Day of the Wand, 12th of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Castor): Google stats show that this blog gets 2,000 to 8,000 views per day, with 100 to 150 views per hour. I don't believe it.

First of all, why? Who would want to read this, and to what purpose? A certain percentage of views might be people who've stumbled onto a post here based on a keyword search in Google, but quickly moved on once they realized that nothing's being said here. I'm also doubtful because I've performed test searches on Google for key words used here, like "water dissolves water" for instance, and not received links to this blog.  

I think that if the Google stats are anything near correct, most of the views are really AI bots routinely scraping content on the internet, or spammers, cybercriminals, and hackers scanning the web for vulnerabilities. Some of the views might be my own, even though I keep telling Google Analytics not to track my own views, but I can assure you I don't view this blog anywhere even remotely close to a thousand times per day. Maybe two or three of those 2,000 to 8,000 daily views are mine, but that's about it.

For the record, I don't care. I'm not trying to monetize this blog and I'm not trying to get noticed or build a readership. In fact, I like the anonymity; I can be more honest that way. If you're reading this now, stop. Go away. A little privacy, please?           

Also, who reads anymore? A recent article in The Atlantic identified a worsening “literacy crisis” in the U.S. and beyond. Book reading is down substantially over the past twenty years, although reading of other material, Instagram Reels subtitles, emails, and Reddit posts, has taken its place. Literacy experts argue that deep thinking, textual comprehension, logical reasoning, and inference-making have been lost in the transition away from long-form books, and that we have entered a “post-literate” age. 

It’s a race to the bottom, and humanity is losing.

It's raining outside right now. Again. Fourth consecutive day with measurable rainfall, and eighth in the last ten days, and even when it hasn't been actively raining, it's been mostly overcast and oppressively humid. These Dog Days are wetter than I expected.