odds and ends

[swan_tower]

I'm still face-down in the book, plus trying to get ready for Christmas travel. In the meantime, have some random stuff!

Like this month's SF Novelists post: "I'm not allowed to tab away until this post is done," in which I talk about distractions.

Or a very wise post from Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, on "Who Gets to Escape?"

Or some frickin' amazing tattoos.

Or an explanation of this poll. My family and I had been speculating that guys were more likely to have scars on the underside of their chins, due to exactly the kinds of hijinks various people described in the comments. But it turns out the data, at least as collected from my readership, does not support the anecdata; a slightly higher percentage of the women who responded have such scars than men.

Or, um . . . okay, I don't have a fifth thing. Feel free to suggest #5 in the comments!

Comments

[samedietc.livejournal.com]

About that poll, were you expecting about 73 women to 20 men as the gender response ratio? Is that indicative of your blog readership or a gender bias in answering polls?

-a man with an unscarred chin (but many scars elsewhere)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I didn't have a specific expectation, but I'm not all that surprised. There's plenty of data that men are less likely to read books by women, and since a fair bit of my blog readership comes from my novel readership, the skew probably follows on, too.

[samedietc.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I figured.

Well, off to read a Jane Austen RPG sourcebook. So hard to make a party--the heir class is clearly overpowered, especially compared to the bounder and cad classes.

(N.B. "Bounder" and "cad" both see a jump in popularity in the 20th century, so I'm being a tad anachronistic perhaps.)

("Tad" as a name seems to see a jump in popularity around 1860. No more Google Ngram for me.)

[cgbookcat1.livejournal.com]

I thought your poll was asking about who plays violin or viola. My husband has a rough spot under his chin from the chin guard.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

My family and I had been speculating that guys were more likely to have scars on the underside of their chins, due to exactly the kinds of hijinks various people described in the comments. But it turns out the data, at least as collected from my readership, does not support the anecdata; a slightly higher percentage of the women who responded have such scars than men.

Based on the comments face-planting resulting in chin scars tends to happen fairly young (and in fact a face-planting at the age of three or so is why I have one). At those ages I suspect that behavior resulting in face-planting is not highly gendered.