So, since 2010 is but a distant memory and 2011 has already started to suck ass, I figured I would share with you some of the stats from this lousy stuff.
Technically I got these stats on January 11th, 2011, so they run the calendar year Jan 11 2010 – Jan 11 2011.
Boringly, let’s look at the search terms that land losers in this place.
| Search Terms | # of Searches |
|---|---|
| debugwire | 233 |
| arduino debugwire | 79 |
| debug for arduino board | 61 |
| arduino jtag | 39 |
| debugging avr dragon | 36 |
| arduino dragon | 30 |
| avr debugwire | 30 |
| debugwire arduino | 30 |
| avr dragon debug arduino | 28 |
| arduino debug wire | 23 |
Notice a trend?
I think the most interesting search terms were “asshole instructions” , since I guess some people don’t know how to use theirs correctly. Related, whoever keeps searching for “jim tranquilla, microwave technology”: If you’re reading this, he still owes me $33,253.63.
First off, here’s the “non-musical” posts. You know, those ones about the microcontrollers and shit where people are trying to find someone to do their homework for them.
Okay, take a look at that first post (the “do my homework for me” post). 2910 views. Now, let’s look at the musical posts. The top musical post is “And Something About A Witch”, which got 47 for the year. I have no idea why that’s the top one, other than Brad Thornton is a talented and popular guy.
I often joke about the fact that only two people actually listen to my stuff, and that pretty much shows. For the sake of brevity, only things with 5 or more views for the year are listed. Some actually have zero views, and that’s cool. I have wordpress set to annoy the five people in the magic ice cream club who follow me on twooofter and I usually get more rebleats than actual views. I also realize that WordPress’ stats aren’t exactly accurate.
The dull as dishwater musical details:
| Post (music title in brackets) | Views |
|---|---|
| Nothing about Big Dogs (And Something About a Witch) | 47 |
| That’s some Big Dog(WHO BEAMED THE BIG DAWG OUT) | 46 |
| Guaranteed to Offend (Hail the Eternal King of Olympus Mons) | 41 |
| In a Galaxy Just Next Door (Theme from the Waxbase) | 32 |
| Late to the Party (Mein Waffle) | 31 |
| 2009’s Pig in a Slanket Collection. (2009’s music as a collection) | 30 |
| Come On, Now You’re Not Even Trying. (Dean of Science) | 25 |
| The X Stands for CASH (Suxmas, from 2009) | 24 |
| The Past Future Imperfect of Law Enforcement (Lament for a Cyborg) | 23 |
| Make It Stop (WTFTATR) | 21 |
| Rampant Attempt at Seasonal Commercialism 2010 (AWXMASFY) | 17 |
| The PenIs Mightier than the Sword (You Got Kicked in the Pills) | 17 |
| Crackpot, Buzzkill, Asshole (Buzzkilled and In the Morning, Yo. Featured on No Agenda) | 17 |
| Catbounce (Nitrogene) | 16 |
| I Warned You. (Glaze) | 15 |
| Still Ruining Other People’s Work (She Insisted) | 14 |
| Green’s Function and Reciprocity Chicken Chicken Chicken (Euclidean Space) | 14 |
| Decompression Fitting (Wrath of the Waxbase) | 14 |
| A Public Service Announcement for Dorks. (not music) | 13 |
| Load of the Rings (Amon Hen Goes Nothing) | 13 |
| QUOTA IS NOT MET (Omatic) | 13 |
| Sham Along (Fence Post) | 13 |
| Fifty Seven Seconds (The UxHJ, not music) | 13 |
| Whoring Out Roundup (Theme from Sexbase 69, For Those About To Disco, and A Very Special For Those About to Rock) |
11 |
| Live from Douchestock (A Flash of Internal Organs) | 11 |
| You still won’t like it (Haus of Waxbase) | 11 |
| Intermission (L’Hopital’s Rule) | 11 |
| Move along, nothing to see here (Teared, from 2009) | 11 |
| … and Special Guests The Harlem Globetrotters. (Metalologist) | 11 |
| Creep’s Show (Feature Creep) | 11 |
| The House the Tired Meme Built (Eerie Ham) | 11 |
| Meh. (Meh) | 10 |
| The Cut of your Jib (Herp deDerp) | 10 |
| Stink it up (Stink the Bismarck) | 10 |
| Bonus Wound (Ah Pretension) | 9 |
| The Defendant Ate The Witness (Trial for the Shark) | 9 |
| PUT THE GLASSES ON. (THEY SUCK) | 9 |
| Ratyuan Poroga Westip Ubucap (Yarga Lomba) | 9 |
| No Profanity Contained Wherein (The Pimento Oaf) | 9 |
| Executive Derision (And With That) | 9 |
