#exponential decay

[bizarrobrain]

"Skeletal Bifurcation" by Perilaxe Occlusion - From "Exponential Decay" (2020)

[linkspooky]

Continuing on with a writing ask (I’m the same one that originally asked which characters you needed up liking when writing + which you found difficult to write)…

Since you’ve made OCs for your fics, which OCs did you enjoy writing the most? And which one was the most difficult for you to write?

Commission by @/ JJIMCMSN

Michi is the easiest of my ocs to write. He is my baby darling boygirl. Look how many outfits I've dressed him up in. The reason he is the easiest is twofold he is the oc I spent the longest time developing. He existed for over a year backstory and all ever since right around the hidden inventory arc was running in the manga.

Fandom-wise I was way more interested in the kids in the previous generation (the SSS Trio) and wanted a character to explore them by being another student at Jujutsu High during that generation. Second, I wanted Geto's family to be more explored because we know very little about the members who are not Mimiko and Nanako so Michi was created around the concept of someone who defects from Jujutsu High to join Geto's family, and therefore interacts with both Gojo and Geto.

The second reason he is the easiest, is because so much of him is modeled after Gojo his character voice is roughly the same. Michi dialogue is the same as Gojo dialogue, it's just phrased more politely. They are both characters who say whatever comes to mind and often have trouble perceiving other people's emotions in reaction to what they say. Gojo is the easiest character to write, so Michi who is his double in the story, the moon to his sun essentially comes naturally to me too.

Michi is just also once again the character I have put the most thought into, and planned out his arc. I know him when he was seventeen years old as a student in Jujutsu High. I know him and how he interacted with Geto's family for those ten years he lived with Mimiko and Nanako. For example, Michi never believed in Geto's dream, he only wanted to remain by Geto's side because he believed in some small way that he could course correct Geto. One thing he often did was intervene and try to calm Geto down whenever Geto tried to attack children who were not jujutsu sorcerers. Michi also believed that Geto is the only person powerful enough, to have stood a chance of achieving his goal of just destroying Jujutsu Society point blank and forcing them to rebuild.

(Michi is the alternative to Gojo, if he had Gojo's powers he would have just slaughtered the elders and let someone else take control from there, which is pretty extreme but Michi's belief is child abuse is the utlimate evil that can never be tolerated and should be punished and made so it can never happen again. An institution that exists at the expense of children cannot be reformed in any way, only destroyed. Basically Gojo thinks any radical change wouldn't stick and wants to make the next generation strong enough to take power and replace the elders, Michi has no patience and wants them gone now).

Then, in the third stage of his life post Geto's death, Michi basically has lost his purpose and place of belonging so he finds himself again in creating a place that is safe for other lost children like Mimiko, Nanako, Junpei.

Like, see it's easy to write an OC when you have this much of them planned out down to the smallest detail. When you have their character arc, flaws, and where you want them to end up at the end of the story all mapped out. (Ideally, Michi will eventually be a teacher again b/c working with children is what his character centers around). 

The OC that was the hardest for me to write was Ito Rie from Werewolf, and that is because they're actually not my OC originally. They belonged to a friend who was basically like "can I create an oc for your universe? Okay, well she's a really dirty kid, she used to live with her grandma but now she's a runaway kid, she cuts things with her kendo sword she swings around. Michi found her on the side of the road and gave her food. And also she's a lesbian. And also I think she'd be friends with Mai."

They did not really give me a lot of details beyond that so I had to spend a lot of time asking her questions, and then giving her ideas for what Ito's backstory could be, and how she became a curse user in the context of the story, and what happened to her grandma that caused her to be homeless and continually on the run from other people. It was all those questions I asked my friend about this character that made Werewolf come about, which was essentially Ito Rie's origin story and how she became a runaway.

The other thing that made Rie tricky is I decided to do the possession with Noranso plotline, which meant I had to write a character who was posessed but this was a twist and not obvious right away. Which means I essentially have to write a character acting very noticeably off (hence why she goes by weird girl) and unsettling for a girl, and at the same time like, idk have her have dialogue, have her interact with other characters, have her do stuff without giving away the twist too early. It was just a weird line to balance. The other thing is that Ito is posessed for most of the story, so I had to establish what Possessed! Ito acted like and what Normal!Ito acted like. The Ito we were talking with for much of the story is not the real ITO! TM so I had to find a completely different character voice for pre-possession ITO! and also she only appears really briefly in her first person segments so she had to be someone unique and striking like. You had to get a grip of what Ito was like before she was posessed within that limited screen time. 

I write characters by their voice, basically how they talk, how they think and so characters with clear voices like Michi are easy for me. Characters who are more muddled, which is Ito Rie by design because she's a victim of possesion and she's also a mystery to the girls of the main cast are harder because they're not so clear. Also, in general the more time I spend before planning a story the easier that original character is to write because I have lots of details to inform me how they would act in certain situations.

