HAHAHA WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON
Look at my daily blog views, friends:
EXCUSE ME??
Almost SIX THOUSAND views in one day?
For someone who usually gets like 25 per day max (except for recently with that guy from Columbus), that’s insane. And unprecedented. And weird.
I figured these views were from Columbus Guy, but nope:
We’re in Germany now, apparently.
So yeah, yet another weird blog viewing pattern that’s new and strange and unexplainable.
Interesting.
Edit: it went back down to normal after today and hasn’t spiked again since, so…
Interloper, IDENTIFY YOURSELF!
So…I noticed this happening with Eigenblogger:
And I was like “what is this unprecedented nonsense?” and looked at the individual post stats. Turns out it’s not XTREME POPULARITY for my blog as a whole but rather XTREME POPULARITY for this specific post:
Which is actually not even a legit blog post. It’s one of the pages you can click on in the list of pages at the top of my blog.
There’s nothing really even there…just links to actual blog posts pertaining to my Decade of Music Project.
The weirder thing? None of those five linked posts have many (if any) visits. Even the link to download the list of songs has only a single click in the past 30 days.
So…that’s odd.
Edit: and the vast majority of these visits are all coming from one place: Columbus, OH.
Interesting.
What you up to, Columbus Dude?
Blog Post #7,000: That’s Way Too Many Blog Posts
Yes, you read that correctly: today marks my 7,000th blog post.
That’s 19 years, 1 month, and 29 days of consecutive blogging.
Ridiculous.
The part that’s even more sad is that I’ve still got 3,000 more posts to go (8 years, 2 months, and 17 days) to hit my 10,000th blog post.
EXTRA ridiculous.
Readers: thanks for reading.
Non-readers: HOW ARE YOU EVEN SEEING THIS?!?!?!?!?!?
Want to read blogs that are better than mine?
Boom!
I’ve complained on here multiple times that people don’t blog like they used to. The personal blog has especially tanked in popularity in the past few decades. But if you’re like me and really enjoy reading those “here are my miscellaneous thoughts and experiences” blogs, check out the “personal” tag as well as the “directories” tag for more blog lists.
BYE!
Eigenblogger Turns 19
Ahoy-hoy!
So today is my 19th blogaversary.
Yes, I’ve been doing this for NINETEEN YEARS. That’s pretty insane.
I don’t really have anything special planned for this anniversary, mainly because next year’s is the big 20 and that’s more important.
But yeah. Thanks to all my loyal readers (Maddie and my mom, haha); I will continue to do this up until my 10,000th blog post…and perhaps beyond!
So I’m formatting my printed blog archives and…
…I’m currently in early- to mid-2020 and am having some pretty wild flashbacks to early Covid times. Remember how scared people were? Remember how much people cared?
Remember how we all agreed to shut down and stay home and try to eradicate this thing?
It’s weird re-living all that stuff via my blog posts. I’ve got one post in mid-March when I was sure that everything would be back to normal enough by the end of the summer so that I could still go down and visit my mom before fall semester started.
Ha.
Though as depressing as those first 1.5 years were, it’s even more depressing now because nobody takes it seriously anymore despite all the deaths, illnesses, and damage to everyone’s bodies.
Humans: the dumbest of the dumb.
Well that was an experience I didn’t need at 3 AM.
Soooooo I got pepper sprayed on my run this morning.
Inadvertently. Indirectly.
Let me explain.
So we’re still in the “go run at 2 AM because it’s too damn hot during the day” period of the summer, and that’s what I did this morning. I did my usual route on the river path towards and through Bowness. Bowness is pretty quiet that time of night (I run through there around…3:00-ish?), but I do see one or two “regulars” walking around as I’m heading toward Bowness Park.
This morning, though, there appeared to be a confrontation going on in the parking lot by the Esso station. A man and a woman were arguing very loudly. There were two guys at the bus stop next to the gas station and I heard one of them say he was going to call the cops, so I figured I would just keep running and let the cops deal with whatever was going on.
I was running on the sidewalk next to the parking lot; there was no traffic, so I ran out to the other side of the road to get as far away from the confrontation as I could (the sidewalk, conveniently, doesn’t exist on the other side of the road across from that lot. Because why would it?).
