Looking back at the stats for this site over the past month and comparing them with last month is a little discouraging and somewhat fascinating.

• My overall visitor traffic has dropped. A lot.
  Ballpark 1,000 visitors, down 40% from the previous month
• My top 5 viewed posts did not even contain any of my photography. Yipes.
• My biggest audience is…..China. Followed by the US.

I would be lying to say that these stats don’t even bother me…
you know…
Im just doing this for the love of it (which I am, sure), and its all bout the quality of the readership not the quantity (which it is obviously).

China, eh?
Im going to call it that 982 of my visitors this month are bots and AI scrapers, and 3 are surfer dudes using AI to search for board wax.

Even so. The ego is strong in this one.
Validation, praise, admiration, and comparison the four donkey-men of the apocalypse drag me along behind them on a hessian rope tied to my transverse colon.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

–unknown

I’m not sure why the drop in numbers. I think AI is corrupting the entire internet now…….and the algorithms no longer favour individual (human) artists. Then, I have also reset my email subscription list, and not many have resubscribed. Which you can do at the bottom of this post by the way.

The temptation is to set up a page on Facebook and open an account on X, and start posting my photos in Instagram… so I can more effectively push my feeds out into the world.

After everything I have said about these platforms the karmic hypocrisy of doing this would no doubt lob tenacious sputum gobs into my most lucid dreams and take dumps in those soft serve ice cream moments of my life.

Instead, my primary strategy for dealing with all this ego desiccating information is to look at the stats once a month. No more.

And to spend the rest of the time in a sweet cosplay denial, imagining that I am posting to a readership of 2.3 million hardcore fans.

Of which thankfully, you are one.