IWSG: Blogging

 

    So, this month's question is:

April 3 question - How long have you been blogging?  What do you like about it and how has it changed?

    That's actually a kind of depressing question for me. 😅  Because it turns out that it will be exactly ten years this summer.  Which means I'll be turning 50 soon(ish). 😱

    See, I started blogging soon after I turned 39, posting daily as I went through the voyage of entering my fourth decade.  Uh, also at the time I thought I wanted to hastily enter into a romantic relationship because I had this weird idea in my head that there was something wrong with turning 40 without having had one, and so I thought I'd use a blog to chronicle that journey and then I promptly did absolutely nothing about it, and upon actually turning 40 I sat down and looked at my life and realized that I actually viewed the idea of entering a romantic (or sexual) relationship as pretty darn scary, and so much of my stress and unhappiness just melted away.  (Proving that you're never too old to sit down and figure out your own sexuality.)

    So, anyway, that was very late in the summer of 2014 that I started that blog (it was on Wordpress at the time, only they kept making more and more changes that made the free accounts more and more unpleasant to use until I finally said "screw this!" and decided to migrate elsewhere, ending up here) and that means I'm close to a full decade of blogging.  Though it's not been steady; for a lot of that time, these IWSG posts were the only posts I was putting up.  (This was the case before leaving Wordpress as well as after.)

    I like how blogging gives me a chance to just sort of say whatever I want (within reason) at whatever length I want.  When I get really invested in a topic, I can go on endlessly about it, and most people don't want to put up with that, and the beauty of blogging is that no one has to put up with it:  if I want to write ten thousand words about cheese, I can, and if no one wants to read all those ten thousand words, they don't have to.  (Uh, not that I'm likely to write ten thousand words about cheese.  I just thought that sounded funny as an example.)  If I start prattling on in person about whatever I'm into, whoever I'm talking to either has to suffer through listening to my nonsense or has to be rude enough to say "shut up already!"  That's not the case in a blog, since I can't tell if someone who visits a post actually reads what's written there or not, so there's no worry that I'm inconveniencing anyone.

    A lot of the biggest changes to blogging, for me, have been that switch from Wordpress to Blogger.  It's not just a question of formatting and Blogger having fewer widgets, but of audience.  Wordpress had a lot of built-in audience, and you could search the whole site for blogs by their tags, and if Blogger has anything like that, I'm unaware of it (not that I've really spent much time looking at other blogs since the change, as I have more drains on my time than I used to), and certainly not seeing any traffic from it.  (Most of my traffic on the blog seems to come from bots, in fact, though at least they're not posting spam comments.  Not sure what they are doing, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️ )  In a way, I kind of like the lack of an audience, because it means no pressure to produce interesting posts, and I actually do like the idea of just screaming into the void to vent my thoughts/feelings.  But on the other hand it's also kind of frustrating that if I do happen to post something clever or interesting, no one will see it.

    There's also the change of not feeling quite as...hmm, how to put this?  "Pressured" isn't the right word, but neither is "motivated," though they're both a bit related to what I want to say.  Hmm.....

    Well, I'll try to fumble through without the right word.  Unlike when I started (post-turning 40, I mean) I don't feel much compulsion to post to my blog, so I end up posting very sporadically, with IWSG being the only constant.  (That's one of the reasons I decided to do April A to Z this year, for the first time in ages, to try and get me posting regularly again for reasons other than NaNoWriMo.)

    Hmmm.

    I feel like there ought to be more to say, but I can't think what it is.

    (That seems to happen to me a lot these days.  Getting old, maybe...)

April A to Z Theme Reveal

     So, this is something I haven't done in a long time--and have never done on this version of my blog, having only done it back on the Wordpress version--but I'm thinking about taking part in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge this year.

    I even have a theme!  (Of sorts.)

    My theme is going to be "characters I have written about."

    Which sounds pretty dumb when I actually write it down, but...

    Some posts will be more talking about the character as a character, and some will be more focused on excerpts of my writing.  (Which sounds astonishingly arrogant now that I'm looking at it on the screen...)

    The characters are going to be a mixed bag (I don't have them all picked out, but I have at least a few candidates for almost every letter), some being truly original characters from things I've written, some being mythological figures I've written about, and some being other peoples' characters I've written fan fiction about. 😅  I might be especially looking forward to that last category, even...