Well, apparently I didn’t get far enough away, because at that moment she must have blasted him with pepper spray or something and I ended up getting the downwind gust of it right as I ran past. Right in my eyes, right in my mouth.
My eyes immediately started tearing up big time; I produced about a gallon of snot in half a second and I could feel the sting of the spray down my throat since I was breathing hard from running.
I had to stop behind the church about half a block away and just snot out the entire contents of my sinuses for about five minutes before I could see/breathe/function again.
So let’s pause for a second. Any reasonable person, upon getting (slightly) pepper sprayed during their run, would probably stop, right? Get a taxi or bus home and take care of the damage.
But remember: I am not a reasonable person.
So I kept running.
My reasoning was that I’d get to the water fountain in Bowness Park faster than I could ever get home regardless of transportation method, and I could use the fountain to wash out my eyes/mouth/etc. The water fountain was about a mile and a half away and it actually wasn’t too bad running down there. Once I got to it, I flushed the hell out of my eyes and mouth and even washed the insides of my ears a bit. I don’t know the physics of pepper spray so I figured I’d just try to stay away from touching my shirt/running pack as much as possible in case they got anything on them that would transfer to my skin. Then I continued my run for about three more miles, turned around, and headed home.
And took a proper shower once I got there.
So yeah. Not the ideal way to start the day and interrupt a nice run, but whatevs.
At least I didn’t get point-blank blasted with it, I guess.
ISN’T SUMMER FUN?
So 30% of Jasper is gone.
https://twitter.com/JaneotN/status/1816295777016090769
https://x.com/ryanjespersen/status/1816494189338566866
(WordPress is being stupid and doesn’t want to embed those Tweets, sorry)
Man, summer used to be my favorite season. Now every year it’s “how many sever forest fires are we going to get?” and “how many days are we going to be in the 11+ air quality because of the smoke?” and “what ridiculous heat records are going to be broken this year?” and “how bad are the droughts going to be?” and “which major city will experience a water crisis?” and “WHY DID WE DO THIS TO THE PLANET?”
Fun.
Half Life (not the game this time, haha)
Counting today, I have now blogged for half my life.
Not half my adult life, but half of my 36-ish years of life.
That’s…pretty wild.
So from now on, I will have spent more of my life daily blogging than not.
Woo?
Guess What’s Finally Up to Date?
This blog.
Guess who cares?
No one.
18 Years of Blogging
So guess what? Eigenblogger is an adult now.
That’s right: today is my 18th blogging anniversary!
The fact that I have a daily record* of my life for the past 18 years is pretty cool. Back when I first started blogging, I had no intention of it lasting anywhere near this long. Hell, I didn’t know if I’d make it to my proposed 50 days in a row back on May 1, 2006.
But I did, then just kept going from there. I guess giving into peer pressure – in this case, the peer pressure from my high school friends to join MySpace – is a good thing sometimes.
ANYWAY.
Today will be my 6,576th blog post. That means I have 3,424 more posts until I hit my ultimate goal of 10,000. Will I keep going after that?
Probably.
Assuming we’re all not dead by then.
WOO!
*I guess the word “record” is very loosely used here, as like 60% of the time my blogs have nothing to do with went on during the day on which they were written, but whatevs. An entry is an entry!
A Question Nobody Asked:
“How do you blog when you’re away from your computer/internet?”
An answer nobody cares about: I type said blog in my “Notes” app on my phone while sitting in the bathroom away from everyone.
There.
Now go away.
Half Life (not the game, for once)
Do y’all know what’s special about the date July 27, 2024?
It’s the day that will mark my having blogged half my life. And considering I’ll be 36 (almost 36 and a half) then, that’s a long time to have blogged.
That’s pretty wild, right?
A party shall happen.
(It won’t.)
Make Like a Baby and Head Out
YO so I love Procreate.
Why?
Because I was able to use it to finally, finally able to create a header for Eigenblogger that used my own handwriting rather than a font. Check it:
I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, but the dimensions of the header file are weird and the few prototype headers I drew just didn’t work with those dimensions no matter how much I modified them.
I like it. I’m sure I’ll have to modify it as I will likely change up my color scheme again at some point, but for now it’s all matchy-matchy AND it’s my handwriting. Finally.
