farla

Last chapter, Katniss' sister had just been chosen for murderdeathball. Katniss volunteers herself in her sister's place.

( And fridge logic kicks in )

( On to Chapter Three )

When I go home for Easter we're going to take apart the other computer and see if the "unfixable" problem for that one can also be fixed with copious liquid metal and a healthy disregard for safety regulations.

Also I can get to my halfway finished fic now and actually finish it.

The snow is melting and forming little streamlets that funnel over mud and pebbles and it is absolutely breathtaking.

Just did a quick check with what's in the meme collection by character. Removing groups (including just "The Felt" instead of counting it on the male side) and just going by individual characters:
Female characters were tagged 56 times.
Male characters were tagged 111 times.

There's 13 listed female characters, which goes down to 10 if you combine ones with different names. The character in the most stories is Rose, at 12, followed by Jade and Kanaya at 7.

There's 22 listed male characters, 20 once combined. The character in the stories is Karkat with 21, followed by Dave (14) then John (12).

Almost exactly twice as many boys than girls in every comparison.

So then I did the category as a whole. It's a bit better.

I removed Death, Hella Jeff, Imperial Drone, Nicolas Cage, Skipper Plumbthroat, and Sweet Bro from the list as not being actual Homestuck characters or, in the case of the Imperial Drone, not having a gender. So that's five male characters down by technicality. Also, Casey was counted as a female character.

There are 18 female characters, once you remove repeats and 582 total times the tags were used. Rose is most popular again at 117, followed by Jade (103) and then Terezi (67).

Male characters at 39 and there were 770 times the tags were used. (Of course I can't think of a single time I've seen a male character get bashed in a story about them.) Most popular was Dave (137), followed by John (115) and Karkat (104). I think the difference is largely that meme fic tends to have a restricted cast, while regular fanfic is more likely to reference the whole cast, at least in passing.

I'm doing a bit better myself - the cast list for my fics is 10 for both, but the total is 19 for male characters and 13 for female ones.

None of this gets into the issue of viewpoint/main character vs side character, but I expect it comes out similarly.

Netbook arrived! After two infuriating hours trying to get Internet Explorer and the wireless to work at the same time without the entire computer freezing I finally managed to get everything working long enough to download a decent browser and now it's running perfectly! And I can type almost as well as I could on my old one, and probably better once I get used to it because I keep typing really weird/lazily so close keys is good.

Also the battery is currently at 24% which gives me another two hours. At max everything. This is awesome.

I was expecting it to choke and die on videos but actually it runs them fine. Haven't checked to see if it'll struggle playing music while I do other things, but cautiously hopeful.

( Technically homework )

My peers liked how academic it was, the way it inserted a new species into our world, and raised questions about how the human scientist had met with cefnir originally. I resolved that the half hour I spent on this was clearly more than they deserved.

The more I think about it the more I'm not sure if octopus people are actually the way to go. Looking over the Nestbound thread, the best bits are the comics that are about human-equivalent bugs who happen to be playing the game like devoted RPG fans, with almost all the weird backstory shit people invent about their doomed culture being interesting worldbuilding but at right angles to what's useful for a sburb story. And the octopus people seem to invite that sort of thing. I was thinking about making their speech involve color changing surfaces (which would allow for the equivalent of stammering or yelling ow by losing control over those surfaces and flashing simpler patterns) with vocalizations being there to get attention when not in line of sight (that being the big issue with having no sound-based communication) followed by realizing either all the sburb NPCs have to use the same thing which conflicts with the whole one-color thing Derse and Prospit have and requires major alterations to the consorts OR that their vocalizations function as a complete language as well, which is redundant and introduces the issue that they'd be able to talk privately around NPCs using the color thing which I dislike for the same reason I generally dislike telepathy, it makes things too easy. There's situations where it'd work for a story but it's really not something I want to insert without having a specific reason. (Also being in the pokemon fandom already I would like to not have to keep track of different forms of speech for once.) And so on. And then fridge logic starts kicking in and I wonder why if they're so weird they'd make good diplomats because a lot of that is being able to find common ground, which would make sense if, say, half of sburb was underwater but again, the focus here would be Derse/Prospit and I don't think the carapace people should vary that much between sessions.

So maybe crocodile people would work better.

The more I think about this the more I actually want to do it.

Is there any good repository of different fan sburb games I could use to get a baseline?

mspa_updates

So yeah. Going to fiddle with settings when I get the chance.

Should probably also make a post asking people what in particular they want.

Also I think I like the update.

So I've given 686 reviews. I have no idea how many stories were deleted over this, because a lot of people did the delete/repost thing and some people who are brighter than them may be waiting until the month is over to repost, so even going through the links wouldn't tell me much.

Normally I stalk the Just In page for this, but this month I've been behind. The major thing I noticed from that is the lack of reviews. Aside from attention whoring submit-an-OC fics, most had few to no reviews. As a number of newbies reviewed their story while signed in, I'm suspicious about how many anonymous reviews were done by cleverer authors. This is kind of depressing. I'm not even sure if I can say that this is a problem on the reviewers' side, because god damn do most of these fics suck. Looking for even mediocre stories is an exercise in tedium, and I can't help but wonder how many people are actually reading.

Of the 686, 370 of them got the dialogue paragraph. That's not counting the number of stories bad enough for me to just tell them to get a beta reader, yell at them for writing songfic or anything else that made me ragequit early rather than list errors, and there's also a number where was no dialogue to screw up. In fairness, a number of them had what looked like errors as opposed to systematically doing it wrong, but still. I spam the dialogue bit constantly and I just did NaRe a few months ago, I'm not really sure what more I could do. I guess actually reply to everyone who PMs me about "omg long paragraph is looooong" and try to talk them through it would be the next step in futility, but fuck that.

And the thing is, until more people do it and readers can get used to seeing how it works, individual authors will still struggle with the explanation and new authors will keep making the same mistakes. It's one of those tipping point problems.

We really need some sort of reviewing/betaing movement that doesn't involve me doing all of the work.