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Things 2024 Q1: Dancing, Temp tracks, Creativity

LEGO is doing okay

This nice visualisation of LEGO group annual revenue shows that after a lull in the late 2010’s, there has been incredible growth since 2020 – presumably somewhat assisted by pandemic lockdowns?

Not shown – revenue growth flattened in 2023

As someone who enjoys LEGO but is running out of storage space, I’ve been trying out BrickBorrow for the last year, where for a subscription (and some postage each time) you can borrow LEGO sets.

A well-designed feature restricts big sets to those who have been subscribed for 3 months – this shows reliability, and also helps with availability of those sets. Now that BrickBorrow have shifted to a Royal Mail sticker postage method, and added a filter on the sets to only show those that are available, I recommend it!

£915 of LEGO I got to build for £235… but had to send back. Worth it!

I Am Not Left-Handed

This is the name of a trope where a character reveals they were previously fighting with a self-imposed handicap, which they then shed to fight at their true power. This is a classic technique for shallow power-fantasy stories, but despite that I find it incredibly compelling every time.

My favourite concentrated example of it is this (now very old!) Anime Music Video which edits together a particular fight from Naruto, which I also appreciate for how it establishes a rooting interest in one of the combatants without any dialogue:

Temp Tracks in film

In this episode of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos break down the way in which ‘safe’ creative choices around music in the Marvel films has led to a weaker overall effect:

Towards the end they highlight the problem of the ‘Temp Track’: a piece of film is edited to a suitable existing piece of music, but the film-makers work with that version for so long they become wedded to the way it sounds, so when they eventually commission original music, they request something almost identical. In a spin-off video, EFAP show a lot of examples.

The opposite of this is Tom Tykwer’s method (director of Run Lola Run (1998) ), in which the soundtrack is composed first. You can hear a bit about it in this segment of the making of The Matrix Resurrections, and it does seem very effective.

While we’re on the topic, I personally greatly enjoyed The Matrix Resurrections (2021) for it’s metatextual resonance rather than literal content, apparently in marked contrast to most people. But that is a story for another time.

Dancing at the end of films

A Bollywood staple, after the film reaches its narrative conclusion, even if it’s not a musical and there has been no dancing before, the film ends with the whole cast performing an elaborate dance number (TV Trope: Dance Party Ending). This can have a fascinating effect on how you feel about the film as a whole, sometimes redeeming antagonists, bringing back characters who died, or just providing an emotional catharsis after an otherwise tense time.

Unfortunately I suspect that citing my favourite Western films that do this is also a strange kind of spoiler. So instead I will recommend to you several films that I have seen recently, at least one of which uses this to good effect, but all of which I think are worth watching for one reason or another. Some will even be improved by you thinking there might be a dance at the end, even if there isn’t!

  • Knight and Day (2010), Disney+, a strange clash of genres that works great… some of the time
  • Labyrinth (1986)
  • Medusa Deluxe (2022), a ‘single-take’ hairdressing competition murder mystery
  • Saltburn (2023), directed by Emerald Fennell, whose previous film Promising Young Woman (2022) I also recommend… for adults that like ambiguous protagonists
  • The Marvels (2023), Disney+, MCU take some creative risks! Some of which work!
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
  • White Noise (2022), Netflix, weirder and less ‘fun’ than the trailer implies (but I still recommend it)
  • The Zone of Interest (2023)

Dancing in a fursuit

Probably best to jump in with no context and watch this one-minute clip, which annoyingly I can’t embed so you will have to actually click on it:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/L03td6_rOvk

Wow! What the heck was that? This ad-laden article lays out the whole story. Gintan is some kind of K-pop star in his own right, but is now known for performing at ‘Random Dance’ events in this very distinctive fursuit. In these events, clips from K-Pop songs with popular choreography are played, and anyone who knows the routine jumps into the centre to perform it. There’s a delightfully over-academic essay about these events here.

What’s really impressive is that not only has Gintan memorised so many of these routines, and not only can he perform them with incredible precision and panache on demand, he does all of this while wearing a heavy fursuit – which is like a really fun version of the ‘I Am Not Left-Handed’ trope described above!

On top of that, the slightly serious expression on the suit is a great contrast with the frivolousness of the whole thing, and it always brings a smile to my face.

