensive than comparing it!” Perhaps this Nand2Tetris course I’ll be starting this week will help me better articulate these sorts of things.

flourishes 💚💛💜

Working on a script that takes forever to run foments at least two desires:

to know what the script is doing Right Now

to spruce the place up a bit

I added an otherwise unnecessary index while running over all the questions in the survey so that I could use it to cycle through a small set of characters. Last week I wrote in my mini-RC blog, "Find out wtf modulo is good for." Well, well, well.

Here’s what my script looks like when it’s iterating over each question in the survey:

I justified my vanity with the (true!) fact that it is easier to work in a friendly-feeling environment.

Plus, this was good excuse to play with constructing emojis dynamically. I thought I’d find a rainbow of hearts with sequential unicode ids, but it turns out that ❤️ 💙 and 🖤 all have very different values. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the data set

One of the central joys of working with this dataset has been having cause to learn some history that I’d otherwise never be exposed to. Here’s a rundown of some interesting things I learned:

This dataset was only made accessible in October this year. The effort to digitize and publicly release The Sister Survey was spearheaded by Helen Hockx-Yu, Notre Dame’s Program Manager for Digital Product Access and Dissemination, and Charles Lamb, a senior archivist at Notre Dame. After attending one of her forums on digital preservation, Lamb approached Hockx-Yu with a dataset he thought “would generate enormous scholarly interest but was not publicly accessible.”

Previously, the data had been stored on “21 magnetic tapes dating from 1966 to 1990” (Ibid) and an enormous amount of work went into making it usable. This included both transferring the raw data from the tapes, but also deciphering it once it’d been translated into a digital form.

The timing of the original survey in 1967 was not arbitrary: it was a response to the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II). Vatican II was a Big Deal! Half a century later, it remains the most recent Catholic council of its magnitude. For example, before Vatican II, mass was delivered in Latin by a priest who faced away from his congregation and Catholics were forbidden from attending Protestant services or reading from a Protestant Bible. Vatican II decreed that mass should be more participatory and conducted in the vernacular, that women should be allowed into roles as “readers, lectors, and Eucharistic ministers,” and that the Jewish people should be considered as “brothers and sisters under the same God” (Ibid).

The survey’s author, Marie Augusta Neal, SND, dedicated her life of scholarship towards studying the “sources of values and attitudes towards change” (Ibid) among religious figures. A primary criticism of the survey was that Neal’s questions were leading, and in particular, leading respondents towards greater political activation. ✊

As someone with next to zero conception of religious history, working with this dataset was a way to expand my knowledge in a few directons all at once. Pretty pumped to keep developing my working-with-data skills.

#recurse center #data analysis #religion #data #python #pydata #programming #silliness

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summylise · 8 years ago

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Erasing the Stigma: Fanfiction as Legitimate Form of Literature

Remember this post from a few weeks ago that got a ton of notes (which I am STOKED about)? Well...I just submitted the final draft!! I figured you guys would want to see what your responses amounted to so here it is!! If you’d like to share it with others (especially those who look down at fanfiction) go ahead!! I’d love to spread the word more~~

(Oh! and here is where you can access the original formatted with the works cited essay)

