Grok 3 Analyzes @doc_nad

"I wasn't lookin' but somehow you found me"

"Nobody Does It Better" (1977)

Carole Bayer Sager

I maintained my Twitter account even when the site was rebranded as X and I continue to post there regularly. Today I have some 99,100 posts on the site, most of which relate to this blog. They do get read and even generate a few responses as I gingerly approach that big milestone of 100,000.

Not all my readers are people. I was surprised to discover that Grok 3, xAI's chatbot launched almost six months ago, has been keeping tabs on me. I usually try to avoid AI results in my searches, but it is becoming more difficult. Anyway, if I'm the subject, I figure it's worth a look. Here's what I found on my iPhone, inadvertently, on July 27:

I never considered myself a "nostalgic blogger," but I can certainly see the argument. I don't approve of "their" as a singular pronoun, let alone one of my pronouns, but I suppose I don't get a say here. I definitely don't like the construction "celebrating New Yorker cartoonists and covers"—that's just bad writing. Why not write "New Yorker cartoonists and cover artist?" Calling Ronald Searle and Edward Koren icons is not something I would do casually, although not because I disagree. Readers can decide for themselves who is and isn't an icon. Finally, my interest in wrestling is news to me.

I repeated the search the next day with similar, but far from identical, results:

There is a newer iteration of the technology called Grok 4 included with a premium subscription. I have no plans to upgrade.

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Best Twitter Notification of the Day

This just in:

Note:  Take a pointer from @sex and follow me on Twitter here.

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Now We Are Six

E. H. Shepard, "The Morning Walk"
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927, pages 84-85

http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/Now_We_are_Six/pages/51_Now_We_are_Six.htm

E. H. Shepard, "Anne's Balloon"
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927, page 86

http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/Now_We_are_Six/pages/52_Now_We_are_Six.htm

Now we are six. Six years ago today, your mild-mannered cartoon correspondent brought into being a brand spanking new blog. Yes, you're looking at it now. This sixth anniversary finds me on the cusp of meeting some long-term goals, goals I once foolishly expected I could meet handily more than a year earlier, but which have come to mean less and less to me over time. Hitting a million page views on the blog, for one, makes for a nice round number indeed, but it is hardly a ringing endorsement when only thirty-four people worldwide have opted to follow the blog after six years. Similarly, winning five thousand Twitter followers sounds impressive enough, but it has done very little to drive new traffic to the blog. Rather, I seem to have gotten caught up in a senseless churning process on Twitter where accounts follow me for little reason other than that I will follow them in return. Thus the engagement on Twitter isn't all that much better than when I had but a few hundred followers who were more interested in my actual posts.

Attempted Bloggery All-Time Overview Stats
June 23, 2017

Twitter Followers, June 23, 2017

More to my usual point, Now We Are Six, the title of this post, is first and foremost the title of A. A. Milne's 1927 book of children's verse. Three original illustrations by E. H. Shepard from "The Morning Walk" sequence were sold as a set at Sotheby's in 2012.

E. H. Shepard, "The Morning Walk"
Original art
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

E. H. Shepard, "When Anne and I go out a walk"
Original art
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

E. H. Shepard, "Anne's balloon"
Original art
A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, 1927

E. H. Shepard
Sotheby's Item Description, December 12, 2012

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2012/english-literature-history-l12408/lot.184.html

Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:

E. H. Shepard

A. A. Milne

Anniversaries

Attempted Bloggery's Ambulatory Index

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My Diffee Doodle

My Diffee Doodle just arrived! The first 1,500 people to sign up for Matthew Diffee's newsletter were offered a free drawing. This is No. 748, which means it's just about halfway through the projected series. The drawing depicts the elongated standing figure of a man seen head-on, wearing a suit but no tie, arms folded behind his back, with a balding balloon of a head. He looks somewhat tired. The figure is placed slightly to the left of the drawing, and it is signed on the lower right. Like all Diffee Doodles, it is unique.

As a compulsive doodler myself, I can assure you that Diffee Doodles are not doodles at all—they're full-fledged compositions created with a lot of thought and deliberation. Hence the relatively slow production of these is no surprise. These are no slapdash assembly-line creations, but individually crafted works of art. Somewhat puzzling is the fact that my Diffee Doodle was created on August 12, approximately five months prior to its arrival in my mailbox. Of course, Mr. Diffee became a first-time Dad in September and that may have slowed down the fulfillment process just a bit.

