As I wrote in my last Blog entry, the new Limerick-based story Wipe Off The Lipstick has been massacred in the voting. As of now, with 300 votes cast, the "score" is 6.53 - making it by far the worst, most mediocre story I've ever published.
So my readers must hate it right?
Wrong. The value of 6.53 is "normalized". "Normalized" being a synonym for "utter fucking bullshit".
In my native language, the word for sex and the word for the number six are identical, apart from the spelling - the number is spelled seks whereas sex is sex.
We label, not always jokingly, some people with the saying that they "har sex på hjernen" - literally that they "have sex on the brain" - if they are obsessed with sex. I think it is fair to conclude that whoever devised the "normalization" of the scores on SOL have "har seks på hjernen" - ie "have six on the brain", since the method is devised to force the average of stories published by all authors at any given time to be 6.
Huh? What the FUCK have OTHER authors' stories that HAPPEN to be published at roughly the same time have to do with what YOU think about MY story?
Since we not only lost the T/P/A system, but also any direct numerical evidence of votes cast, I took the bar diagram of the said 300 votes, threw them into a graphics program and "measured" the height of the bars.
The graph included a scale to show that 94 people had voted 8, so I was able to "translate" heights to votes - and be able to account for each and every of those 300 votes exactly.
Guess what? The true average of Wipe Off The Lipstick is 8.01.
If you live in Florida or Ohio, you are used to systems where your vote doesn't count. SOL is a Canadian company. Could we have some good old fashion Canadian honesty and decency? If the site managers are in love with the number 6, then bless them - keep the bullshit number on too, but PLEASE could we have the ACTUAL RAW UNCHANGED SCORE?
Cheers
WTSman