    I plan to talk about what the characters are like, and why I've chosen them for the blog post, whether that's why I like them, why they're important to me, or whatever other reason I had for picking them.  (In one case, it may be "I couldn't even find any other characters whose name starts with the letter U".)  Some of them even have art I can post.  (Mostly the fan fiction, but a few of the originals, too...)

    For the most part, I'm hoping I can fulfill this challenge using works I've already released online, or plan to release eventually.  If that doesn't work, I may have to dip into older works that I would otherwise like to pretend don't exist due to sheer cringe.  (The letter "V" might require that, unfortunately...)

    Anyway, I'm hoping that this will both help me get back into the spirit of more regular blogging (instead of a frenzy of blogging in November and barely even doing so sporadically the rest of the year) and maybe also help me to start visiting other people's blogs again.

    Oh, final thought, re:  "adult content."  My blog itself does not contain adult content, but my fiction often contains swearing and sometimes contains what would be called "suggestive material" if it was in a movie.  So while my posts are totally SFW, their links may not be wholly so.  I think that leaves me okay to not click the "adult content" marker on the actual challenge form (when it's available to fill out) but if I'm wrong about that, please let me know now so I don't make that mistake later!  Thanks! 😆

Should I be worried?

     I ask, of course, because I am a bit worried, regardless of whether I actually need to be.

    See, I tend to check the stats tab on my blog, because why wouldn't I?  I mean, what else is it there for but for me to check it, right?  And today I found this:

    It's like...why was someone from Google's corporate administration accessing my blog?  I tried following the link, and it was some kind of official-looking sign-in page.

    I mean...maybe it's just a routine thing, that the company periodically checks on what's being posted on people's blogs, to make sure it's not anything they could get in trouble for hosting?  But it's still creeping me out.

    I guess they would have sent me some kind of warning email if I'd done something wrong, but it's still just sort of creepy feeling. 😭  Like, now I'm worried my blog will be suddenly disabled or something, even though I haven't done anything wrong.  (Unless posting fanfic is against the rules, but that seems highly unlikely, since it's my own fanfic. I mean, sure, posting fanfic someone else wrote, yeah, that would be bad, but...)

Looking back on 2023...

    So, 2023 is ending, and I thought I should post about that, because that seems like a thing to do.

    To be honest, the Year of the Rabbit has not been kind to me, it feels like.  Which is weird, because I was born in the Year of the Rabbit myself.  Then again, I recall reading somewhere (around January, I suspect) that each cycle is connected to one of the five elements, so I guess whichever one 2023's Year of the Rabbit is connected to is bad for whatever one 1975's Year of the Rabbit was connected to?  (Or, you know, I just had a bad year and everything else is unconnected to that fact. 😅)  

    It's kind of weird, though; I don't really remember any of the past Years of the Rabbit, or even if the fact that it was same even mattered to me in the slightest.  I mean, obviously I didn't care for the first one.  Uh, I mean, the first one after 1975, since I was obviously unable to care while I was a newborn infant.  But I don't really have any memories of being 12.  Or rather, I have no memories connected to being 12:  I'm sure I remember plenty of things from that year, I just don't think of those memories in terms of my age at the time. 1987...I wanna say that's the year I graduated grade school?  Except that sounds kinda late for it, doesn't it?  Wait, if one typically is six when one starts first grade, then...yeah, being twelve when you graduate sixth grade does track.  So, yeah, that would be the year I graduated grade school and started high school.  (My high school was a combination high and junior high, so it was one school from 7th to 12th grade.)  In which case it was actually a pretty decent year for me in some respects--I met my high school best friend, the only person from high school I still have any contact with--but in other respects it was awful, since my entire high school experience can be summed up with one word:  pain.  As to the year I turned 24...nope, no memories whatsoever connected to being 24.  That would have been 1999?  Ack.  Nevermind.  Waaaaaaay too many memories, almost all of them bad.  That's when I...actually, no, if I go into too many details then I will totally be doxxing myself if anyone who knows me happens to stumble across this.  (Which is unlikely, but I'd still rather not take that risk.)  But it was a bad year for me.  So...turning 36...that would have been...2011.  Hmm.  Yeah, I actually do have zero memories connected to that year.  I'm wanting to say I got my second BA in 2010, in which case I was not currently in school in 2011, but maybe it was the year I started volunteering at the museum where I used to work.  In which case 2011 was probably pretty good for me?