At any rate, this project is an extremely generous giveaway, and coming from a New Yorker cartoonist it is certainly one for the record books. Those who sign up now for Mr. Diffee's newsletter should still be able to get a free print of a Diffee Doodle, not a bad deal either.

Matthew Diffee, Diffee Doodle No. 748

Diffee Doodle No. 748, verso

Official Diffee Doodle Certificate of Authenticity

Proper Care and Handling. Now you know.

 Be my guest! You can like my Diffee Doodle on Twitter.

Note:  More posts about Matthew Diffee are in the blog archives. It's what I do instead of giving away doodles.

Sign up for your free newsletter, the Diffeeville Dispatch, and get a Diffee Doodle print!

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The Missing 1,800 Twitter Followers

By January 16, 2015, I had reached 1071 Twitter followers and I set myself an admittedly ambitious goal.

My Twitter Stats as of January 16, 2015

This goal was that I would add about ten followers each day and that I then would reach some 5,000 Twitter followers handily by January 1, 2016. This in turn would generate a large increase in traffic to this blog, as I would promote it daily with an unending stream of brilliantly compelling tweets. It seemed like a good enough plan, but things didn't quite work out as foreseen. In fact, I'm about 1,800 Twitter followers shy of my goal. What happened?

One of the easiest ways to add more followers—or so it seemed—is to follow more Twitter accounts yourself and hope they follow you back. Unfortunately, this strategy falls apart once you follow 2,000 accounts as the total number of accounts you can have subsequently is limited to no more than ten percent more than the number of accounts already following you. This forces a sudden change in Twitter strategy to include more aggressive unfollowing of accounts which don't readily reciprocate your interest. The end result for me is that I could get just a little more than halfway to my goal of 5,000 followers by yesterday's deadline. 

My Twitter Stats as of January 1, 2016

Even more perplexing, despite my generating almost 6,000 more-or-less earthshaking tweets last year, my blog readership remained unchanged at 15,000 page views each month, give or take.

Attempted Bloggery All-Time Page Views

I hate falling behind. Going forward, I'm going to continue to try to grow my Twitter followers. My new goal is belatedly to reach those 5,000 total Twitter followers by Columbus Day 2016. That should be a piece of cake. What could possibly go wrong?


Note:  Regarding social media, I'm active mostly on Twitter and Google+. I'm not really sure what the others are for.
Follow me on Google+.

Follow me on Instagram.
Pinterest pins from this blog

Follow me on Tumblr.

Follow me on Twitter.

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My Best Columbia Surgery Cartoon Caption Contest Entries of 2015

Another caption contest? The last thing I need, I told myself, is to start documenting a third cartoon caption contest. I'm already reporting on the New Yorker's challenging weekly contest and on Moment magazine's bimonthly contest. So on July 27 when Columbia Surgery announced on its Facebook page a new weekly caption contest with cartoons created by none other than Benjamin Schwartz—that's Dr. Benjamin Schwartz—I thought I might just play the game quietly without generating another 52 blog posts each year.

I have made no secret of the fact that I don't find anything funny about medical situations—unless of course they involve psychiatrists. Dr. Schwartz's wonderful efforts have done much to change my mind about this. Now five months into the run, I find that I wrote some decent entries and even won the contest a few times. Most importantly, I enjoyed myself. Surely you'll indulge me if I share with you a selection of my captions—just the winners, mind you—as I've become quite fond of some of them.

Here's how the contest works:  there are no published rules. There are no finalists, only winners. There's no prize other than acknowledgement on social media. The contest appears simultaneously on both Facebook and Twitter, each of which usually has its own distinct winner. I enter the Facebook contest only. Twitter usually has fewer entries and may well be easier to ace. A fresh cartoon in need of a caption appears sometime on Monday and a single winner is announced for each contest sometime on Friday.

This is the only caption contest I've seen professional cartoonists take a stab at. It turns out they're not bad at this game. Here for openers are three winning entries by two New Yorker cartoonists who entered the Facebook version of the contest. The first is by Liana Finck from the very first contest that ended on July 31 and, boy, it's a beauty:

The second is by Jason Adam Katzenstein from the contest ending September 25:

The October 30 caption contest winner once more is Liana Finck:

Without further ado, here are my own winning Facebook entries. Please hold your applause until the end.

August 14:

August 28:

September 4:

September 18:

October 2:

October 23:

December 4:

Note:  Want to play along with me? Follow Columbia Surgery on Facebook or, if you're intimidated by me, Twitter.