Find lots more Gintan footage like this with this Youtube search.

The Meta-Problem of Consciousness

Let’s get a bit more serious for a moment.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a philosophical one: to use Wikipedia’s summary, it asks why and how do we experience qualia, phenomenal consciousness, and subjective experiences? Related questions: where does consciousness reside? Is it a quantum effect? Is it separate from our physical forms in some way?

I never found this problem convincing at all. Why would we expect consciousness to feel any different to the way it actually does? Literally our only reference case is how we experience it, on what grounds can we say this is surprising?

I first read about this some decades ago, so I was delighted to find that in 2018 philosopher David Chalmers proposed a more precise and slightly sassy formulation of my line of thinking: the “Meta-problem of Consciousness”. This is “the problem of explaining why we think that there is a [hard] problem of consciousness.”

Yes! That does indeed seem to be the more pressing problem.

The Temp Track that went well

I know of one example of a film that used a temp track to edit a key scene, and (in my opinion) this actually produced an excellent final result. Even as someone quite averse to spoilers, in this particular case I don’t think reading about it – or even watching the scene on its own – actually spoils the film!

However, if you worry even more about spoilers than me, you might not want to know about it. So, just know that it is from one of the films listed above, I’ll be talking about it after the extended Thing about creativity-over-time below, and it is the last Thing of this episode so you can easily skip it if you want. Be ready!

Creativity over time: productivity and scope

I’m very interested in the creative process. The brain is a machine that can come up with ideas or whole creative works, but the methods by which you can best achieve that are not obvious.

When it comes to long-form works this is particularly tricky. Here’s a segmentation I came up with for thinking about this:

Planning style: Plan in advance vs. Freestyle
Routine style: Fixed schedule vs. When it’s ready

The pro/con on these is pretty clear, at least for narrative works.

Plan in advance
Pro: A solid overall story that wraps up satisfyingly (even if you have to alter it a bit as you go)
Con: Characters may not act consistently as you’re forcing them to hit story beats

Freestyle
Pro: Characters and situations evolve naturally
Con: Plot may spiral out of control and not go anywhere

Fixed schedule
Pro: Progress is made consistently, can retain and build an audience
Con: Quality may suffer

When it’s ready
Pro: Maximise quality
Con: Easy to put off and polish indefinitely

If you know me, you know what’s coming next… a consideration of the four combinations!

The four approaches to ongoing narrative

As with any classification of creative works, some of this is subjective or debatable for many reasons. Regardless, here’s some examples:

Plan in advance, fixed schedule
Star Wars original trilogy (sort-of), Babylon 5, Breaking Bad.

Plan in advance, when it’s ready
The Gentleman Bastards book series

Freestyle, fixed schedule
Questionable Content, Star Wars sequel trilogy, Lost

Freestyle, when it’s ready
Game of Thrones, Dresden Codak, Confinement animation

Now, just from writing down the first examples I could think of, some very natural patterns emerge.

A plot planned in advance and delivered to a fixed schedule has produced some of the most beloved completed works there are.

In opposition to that, Freestyle and When it’s Ready has produced works that I think have an even more intense fandom (as it maximises quality), but frequently slow down and stall for one reason or another.

Freestyle with a fixed schedule generally seems like a bad idea, but over long time periods works in a sort of ‘soap opera’ format.

Plan in advance, release when ready seems to be very rare, and seems intuitively the most likely to become a victim of procrastination / anxiety / writer’s block stalling progress.

Some case studies in slowed progress

Game of Thrones (or properly titled, the ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series) is perhaps the apex example of ‘Freestyle, when it’s ready’ slowing to a crawl (or possible halt). Here’s a chart showing the release date and length of each book, running up to the present day when ‘The Winds of Winter’ has not yet come out.

To be clear, I don’t consider this a failing. I think the books are as well-loved as they are precisely because this method of production maximises quality and character. However, expectations for a timely finish should be held quite low.

A recent example was shared with me by Laurence: Confinement, a series of animations based on the SCP Foundation (referenced in Things November 2022). These had an even more dramatic stall: episode 7 was extremely popular and drove many to support the creator’s Patreon. However, about 3.5 years later the creator admitted they didn’t have it in them to make episode 8 any more and formally closed all their social channels. (There’s a lot more drama to that, which you can read about here).

