• WeirdAlex03
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    2 months ago

    I have officially done a thing.

    It’s a very early start, but hopefully communicates the idea. I’ll slowly flesh it out over the coming days, and of course you may, too. The Data sheet is going to be a lot of checkboxes for everything, which will work well for filtering, but obviously a bit hard to read and a lot of blank space. So I also designated a Display sheet, which will be purely automated to read from Data and print just the relevant stuff in simple text

    It’s currently editable by everyone. I’ve started a few other similar projects like this that were globally editable without problems, but just in case I do have the power to revert and restrict (adding data validation and protected ranges will also help)

    (also btw the evil!collectors are called the archivists)

    • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      This is great, thank you so much! I’ve spent the last hour fleshing out the characters, dividing them into subsections that hopefully make sense. There are a few currently underutilized (mostly the Empire/Coven Heads), but I included them just in case some of them make an appearance in the ongoing Hexsquad series alongside Adrian. If they don’t, they’ll probably be folded in the Misc category. Apart from that, the list should now include (most of) the characters appearing in the comics.

      We should have this posted and stickied at the top of the community!

      • WeirdAlex03
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        2 months ago

        Awesome work! I added and rearranged a few, but I’m sure that will remain in flux for a while. Now on to the rest of the fields!

        I definitely plan to make a separate post to announce it, but I figure it would probably be a good idea to at least the overall formatting done first (obviously filling the entire backlog is going to take a while)

        • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I’ve filled the form with two months-worth of Mark’s comics. Question: Is the “storyline” tab meant for the general theme like on r/TOH wiki (Angsty, “Cool”, Funny, Heartwarming), or to tie together comics that share a common story/characters but different names (such as Fight Coven and Grom Factor, for example)? I wouldn’t mind the latter, it seems more useful.

          Also, I’ve decided to tag characters based on a “tag everything that appears on the image” policy, so even characters that are shown only in the background of one frame are tagged. Drawing a line between what should be tagged and what not would get difficult otherwise. If you have a different opinion, please let me know so that I will tag them correctly in the future! :)

          • WeirdAlex03
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            28 days ago

            Finally had time to back and finish up the Display Links formula, thanks for keeping up with the comics! Google Sheets only lists all links in the cell when you click on it, not the specific link you click on, put the formatting does looks good on the cells. Also Lemmy links are now all run through https://lemmyverse.link/ to redirect to everyone’s preferred instance

            While dropping in the last few days of comics, I realize we don’t have a Timeline tag for timeskip-era when Luz and Amity are adults but not part of an ongoing storyline. It looks like you’ve just been calling those Post Finale? That might need a little review

            Contrast also calls our character listing into question now too. I’m find with listing everyone seen, even in cameos, but what if they’re completely unseen, with no dialogue, but explicitly confirmed to be in the area?

            Anyway, next I’ll (hopefully quickly) concatenate the full list of characters into one cell for the Display page, then start building out the Locations section on Data

            • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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              28 days ago

              While dropping in the last few days of comics, I realize we don’t have a Timeline tag for timeskip-era when Luz and Amity are adults but not part of an ongoing storyline. It looks like you’ve just been calling those Post Finale? That might need a little review

              You have a point. I suppose it would be best to use “Next generation” (or maybe change the name to “Adults/Next gen” so that it covers both), as they are theoretically the same time period.

              Contrast also calls our character listing into question now too. I’m find with listing everyone seen, even in cameos, but what if they’re completely unseen, with no dialogue, but explicitly confirmed to be in the area?

              I’d say no, because that opens a huge can of worms. I think it would get too difficult to take into account who might be in the general area, and in some cases, it would make for a messy tag system, mostly in established storylines where multiple pages happen in the same location/time frame, but characters drop in and out of view (such as aLHoB or Grom Factor). For example, the students fighting Kikimora in aLHoB change every other page (the Fear chars only appear in the beginning and the end of the fight, Jerbo only in the end, Boscha appears in the beginning and in the aftermath, etc…). If someone is trying to look for all the appearances of a certain character, it’s going to get real messy really soon if the tagging gets made on a “who is in the vicinity” policy.

