Never mind

On October 17, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching

I was going to write a whole post about telling my kids that I was quitting, and instead I got into a half hour clusterfuck with a website where I was trying to change my payment method for something and it just went wrong in every imaginable way and now somehow I am paying twice as much for the item in question, which I don’t even really want any longer, plus I hate everything and I’m resolved to never use this particular retailer ever again. Pfah.

There’s not even much of a story, really. If anything, they were … resigned? Let’s go with resigned.

Whatever. One more teaching day and then I clear out my classroom.

A brief bit of blogwankery

On October 16, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking

Sometime this weekend– possibly today, although it would require someone or a few someones to go a’wandering through the archives for a while, or looking at cosplay pictures— the site will surpass last year’s traffic. Which would be nice! That big spike in 2015 and a good chunk of 2016’s bar is all from a single post that went nuts, but in general I’ve considered 60K a nice round number to shoot for each year, and while I didn’t get there last year I should get a decent way past that this year unless the site collapses for some reason. I’m already up on visitors from last year, but I still need about 400 more hits to catch it in traffic, and there’s a bit of a way to go for Likes and Comments.

This site doesn’t make me any money, mind you, other than second-hand by occasionally driving readers to my books; I tried to go through WordPress’ monetization application and was denied because it turns out I say too many swears, and I’m not going to stop swearing for a few extra bucks a month. But it’s definitely nice to see traffic up. That’s probably an artifact of me posting more– last year was, uh, a bit of a bust in that regard, what with every aspect of my life imploding at once, and as of right now I haven’t missed a day since April 5th.

I was about to go into more metrics, but we’re close enough to the end of the year that I’ll put that off until my end-of-2020 blogwanking post. For now, I thought I’d acknowledge the milestone and leave it at that. Now go troll through my archives and get me over the hump today. 🙂

In which I apologize in advance

On September 10, 2020September 10, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

It’s happening again, somehow– my first viral video on TikTok is now up to 3.7 million views and really hasn’t slowed down all that much, and I woke up this morning to discover that one I posted last night had amassed 130K views overnight and has tacked on another hundred thousand in the 10 hours I’ve been awake.. The first video got me from around 50 to just under a thousand followers; this one has taken me from 900+ to 2100 in less than a day.

I am apparently at least a little good at this.

I still have over five times the following on Twitter that I have on the TT account, but TikTok gets massively more engagement than Twitter does. It’s kind of shocking how much of a difference there is given that TT doesn’t have any sort of “retweet” type of function.

(I know I’m still kind of being a dick by not posting my address on here, for those of you who care. It’s because it’s under my real name, and I’m still trying to avoid crossing the streams, so to speak. If you’re curious, email me or drop a comment and I’ll let you know individually.)

I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be somebody who gets this kind of engagement on every single post. I was just starting to break away from constantly checking my notifications inside the app like a rat in a Skinner box looking for a heroin fix, and now it’s started all over again. I assume that once it starts happening all the time you get over it, but it’s nuts how constant the new notifications are. There have been sixteen while I’ve been writing this, for example, and I write fast, and they’ve started to slow down because everything always slows down around this time of day. If this behaves like the other one, in an hour or so I will be able to clear my notifications, then reload and immediately have new ones, and I’ll be able to do that constantly. It’s nuts.

Still looking for a way to monetize this. At some point in the last 24 hours they decided I was important enough to unlock live-streaming on the app, which is terrifying and I’m not going to do it. If I get another 98,000 followers I can join the Creator Fund, but I gotta figure that’s still a ways off, right?

… right?

Yes. Definitely.

In which I withdraw

On April 24, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn movies1 Comment

Going to try my damnedest to enforce a total internet blackout until I see Avengers: Endgame Friday night.

In related news, Avengers: Endgame comes out Friday night.

See y’all on the other side.

I’m just gonna rebrand the blog now

On November 20, 2018November 20, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.

Nah, not really. But in the midst of all this nonsense about the goddamn books we ordered some boots and shoes for the boy, because apparently November is just too ridiculously late to do something crazy like walk into a store and buy boots.

(I feel less sorry for brick and mortar retail every time some shit like this happens. It’s November. We haven’t had real snow yet. Leave some fucking boots on the shelves, you jackasses.)

Right, I forgot to complain about Amazon. So, we couldn’t find boots at the shoe store nearest to our house, or the Target nearest to that shoe store, so we ordered him a pair of boots and a pair of new shoes, because why not do both at the same time and OH HEY you missed out on that sale too. The boots got here the other day; all good.

The shoes got here today. Now, this was one of those “fulfilled by Amazon” things, so Amazon isn’t directly responsible for this, but I opened the box and there was still a fucking ink tag on one of the shoes.

Come the fuck on, guys. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and my appointment is near an actual Dick’s, so I’m gonna just swing by there with all my receipts and everything and see if they will remove the tag for me. Alternately, we’ll just cut the fucking laces off and buy new ones. I don’t have the damn energy to deal with a return right now.

(Wonders how effectively the internet can help with removing the tag.)