Here’s how those releases looked, running the x-axis to the point when the project was officially cancelled:

In what is (I think) an example of the rare “Planned in advance, release when ready”, the Bee and Puppycat animation managed to reach a pretty satisfying conclusion (so far) about 9 years after it began – with an astonishing 83% of the run-time dropping all at once at the very end:

The slowness of early releases was due to a very small team working on the animation. Then a series of complicated licensing delays and disasters conspired to delay later releases. But in the end, a soft reboot / series 2 eventually dropped all at once on Netflix in September 2022.

I’ll tell you why Bee and Puppycat is so good another time, but for now just know that when I audited all 50+ in-jokes I share with Clare, this series accounted for more of them than anything else.

While less narrative in nature, the web comic Hyperbole and a Half had a very prolonged hiatus. In the dangerous “Freestyle, release when it’s ready” category, but without the burden of an overarching narrative, artist Allie Brosh had published a series of excellent and very personal hybrid comic/narratives, from 2009-2010. Output slowed in 2011 due to mental health issues, a medical condition, and a focus on turning the content into a book. Things seemed to end with the book coming out in October 2013 and at the same time the truly excellent “Menace” strip being published (shortly after the Bee and Puppycat pilot aired).

Then, nothing, for a very long time. This was also quite concerning given the prior comic was a very personal one about coming to terms (perhaps?) with depression. On the other hand, author Allie Brosh had said “In the world of writing internet content, there’s all this talk of “maintaining an audience” and “staying on the radar,” but I’d rather just work really hard for a really long time on one thing that I feel really good about publishing.”

So it was that a sequel book “Solutions and Other Problems”, announced in 2015, eventually came out in September 2022, 9 years after the last published work (and also around the time the Netflix Bee and Puppycat series finally dropped, as it happens). The content of that book follows the previous form, and also details some of the things that happened to Brosh in the intervening years, and the reason for the gap in public output becomes devastatingly clear. I highly recommend both books.

Finally, in that rare “Plan in advance, release when ready” category, Scott Lynch published The Lies of Locke Lamora in 2006. Nick recommended it to me, and I enjoyed it quite a lot, but it seemed like the author liked world-building a little too much. As the first in a planned series of 7 books called the ‘Gentleman Bastard’ series, I decided to wait until the series finished before reading on.

A second book appeared in 2007, a third in 2013… and at the time of writing, nothing else.

Scott Lynch wrote very candidly in 2022 about what has been going on. He has in fact been writing very productively, but a kind of anxiety is holding him back from publishing any of it, including updates about how it is going. (As a Things reader you probably enjoy ‘meta’ things, so you should read that post).

Here’s the point where we get meta about it right here: I recognise that problem because that is exactly what happened to me since 2020 (when a pandemic happened, funnily enough). I have 4 rather long and pretty much complete blog posts about various topics, none of which I felt confident enough about to post. This hasn’t happened to me before!

As a Things reader you might also recognise that even aside from that, the rate of Things posts gets slower and slower (with the surprise exception of this one… at the time I’m writing this sentence, anyway). That is something I find a bit harder to explain.

Having written all the above, it does make me wonder: should I commit to a schedule for Things? Wouldn’t once a quarter be a completely reasonable one to try?

Let’s say this is the 2024 Quarter 1 things and see how things go from there!

The Temp Track that Went Well: not a spoiler, but might be if you’re very worried in which case don’t read this

Are you ready?

So this is about a scene that happens at the very end of one of the films in my list above.

Specifically a scene where everyone starts dancing

That’s enough line spacing, so here we go. Perhaps you are familiar with the LCD Soundsystem’s 2005 song “Daft Punk is Playing in my House”. It seems to be their 3rd most popular song on Spotify, and 2nd most popular song on Youtube. It is rather repetitive but has a very compelling hook:

(The music video references the Things-favourite Michel Gondry-directed music video to Daft Punk’s “Around the World”, another repetitive but compelling song).

So at the end of White Noise (2022), there is a scene where the characters visit the excellently set-dressed 80’s supermarket and everyone there starts dancing as the credits roll. Incidentally, this tipped the movie over from something I thought was interesting-but-a-bit-weird into excellent.

LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Daft Punk is Playing in my House’ was used as the temp track for this scene – and indeed was the track the dancing was choreographed and performed to, which ordinarily I would say is going a bit too far for a temp track. However, here’s the twist: they commissioned LCD Soundsystem themselves to write a new track to play over the scene instead.

I had previously written about how fans of a band often cling to the past and are less keen (at least initially) on new musical directions, with the example of the audience response to a DJ Shadow gig (“Artistic Stasis or Death!”). So it seems like an outrageously bold thing to ask a band to make a new song so specifically similar to a well-loved old one.

And the beauty of it is, LCD Soundsystem did it. They made a new track – “new body rhumba” – that for me is even better than DPIPIMH from 17 years earlier, and is completely perfect for this scene in the movie. You can listen to it here or just watch that scene itself (accepting that this is perhaps more of a spoiler, although not really given how loose the rules of continuity are when it comes to Dance Party Endings).

Side-note, this may just seem weird and boring without the context of the film leading up to it, or even with it since everything is subjective. But anyway, enjoy!

  • Transmission ends
Categories
Special

Things August 2017: Archive Adventures – part 2

Last time I shared the first half of the exciting archive of historic unused Things. In this second half, I’ll cover music, games, writing, and some data visualisation. Enjoy!

Video/Audio

I was collecting examples of music where I felt the production process was the main contributor to the quality of the song (rather than the songwriting or performance), examples being Britney Spears – Toxic, Mark Ronson – God Put a Smile on Your Face, and the Space Channel 5 theme tune. Then I wondered if actually I just like crisp brass and distorted orchestral sounds, and have no ear for production at all, so wasn’t sure whether I could meaningfully comment. But listen to those songs as a set and see what you think!

Putting a record of important sounds from earth in a spacecraft and shooting it out of the solar system is pretty speculative (although I’d argue we don’t know enough about the parameters in the Drake equation or the full potential of technology in this universe to know just how speculative) – but is also a profoundly optimistic and beautiful act, so I’m really glad we did it.

Some trivia that hilariously undermines the beauty of the gesture: EMI refused permission for The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” to be included; and the engravings showing what humans look like (naked) were actually censored and therefore inaccurate.

Copyright issues have always made it challenging to listen to the full Voyager track listing on earth, but the copyright-subverting hydra that is YouTube solves this problem, and I highly recommend making time to appreciate the playlist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhuq9rNO_FQ&list=PLA5Z0m2JKyVJUgkMG08WP8KsAvLrjfkjP

[Haha, no – that’s dead. Try this youtube search – T.M. 7/4/21]

And this just in, with a title that sets expectations perfectly, another candidate for music-to-share-with-the-galaxy: Duel of the Fates on Trombones

Games

I previously wrote about game-maker Jason Rohrer in Things 121 (specifically on Chain World, a game intended to become a religion). In 2014 he released The Castle Doctrine, a game about gun-ownership through the medium of PvP house-security design and burglary. Players design a secure ‘house’, with the restriction that it must be possible to break into without tools; they then try to break into other player’s houses to steal loot, and then store that loot in their own house and hope their design keeps other thieves out. Total loot owned is public, so a nice feedback loop emerges where a more successful player will attract more burglary attempts.

The challenge for such a game design is you need to come up with creative opportunities and restrictions that will emergently lead to players creating a huge range of fascinating house-designs. I particularly enjoyed the systems-design reasoning at work in Rohrer’s post on some of the design changes he had to make in response to players converging on clever (but boring) solutions.

In mobile games, the mind-bogglingly successful Clash of Clans (and its many clones) operates on a similar basis with (very) light real-time-strategy gameplay, but the strategic variety seems ultimately quite weak. I’m more impressed by King of Thieves, also operating on the same idea but with single-screen platformer gameplay. It’s free, so if that sounds at all interesting you should check it out (on iOS and Android). Unfortunately the late-game becomes about pixel-perfect jump timing which is a bit less fun.

Self-improvement

I can’t remember what I was thinking when I added this link, but perhaps that in itself is telling: Kottke’s extract from an Adam Phillips interview, “The need not to know yourself“.

I suspect that procrastination is a challenge for a large number of people, and found that Quora has a collection of highly upvoted answers. I personally found the best approach is a mixed strategy: trying lots of things in sequence. So this is a good place to go to find lots of ideas.