Today is Jason Adam Katzenstein's first mention on the blog. It's not all it's cracked up to be, Jason. Here's more about caption contests and cartoonists from the blog's archive:
           Benjamin Schwartz
           Liana Finck
           The Caption Contests

           

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An Unmet Goal

In January I very rashly set a few ambitious goals for this blog. I wrote that by Columbus Day, today, I would increase my Google+ views from five million to ten million. Piece of cake, right?

One problem with this goal is that I have no idea what a Google+ view is. Is it someone seeing a post of mine on Google+? Is it a page view of this blog? Is it a view of any photo I have on the blog in any social medium where it appears? Is it watching a YouTube video? Maybe it's all of these. Maybe it's something else. At any rate, my views are now at 6,400,000 and my goal is therefore very much unmet.

Google+ is an interesting social medium. I spend very little time on the site, mostly to try to promote this blog. I get very little feedback and have very few followers. For example, over this same time period my Google+ followers have increased from 50 to 61, while my Twitter followers have increased from 1071 to 2848. The interactions are more satisfying on Twitter as well. I should note that neither site sends very many readers to the blog. For that, Google's search engine remains my main referral source.

My Google+ Stats as of January 16, 2015

My Google+ Stats as of October 10, 2015

So what should my revised goal be? I now have a better sense of how fast these views accumulate on Google+. With that in mind, I'm gong to give myself an extra year to reach those 10,000,000 views. To make it interesting, I'll also add a goal for reaching 100 Google+ followers by Columbus Day 2016. Anything's possible.

Here's the current status of my other goals:

Goal:  One million page views of the blog by Bloomsday 2016.

Status:  It would now require over 1400 daily page views for me to reach this goal. In all likelihood that is not going to happen. Instead, I should be able to exceed 750,000 page views by the deadline.

Goal:  Five-thousand Twitter followers by New Year's Day 2016.

Status:  I'm on track to reach only 3500.

Goal:  To have Siri write my blog posts for me.

Status:  She's stubborn.

Goal:  To win the Moment Cartoon Caption Contest four times.

Status:  I have won it three times and I am currently a finalist. So this one is within reach.

Goal:  To become a finalist in the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.

Status:  Nada.

Goal:  To have Attempted Bloggery cited in print.

Status:  Who would cite a blog in print?

Goal:  To interview Thomas Pynchon.

Status:  You've got to be kidding.


Note:  These goals were originally set in Blog Post No. 1400. What was I thinking?

Earn my undying gratitude by following me on Twitter and on Google+.

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Attempted Blogger

I'm privileged to write this blog, Attempted Bloggery, and to be active on Twitter, but that does not make my Twitter handle Attempted Blogger. That honor goes to someone else, someone unrelated to me or to my blog's activities in the cultural landscape. Attempted Blogger writes about many things, including pizza and pizza box design. The individual is, I believe, Lena Webb, and her blog is called The Lower Crust. She has been on Twitter since April of 2011, a couple of months before this blog was realized, although I can't be sure she used the same name from the start.

I myself don't spend a lot of time on the topic of pizza box design, but as it happens I was recently struck by one particular box and I photographed it for the ages. I don't believe The Lower Crust's readers have seen it yet:

Pizza box

This blog is written under the name of docnad, of course, and my personal Twitter account is @doc_nad. Why the underscore, you ask? Well, the name @docnad on Twitter already has been taken by a generally inactive account started in March 2009 which now has a grand total of five followers and four tweets to its name. So it goes.

Note:  I am present on various social media but I don't necessarily know what to do with them. Far more people follow these accounts than follow my blog. Join them if you must...

Follow me on Google+.

Follow me on Instagram.
See what folks have posted on Pinterest.

Follow me on Tumblr.

Follow me on Twitter.

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Blog Post No. 1400: New Goals for an Old Blogger

If it's not clear to you just exactly where this blog is headed, you're not alone. I'm not certain what lies ahead either and I write this thing. Perhaps it might help if I were to clarify what some of my existing goals are for Attempted Bloggery and even to set some new ones. After publishing 1,400 blog posts over not quite four years, I'm cognizant that not enough people are reading what I write. I know that this material is not for everyone, but I do worry that many of those who might be interested aren't finding their way here. The benchmark I use to measure this is simply page views. As you may know, I met my well-publicized goal of reaching 500,000 page views for the blog by Beethoven's birthday (December 16) on that very day--just. Now I need a brand new goal regarding page views. I've decided to reach for the sun.