| Cleanse the Patella (Le Parc du Coq Sac) | 8 |
| And now there only was. (Fart in a Spacesuit) | 8 |
| The Contractual Obligation Piece (Interstellar Crotchicanery ) | 7 |
| Two Thousand and Ten and One and Two and Three and (Sacrifical Anode) | 7 |
| Genie in the Bottle (Spilled) | 7 |
| The Dork Knight (Midknight) | 7 |
| Decoughinated (Punitive) | 7 |
| Timed and Timed Against. (KICKSTANND) | 7 |
| Sabre Dance (Conference Slide) | 7 |
| The Interactive Nonfiction Best-Seller (Antialiased) | 7 |
| With Powdered Milk Love is Eternal (Interior Liquid) | 6 |
| The Hedgehog’s Hedge Fund (Beatstone, from 2009) | 6 |
| You want your money back. (Auld 2010) | 6 |
| Five Pack of Brown Paper Bags (Endless Chicken at the Ritz) | 6 |
| Sold. (Kimg of the Assholes) | 5 |
| Voided (Destination Waxbase) | 5 |
| Fourteen Sticks (Skein of Evil) | 5 |
| Movie of the Weak (Oak) | 5 |
| You can’t catch salmonella from Cooley-Tukey. (Walt’s Crack, from 2009) | 5 |
| Mindless Repetition is Boring. (Fawdown) | 5 |
| Screaming Bunny Ninjas (The Catscape Expanse) | 5 |
| Dubious Achievement Unlocked (Have You Seen) | 5 |
| The Gene Pool Can Be Pretty Shallow (Off the Weak End, from 2009) | 5 |
| 2010’s “AND WITH 2010, FU” Collection (2010’s music collection) | 5 |
| Fatfinger and the Humminao Zwo (Humanatio, from 2009) | 5 |
| Wide Open Throttle (WOT) | 5 |
| Carborundumbest (Reaction Bonded Carbide Blues) | 5 |
Now, those are post views, and all the music posts have the embedded flash music player (I can’t get stats for if anyone actually plays anything from the flash player), but you can also download the MP3 to keep if you wish. Very few people do that. Top one of those is “Hail the Eternal King of Olympus Mons” (16 times), and then “Euclidean Space” (9 times). Lots of people download the schematic for where to pop off the capacitor from their Arduino, for some reason.
In trivia, the reason Meine Waffle is so high up the list is because it’s the post adjacent to that “do my homework for me” thing with 2910 views. People read about how to cut off a capacitor, click to see the next post, and then… leave.
Also in trivia, the “all time” top music post is “The X Stands for CASH”, 2009’s xmas crap (67 total).
I’m also dismayed that “Dean of Science” is as poopular as it was. Scott Redman, one of the two people who actually listen to this stuff, (unsolicited) sent me one of his guitars from his collection. The Dean guitar is beautiful, and a damned order of magnitude nicer than my Ibanez EX350 I’d been using up until that point. I took it out of the box, didn’t tune it, plugged it in and recorded something and pushed it out. Mr. Redman also sent along the acoustic guitar from “Teared” which appears in a few places. Thanks, Scott, who didn’t have to do that.
I should point out that I don’t ask for money or anything, as I am rich in the spirit of our Lord and Saviour Geddy Lee. Hell I’ll send you a disc of this shit for free if you actually figure out how to ask. If you want to support someone, donate some money to your local animal shelter or your favourite Podcast. Sometimes those are the same thing, I think.
I have this habit of taking existing themes/pieces and backing over them again like you would an old lady at the intersection. Big winner this year was the theme from podcast Starbase 66, for which I managed to squeeze out 1,2,3,4,5 versions, plus 6,7 which were the “Big Dawg” variations. Starbase 66 got so damned tired of listening to me do this they replaced their intro music with a variation of Theme from the Waxbase.
For Here Goes Nothing’s theme I ended up doing 1,2,3 (SB66 Crossover),4 and also Metalologist which featured a clip of Casey from HGN playing guitar. I also did a couple of stingers that made it onto HGN (“That’s Not Metal/Now That’s Metal”, and the F-U-Haiku backing track)
I did 1,2,3 bits based on For Those About To Rock, and by virtue of being the only entry did 1,2 show intros for them. “A Flash of Internal Organs” was a bit I took on as a challenge issued by the FTATR folks during an episode to cut their jibjab during that show into a song.
