Randomly....

     I have lately been watching the anime The Apothecary Diaries.  (Or rather, over the past four or five days I've binged the show, but as it's simulcasting that just means I've watched the first ten (or was it eleven?) episodes and caught up to its current status.)

    It's really good (so far), and obviously it must be doing well, because Goodsmile has pre-orders up for Nendoroids of the two leads, and a Pop-up Parade of the heroine.  Without knowing how the story will end, I'm not sure if I want to spring for all three, but I will probably have to get the Pop-up Parade because of the following weird brain logic.

    I was thinking about the figure and mentally commented to myself that the Pop-up Parade of Maomao might fit in nicely next to the Pop-up Parade of Wei Wuxian...and suddenly I found myself thinking how cool it would be if Maomao was the reincarnation of Wen Qing.

    So now I suddenly and totally headcanon that she is, in fact, the reincarnation of Wen Qing, and I kind of want to write a fanfic wherein Maomao meets the still-existing fierce corpse version of Wen Ning, who recognizes her as his sister, and he's thrilled to get to see her again after so many centuries.  I don't think I ever could write that, since The Apothecary Diaries is set in a much more realistic world without magic and monsters and the undead, but it could be a fun cross-over regardless of that.  (Uh, aside from the fact that it might be a little dubious to have a cross-over between an actual Chinese IP and a Japanese IP that's merely set in ancient China. (Okay, technically I don't know for a fact that The Apothecary Diaries is originally Japanese, but...I feel like if they were just adapting a Chinese novel or whatever then the characters would all have family names, and yet they don't, which is just really weird to me.  They all just have given names, unless Crunchyroll is purposefully screwing up the subtitles so that a whole lot of people with two single-character names are being treated as having one two-character names, which is equally implausible.  There's also the fact that if it was based on a Chinese novel or comic or whatever, then you'd expect a Chinese animation studio to be doing the adaptation, not a Japanese one.))

    Long story short, now that I've come to the weird brain conclusion that Maomao is Wen Qing, I almost feel obligated to buy the Pop-up Parade of her. 😅  (Especially since lately I've been putting together Nendoroid dolls to represent various other Mo Dao Zu Shi characters besides the two who have official rep, but I have not so far done one for Wen Qing.  Just Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli and Wen Ning.  I did spot a dress I could buy that would do for a Wen Qing Nendoroid doll, but finding a Nendoroid with hair that could do for Wen Qing is another matter entirely, and much more difficult to pull off.)

    On an unrelated note, some time ago, I reported on some crazy activity that seemed to be entirely one (or more?) bots loading my blog's main page over and over again.  And then later on I reported that the bot seemed to have moved on after more than 11,000 pageviews.

    Wellllllll....it's not the same bot, as far as I can tell, but there's definitely a bot accessing my blog again.  A lot.  To the tune of in the neighborhood of 1,500 views in the last week.  And yet the pattern is a bit different.  (I think?)  Certainly, the bot is coming from a different place--the new bot is domestic, or at least Google's stats say the vast majority of my recent hits are from within the US (but only about 1.23k out of 1.5k)--and either it sometimes loads pages and posts or I'm also experiencing an influx of actual human visitors.  (Impossible to know for sure without anyone leaving any comments.)  The previous bot mostly registered with the stats page as using Mobile Safari on an Android phone (making no sense whatsoever!) whereas the new one registers exclusively as using Chrome on Windows.  There is this, though:

    (Please ignore the blurred out URLs.  Those are my previous blogs.)  That's the results for the entire past year.  In both the old and new bot cases, they 100% have "Other" for the referring URL, and "Other" for their "Search keywords".  Which, technically, so would anyone following a bookmark in their browser, or having to copy-paste the URL I left in my AO3 profile.

    I do feel like the general pattern of the way it's accessing my blog is different, beyond the whole "it's also loading pages and posts" thing.  Here's the last week of hits on my blog:

    And here's the hits over the last year:

    The rise is far more sharp, and the troughs between peaks far deeper.  (On the 16th there were 361 views, on the 17th there were only 5, and then on the 18th there were 747, just for an example.)  Particularly sus is this little gem here:

    When looking at the views for the last 24 hours, there are 127 at 4 am, 1 at 7 am and 1 at 8 am.  Obviously, that's only 4 am here, but 125 of those 128 views are listed as coming from the United States, so...that would put them between like 2 and 6 am if they're from the 48 contiguous states (not sure what the time difference is for Alaska or Hawaii...probably only one more hour for Alaska, but Hawaii is definitely a lot more than that...) that still comes off as pretty, well, implausible.  Okay, no, wait, scratch that.  Anyone loading my blog 127 times in an hour is implausible on general principles, especially since only ten actual posts were loaded in the last 24 hours, and no pages, meaning that out of the 128 views in that time, 116 were just loading the front page and/or hitting "older posts" at the bottom of the page.  (One of the posts was loaded twice.)  That just doesn't feel likely.

    At all.

    But, as before, I don't know if there's anything I can or even should do about it.  It just sorta weirds me out.  And I felt like sharing because.

    Also because this looks really bad: