This week my complete obliviousness to what's going on around me has surface in two ways, kinda funny actually, but a little worrying depending on the context.

The one that provoked me to journal though is not the dead fish that was in my tank for probably 2 days before I realized it was dead (damn bottom feeders, they always look dead) but rather a spike in pageviews that is just not natural which embarrassingly was days ago but I just realized now I've been averaging in the low to mid 100's each day this month (whut? half my average for this time last year? ) And all of the sudden on June 17 I got over 32'000 of them, yet didn't notice any more messages that I would get on a normal day, which is probably why it slipped past me without me knowing, like a forming tsunami that barely budges a boat out at sea, yet later gets noticed when it approaches the shore (God I love my analogies ) It's probably just a weird dA bug, I've heard of the same thing happening to others before as evident in this screenshot [link] smaller numbers yes but same ratio. I kinda hope that's what it is since the thought of getting real pageviews at that rate all of the sudden for just one day is scary...what powerful forces could lead so many views to one page, and have it forgotten the next day? yeah, probably just a bug I hope.

Or maybe it's an ironic case of Murphy's law, for you see - recently the "popular deviants" bar was removed from the "today" page and because of this bug I would have finally gotten there by accident a few days ago Heaps of people, including myself all rejoiced at the list being removed though. What's all this about then? well for the uninformed, the today page just shows a bunch of stuff going on in dA that day, like most-commented journals and forums, newest deviants and latest comments and critiques on deviations, Daily Deviations and more - but there was a highly coveted list there up until recently - deviants who were getting the most pageviews that day. You know - those people that you secretly hate because they get more viewers in a day than you get in a year, don't worry - I hated e'm too since certain artists were there every day, getting even more exposure as a result, it was almost like an unfair system that rewarded people who were popular by giving them thousands of extra views on top, the reverse Robin Hood if you will. But people found ways of cheating pageviews by paying for them with points (I'm not explaining how since it's wrong and I'm tired) causing the most mundane, boring-ass galleries no-one has heard of to skyrocket to getting sometimes millions of "generated" pageviews in a day, shooting these random people to the top of a now flawed list, so dA got rid of it, much to the joy of all but the same 12 deviants who were there every day

It sparked many conversations in the forums actually, people have always said pageviews are meaningless but deep down inside many of us know that almost everyone has one eye on their view counter once in a while, it lets us know are we taking the right track or not, which never sounded useless to me, like how people say money can't buy happiness even though you know you'd be bouncing off the walls right now if your lottery numbers suddenly came up on the TV. But maybe they finally are useless, a person can these days pay shifty deviants points to use these...things (computer terms - don't know e'm) to somehow hack up views at a rate comparable to crack on speed, now being a super-duper awesome million pageview artist is a spot that can be bought. I can't say I approve of this, but hey - if it de-values those with millions of pageviews then people might finally stop worrying about that stuff once these pageview walls are torn down and reveal that there's a thriving and fun art site behind them, what's that doing there?

Anyway, what a long journal caused by my mouse clicking on something I usually ignore. Not a rant though, not sure what this is, a blog perhaps? yeah, we'll call it that...Says the rhino that apparently has been sitting in this room for the past hour that I'm only just noticing now