quantifica august: stats no one asked for!

Hey team!

FIRST SOME HOUSEKEEPING

Patreon is making two changes in the coming months, so I'm letting you know how I'll be managing them. Change #1: they are switching to mandatory subscription billing rather than monthly billing. All this means for you is that you will get charged on the monthaversary of whenever you pledged instead of on the first of the month. We have the option to turn this feature on now or wait til November; I am opting for the latter. Change #2: there is now a 30% fee for people backing through Patreon's iOS app. Creators have the option to this fee on to backers (a 30% increase to you) or to cover it themselves (a 30% decrease for me). I have, again, opted for the latter. Math came out like "a $10 pledge can go up by $4.50 for backers or go down by $2.40 for creators" and it felt like a no-brainer. I'm just gonna BEG all you iOS backers to start using the website to make payments so you know your money is going to me and not Apple.

This is all due to some changes on the iOS Store, and Patreon's executive decision to pass those fees onto us. Lovely folks, Apple. Lovely folks, Patreon.

Okay: on to the numbers, of which there are MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR.

FINANCIALS

AdSense and bonus income did us a lot of good this month, though I'm very disappointed to not have a video release. Spent the first half of the month out of the state and the second half tackling a lot of non-professional labor. The lack of release means we have made up for last month's shortfall, but not pushed us ahead of projection the way I'd hoped. This year has been a roller coaster for me; in aggregate, we are still doing well on financial projections - 16% ahead of target for the year! - but we are way behind on releases. I had so much more I wanted to have done by now. My hope is that finally - finally - life has quieted down enough to focus on the channel, but I feel like I'm tempting fate even typing that out.

BINGOS

We've got no fewer than three squares filled this month, which is a personal best! Distribution is such that we have several potential lines with two-out-of-five, but none with three. Any number of directions we could go for a bingo, but more on that later. :3

AUGUST MINIMIX

More tunes for you! This month's listening habits were mostly repeats of last month's, which was leading to a mortifying minimix of the same songs in a slightly different order, so I started a new playlist I called "Juking the Stats" where I collected a bunch of new songs and listened to them on repeat to re-weight the playlist. This act of subterfuge worked! Now the playlist is mostly recent finds, many of them fresher discoveries than the last couples months! This is arguably "cheating" but it keeps the spirit of the project: compel me to find and listen to new music.

Grenadine
- actually don't remember whether this was a Discover Weekly rec or if I found it on Music Map after plugging in Sarah and the Safe Word...

Delilah
- made a playlist for a friend and was sweating which Florence song to put on it; this one finally won out over Too Much Is Never Enough and Cosmic Love, and then of course I just listened to it a lot

Sleep
- Discover Weekly

Decorated Silence
- came across this while digging through albums I had flagged but never got around to... it's good!

Appointments
- rec from a partner; felt like a good companion to Delilah ("things are gonna be bad but I'm pretending they won't be" vs. "things are gonna be okay but right now they're not")

Be Gay, Do Drugs, Hail Satan
- Discover Weekly

FALL STAT CRUNCH BAYBEE!

Since there was no release in August and I didn't have much to share in this quantifica, I decided it would be fun (for me, can't speak for you) to look at the 8 months of data I have collected and see what sense can be made from it.

Mana Year-to-Date
Went through my mana-tracking document for the full year, and this is a chart of all of it, excluding dates I simply did not have data for (e.g. days I failed to log, not tracking during my honeymoon, etc.). Notable takeaways: 1. peaks are followed by troughs, as is to be expected. 2. amplitude has increased as the year has gone on - I am working harder and then burning out more... or working harder and then taking needed rest, I guess both show up the same on the chart. 3. polynomial trendline implies we are on an upswing after a fuckin' ROUGH summer, hoping that is correct.

Patreon Year-to-Date
Compared Patreon target-to-received income. Sobering to see I have never once hit target and they are diverging more and more as the year goes on, but heartened to see the trend is maybe softening? In retrospect, I was probably too optimistic with my projections, basing them on a few abnormally-productive months; on the other hand, I was also projecting a lot more releases, so who knows how off I would've been if I'd come closer to that plan.

Song Novelty
Ranked every song on the minimixes so far on a 5-point novelty scale, with 1 being a song I already knew and 5 being a song I had never heard of and found on my own. We can see a strong stretch of finding new music in the first half of the year, and then weighting heavily towards the familiar in the past couple months. I'm guessing that second trend would correlate to the summer burnout we see in the Mana YTD chart if we were to overlay them, and both have a similar upswing towards the end.

Music Genres Year-to-Date
Using Every Noise at Once and Bandcamp, I categorized all the minimix songs by genre and made a tag cloud. Prog Metal and Pixie have strong showings, each from a single month rabbit hole, where Hip Hop, Pop, and Indie have been steadily peppered throughout. Surprised there aren't more electronic genres on here, I should remedy that in the coming months...

Randomizer List Star Ratings
Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that a randomized movie list does not have a lot of obvious trends. Mostly I'm shocked that my average rating for the films on this list is almost exactly three stars. This has been a year of discovery, both filmic and musical, but I am bummed that, on both fronts, there haven't been a ton of standouts. Past Ian who put all these films on a list did not have some sixth sense about what Present Ian would love; I don't regret any of these watches, but even my top movies are more "this is a great film" than "this is a new favorite."

Pages Read Per Month
I've been reading a lot! More as the year went on! My reading habit had been in the gutter not long ago, but I've really turned it around. I've read almost as many pages as I did in 2023 with 4 months still to go.

Definitive Ranking of Novels Read
In case anyone wants recs, here's every work of fiction I've completed in 2024 in order of how much I liked them. Color-coded with five levels: Great, Very Good, Good in Places, Not Bad But Didn't Leave A Lasting Impression, and one Disappointment. This list is heavily-weighted towards science fiction because that's been a comfort genre and I'm more into reading a lot than reading widely at the moment.

Bingo Heat Map
Hehehe, this was fun. Many of these charts will be more interesting come the end of the year, but this one... this one is interesting now because it lends itself to strategy. My Bingo Card for the year currently has several potential lines brewing, but none have more than 2 squares blacked out. So I calculated all the possible lines that could be made with the squares I've already filled and mapped which squares are most valuable to fill going forward. Currently, I2 is the most valuable square, because it would get me to 3-out-of-5 on three different axes. O5 is the second most valuable, as it gives me two 3-of-5s and one 2-of-5. G5 is emphatically the least valuable, only getting me a single 2-of-5. Now, this ignores the contents of those squares entirely; G5 may be an incredibly valuable square, but the task itself is one of the biggest longshots. And, if I can't pull that one off, then the diagonal is no longer feasible, which makes I2 less valuable. But, also, B1 is all but guaranteed to happen in the next week, and G2 is in the works, making Row 2 one of the most likely lines, thereby making I2 critical once again. And I2 is... not a longshot, but by no means easy! In conclusion: there's layers to this. The rest of the year's gonna be interesting.

That's it, folks! I'll have releases for y'all very soon. Can't wait to show them to you!