Today, I reached level 100 in Pikmin Bloom, a walk-around-with-your-phone game.
That's the highest level achievable.
And Alexander humblebragged: "Oh woe is me, I just don't know what to do with myself now that there are no more worlds to conquer."*
Anyhow, I will soon un-install the app; I'm 🏁 done-zo 🏁.
*This is not accurate: There are more things to accomplish in the game, achievement badges to collect, etc; but I don't feel motivated to go after those. Also, when I looked up that Alexander the Great "quote" about no-more-worlds-to-conquer, I found out he didn't actually say that but rather kinda the opposite.
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Wow, it's the site's 44 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:
85.208.96.199 - - [22/Sep/2024:03:51:25 +0000] "GET /departures/SFO/hawk_hill/27_lobby.html HTTP/1.1" 200 849 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)"
Semrush is a service for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) people.
If you have a website, you can pay SEO people to suggest tweaks to your site so that it will show up higher in Google searches.
(Some of these SEO people are legit; many are scammy. But that's a tangent for another day.) When you're trying
to figure out the best way to tweak a site, it helps to have lots of data about it and other sites: text on the pages, what they
link to, and more. Semrush has a bot to gather that data so that not every SEO nerd has to figure out such a bot on their own.
That bot was confirming that a
page showing a picture of a photo I took back in 2009 hasn't changed since.
It's not such an interesting thing to do; a good task to delegate to a bot.
Oh now I'm getting distracted by the photo.
I guess back in 2009, I was carrying a camera separate from my phone. Ancient times, I guess.
People are more interesting than bots. Glancing at "nearby" log lines, I guess that humans at around that time were
playing Bewordled, my word-nerd idea of
a "match 3" game. Anyhow, welcome to the bots, welcome to the humans. Have a nice time.
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Milestone: 42 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 42 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
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I have gone five million steps while playing the Pikmin Bloom phone game. Look on my walks, ye mighty, and despair! (Yeah, yeah, I know some other people have more steps than this. I bet there's...
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Some weeks back, I set up a dashboard of San Francisco COVID-19 data. It showed data that was already available elsewhere, but zoomed in near the low end of the graph. I wanted a graph that I could g...
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Milestone: 39 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 39 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
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1 Million Steps
I'm still playing that Pikmin Bloom walking-around mobile phone game. I recently hit a milestone: I've walked a million steps while playing the game. ...
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Nowadays, I appreciate outdoor hot dog stands. They're very well ventilated and I can buy food unlike that I'd cook for myself. When I ran the hotdog stand at the MIT Mystery Hunt, I made more hot d...
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Today, I note a major milestone in my recovery from shelter-in-place. (To be clear: I don't think I caught/recovered from COVID. This is recovering from the measures I took to evade COVID.) The miles...
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You may recall that some months back I started playing a walking-around game called Orna. I'm still playing it these days and hit a milestone this morning: My character is №100 in my region (Northern...
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Wow, it's the site's 36 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
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I have walked 1000km while playing that Harry Potter Wizards Unite game. (That milestone doesn't capture the fun of the game, but it's something that folks can understand even if they don't know t...
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Milestone: 35 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 35 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
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Milestone: 33 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 33 millionth hit. As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits s...
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One Year of Octothorpean
The Octothorpean online puzzle-hunt launched a year ago today. How have things gone since then? Pretty well, I think. On the other hand, for the goals I had… They're not so easy to measure. S...
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Milestone: 24 Million Hits
As usual, these "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: everytime a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human ...
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Milestone: 21 Million Hits
It's the site's 21 millionth hit! (As usual, this isn't as impressive a number as you might think at first: these "hits" include, e.g., one for each graphic on each page loaded, visits from search-en...
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