Big in Japan

I've never really taken a moment to do so, but: hello, Singaporeans! Singaporese? Singaporites? I'm really not sure. What does the CIA World Factbook say, hang on... oh! Singaporeans, I got it first try. The CIA World Factbook is a great reference resource I used to be wary about using on my home computer given, you know, it's the CIA and everything. But I've worked in a government-adjacent capacity long enough now to know if the CIA really wanted to know something about me, the people at Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Apple and Meta/Facebook/Instagram would laugh at them and the effort it would take for them to learn all the things I sign away immediately and voluntarily, over and over again, just because I want to pre-order my coffee or buy a novelty T-shirt with the logo of a defunct ABA team or find out what kind of a sound a ruffed grouse makes. It's enough information to either recreate a whole online version of me based just on my purchasing habits (the only measure of true citizenship in a globalized economy anyway) or to really fuck me over with a bunch of dork-tastic cringe taken out of context (or worse: not) and congealed into one completely unloveable avatar birthed into being only to be immediately pilloried, publicly shamed and probably ultimately cancelled. What's the CIA going to do, look up my Social Security number? An Eritrean tween with a 2005 Dell plugged into a 56k dialup modem could have that inside five minutes. Governments are so passé.

My very delicious and benevolent (benevolicious? I'll work on it) overlords at Blogger, presented by Google, do have SOME of their analytics they don't mind sharing with me. For those of you who don't know, which seems likely to be everybody-inclusive seeing as no one has created a new Blogger account since the first Obama administration, every blog owner has access to site stats for their blog. I haven't really looked at the ones for this one in a long time, since I'm kind of too cool for such prosaic and bourgeois worries as "views" and "clicks" and "wondering what the point of this is," because of how post-ironic I am and because my therapist says I'm not allowed. There was a time when the mostly flat line graph bouncing off the horizontal X-axis over and over was sort of low-key collapsing my entire personality in on itself and nobody wants to go back there, at least not if there aren't any plans to figure out how to make it into content.

The Blogger stats have been re-jiggered a bit in the last several years, at least in terms of what they present. Layout aside, it's still the basics: view numbers, what the referring websites are, where the traffic comes from, that sort of thing. I still get a weirdly outsize number of views from time to time, by factors of several hundred, spiking for no reason attached to content or posting frequency or anything recreateable or exploitable. Either it's some kind of automated bot swarm or I become incredibly fashionable at unpredictable intervals and then immediately fall out of the public eye again. I'm like the Birkenstocks of zero-cost internet writers.

I'm not typically a glass-half-full guy, mostly because a half-full glass left out is just one more thing for the cat to knock over when she gets bored, but I guess I should at least embrace the possibility that maybe the geometric multiplicatives are real, eyeball-having humans and not code-bots sent out to scour the internet for content, just happening to stop by the blog for the nanosecond long enough to sniff it, generate a measurable trace, and move on? What does it say about my self-esteem that I can't imagine the possibility that you're all really out there and you like me, you really like me?

Is it unlikely that this Schrödinger's Readership just materializes out of nowhere--or more very specifically, Singapore--once or twice a month? I won't know until I address them head-on. It's a non-zero chance, but that's still definitionally not zero! We'll call this an exercise in grace and humility. Or, from another point of view, an utter lack of both of those things.

What are the odds I get 948 readers from Singapore and 15 from the USA over the same space of time? What am I, a goddamned physicist? I can't know everything! If David Hasselhoff can be a huge pop star in Germany, I can be the blog-toast of a sophisticated island nation in Asia. I've put in the time. A lot of people know English there, I think!

So I'll say it again: hello Singaporeans! Forgive my ignorance of your customs and manners, your food, language, government, climate, holidays or history. You seem really cool to me! I've decided to accept your existence as human people (not all Singaporeans, I'm relatively certain they are not fictional, I mean the Singapore-based readership spikes I'm seeing). You are welcome. Would it be easier to accept/prove you were real if some or all of you signed up to become Patreon supporters and sent me... whatever it is the currency is you use? I'm almost certain it can translate them into American dollars! What a way to bring us together. If I'm about anything, I'm about the harmony of humankind. Or if you really are just clouds of code sweeping indiscriminately across all of blog-space, if you have access to some credit card numbers, I can also be about the harmony of human and botkind. I think you'll find my buy-in price to promote the Singularity and ultimately the rise of the Cybermen is pretty shockingly reasonable.