Christmas Prosents 2019 #2: State of the Blog 2019

Thank you so much for reading, and Happy New Year from GMT.

TL:DR 2019 Mini Achieved, forward to Smol in 2020.

It was a good year and I just posted The Tudors Season 3 Episode 1 (Part 1). Go right ahead and click if the ‘running a blog’ stuff doesn’t interest you.

Hello there. I’m the human behind various curtains running a blog.

I have not yet issued my New Year’s Resolutions, which means I am not yet bound to them, so first let’s check on the old.

1) By 31st December 2019 I will have recapped Season 2 of The Tudors

Check

2) If, from now on, someone dies a decade later than mentioned or someone is say, not actually a fucking murderer when they’ve been shown murdering I will manage to point that out.

A Check, I think. We got more Actual Historical this year and I don’t think I missed a big one but if you find that I did, let me know.

3) Only one ‘Shit’ and one ‘Fuck’ (or variations thereupon) per post

Yes, now I know I’m over budget on shits in a quite a few posts this year but I think I stuck to my fucks for all except a couple of times. (Witcher exception) I would like to point out that this then is a semi check, and I am currently bound by nothing.

4) Nudity will continue to be censored, as will gory violence.

Check. Although you might get the odd stray nipple in The Witcher.

5) If I say Actually Historically that means that I went and I checked it.

Check. And when someone actually asked me I went and I got it a couple of times. Turned out when they asked I was wrong once, and that’s why The Tudors Wrapup had a lot about Alison Weir in it this year.

Not bad for 2019,then.

What is this about the Witcher?

Yeah, I should introduce my new side piece.

I’ve been promised feminism in my fantasy dramas since Sansa’s storyline last made sense. The Witcher delivers it. And it’s got an interesting plot, acting between good and great, cool concepts and characters and a lot of substantial world building.

Recapping The Tudors the way I do is rewarding, but it’s also work. Quite a lot of work. I’m basically unspoiled for The Witcher (I played through some of the early part of The Witcher III), there’s a hard 2000 word limit so I can’t just go through the whole thing like The Tudors but must edit and select, and I can’t see the next episode until I’ve written the recap for the last which is both keeping me moving and prevents too many second guesses and reworking.

I’m happy with what I’m putting out, and it’s rewarding. I’m working on part 4 tomorrow because I really want to see part 5 before I go back to work. Definitely the season done (8 episodes) by the end of January.

I will complete The Ten Commandments at some point, ideally before Easter, which is the time it gets its audience. It just ran into the ground this year.

Brass Tacks and Statistics

I opened last year’s State of the Blog with the number of views for the year. It was 2940 (I really wanted 3000).

This year it’s 24,392, and by the end of the year I really wanted 25,000.

I am, apparently, like that.

Last year’s target in the State of the Blog was 10,000 for the year and we passed that on the 18th of July. So I doubled it, and we passed 20,000 on the first of November. And at that point 25,000 was optimistic, but not out of the way.

I kept extending the target because 10,000 turned out to be modest, but not for the numbers I was looking at, at the end of last year.

Basically that’s my ‘per month’ graph taken today, January 2019 is the one in pink and it had 1345 views. With just 53 posts in total we got nearly 25,000 views this year. Lowest month was March with 1246, highest September with 3118.

I went from 60 being a very good day last year to just an average day this year. Last year, I only broke 500 views per month three times. This year, 500 was a good week.

Thank you so much for coming by, because it got me through the end of Season 2.

Right now I think 40,000 in 2020 actually will be a stretch. I don’t think I’m going to get to double it, add another half and go ‘we just missed it’, but that’s where I’m aiming for 2020.

Number one Country?

The United States with 15,377 views. Second was the United Kingdom, with 2,358.

It’s so far ahead I think we may just have to retire the category and I might have to learn the rest of the lyrics to America the Beautiful, but I’ll never be able to renounce the Queen.

Anyway,  then it’s Australia, Canada, Peru, Japan, India, South Africa, Norway, and Germany that make up the top 10.

My thanks to everyone.

The reign of The Come Cloth Holder continues, but for how long?

Highest scoring post, once again Death of Wolsey Part 1. I remember sitting in front of this screen for hours trying figure out what the hell I was going to do with this. This was an episode opener so just the fact that it was hard to write about was nowhere near a good enough reason to skip it, Autocrat.

Politics was being run by Henry’s sexual frustration at that point so, there’s that, No costumes to write about, it doesn’t change anyone’s relationship…Wait, who’s that guy?

And a Blog Ambassador was born.

