Back-from-vacation Links Post

[deusvulture]

I had been doing these on Thursdays, and it's currently almost Saturday. Also, I don't have that many links this time. Also I'm not actually technically back from vacation yet. But we will set these worldly matters aside for the time being and enjoy the following links:

• According to some back-of-the-envelope statistical analysis from 2013 by the marvelous decisiontoast, explicit fanfiction gets far more views than fic in other ratings categories, even adjusting for word count. The most popular ratings categories to write in, however, are "General" and "Teen". I believe, not entirely unfoundedly, that this trend extends well beyond fanfiction; it seems plausible to me that a highly disproportionate amount of information consumption on the internet is people looking for pornography, and that traffic ends up subsidizing a lot of other fields of human endeavor.


• Sacha Baron Cohen tries to pull one of his infamous candid-camera pranks by posing as a foreign millionaire, and asking a concierge at a fancy Vegas hotel to get him an eight-year-old boy to molest. The concierge cheerfully agrees. At that point Cohen freaks out, and tries to turn in the tape to the FBI (who decline to investigate, natch). Chalk one up for "don't ask questions that you don't want answered", I guess.


• The annual SSC survey is up, so if you've read a Slate Star Codex post before you should go take it. There are a couple methodological problems with this survey, but the results are still valuable and Scott does interesting things with them. He is also a generally ethical person such that even I am comfortable answering questions about my deepest political/sexytimes convictions on his survey, and so you probably should be too.


• Relatedly, here on dreamwidth, oligopsoneia is trying to make talking in the dreamwidth rss feed comments a thing - an ideal scenario for loudmouths who can't be arsed to register a wordpress account (i.e., me).


• Over at Thing of Things, Ozy posts An Irrationalfic Manifesto. To me this sounds like just "any fiction other than rationalfic", but opinion is clearly divided: the comments there run the gamut from people who see irrationalfic as a rare and distinct genre, to people who basically agree with my take, to Eliezer Yudkowsky claiming that actually, HPMOR is irrationalfic. Ah, literature!

Comments

[another_normal_anomaly]

IMO it's definitely possible for something to be both rationalfic and irrationalfic, and that many traits of irrationalfic are traits of mainstream writing in general.