To round out the whoring-out report, Lament for a Cyborg got chosen by Brad Thornton as a closing theme for the first couple of episodes of his podcast A Brief History of Music.
In an embarrassing situation, the bit I’ve done that the most people have probably heard was “In the Morning, Yo”, which I managed to assemble from some snips of Adam Curry during an episode of No Agenda. I sent the thirty-three second piece to Adam and to my surprise he played it on NA244. No Agenda says they have around 450,000 listeners. Thankfully he did not credit me on the show.
This year I also submitted a few tracks over to Radio Reddit, and according to theory they add things to their playlist. The reality seems to be “they will add it to the playlist if I make a donation”. Well, not really. It just feels like that. I submitted AWXMASFY (2010’s Xmas crap) a few weeks before xmas, they even put out a call for xmas music to play on Dec 25th, and as of Jan 11th it still hasn’t been approved. Only two songs have actually been “submitted” to reddit by listeners anyway. (Unlike some folks, I’m not a whore and don’t submit my own stuff from Radioreddit to Reddit). Not really a compelling use case for Radioreddit, but hey, it’s there.
In technical terms, up until “Dean of Science” all the guitar bits were done with my Ibanez RG350 which I got at the pawn shoppe and has a shitty floating floyd rose tremelo I can’t stand. All the post-“Dean of Science” bits are done with the Dean. Scott’s a great guy, unlike myself.
The only other equipment change was at one point I got completely fed up with my Digitech GNX3000, which I’d been using for the guitar work. The GNX3000 was nice when it was new, but as of OSX 10.5 it had become just about useless. It was perpetually not being recognized as an audio input, making me hack the xml files and constantly reboot to get it to work, which kinda cramps your muse. I also noticed I was never actually using any of the onboard effects (which is what it’s for, dammit) – I was doing everything with the realtime processors in Garageband/Logic anyway. So I sold that and it went to a nice home, and got a Presonus Firestudio mobile unit, which runs over firewire and has been absolutely rock solid. I got that around the end of April, so probably everything from May onward was done with the Presonus. The acoustic is recorded with a Shure SM57 which also goes into the Presonus. I know, you don’t care.
Up until “Smoak”, other than a couple of test pieces from 2009 everything was done with Garageband. I had famously bought Logic 8 and hardly used it due to the learning curve. When I plunked out another five hundred bucks to buy Logic 9 I figured I had to learn it. First was “Test Was Negative” from 2009, then “Smoak”, and from “Theme from the Waxbase” on everything is done in Logic 9.
So, what did I personally think of this year’s shit? I’ll freely admit that I’m vain and I listen to my own music, since why the fuck not – that’s why I make it in the first place. Some pieces I think turned out not-so-bad were “Wrath of the Waxbase”, “Destination Waxbase”, “Spilled”, “Your Wallet, Sir/And Your Watch”, and “She Insisted”. Some other pieces have some nice segments (4:05 in “The Hazmat Suit Suite”, 5:34 in “Have You Seen”, 2:20 in “Conference Slide”, 10:25-11:45 of “A Flash of Internal Organs”, 2:05-3:00 of “Haus of Waxbase”). Some of them even I won’t listen to (“Omatic”, “Artherioysuisocialism”, “Deneb”, “Stump”). I have no clue what the two listeners liked/disliked.
Last year’s big piece that took forever was “You Look Feiss Today” (because it used so many tracks). This year’s big winner for time suck was “A Flash of Internal Organs” because of all the bits I had to do to meld in the lines from FTATR.
As if you can’t tell by listening to them, “Ah Pretension/The Ibuprofen doesn’t help” were quite literally experiments in “record something really fast and try to build something out of it”. I really liked how those turned out in the end.
I think the official count for 2010 was somewhere between 90-95 pieces depending on what you wanted to include. I only had a few things that I did that I never published. After hearing “Omatic” you’d have to figure that I’d publish anything. I have a few unfinished things that either I didn’t like anything I could do with them, and one case of a collaborative project that I think has died on the vine. I think the best part was tricking convincing Ro Karen to do the cover art.
So, that’s it. I haven’t picked out a name for the 2011 collection yet. And with that, fuck you.
The inability to follow simple instructions 