Erasing the Stigma: Fanfiction as Legitimate Form of Literature

Two writers type on a desktop computer. One sits cross-legged in a dark room lit only by a single, smooth Mac surrounded by sheets of character references, thesauruses, dictionaries, and the occasional motivational quote. The other in a similar position but at their local Panera with nothing but their school laptop open to a few wikis, Thesaurus.com, and maybe some calming music. Both bite their lip as the words fail to transfer to screen. Both stress about the possible response to their pieces. A few hours later and they are ready to submit. The first contacts their agent who then contacts a few others. Days, weeks, months pass and the first writer still hasn’t heard back from their agent. The second author uploads their file as soon as they finish typing the last word, sometimes in an email to their beta (or their editor from the same fan-base), other times directly to the site. Days, weeks, months pass and the second author has already cranked out more chapters, received a handful of reviews, and has gained many followers. The difference? The second person uploaded theirs to Fanfiction.net and is looked down upon by most of society. There has often been a stigma associated with the term “fanfiction”, as if it was a disease or something others look down upon. Yet many see it as a creative outlet and something that allows them to fully express themselves in a way that formal writing or writing a physical book cannot. Some oppose the fact that fanfiction, stories written about video games, movies, television shows, etc., are forms of literature and say that reading and writing is not “real” reading or writing. They even may go as far to say that fanfics serve no outside purpose and has no content. While some stories may be lacking in the grammatical or logical correctness, fanfiction as a whole is in fact a valid form of literature, especially when compared to formal reading and writing.

In order to discuss fanfiction, it needs to be defined. Fanfics are stories that are written by fans of a certain form of entertainment (whether that be musicals, books, animes, television shows, movies, etc.)(Lammers and Marsh). Fanfic authors are not paid, do not expect anything in return (except for the occasional review or two), and write just because they like the show and have an appreciation for writing. The fanfic author, formerly known as epeolatryx on Tumblr, writes, “People don’t pay for fanfiction. Reviews are our currency. Thank yous pay for the effort we spend on the next one,” (Xambedo). Another difference comes in the form of creativity, or rather, starting with nothing versus starting with a pre-existing base. Instead of creating entirely new universes with brand new characters, fanfic authors use existing characters, settings, and plots from existing medias to generate their own stories. Some of these stories even become so popular that they end up published due to a uniqueness they had despite being based on something else. The After series by Anna Todd, a One Direction fanfic, began on Wattpad, a free, digital publishing service, and became a published novel that is going to be made into a movie (Contrera). Granted, Todd had to change the names of the band mates in order to avoid copyright infringement but this successful story still began as fanfiction. Other fanfictions include The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Ella Enchanted, and many more that do not seem obvious to the naked eye. The only difference between stories on sites like Fanfiction.net and the ones listed above are that the second are considered “actual books” or “real reading” whereas the first are not. It all comes down to what makes up real literature.

Literature is defined as “any piece of writing that can claim that it has—in some way—artistic beauty” according to Richard Jewell, author of Experiencing the Humanities. However, he later states that items such as bullet points and grocery lists would not count as they are not artistic and are only meant to serve as lists rather than actual pieces. In his textbook, he states all of the qualities that make literature and claims that if a piece were to include those attributes, that it would be considered literature. Those three attributes are creative description, characters, and plot (Jewell). All of those are included in fanfiction which are just stories created using non-original characters. Based on these requirements, fanfiction would factually be regarded as literature. Not only does fanfiction count technically as literature, but the process is the same.

Fanfiction should also be viewed through a newer learning term known as the multiliteracy framework. Multiliteracies are forms of reading or writing that incorporate more than just a pen and an idea; they explain how different cultural mediums, forms of communication, and compositional variety come together to create a piece (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 559). Three main branches of this framework can specifically be applied to fanfiction: multimodality, intertextuality, and hybridity.

Multimodality involves the “integration of various Designs such as visual, linguistic, and audio in one text…” (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 561). In regards to fanfiction, authors often employ these three attributes in order to entertain their readers and make their story more enjoyable. In my experience as a fanfic writer and reader, we authors show pictures or fanarts that we have created or have had created for us, find music or sound effects to serve as the background to our stories, and alter their fonts to evoke a stronger meaning (such as italicizing thoughts). By doing so, we are incorporating many different elements into one to create a diverse and interesting final product.

