The first stage of grief, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross famously postulated, is denial.
So it’s hardly surprising that Paul Elam and his gang of flunkies and fans at A Voice for Men have responded to the news that my site is besting AVFM in traffic by trying to claim that my traffic is somehow … fake.
Elam’s “evidence” for this assertion? He poked around my site for a few minutes and couldn’t find any posts that felt really “viral” to him.
He explained his, er, logic in a post yesterday. (You’ll have to excuse his terrible prose; he’s apparently running out of ways to call me fat.)
The gynecomastia plagued mammoth hunter’s sudden, meteoric rise into alleged relevance can only be explained by one thing. There must have been a stratospherically viral article (usually meaning more than two paragraphs) penned by the Wizard of Wallow that must have been picked up by every major media outlet in the mainstream.
Trouble is, we could not find it. A complete search of his website for something that coincided with his liftoff into the upper echelons of Alexa rankings, only turned up more of his usual fare. Quote mining, distortions, lies, poorly written snark and hundreds of comments, most of which have nothing to do with the OP and everything to do with kittens.
I’m not sure how one is supposed to be able to tell how much traffic a post has generated just by looking at it; it’s a bit like trying to tell how fast a car can go by looking at it parked.
But using some methodology of his own, apparently based not so much on what is true as on what he desperately wants to be true, he concludes that I bought the traffic using some of that sweet sweet cash I apparently get from the Femilluminati overladies.
So, that leaves us with only one other conclusion about David’s strut-worthy presence on Alexa. He paid for it. Yes, for those who cannot create real traffic, it can be purchased. Of course, purchasing a fake Alexa ranking is, well, fake. But what better tool for web presence could there ever be for a fake writer, with fake ideas waging a fake war against fake enemies for the approval of fake allies?
Also, I’m a big fan of fried chicken. (How did he know?)
A fake Alexa ranking fits on David Futrelle like a day old bucket of fried chicken fits in his lap . And it will probably last about as long given it requires regular financial maintenance.
Elam’s preoccupation with Alexa is a little weird. I didn’t even mention Alexa in my post comparing my traffic to his. Alexa’s numbers for my site and his are based on estimates — extimates that I’m pretty sure are something less-than-reliable, at least when it comes to my site.
No, the reason I know that I’m getting more traffic than A Voice for Men – or at least that I was getting more when I wrote my post on the subject – has nothing to do with Alexa rankings. It’s because Elam posted a screenshot of his actual traffic stats. Which I was able to compare to the traffic stats I get directly from WordPress. (You can see my screenshot and his in my post om the subject.)
The closest thing to “evidence” Elam has to back up his false accusation that my traffic is “fake” is based on something called Google PageRank, a zero-to-ten ranking that provides at least a rough representation of a site’s importance in the internet world. (Zero is totally obscure; ten means you’re as popular as Google.) Unfortunately, Elam’s internet research skills leave something to be desired, and his “evidence” isn’t actually evidence of anything real.
Elam reports that when he typed his site’s url into a site that tracks PageRank it got a rating of 5. He typed WeHuntedTheMammoth.com into the same page and it gets a PageRank of … zero.
Which would be pretty damning, except that it’s meaningless.
You see, the real URL for this blog is manboobz.wordpress.com; that’s the URL that WeHuntedTheMammoth.com redirects you to. And if you type manboobz.wordpress.com into that same PageRank site that Elam used, you’ll see that my site has a Google PageRank of … 4, pretty close to that of AVFM.
Seriously, Paul, try it yourself if you don’t believe me.
So, no, Paul, I didn’t buy traffic or whatever it is you think I did to get “fake” traffic for my “fake” writing.
You want to know the real secret behind the increased traffic to my site? Well. I don’t know if you realized it, Paul, but last year was kind of a breakout year for online misogyny. You remember that whole GamerGate thing? I wrote a lot about that, including a number of posts that collected together a lot of information that other people found useful.
If you look at my most-read posts from the past year – here, here and here – you can see that a lot of people did in fact find them useful: each one was shared on Twitter and Facebook literally thousands of times, as you can see by scrolling down to the bottom of each post. (Or did I fake those too?)
Also, I started writing more than one post a day. All else being equal, more posts means more traffic.
The flipside is that all this misogyny and all this writing kind of burned me out, and I’ve been taking a bit of a breather for the last few weeks, writing fewer posts and taking some days off. So my traffic has slowed a bit. Heck, my traffic may have dropped back down to AVFM levels.
But I’m not worried, Paul. As long as terrible and ridiculous people like you keep saying and doing terrible, ridiculous things, I’m not going to run out of things to write about. And as long as people are interested in hearing about people like you, it seems likely that I’ll continue to get enough traffic to reduce you to tooth-grinding rage.
I can only hope you’re able to work y0ur way through the other stages of grief until you finally reach acceptance. Because right now your desperation is so obvious it can probably be seen from space. It’s not a good look for you.
I’m serious, langue students were the only people (in the top class) who knew any grammer beyond Noun and verb.
