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The Plate Archive44 charts

Love and Other Variables: Charts About Dating and Relationships

The collection with the archive's most-linked chart about probability, and the most self-aware sample of its readership.

Forty-four charts, seventy-one sites still link to it, and the archive’s biggest single hit. This is the collection people actually linked to, and the reason is not that the jokes are better. It is that a chart is an unusually effective way to make a claim about your own romantic life sound like a finding.

The chart that travelled furthest

Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend is linked from thirteen sites, more than any other entry in this collection and among the highest in the archive. It works because it is not a joke with a graph attached: it is a probability argument, carried out in steps, that arrives at a number. Readers passed it on the way you pass a proof.

Nerd Love Solve for “i” does something similar with algebra rather than probability, and holds four. Both are published as their own plates. The pattern is consistent across the whole archive: the charts that escaped were the ones doing real arithmetic about an unserious subject.

The correlation charts

The dominant form here is the two-axis claim. Likelyhood He’ll Cheat On You Against Number of Video Games He Owns plots an inverse relationship and is linked from two sites. Level of Dedication Vs Kind of Boyfriend, Amount of makeup a female wears by age., Attractiveness of Speedo vs. Age and how acceptable speedos are all do the same thing: assert a correlation, draw it confidently, supply no data.

They are the collection’s weakest charts as arguments and its most honest ones as documents. Every one of them plots a belief that was widely held and never measured, which is precisely what an archive of amateur charts is good for.

Several of these plates run an explicit probability argument about the size of a dating pool, which is the collection at its most numerate. The same reasoning with countable outcomes instead of adjectives is what the odds section is for.

Who was drawing these

It is worth stating plainly, because it shapes everything above: the great majority of this collection is drawn from a young male perspective, often self-deprecating, occasionally cruder than the site’s usual register. Analysis Of Men and Why My Boyfriend Is Dating Me are among the few written the other way round, and Claim This Bed In The Name Of Estrogen from July 2010 is a late exception.

That skew is not a flaw in the recovery. It is what the submission queue of a 2009 chart site looked like, and pretending otherwise would misrepresent the record.

Marriage, children and the far end of the curve

A smaller group looks past dating entirely. Carrie, Will You Marry Me?, published as its own plate, is a genuine proposal executed as a chart, the only entry in the archive with a practical purpose. Pregnancy holds two referring domains. Benefits of Being a Father is drawn from inside the outcome rather than speculating about it, and Female Matrimonial Likelihood Based on Number of Cats Owned is the collection’s most cited folk statistic.

The Truth About Valentine’s Day from February 2010 is linked from two sites and is the only seasonal chart here, which is surprising for the subject and says something about how little of this material was written to a calendar.

Charts here
44
Images recovered
19
Published as plates
3
Referring domains
71
First posted
Apr 2008
Last posted
Aug 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    QILFS

    · image not recovered

  2. A2

    How Many People Would Be In Love With Me

    · Drawn by Matt Anderson · image not recovered

  3. A3

    KISS’s weekly calendar

    · image not recovered

  4. A4

    Want, Need, Love, Loaf

  5. A5

    Heaviness vs. Familial Relationship

  6. A6

    What I Love

    · Drawn by Jacek Z. Anchorman · image not recovered

  7. A7

    Days I Need Your Love, Babe

    · Drawn by David T

  8. A8

    Classification Of Young American Females

    · Drawn by Ben J · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  9. A9

    Analysis Of Men

    · Drawn by Anna · image not recovered

  10. A10

    Ages Of Polygamous Wives

    · Drawn by EYZAATHEBELL · image not recovered

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    Things to do after sex

    · Drawn by Peter B · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Ass by type

    · 2 domains still link here

  14. B3

    Chances of having sex with my wife

    · Drawn by Arden Varney

  15. B4

    Instances of Female Stalking Behaviors in Selected Subjects, circa 1979

    · Drawn by Jen N · image not recovered

  16. B5

    Days Allotted (per week) Towards Loving You

    · Drawn by Joshua P

  17. B6

    Female Matrimonial Likelihood Based on Number of Cats Owned

    · Drawn by Hieran · image not recovered

  18. B7

    Practical Uses of Keys (according to my ex-girlfriend)

    · Drawn by Mike

  19. B8

    Do you want to be my lover?

    · Drawn by Oli R

  20. B9

    Carrie, Will You Marry Me?

    · 3 domains still link here · published as a plate

  21. B10

    Probability that an Attractive Girl is Single

    · Drawn by Lebowski · image not recovered

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    The Friend Zone

    · Drawn by Sunil S · image not recovered

  24. C2

    Likelyhood He’ll Cheat On You Against Number of Video Games He Owns

    · Drawn by TWIGBy · 2 domains still link here

  25. C3

    Pregnancy

    · 2 domains still link here

  26. C4

    How fun tickling is over time

    · Drawn by tmare0790 · image not recovered

  27. C5

    When I should start dating according to

    · Drawn by WalRoss

  28. C6

    Men Who Stay Up All Night to Watch Girls While They Sleep

    · Drawn by DrRandomness · 2 domains still link here

  29. C7

    Level of Dedication Vs Kind of Boyfriend

    · Drawn by Jordrake · image not recovered

  30. C8

    Amount of makeup a female wears by age.

    · image not recovered

  31. C9

    Attractiveness of Speedo vs. Age

    · image not recovered

  32. C10

    Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend

    · Drawn by Xen · 13 domains still link here · published as a plate

  33. Side D
  34. D1

    Nerd Love Solve for “i”

    · Drawn by Tsukasasoul · 4 domains still link here · published as a plate

  35. D2

    how girls react to boy wearing axe

    · Drawn by SoiJoi

  36. D3

    Benefits of Being a Father

  37. D4

    Amount of Clothing Worn by that Shy, Quiet, Cute, Nerdy Chick

    · Drawn by StarsHallelujah · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  38. D5

    “Do these jeans make my butt look big?”

    · Drawn by unclesamkent · image not recovered

  39. D6

    Aaawkward!

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  40. D7

    How Teens Learn About Sex

    · Drawn by Geetawr · image not recovered

  41. D8

    When You Should Start Dating According To

    · Drawn by Spartan004 · image not recovered

  42. D9

    Potential partner

    · image not recovered

  43. D10

    how acceptable speedos are

    · Drawn by xybob

  44. Side E
  45. E1

    The Truth About Valentine’s Day

    · Drawn by BigFatGuy · 2 domains still link here

  46. E2

    Why My Boyfriend Is Dating Me

    · image not recovered

  47. E3

    Claim This Bed In The Name Of Estrogen

    · image not recovered

  48. E4

    Love friday gif

    · 3 domains still link here · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is the most-linked chart in this collection?

Why I Don’t Have a Girlfriend, from August 2009, linked from thirteen sites, one of the highest counts in the whole archive. It is published as its own plate, and it circulated far beyond humour sites because it makes an argument with a probability calculation.

What is in the collection generally?

Forty-four charts about attraction, dating, marriage and the arithmetic people apply to all three, drawn between April 2008 and August 2010.

Are these charts drawn from the same point of view?

Largely, and it is worth naming: the majority are drawn from a young, male, self-deprecating position. The pattern is a fact about who was submitting to the site in 2009, and it is visible in the framing of almost every entry.

Is there a chart about the friend zone?

Yes, from November 2008. The image was not recovered, so what survives is the title, the date and the address, which is a fair record of a term that was ubiquitous online in exactly that period.

Why are some entries listed without a chart?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that no longer serves them, so a surviving copy had to be found for each one. Where none survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a substitute image.