Blogwanking 2024

On January 2, 2025January 2, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

The short version: not a bad year.

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!

Okay that’s it

On July 30, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy3 Comments

I gave myself an hour this time, and got to 157. Then my brain exploded. 200 is, I think, utterly impossible without actively cheating or trying to memorize a list, and I’m pretty sure I still missed a handful of capitals. I did manage to get at least one in every state, though, plus DC and two in Puerto Rico. What’s the dumbest one I missed?

Juneau	AK
Anchorage	AK
Wasilla	AK
Montgomery	AL
Birmingham	AL
Tuscaloosa	AL
Little Rock	AR
Fayetteville	AR
Phoenix	AZ
Tempe	AZ
Sacramento	CA
Los Angeles	CA
San Francisco	CA
Oakland	CA
San Diego	CA
San Jose	CA
Fresno	CA
Denver	CO
Littleton	CO
Colorado Springs	CO
Hartford	CT
New Haven	CT
Washington DC	DC
Dover	DE
Wilmington	DE
Tallahassee	FL
Miami	FL
Tampa	FL
Athens	GA
Atlanta	GA
Honolulu	HI
Oahu	HI
Iowa City	IA
Des Moinses	IA
Boise	ID
Chicago	IL
Springfield	IL
Bloomington	IL
Peoria	IL
Schaumburg	IL
Palatine	IL
Nappanee	IN
South Bend	IN
Mishawaka	IN
Goshen	IN
Granger	IN
Elkhart	IN
Gary	IN
Portage	IN
Fort Wayne	IN
West Lafayette	IN
Lafayette	IN
Indianapolis	IN
Bloomington	IN
Mexico	IN
Bedford	IN
Evansville	IN
Santa Claus	IN
Muncie	IN
Rochester	IN
Kansas City	KS
Louisville	KY
Lexington	KY
Frankfort	KY
Paducah	KY
Baton Rouge	LA
New Orleans	LA
Ruston	LA
Boston	MA
Baltimore	MD
Annapolis	MD
Augusta	ME
Portland	ME
Bangor	ME
Portage	MI
Novi	MI
Detroit	MI
Flint	MI
Traverse City	MI
Ann Arbor	MI
Lansing	MI
Farmington	MI
Niles	MI
Benton Harbor	MI
Minneapolis	MN
St Paul	MN
Kansas City	MO
Springfield	MO
St Louis	MO
Biloxi	MS
Helena	MT
Butte	MT
Raleigh	NC
Durham	NC
Winston-Salem	NC
Bismarck	ND
Fargo	ND
Lincoln	NE
Dixville Notch	NH
Hart’s Location	NH
Princeton	NJ
Jersey City	NJ
Newark	NJ
Trenton	NJ
Hoboken	NJ
Albuquerque	NM
Reno	NV
Las Vegas	NV
Buffalo	NY
New York City	NY
Albany	NY
Rochester	NY
Cincinnati	OH
Columbus	OH
Sandusky	OH
Toledo	OH
Oklahoma City	OK
Tulsa	OK
Bend	OR
Portland	OR
Pittsburgh	PA
Philadelphia	PA
Gettysburg	PA
San Juan	PR
Mayaguez	PR
Providence	RI
Charleston	SC
Pierre	SD
Sioux Falls	SD
Nashville	TN
Memphis	TN
Austin	TX
San Antonio	TX
Galveston	TX
Houston	TX
Dallas	TX
Fort Worth	TX
El Paso	TX
Salt Lake City	UT
Moab	UT
Quantico	VA
Richmond	VA
Norfolk	VA
Virginia Beach	VA
Wilmington	VA
Lynchburg	VA
Roanoke	VA
Charlottesville	VA
Montpelier	VT
Burlington	VT
Olympia	WA
Tacoma	WA
Green Bay	WI
Milwaukee	WI
Charleston	WV
Cheyenne	WY
Jackson	WY

Ouch

On July 29, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

I was out of town all day today visiting my wife’s family, and along the way we played a stupid little game based on something I saw on TikTok yesterday. It was a live stream of, of all things, a man trying to remember as many cities in the United States as he could. The first question was how many do you think you can name, and then my wife and I would occasionally throw states at each other as I was driving. And I was doing well! I figured I could name at least one city in every state– I mean, surely I know the capitals— and at least two in most, with a handful where I could name a hell of a lot more than that, especially since we didn’t bother putting a limit on population. I figure most people can name a ton of cities near where they live so that’s going to even out, and once they get outside of a one-state radius or so it’s gonna get a lot trickier.