[deadzombiebrains]

[10oclockdot]

Max Tohline, Half-Life, 2017 algorithm, lottery tickets, tape, adhesive; as installed: 45x66 in

What's the half-life of money spent on lottery tickets? To find out, I devised a simple algorithmic project.

Procedure Step 1. Purchase lottery tickets and hang them on a wall. (For this project, I purchased 50 tickets for the June 12, 2017 drawing of the Missouri Lottery's Lucky for Life game: five each from ten different gas stations, supermarkets, and liquor stores in Rolla, MO. By buying from ten different stores, I ensured color and design variation in the paper they were printed on, adding some slight visual interest.) Step 2. After the drawing, cash in any that win. Step 3. Return to Step 1 until no tickets win and the project ends.

Research Conceptual artists have made stochastic works involving money before (cf. Les Levine’s work, as recorded here in Lucy Lippard’s 6 Years), but I haven’t encountered one where the lottery is the mechanic and the rate of loss is the specific object of study. According the Missouri Lottery's website, the chances of winning any prize on Lucky for Life is 1 in 7.8. If one were to purchase an unlimited number of tickets, such that one could expect to win all the possible prizes at statistically-expected rates, the expected value of the $2 ticket would be $1.15. Since Lucky for Life drawings happen twice weekly, the half-life of money dumped into an unlimited number of tickets would be 4.375 days (assuming instantaneous lump-sum payouts immediately "re-invested"). But if you were to buy a small number of tickets (like I did), such that it would only be reasonable to anticipate winning some combination of the three lowest-value prizes (their odds of winning are given as 1/15, 1/32, and 1/50), the expected value of a $2 ticket drops to just 44 cents. That corresponds to a half-life of 1.614 days, which is the half-life expected for this project.

Results Of the 50 tickets purchased, 6 won a prize. Of the 9 tickets purchased with that prize money, only 1 won a prize, which furnished money to buy 2 more tickets, both of which lost. 50 tickets became 9 tickets in half a week, then 9 tickets became 2 tickets in another half-week. That works out to an average half life of 1.521 days, or a little less than the hypothetical half-life suggested by the odds given on the Missouri Lottery's website.

Discussion In hindsight, I think I did this project to disgust myself with how quickly I could piss away a hundred bucks playing the lottery. But in the back of my mind, I harbored this irrational hope that buying 50 tickets at once actually made it likely that I might win a big prize. I fantasized about having to abandon the project halfway through because I hit the jackpot. Of course that didn't happen; of course I wasted the money. But the fantasy is powerful and hard to shake, despite having a math minor and even after doing this project. Whenever I stop for gas, I still want to drop a few bucks on lotto tickets, even though I know what an irrational, wasteful decision that is.           Call it the flip side of the law of large numbers: if a large enough sample size of randomly-behaving operators (molecules of a gas, radioactive atoms, or lottery tickets, take your pick) behaves perfectly predictably in the aggregate, then it's reasonable to expect that a small sample size will behave unpredictably. That doesn't mean it's likely to win (it's not), but for some reason it makes it easier for us to believe... that it might? It's like the mother who (irrationally) thinks her child might be president or a star athlete someday but (rationally) looks at all their classmates and knows none of them will make it. I think that most of us understand at least some aspect of the law of large numbers, we just have trouble placing ourselves within it.           What’s more, celebrity culture inundates us with survivorship bias. By flooding us with images of the wealthy and successful, media lead us to overestimate our own chances of success. We even see it in the natural world. For billions of years, death has sifted unfit organisms and species so well that now the biosphere teems with incredibly well-evolved creatures. On the one hand, the plenitude of life may trick us into thinking that life is easy, or inevitable. On the other hand, the apparent design of it all may beguile us into assuming the presence of a creator. We only see the living, none of the innumerable dead, and we draw misguided conclusions. Half-Life inverts that selection bias by showing only the dead.

[math-studyblr]

13.1 & 13.2 - Exponential Growth and Decay Functions

[math-journal2]

<— Unit 23 — Unit 24: G & D — Unit 25 —>

Unit 24: Growth & Decay

Part 1 —>

Review: Basic exponential

Basics

b^+ functions

Key point: (0,1)

Common pivot point

Important to know when shifting

.

Discrete Compound Interest

Related terms:

Quarterly = compounded 4 times per year

Semiannually = compounded 2 times year

Biannually = compounded 2 times per year

Continuous Growth

Compound Continuous interest

Page 63

[math-journal2]

<— Unit 9 — Unit 10: Logs — Unit 🍎—>

Unit 10: Logs + 2^x

Related: Graphing Logs

Part 1 —>

Logs

Memorize

Log Properties

Expanding Logs

Solving for x

Misc

*Don’t need to know this but it makes communicating easier.

Page 28

[math-journal]

Decay and Growth