The second concept is that of intertextuality. Intertextuality are the “relationships and references between and among texts. Fanfiction is the crossing of original ideas with those of pre-existing characters and features which, in a sense, is exactly what intertextuality is. The connection between two sources doesn’t have to be strictly between two written pieces; Chandler-Olcott and Mahar explain that it can also occur between fanfiction and reality. The authors describe a fanfic the girls they studied wrote that involved deep, psychological questions such as a woman’s place in the world and heterosexual relationships despite the girls still being in middle school. The authors say, “Viewing rhetorical moves like these from the perspective of the Multiliteracies framework helped us to appreciate how complicated, and even sophisticated, the girls’ fanfics often were,” (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 563). The two fanfic authors were able to pull from different forms of “text” in order to create a unique and thought provoking piece by using the concept of intertextuality.

Finally, hybridity is the creation of new ideas by picking and choosing specific parts of different mediums and combining them in a unique and sometimes never before seen way. Fanfics tend to grab from many different areas such as different genres and different story structures. When I go to publish a work of mine on Fanfiction.net, it prompts me to select two different genres before I can continue. Much like published books, fanfictions mix many genres together such as adventure, romance, comedy, etc. in order to create a successful and unique piece. However, fanfictions differ from books immensely when it comes to story structure. In fanfics, there tends to be a lack of an exposition or any explanation, description, or background of the story; the author jumps right in (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 564). Fanfic authors choose to not add an exposition because they know that their audience knows almost everything about their characters: their physical attributes, their history, their personalities, their hopes and fears (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar 564). By neglecting to include an intro and picking multiple genres with which to base their stories on, fanfic authors rely very heavily on the concept of hybridity. Creating a hybrid of literature tends to have consequences, though not the ones that society may expect.

Fanfictions are a new branch of reading and writing that not only counts structurally, subjectively, and scholarly as a form of literature but also, much like its published counterparts, leaves an impression. In my survey of over two-hundred people, I found that around 53.59% of respondents had connected with new people they otherwise would not have met through fanfiction, whether it was reading or writing. This is due to the collaboration and connection with authors and readers via the follow, favorite, review or comment ability on Fanfiction.net that allows people to say how a certain chapter made them feel, make assumptions on future chapters, and offer suggestions for future chapters. Social media also plays a role in connecting readers and writers. On the popular social media site, Tumblr, many fanfic authors publish their stories in order to further spread their work across their fandoms (or domains in which fans from the same genre congregate). This allows the fan-base to actually contact the author on a more personal level rather than just via the comment section.

In addition, fanfiction affect the connection between each other but it also changes one’s reading and writing habits. Motoko Rich’s claim that student standardized reading scores have steadily declined due to online reading (Rich 1). However, measuring one’s aptitude for test taking does not translate to their inclination towards reading. A psychology professor at Michigan State, Linda A. Jackson, agrees when talking about the results of giving low income students internet access: “[The students] were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time… Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading,” (qtd. in Rich). I have also found that fanfiction actually increases a reader's want to read by means of the survey I conducted. 75.95% of respondents say that they are more motivated to read fanfiction than actual books, which in turn makes it easier for them to read more.“Books are a big time commitment for something I might not like. With fanfiction, I get something I’m already familiar with and will know I’ll enjoy, and they’re much shorter,” said a respondent to my survey. This is because in published works, the author has to include an exposition where they describe the characters and setting. In fanfiction, since it’s based on a world that already exists, the readers already know what the characters and setting look like so the author can jump right into writing their story. Reading online not only increases one’s wish to read, but also improves their writing as well. According to the study done by Jayne C. Lammers and Valerie L. Marsh titled “Going Public”, the young author they had longitudinally studied said that fanfiction had allowed her to stay anonymous and therefore felt more willing to share her works with others than if they had known who she was (Lammers and Marsh 281). By being anonymous, fanfic authors are able to express themselves and produce pieces that they otherwise may not have shared which allows them to further grow as a writer. A fanfiction writer who took my survey said the following:

Real writing, to me, is writing that makes us grow both as readers and writers. When I first started writing, it was through fanfiction. I was horrid at first. But fanfiction gave me a supportive, eager community to be able to continue producing work and subsequently grow into the writer that I am today. Therefore, I can confidently say that fanfiction is a valid alternative to reading and writing.

