random statistics

The world we live in

I did that thing tonight where I watched a particular video on YouTube and ended up going on to watch a bunch of mostly-unrelated videos. One of them was Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” which is a catchy song with a well-choreographed video (seriously, it’s obvious the director is meticulously timing the entire video to the actual music, something you don’t see that often).

One of the things I noticed is the video has over one billion views. It was released in 2009 so it’s had time to acquire those views, but it’s still a staggering number.

But more than the number of views, I was struck by the number of comments.

802,810.

If you read one comment per second, it would take you 223 hours (over nine days) to read them all. Also you would be insane.

And this is the world we live in.

I am afraid.

January 23, 2016: A day that will go down in ignominy

You may be asking yourself, “What happened on January 23rd that was so utterly unremarkable that it ironically merits mentioning?” More likely you are asking yourself something like, “What should I have for lunch?” or “What’s the deal with the Canadian dollar?” but I can only answer one of these questions.

On January 23rd this website had zero visits. Think about that for a moment. With over seven billion people on the planet, with over 1.5 billion people on Facebook, not a single one visited this site on January 23rd (I did, but the site analytics don’t count me. It’s kind of like using your mom as a job reference.)

I’m not really bothered by this. It’s kind of liberating in a way. I can ramble on about anything I like without the bother of attracting attention. Or maybe I’m actually shattered by the impressively obscure nature of creolened.com and despair over the pointlessness of waxing philosophical about various topics while no one listens. Well, reads.

Except the only waxing I do is of my chest.

(I don’t really wax my chest; the very thought makes my toes reflexively curl up in horror.)

As a bonus, here are the answers to the two other questions:

  • Have a slice of pizza. You’ve earned it.
  • Falling oil prices and economic uncertainty, coupled with a strengthening US dollar, are the primary reasons for the precipitous drop in the value of the Canadian currency.

Coming up next: More rambling.

September spam, now with more stats

Upon review it looks like 33 posts will not break the record for most posts in a month, as I went temporarily insane in July 2009 and wrote 38 posts back then. Thirty-three posts will rank #2, though. I’m #2! I’m #2!

Here are some stats for the site. I imagine sites with real traffic probably have similar stats, just with six more zeroes at the end of each number.

  • 1,239 posts (including this one)
  • 31 pages (most of them are not publicly viewable)
  • 22 comments (mostly me asking friends to make sure comments were working)
  • 31 tags starting with the word “random”
  • 5,231 blocked malicious login attempts
  • 3,239 spam comments blocked by Akismet (I checked and there is an actual comment in my spam queue. Usually they get swept away before I ever see them. Here is the comment in full: “The posting a blog will be thinning out it is chicken wings promptly. Your current crank out up may be a okay style of doing it.” Chicken wings promptly is not a bad idea, I say. Thanks for the suggestion, spam comment!