Weekly Roundup: Thank You For Five Million Edition

When I was a contractor for VerticalScope, home of TTAC and many other collapsing websites, one of the senior executives admitted to me that "When it comes to site traffic, we pretty much make the numbers up, and so does everybody else." The situation hasn't gotten any better since 2013. Once upon a time, there was a genuine source of truth: the Apache logs on Linux and UNIX webservers. Today, the lizard people use astoundingly stupid and broken tools like SimilarWeb, Adobe Analytics, and Google Analytics to figure out how many people are looking at the advertisements. All of these metrics-collection services can be manipulated, and none of them can say for certain that fifty people using restrictive security settings behind a major corporate firewall are not, in fact, one person. Nor are they sophisticated enough to know that the "three unique users" they just reported to the Lizard-In-Chief are actually one person browsing the site via work laptop, tablet, and phone.

Jetpack, the freemium logging service offered to WordPress users, isn't any dumber than the Adobe software, and I think it's more conservative in estimating actual user volumes, which is probably a good thing. It thinks that Riverside Green has a steady audience of about 35,000 readers, and that we have served just over five million pages in the past nine years. I've done some sanity checking against my Apache logs and this doesn't appear to be far from the truth. So... yay!

As I usually do at the million-visit marks, I will answer some general questions after the jump. Since this is a Roundup and not Housekeeping, there will also be a link to stories at the bottom. If you don't have time to continue, please accept my thanks for being a reader. Most "creative types" like to pretend that they don't need readers or listeners, that they would be happy just committing their pearls of wisdom to the custody of futurity, secure in the knowledge that they will eventually get a Nick Drake's worth of critical recognition and respect. Of course, Nick Drake probably killed himself because he couldn't sell more than five thousand copies of an album, but nobody likes to think about that. I'll be more forthright. I cherish my readers. If you really hate me, the best way to hurt me is to stop reading. Please don't do that.

Alright, let's continue with Q&A.

Are you going to do anything substantial outside the Hagerty umbrella in the near future? Not right now. I can and do freelance occasionally on topics that do not compete with my employer, but I'm not going to release a novel or a short story collection until I quit or get fired. I've considered writing a sci-fi book, because if I made the whole thing about aliens and robots there's a slim chance I wouldn't get immediately canned for Henry-Miller-plus obscenity. Of course, with my luck if I wrote a book exclusively about hyper-intelligent aliens from the eighth dimension, those aliens would then arrive for real and immediately complain to HR that I'd mis-dimensioned them or something.

In the event that I do quit or get fired, I can guarantee you that I will have a novel out in 120 days, and that it will set new standards for on-page insanity. I know a thousand dirty little secrets and horrifying stories. I'll be packing them into my prose tighter than the W-8 was packed into the Passat.

How are you physically? The worst, and saddest, I've ever been. My left wrist is trashed, my left thumb finds playing a D/F# to be nearly impossible, I'm overweight even for me, and six months spent on limited weightlifting and unlimited storage-unit re-boxing has rendered me just about useless. That being said, I think I've finally hit rock bottom and am climbing back out. Two months from now I expect to clear every jump on "Rainmaker" at Trestle Bike Park in Colrado. Four months from now I'll fit in my Radicals. Six months from now, people will describe me as "mildly obese" rather than "morbidly obese".

How is Brother Bark? Brother Bark is now officially a member of the fabled One Percent. If he wants to talk about how he did it and what's next for him, I'm sure he will come on the site and tell you, but I suspect he is going to retire from public life and quietly enjoy everything from a Grand Seiko collection to a McLaren longtail. I think there's something inspiring about the fact that you can behave as badly as he has behaved for the past forty-four years and still get rich. Only in America, I tell you. When I think of how many people in this business and elsewhere absolutely despise him, and how powerless they have been to prevent him from enjoying the very finest of everything there is in life, it fills me with joy like a Mylar experimental balloon soaring to the troposphere. I've asked him to hire me to be his underling, since even being his underling would be far more impressive than what I'm doing now, but he says he is only hiring people for whom excellence is a passion.

The most tragicomic part is that he just drove a Genesis G90, which all of you know is my unattainable dream car, and then decided it wasn't worth his time to buy one.

Racing plans? The rectification and configuration of my little hobby farm is going to make it hard for me to get out much in the first half of the season. I'll likely run my Neon in NASA a bit later on in the year. The Accord is moving to SCCA, where I'll campaign it in the STU class. My 1340cc Radical will be running in SCCA P2. There's more to say on this, perhaps hinted at in the previous sentence, but ask any Instagram influencer: there's nothing quite as (un)cool as vague-posting about future plans. MAKING MOVES IN SILENCE! HEY, EVERYBODY! I'M MAKING MOVES!

What's in store for the site? During the past year I decommissioned my server racks in Powell, Ohio and San Antonio, TX. Doing this cut my costs to the point where we don't need to run ads to keep Riverside Green afloat. Perhaps you've noticed that Tom Klockau has really been carrying an unfair share of the publishing burden here during 2021 and 2022. I'd like to change that, so if you would like to share anything with my readers on a regular basis, please let me know. If you've already contacted me and didn't hear back, it's not a "California No." It's a reflection of the fact that sometimes I get 150 serious emails in a day and occasionally I just have to archive them before they are all handled.

Will you ever do some kind of OnlyFans Patreon Substack? Over the years, many of you have offered to contribute financially to the site and/or buy whatever service I have to offer. I'm not going to take advantage of this kindness until I think I have a product worthy of your consideration. I also want to be very careful about political and/or controversial writing. Riverside Green readers are hard-core populists, tradcons, moderates, limo-liberals, and black-clad anarchists. I don't suffer from the modern malady of hating my customers, and I don't want to alienate them. If you hold your beliefs in absolute sincerity, I consider you my friend, though we disagree on everything under the sun.

I worry quite a bit that all of us are losing our humanity to a reckless faith in ideology. Former TTAC and RG contributor David Sanborn, known to some of you as "Piston Slap Yo Momma", recently wrote a heartbreaking post about the ways in which the modern political divide has torn his family asunder. If any of you out there feel personally insulted or "thrown away" due to the way I handle political discussions here at RG, please contact me directly so we can fix it to your satisfaction. That being said, if any of you decide to show up at my funeral and speak about "what an inspirational and sincere person Stacey Abrams is and our hopes that she'd become governor of Georgia," the way David did at his mother's burial, I want you to know that I've set aside five thousand dollars in my will to have you forcibly tased by an off-duty policeman.

Thanks for reading, everyone.

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For Hagerty, I wrote about various pickup trucks and spun a story about a "GR Sienna".