I really ought to re-embrace the notion that I don’t have to post every single day, but I’m absurdly close to a year straight without missing a day and only, what, 2/3 of those have been bullshit? That’s a pretty good record, right? January and February have been exceptionally heinous, I know, but between being constantly sick and actually (don’t tell anyone) having a pretty damn good year at work, I’m both lower on good material than I normally am and less inclined to talk about it than I might be otherwise. The main things going on in my life right now are shit I actively don’t want to talk about here, which leaves book reviews and the occasional picture of a pile of fountain pens.
(The purple one on the right and the coffee-colored one in the middle are my current favorites. I am trying my best to not buy any more, because if I do, I’m going to start edging into more expensive ones. The most expensive pen there was $52. I caught myself eyeing one for five hundred dollars the other day and am uncomfortably close to pulling the trigger one that runs $150. I can’t do this.)
Anyway, speaking of video games (just pretend), I’ve been trying to put 9 Sols to bed but I’m completely stuck– I actually turned the difficulty down on a boss that I’m certain I could have beaten but I didn’t want to take the time, and now I can’t figure out where to go next. If I can’t figure it out tonight I’m gonna hit up a walkthrough. The game’s a lot of fun but I feel like it should have been a 25-hour game and right now I’m pushing 30 and I don’t know how much game there is left– at least two more bosses and who knows how much exploration. I have like four games on my PS5 I want to get to and another on the Xbox, believe it or not, and I can’t play any of them until I beat this one.
I got the best kind of snow day today, the one that takes you by surprise; the area got blanketed in ice last night, so I was anticipating a two-hour delay but I really wasn’t thinking we were actually going to get the day off. And then … I blinked, and now it’s 8:45 somehow, and I came closer to just forgetting to put a post up than I have in a good long time? I took a nap today but it wasn’t the whole day. I have no explanation.
I just looked at my watch and oh my GOD where the hell did the evening go? I have nineteen thousand things I have to do before going to bed and all I want to do is stare at the wall, so my adoring public is going to have to be satisfied with this meager offering on the blog front tonight.
Also, if you ever wondered “Luther, how many pages of Brandon Sanderson can you read before you are tired of Brandon Sanderson?” the answer is approximately 5,600 in 23 days, because the thought just put it down and never speak of it again to anyone floated through my head earlier today as I was continuing to make my way through Wind and Truth. I’m not gonna– I started this and I’m ferdamnsure gonna finish it– but God, am I tired of it.
I chose that image because I am convinced that you’re supposed to see the word “fucking” in the first five logos, despite the Instagram image being in the way, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the rest of it.
Anyway, I haven’t done a social media roundup in a while, and I keep turning things off, so in the absence of anything else to talk about (that said, I’m ranting on Bluesky right now) let’s list off my accounts.
Infinitefreetime.com. You’re here now. If you’re not here right now I’m very confused. This is the only one of these accounts that is never ever Going Away.
Microblogging is handled on Bluesky, at @infinitefreetime.com. I will probably cross over 3000 followers this weekend. Whee!
I really really really want more StoryGraph followers, so if you use that app, please send me a friend request at, wait for it, infinitefreetime. I’ll follow you back! I promise!
I’m still on Goodreads! My profile picture there is ancient and I should update it.
I’m not updating my YouTube channel any longer, but you can find it at lutherplaysgames.com anyway. You never know, I might get back into it eventually.
God, is that it? I think that’s it. I’m not on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, Google+. was never actually real, I don’t recognize that green app up there, and I don’t really post on TikTok so I don’t need any followers over there. I shut down my Mastodon account and was never on Threads. I’m on Reddit, but don’t post very often? I don’t even know if Reddit really has any follower/friend features.
Anyway, point is, go follow me on Bluesky and Storygraph. Please.
I’m back to work on Monday, and I’m not exactly Sundaying yet, nor do I currently feel like I wasted my entire break, but there is a bit of ennui and just general blech going on right now. So I’m gonna play video games and put the book down for a while and see if I snap out of it.
This is the second year in a row with traffic going up, and while I’d like to be seeing at least 60K a year again, I can’t complain about thirty-five thousand people coming to look at my stupid little blog. Here’s this year and last year, month-by-month:
So there’s been a drop-off in the last half of the year, but still: with the exception of February, every month in 2024 was better than every month in 2023, which I feel like is a pretty good trend. Here’s the year-by-year:
That huge bump in 2015 is entirely from one post, but what this looks like is a return to normal after a few years of less traffic. I’d love to go massively viral again (or maybe not, I dunno; it can be really annoying) but honestly I’m perfectly happy with the traffic I’m getting. What I’d like to see more of is interaction; my comments and Likes (comments being more important, since I think you have to be a WordPress user to make Like work) have been in a freefall for years and I miss having a bunch of regular commenters. (Not that I don’t love the few of you who still talk to me! But there used to be a lot more of you!)
That’s a total of 1,630,889 words over the life of the blog, by the way. Which is nuts.
And now my favorite part, geography:
If I could get WordPress to do one thing, it would be to let me zoom in on that map. I have had traffic from damn near every country on Earth over the life of the blog:
I’m convinced that Svalbard island ends up getting counted as Norway. I know there aren’t many people living there but I have literally directly asked people from Svalbard to click around a bit and some of them have said they did! The rest of the countries– Western Sahara, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Eritrea, Burundi, North Korea, probably still a bunch of tiny island countries and Timor-Leste, which is right at the eastern tip of Indonesia and is barely visible– are not well known for their infrastructure, to put things lightly. There’s also a weird spot on top of Israel that I can’t quite figure out; I have 31 hits from “Palestinian Territories” and 615 from Israel, plus some from Lebanon, so I don’t know what’s going on there. Maybe the West Bank is its own thing and “Palestinian Territories” is Gaza? No idea.
Either way, it’s amazing, even knowing that most of those folks were looking for porn and were only on the site for a few seconds, to realize that this site has been viewed damn near across the entire planet.
Can we keep up the positive momentum through 2025? Will there even still be an internet at the end of the year or will the bird flu have wiped out American society? Stay tuned!
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 