With the practice of writing fanfiction and support of the community, this author was able to make a name for themselves and eventually grow into the writer as seen above. A writer that may either turn into a published author or a fanfiction author.

#fanfiction #essay #drabbles #fanfics

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nchyinotes · 6 years ago

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Wikidata Hackathon @ Newspeak House

February 3 2018

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/wikidata-hackathon-in-london-all-levels-of-experience-welcome-tickets-42426460686#

Thoughts: So this was kind of my first foray into open knowledge/culture, and there were two parts to this day - the first was learning about wikidata and how to query it and contribute to it. This was pretty cool and actually what I had initially signed up for because I want to get out of my comfort zone/learn a new skill for research, but I did feel a little over my head haha. The second part I actually just found out about on the day, and stayed for. This was a talk about the future of Wikipedia, and it sounds pretty awesome tbh. I came in knowing nothing about Wikipedia, how it works as an organisation (it’s a non profit!), or how the site is maintained or who contributes, or what its missions are. Katherine is a great speaker. And while the talk was obviously very specific to Wikipedia, I think I was able to learn about all sorts of topics I’m interested in - how NGOs operate and are funded, how huge collaborative projects work, acknowledgment of and potential solutions to structural barriers that promote limited diversity in contributors of the collaborative projects, the bias that results from this, the impact of new technology, and their vision and belief in the public good of open knowledge. Was a very well spent day for me.

basic structure of items (neville)

problem: machines don’t understand whats on the pages of wikipedia = hard to do things on a mass scale

the identifier is always the same (Qxxxx)

every concept is an item, it has a page, and it has a Q number

data is stored in statement boxes

statement = to state a fact about someone, its on the item page, with a property (sex or gender = p21, a category which helps you describe the thing) and value (female, london = q84)

big connected web of linked data that machine and human can read = can get mass insight out of the data

anyone can create an item

you can find these through wikipedia pages

it’s multilingual - not stored as english, is stored as data, it’s up to your viewing thing

qualified data - ie. population

finding connections between a linked web of data

how wikidata ties all other wikimedia projects together within the ecosystem (magnus manske)

mediawiki: most widely used wiki software, over 2200 extensions, comprehensive API

used by all projects on wikimedia

wikisource has its own sources for dealing with pages, etc, which have OCR that need to be cleaned up

wikidata: database on top of a database? uses wiki base extension, broader than all wikipedia articles combined, contains wikipedia language links. can be queried and written by machines - what makes it fundamentally different from wikipedia.

wikidata query: run complex queries across all of wikidata. accessible through web interface. eg. largest cities with a female mayor.

wikidata ecosystem - site link statements?

can interrogate or programmatically query wikidata / media info on other / third party sites ??

wikimedia commons (wait what is this) = free digital media archive

scanned pages of book on commons —> transcribed pages on wikisource —> article as transcoded sections from transcribed pages —> wikidata item about the wikisource article. —> wikidata item about the subject described in wikisource article —> wikipedia article about the subject describe in wikisource article (in diff languages)

how the user journey can work

has been turned into a science hub: wikidata holds key data, but is not trying to replicate all the databases! can be used as an intermediary?

contentmine: project to link wikidata to scientific literature

query scientific lit about subject or subject group

using underlying wikidata (base) tech for upcoming projects

wiktionary - right now is broken in to several different languages ?

wiki base for commons - store file metadata, licenses, GPS in wiki base on commons.