Death of Wolsey Part 2 is now number 2, climbing a lot this year. And Season 2 came in hard, two episodes in the top ten and at least a noticeable number of days later in the year when it was a season 2 episode getting the most views.

Ads?

Yeah, sorry. Not yet though, some time this year.

I would really like this blog to at least become self sustainable, and pay its own bandwidth costs.  Which are £84 per year. With Ads at 40,000 views a year, it might just pay for half of that. Unless they suddenly drop the media storage limit, I shouldn’t need to upgrade my plan.

If I put in Ads, the blog will pay for some of its bandwidth. I work pretty hard on this site every year, it would be nice to not have to entirely pay for it, too. Ads will be a bit annoying, but I hope if you found anything offensive in them you would screenshot it and message me.

And I imagine you know the next step in this conversation.

Yeah, there’s going to be a donation button. But given who and what I am, I’d like to put it to you as a generous ultimatum. The donation button will stay up, but the Ads come down if both Ads and donations cross a total of £84 per year, or whatever the current cost is. So, if there is enough money to cover costs, you won’t be annoyed.

There’s a few pre-paid ad slots that still come up for a week or two once you cancel WordAds, but it does shut down fairly quick.

That’s the deal, reader. Also, I doubt it would come up, but I’ll really only be comfortable with donations under the equivalent of £10.

It won’t be happening immediately, but you’re most of the way through the State of the Blog, you deserve to know what’s planned for the year.

A Journey, as always.

That’s what The Tudors Recap was this year. It’s what it is every year. In some ways your journey and mine, Reader, are very similar. In some they are different.

I get a heading and a map with gaps in it at the beginning of each Season, and, to a smaller degree, for each part of each episode. I’m sorry I did not get much done in the run up to Christmas.

I go scene by scene because it helps me take my own blinkers off, and allows a fantastically rich piece of art to still keep surprising me after 10 years (It was how me and The Tudors started) and I don’t know how many viewings (The Tudors was a regular for my walking workout and I’ve replaced one treadmill) . Although it’s now going to be a lot of years before I break out Season 1 or 2 again.

It’s time to begin Season 3, dear reader, and it’s fair to say that I always have some trepidation at the start. If I didn’t it wouldn’t be a real journey.

Sometimes I stop on the way and in my crisis of March this year it was my very first comment from Marta that got me going. At the end of this year I was amazed to hear from No One In Particular that my choice of method had actually helped someone with attention deficit problems follow this politically complicated historical drama with a massive cast and enjoy and be moved by this kind of drama for the first time in a long time.

And that fucking moved me.

I do need to respond to that comment, but I couldn’t do it off hand, and I have this to complete before the clock strikes 12. So I’ll get to a response soon, but not today. I know who gets the first episode of the third season dedicated to them, and I hope the very happiest of new years.

Now, resolutions for 2020.

1) By 31st December 2020 I will have recapped Season 3 of The Tudors

This is the way.

2) I will not steer you wrong. If there’s a large event or occurrence and The Tudors does it well or fucks it up I will mention it.

Why is the second one always the long one?

3) Only one fuck, only two shits per post.

Damns, Buggers and Balls are free. As was anything between 00:00 on 01/01/2020 and now. I want a Witcher exception, I’m cussing there.

4) Nudity will continue to be censored as will gory violence.

It just makes sense. I’d like a Witcher nipple exception, and The Witcher will be done by the end of January.

5) Actually Historically we’re having fucking Footnotes now.

And this is the bit where I’m gritting my teeth. It’s a significant pain in the ass, but when I finally got an Actual Historical question from a commenter (who turned out to have found a Weir issue) it occurred to me that that that was a lot to ask someone to do just to get a fact check of where you got it. And everything had got more in depth by the time we got to the end of Season 2 and the controversial history it covered.

So we’re having footnotes. But I can’t promise to have them all done at when the recap gets published. For some episodes they may well get done in the off season, because it was noticeable doing the first recap they take time, and were slowing the writing significantly. But I’ll get better and more efficient as we go. I used to do footnotes for essays all the time, they just weren’t online documents, and it’s been a while.

We start footnoting with Season 3 and I’ll stick a note at the bottom of the recap when I think the footnotes for each one are finalised. Currently there’s a link to the footnotes page with every note, but I’m thinking of just making it the top one in a section that gets linked.

As anyone that’s got this far is the most likely to be looking at a footnote this year, so let me know if they’re difficult to use, would you? Thanks.

Now, let’s start 2020’s journey, shall we?

The deadlines are back up in Housekeeping, and we’re off…

Henry and all his court await, down and to the right, I believe.