Why, yes, I’m writing two posts back-to-back.

Today is, by a wide margin, the highest-traffic day in the history of the blog. Even when In which I tell you how your religion works was blowing up on its way to amassing over 100,000 views, the biggest single day was 12K. To get an idea of how ridiculous those numbers are, I had more pageviews today than all but three months in the twelve and a half years I’ve been writing here. We aren’t halfway through February just yet and it’s the third-highest traffic month in that entire time. February is on pace to beat entire years.

Nearly all of those views (around 17K) are from the US. Another thousand from Australia. None from China, which is where I was getting a lot of my traffic during the last few months of 2025. And they’re spread out— look at the difference between uniques and pageviews. In which the kids are fine, shut up has about 1500 views. How your religion works is adding another 750. The rest of the hits are all over the place.

Three likes and zero comments.

I feel like I ought to be elated— who doesn’t enjoy it when their writing is getting noticed?— but the absence of any clear reason for the spike has me suspecting bots, even though I don’t have any real idea how that would be happening either. Very few referrals are showing up. Google’s telling me I have 378 active users right now, and I’m watching that number climb as I’m typing. I have no idea what’s going on.

If you’re new around here, please let me know what brought you to the site. I mean, I appreciate it, but the curiosity is killing me. I’ve had 400 hits while I’ve been typing this and the active users number is up to 482 now:

Send me some money, damn it. 🙂