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A brief bit of blogwankery

October 16, 2020 Luther M. Siler

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

April 16, 2018April 16, 2018 Luther M. Siler1 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)

September 2, 2016 Luther M. Siler2 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.