Postcrossing

  • March 9, 2019

Recently I became a member of Postcrossing, a community of deltiologists that send and receive postcards to each other. It’s extremely simple: you’re given a random address to send a card to, and when it arrives another stranger will get your address and send you a card.

Each card is assigned a code, and when it arrives I enter the code to verify receipt. It’s a simple and effective system.

At first you can only send/receive five at a time but this increases with use. I’m up to seven now. While you don’t have any control over the recipients, you can elect to exclude your country which I have.

At first I wondered if it was weird to send cards to strangers but it’s not at all. I can write about anything and I do, but I often include mundanities such as the weather or what I just ate! Here’s a message that was written to me:

It’s fun seeing people’s preferences (one woman today liked cards featuring buckets, another requested no cards with toucans on them!) and trying to pick cards they like. Mostly though I’ve been sending Albany cards.

Of course another nice aspect of getting cards from all over the world are the stamps! In my profile I’ve requested animal/nature stamps and already people seem to have obliged.

I’ve been doing this only two months and have received fifteen cards. Living in the USA is a disadvantage since it quickly became apparent how slow our mail is. Postcrossing tracks all sorts of statistics that show, for instance, that it takes about 8 days for a card I send to arrive in Germany but 16 days for theirs to arrive here.

Although I’m still relatively new to the service I’m loving it so far. Some users have sent/received thousands of cards! Whether I ever get to that stage who knows, but for now I’m just happy whenever a new card arrives from distant shores 🙂

  • Posted in Collecting
  • Robert

Robotclaw Analyzed

  • March 2, 2019

With big thanks to Bernard – a maestro of data science -many secrets of this blog can now be revealed! Here then, a peek into the details of 13.5 years of ‘Robotclaw’…

Above you can see (click on it for a larger version) a plot of the post and word count averages since blog creation. Ignoring 2006 and 2019 (both partial years of data) you can see that the average number of posts has been increasing steadily for a decade but the word count while drifting down does so at a slower pace.

All told there have been 1820 blog posts since the blog was created. That’s an average of 130/year or just under one every 3 days. I reached my posting peak in 2008 with 300 posts (!), but in recent years the average is under 100/year. This is in-part intentional, where I have attempted to focus on fewer more interesting posts rather than a simple chronologue of my model-making and game-playing exploits!

I’ve typed 178,229 words in those 1820 posts, with an average of about 99 words/post. To put this in perspective, here are the lengths of some well known books:

Animal Farm – 29,966 words
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy – 46,333 words
The Great Gatsby – 47,094 words
The Hobbit – 95,356 words
To Kill A Mockingbird – 100,388 words
Robotclaw – 178,229 words
The Fellowship Of The Ring – 187,790 words
Mody Dick – 209,197
War and Peace – 561,304 words
King James Bible – 783,137 words

So we can say I’m in Tolkein territory! A printed novel contains about 275 words per page, so if printed without comments and images, the blog would require about 650 pages!

If you’re curious about the longest posts, here are the top 3:
How Times Change (1571 words)
Shining Forth (The History) (1380 words)
The Vault of Helgorim (957 words)

Now let’s move on to the actual words…

The above is a ‘wordcloud’ of many of the most commonly used words on this blog (click on it to see detail). In total, the written vocabulary here includes 20,705 unique words and of those, the ten most commonly used (in order) are: game, time, day, games, days, bit, shot, hours, cards and trip. And just because it’s cute, the eleventh most commonly used word is ‘kls‘ 🙂

Game, time, and day are each used over 1000 times (statistically game is represented in about 70% of posts!) and games is only slightly less than 1000. None of this is surprising: you all know about my game obsession and the other two (time and day) often occur in trip-related posts which have become a hallmark of this blog.

Yossie was mentioned 48 times across 35 posts, and thus placed just outside the top 50 words.

As for bigrams (two word combinations) the three most commonly used have been ‘star wars‘, ‘monster hunter‘ and ‘video games‘. I’m starting to think this is some sort of otaku blog!!

