Blogiversary: Greatest Hits

Five years of all this nonsense but what nonsense were people reading and when? I’m down here in the archive stacks of Felapton Towers and blowing the dust off the weird old filing cabinets to find out. These posts are just the numbers-game hits rather than special favourites and often other factors drove the traffic to them.

2015

The first year out for the blog and Puppy-kerfuffling was already in full on kerfluff.

• The most popular posts were about the map of different groups and blogs in the Sad Puppy fuss: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/08/12/map-of-the-2015-puppy-kerfuffle/ Surprisingly, the map was actually quite popular with the various Puppy factions as well.
• The Unified Puppy Theory was my attempt to sum up what was going on. This was in July 2015 and everything felt like it was winding down https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-unified-puppy-theory/
• In August 2015 I decided I better try and track what had happened when, mainly to get things clear in my head but also anticipating that we’d be getting some very different versions of events in the future: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/the-true-history-of-the-great-puppy-kerfuffle-of-2015-ce/
• Late in 2015 I made my first attempt at reading a book by the far-right extremist and sci-fi publisher Vox Day https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/12/11/reading-vox-day-so-you-dont-have-to/
• Doubling back to June 2015, I finally decided to review Michael Z Williamson’s “Wisdom from My Internet”. I’d skipped it initially because it was just so obviously bad and I felt sorry for the guy that the SPs had made him look ridiculous. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/lets-talk-about-puppy-poo/

2016

2016 was the year that the unreality field started spilling out everywhere.

• This sticker design got shared a LOT on Facebook and was the top traffic post for 2016 here https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/suggested-sticker-design/
• January 2016 had me musing on the year to come. None of this was prescient though https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/more-on-puppies-and-2016/
• Vox Day created a “new” online encyclopedia that turned out to be an out of date and vandalised copy of Wikipedia: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/voxopedia-where-information-about-women-goes-to-be-erased/ Amazingly, it is still going.
• The number four spot is actually a post from December 2015. It still draws regular views even today. R2D2 is a sith. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/the-true-history-of-r2d2-sith-lord/
• Vox Day had a bad week and I was hoping that the presidential election polls were looking bad for Trump. Oops. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/vox-days-no-good-horrible-very-bad-week/

2017

2017 was dominated by Rabid Puppy shenanigans. In particular Vox Day’s spoiler campaign for John Scalzi’s new sci-fi trilogy.

• You know what will really drive traffic to a blog post? A link from John Scalzi… A cover generator to make your own fake covers for your own knock-off version of a bestseller https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/a-message-from-the-ceo-of-cattimothy-house/
• And because people demanded it, I slogged through the turgid prose of “Corrosion” — Vox Day’s attempt to write a better book https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/03/24/reading-corrosion-so-you-dont-have-to/ Oh god, I’d forgotten how bad that book was.
• And the Sad Puppies? They just got sadder. Sad Puppies 5 started with an internecine attack by Mad Genii against Declan Finn for no good reason at all https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/06/26/sad-popcorn/
• Meanwhile…new characters joined into the fray with the rise of the Scrappy Doos https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/and-i-would-have-got-away-with-it-too/ I think a lot of the traffic to that post was just for a relevant screenshot.
• Free speech and the Alt-Right and the toxic sludge that was the social media platform called “Gab” was another thing of 2017 proportions https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2017/09/08/the-alt-right-view-of-free-speech-isnt-even-simplistic/

2018

I was downloading a report from an online database the other day and I was entering a date range. I wanted to cover the whole set of records which started in 2011. So I picked 2011/1/1 as the start date and that day’s date which I typed as 2018/5/8. What? I think my brain stopped updating the year and I’ve been stuck in 2018 ever since.

The reality dysfunction was going full-on as world politics got even stranger. Meanwhile this blog was forced into self-referentiality as I got caught up in my own Sad Puppy kerbungle and then later became a Hugo Finalist.

• Inevitably, a huge amount of the 2018 traffic was about the Fieldsy-Flap. Lou Antonelli, Brad Torgersen and Dave Freer launched a failed-quasi doxxing claiming I was the philosophy professor husband of author/fan-writer Foz Meadows. Dave, in particular, got very cross when people pointed out that I wasn’t. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/meanwhile-former-sad-pups-keep-digging-the-hole-deeper/
• Jordan Peterson is not a very coherent writer or thinker but maybe that very trait of making very little sense but in a vaguely plausible way suited the mood of 2018. Anyway, he was a thing back then and I wrote about how he exemplified a kind of toxic nonsense that interested me: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/02/28/reading-peterson-so-you-dont-have-to-part-1/
• A new science fiction author’s association was established: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/the-scrappy-dappy-club/ That was a short post but it caused some reactions…(see above)
• I don’t have a distinct four or five. The multiple themes of Jordan Peterson, weird alt-right trolling and self-reference sort of cover most of the big traffic posts for 2018. Seriously, that was a WEIRD year.

2019

At the very start of January 2019 I considered winding down the blog. Later I decided to post something every day. I’m fickle. Surprisingly, it was the Nebula Awards that drove traffic to the blog.

• The Facebook author self-help group 20Booksto50 had it’s own Nebula award recommendation list https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/the-nebulas-20booksto50-not-a-nudge-nudge-slate/ Chaos ensued.
• That chaos spawned it’s own baby chaos in multiple posts when nominee Richard Fox dropped by to say hello https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/03/02/nebula-shorts-going-dark-by-richard-fox/ (not the top post on the sub-topic but the most relevant one).
• Somehow Brexit was still unresolved, so I made a chart explaining things. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/todays-infographic-brexit-next-steps/ One of the ‘joke’ outcomes was Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister. Oh how we all laughed…
• I have no idea why this post about a bad Netflix sci-fi series got so much traffic. A lot of it seemed to be coming from ‘Google News’ but this website never appears when I look on Google News for it. Anyway, here’s a show I didn’t finish watching. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/08/04/i-didnt-finish-even-one-episode-of-another-life-on-netflix/
• Meanwhile, I did watch ALL the episodes of a different Netflix show: the sci-fi anthology series Love, Death + Robots. I made a viewing guide so you could skip the dodgy episodes https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/03/20/love-death-robots-a-viewing-guide/

2020

The year isn’t finished yet but it started on fire and followed up with a global pandemic. This is a first-quarter list but I think some of the themes for the year are clear…

• One time Sad Puppy and Dragon Award hopeful Declan Finn went to Italy. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/03/17/perhaps-the-most-significant-story-from-a-former-sad-puppy-ever/ Honestly, I think Finn’s own account provides a better insight into the psychology of the past five years of WTF from the right than anything I’ve written trying to analyse it.
• Goodreads has a big troll problem. With little moderation or oversight a small group of trolls set out to harass multiple authors https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/01/05/looking-deeper-into-the-goodreads-troll-problem/
• This feels like it was centuries ago…Clarkesworld published a story that attempted to subvert a right wing meme about gender identity https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/a-curious-story-in-clarkesworld/
• Superversive press announced that they were closing. https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/01/22/superversive-press-is-closing/
• A lot of the discussion on the situation with the Romance Writers of America was elsewhere but my take on things was here https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/01/01/chaos-coup-conspiracy-how-does-the-rwa-appear/