I’ll always wonder what that was about.

TUAK will turn ten years old in December and in that time, though readership has slowly increased it has never showed itself in any danger of getting into Tam or SaysUncle numbers. I’m perfectly happy with that: It started as a sleepy little hobby blog and gradually became a small community of commenters and supporters and lurkers with a larger oort cloud of occasional readers – just like any blog that hangs around for a while, I suppose.

And that’s cool. In fact sometimes it’s more public than I’m entirely comfortable with. I didn’t move to a hollow in a desert out of a desire for large amounts of attention.

So when there’s suddenly a blip in page views because somebody linked something to somebody else, it has a bad habit of spiking my paranoia at first until the anomaly is explained. There was that one time Milo Yiannopoulos tweeted something I said about him and the pageview counter smoked its bearings for just under an hour, which is apparently a typical example of a Twitter attention span. Or the much healthier time Commander Zero linked to those reviews of 40-year-old Mountain House storage food*.

And then there are things like this…

Sometime Sunday evening somebody posted a link to the homepage on BookFace, and since I don’t BookFace I’ll never know what it was about. Not a problem, at all, but I won’t say it didn’t pique my curiosity.

Not curious enough to sign up on Bookface, of course. Or to Twit, for that matter. A hermit needs some standard of privacy, even if he’s not very consistent about it…

—
*Which was also probably the highest-profile example of a funny but somewhat annoying phenomenon I call the “You know Ian? Cool!” effect. Sweartagod when I get shoveled into Boot Hill I currently want my epitaph to read “Here Lies Joel. He Knew Ian.”