Site traffic… …

So, ummm… it looks like this weekend Modern Evil’s viewership so far for 2003 surpassed the total number of viewers for 2002. Which is good. It follows an upward trend we’ve been experiencing lately in traffic. For instance, in 2002 Modern Evil experienced more traffic than in 1999, 2000, and 2001 combined. Traffic to Modern Evil seems to have reached a new plateau right now, and while I expect it to begin going up again in the future…

If the traffic to Modern Evil stayed the same for the remainder of 2003 as it has been steadily in the first 16 weeks of 2003, Modern Evil will have experienced more than twice as much traffic as it had experienced in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002, COMBINED. I’m exicted. Are you excited? And if site traffic doubles (or more) from current levels by the beginning of 2004 & doesn’t recede, ME’ll have more traffic in 2004 than it had in it’s combined history AGAIN! (Which, by the by, would be more readers than many printed periodicals receive.)

Still, there is a strange part of my mind that is reaching for a particular level of traffic… See, when Iain and I first put Modern Evil together, back in the fall of 1999, it was originally inspired by Goats. (goats.com, that is.) And at that time, goats.com was getting around 5000-6000 unique visitors every weekday. And that has been one of my aspirations for Modern Evil from the beginning; to reach that level of traffic to the site. To have content so compelling that that many people want to return to Modern Evil every day to see what comes next. Sure, by now Goats has significantly more traffic than that, and is even approaching profitability, a goal so lofty I dare not set it yet… but I’d still love to see ME reach 5k-6k unique visitors every weekday.

Which, by the by, is around 20 times the currently exceptionally, excitingly high level of traffic. So, a long way off. OR right around the bend, if we can somehow work up another spurt of exponential growth… Looking at the numbers to add them up for this post, I see that most days this month ME’s had more uniques than it had in most entire months between summer 2001 and summer 2002. So we’re now at more than 20 times more traffic than we were then, which like I said, is great. Exceptional! Exciting for me. (And for ME.) So that factor of growth is possible in a very short period of time. Even a second time, because of the power rule. Actually, if modern statistical analyses are to be believed, the next bout of exponential growth should be easier to come by than the first (though still not easy), and after that, it may never level off as long as the number of new people accessing the internet doesn’t level off.

err, that is… well… we’re already out of the lower 90%… we’re getting closer… but 2% of sites get over 90% of traffic, which means that the other 98% of sites (which ME still belongs to) have to share 10% or less of all internet traffic… but we’re up from the place where the lower 90% are fighting over hundredths of a percent of the traffic or less… we did our time there… I wonder if my old posts still exist somewhere… the ones where I laid out my vague plans for ME to become a multi-national media giant… In the last six months, we made the third big step in that direction, and hopefully in the next six months we can make another.

Am I babbling yet? Have you stopped reading? Am I boring? Am I egotistical and megalomaniacal? Whatever. Now I’ll go to the ‘extended entry’ field and type something… maybe something scandalous…

Like “Women are Evil”… ? ::wink::

Earlier today my grandfather said these exact words, in reference to some news item on the radio as we drove from Phoenix to Pine:

“I believe homosexuals should be exterminated like any other vermin.”

I just stayed quiet, of course. No need to argue with him. Not even on the Christian side where Jesus says to love thy neighbor, where we’re supposed to learn from Jesus’ example and be reasonably forgiving of people’s sins… What good could possibly have come from it? Personally, I’m just about as much a homosexual as I am an adulterer. That is, Jesus said that to think lustful thoughts about a woman was the same as committing adultery with her, and while I’ve never had a ‘homosexual relationship’ or ‘homosexual sex’, I have also never had ‘heterosexual sexual intercourse’, nor have I been involved in a ‘heterosexual relationship’ since very early 1998. Nor do I plan to engage in sexual contact with anyone of either gender until marriage (or other equatable, contractual/lifetime arrangement has been made — and I don’t just mean with men; I know women who have told me they don’t believe in the institution of marriage, but do believe in commitment between two people…)

Oh, but I’ve been thinking lustful thoughts. And not just about women.

No need to mention them to my grandparents, though. Or my father, either. The last discussion I had with my mother before she died was on this very subject for the most part. I bet you didn’t know that. We discussed it at length and ended up agreeing that since what I actually am is a-sexual or non-sexual, I’m not really an abomination against God, but that she would pray that I stopped having lustful thoughts about men. Which seemed fine with me at the time, but I guess it either killed her or God stuck her dead for hating her own child’s un-acted-on thoughts. Since which time, I have tried to keep quiet about the idea of my sexuality as much as possible in any medium/situation where my family is involved. I don’t want them all dropping dead from shame about what turns me on in the lonesome privacy of my own room. That is, I’ve been censoring myself here on Modern Evil, and in life. And I don’t know if my dad just put it out of his mind or what, but since we made the aggreement that i would live in Pine & help with my grandparents & he would pay my debt payments (he was paying someone almost as much just to run the store here on weekends, so it’s not really unreasonable, people) I’ve felt as though and axe were waiting pendulously, about to drop and tear everything apart if anyone anywhere, even radio correspondents talking about some vocal old man on a hill thousands of miles away, mentioned homosexuals. As though the very thought of men with men would remind my father that he hates me, that I should be exterminated like vermin for my unclean thoughts, that I killed the love of his life somehow with the subject, rather than diabetes and MS and whatever else was breaking down in her body all those years. And then where would I be? Out on the streets, no job, no savings, no idea of where to go from … nowhere, because right now I’m living my life towards being a successful artist and a writer, and towards making all my family members (and friends, as much as I can) more successful at whatever they want to be successful at, and that’s all built on my being a guest of my grandparents and my father, and most of it falls apart if they decide they don’t want me to be their guest anymore.

***

For a long time, before I had any talks with either of my parents about just what the nature of my sexuality might be, my friends who had known for years, or new people who just found out I wasn’t ‘out’ with my parents, they asked me the same question over and over again: “Do you want your mother to die not knowing?” (Sometimes they said father, but it was widely known that my mother was ill and growing iller.) But that’s like asking me if I want my mother to die unhappy. I know my parents, and I’m working on getting to know my grandparents better before they die, and it doesn’t take much to know that no amount of conversation is going to quiet the violent hatred and fear they hold for the simple idea of homosexuality existing in the universe to be toned down or stopped. For a long time I didn’t even bother to breach that subject with either of my parents, but it always breached that wall of fury when I did.

Now the question turns about in my head alone. I live 100 miles from anyone who knows to ask me, but I know the answer. If both of my remaining grandparents die without ever hearing about ANY of the lustful thoughts that have entered/exited my head, hetero, homo, whatever, that will mean they have had an easier time of their remaining time. That will be a good thing. That will not change me, and being a-sexual, my sexuality really only concerns me, right? Why bother anyone else with it, let alone old, sick people with weak hearts or who are dying of cancer? So what if they believe homosexuals should be exterminated? They’re not hitler, they won’t be exterminating any homosexuals in their waning years, nor ordering any subordinates to do the same.

So what? So… it upsets me a bit… And not nearly as much as what’s really been bothering me lately… if this is the sort of rant I can go on about this brief subject, imagine the one I’ve been hiding from everyone… Remember, I like to hide things right out in front of people where they’ll never find them. Like the way this post about my grandfather’s comment is hidden right out in the open…. after a longer post about site traffic that many people have no interest in reading. If I were REALLY trying to hide it, of course, I’d probably have made two seperate posts and modified the wording slightly, so you don’t notice how upset I am.

About something else.