wyomingnot

[wyomingnot]

Turtle lock its a turtle lock y'all!

#turtles #locks

[wyomingnot]

Today I explained to a guy what shipping is

In the beginning he was quiet but when I started to panic he smiled and said:”it’s really cute that people see love everywhere, even if it’s not officially there.”

[wyomingnot]

#kylux #modern au

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#superman #batman

[wyomingnot]

Biggest reframe of my artistic life was when somebody pointed out that putting down your own work in front of people who enjoy it is tantamount to insulting those people’s taste. Knocked the self deprecation right out of me

[wyomingnot]

The Marvels dir. Nia DaCosta | 2023

#the marvels

[wyomingnot]

Quick question

You step outside, you step away from any buildings around you. You are now not inside or on a building in any way.

regardless of what your native language is, how do you refer to this?

#fun with polls #native us english #if you're outside it's the ground #generally speaking #fun with language

[wyomingnot]

#cats

[wyomingnot]

What if we gave every one of them a vote?

#critters

[wyomingnot]

"Can you fly a TIE fighter?" "I can fly anything."

OSCAR ISAAC as POE DAMERON in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

#poe dameron

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Interviewer: Are women in this country going to be better off... uh, with President Reagan in office?

Alan Alda: [laughter] No. (x)

#hell no #alan alda

[wyomingnot]

Episode XI

more [or click here for more roommate shenanigans]

#kylux #modern au

[wyomingnot]

Ed can do both but Stede's got a-

#i am amused #ofmd #stede bonnet #fanvids

[wyomingnot]

I see a lot of posts going by about comments and kudos and hits and...well... I've been thinking about the three quite a lot lately--as both a fic author and someone who spends a lot of my professional life looking at web metrics and determining which are actually important/accurate measures of user engagement.

Mileage varies, of course. And this is all just MY opinion, so do feel free to ignore it wholesale.

What I think when I see someone say that sorting by a hits to to kudos ratio is a good way to find "good" fic:

Hits are a measure of quantity (how many times your story or art has been viewed), but without knowing how AO3 defines a hit, it's actually kind of a meaningless number.  We know that our own views of our work do not count toward hits, but...if my BFF looks at my story 7 times in one day because she keeps trying to read it but getting interrupted...is that one hit, or seven? And if it's seven, then the numbers are artificially inflated because it's really just Bestie trying to get her Codex fix. And...if Bestie looks at it three times today and four tomorrow...is that 7 hits total, or two? 

Some transparency on the part of AO3 could clear this up handily, but until we get that...shrug. All it is is a number that may or may not be an accurate reflection of how many actual people looked at the page your fic is on.  Did they READ it? Or did they nope out?  No way to know.

Kudos are intended to be slightly more qualitative, but there is no way of knowing why the reader gave them. (Similar to likes here on tumblr.) It might be that they loved the piece. It might be a simple acknowledgement that the reader was there. It might even be a pity kudo. We have no way of knowing. It's, again, just a number.

Obviously, everyone is free to interpret both hits and kudos as positive reaction/interaction. I might do that myself if I didn't spend my workdays explaining to people that 50,000 "hits" to the website could be 50K people who came to learn about us or...simply the result of the computer labs on campus having the university homepage set to default.

Bigger numbers are just that....bigger numbers.

Comments are the only objective way to judge how someone is reacting to your fic or art.

So, what then? Sort by number of comments?

You can do that, sure. (I think. I confess I have never once gotten the AO3 search to work as well as people rave about.) But do keep in mind that many authors answer their comments. So, something with, say, 20 comments may be 20 people telling the author they loved it. Or it might be ten people and ten author-replies. OR, it might be three people having a conversation in the comments. You have to look and see.  

Bigger numbers are just bigger numbers.

Okay, fine Elis. What am I supposed to do then?

Look, I'm not your mother or your therapist and you are free to assign whatever meanings you like to these things. I, personally, find "good" fic through a combination of things including: recs, the fandom grapevine, dumb luck, events, and just...reading some of it and not feeling guilty if I nope out for some reason.

This all sounds a little depressing when laid out like this, huh? Especially when you take into account the downward trends in interacting and the rise of folks treating fic and art as content to be consumed. 

Here's what I have learned from writing fic for 30 years (well, 28 and counting):

As an author (and an artist, I would presume), you have absolutely no way of predicting which of your work will land and take hold and which will not. It's alchemy and luck and the weird (and not actual) algorithm of fandom. Sometimes, the piece you whipped out in 30 minutes and posted on the fly will land in the right person's inbox and they will share it and their friends will share it and it will get big.  Sometimes, the piece you slaved over for weeks and weeks will do that...sometimes it won't.  Sometimes your genius manifests and resonates, sometimes it does not.

My personal favorite fic of my own--the one I think is probably the best thing I have done in SW fandom-- has like 8 kudos and 4 comments (2 of which are my responses). Is it disappointing? Yes. Is it an indication that the fic is objectively "bad"? No.

The mercenary in me suggests that if you want to get lots of comments and kudos, you should pick the pairing that is THE pairing in the fandom and write for that--because that's where the eyeballs are, because that's where the connections are.  But that is not why I write, so it's just that--a very mercenary way of looking at things. Not that there is anything WRONG with doing it that way. Supply and demand run the world. If the people want Codywan and you want the people....give them Codywan. No shame in that.

And there is no shame in wanting or seeking validation for your work, either.

But it breaks my heart to see authors (and artists) give up on themselves when they do not receive piles of kudos and comments. It's not you. It's...the luck of the draw. It's...fandom. It's...an artificial and murky set of measurements that have almost no basis in anything meaningful.

Keep writing. Keep drawing. Keep sharing. You are what you make, not how people respond to it.

[wyomingnot]

#is that you phasma

[wyomingnot]

these are the same pictures. any objections will be rejected.

#stensland #is that you millicent #cats #domhnall gleeson

[wyomingnot]

[Constable Hux and Unicorn] - Ink, watercolor, acrylic, and gold leaf on watercolor paper. Approximately 10x8 inches.

It happened. I finally painted a medieval Hux. I also made a doc to go with it, explaining a bit about his role in a medieval au, as well as highlighting the works that most inspired me.

#armitage hux #stuff you can buy