This was on Nikki’s request list for me for years, and I finally had the breakthrough needed to conceptualize the code in a way that won’t slow the site down terribly.
What Nikki wanted to know was ‘how long is the longest time between deaths?’ and I would always say “about 5 years.” However that’s inexact for everyone, and it bothered me a great deal. I thought if I was going to show a metric like that, it should have at least some context.
We now have a raw list of death which includes how many days passed since the previous death! This means, the longest timespan between character deaths is 1429 days (1980-05-27 to 1984-04-25). The shortest timespan is 0 days (multiple characters have died on the same day).
But more than that, you can now look and see “Oh the last death was 3 days after the previous”:
An important item of note is that this list includes people who don’t stay dead. Yes, Sara Lance has 3 entries. The reason for that is that while death can be impermanent (for sci-fi/fantasy stuff mostly), it still is a moment that punches us in the gut and makes us hurt.
As always, the in-box is open if you have stats or data you’d like to see represented in another way. Give a shout in the comments, use the contact form, or come by Slack and shout at me.
