Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Kiloblob

1000th Post today, here, now!
Back in May 2013, I was feeling rather smug about having survived the first four months of the new job at The Institute that induced me to launch The Blob on an unsuspecting and largely [7 billion+ unreaders] uncaring world. For the 100th post I went through the back-catalogue picking out the names of people whom I had mentioned and put them all down in a list. 10 weeks later, I wrote my 100,000th word and updated the list of players. Those associations of totally unrelated [except in my 'mind'] names changed Google, so that a search for "Johan Kjeldahl" "Emil Zatopek" now yields four (4) hits - all on The Blob - but didn't before! 

I've now cranked up my contribution to the weight [60g] of the internet by an order of magnitude to 1000 posts but even an obsessive Blob-watcher like me is not about to go through the back-catalogue and list all the people who have strutted and fretted for a second on The Blob.  It's easier to find some classes of people, like 42 women in science, who have been given more substantive attention than a throw-away mention. To get to write 1000 essays in two and half years, I've had to post early and post often.  Since 22nd May 2013 I've posted something every day; on occasion by proxy when I was travelling outside the shadow of the interweb. Each post has almost always been an essay of between 500 and 700 words; often triggered by something I've read whose light can be reflected back on some element of my own experience. I'd like to think that I've got write read easier you - YO! So much so that, for Post 500 I offered advice about how to write - the chutzpah! I try my best not to merely rechurn material posted by others in the blogosphere. In quite a real sense my whole life is gradually getting patched together chunk by +500 word chunk into a gurt Blobby quilt that is now far larger than convenient for a normal bed. 

Just how large?  1000 posts obviously, but that is also 646,000 words.  How big is that?  Well it's longer than all the standard mega-novels. 1.42 LOTRs for example:

Classic WordCount Ratio
Moby Dick 209,117 3.09
Crime&Punishment 211,000 3.06
Ulysses 262,869 2.46
Gone wi' the Wind 418,053 1.55
Lord of the Rings 455,125 1.42
War&Peace 544,400 1.19

The Blob is still dogging the footsteps of the KJV Bible [788K words of Lord God] or the complete Harry Potter canon [1,084K words of Lord Vol-au-vent]. I'd like to think that The Blob is both more varied and more interesting than either of these; certainly contains more science, and fewer miracles, than either of the others.
Despite all these words, The Blob is still pootling along at about 100 pageviews a day and I'm still waiting waiting waiting to go viral!  I have about 6 months in hand before I follow the logical advice of Mark Twain "Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for" and fall on my own pen keyboard. I've printed the whole danged thing out so that it will remain in our Armageddon Bunker, next to the tins of beans and the shotgun, long after the interweb disappears down the Drainhole of Friendface. That is surely likely to happen before I write the 10,000th post on The Blob in 25 years time. The double-sided A4 print-version is 5cm thick. By way of kiloblob celebration, I thought I'd flag 10 pieces from the back-catalogue that could with advantage be read again. Although I have data showing that, to a close approximation, nobody follows any embedded link.
So long and thanks for all the pageviews.
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