The Treehouse set, which has since been retired, has been sitting in my office waiting patiently for me to get to it since my 48th birthday. I finally started putting it together a week or so ago, doing a couple of bags at a time because the instruction manual was terrible and I was going blind every time I looked at it. One way or another today I finally tackled all those leaves and finished it off. There were also green leaves in the box, but I like the autumn look a lot more.
Also, my fingers are not quite bleeding, but damn, putting all those vertical pieces into the leaves hurt.
The leafy portions can be lifted directly off, and all of the roofs come off of the three “house” portions of the set, so you can explore inside if you want to. Everything is detailed and furnished according to Lego’s traditional “details where no one will see them” system (and there’s a yellow gemstone hidden underneath the grass for some reason, too) and it all looks really nice.
In its final resting place, giving the A-Frame cabin some extra shade:
I may end up putting it on a little riser to make it more visible. That picture’s not from eye level in my desk chair but it’s still a little more covered up than I’d like.
We’re going to the Michigan Renfaire on Saturday, which … which means I have made some decisions, is what it means. Bad decisions.
I owned zero of those garments other than the shoes on my feet (which don’t quite fit the theme, but whatever) before deciding we were going to a Ren Faire. Now I own all of those things, plus a sporran that I’m not wearing in this picture.
Problem is, I need headgear. This is where you, and some terrible bathroom selfies, come in.
Headgear option A: Hat. Irish! Irish people don’t wear kilts. Advantages: easy, black, classy. Disadvantages: no neck covering, may not fit the theme.
I gotta get that leather string stretched out so it stops spiraling like that.
Headgear option B: Silk du-rag. Advantages: Easy, black, covers the neck. Disadvantages: A little more piratey than maybe I want.
My bathroom mirror? Filthy.
Headgear option C: Cowl. Advantages: A touch more renfairey, covers the neck, also covers the collar of the shirt which I don’t love. Versatile; I can take the hood down if I want, where the hat and du-rag will need to be carried around if I’m not wearing them. Disadvantages: Blue, but not matching the blue in the kilt, kinda feels dorky in a way the rest of the outfit doesn’t, makes me make that face, possibly more complicated to keep on/ in need of constant adjustment throughout the day. (It wears like a scarf, with long tails down my back.) Uncertain: Warmer, which may be a good or bad thing depending on weather.
I was thinking about waiting until tomorrow for this one, but unless someone decides to go through all of my posts between now and midnight (Feel welcome! Please do!) I don’t think the next few hours are going to make all that much of a difference to how my traffic looked in 2023. Interestingly, I like how the data is presented on my phone better than I do on the website, but here’s the main piece of data:
Here’s the last year by month:
And here’s year-over-year for the entire life of the site:
For those of you who are unaware, that huge spike in 2015, as well as a big part of the 2016 traffic, was from one post, and I obviously haven’t been able to reach that level of virality with anything since. Being up 14% over last year feels good, though, especially since I wrote less this year than I have … well, basically almost forever:
Does it entertain me that I sent my traffic up by posting less than any year other than 2017? Yes. yes it does. And even those 2017 posts tended to be longer; I only had one year with shorter average posts than this one. Interaction is way down, too, but blogs in general are way less popular than they were in the early 2010s and I have trouble worrying too much about it; while I enjoy looking at my numbers and pretending I have any idea at all what moves traffic one way or another, it’s not why the site is here, and I’d still be writing even if no one was reading at all. I had nearly thirty thousand people at least glance at my stupid little blog this year. That’s insane.
Even more insane:
I don’t have an easy way to quantify this, but that’s considerably more geographical diversity than I have gotten most years on the site. That’s just 2023. Here’s the whole time:
The very short list of places where I have never had blog traffic from: that blob at the top is Svalbard Island, owned by Norway, and I’m not completely convinced that traffic there doesn’t show up as Norway. Svalbard Island is my white whale, I think. North Korea. And then Western Sahara, which I don’t think is actually a country, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Gabon. That’s it, other than maybe some tiny islands that you literally can’t see on the map. Nine places. I can’t even say countries.
That’s absolutely fucking nuts, even knowing full well that the wild majority of those hits were probably both accidental and brief.
Back to the site traffic, though, and the undeniable slowing down of how much I’ve been posting here: I hate to admit it, but the main reason I’ve been posting less is that I’ve been happy lately, more or less. And being generally content does not lead to blog posts. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, I think (this, the third post of the day, represents the final snowflake of your promised flurry) but I’ve been in a pretty good place for most of the last two years, and there are just more days where I don’t happen to feel like I have something I need to hash out or complain about or get off my chest so I don’t inflict it on my family. Plus, hell, y’all got nearly 80K words out of me on a down year, so it’s not like anyone’s going to complain.
So yeah. I’d like to pretend I’ll be asleep by midnight, but I won’t, if only because being on break has shoved me more toward nocturnal than I’ve been lately and I will probably be up and reading at midnight. We aren’t doing anything, though. Too old for that shit. I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning, briefly luxuriate in the thought that I have been asleep for 99% of the year, and then find something to do with myself. Don’t do anything too dumb tonight.
You like movies, right? Everybody likes movies. You may have noticed that they made another movie about that Spider-Man dude recently.
Quick! Guess if I saw it.
Of course I did. And I’m pleased to report that I liked it quite a damn lot; I continue to be amazed that Marvel has cranked out something like ten thousand of these movies and I haven’t seen one I disliked yet. It’s not the best superhero movie of the year– that title belongs to Wonder Woman still, but it’s a solid effort, especially when you consider that there have been like seventeen movies just about Spider-Man in the last fifteen years or so.
Highlights: Tom Holland, Tom Holland, Tom Holland, and Tom Holland. Also Michael Keaton. Actually, hell, let’s be honest here: I like the entire damn cast. There’s just enough Robert Downey Jr– I didn’t want this to have as much Iron Man in it as, say, Civil War did– and he’s got enough screen time that it’s more than a cameo but not a lot more than a cameo, if you know what I mean. Putting Peter Parker back in high school was the right move, and Tom Holland plays young more than well enough. Michael Keaton as the Vulture (who, note, is never actually referred to by that name) is the best villain Marvel’s put on-screen since Loki, and I actually really like how low-stakes the film is for most of its runtime; it fits Spider-Man’s role as a street-level hero. This movie gets the character’s soul completely right, and that’s really important.
One minor gripe: this guy?
The character’s name is supposedly Ned? And maybe he’s supposed to be Ned Leeds, although they don’t ever use his last name, and shouldn’t Ned Leeds be a lot older than Peter anyway? And: nah. Fuck that. This isn’t Ned. This is Ganke, dammit, and I want Miles Morales in a Marvel movie. Donald Glover plays his uncle Aaron! He’s out there, dammit! Quit giving me his friends under weird pseudonyms and his relatives and give me Miles Morales!
I also saw this, finally. You may remember my review of the book of The Girl With All the Gifts: I loved the hell out of it, and it ended up being my second favorite book of 2016. I actually first heard of the book when I saw the trailer for the movie and it blew me away, and then I waited a year and a goddamn half and the damn movie either never came out in the States at all (I’ve been unable to get a solid answer on this, and believe me, I’ve looked) or got such a limited release that I was never anywhere near a theater that showed it.
Well, good news: Apple to the rescue! I was able to rent the movie for 24 hours for just 99 cents, and if anything it’s even a bit creepier than the book was– and, remember, I loved the book. You won’t be able to find this in theaters anywhere, but it’s absolutely worth hunting down if you have any way to stream it. Read the book, too, while you’re at it.
You get it, right? A+! School board! And the letter is in a bigger, different font and it’s red.
Unlike his road signs– picture to come later, if I can find one conveniently located to get a picture of– which are all the same color, and the font change either isn’t there or isn’t as noticeable, and therefore it takes me weeks to realize that you aren’t trying to signal your Jesusyness to people by sticking a cross into your road sign, which caused me to (ahem) cross you off my list of people to vote for.
Well, okay, that sounded negative. Let me phrase it differently: today was spectacular, except for the part where I sold zero books.
Zero. None. Bupkis. Nada. Less than one. No books sold.
I did not drive here to sell no books.
I have entertaining stories. I’m going to wait to tell at least one of them until I’m no longer in Indianapolis. But a combination of a number of things appear to have killed me:
It’s the first day of a three-day con. I suspect that most of the folk who were at the con today have three-day passes. They were, therefore, sitting on their wallets.
I’m a complete unknown, and my work does not immediately scan as relevant to any particular fandom (for these purposes, science fiction is not a “fandom.”)
…actually, those are the only two things. Now: for whatever it’s worth, I was keeping a very close eye on all the other vendors around me and everybody was selling shit today. The Star Trek cosplayers two booths down made one sale that I saw. The Dr. Who guy next to me made one sale– to a group of Dr. Who fanatics. The author to my right made three, but she’s been coming here for years, hugged every person who came to her booth, because she knew all of them already, and made most of her sales to people who began their conversation with the words “Do you have anything new this year?”
So…no sales, but I’m not sweating it. I talked to a lot of people, and had a bunch of them pick my books up and take long looks at them. I’m certain tomorrow will be better. If it isn’t I will cry. Forever.
(This isn’t me giving myself a pep talk. This is objective truth. Timothy Zahn is here. He looked bored to death every time I walked past him, and he didn’t seem to be selling much either. If Timothy fuckin’ Zahn isn’t moving a lot of books, I’m not gonna do better.)
One other thing I underestimated: InConJunction is seriously a community. The vendors all know each other, and even Dr. Who guy, who was at this con for the first time, had a mess of folks coming up to him and asking him if he’d been at other recent cons– he’s been on tour for a while and has been hitting bunches of them. The lady next to me has been coming for years and appeared to be making sales to people she knew. So it’s not just that I suck.
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 