I figured I could do 150 pretty easily, ultimately, and if I sat and thought about it for a while I was thinking I could get to 200. Well, I just gave myself half an hour, after prepping for it all day, and I named 107. This includes a couple of states I went completely blank on, including some that are genuinely embarrassing– Virginia, for fuck’s sake. I’ll come up with four of them the second …

(Adds fucking Winston-Salem, NC to the list, because I was blanking on it and put “wherever the fuck Wake Forest is” in the margins.)

… I hit submit on this. Also not on the list: New Haven, CT. Also not on the list: the entirety of Connecticut, despite the fact that I was looking at a map. Also, Princeton, NJ, which you would think I might have thought of since it’s where fucking Princeton is. God.

So anyway, my brain went completely batshit dry as soon as I started doing this, which … okay, I drove for like six hours today and spent most of the rest of it outside and being friendly to relative strangers, no pun intended, so my brain is a trifle underpowered at the moment.

(One city from Kentucky, dude? One? That’s shameful.)

I’ll try it again tomorrow.

A brief, weird little story

On May 20, 2023May 20, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

On my way in to work, late last week, I drove by a sign on the side of the road. I didn’t get that long of a look at it, obviously, because I was driving and I wasn’t expecting to suddenly encounter something interesting, but it looked permanent– it wasn’t, like, attached to a light pole or something like that. Somebody had dug holes and poured concrete for this thing.

It was advertising a local business, and had the following instructions on it under the name of the business: STRAIGHT AHEAD, ON THE RIGHT.

And underneath those instructions, an arrow. Pointing to the left.

I very nearly stopped the car and turned around to get a picture of the sign, but again: driving to work, and my margins for “arrive on time” and “perilously late” are, uh, thin, on the best of days. So I resolved to get a picture of it the next day, because obviously I need to put this sign on my blog.

And the next day, the fucker was gone. I have been looking for this sign for a week, assuming that I just didn’t remember where it was or something, and it’s no longer there, and it hasn’t been replaced by anything, either, because surely I would have noticed that. And so I’m left wondering if I just imagined the damn thing, or badly misread it, or what, and I can’t confirm my own memory, and that’s really annoying.

Slightly related, at least according to how my brain works: I live in northern Indiana, maybe a 25-30 minute drive from Michigan. This area is generally known as “Michiana,”(*) and that word is pronounced like you think it is, especially once you realize that the “-ana” part comes from Indiana, a word that is generally pronounced only one way. To be obnoxiously clear about it, that penultimate A is pronounced like the penultimate A in banana or Havana or bat. And I have lived here for more or less my entire life and I have never heard anyone pronounce it incorrectly.

There is a local radio ad that I keep hearing all the Goddamned time for a used car company, and the person reading the ad repeatedly– at least a dozen times in the ad, since the word is part of the car company’s name– mispronounces “Michiana” as “Michi-onna,” like the last o sound in Pokemon. And it drives me into a killing fucking rage every time I hear it, because not only is it wrong and stupid but it offends me on a deep and fundamental level that somebody from the company that paid for this ad listened to it and went yeah, okay, that’s fine, and didn’t immediately demand that the ad be re-recorded because of the constant mispronunciation of the name of their business.

I hate it. I hate it so much.

The end.

(*) I believe I have brought this up in this space before, or at least on Twitter, but Indiana also features Kentuckiana and Illiana, although I do not know if either Indihio or Ohiana, both of which strike me as linguistic abominations, are places. Do other states do this with their border regions? I know there’s a place called Texarkana which, oh, Christ, is in something called the Ark-La-Tex region, but beyond that is it a thing? Is there a Califoregon out there, or a Pennsylvaryland? Michiconsin? Colobraska? Help me out.

The last post of last year

On January 3, 2022January 3, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I keep almost writing a 2021 blogwanking post or a sort of round-up of last year, and then finding excuses not to do it. Not that the bathroom renovation isn’t more interesting (I hope, at least) than endless navel-gazing, but I can only put this off for so long before I just can’t write it any more. So, long story short: traffic last year was way way way down, which doesn’t matter because it’s still plenty high for a personal blog site of a non-famous person in 2021, and y’all are stuck with me here anyway for the foreseeable future. Two things are pretty cool. This is the lifetime map of countries that I’ve had hits from:

That’s … everywhere, basically; that island up at the top is Svalbard island, where less than fifty people live, most of whom are climate researchers, and it’s part of Norway anyway. North Korea. South Sudan. Tajikistan, I think? (EDIT: Nope, that’s Turkmenistan.) These are not heavily populated countries with a lot of infrastructure, in other words. And despite the low numbers of actual hits (down over 20K in hits and about 12K in unique visitors) the geography from last year is pretty gratifying all by itself:

One way or another, the notion that people from literally all over the world have at least popped in over here, if not actually stuck around and hung out, is pretty amazing.

