Blogstones (3?...4?... A Million?)

Yet another 28th of August has rolled around, the date on which I first posted to this blog waaaaay back in 2009. You'd think the fourth occasion of such a milestone would thus be #4 in a series of recurring entries, but of course I am nowhere near that consistent or organized. I humbly skipped the first anniversary of the ol' bloggity-blog, then made sure to point it out at the two years mark, and then followed that up scant days later with the 500th post. At the time, I lamented not having properly aligned the anniversary and the big round-numbered post, and I even made a crack about doing better come August of 2013.

Then the third anniversary came and went last year unremarked upon, mostly because I was just getting back form vacation around the 28th and was not in the commemorative mindset, plus I had a lot of other post-fodder from the recent week at the beach, anyway. So here we are now, the blog is four, but this is the third time I've drawn attention to the (debatable) noteworthiness of its age and/or size. And the 1,000th post? Still a couple months away at the rate I've been going lately. So it goes.

Since today is Wednesday, if I'm going to indulge in any backwards-looking self-regard I might as well tie it into something on the geekier end of the spectrum. How about Game of Thrones? I will keep my remarks brief, but I do have a couple of thoughts to share:

I always keep one eye on the page hit stats for this whole endeavor, just out of curiosity as to which posts draw random visitors from crazy keyword searches and whatnot. Usually it's all driven far more by image searches returning the pictures I appropriate to break up each post, rather than anything I've actually rambled about in the text. I noticed recently that a seriously old post from November of 2009 had been stumbled upon, and I opened it up to remind myself what it was about. Post-apocalyptic pulps, mostly (and the picture of the day was the half-buried Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes) but I did have to laugh at part of the opening: I wanted to talk about the author Jack Vance, but in my roundabout preambling kind of way I started talking about how I heard about Vance through George R.R. Martin, and I made a very coy mention about how I was currently reading "an unfinished series of books by Martin". Obviously I was talking about A Song of Ice and Fire, which is the basis of Game of Thrones, but back in 2009 I assumed nobody would know or care what that series was, or who the hell George R.R. Martin might be, either. Funny how a few years changes things, and Game of Thrones is pretty inescapable now.

Which segues nicely into my second point, about another post which does come up every once in a while in the stats log, also from that same month and year. In it I was going on and on about an old Superman supporting character who was blatantly ripped off from an obscure Sean Connery sci-fi movie, a character named Vartox from the planet Valeron. And as time has gone by I've often wondered if people are trying to enter "Valyrian" into their search engines, or even "Valyrian steel" which is the fabled metal that the most legendary longswords are forged from in the world of, you guessed it, Game of Thrones. And my post, referring to a world called Valeron (as well as Superman aka the Man of Steel) would be a close match, particularly for people who've only seen the show on HBO and never read the books and don't quite know how to spell "Valyrian".

At any rate, here's to another four years (at least!) of over-obsessing about fictional universes and playing havoc with search results!