Occasionally, when I want to depress myself, I imagine I had invested in GW shares what I had spent on their products over the last thirty years (also works for Apple).

It would be reassuring if this were seen as a good start rather than drawing a line under the matter.

This is in large part why I liked the LOTR films but couldn't bear the absurd three part Hobbit: LOTR was quite congruent with my mental picture and Hobbit somehow wasn't.

They are lovely looking documents. I treasure mine. The Chamberlain's Office at the Guildhall can supply frames for them.

Yes, indeed. I say further down the thread that I would be really interested in perspectives from non-fiction authors as well (to be fair, that was outside the scope of the research I was writing about, so no criticism of the authors in saying that).

I think I've seen this movie. Suspect the real life version doesn't have as neat an ending, but hope you're doing OK.

Finally, thank you to @clemicollett.bsky.social for engaging very promptly to answer my questions. The report is definitely worth reading here:
www.mctd.ac.uk/wp-content/u...

What I really hope this report does is demonstrate that this is an important subject for further research: I'd love to see a larger, generalisable study, and also to understand the perspective of non-fiction writers (reminder: not in scope of this, so not a criticism of this research).

But those are slightly different things. Regardless, the research captures important lived experience and attitudes, which may indeed be broadly representative. But it's possibly more nuanced than some of the communication and reporting suggest, particularly if readers don't get past the headlines.

For clarity, the report is always clear about its data. But the dissemination of the research uses headlines like "half of published novelists say...", with the nuances somewhere below the fold. From a comms perspective, I understand why people don't say "half of 258 survey respondents say"...

A 2-5% sample size is by no means inappropriate for social research—but only with a random sample. As a non-probability sample, this is indicative, but it's harder to generalise out to a population.

The size of that sample isn't the issue so much. It's hard to know population size: some industry estimates suggest ~70-80k authors in the UK, @societyofauthors.bsky.social has 12.5k members, though both include non-fiction authors as well. Say 5-10k novelists as a ballpark?

The methodology section of the report doesn't give any detail on recruitment and sampling. @clemicollett.bsky.social was very responsive to a question and confirmed that recruitment included robust steps to confirm the validity of responses. But the survey data comes from a convenience sample.

The report is a mixed methods study combining focus groups, a survey, case studies, interviews and a forum. That's a great approach for exploratory and descriptive research, but it's potentially less suitable for population-level inference.

This looks like it should be accompanying a feature in early 90s NME.

Haven’t played TOV but I enjoyed Donnerschlag from the same publisher and have my eye on their other, Eastern Front Traces games. Really like VUCA Sims ethos, production values and the historical context in their rulebooks.

Thank you! Super to see you today. Thought the rest of the conference was excellent, hope you enjoyed it.

Further anecdata, and possibly not the most reliable proxy for the entire hobby, but some of my earliest gaming memories are the letters page of White Dwarf melting down discussing women in gaming. The impression was of a very male environment.

A couple of minutes before I opened this app, I announced to wife and youngest that now is the time for an extended edition rewatch. I am taking your post as serendipitous validation. 🤓