Knowledge representation in wikidata (Martin, Oxford)

totally open and free, no restriction on reuse of this dataset, cc0

it’s one database - provides a user interface to the query

wikidata is a collection of billions of facts about people, in triples (semantic database with rdf ??)

connects one identifiable thing to another thing

subject (identity or item) —> property (property) —> object (entity or string or data or quantity)

billions of triples, which connect

describing all human and culture connections in a visual way

wikipedia & data are not to decide what’s true / create truth, but to share what’s already been published from trusted sources

statements themselves can have properties - we have qualifiers and references

start time, end time, reference (URL, entity, DOI)

autocompletes and uses english labels

complication of querying - language independent

Q7259 = attach various labels “Ada Lovelace” “Augusta Ada King” whatever other language

Q7259 (label in english: ada lovelace) —> P22 (father) —> Q5679 (lord byron)

specify what language you want it in, and fallbacks

you can ask a question and wikimedia will answer you with all their database info??

UK parliament = jobs of people in house of ??? besides politicians - judges barely lead

US = all lawyers lol

Q12345 count von camp?? some humour embedded in identifiers. Q13 is fear of number 13.

how to query wikidata (neville)

https://query.wikidata.org/ —> asking complicated questions —> generate timelines, graphs, maps, charts

starting point is a certain structure = looking for items, and i want the occupation to be computer scientist

item

wdt: prefix we need to use so engine knows we’re talking about wikimedia property. CTRL + SPACE = type occupation.

then wd: CTRL + SPACE = type computer scientist.

space, then period at the end

wikidata query service = label service (control space, type label)

SELECT ?item —> SELECT ?itemLabel

makes another column for it

wikibase:language “ar, en” makes the first language arabic, then fallback english!

—> we’ve gotten a list of computer scientists, with their label

what if i don’t know what gender they are? after the wdt, instead of the wd, put ?gender

every new line is another filter on the results = they’re getting shorter and shorter

when you run the data you get visualisation options !!

LIMIT 200 (for number of results that come up)

?item wdt:P19 ?birthPlace . = won’t show up as a map because they need actual coordinates

?birthPlace

Link = SPARQL endpoint = .XML (can also add JSON?)

GROUP BY (copy and paste from original SELECT group

so you can use aggregation commands in first line:

sample (picks one random image or whatever type of thing you want)

(SAMPLE(?image) as ?image)

count

* at the end of wdt:P40* (does it an infinite number of times?)

OPTIONAL = when showing child, don’t NEED to show the ones that only have a gender

OPTIONAL { ?child wdt:P21 ?sex_or_gender . }

just put optional around each one?

wdt = property

wd = value

tools

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools

https://tools.wmflabs.org/

bibliographic power

https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/

http://zone47.com/crotos/cosmos - art

shazam for art??

https://tools.wmflabs.org/monumental/#/ - registered monuments near you

https://tools.wmflabs.org/everythingisconnected/index.html

educational tool

http://histropedia.com/ - interactive, filterable timeline

mix n match - takes catalogues of external identifiers and matches them to wikidata (which ones already exist, and to add the identifiers to it)

wikidata game

wikishootme - everything on wikidata that has coordinates, that’s near you (can add images to the things that don’t!)

free image search tool - find commons images for wikidata items

file candidates - copy free items from flickr to commons to wikidata

wiki federation / federated wiki

co creative stuff happening between servers

“networked knowledge”

http://www.federated.wiki/view/welcome-visitors

holochain

blockchain alternative, (inversion of the) architecture to be much more scalable (not just tokenisation)

peer to peer app ?

DHT (distributed hash tags??) - similar to the way bit torrent holds things, it’s shared out into parts

co hosted architecture - i build my pages on my node running on local hosts,

but data synchronises on back end and grows

—> federated wiki which can outlive individuals + individual servers

shared knowledge network

blockchain is inefficient because it’s trying to do one massive, global ledger

no mining involved, using concepts that have come out of blockchain chains, DHTs, cryptography

monotonic data store - you can’t take away any info can only add new stuff (cryptographic history), all the old versions point to the new versions

working on a visual representation, time stamping, robust flow of information

#tech #wikipedia #open knowledge #london #2018 #event

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