I have to admit something that is, if not a Hot Take, at least not an especially popular opinion: for me personally, and my immediate family, I don’t think last year was that bad of a year. Now, you have to take this in context, where I am pretty sure that I have described every year since 2016 as the worst year of my life, and I remain of the belief that yes, my life really did spiral south for five straight years, culminating in the loss of my mother on January 11, 2020. 2021 was the first year in a long fucking time where I have a few good things to think about when I look back on it. My brother and his wife had their first child. My dad’s doing okay. We’ve done a lot of work on the house. I made more money last year than I’ve ever made before, a feat I should be able to repeat this year, and because I’ve paid off my credit cards, leaving me with no credit card debt for the first time since college, I’ve been able to keep more of that money and use it for more than just paying off interest. My son is happy and healthy and thriving at school. My wife got a promotion and a raise. I, who a few years ago was convinced I’d never see the inside of a classroom again, got nominated for Teacher of the Year again. By the time this school year ends, I’ll not only have paid off my car, but my student loans might be gone.

All in all, on a strictly personal basis, I can actually see some light again. I have reason for at least a guarded level of optimism, which has not been true for quite some time. I mean, the rest of the world is still going to hell, don’t get me wrong. But at least not everything is going to shit.

My one big personal regret right now is that my writing career is, at the least, on a significant pause, and very well might be done. I haven’t written a word of fiction in at least a couple of years, and I’m not missing it much. I mean, it’s not like I was changing the world or anything like that, as much as I tried to take everything seriously, I never managed to make any money at it– every single con I attended lost me money, so it was more of an expensive hobby than anything else. I’m not saying I’ll never release another book, but I’m not in a hurry to.

You never know. Most of my creative energy lately is going here and to the YouTube channel, and maybe eventually that’ll blow up. If not, well, we’ll see what comes next.

#READAROUNDTHEWORLD: Final 2021 Update

On December 29, 2021December 29, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading4 Comments

Pretty, ain’t it?

While I am going to continue adding new countries to the list for a while, at least until I feel like there’s no good way to get books from the countries that are left without rather inconveniently learning new languages, we are basically done with this for 2021, as anything else I finish reading this year isn’t going to change the tallies any. I ended up reading books this year from all 50 states, plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico, along with 48 different countries, with Antarctica counted as a country for the purposes of the list. There are a few countries represented on my TBR shelf that I haven’t gotten to yet: Zimbabwe, Turkey, Egypt and Indonesia, and I have a book from a Cambodian author that I haven’t reread in forever that I’ll read this month as well. And come to think of it I have a compendium of Iraqi science fiction that I never finished, too, that I could go back to. So that’ll be 54 countries before I buy anything new. I’ve read books from just barely under 75% of the world’s surface, which doesn’t seem too bad for a year’s work.

Other countries I definitely want to read books from but haven’t found any yet: Pakistan, Mongolia, Israel, Finland, somewhere in Central America, and I feel like I could probably hit a couple more countries in Europe without working too hard. There’s a book on my Amazon wishlist from a Yemeni author that I’ll probably grab at some point too. After that, who knows. But I won’t be feeling like I’m done with this for a little while yet.

In the meantime: Leaving aside the US, the top countries I read from this year probably won’t be too surprising: the UK (6, mostly from England), Malaysia (3,) Canada (3), Australia (2), China (2, with one more to come since I have a Ken Liu book on the shelf), and South Korea (2, but both by the same guy). States represented more than once include Texas (7), California (5), New York (5), Maryland (3), Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin (all 2). Texas is the highest because Rachel Caine is from there, but that’s still four different authors. The largest places I read books from are pretty obvious from the map, but the smallest is Washington DC (68 square miles), Rhode Island (1214 square miles) and Trinidad and Tobago at 1981 square miles.

All in all, I’m … mostly glad I did this? Like, filling in the map was really neat, and going looking for new books to read from a specific place was fun, but one knock-on effect that I didn’t really reckon on was that I started deliberately avoiding reading multiple books from people or places that didn’t “count” so that I could drive the numbers up. I’ll post my unread shelf like usual on the 31st, but one thing you’ll notice if you look at it and you know my tastes in reading (and if you’ve made it this far in this post, you probably do) is that I have several books from authors I really like patiently waiting for me to get to them, because I’ve been prioritizing books I could color in a spot on the map with. I only read one book in December– and only one of the last fifteen books I’ve read– that didn’t “count,” and in the meantime there’s a damn Dandelion Dynasty book on my shelf waiting for me to get to it, along with a couple of other hotly anticipated sequels and another TJ Klune book that isn’t part of a series. So I’m not doing this again once I’m done with it, and I’ll update the site one more time once I feel like I’m done, but we’re not going to be organizing our reading by geography again anytime soon.

#Readaroundtheworld: September Update

On September 28, 2021September 30, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

For visual comparison, here is June’s update.

