A Shout Out To You, Internet

I have less than 50 friends on Facebook.

My friends (!?!???) and family have always joked that, while I may not have a lot of interpersonal relationships, I'm still kind of a big deal on the internet.

This, I won't lie, is a little hard to explain without feeling self-deluded.

Still, when you show up for a midnight showing of a movie and strangers want to hug you and you get a call from CNN the next day, it's hard not to think there might be something to the rumors.  For the most part though, I tend to keep a pretty low profile.  I use the same login name everywhere, but I don't cross link my blog, my twitter account etc... to any of my websites and I don't do it because being "kind of a big deal" doesn't really interest me.  It's wonderful to be appreciated and there's nothing handier than having an 'international contingent' when you want to travel and you need to know what kind of outlet adapter to buy, but I'm not Tila Tequila, nor do I want to be - so I'm me, and if you want to web stalk me and follow me around, go for it.  I won't be making any Forbes lists anytime soon....

Where am I going with all of this?  Today I was looking for a new avatar to use, so I was browsing my gallery to see if anything struck my fancy or if I was going to have to make a new one when I got home.  Internet, I've had Gallery installed for years and I love it, but I've never really noticed the "views" feature. 

A few months ago, I removed all of my files from Gallery and re-uploaded them with all new meta data to give myself a uniform structure and remove a lot of crap I didn't want.  Doing so, obviously, reset the view counters... This was July.

 

What have you people been up to because I don't even like that icon...

I guess sometimes I forget that there are people out there reading my blog, browsing my gallery and looking at my tweets.  It only really occurs to me when I have to confront that, despite the fact that I block search engine spiders to save on bandwidth, in the last 63 days that single icon has not only been looked at but been clicked on 1049 times. 16 times a day?  Seriously??!?  I don't advertise...my stuff is not posted all over the internet and the first time I walked into a store and saw someone wearing a t-shirt i'd designed I almost passed the fuck out.

It's weird, but it's a good weird - so thanks, Internet.  I love you too.