Category: Illustration

Today’s Infographic: Pie Charts of James Bond Movie Theme Singers

I was wondering what proportion of Bond theme songs were sung by somebody Welsh. Quite a few because Shirley Bassey sang several and Tom Jones sang one. There are a few basic questions about how to count things along the way though.

Weirdly when I export the graph Washington disappears as a label

Firstly, do you count Shirley Bassey once or three times? Secondly, Jack White and Alicia Keys are joint singers of Another Way to Die from Quantum of Solace. Do they both count as 1 or should they get 0.5? Thirdly, Aha, Garbage and Duran Duran (and to a lesser extent Wings) are listed on Wikipedia as the artists for their respective Bond theme songs, so should the whole band count or just the lead singer? I went with the lazy option: Bassey gets counted for each song, White and Keys are counted separately and for the bands, only the lead singer counts (which is a net gain for Scotland). Lastly, as far as I’m aware, Norway doesn’t have an equivalent state-like subdivision.

Here’s the national breakdown.

If Norway allies with the UK then they can avoid being outvoted by the USA.

Debarkle Conversations

One more of these network explorations. I tried a bit of data mining on the Puppy Kerfuffle Timeline. The idea was to pick out from entries people talking about other people or being talked about together. So John Scalzi talking about Vox Day or vice versa. A few stray non-people (or groups of people) got in the mix as well. Also Santa Claus?

The graph is undirected i.e. it doesn’t distinguish between talking and being talked about. Also, this is very much NOT about allegiances or other connections — a line joining a group is more likely to be a critic than an ally.

Blogiversary: Greatest Hits

Five years of all this nonsense but what nonsense were people reading and when? I’m down here in the archive stacks of Felapton Towers and blowing the dust off the weird old filing cabinets to find out. These posts are just the numbers-game hits rather than special favourites and often other factors drove the traffic to them.

2015

The first year out for the blog and Puppy-kerfuffling was already in full on kerfluff.

2016

2016 was the year that the unreality field started spilling out everywhere.

2017

2017 was dominated by Rabid Puppy shenanigans. In particular Vox Day’s spoiler campaign for John Scalzi’s new sci-fi trilogy.

2018

I was downloading a report from an online database the other day and I was entering a date range. I wanted to cover the whole set of records which started in 2011. So I picked 2011/1/1 as the start date and that day’s date which I typed as 2018/5/8. What? I think my brain stopped updating the year and I’ve been stuck in 2018 ever since.

The reality dysfunction was going full-on as world politics got even stranger. Meanwhile this blog was forced into self-referentiality as I got caught up in my own Sad Puppy kerbungle and then later became a Hugo Finalist.

2019

At the very start of January 2019 I considered winding down the blog. Later I decided to post something every day. I’m fickle. Surprisingly, it was the Nebula Awards that drove traffic to the blog.

2020

The year isn’t finished yet but it started on fire and followed up with a global pandemic. This is a first-quarter list but I think some of the themes for the year are clear…

Important correction from our infographic department

Felapton Towers and the Cattimothy House News Network would like to retract our recent infographic (see below) entitled “anatomy of a virus”. It has come to our attention that the labels were added by an intern who was also drunk and were not, as stated, the “latest details from the CDC”. In the interests of transparency the image is repeated below for reference.

Missing Moments in Comic Book Art: Bob Kane’s Discarded Early Concept

Reputedly, Bill Finger asked repeatedly why a giant purple cat was flying through the window until Kane agreed that a bat made more sense. Only after a further series of attempts with first a baseball bat, then a cricket bat, that a compromise was reached with a flying mammal bat, which had already been drawn into the third panel.

A Tube Map of SF&F Genres

As with any London Tube style map, distance on the map has no connection with distance in reality. Position is about how to make everything fit. I feel like it needs more stops on the big pink Fantasy circle line. Green stops allow you to change services to mainstream rail lines. Purple stops allow you to change to the horror tram services.

There is a foot tunnel between Cyber Punk and Steam Punk.