Rise

It's official: this is weird. 

While technically I did not hit 1,000,000 views for September, I still surpassed 5,000,000+ views on the first of this month. 

I'd like to say I'm popular, but I think we all know that is not the case. 

For those not paying attention, or not retaining 4-1-1, it took me 20+ years to hit 2 million views. It took me another year or so to hit 3. But now it's about 1 million per month for the last three months. 

I'd love to say it is my captivating writing, but again........we all know that is not the case. And while Shep and Simon are cute......it isn't them either. 

I have been watching the numbers and there are certainly patterns. 

This is a typical week. About 34-36k one day, 20k the next - and repeat. I can tell you on the 36k days, the numbers start to rise around 20:00 the evening before. 

You may or may not know that 710 rarely, if ever, reads this blog thing. He figures he lives a lot of it. And we rarely discuss it either. But I did mention the rise in numbers, and he was pretty quick to point out that it is probably AI. 

710 has been working more and more with AI at this job. He surmised that lots of AI things go out and just 'scrape' data and content on a daily basis and pulls it into their tools. 

Oh, if true, those poor poor suckers using my shitty posts to gather content to be reused elsewhere. And if we wondered where the downfall of the internet might be - look no further than my blog url. 

There are enough bloggers reading my stuff. What I don't know is if they are experiencing the same thing, or something similar. I mean, 710's theory is as good as anything I've conjured in my pea brain. However, I can't imagine the Chinese.....yes, the Chinese.....

....have singled out my blog and no one else's. 

The above is data from the last 3 months. I'm not sure why Hong Kong is separated from China. They got that back from the UK in 1997.  ....and they're really barely pulling their weight according to the paltry 878 hits. Even Romania is kicking their ass. 

There is high doubt that 1.8 million Chinese folks are reading my blog. I mean, I don't even do a lot of Asian cooking entries - and you gotta figure they can make it better without following my directions. The closest I come to Asian references are about / from Long Duck Dong from Sixteen Candles.....though now that I think about it, we did see Crazy Rich Asians a few years back. 

I assume most countries have an AI presence, so maybe it does all stand to reason. 

So, since hitting the big 5M, I'll be at almost another 100,000 by the time this publishes. I say it's weird, bu honestly it means nothing. Not in the big scheme of things. The WHOPR 2000 is reading my blog, not people.  ....but the WHOPR 2000 is probaby self-actualizing and probably laughs at my JD Vance put downs. 

Yeah.......that's it. 

Song by: Eddie Vedder