Believe it or not–and I’m in the “not” camp–this blog celebrates its one-year anniversary today! Back on June 3, 2010, I posted one of the comics I made back in 2008 and then wrote a short entry where I made it clear that I had no idea what I was doing here. 365 days later, I’m still not totally sure of my intentions, but I think things are a bit more well-established and consistent these days. When I started, I just figured that I would be posting my comics on it so that people who weren’t friends with me on Facebook could still see the demented work that I was doing. It would also be a way to relieve some of the crippling boredom that I faced right after graduating from college.
It’s somewhat hard to believe that one year’s already gone by since then, and then I’ve done over 300 posts. In fact, this is semi-coincidentally the 365th post, which means that I somehow averaged a post a day. I know that I can’t maintain that pace once I go to school in September, but it’s been a lot of fun developing this little page into something that others find some interest in reading.
I tried to think of some way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of my blog, and I was a bit lost on what to do. I think I’m just going to do a few things. First, I want to give you some stats to show how far we’ve come over the year. Second, I’m going to point out some of my favorite posts, since I’m sure some of you have only been keeping up with the blog over recent weeks or months. Third, I’ll just express some thanks.
The full extent of my first written post, one year ago.
I’ve already mentioned that there have been 364 posts, and that this is the 365th. Of course, this sort of exaggerates the whole thing–about half of the posts are comics of some form or another. The Herman strips take relatively little time to do, but the actual one-panel comics takes quite a bit of time to draw and color–somewhere around three days. They are far more involved than actual written blog entries, even if they only use a small handful of words. When I started doing this blog, I figured it would be nice if I could just have some people check it out every once in a while. I initially accepted the fact that it would be my quiet corner of the internet, and the number showed. In June 2010, I had less than 300 views. However, starting in July, I started to put a bit more concerted effort into writing actual entries instead of just posting old comics and doing 100-word associations. (I was in Korea at the time and I was desperately seeking some outlet to use English–the blog ended up being my release, and writing those posts gave me the motivation to actually start writing meaningful material.) Something about that must have had an effect, because the monthly views went up to 1,200 in July, 1,700 in August, and 2,200 in September. These were numbers that I seriously wasn’t expecting.
Then once I decided that I needed to stop procrastinating on graduate school applications, my productivity dipped from October to December, as did the number of views. But since January, the numbers have steadily increased to a point where I think I’ve either plateaued or hit a peak that I probably can’t recreate again. In May, I had over 4,200 views. And none of these numbers include my own visits to the blog. As of today, I have around 24,000 total views. The figures blow my mind every time.
While each of my posts typically gets a decent amount of attention the day that they are posted, there are a few posts that mysteriously continue to draw in a small trickle of random net surfers every single day. Then there are others that exploded for a couple days (relatively speaking). I guess that the internet didn’t have enough material on these topics, so Google had no choice but to lead them to me.
The first had to be my post on the 5-Hour Energy Guy from July 2010. It got a modest number of views the day I posted it, but ever since then, at least 2-5 people have somehow stumbled across my page describing how that guy is a jerk.
The other Sunshine Burger.
Another was my post on the Sunshine Burger at Perkins from January 2011. I ate that monstrosity and wrote about it a few days later. The post got a mysteriously large number of hits. It took me a minute to find out that there’s a company called Sunshine Burger that makes vegan burgers. They somehow found my post and posted a link to it on their Twitter account. I’m still not sure how they found it.
My post focusing on the K-pop girl group called T-ara keeps getting a few views each day, even though I wrote it last December. Lots of people seem to search “kpop tiara” on Google, and some of them end up on the blog. Those few people must be incredibly desperate to learn about T-ara, because I tried doing the same search on Google and went through the first 25 pages of results. My blog isn’t there.
Leading up to this last Easter weekend, I wrote about my experience with the incredibly fake Easter Bunny at a local shopping mall. Over the next couple days, I got a couple hundreds views on that post alone. Over 300 people had found my blog by searching “is the easter bunny real.” I think it’s safe to assume that I tainted some kids’ Easters.
One of my other well-visited posts was really popular when I posted it, but has since faded away: My third RA tale, which I entitled “Vomit Fest” and shared in September. The four-part adventure covers what is easily the most surreal and memorable night of my entire life. If you haven’t read it before, I implore you to do so. It’s still probably my favorite series of posts on this one-year-old blog.
My signet's the blocky thing on the left.
If you have spare time, I’d also suggest my post on the origin of my signet from August, and how an old man named Ronai shaped a lot of my creativity when I was a kid. It’s probably one of the more personal stories I’ve put up here.
And then a few others: One about a potentially perverted crucifix (September), another about my deep appreciation of video game music (September), 200 random facts about me (October), my Tiger Mom tirade (January), a post about the Star Wars Christmas Special (February), my disbelief over Chinese buffets (February), and my fond memories of Maury Povich’s terrible show (April).
And of course, the greatest accomplishment of this blog is the cute, misanthropic panda named Herman. In case you weren’t around when this started, Herman was inspired by a couple July 2010 blog posts where I complained about how formulaic and unfunny Garfield is and where I said we could all do the same thing. When I started my silly Coffee Week, I decided to demonstrate how simple it is to do what Jim Davis does; I drew a single template of a guy and a panda and changed the text and colors each time. I did that 10 times without any real intent to keep going with it. I didn’t realize that Herman would take on a life of his own; I had too much fun mimicking Garfield but doing it in my own dark, and funnier (at least to me) way. Now, I’ve done over 110 of them, have redrawn them so that they look better than when I just scribbled a template, and have introduced three new characters while killing off one. It’s a very ironic twist that Herman–which was supposed to be a lazy endeavor–has become so time-intensive, especially when I make drastic changes. Now people want Herman merchandise… and a cut of the sales. I am unable to provide either one.
Even Herman's joining in on the fun.
Yeah, this seems like a self-serving and self-congratulatory post. But I think it’s warranted because it’s an anniversary, and also because I couldn’t even pretend to celebrate any of this if you hadn’t come by to visit the blog at some point. I offer my genuine and heartfelt thanks to you for coming by and checking things out. Even more thanks if you’ve ever decided to post a comment! Random people on the internet occasionally comment on my blog, so if you know me personally, it should be even easier! In all honesty, even though I’d blog even without people coming by, it is definitely more fun when I know that some people (including a large contingent of high school students) are keeping up to date and letting me know.
Thanks again. I’m not sure where this blog will be in another year; it could easily be dead or a bit slow to be updated because of grad school. We can’t know for sure, so let’s celebrate the fact that we got even this far.
I draw sometimes. 