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Friday Flashback: The Unsurfaced, Part 1
🕑 Added 2021-09-17 11:06:33 +0000 UTC
For this week’s itineration through our interned inventory of indecent intimations, I’ve collected a sampling of the Unsurfaced: well-regarded and well-viewed stories that have so far fallen through the cracks for past Flashbacks. Part of the point of the Flashbacks is to gain exposure for stories folks like that live in the archives and might not get seen much apart from people who like to surf the random button or revisit their favorites, and doing Flashbacks by theme can end up bypassing a lot of stories that don’t have the kinds of unusual elements or gimmicks that give them a neon “pick me” sign when I trawl for Flashback theme matches. So I’m going to do stuff like this periodically, too.
The method (if you’re interested): I started with a data crunch, pulling a list of stories that had never been surfaced in a Flashback post from the middle third of the archives by total views (the top third can take care of itself, I figured), last updated 6 or more years ago, with 4+ stars and 5 or more votes. From these I picked ten stories from the top 20 results as ordered by votes and views. It was an interesting SQL/Excel exercise, if nothing else. Hope you find something interesting. (Coincidentally, one of the hits turned out to be Josef Howard’s “Fun with Math,” which I fondly remember as being an early favorite of my own, back in the day.)
The next update is tomorrow, 18 September. In the meantime, have fun exploring the archives, and thanks for visiting.