Writing, Data Visualisation, Everything Else

A good long read is, these days, the closest I get to the escapism of a good novel: a chance to inhabit and explore another world-view. If you’re the same, you’ll probably enjoy this long article on novels, tragedy, comedy, and religion on two levels. Sample quotes:

“the invention of the novel privatised myth, because the novel, invented after Aristotle, did not have a holy book. The novelist was on his own. Sometimes he’s even a she. There were no rules.”

“As they became professional, writers began to write about writers. As they became academicised, writers began to write about writing.”

“You may think that to praise The Simpsons at the expense of Henry James makes me a barbarian. Well, it does, but I’m a very cultured barbarian. The literary novel has gone late Roman. It needs the barbarians.”

There was an article about a trend online to use “?” where formal writing used a hyphen, for example:

“The greatest pleasure of all – the categorisation of minutiae.”
“The greatest pleasure of all? The categorisation of minutiae.”

I felt that captured something I’d seen and been annoyed by, and figured I would collect some examples. I guess shortly after that I just started to accept it and didn’t collect anything, and then couldn’t find the original link, leaving this a bit of a non-thing. Although I think the fact I abandoned it is at least somewhat interesting.

Unremembered by present me, and unexplained by past me, the Things archive includes a link to the Tableau product support page.

Here are some fascinating maps on the distribution of blood types.

And finally, a superb example of giving insight into long-term trends using well-designed data visualisation: The Great Prosperity (1947-79) and The Great Regression (1980-2009)


(Click for full version)

– Transmission finally ends

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Things 123: Game weekends, Puffins, Lilith, Abstract Animated GIFs

Events Sandpit this very weekend (25th August), Weekender later (Fri 14th-Sun 16th September)
Hide & Seek are running one of their curated ‘Sandpit’ game events, taking place on Saturday and Sunday afternoons this weekend (25th and 26th August), unusually but awesomely located at the Natural History Museum. NHM page is here; a longer article about what’s happening can be found on Wired.

Then, from Friday 14th through to Sunday 16th September is Hide & Seek’s Weekender (facebook event here), mostly in the Clore Ballroom in that Royal Festival Hall place, this being as usual a whole festival of games, largely drawn from Sandpit events from the last two years.

This happens to include Competitive Sandwich Making on the Friday, which Clare and I will be running (here’s what happened last year when we ran first), this time featuring a secret rank beyond Earl of Sandwich, if people are competitive enough to discover it. There’s also lots of other amazing things happening, including two of my favourites: Die Gute Fabrik’s Johann Sebastien Joust and Viviane Schwarz’s Treasure Maze.

Tim Link – You’re In A Room
I finally wrote up the game Clare and I made for a more recent Sandpit: You’re In A Room, a sort of Whose Line Is It Anyway version of Knightmare; you can find out what on earth that means here.

Video – Puffin Webcam
In the exciting new world of putting webcam streams onto my TV for background entertainment, now that the Miranda’s Kittens feed is no longer live, I’ve had to find something else. It turns out there’s a whole range of great feeds available on explore.org, including a puffin cam.

Bonus videovia Clare while I was writing this
Dog swims with dolphins!

QuoteLilith
I recently wondered what really is the deal with the biblical (or is she?) character of Lilith, so I turned to Wikipedia on the subject, and found it fascinating – here’s just the section headings to give you an idea of the span of cultural records she appears in:

Mesopotamian mythology
Siegmund Hurwitz
In the Bible
Jewish tradition
Greco-Roman mythology
Arabic mythology
In Western literature
In modern occultism

The highlight for me was discovering that Lilith only appears once in the bible, and even then arguably so, in Isiah 34:

(13) [Edom] shall become an abode for jackals and a haunt for ostriches. (14) Wildcats shall meet with desert beasts, satyrs shall call to one another; There shall the lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest. (15) There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow; There shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate. (16) Look in the book of the LORD and read: No one of these shall be lacking, For the mouth of the LORD has ordered it, and His spirit shall gather them there.

This makes “lilith” (in the bible at least) a hapax legomenon, a word only occurring once in the source and therefore challenging to decipher – given only this context, is she a demon, or just some kind of regular animal with sinister associations?