    Anyway, as to why this year was not good, well, there's a lot on this blog about it already.  I was taking part in a game jam in my fledgling indie game dev hobby, and started getting heart palpitations, which became so bad that I dropped out of the jam and stopped writing altogether for about a week (maybe only a few days), and then decided I wouldn't do any more game dev until the heart palpitations were all cleared up.  (I did permit myself to write for non-game dev purposes...which in this case meant fan fiction.  So, so, so much fan fiction.)  They, uh, still aren't.  They're less frequent--a few spells per month--and pretty minor, but they still happen.  Meaning I haven't felt safe returning to game dev, despite that I was in the middle of rewriting an old series of my (many) unreleased novels and releasing them as interactive fiction.  So it's just sitting out there, the first two of seven, taunting the universe.  Admittedly, very few people have even interacted with the game pages, let alone actually read them, but that doesn't change how annoying it is not to be working on them.  But heart health is a scary thing and I don't want to tempt fate.  (And yes, I have seen doctors about this heart thing.  It's just that they can't find anything wrong with my heart.  I don't even have high blood pressure.)

    Looking back on the year, that's honestly been the major part of it.  Just more and more and more doing nothing because I'm scared to do anything.  Though also my favorite Chinese restaurant closed shortly after my birthday (my birthday was the last time I ate there, in fact) and although a new one has opened in the same space using the same name, my parents have eaten there since it reopened and they said the menu has changed and isn't as good.  😭  I also feel like my house has become even more of a roiling, uncleaned chaos, but I think part of that is the health thing; I'm afraid to do anything for fear of upsetting my heart.  Which is dumb, but somehow I got into that mindset and it's hard to push myself out of it again.

    But this is depressing, so let's change the subject!

    Please be amused by my very amateur attempts at photography instead:

    Since rabbits feature heavily in a few choice moments in Mo Dao Zu Shi, Goodsmile released special Year of the Rabbit Nendoroids of the two leads.  And somehow I didn't actually take them out of the boxes for some photographs until today. 😭  But they're super-adorable, right?  😁  I'm not sure how clear it is in this picture, but their eye highlights are little bunnies.  🐰  The bunny-ear headbands were the pre-order bonus for getting them directly from Goodsmile.  😁

    Anyway, looking ahead to next year...

    I don't do New Year's Resolutions.  Those seem like "promises I don't intend to keep," you know?  But I do have goals for next year.  Things I want to do, and hopefully will do.

    My goals (in no particular order) are:

• Polish up and release book three (it's already gotten a couple new drafts and I've already put it in the game engine, so it just needs polishing and some work on the glossary)
• Finish this @#$^#@$#ing fanfic that I've been working on since like April (it's at like 385k words now!)
• Post my dragon-based MDZS fanfic tomorrow (since it had gotten to nearly the end of the year, I figured may as well wait and post it in the Year of the Dragon, lol! (yes, I do know that technically that doesn't start until February, but humor me))
• Start exercising in some manner (if nothing else, there's supposed to be a Vocaloid version of Fitness Boxing coming out in a few months, that should help)
• Try to fix up my awful diet at least a little (I do plan to talk to my doctor about weight loss when I see her in January)
• Do at least a little cleaning around the house (hopefully enough that I can replace my dying refrigerator)
• Try and give away or sell some of the crap I don't need/want/use anymore
• Get my car fixed (it died on me again)

    Okay, admittedly, a lot of those sound like exactly what everyone says every year, but a lot of my health problems are coming to a point where I can't keep on going like this much longer, which has given me a lot more motivation to fix the problem, only I keep trying to diet too strictly and going off it and making things worse. 😭  (Hence why I plan to ask my doctor about it.  And hope she'll have something to say other than "let's cut you open and staple your stomach shut" because that is just cursed.)

    Hmm...what else did I want to say?

