2025 in Blogwanking, or: WTF, China?

On December 29, 2025December 29, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek4 Comments

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?

This was almost a politics post

On November 10, 2025November 10, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

…which I have refrained from, because typing “Fuck Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin” three thousand times, while accurate and fair, is not exactly compelling reading.

Speaking of not compelling, let’s blogwank:

Seriously, what’s going on here? October 31 was the highest traffic day since 2015 until November 1, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until yesterday, which was the highest traffic day since 2015 until– goes and looks— oh, basically right now, since I’m 7 views short of yesterday’s numbers. Engagement doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere and I’m not seeing anything weird in what limited data I’m getting from referrals, and while the immediate impulse is to suspect bots, if they are bots, has WordPress suddenly lost the ability to keep them from showing up in our statistics? Or turned it off? A lot of this traffic is from China but the last couple of days it’s been mostly American. Here’s the geography numbers:

The 7200 from the US would nearly be the best month of the year all by itself. October 2025 was the best month in years, and November should pass it tomorrow. It looks like my traditionally big posts are getting the lion’s share of this traffic, but the numbers aren’t adding up, which is weird, and I feel like this also pushes back on the bot theory– would thousands and thousands of bots be indexing the same post over and over again?

Somebody who knows more than me explain what the deal is.

In which I have been here a long time

On January 19, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek1 Comment

I discovered a rogue bit of autocorrect had changed “Baldree” to “Balder” in the previous post and went to fix it, only to discover this little bit of blogwankery. My review of Bookstall & Bonedust was the four thousand, four hundred and forty-fourth post on the site, and this one is number four thousand, four hundred and forty-five.

Whew. That’s … that’s a whole lotta words, right there.

In which I am bad at the subject I teach

On January 9, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I don’t know— I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know– if any other jobs outside of education ever are in a position where they experience the phenomenon known as the “two hour delay.” I actually have not experienced very many of them, as my previous district never used them; school was either in session or cancelled, and the only delay I remember ever having turned into a cancellation pretty quickly.

But today the weather was shit in a very specific way at 5:30 in the morning, and promising to be substantially less shit in a couple of hours, and as a result nearly every district in northern Indiana called a two hour delay today. And you would think that as someone who is used to being up at a certain time, being dressed and out of the shower by a certain time, in the car at a certain time, and at work at a certain time, the process of simply adding two hours to all of those things would not be especially complicated.

You would be wrong.

I did, in fact, manage to make it into work in time, but the amount of times I had to recalculate literally all of those times up there, oftentimes being completely unable to remember simple things like when do I leave for work? was truly Goddamned ridiculous. School starts two hours later than normal! That’s all! It sounds uncomplicated, but that’s before you realize that you have completely forgotten when school usually starts, what time you get up (never mind that the alarms are literally still active on your watch) or how long it should take to get to work. I spent the whole morning half-asleep and trying desperately to figure out how much longer I could reasonably stay in bed versus how long I could wait to extract every possible second of bed time instead of, say, getting a perfectly reasonable hour and a half of extra sleep and then having time for a leisurely cup of coffee in a comfortable chair instead of tumbling out of the house at high speed and at the last minute.

I got out of the shower and managed to convince myself that school was starting in ten minutes. I swear to you that my heart rate and my blood pressure spiked. All of this because of an inability to add two to a number.

And it’s entirely possible that tomorrow we get to do the exact same thing again, then a foot of snow on Friday but probably after school is over, then a three-day weekend, then three days of ten below zero before wind chill. So January is proceeding according to expectations so far.

A brief bit of blogwankery

On October 16, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

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. 🙂

A quick insight into my personality

On April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

Django Wexler, an author I was rather fond of ten minutes ago, just did this to me:

Math question:

If I have N N-sided dice (e.g. 100d100) and I roll them repeatedly, removing any that roll maximum (e.g. 100), what is the expected number of rolls until I have none left, in terms of N?

— Django Wexler (@DjangoWexler) April 17, 2018

I had a long day at work today, guys. My last customer of the night kept me at work well past closing time and didn’t buy, I want to curl up in bed with a book, and instead this damn math problem is in my head and fucking with me.

I may need to grab a note pad and oh fuck it I’ll do it on the blog.

Let’s say N is 2. So two bits, either 1 or 2. Roll them once.

25% of the time you get both twos. (so 25% of the time, only one roll)

50% of the time you get one two.

25% of the time you get two ones.

SECOND ROLL

If you have one die left, you have a 50% chance of being done.

If you have both, see the above calculation.

So…

this suggests you have a pretty big chance of being done after N rolls, with diminishing returns after N. I’m too tired to nail the numbers down, but I suspect N² is a reasonable answer. Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to figure it out more carefully.

Assuming I can sleep, ever.

DAMMIT.

Whoopsie (on 2000 posts)

On September 2, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking2 Comments

I really meant to eventually write a “real” blog post after my brief ode to a good morning yesterday, but events got away from me in the morning (in other words, I laid around reading and then took a nap) and then we spent the entire evening at my parents’ house. If I hadn’t gotten that post up early, I’d have entirely forgotten about the blog yesterday. Which would have broken a streak that’s nearing two years long now, but otherwise wouldn’t have been any kind of big deal.

I wrote my 2000th post on this thing a week or two ago. This is actually probably post 2010 or so, because the milestone slipped past me at the time. I noted it on Twitter, but haven’t mentioned it here yet. The post itself wasn’t exactly earth-shattering, but I’m entertained about the song I chose.

Some random facts:

I’ve had, so far, 377,623 pageviews and 204,501 unique visitors to the site.
The first post was June 4, 2013.
My best day had 12,451 pageviews. Today will probably have around 150; traffic’s been a bit down this year.
My most popular post, by far, is “In which I tell you how your religion works,” with 106,900 pageviews. The next most popular is the Goddamned Snowpiercer review, which has 22,872 and still is regularly in my top 5 posts every single fucking day.
I’ve had traffic from 195 countries, or at least what WordPress calls countries, which occasionally seems a little odd.
The top 10: The US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, India, France, Brazil, and Norway, in that order.
There’s been exactly one pageview from 14 places: the Cook Islands, Equitorial Guinea, the Faroe Islands, French Guiana, Iran, the Marshall Islands, Martinique, San Marino, the Seychelles, Sint Maarten, St. Martin (apparently a different place?), Syria, Tajikistan, and Togo.