Internationally Renewed Vigor

In honor of Halloween, I've decided to give you all a trick and a treat, which is 100% more than you could expect from any given house in your neighborhood. That is, if any of my readership is young enough that they could go trick or treating. And they most certainly are not. In fact, I wonder if the decline in desire to trick or treat correlates with the realization that they sell candy at the grocery store and you can buy that whenever you want. But I digress. The treat is that I'm giving you an update. The trick is that it is an update about why there are less updates. But there is yet another treat in that it will be more like my normal updates (i.e. long and filled with hilarious digressions)rather than my typical "I should update more" post (which is normally about 75 words, 50 of which were written out of guilt).

It is the worst kept secret in the world that I do not update the English Muffin Power Hour regularly. In fact, with this update, October will be my busiest month of blogging for the year with 3 updates and will be the most updated month since last August. Fortunately, after some thought (read: two minutes between innings of the World Series), I think I've isolated the reasons why the English Muffin Power Hour has been only slightly less neglected than all other Power Hours in the world.



Reason 1: Loquacity + Verbosity = Less Bloggity

This is easily the biggest stumbling block and also the hardest to solve. In fact, a ton of the humor and content here is based on the fact that I go on long, funny rambling yet somehow related speeches. I've talked about trying briefer posts before and had mixed success with it. So my solution is to dedicate a single hour of incredible focus, a "Power Hour" if you will on my update days and write as much as I can in that hour and post it on the website, an "English Muffin" of sorts. The blog is an English Muffin in the sense that it has nooks and crannies and is less popular than bagels or toast. Some of you might say that nearly three years after starting a blog is a terrible time to justify its name. To which I say, "Whateva! I do what I want!"

Reason 2: No Feedback

Popular video game critic Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw once said "The problem with posting a video to YouTube is its like tossing a message in a bottle out into an ocean made of messages in bottles". The same principle applies to blogging in that just because I post something, that doesn't give me any sort of idea of whether or not anyone read it or if it was worthy of comment. I have a very conversational style writing (in the sense that reading my writing is just like listening to me talk) so, in many ways, writing on a blog is like performing stand-up comedy for a troupe of mimes while blindfolded. In the past, the sole indication of readership I used was comments and the little boxes I put at the bottom of the article. Of course, the catch is that most people prefer to make their comments to be of substance rather than just generic positive reinforcement and most people couldn't care less about the little boxes. Luckily, I just found the stats section of my blog, which tracks traffic to my website. Even though this blog is posted on the worldwide web, I would not guess that I had any type of readership outside of the United States. However, a quick glance at my audience stats reveals something completely unexpected.

Total # of Views since May 2010
United States
498
United Kingdom
90
Azerbaijan
37
Canada
34
Russia
18
Germany
16
Australia
15
Japan
15
Romania
11
Hong Kong
10

Woo! I have more readers in Azerbaijan than Canada. Suck it, Canucks! I'm more popular in a country with a really awesome sounding name than I am in your maple syrup & beer-filled tundra. Woo! What I really like is that these numbers are only since May, and I have not been very prolific in blogging since then and haven't really promoted the website in any way other than facebook. So the discovery of Blog Stats has solved the feedback issues.

Reason 3: No Schedule

Last week, I was surprised to read that I once promised to update my blog every Monday and Thursday. That had to be the fastest broken promise by someone outside of Capitol Hill in the history of man. So I decided to put together an outline of a schedule and try to stick to that. I'm also going to say a bit about the new categories of updates.

Monday: Toss Up! This category is inspired by the PTI segment of the same name. It would be a straight up copy of the segment, but PTI didn't invent the concept of a toss-up. Basically, I present two closely comparable things (and it could be anything: pizza, athletes, dinosaurs, video games, zombies, guitar solos, etc.) and give my argument as to which one is superior, according to Hunterian logic.

Wednesday: Iron Dirigible Update For the past few years, I've been writing a weekly update for the fantasy football league I run, called "Iron Dirigible". As you might expect, these updates are well-written, insightful, and long enough to be a high school essay. I've been torn on whether or not to include these updates on the blog, since they contain a ton of inside jokes (the league is composed of six of my good friends from high school and my cat, who is represented by my dad) and some people may not like having me blog about them to my insatiable Azerbaijan fanbase. But then I realized that almost everyone in the league either had a nickname or was already mentioned on the blog. And I also realized that if I'm going to write 600 words about fantasy football, I should probably share it with more than seven other people.

Saturday: This Week In Hunteria/Wild Card This is basically the traditional English Muffin Power Hour update but with a shiny new name. I'll either recap the goings-on of my week, which is no doubt filled to the brim with adventure and intrigue, or write about an interesting thing I found, also filled to the brim with adventure and intrigue.

Well, this update has just about topped 1,100 words, which means it crushes all the other "Will Update More Often" posts combined. This update schedule will go into effect on November 8th, because I will be studying like mad for the GRE in the interim. It just seems irresponsible to blog like I've never blogged before with a major exam lying in ambush. However, I thought it was important to make this update now, so I could have my most active month in over a year.