Also Macedonia is still a country! I thought it had been absorbed into other countries!
Ok, as people might have noticed. I am technically unipolar, but at times I go hyper and comment all over the place. Sorry.
As a writer, Latin is invaluable to me not only in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but also for developing logic and structuring skills. I tell any young person who asks me for advice about writing to take at least some Latin courses; I found it one of the best teachers for writing in English.
I totally agree Cassie’sMD.
I seem to have been one of the few people who actually got taught sentence parsing in English classes, so I at least knew more than just the Schoolhouse Rock songs. Most people I’ve talked to never seem to have done that, which is annoying.
That said, I still learned more about English grammar in my German class than I ever did in English class. I never learned Latin in school, but did do French (I’m in Canada, it was expected) and German, and English is sort of a mash-up of the two. German class is where I realized that the -‘s possessive in English is essentially a contraction of the Germanic genitive case, which still uses -es.
Once you know bits and pieces of multiple languages, the patterns become a lot more obvious.
Yes. I was unusual in doing Latin. To do so you needed passes from other teachers that you could miss their classes to learn Latin. I also did French to O Grade (written not spoken. Which was a choice) and later did a German O Grade in one year.
I also did a bit of Russian as an hour long class once a week.
I was amazed when I looked into Old Icelandic off my own bat how much the other languages helped.
(I wanted to studty Anglo-Saxon at Uni, but you had to take 2 years of English before they taught it).
I think liguistic teaching at Uni is wrong.
@Jenora Feuer: Yeah, there’s plenty of French and German in English, but there’s Saxon and Latin and a bit of other Romance languages.
Who was it that said English lurks in an alley and mugs passing languages for interesting words?
I could muddle through Italian enough to navigate train stations thanks to multiple years of French. Plus I think there were plenty of pictographs.
I am not good at languages, I am not claimiong that. I just love them
@Falconer
It was James Nicoll, a first reader for the SF Book Club. He’s pretty much known for that quote:
BTW, English beat up Arabic to steal the word “Admiral.” (al-Miral).
Also “alcohol”, “assassin”, and possibly “candy”.
Yeah, it was James Nicoll that said that. After a rather crude comment on the ‘purity’ of English.
(I knew James relatively well; we both went to University of Waterloo, though he’d graduated about the time I started there. He was running Imperiums to Order, a book and gaming store in Kitchener for years while I attended University.)
Really, the history of the English language is mostly the history of the number of times England was conquered and the various occupying forces left chunks of their language and culture behind. Danish fishermen, Roman armies, Vikings, the Norman conquest… then the Dutch made the mistake of teaching the English how to do international trade and the English kind of took over after that. Pratchett makes pretty much the same comment in the Discworld books about Ankh-Morpork, which is pretty blatantly a take on London.
Most of my Latin is hobbyist level only. Anybody else ever played Ars Magica?
Ars Magica! I am quoted as a playtester in the Arabic sub-book! (Yes, I know that is not the correct term but I can’t think of the right word now).
I knew the author who attended St Andrews Uni and got a First in Arabic language and Culture.
AAAAAAAAAA! What fun his classes must have been! I’m just picturing that, and…smiling all over the place.
Aaaaand now I’m picturing John Cleese singing “Cano carmen sixpence”, and slapping some poor hapless student with a fish at irregular intervals.
This, I assure you, totally makes my day.
I’ve often wondered how the city came to be named Ankh-Morpork when Pterry was writing the first stories. Is it a parody of Lankhmar? Or is it just supposed to sound silly?
I’ve never played Ars Magica, and with my current group I’d be hesitant to try. One of them is really smart, but has a persistent blind spot about how to spell and pronounce “portcullis.” Maybe I’m underestimating him, but I think Latin would be difficult for the group to pronounce and a pretty big turn-off.
Oh, I can go further. I knew the original Gytha (Ogg). And she was a witch/pagan rl. She had a letter from PTerry asking to use her name.
It was apparently before he went to Cambridge, but yes, it’s a wonderful idea.
She once asked if I was a witch. I denied it, but should have asked for training.
@gilshalos: Oh wow, that’s awesome!
Ars Magica can be a fun game, but it requires a good GM and players willing to play along. It tends to reward troupe style where everybody can have multiple characters. Some of the books can get obsessively detailed about the medieval background, but it is an interesting attempt to do a world that actually runs on Aristotelian physics.
The last game of it I played with our current group ended up getting thrown out due to disagreements over exactly how ‘magic resistance’ should be handled, as the rulebooks themselves are not entirely consistent on the matter.
Not an official playtester myself, but my old GM wrote part of the Ancient Magic sourcebook.
I also have a first ed copy of WOD:Changeling Gm’s guide, with a (penciled) comment by one of the authors. (I should check if it was GM’s Guide or Players, but I think GM’s) He was a great GM.
The great thing about that book is there is a wonderful lot of info about GM’ing, very little about Changeling. The part author I knew hated Changeling. But as I said, great GM