YAY!
Blog Facelift
I’ve redone some of the custom CSS for my blog. Observe:
Before:
After:
That’s one of my OLD headers on there; I don’t know if I like it. I don’t like the other one anymore. Maybe I’ll make a new one.
Blogging is Lonely
I’ve mentioned this on here before, but it’s really sad to me how few people blog anymore. Didn’t it seem like everyone had a blog back in the mid-aughts? I don’t know if that’s just because everyone had a MySpace and blogging was pretty well integrated into it, but everyone seemed chill with keeping an online journal of sorts.
Nowadays, though, it’s hard to find bloggers in general, let along daily bloggers. It’s not like I ever interacted with anyone in the blogging community apart from commenting on some of my friends’ blog posts, but it still feels a lot more lonely nowadays. I wish more of y’all would blog – I’d read them, gladly!
Anyway.
Seventeen
Today marks SEVENTEEN YEARS of blogging, yo.
It’s been 17 years since senior year of high school. Isn’t that wild? Does it seem like it’s been that long or does it seem like it’s been longer?
Anyway, I’m still holding off doing any sort of big celebration because I’m waiting for the 18th anniversary (when Eigenblogger is finally an adult, haha), but this yearly anniversary always has to be acknowledged.
Here’s to another year and more!
Progress!
I have now printed and received twelve years of my blogs. That’s May 2006 to April 2018. I’m still formatting the later years, but I really do hope to get a complete hard copy at some point. I think that would be really cool (assuming I have the shelf space, haha).
Anyway.
NoJo MoJo
So back in the Stone Age of my blogging, I made Johari and Nohari windows on some website and asked all my friends to fill them out for me.
Well, who knew that SIXTEEN YEARS LATER that those links would still be active.
What all did people even say?
Me? Overdramatic???? NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!1!!1!!!!!!!one
(I think I made that same damn joke in 2006).
Vlog?
I’ve wondered about this before (and have maybe posted about it, too), but I’m curious if I should try a week of vlogging rather than blogging. It’s essentially the same thing with different formats, right?
Pros of a Vlog Week:
- Variety!
- Easier to show you things that are hard to show via regular blogging
- I could still type up the transcripts so that I don’t technically skip a “traditional” blog
- I could include a lot of Pepper
Cons of a Vlog Week:
- It’s not technically blogging the same way I’ve been doing it, so I’m not sure if it would actually count
- You’d have to listen to my horrible voice
- There’s a chance you’d have to see my horrible face/body
- I’d have to type up the transcripts so that I don’t technically skip a “traditional” blog
- NOBODY CARES
So yeah, not sure if I’ll ever vlog. Blogging’s a dying art form, anyway; it needs at least one loyal adopter!
6,000
Hello, faithful readers (all one of you)!
Today is my SIX THOUSANDTH BLOG!
It’s been 6,000 days since May 1, 2006. It’s also 4,000 days until I hit 10,000 blog posts.
That’s pretty wild.
(I know no one cares, but whatever.)
I Need to Post These Blogs, Yo
[This is a casual reminder to myself so that when I’m scrolling through a 300+ page Word document of these blogs in late 2023, I get off my butt and actually get these up on WordPress]
Edit from December 2023: HAHAHAHA THESE STILL AREN’T POSTED WHY AM I SUCH A FAILURE AT LIFE
Edit from January 2024: HAHAHAHA IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING, SUCK IT, PAST ME!
16 Years of Blogging
Today marks my SIXTEENTH anniversary of blogging! Counting today, that’s a total of 5,845 consecutive days of blogging.
I’d say that’s pretty cool.
Sixteen isn’t a super exciting anniversary year (unless it’s your age, I guess), so I’m not going to do anything special for it. But when we hit twenty…watch out!
Periodic
Remember that “Periodic Table of Academic Disciplines” blog post that I made like 300* years ago?
That blog post gets an insane amount of views compared to my other posts. The table itself has been used in quite a few things, too.
Here (slide 4)
Here (slides 8 and 9)
A blog post about it
Kinda cool.
*Ten. It was ten years ago.
It’s a blog!
No one cares!!!!!1!11!111one!
Eigenblogger 