Felicitations of the newsdump for you. - December 02021

Let us begin with a headteacher calling for other teachers to encourage their students' desires to make a better world, rather than mock them for being unrealistic or 'woke'.

The ease in which moral panics can be sparked off by nothing at all, just the insinuation that someone heard something somewhere. Especially if it is something about the virginity (and "purity") of girls and women. The United Kingdom makes pledges and claims to ban hymenoplasty and to require GPs to have training in women's health issues, but we'll see how that turns out and whether it's taken seriously as a requirement.

If you are looking for a way to punish the United States Supreme Court for their decision to allow bounty hunting for people who might have even a whiff of abortion in Texas, Abortion Funds will find you a local practitioner or mutual aid fund that you can support, if you have the spare monies, because those funds are the people who have the best networks and the most direct access for helping people in a world where abortions have become functionally illegal, even if not yet de jure illegal.

( And we go farther in )

The Average (Mean) AO3 Questionnaire.

I saw this idea of talking about your average fic in el_staplador's journal, who grabbed it from thisbluespirit and I thought it was charming. And also, I realized in a hurry that I'd have to exclude the entire Suck Fairy sequence so far if I wanted to actually get something resembling my real fic averages, because otherwise I'd be talking a lot about the Suck Fairy sequence. (Doing the average word count with the Suck Fairy Sequence included and excluded was a difference of nearly 3000 words, so it's a good idea to exclude it, unless I want to talk exclusively about works that are over 5k words.)

So, according to the Stats page, that means it's 506,598 words, with a total of 90,808 hits, 8,538 kudos, 707 comment threads, and 1,361 bookmarks over 172 works (including two that are unrevealed as of these calculations). Which means, if we're talking about averages, we're at:

• Average word count: 2945
• Average hits count: 528
• Average Kudos count: 50
• Average number of comment threads: 4
• Average number of bookmarks: 8

That's not terrible. Let's see what shakes out into the averages, again using the Stats page and its counts, which may be different than the actual work page counts.

• Work(s) closest to the average word count: The Princess (and Prince, and Queen) and the Pea Test (The Princess and the Pea, -8 words from average), Giving In To Temptation (Monty Python and the Holy Grail, +18 words from average).
  
  Both of them done this year, in fact, and both of them on the theme of fairy tales, mythologies, and characters having sex in circumstances designed to teach the supposedly innocent more about the realities of life.


• Work(s) closest to the average hit count: Hermione Granger and the Time Turner Shenanigans (Potter Salt, -5 hits from average), Fusion Dilemma (Steven Universe, -9 hits from average).
  
  I've found that when I write Potter salt (and ever since the author outed herself as a TERF willing to use her platform for more TERFery, my Potter fic is much more salty), there's usually a good reaction to it. I think because there are, on the whole, a lot more fans who are salty about Potter and want to fix it in and around AO3 than in general.
  
  The Steven Universe one was one I created for a prompt fest elsewhere on Dreamwidth and then moved over at the suggestion of alexseanchai because they thought it would resonate with others and a wider audience.


• Work(s) closest to the average number of kudos (sort by closest to average bookmarks): Birth By Sleep (Miraculous Ladybug/Kingdom Hearts fusion, exactly average number of kudos.)
  
  There's a-1, a -2, and a +3 to the average as well, which are all in different fandoms (ST: Disco, AtLA, RWBY) than this one, but this one is the second part of The Heart of the Miraculous, so you'd probably want to read Dream, Drops, Distance first to get the reasons why this work starts inside Chat Noir's heart and continues from there. It's my longest series outside of the Suck Fairy, since both of those stories wrote themselves at a pretty intense clip when I had time to think about them. Probably good if you've played the games and seen the show, may not be as good if you haven't.


• Work(s) closest to the average number of comment threads (sort by closest to average bookmarks): Status Updates (Lilo and Stitch, exactly average comment threads, exactly average bookmarks)
  
  I really like this one, because Cobra Bubbles is one of the best MiB that I have seen in a movie about aliens, and he's supposed to be nothing more than a social worker who used to do this kind of thing. It makes him a great viewpoint character and someone who can be trusted not to freak out if someone were planning to build an interstellar bypass right through the planet. It's gotten a few kudos, but the fandom around for many of the Disney movies doesn't seem to be all that big, at least in the circles that I've been a part of.


• Work(s) closest to the average number of bookmarks (sort by closest to average kudos): In Flagrante Trio (Arthurian Mythology, exactly average bookmarks, +6 to average kudos)
  
  This one is pretty average, I suppose, in that it's Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere all together, without the fighting and the terrible results that come from it, and Lancelot in the middle of them both, taking direction from both king and queen to make them both happy with him.

Well, that worked out really well, didn't it? And it's a good mix of the older and the newer. Miraculous Ladybug is the only fandom that repeats, which is very nice. As is probably the point of the exercise, there's nothing in there that is a great smash and nothing in there that's a dud, at least according to the AO3 community. It's a good mix of lengths of work from less than 1,000 words to tens of thousands. These are statistically average works. Even if I want to believe that all of my works are above average in quality, these are the ones currently sitting in the middle by outside decisions. It should be interesting to run this again after a significantly greater amount of works have been added to my account, and see how the averages shake out and if that moves the needle in the direction of different places.

December Days 2021 #24: Blowing the Raspberry

[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]

• CPU: Single core ARM1176JZFS (ARM11 using an ARMv6-architecture core) @ 700Mhz on a Broadcom BCM2835 System on a Chip


• Memory: 256 (B)/ 512 MB RAM (B+)


• Graphics: Videocore IV GPU @ 250 MHz, max resolution 1920x1080


• Sound: Stereo output sound through HDMI or 3.5" jack


• Inputs/Peripherals: 2 (B) or 4 (B+) USB 2.0 ports IEEE 802.11 b/g/n via USB Wi-Fi dongle, Bluetooth 4.1 via USB dongle, 100 MBit Ethernet jack


• Storage: No internal storage, operating system and data all provided by SD (SDHC, SDXC) (B) or microSD (micoSDHC, microSDXC) (B+) card inserted, usually 4/8 GB, 40-pin General Purpose Input/Output interface


• OS: Raspbian → Arch Linux ARM → RetroPie → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (mopidy music server and Internet radio) (B), Raspbian → RetroPie → OpenELEC → LibreELEC 9.3.2 → Screenly → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (Pi-Hole) (B+)

( The Raspberry Pi Model B and B+ )