I was never especially worried about being able to complete this project, but at this point I’m certain I’m going to be able to do it. I currently have, of the 52 Identified US Places that I intend to read books from (all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC, and I’ll totally throw Guam in there if I can find a book,) 36 states that I have read books from. For ten more– Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Vermont, West Virginia, Missouri, and Rhode Island– I physically have the books I’m going to read and just need to actually read them. That leaves six states that I’ve yet to identify an author from: Arkansas, Delaware, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and for Nebraska I’ve actually got two possible authors. I own a couple of Alex Kava books already, and Chigozie Obioma looks interesting, but he’s a Nigerian who happens to live in Nebraska, and his books are set in Nigeria. Now, I’ve said many times that everyone should be reading more work from Nigerian authors, but I kind of want the book to be a touch more Nebraska-centered than his work seems to be. I’ll get to him eventually, because interesting, but maybe not for this project. The others? At the moment, no idea, but I feel like I have plenty of time. Feel free to make recommendations.

As far as countries: 37 currently represented, with a few more (without going and looking at my unread shelf: Poland, Kyrgysztan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Saint Thomas, and North Korea) on the shelf somewhere. I’m going to focus on finishing the states in October, or at least getting as close as I can, and then I’ll keep checking countries off until I get bored with it or literally hit a point where I can’t find anything from any place left on the map without translating it myself.

Next year’s reading project: Read Whatever The Fuck I Want and Don’t Worry About It. I’ve had projects for several years running and I feel like I need a year off.

Blogwanking 2020

On December 30, 2020December 30, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I’m not doing a saleswanking post this year– I had no new releases, and went to no cons, and didn’t really market my books at all or, really, do anything to make people remember I occasionally write fiction other than a handful of haiku and short stories on Patreon, so I’m not even looking up how many books I sold this year. I would be surprised if it ended up being more than a couple dozen.

But the blog?

You’re not going to see these words in this order very often, but: 2020 was a very good year, if only in this one minor respect. The blog, no doubt because everyone was home all the goddamned time, had the best year it’s had since the Great Virality of 2015-16. Check the stats:

68000 page views and 40K visitors are both up from last year, and in fact are both up from any year since 2016, which still benefited from the Syria post; it’s possible that without the big bump from that post this would have been the best year since 2014, which continues to make no mathematical sense. Comments are also up, although Likes are down a bit, which is frankly the least important to me of the various metrics I’m looking at.

Why? Well, to start, I wrote a lot:

Highest total posts since 2016, more than one a day, and there were only a handful of days this year where I didn’t post. More words than any year since 2015, and the second-highest words per post of all time. Ultimately the only gripe I can come up with looking at this is that I’d still like to see a lot more engagement and comments, but I keep hearing about how blogs are dead, so maybe that’s why I don’t get as many comments as I used to, and that 5.8 comments number in 2014 isn’t exactly a hotbed of competing opinions.

Total word count over seven and some change years: 1,181,069, not counting this post. That’s … a lot.

Let’s talk posts next. No secret, because this has been the case for years: a lot of site traffic is driven by my perennial posts, and none of the top 10 posts on the site were written this year. This is just an image, but here’s the overall top 10 posts and the number of hits they got:

None of this makes any sense to me, particularly the fact that the fucking Snowpiercer post is still my second-highest yearly views.

This year’s top 10 posts, in order from highest to lowest traffic, are:

Nothing completely inexplicable in there except maybe for that one Monthly Reads post; I’m not sure why that one post would have done so much better than all the rest of them, and the Christmas Abortion Story post was only written five days ago and is on the list already, which is either a sign that the top 10 posts of this year are really weak or that it’s maybe heading toward blowing up. We’ll see if it keeps showing up next week or not.

Geography? Let’s talk geography. This is this year:

And this is over the life of the blog:

And I gotta be honest, y’all: I look at that and I’m proud of it. My stupid little website isn’t making me any money and it isn’t making me famous, but people from damn near every country on Earth have visited it. I mean, what’s left? North Korea and Turkmenistan, both of which are dictatorships; Svalbard Island, where less than 3,000 people live, and several countries in Africa where I suspect reading Western blogs is not a high priority.

Basically, I feel like I have a chance to land a lucky hit from Svalbard at some point, and the rest of them are probably never happening.

I thought about finishing this post with some goals for next year, and … honestly, I’m dialing back on the entire concept of “goals” right now. My one social media goal is to have more followers on TikTok than on Twitter by the end of next year, and I bet that’ll be the case by the end of this school year. For the blog? I’m going to keep writing; this place has been part of my daily life for over seven years and that’s not changing any time soon. I’d like to see those higher numbers become a trend and not a blip, but I’m not going to break my neck over it.

Seriously, though, if one of you ends up heading to the far north or North Korea at some point, make sure to hit the blog up.