I noticed today, while watching Toy Story with the kid, that one of the film’s screenwriters is Joss Whedon, the guy behind Buffy and Angel. I have no way of knowing for sure, but somehow I’m suspecting that Whedon’s contribution had a lot to do with the film’s entire “Sid and the mutant toys” subplot.
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In terms of traffic, the just-concluded April was the best month yet for Byzantium’s Shores. This is almost entirely due to my April Fool’s Day post of “Even More Turgid Steven Den Beste”, which was noticed and linked by Matthew Yglesias. If my traffic pattern holds, I can expect to fall a bit in May and then rise again in June. (However, my April spike was so large that it might take a while to really rise up to that level again.)
There have been a couple of essays appearing in Blogistan the last few days about weblog promotion (Truth Laid Bear and Volokh, mainly). While I check my stats several times a day (yeah, that sounds nerdy, but it takes all of six seconds to do so; I spend more time than that each day just standing with the refridgerator door open trying to remember why the hell I went to the kitchen in the first place), I’ve generally shied away from “direct promotion” of what I do here. I’ve never sent any e-mails directly asking for links, although I have done the “Hey, I wrote a post in which I comment on what you said the other day, and here’s the link to that post” thing a couple of times. (It hasn’t worked, but then, on the handful of times I’ve tried this tactic it’s been with the “biggies” who probably get several dozen such messages each day.) I leave comments on other blogs, but judging by my referral history, that’s a lousy way to generate traffic, and I don’t leave comments in hopes of generating traffic, anyway.
So basically I operate on the “Just keep doing the best I can and hope people like it” style of promotion. I do wonder sometimes if my general subject matter doesn’t have enough wider appeal, and my political content — while more frequent these days — still isn’t my primary focus (nor, really, do I expect it to ever be, even if I’ve generally abandoned my former, strict “No politics here” policy). Generally I try to enhance what SDB calls the “stickiness” of Byzantium’s Shores.
That said, a few random traffic-related thoughts abound….
:: I recall reading, somewhere recently, that Saturdays generally see the most traffic on the Net. If that’s true, you sure can’t prove it by my traffic patterns. My hits always drop like a rock on Saturdays.
:: SDB also redid his blogroll this week. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t make the cut, since I’m not a Jacksonian. I’m an Arthurian. (King Arthur, not Chester Arthur.)
:: (Yes, I know that is the single worst joke I have inflicted upon my readers in all the time I’ve been doing this. But in Blogistan, nobody can hear you groan….)
:: Yeah, I know I said above that I never beg directly for permalinks. But you know, maybe all those people who link to William Burton could change that link to me, since (a) Burton hasn’t posted anything new in almost three months and (b) alphabetically, Byzantium’s Shores would fall in about the same place on those blogrolls. Come on, folks!
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It’s pretty obvious, by glancing at my blogroll, that my liberal instincts far outweigh my conservative ones. Sometimes I feel I should read more stuff by conservatives and libertarians; but then, I remind myself that I also think I should read more short fiction and poetry and Dostoevsky (ahem…) and Twain and Pynchon and Asimov and Dunsany and Wolfe and Wallace and Shakespeare and…you get the idea. In the long list of things I think I should read, those that I want to read get higher priority. So I pretty much confine myself to the handful of right-side thinkers I link here, and then I follow their links to other places that they recommend, pretty much on a specific citation basis.
And besides, I never know when someone with whom I disagree ninety percent of the time is going to say something I agree with one hundred and ten percent.
(This is also why it’s generally good policy not to flame people when you think they’re full of crap. Because when they do say something that you want desperately to applaud, to do so after telling that person how stupid they are doesn’t seem…possible.)
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A while back I selected Wonder Woman for my “Image of the Week”. Wouldn’t you know that today, by pure chance, I found an even better one.
Now, doesn’t that just beat the crap out of all those black-leather clad heroines with cropped hair who are so prevalent these days? The image comes from this collection of the 25 greatest comic-book covers, which in turn links to the worst comic-book covers. (Check out Chaplains At War, for mind-boggling goofiness. Note that the guy on the right looks a lot like President Bush.)
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Never before has a TV ad made me want to buy a car.
How on earth did they get the tires to roll uphill?! That’s the only part of the ad that kicks off my “Skepto-meter”.
(Courtesy TBOGG, whose site had at this writing fallen victim to the BlogSpot hiccup I mention below.)
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Okily-dokily, what’s going on with BlogSpot now? Random BlogSpot blogs — including, for a time, this one — are coming up with a generic “Under Construction” page. What gives?
And it would be really nice if the people at Blogger would at least post news updates to the Blogger main page when issues like this crop up. It would, you know, make the whole thing seem less a craps-shoot.
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The other day I commented on Matthew Perry’s good fortune to have a side-gig to his normal work on Friends: reciting the wonderful dialog of West Wing writer-extraordinaire Aaron Sorkin.
I hope I’m not the one who jinxed it, because Sorking is leaving.
Writers leave shows, so at first glance this might not seem a total disaster; but this departure has the potential for calamity. Sorkin personally wrote the teleplays for just about every episode of the show, and it’s his dialog that gives the show its distinctive feel. I’m not sure how well the new writers are going to be able to simulate Sorkin’s rapid-fire wordplay, and I sort of hope they don’t even try. Maybe they can take the show in a couple of new directions. I wouldn’t mind seeing an episode, perhaps, from the viewpoint of one of those interns who are always in the background; or an episode focusing on the Press Corps.
I expect the show will last at least one more year, because they need to get it up to one hundred episodes to make it really marketable for syndication rights. But if NBC gets really desperate, they can turn the reins over to Dick Wolf. And then he can write in a big scandal and a storyline where President Bartlet gets impeached, thus changing the show into Law and Order: The West Wing Unit.
(That last suggestion is not meant seriously.)
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A Public Service Announcement: This is why I consider a videotape containing two episodes of The Simpsons to be an essential part of any home emergency kit.