John Cena in an "I Quit" match at Breaking Point 2009 | The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Guido Reni, 1616

Seasonal affective disorder is like scurvy

Both are associated with being exposed to the uncaring reality of mother nature for too long (months of being stuck at sea vs months of deathly cold and little sunlight), both are caused by a vitamin deficiency (vitamin C vs vitamin D), and both reopen old wounds that you thought you had long since healed from (physical vs mental)

marina

wood whittled przhevalsky horse

Perhaps it will come as a surprise that Dr House, contrary to expected wisdom,¹ retorted at this juncture that the hygiene drug would kill the patient. If indeed this is truly surprising, it pales in comparison to House’s suggested alternative: the bold assertion that the patient required the mouse bites to live.²

1. House, G. et al. (2004) Unforeseen Malignancies Associated with Hygiene Drug in Cases of Mouse Bite Related Nose Blood

2. This vexes me.

You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?

So it was with this desktop greenhouse.

I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.

I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.

I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.

I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…

Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.

I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.

This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.

I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.

Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.

In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…

I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.

Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.

THE PEQUOD WRAPPED

Why Isn't There More Femslash on A03?

Hello! I'm not in fandom spaces but I see this question on my dash regularly.

Is the lack of femslash because:

• People are averse to writing femslash? or
• People don't write fics involving female characters as romantic leads?

I know very little about fanfic but I am a trained statistician and this is a question we can answer using science!

The Math

Specifically, we can test whether or not people are writing less femslash than expected, given the fraction of relationship fics with a female romantic lead.

As a toy example, consider a fandom where 20% of relationship fics feature a female character, so say f=20% and m=80%. If people are arbitrarily choosing characters to pair up, then we expect that the proportions of relationship tags are as follows:

• F/F: f²=4%
• F/M: mf + fm = 2fm = 32%
• M/M: m²=64%

So, if this hypothetical fandom were to actually have 10% of fics be tagged F/F, this would mean that this fandom is not biased against femslash, but against writing female characters in general (because 10%>4%).

In general, this is what our expectation looks like:

As expected, when most of the leads are male, we get much more M/M fanfic, and vice versa.

(side note: I work in genetics and this is the same math we use to determine whether a certain base in your DNA is adapting to a new environment!)

The Data

To get data, I got the number of relationship tags for the top 100 fandoms on AO3 (excluding fandoms with single gender subjects, mostly k-pop bands). [source] This resulted in ~10.8 million works, with the following tags:

Obviously, there are far fewer femslash fics than any other relationship category. But is this because people do not write about femslash, or because people do not write about women?

The Results

How often do the top 100 fandoms write about female characters?

The dashed line indicates gender parity, so clearly authors write far less about female characters than male characters. The median fandom chooses a female romantic lead only 25% of the time.

(The top 3 fandoms for writing female characters are Supergirl (92%), The Owl House (71%), and RWBY (71%). The bottom 3 are Blue Lock (8%), Yuri on Ice (6%), and OFMD (4%). It still confuses me that Yuri on Ice is not about Yuri.)

Now, using this data, we can ask the central question: do we see more or less femslash that we expect, given that women are written less frequently than men?

In this plot, each dot is one fandom. The x-position is the fraction of fic characters that are women, and the y-position is the fraction of F/F fics of the total. The black line represents the fraction we expect to see if authors are choosing characters randomly, that is, they do not have a bias against writing femslash. Dots that lie above the line, in the pink region, represent fandoms that write femslash more often than expected, and vice versa. We find that 74/100 fandoms actually write more F/F than expected, given how little they write about female characters.

for the curious:

• the fandom that has written the most femslash, relative to the expectation is Project SEKAI COLORFUL STAGE! (expected: 6344 F/F fics, actual: 11029 F/F fics)
• the fandom with the least femslash relative to the expectation is Love and Deepspace (expected: 5693 F/F fics, actual: 219 F/F fics). i assume this has to do with the fact that it is a dating simulator?
• the fandom closest to perfectly balanced (25% F/F, 50% F/M, 25% M/M) is ATLA (19% F/F, 53% F/M, 28% M/M)

Conclusions

AO3 fics contains very few F/F tags relative to other relationship categories. Through examining the data, we see that this is not because authors have a specific problem with femslash, but because authors do not write fics with female romantic leads in general.

This is where my job as a statistician ends, so I will not speculate on the extent to which this is caused by creators writing shallow female characters (or not writing female characters) versus the fanfic authors' preference toward writing about male characters.