    I've made a few plans for the turning of the year.  I managed to finish the book I was reading today (volume 4 of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun) which is good, because I did not want that to be the first book I read in the new year, 'cause about half the volume is just the two leads being insanely horny for each other and refusing to do anything about it, until I just want to scream at them.  (It's a pity it's so insanely thirsty, because the actual plot of the novel is fairly interesting, but I'm not sure if I can put up with any more drowning in lust garbage.  It's agonizing to read.  Especially as someone who is both aromantic and asexual, because I can't even connect with it in the slightest.)  I'm going to read something short before the day ends so that it's not the last thing I read, either.  (The only short thing I haven't read before that's lying around is a sexually explicit fan comic for Promare, but I have a feeling it will actually contain far less horniness than that volume of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun.)  And then, at some point before midnight, I will start reading a book I got for Christmas, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines by Garret Ryan.  It was one of the few presents I wasn't expecting, but I'm really looking forward to it:  I read one of his earlier books, and it was a lot of fun, a combination of things I already knew some of and interesting tidbits about the ancient world that I didn't know.  (I seem to recall that there was one thing in the previous book that I didn't agree with, but I can't remember what it was, specifically...though I'm betting it had to do with same sex relationships.  That tends to be the spot where straight male scholars drop the ball most often.)  Anyway, I figure that of all the unread books on my shelf, that's the best one to be reading at the turn of the year.   Well, that and I promised I'd let my mom read it when I was done with it, so I don't want to wait too long to get to it. 😅

    I have some sparkling apple juice to drink at midnight (I don't drink alcohol), and a naughty-but-not-too-naughty snack to enjoy with it, too.  I'll probably either get lost in playing My Time at Sandrock and barely notice midnight or I'll start watching Dungeons & Dragons:  Honor Among Thieves around quarter past ten to be watching that when the year ends.  Not connected to New Year's in any way, but it's on my unwatched Christmas gift pile, so...hmm.  Then again, maybe I should dive into Doctor Who instead, to usher out the 60th anniversary year?  (I got the second season for Christmas.  And I do mean the actual second season, as in the 1964-1965 season.  There's some real gems in there.  Also the unbearably awful "The Web Planet" which my brother and I couldn't even finish when we tried to watch it before. 😅  But it starts with "Planet of the Giants," which is pretty good, then goes into "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" which is better, and...anyway, there's a lot of really good ones in there.)  Hmm.  I'll have to think about which to do....but I'll probably end up gaming anyway. 😅  Oh!  That's right, I could also watch some anime on Crunchyroll:  there should be a new episode of The Apothecary Diaries, and I wanted to start watching Frieren...  (I still haven't had the courage to check out season two of Heaven Official's Blessing, in case the subtitles are as bad as the ones on the blu-ray...and New Year's Eve seems like a very bad time to take that risk...)

    Oh, yes!  Gaming!  That was it!

    Someone on one of the Discord servers I'm part of posted a thing about the games they loved that they played for the first time this year.  I thought I should do that, too.  In chronological order...

    (That's order played, btw, not order released.)  Technically, Sword and Fairy 6 probably doesn't belong, as I didn't quite love it, but...because of the different sizes of Switch and Playstation covers, it was going to be even more lopsided if it was only eight, like the version the person on the Ooblet server posted.  (Said person being primarily a PC gamer, they didn't have the different image shape issue.)  I mean, I suppose I could have tried to balance it out by removing Oshirabu, but...that would have felt much more wrong.  I did play more games that I loved this year, but there were a lot of remakes and remasters in my year, including things I had played in their original versions:  Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy, Grandia II, and Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space.  (There may have been even more than that and I'm just blanking on the others.  Though technically I only played about half of Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii; I hit the point where one of the characters said something that pissed me off so badly I was like "yeah, I'm just going to put this aside for a while until I cool off..." and then I never ended up picking it up again. 😅)  I kinda shouldn't include My Time at Sandrock on this, since I only started it like two days ago, but...it's the type of game that's much more make-or-break on its mechanics than its story, so I already know.  😆  (Thankfully, there's a full character creation at the start, so you don't have to play as Mr. Generic from the cover there.  I'm playing as a woman with purple ponytails.  💜  Though if I'd known the town doctor was going to hit my character design sweet spot, I might have played as a guy after all in order to romance him.  (I do not do het romance in a game if I have any choice in the matter.  Just not how I roll.))  I still would have probably gone with purple hair, though.  I almost always choose purple hair when it's an option.)  Even more technically, Forager kind of doesn't belong, because I first started it when I bought that copy a year or so ago, only the TV I had at the time was not compatible with the Playstation 4 and I lost so much of the edges of the picture that the game was literally unplayable because so much of its UI was off-screen.  Therefore, I had only played like two, three minutes before I gave up in despair.  When I got a new TV this year, I started playing it again for real...ah, crap.  It and Sword and Fairy 6 are in the wrong places; I got the TV because I was already playing Sword and Fairy 6 and was losing too much of the edges of the screen, and I was determined to keep playing it, enough so that I actually went to buy a new TV.  (Thankfully, it was a cheap one...)

