August 2021 was a bad month for me. I don’t wish to get too personal here. But you see how bad it was from my mid-month crashing out of reviewing 60s Popeye cartoons. The Popeye cartoon reviews were already a thing I did to conserve energy, so you see how bad it’s been I had to switch to reposting old Talkartoon reviews. I hope that things are getting better, and that I’ll be able to get back at least to the Popeye-reviewing. However, I intend to rerun all the rest of my Talkartoon essays to give myself time to recover. Between those and the MiSTings, right now, the only things I’m writing each week are the Statistics Saturday and the What’s Going On In story strip recaps. That feels as much as I can commit to right now.
How did a month with such a limited creative output work out? To my surprise, it brought more readers than the previous several months did. Here’s the numbers:
So there were 4,678 page views in August. That’s below the twelve-month running mean of 5,565.3 for the twelve months leading up to August 2021. That figure’s a little distorted from April, when one of my images was posted in a Fandom Drama thread on Reddit and I got spurious hits. But it’s also below the twelve-month running median of 4,996 views. Medians are less vulnerable to fluke events.
There were 2,665 unique visitors in August. That’s below the running mean of 3,365.8, again affected by that Reddit thread. It’s also below the median of 3,036.5 unique visitors, though, suggesting people are not actually that interested in four-year-old reviews of Bimbo cartoons. Their loss.
And maybe they are interested anyway. There were 137 likes given to posts in August, which is almost dead on the averages. The twelve-month running mean was 135.1 likes, and the median 132 likes for a month. There were 63 comments given in August, above the running mean of 51.0 and the running median of 42.
None of the Talkartoon reposts have been among my most popular posts for August. No, what people did want to see were these, and fair enough:
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What is this Visitor the Phantoms keep getting? May – August 2021
- 60s Popeye: Popeye and the Magic Hat; yes, this is finally the one where Popeye’s a giraffe
- What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Why are Shauna and Ashlee fighting so much? May – July 2021
- Statistics Saturday: Apollo 15 By The Numbers
- 60s Popeye: Sea Hagracy, and do you understand what that title is riffing on?
My story comic summaries are still the backbone of my popularity here. And I still feel enough energy to write them. My plan for the next month is to do these recaps:
- Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (7 September)
- Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (14 September)
- Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays) (21 September)
- Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant (28 September)
- Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy (5 October)
The Amazing Spider-Man recap I intend to be the last one I do, unless the strip somehow emerges from reruns, or jumps around in the rerun cycle. This because the strip has reached the point where I started doing recaps back in 2017. Though I could do a better job recapping these strips now, my alternative is to do less job.
That is unless I decide to replace Spider-Man with another strip to recap. I’ve held off on Rip Haywire, partly because I had felt it was driven more by the comedy than the plot. But, heck, I don’t complain about Alley Oop being a comedy-adventure strip. I suppose I feel my dividing line is story strips that appear in newspapers and I’m not sure whether Rip Haywire does. That division is arbitrary, yes, but I want some compelling rule that explains why I won’t do, like, Endtown or The Martian Confederacy.
98 countries or country-like entities sent me readers in August. 18 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the map, and here’s the table listing them:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 2,969 |
| India | 233 |
| Canada | 198 |
| United Kingdom | 195 |
| Australia | 69 |
| Brazil | 61 |
| Germany | 57 |
| Spain | 57 |
| South Africa | 49 |
| Italy | 37 |
| Kuwait | 37 |
| Philippines | 37 |
| Saudi Arabia | 37 |
| Sweden | 35 |
| Austria | 32 |
| Turkey | 32 |
| Finland | 29 |
| France | 28 |
| Nigeria | 27 |
| Mexico | 26 |
| Japan | 21 |
| Ireland | 18 |
| Ecuador | 17 |
| New Zealand | 17 |
| Denmark | 15 |
| Malaysia | 14 |
| Peru | 14 |
| Taiwan | 14 |
| Indonesia | 13 |
| Israel | 13 |
| Norway | 13 |
| Qatar | 12 |
| Colombia | 11 |
| Romania | 11 |
| South Korea | 11 |
| Thailand | 11 |
| Argentina | 10 |
| Jordan | 10 |
| Oman | 10 |
| Russia | 10 |
| Egypt | 9 |
| Lebanon | 9 |
| Netherlands | 7 |
| Greece | 6 |
| Macau SAR China | 6 |
| Pakistan | 6 |
| Bulgaria | 5 |
| Hungary | 5 |
| Paraguay | 5 |
| Portugal | 5 |
| United Arab Emirates | 5 |
| Algeria | 4 |
| Belgium | 4 |
| Czech Republic | 4 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 4 |
| Lithuania | 4 |
| Montenegro | 4 |
| Nepal | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| Vietnam | 4 |
| Chile | 3 |
| Croatia | 3 |
| Iraq | 3 |
| Morocco | 3 |
| Puerto Rico | 3 |
| Uruguay | 3 |
| Bahamas | 2 |
| Bangladesh | 2 |
| Barbados | 2 |
| Belize | 2 |
| Bolivia | 2 |
| China | 2 |
| European Union | 2 |
| Guatemala | 2 |
| Kenya | 2 |
| Libya | 2 |
| Poland | 2 |
| Singapore | 2 |
| Tanzania | 2 |
| Venezuela | 2 |
| Bahrain | 1 |
| Costa Rica | 1 |
| Dominica | 1 |
| El Salvador | 1 |
| Guadeloupe | 1 |
| Guyana | 1 |
| Jamaica | 1 |
| Malta | 1 |
| Mauritania | 1 |
| Panama | 1 |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 |
| Serbia | 1 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 |
| St. Lucia | 1 |
| Sudan | 1 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Ukraine | 1 |
This month was a clean sweep. No countries that sent me a single reader in August were single-reader countries in July, and vice-versa. Haven’t had that happen in ages.
WordPress figures I posted 26,178 words in August, for 844.5 words per posting. WordPress has no idea how many of these words are reprinted from earlier, including in this blog. I won’t tell it if you don’t. It brings me to a total of 175,025 words for the year, as of the start of September, and an average 720 words per posting, which is exhausting and I’m glad the number is now complete bunk.
Between the final episode of The Facts Of Life and the start of September I’ve posted 3,134 things to this blog. They attracted 251,025 views from 144,101 unique visitors. And, what the heck, a total of 4,703 comments too.
If you’d like to be a regular reader, please do. The easiest way to be sure you don’t miss anything is to use the panel in the upper right corner of the page to follow Another Blog, Meanwhile via e-mail. This will send every post the moment it’s published, and before its typos are corrected, to your inbox, where you can mark it as read and intend to get back to it sometime.
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And I am @nebusj@mathstodon.xyz, the mathematics-themed instance of the Mastodon network. I’m not very funny there, but then, I hear you making the inevitable joke for the other half of that sentence. In any case, thank you for reading.
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