Oh, I like that subject line. I should have thought of something Halloween-themed for last month. Ah well. There’ll be another October, someday, although there’s no knowing when. (We say this to make October feel more sneaky. Don’t let it know we almost always find it right past September and short of the Moon.)
October saw a slight rise in readership around here. There were 4,355 page views recorded from 2,410 unique visitors. However, that’s still got the blog below the twelve-month running averages. From October 2020 through September 2021 the blog had a mean 5,565.1 views from 3,341.4 unique visitors. I mean arithmetic mean. Few of them were hostile. The running median was 4,996 views from 3,036.5 unique visitors. I can’t explain this dropping off except that it could be people aren’t thrilled to see plot recaps of forgotten Talkartoons that they already saw three years ago.
Or they are. There were 161 likes given in the past month. That’s a fair bit above the running mean of 138.1 per month, or the running median of 135 per month. It was chatty, too, with 62 comments given, above the mean of 52.6 and median of 45.5. That’s the fourth-chattiest month in a couple years now.
The most popular posts from October were the set one might expect, mostly comic strip recaps and complaints:
- What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why is there time travel now? July – October 2021
- How Angry Should You Be About the _Crankshaft_ and _Funky Winkerbean_ Stories Not Being Done YET?
- Reposted: The 33rd Talkartoon: The Robot, surely Not A Time-Traveller’s Prankish Insertion To History
- What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Are new people taking over the comic? October 2021
- What’s Going On In Mark Trail? What happened between Diana Daggers and Bee Sharp? July – October 2021
While Crankshaft has moved on to a different story, I don’t get how that’s still going on either.
The most popular piece of all was the September 2021 plot recap for The Phantom, weekday continuity. In it, it did look as though The Phantom might die. My most popular piece intended to be funny and posted in October were these selections from my library.
But my story comic recaps will stay the most popular things around this blog. My schedule for the next couple weeks is:
- Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (9 November)
- Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (16 November)
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (23 November)
- Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man (30 November)
- Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop (7 December)
There were 71 countries, or things as good as countries, sending me page views in October. 14 of them were single-view countries. Here’s the aways popular roster of them:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 2,952 |
| Canada | 157 |
| India | 147 |
| Australia | 125 |
| Philippines | 114 |
| United Kingdom | 96 |
| Sweden | 86 |
| Germany | 67 |
| Brazil | 66 |
| France | 40 |
| Spain | 40 |
| Finland | 30 |
| El Salvador | 27 |
| Ireland | 27 |
| Serbia | 24 |
| Ecuador | 23 |
| Mexico | 22 |
| Italy | 21 |
| South Africa | 17 |
| Japan | 16 |
| Argentina | 15 |
| Austria | 15 |
| Indonesia | 15 |
| Peru | 14 |
| Netherlands | 10 |
| Romania | 10 |
| South Korea | 10 |
| European Union | 9 |
| New Zealand | 9 |
| Thailand | 9 |
| Czech Republic | 8 |
| Lebanon | 8 |
| Israel | 7 |
| Kenya | 7 |
| Malaysia | 7 |
| Poland | 7 |
| Portugal | 7 |
| Singapore | 6 |
| Turkey | 6 |
| Barbados | 5 |
| Chile | 5 |
| Colombia | 5 |
| Jamaica | 5 |
| Malta | 5 |
| Nigeria | 5 |
| Guadeloupe | 4 |
| Hungary | 4 |
| Norway | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| Belgium | 3 |
| Croatia | 3 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 3 |
| China | 2 |
| Egypt | 2 |
| Estonia | 2 |
| Taiwan | 2 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 2 |
| Bulgaria | 1 |
| Costa Rica | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 |
| Greece | 1 |
| Guatemala | 1 (*) |
| Jordan | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Madagascar | 1 |
| Pakistan | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 (*) |
| Qatar | 1 |
| Russia | 1 |
| Ukraine | 1 |
| United Arab Emirates | 1 |
Guatemala and Puerto Rico were single-view countries in September also. Nothing has been a single-view country three months in a row.
WordPress is of the opinion I published 21,001 words in October. That’s an average of 677.5 words per posting in the month. This is also well down from September and most of the rest of the year. This shows the power of switching from nothing but long recaps of cartoons to photographs with two sentences setting them up. Also to using much shorter MiSTing segments than I had been. I am up to 227,572 words posted this year, so far, an average of 749 words per posting.
Between the original theatrical release of Young Frankenstein and the start of November I’ve posted 3,195 things to this blog. They’ve drawn a total 259,464 views from 148,630 unique visitors. WordPress also claims I have 1,370 followers, although I suspect not all of them are following that closely.
If you’d like to follow more closely, you can try increasing your browser’s zoom on this page. It’s almost as good as shrinking. If you’d like to add this to your WordPress reading page, click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” sticker on the upper right corner of this page. If you’d like to get them by e-mail, you can use the panel underneath that. I won’t do anything with your e-mail address except send posts as they’re published, but I can’t say what WordPress plans to do with them.
For more private reading (not even showing up in my statistics), you can add the RSS feed for posts to your reader. If you need an RSS reader can get one at This Old Reader or at NewsBlur. Or you can sign up for a free account at Dreamwidth or Livejournal and use their friends pages. Use https://www.dreamwidth.org/feeds/ or https://www.livejournal.com/syn to add RSS feeds, not just mine, there.
And thank you for whatever kind of interaction we’re having here.
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
Did you remember to put together the Tron 70’s Alex Trebeck costume and if so did you add the raccoon mask for Raccoon Tron 70’s Alex Trebeck? I think your rabbit would approve.
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I never did, no. All my impressions of 70s Alex Trebek are from how he was portrayed on SCTV, which is to say Eugene Levy losing control of the situation. I don’t know how that compares to the reality.
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I saw the “Half Wits” sketch, interesting to compare it to SNL’s “Celebrity Jeopardy!” later sketches
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Yeah, it’s fascinating watching the comparison in how to spoof Alex Trebek, especially considering the fundamental idea (the host loses control of the show to goofy-to-malicious answers) is so similar.
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