    Anyway, top three of those are....

    At number three:

    And at number two:

    

    (To the extent that I've bought the doll I found of the secondary female character, and the Nendoroid of the heroine.  😁)

    And--drumroll please--the number one favorite of the year...!

    I've even bought all three of the Ooblets plushies released through Fangamer!  (And will likely buy every other Ooblets plushie they make...)

    And on that note, I'll bring this post to a long and rambling close.

🎉  Happy New Year! 🎉

Blogger and "Total Pageviews" ~ A Mystery

     Okay, so since I posted "A Hidden Road" on pages here on my blog (following my somewhat questionable decision to delete it from AO3 because of one truly upsetting comment), I've been paying more attention to the "Total Pageviews" number when you visit the blog (or, in my case, hit the "Preview" button from a post or page in the editor).

    This is because in that time it's gone up, a lot, while the number of views for the individual posts and pages have not gone up much at all.

    Meager photographic proof:

    (Wow, that partial screencap turned out to be enormous.)  This was what it said at 8:05 yesterday morning.

    This is what it said at 7:30 this morning.  (And as of about two minutes ago, that number had gone up to 7,834.)

    However, if I just add up the number of visits to the pages and posts, the total is only 1,435.  (Yes, I actually went through and added them all up.)

    Before I added the fic (and a link to the blog in my profile on AO3, in the hopes that someone would click on my profile, wondering where my fic had gone, and then follow the link to find it here, which might have happened once, but I'm not sure about that (even if it did, they didn't finish reading it, because the pages that had gained a view stopped a third of the way through)) that "Total Pageviews" number was somewhere in either the high 4,000s or the low 5,000s.  I think the latter, but I'm not positive.

    So where the heck did all those extra views come from, when most of them don't represent a view of a post?  (Especially considering that when I click "view post" from the post management screen, that makes the post's view counter go up one, so a lot of the 1,435 are actually me.  (Though it sounds like maybe I can turn that off, which would be sweet.  I need to look into that as soon as I'm done with this post.))

    Now, admittedly, just following the link to the blog will take you to a landing page that shows the full posts without counting on any of their view numbers, so some of that may be people clicking through from the Insecure Writer's Support Group and then not clicking on any individual posts, and the spike could (conceivably?) be something the whole IWSG has been experiencing, with some bot going through all the links on the IWSG's page, but then not leaving comments, or not leaving them on my particular blog because the landing page doesn't have a comment form, and the fact that it happened since adding the fic is coincidental.

    The only other theory I have is that maybe when a search engine grazes the page, that counts as a pageview even if the person who ran the search didn't actually visit the blog.  Given that I've been posting more and more about MDZS (which is very popular worldwide), that seems possible?  But it's weird to imagine that Blogger counts a search engine as a pageview.

    Obviously, none of this actually matters, since worrying about how many views my blog has gotten is 100% empty vanity (well, maybe not "vanity" exactly, but something akin to it) but I have to admit that it's weirding me out that my total numbers have gone up so much so fast (it's been like a month and a half, maybe?) compared to how much they went up in the preceding two and a half years.

    Anyway, that was just sort of sitting on my brain and bothering me, so I wanted to let it out.

    I may try futzing around with the settings to see if I can make it so the total only goes up in accordance with the posts and pages, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

    EDIT:  I just had a look at my stats page (lol, should have done that first!) and I can confirm from what I saw there that it is definitely a bot.  (Surprisingly, according to those numbers, the numbers shown on screen should actually be higher, which suggests that Blogger started cottoning on to it being a bot and stopped counting it after a while.)  The bot is using Mobile Safari on an Android device (weird in and of itself, considering Safari is the Apple browser!) and coming out of one particular country, but I feel like I'd be insulting the country if I said which one, so I won't.  The bot accounted for almost 5.5k pageviews.  There's also the possibility of a bot elsewhere for the "Other" views that were around 1.7k pageviews.  The ones that actually seem to be genuine views account for about 500 of the new views over the last month.  In itself that's already an unrealistically high number, imho, but not quite as shockingly so.
    (This makes me very glad I've never attempted to monetize my blog, because I would totally feel like a thief if I was getting paid because some bot is glitching out and loading my blog repeatedly.)