This is Post Number 7500 at New Savanna [Milestone – To Infinity and Beyond!]

I made my first post at New Savanna on April 14, 2010. Before that I’d been blogging at The Valve, a now defunct group blog centered on literature. I made my first post there, I believe, in December of 2005, but I’d been active on the web in one way or another for over a decade before that. Back in 1994 Bill Berry and I created Meanderings – actually, Bill created it, I just joined in – and I’d been on CompuServe before that. I tell the story about my digital travels in this working paper: Personal Observations on Entering an Age of Computing Machines, Working Paper, November 2015. It started life as a series of blog posts here, as most of my working papers do.

Anyhow, it’s time for another accounting. First I look at the overall total, then I make some observations about the top 10 posts, and I conclude with some remarks of a more personal nature.

Overall page visits and top 10

I still haven’t got the foggiest idea what was going on in 2017. Maybe Russian bots, by why would they spend a year cruising New Savanna? The recent spike looks interesting. I have no idea where that will go. Top posts

Here at the ten most popular posts. Those numbers are not accurate, however. If you go through the numbers post by post you’ll see higher numbers. And I’m pretty sure there are at least one or two posts that should be in this list by aren’t. But I’m not going to try tracking them down. This will do my present purposes.

What’s interesting about the behavior of individual posts is that a number of them show large spikes at some point. With one exception, I do not know what’s going on.

1. Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll [Rape]

Posted September 2010.

This has been the most popular post since it went up. There’s no mystery about that. Ninja Scroll is a popular anime and the post is about sex. But what’s that spike at about January of 2019?

2. Secrets of Pink Elephants Revealed

Posted October 2010.

This has been popular for a long time as well, though it took two years to gain traction. No surprise here either. It’s about a very popular sequence from a popular Disney cartoon, albeit one that’s eight decades century old. Think about that.

3. Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises

Posted November 16, 2015.

This one pleases me a great deal. Why? Because it’s Miyazaki. I posted it near the end of 2015 and, as I recall, it just coasted along. Then for some reason it spiked early in 2020, and then tapered off at midyear.

4. Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice
Posted December 28, 2010.

This one saw a lot of action in its first two years and then tapered off. I haven’t got the foggiest idea why

5. Joe Rogan and Joey Diaz call “Bruce Lee vs. Chuck Norris” – a rough transcription of their conversation

Posted July 26, 2018.

This went up in July 2018, so it’s relatively recent. It’s also Joe Rogan. What’s that spike early in 2019, January to April?

6. Disney's Fantasia as Masterpiece

Published at The Valve in August, 2006, and republished here in November, 2010.

More Disney; that gets it in the top ten. Why the spike in 2013? That’s just after the tapering of interesting Two Rings in Fantasia, at #4.

7. What's Popular, and Why

Posted April 26, 2011.

Why the spike in the middle of 2013? That’s just before the Fantasia masterpiece spike.

8. Hilary Hahn on daydreaming as a mode of practicing music, of priming yourself to go with the flow in performance

Posted January 12, 2020.

This is the most recent one to make the top-10 list and it spiked when it was posted. I know why. Tyler Cowen listed it at his very popular Marginal Revolution blog and that drove traffic here.

9. Pigs in Spirited Away

Posted December 4, 2010.

This is an old post; it’s Miyazaki. It seems to me that’s enough to get it in the top 10. While it has its ups and downs, it does seem to be one of the most consistent posts of the bunch.

10. Dandelion

Posted May 2, 2017.

Another relatively recent post in the top 10. I do not know why it was so popular in the beginning. Perhaps it was caught in the overall run that began in 2017 and lasted a year.

Posting frequency

This shows the number of posts per month for the last five years. There’s a slump during each year, usually during the Winter or early Spring. The slump came unusually early this year, in November 2020.

I discuss this pattern in A Mind Over the Long Haul: My Posting Patterns.

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A decade of New Savanna: 2010-2019: This post looks at the kinds of posts as broken down by topic label.