Of the 20,705 unique words, the most common word size was 7 letters, and the longest was 24. Bernard didn’t provide examples of each (what’s the 24-letter one?) but I think ‘monster’ must have contributed to the 7-letter median.

As for that vocabulary count… well it’s high. Here are a few others to compare (all these include proper nouns):

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – 2766 unique words
Pride and Prejudice – 6424 unique words
Oliver Twist – 10,419 unique words
King James Bible – 10,867 unique words
Robotclaw – 20,705 unique words
The Collected Works of Shakespeare – 31,534 words

So from the above, I think it’s appropriate to rate me halfway between The Bible and Shakespeare. (Incidentally almost half of Shakespeare’s 31k words were only used once, and depending on who you believe he actually invented anywhere up to about 1500 words, several hundred of which have never been reused by anyone and the meaning of some of which is still in question!)

A high vocabulary isn’t necessarily a good thing if you want an audience. The fewer unique words the easier something is to read, so I imagine the average reader may be a bit glossy-eyed by some of my content (for more reasons that this)!

The above chart is taken directly from the data Bernard sent me, and shows the average sentiment of this blog. Happily it’s positive! In fact his conclusion was that the writings on this blog are in fact 78% positive and are becoming more positive over time!

The most common emotions in my writings are apparently ‘joy’, ‘trust’ and ‘anticipation’ with the least common ‘disgust’, ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’. Come to Robotclaw to cheer yourself up!

If you’re curious, here are the top three most positive blog posts:
Dream Gear Showdown (worth reading again for the awards ceremony alone!)
The Heart Of The Cards (features a ‘young Florry’ appearance!)
The Day Jesus, The Devil, King Arthur and The Magical Emperor of Light, Nero Griffth, Made My Dream Come True! (I’ll never surpass that post title…)

And here are the top three least positive:
The Vault of Helgorim (It’s a pretty grim adventure!)
Corporal Punishment (controversial!)
Review: Galactica 1980 (I literally laughed myself to tears re-reading this just now)

It’s mind-blogging to think of all this I’ve written and uploaded over the years. Every now and then I go back and re-read posts and forget writing them, and are often entertained myself. I still love the blog and still love writing it so you can look forward to much more in the future, and I promise I’ll try to stay positive and keep delivering you the high-vocabulary, star wars and monster hunter themed content you know and love 😉

Farewell, Beloved Yossie

  • February 15, 2019

Yesterday suddenly and unexpectedly we lost our sweet cat Yossie to a presumed heart attack. She was twelve.

Yossie entered our lives as a rescue cat and she was apparently found by a dumpster. She was tiny and cute and immediately filled our home with her energy.

I bonded with her quickly and she became ‘my’ cat. She was as interested in and comfortable with me as I was her.

She seemed to change overnight from a sleek kitten to a giant cat but she never lost her looks. Everyone that met her commented on how pretty she was, and how expressive her face. I think this was partially because of her ‘mascara’ – the white fur that surrounded her eyes.

Yossie’s been all over this blog her entire life. Most any activity I did she involved herself in, and there’s endless photos of her playing with legos or assisting me with model kits or just resting in my lap while I played games. If I was interested in something, so was she.

She had her own routines as well. Here you see her propping herself up on the wall to wash her belly. She also had a daily ‘follow the sun’ routine where she’d move around the house with the sun shining through the windows. She loved her toys, her treats, and her naps.

Yossie was always gentle and sweet. Never angry, never sad. Always forgiving. Always loving. I’ll never forget her face, and her meows, and how she brightened up my life.

Yossie died in her sleep, curled up on the couch where I usually sit. She looked peaceful, and beautiful. We’re very sad now, because the hole she leaves will not easily fill, but at the same time I know Yossie had a wonderful life and was loved absolutely.

She would often dream while she slept, twitching and quietly meowing. I hope her last dream was a happy one, in which she was having fun with her toys and eating treats and with me – her ‘dad’ – happily by her side 🙁