Anyway. The image up there isn’t there for any reason other than that I’m listening to Shimmy Shimmy Ya right now. I am officially on Thanksgiving vacation, meaning that I don’t even have to think about any children other than the one that lives in my house for the next several days. Virtual hunting is about to get way more important to my lifestyle than it used to be. It turns out we’re not leaving town like we thought we were, so we’re hosting Thanksgiving, but we’re gonna keep shit simple. The other four days of the weekend? Relaxation, motherfuckers.

Y’all do the same.

I would say words, but…

On April 27, 2018April 27, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

…I’m limiting my Internet access as much as I possibly can until I’ve seen Infinity War tonight. Yes, I know, this is my blog, and it’s difficult to imagine spoiling myself on my own blog, but the tendency is to websurf while I write, or at least monitor Twitter, and I can’t have that.

In particular, I have lots of things to say about the God of War reboot that just came out for PS4, but you’re going to have to wait a bit.

#2017 blogwanking

On December 24, 2017December 24, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

It’s that time of year again, where I pretend that people care about my site metrics even the teeniest little bit and waste time posting about them anyway! You’re excited, right?

Okay, there’s a reason I’m posting this on Christmas Eve, nobody’s on the blog today anyway. 🙂 Onward!

Here’s overall traffic for the blog, organized by year:

Screen Shot 2017-12-24 at 1.50.03 PM

That’s… not super encouraging, obviously, and I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t written a monster post at the end of 2015 (more on that later) we’d be seeing a steady decline since 2014. Now, a lot of this year is my fault– I’ve not been engaging with other bloggers and I haven’t been posting as often, so traffic was bound to be down. That 575 comments number is definitely something I’d like to see go up in the future; that’s not even two a day. But hey! Sixty-one thousand pageviews ain’t bad. It’s not like I’m a celebrity or anything; I’m an idiot with a website.

The top ten posts written in 2017 were:

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: MINI FORCE, 6,413 pageviews.
#REVIEW: SLEEPING BEAUTIES, by Stephen King & Owen King, 276 pageviews.
Betsy DeVos is a fucking worthless hack and so is her scumbag boss, 249 pageviews.
KOKOMO-CON: The Cosplay, 236 pageviews, plus hundreds on the pictures.
RIP, Sonya Craig, 186 pageviews.
On refugees and Christianity, again, 174 pageviews.
On “assassination porn” and stupid, stupid people, 169 pageviews.
#metoo and me, 149 pageviews.
May as well tell the whole world, 123 pageviews.
On letting idiots make decisions for me, 118 pageviews.

…so, yeah. Nothing that really set the world on fire, other than that MINI FORCE piece, and… well, prepare for a pattern on that. I have no idea who the hell is reading the Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews series, but holy shit are those posts popular, except when they’re not. The one on Pokémon that I wrote this year got nowhere, the one on Mini Force got six thousand pageviews. Hell if I know.

The top ten posts of the year, regardless of when they were written, are:

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: MINI FORCE, 6,413 pageviews, 6,413 pageviews overall.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: BOB ZOOM, 5,262 pageviews, 15,799 pageviews overall.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: OCTONAUTS, 3,045 pageviews, 9,068 pageviews overall.
SNOWPIERCER: I hated, hated, hated, hated, HATED this movie., 3,013 pageviews, 27,152 pageviews overall.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: SARAH & DUCK, 2,791 pageviews, 3,206 pageviews overall.
In which I tell you how your religion works, 2,118 pageviews, 109,692 pageviews overall.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: COLOR CREW, 1,958 pageviews, 6,977 pageviews overall.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: CURIOUS GEORGE, 1,423 pageviews, 5,781 pageviews overall.
In which I am still a bad student (pt. 2 of 3), 1,243 pageviews, 2,014 pageviews overall.
Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: Peg + Cat, 958 pageviews, 3,694 pageviews overall.

…I assume you may have noticed a theme. Be aware that the next six highest posts for the year are also CCPR posts. I don’t understand any of this, really; that Goddamn Snowpiercer post should not be still getting views but still does every single day (and remains the #1 Google result for the words “Snowpiercer stupid,”) and I’ve never understood the popularity of specifically #2 in that “Bad Student” series. For comparative purposes, part one got 59 views this year, and part 3 got 67. I think it has something to do with being a high Google result for searches that include the image at the top of the page, but why the hell that led to twelve hundred pageviews? I dunno.

Clearly I need to just review kids’ shows all the time. That’s obviously my niche.

OH I ALMOST FORGOT EDIT: Geography! Geography is fun. Here are countries that have visited my blog this year:

Screen Shot 2017-12-24 at 5.09.52 PM

And here is the lifetime-of-the-blog chart. Both are clickable to make ’em a bit bigger if you care to do so:

Screen Shot 2017-12-24 at 5.10.34 PM

Still missing: North Korea, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Western Sahara, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Gabon, Svalbard Island, and… Kosovo. I have always suspected that for some unclear technological reason whatever software WordPress is using interprets hits from Kosovo as being from the neighboring countries, as they’re fairly well-represented, and none of the rest are especially surprising, as they’re either Communist dictatorships, tremendously poor, have essentially no people, or some combination of the three.

It is very cool to say that my stupid little blog has had visits from damn near every country on Earth, guys.