              Tagging only characters that physically appear in the page will also be useful to run some stats on chars appearances after we’re done! I’d be really curious to see the results of a list of chars sorted by number of appearances.

              • WeirdAlex03
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                27 days ago

                I suppose it would be best to use “Next generation” (or maybe change the name to “Adults/Next gen” so that it covers both), as they are theoretically the same time period.

                Yeah good point. We already have enough ambiguity for Human Realm stuff between before or after S3 (unless Hunter is seen), we don’t need to think about or draw a line between before or after Ayzee. The Storyline tag can cover that

                I’d say no, because that opens a huge can of worms.

                Agreed. We’ll just leave those to mentions in the Synopsis.

                Tagging only characters that physically appear in the page will also be useful to run some stats on chars appearances after we’re done! I’d be really curious to see the results of a list of chars sorted by number of appearances.

                Yeah that’ll be fun! I think the next step after filling out locations will be a general contributing guidelines/notes to explain stuff like Timeskip=>Adult/Next Gen and how we distinguish before/after S3 in the Human Realm (how do we do that? just assume one or the other unless its obvious?). That can then become the main source of data for Series/Timeline/Storyline options, and I can add extra stats there

                In other news, Chars and Locs and now listed on the main page, because we now have the start of location data! Same format for both. Haven’t bothered sorting locs yet as we figure out what we’ll need

                • Aielman15@lemmy.world
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                  27 days ago

                  Timeskip=>Adult/Next Gen and how we distinguish before/after S3 in the Human Realm (how do we do that? just assume one or the other unless its obvious?). That

                  Yeah, I’ve had this problem a bunch of times :/ I just try to infer as many info as possible from the page:

                  • If the Hexsquad is in Luz’s house, it’s almost certainly set during S2-S3.
                  • Certain characters make it obvious, such as Flapjack (pre-S3), Waffles and Bean (post-S3), Masha (post-S3).
                  • If the characters don old outfits, it could mean that it’s set in that season (although it’s not always the case). For this purpose, Luz’s scar and King’s cracked skull/glued horn can also help identify the timeline.
                  • If a page references multiple time periods (such as “He Tripped.” and “Phases”) I tag the most recent one.

                  If it’s genuinely impossible to distinguish between pre and post-S3, I just default to post-finale. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than leaving the box blank, I guess. I thought about introducing a “non specified” timeline box, but I feared that it would become unwieldy and a bit confusing for some people.

                  • WeirdAlex03
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                    10 days ago

                    So as I’ve been working on adding additional sheets to explain tagging and add more details about Series/Timelines/Storylines. You can see the first of those now, and the others will be pretty similar. New Series/Timelines/Stroylines should be added to their respective sheets and then they will automatically be added as options to the dropdowns

                    I also added a little extra conditional formatting to highlight missing data

                    Discussion from today's comic

                    I was originally planning to include the occasional non-comic in the sheet too, co-opting the Series label to add a “Non-comic” option. But the Rain piece from the other day kinda messes that up by being both non-comic and part of an official series. The other tags are obviously also applicable. Maybe a new column just as a “non-comic?” checkbox? Or should we just leave mentioning that to the Synopsis? I’m leaning towards the checkbox

                    Also how should we tag alternate versions of the characters. Adding a Beta!Luz/Lucia column would be easy, but that’s a slippery slope leading to why not Witch!Luz and then Human! versions of everyone else for WAH, which is obviously way too much. And a simple dropdown to toggle variants wont work because of that one comic that I cant find where Luz and Lucia had to work together to stop a cross-dimensional demon

                    WAH Witch!Luz is based on Beta!Luz, so maybe only add a set of Beta! options and we don’t consider if theyre witch or human? Obviously this is just for tagging and any more specifics can be added in Synopsis if needed

                    Lastly there’s also the question of standardizing phrasing between i.e. Beta!Luz vs Lucia. Not all alternate versions of characters have names like Lucia (and those arent MM cannon anyway), so the “Variant!Name” format is the obvious choice. Hey I like when these questions are easy for once! lol