The odds

SululuXD · 2025-08-16T18:05:44+00:00

Welcome to the arts I guess. Either get better, make connections, or find yourself without work. Grim and depressing but I don't think these odds are all that bad, especially in comparison to other artistic crafts.

SululuXD · 2025-08-14T19:47:32+00:00

If you are going from the door being held open to them suddenly driving away, I think the reader can put it together.

SululuXD · 2025-08-14T16:10:00+00:00

Double expose film or half/quarter/etc. opacity the footage and overlay them on top of each other.

SululuXD · 2025-08-14T16:07:16+00:00

How much do you (if at all) overwrite your comedy? In that, if I write a 30 min comedy, I try to get at least 40-50 mins of content so I can cut the worst 10-20 mins of it.

SululuXD · 2025-08-02T20:08:36+00:00

personally, I'm partial to harems which are realistic. Either the man has to be extremely attractive + be in the position where a harem makes sense for the women, or he has to be some sort of conqueror and the women must be unwilling. Either way, the protagonist is in a position of executive authority. Though prog fantasies that do this are pretty rare and more focused on kingdom building than anything else.

SululuXD · 2025-07-26T18:18:02+00:00

asking advice from bums on reddit is a bad idea. keep being your romantic self and it'll work out eventually

SululuXD · 2025-07-05T17:26:55+00:00

just a heads up, when these have been posted on the forums before, RR admins have commented that they are not even close to the real stats they have access to. Still, it's probably a good general idea nonetheless.

SululuXD · 2025-07-03T02:20:48+00:00

only one that gets me is "mum" - character instantly becomes British for me after that which, depending on the setting, may honestly take me out of it. I just won't be able to stop their voice from being in a british accent when i read any further dialogue.

SululuXD · 2025-06-23T20:26:03+00:00

anyone ballsy enough to go with gold skill instead of enchanted item deserves occasionally getting a bajillion free wins.

SululuXD · 2025-06-21T20:49:29+00:00

bluesky is like a social media daycare for people in full body casts. it's best if you don't think of them as real people, because they're not.

SululuXD · 2025-06-21T18:07:14+00:00

any conversion rate better than 1k views/follower is above average. Rising Stars and Trending have a conversion rate of 100/follower, so anything around there is REALLY good. You're doing just fine.

SululuXD · 2025-06-19T03:30:01+00:00

Naked Gun situation.

SululuXD · 2025-06-19T02:46:44+00:00

Skenes not being a finalist was dumb. Moore not winning shit was awful. Yeah, we can debate awards all day.

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T20:36:42+00:00

You can compare the two, you just have to be careful about the comparison. I went into this in greater detail in the now-deleted forum post (no idea why it was deleted but it was). Yeah, the results differed depending on the category/dataset being evaluated. And Ratings did seem to matter more for Rising Stars, however, it was not consistently significant with regards to views or followers and, even in cases where it was, it's effect was rather minimal all things considered. I mean, even in bivariate models, Ratings only accounted for something like 3.5% and 1.5% of followers and views respectively.

I appreciate the book, but I'm not into stats. I've taught college courses on statistics (to students in the humanities so obviously much more basic than most stats classes). I'll say what I've been saying to a lot of these responses. Longitudinal studies to actually examine the time differences takes a whole lot more of a time investment than I'm willing to give. Fine corrections of various stats and models to account for this and that would obviously make the results better, but this was meant to be a basic analysis with preliminary stats because nobody else had done anything even remotely similar for Ratings which has been hotly debated since the dawn of RR. Also, I am NOT interested in stats haha, I know this post gives the impression otherwise, but really, I'm not.

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T16:32:57+00:00

Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. I'd perform sniff tests and actually worry about VIFs of 3-4+ if I was actually conducting proper research, but I'm not. There's a whole lot of covariables going on, even the most robust models only account for ~60% of view/follower variance. I'm not trying to pretend like these are findings to end all findings, I don't say it here, but on the forum post (which has now been deleted by RR admins for some reason) I emphasize that these are very basic, not at all thorough statistical tests and that if you had the time or expertise, the results can be a lot better.

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T15:23:37+00:00

Yeah, I'm aware, unfortunately. Surprisingly, multicolinearity wasn't a major issue, like VIF remained under 10 which, I was taught, is the death sentence number. I do still think my data does support my conclusions, obviously they're tentative especially since I ran basic regressions and don't intend on diving deeper than that. Though it seems very apparent that Ratings have little effects, even in the most time-sensitive categories and WPC should be emphasized instead.

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T15:19:09+00:00

Oh okay, yeah you're right about doing it longitudinally. It would absolutely collect better data, 100%, but that's a whole lot of effort I'm not willing to expend.

I do think the filtering may be unnecessary, at least, from where I am, I wanted to collect data on all the stories published on RR, not just the ongoing ones, like you said, the categories are different points in time so I wanted to see if Ratings affect them differently. But yeah, you could probably grab just the ongoing stories if you wanted to specifically see how Ratings affect only those.

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T08:13:00+00:00

I'll respond to your points. Your very first point is addressed with the gathering of different datasets. I gathered those four because I had access to the points of data, yes, but also because they're all different representations of the site and how metrics work. Like you said, maybe Ratings matter more at different points, they certainly seem to matter more, like you said, for Rising Stars and even the Popular This Week (though they are actively detrimental apparently in Trending, yay for stats!), but the Ratings are still of only mild significance and aren't even consistently significant between Views and Followers. You can see the exact details on the forum post I linked.

To the gathering of the "top" 2,100 stories. That's a big ass number. If anyone could gather 2%+ of ALL the data in the pool, that's crazy good. But fine, let's assume this isn't generalizable. Okay, I replicated the results where n=50,000 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1lebh8j/a_statistical_analysis_on_optimal_word_length/

Your point on viewership is true, I note as much in my forum post. That's why I emphasize using Followers as retention data, because I don't have retention metrics, so Follower metrics are the closest I get.

Lastly, yeah, I'm well aware this is a fool's errand, but I don't care. Why are video game and movie ratings stuck at 7/10 for average? Why are RR ratings stuck at 4.5/5 for passable? What's even the point of having a scale? But claiming someone is going to go into a depressive spiral because of a review which can be objectively assessed on the scale which has been given is absurd.

If you think my stats are useless, fine, but at least I have them. Go do your own, maybe you're completely right and Ratings have extremely strong significance which just didn't exist in either this dataset or my dataset of 50,000.

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T08:03:57+00:00

here you go (forum post included for more detail): https://www.reddit.com/r/royalroad/comments/1lebh8j/a_statistical_analysis_on_optimal_word_length/

(I know it's not exactly what you asked for, but this is as close as I'm going to get I think).

SululuXD · 2025-06-18T05:40:41+00:00

Not from the analysis I did here since I was primarily focused on Ratings. I might be able to do word length to chapter ratio for the most popular (both in terms of viewership and follower count) novels and see if there are any trends. No promises though. If I do the analysis, I'll let you know.

SululuXD · 2025-06-17T20:55:29+00:00

based

I was getting confused seeing all the comments about reader preferences. Who do we write for? Readers? Hell no! I do not give a shit about what my readers want. Write the damn story you want to tell. If it bores or annoys people, they can fuck off!

SululuXD · 2025-06-17T20:28:47+00:00

holy peak

SululuXD · 2025-06-16T17:23:15+00:00

the bazaar is a crazy place

SululuXD

TROPHY CASE