end of year posts – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Let’s start with the good news: traffic was up by two-thirds this year, and depending on how the next two days go this was either the second-best or the third-best year in the history of the site:

We’re still not reaching the heights of 2015, and “In which I tell you how your religion works,” the reason for that huge spike, still sits atop all of my other posts at 113,306 views. Most of the rest are from the Creepy Children’s Programming series and, of course, The Fucking Snowpiercer Post.

Here’s the problem: a large proportion of those views are probably Chinese bots. Why does China care so much about my stupid little website? I have no clue. Why did it start this year? Also no clue. But given that none of my site is in Chinese and I’ve never really discussed anything of particular interest to Chinese citizens, I have a hard time making this geographical distribution make sense:

Worth pointing out: even if you subtract all those Chinese hits out, I’m still up from last year, the fourth year in a row of increased site traffic. It’s just not nearly as impressive. 🙂

Here’s the lifetime geographical distribution, which is about as full as it’s ever going to get, I think:

That white island at the top of the map is Svalbard, which belongs to Norway, and beyond that, we’re looking at North Korea and, frankly, a handful of places that either barely or flat-out don’t have governments: Western Sahara, the Central African Republic, Guinea and Eritrea. Any other missing spots are literally too small for me to be able to pick out of the map.

Here’s how much Chinese traffic I had this year: WordPress just started showing us city data in 2025, and eight of the top twenty cities are in China, including Beijing at #1– I got 2 1/2 times more traffic from Beijing than I did from the city I live in. London, Sydney and Toronto are the first three cities outside of China or the US to show up on the list. We’ll see how much this jumps around next year.

This post will mark 653 days in a row of blogging.

Interaction continues to drop, sadly– well, likes are up slightly, but comments are down, and I feel like comments are more important– and my word count was a little bit down from last year. At just over 1.7 million words over the lifetime of the blog, I’m closing in on that two millionth word:

Obviously I’m not going anywhere; I don’t have anything in the way of specific plans for the future around here other than to keep writing, although I’m considering making the jump from WordPress’ Premium hosting, which I’ve been using for more or less the entire time the blog has been active, to their Business tier. I make enough money now that dropping $300 a year on the site doesn’t feel completely stupid, if only for increased access to stats (I love numbers, as you can see) and better control over how the site looks. We’ll see. January’s a three-paycheck month so I might as well blow some of it, right?

Anyway, if you’re seeing the traffic from China too, let me know– I know of one other WordPress person who has mentioned high Chinese traffic on a mostly-defunct blog, but only the one at the moment. It would make so much less sense if it was just me, y’know?

I was all ready to write a big long post about the best video games of 2024. Then I thought about it for a while.

Turns out … there weren’t that many, really? At least by my standards? And that’s really surprising, to be honest. I spend a fair amount of time playing video games, as all of you know, although my rabid devotion to reading certainly stole a lot of time this year that might have been spent on playing games in previous years. This year has been a lot of either mediocrity or “Oh, that was fun, I guess” types of games without much staying power.

One way or another Shadow of the Erdtree is Game of the Year.

But … man.

I basically went through all of 2024 and didn’t touch my Xbox. Check this out:

Unpacking is a cute little thing but is entertaining for a couple of hours. Palworld is a Pokemon ripoff that I played with my son for a little while, and that’s already a year ago. Of the four games left, the only one I liked (and, frankly, the only one I played for more than a couple of hours was Lies of P, and I’m pretty sure that was in 2023.

I played zero Switch games in 2024.

My PS5 game list is a little more robust, but still, it’s really nothing to write home about. I’m having fun with Cult of the Lamb right now, and I downloaded Carrion earlier today because I was curious and it was five bucks. Neither are 2024 games. Baldur’s Gate III left me cold and I never finished it, quitting after Act II. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever go back. Lords of the Fallen was fun and kept stepping on its dick. There have been tons of updates since I beat it, so I might go back at some point, but I spent at least 20% of the time I was playing it absolutely hating it. I played through The Surge; the sequel was a vast improvement. I still haven’t finished Rise of the Ronin because Shadow of the Erdtree got in the way. Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Black Myth: Wukong were the only challengers to Shadow for my personal GOTY, and really, neither of them were very close. BM:W is definitely the best full game of the year, but Erdtree is a better game.

I know there was a recent expansion for BM:W, and there’s supposedly big DLC coming, so I’ll probably go back to it at some point. I need to play through at least part of Veilguard again if I want the platinum. I’ll probably do it eventually.

As far as the rest of the actual GOTY candidates … well, I’ve played the ones I’m going to play. Deckbuilders hold no attraction for me, so Balatro is out. I want nothing to do with the Final Fantasy series, much less the remakes. Metaphor: ReFantazio has too stupid of a name for me to even look into it, and I refuse to admit that Astro Bot is even a real game. The whole series is a marketing gimmick. It might be a good game; I just don’t care. And it takes a lot to get me into a platformer anyway. I definitely enjoy one once in a while but they’re rare.

I wasn’t expecting this post to end with “Blech,” but … blech.