When I am feeling happy, I laugh about the times when I was grumpy. From the comfortable distance of a better mood, yesterday's irritations lose their authority over my emotions. They shrink into small, badly managed shelf kingdoms ruled by someone who put them on the shelf and then in reflection, looks suspiciously like me.
When I am in fact a bit on the grumpy side, however, I prefer my wit served with a side of slapstick. Subtlety can come back when it has brought some snacks to share. On those days, I want something to fall over. I'm not saying pies are involved, but they aren't not involved either. Gravity should always accept some responsibility because I mostly blame it for what it's doing to my bioenergetic mechanism - even on good days.
So, what does that have to do with the comic above? Well, the comic began with a graph showing the total pageviews for my blog. The line was mostly ordinary until June 22nd when with tremendous confidence, the line increased. My mind flipped that over and instantly I was making fun of myself, saying well that was the day I actually seized the day. Or thought I was.
That made me laugh. It's what happens perhaps when you read a lot of data. You start giving graphs backstories. I don't have to make myself laugh. I just laugh. My brain seems to be predisposed to it.
I'm not the only one: https://medium.com/@marvin.vonrenchler/the-brain-that-jokes-first-5dd2d018411b
This dude claims to be wired towards humor. Perhaps better said is that he's a typical wise-arse, and that wise-arsery makes him laugh. It does me too, within reason.
Going back to the graph. Most people read pageviews with one thought in mind: getting more. When I first started getting pageviews on HTTF, my immediate thought was "Why are all these people coming to my blog?" Followed by "Don't they have anything better to do?"
Remember that bit about wise-arsery? Well, this may be an adjacent example of that same mindset. Anyhow, I just kept writing and people just kept visiting. The last time I checked, back in 2014-2016, something like that, the blog went from 20 million to 33 million to 44 million within a short window. But then one day, the spike hit the opposite direction. Google changed its algorithm and my pageviews went down to 0.
Wow. For someone who didn't really pay much attention to pageviews, all of a sudden it had my full attention. If digital currency could be reset, the implications were broad. In protest, and to start my test over, I deleted all 7k+ followers I had on FB. I removed 80% of my connections on Twitter. I deleted all 10k+ followers I had on Insta. And then I stopped blogging and drew comics instead. I recently resumed posting on HTTF but haven't yet recorded another spike of the magnitudes I saw during that original window, except for June 22nd. Not sure why. I didn't even post that day. Plus, I don't advertise and only a handfull of my colleagues even know (or care) about my humor experiment. I don't follow traditional posting rules. I post whenever I have time or a thought I want to record. That is about 2% of my week.
2026 Reset:
- 47 followers
- 1450 posts
- 272 comments
- All Time: 2,781,900
- Today: 1,526 (13:01 UTC-7)
- Yesterday: 6,086
- This Month: 50,099
- Last Month: 180,662
Above this point I'm walking through the explanation of how this comic came to be - with a side of backstory. This is why explaining humor ruins jokes. Explanation promises clarity, then escorts the joke into a brightly lit poorly decorated little room with two guys and a lie detector. By the time everyone understands exactly why that moment was funny, the joke has requested legal counsel.
Still, the comic says something true about perspective. The same line can represent ascent or descent depending on how we show up. The same day can feel triumphant while we were living it and ridiculous when we remember it later. Or another day when we thought we performed poorly, we record the highest level of documented EBITDA.
Now that's funny.
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