I also recommend reading this translation of Isiah 34 in full (it’s only ~400 words), as it’s use of hyperbole puts our modern tabloid newspapers and comment trolls to shame.

Pictures – Abstract Animated GIFs
I’ve seen some interesting abstract animated GIFs floating around the internet, and tracked them down to two artists: David Ope, and Mr Div. Here’s one example of each, and do click through to view the rest of their work:

David Ope:

Mr Div:

Puzzle – The shrinking empires
Here’s an unfortunately small version of a fascinating visualisation of world history (which we bought as a poster for the office from Stanfords, although they don’t seem to have them any more), with time running from left to right, and rough location on earth from top to bottom, with identifiable countries/kingdoms/empires marked out:

You can just about see the Roman Empire as a big blob of orange in the middle, the Ottoman Empire in blue towards the right, and the British Empire stretching wide in patches of red before retreating back home by the time we reach the right-hand side representing the present day.

Even at this scale, one pattern is apparent: they just don’t make empires as big as they used to. The closer we get to the present day, the smaller the tribal groups become. Why is this?

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Things 109: Jonathan’s Card, Dr Who Cats, Mix Shift Visualisation

Question – Nothing to Hide
As technology makes surveillance of many kinds ever easier, some people  are worried about Big Brother, two words which conveniently encompass the general idea that this would be bad, via Orwell’s 1984, which incidentally is one of those classics that you really should read if you haven’t yet as it is only becoming more relevant.

In response to this, others say “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear,” which is powerfully concise rebuttal to these vague fears.

I can think of some counterarguments to that, but they tend to be long, and as noted by The Brads, something that takes more than 140 characters to explain doesn’t generally spread. So: this week’s challenge is to come up with a counterargument for “nothing to hide” that is 140 characters long or fewer.

Link
A while ago, as an experiment, Jonathan Stark made his Starbucks card details public, so anyone could add credit and anyone could spend that credit. His page explaining this is here. (Note the caveat at the top – this no longer works).

Sam Odio found an easy way to transfer credit to his own Starbucks card, and I recommend reading his take on the idea (and his exploit) here.

If you don’t have time for that, you could just read this summary of the whole story over at Good, which lays out the whole strange tale.

Quote
Les Dawson:

“There is a remote tribe that worships the number zero. Is nothing sacred?”

Picture (via Jason)
Pure internet linkbait, but with an execution this good, it deserves to be: Dr Who cats.

Previous Puzzle
Last time I asked for ways to visualise data in such a way that mix shifts affecting conversion rate would be readily apparent.

Adam naturally had a full consultant’s answer, explaining how he would show the data different ways depending on the audience (sales director, website content manager, SEO manager…), and how he might talk through the component parts of the change in a sequence of slides, which is all very sensible. However, what I really want is something that I as an analyst can look at to apprehend the whole situation, ideally in a generic way, so any given shift becomes clear.

Simon described an interesting single-view answer, but in preparing this post I realised I needed to confirm some of its details with him, so that will have to wait for a later edition of Things.

On to my answer… the data set was as follows:

[before mix shift | after mix shift]:

Banjo section visits [10,000 | 20,000] – lots more traffic
Banjo section sales [100 | 220]
Banjo section conversion [1.0% | 1.1%] – conversion increases!

Gun section visits [1,000 | 1,000] – same traffic as ever
Gun section sales [100 | 110]
Gun section conversion [10% | 11%] – conversion increases!

Overall conversion before:
(100 + 100) / (10,000 + 1,000) = 1.82%
Overall conversion after:
(220 + 110) / (20,000 + 1,000) = 1.57% – overall conversion has decreased!

My solution looks like this:

This shows how the total visits and orders (black lines) are composed of the individual sections (red/gun and blue/banjo). While both the blue and red arrows get steeper (representing improved conversion, although it’s hard to see this on the red arrow), the angle of the black line decreases (representing the overall decrease in conversion), since the blue arrow became so much longer.

This pretty much works for the extreme example given. However, it has significant weaknesses as a general solution:

  • It doesn’t work as a trended view – conceivably it could be animated, but that seems like overkill
  • It’s hard to compare the angle of arrows when traffic changes significantly, as in the gun section above
  • It tends to encode all the interesting information into a narrow diagonal band of the chart.

Further improvements are of course welcome!

-Transmission Ends