Goal: I am going to try to reach 1,000,000 page views by Bloomsday (June 16) 2016. If it took three and a half years to reach my first 500,000 page views, I see no reason to wait nearly so long for the second 500,000. A year and a half should do it. Status: With just 516 days left in which to achieve the remaining 483,000 page views, I have set my sights on averaging some 936 page views per day. This will require an immediate increase of my daily readership of at least 50%. I have no idea why I think this is achievable, but I like a challenge.

Attempted Bloggery's Page View Stats as of January 16, 2015

Here are some other challenges:

Goal: I understand perfectly well what it means to have 517,000 page views on my blog, but I have no idea what it means to have 5,000,000 views on Google+, one of the social media sites on which I promote the blog. Since I don't know what it means, I have no compunction about trying to reach 10,000,000 views rather quickly, let's say by Columbus Day 2015. Status:  We'll just have to see now, won't we.

My Google+ Stats as of January 16, 2015

Goal:  The other major social media site I use to promote the blog is Twitter. I figure my blog stats can't increase sufficiently to meet my readership goal unless my social media presence increases first. My goal here is to increase my followers from about 1,000 to 5,000 by New Year's Day 2016. Status: I'm going to need more than ten new followers every day. That shouldn't be a problem, right?

My Twitter Stats as of January 16, 2015

Goal:  It has long been my desire to have Siri write my individual blog posts for me. I would prefer to retire from the daily grind of generating blog posts and instead to function in the background as a sort of blogging muse for Siri. Status:  Apple's technology so far has failed to keep up with my blogging needs.

Goal:  When I told New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff I had been a finalist in the Moment Cartoon Caption Contest four times, he inscribed my copy of his memoir with the erroneous statement that I'd been a winner four times. Therefore, in order to spare him a lifetime of embarrassment over this little mistake, my goal now is actually to win the Moment Cartoon Caption Contest four times. Status:  I've now won once and been selected a finalist six times.

Goal:  The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest is an even more daunting challenge. I'll set a goal of making it to finalist status not because I have a chance, but because  well, what's the point of entering so often without such a goal? Status:  No way, José.

Goal:  I suppose it's no secret that I'd like to see this blog cited in print, either in a book or even better in a college syllabus. Status:  Nothing yet. This blog is  online. How on earth would I ever know what's published in print?

Goal:  To interview novelist Thomas Pynchon. Status:  He hasn't asked me yet.

Note: Help me meet my new goals. Follow me on Twitter and on Google+.

I like nice round numbers! All the previous Attempted Bloggery centennial posts are right here for your counting pleasure:

Blog Post No. 100
Blog Post No. 200:  A Shaggy Dog Story
Blog Post No. 300:  From the Libraries of Searle, Koren, Booth, and Saxon
Blog Post No. 400: The Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 500:  The Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 600:  What I Do When I'm Not Blogging
Blog Post No. 700:  The Many Hazards of Blogging
Blog Post No. 800:  Think Locally, Blog Globally
Blog Post No. 900:  The Blog I Was Meant to Write
Blog Post No. 1000: Happy New Year, Lurkers and All!
Blog Post No. 1100:  The Power of Google

Blog Post No. 1200:  The Ukrainian Situation

Blog Post No. 1300:  Plus-Sizing the Readership

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Blog Post No. 1300: Plus-Sizing the Readership

Welcome to my 1,300th blog post. You'd think I'd know better by now. Anyway, I hope you brought your calculator.

My blog statistics are pretty straightforward, at least at first glance. There have been some 465,000 page views of Attempted Bloggery since its inception more than three years ago and the number grows by about 500 per day. Therefore I should be at 500,000 page views by Beethoven's birthday, which any Peanuts fan can tell you is December 16. There are only 26 people following the blog publicly and an unknown number of lurkers. It has always been my belief that the blog's followers are responsible for only a very small percent of the page views here. Most readers are directed to this site through a Google search.

For some time I've tried to use social media to promote the blog, hoping to find more of my elusive target audience. My Twitter account now has some 476 followers, almost twenty times the number of my blog followers. More recently, I've been using Google+, where I already have more followers than on the blog itself. If you run a little experiment and search either of these sights for hashtags consisting simply of the name of New Yorker cartoonists past or present, you'll likely come across some post of mine. While I would hardly characterize myself as an early adopter of anything, I do seem to be one of the few people using such hashtags in this way. That either means that I'm way ahead of the curve or, more likely, that I don't understand hashtags. For better or worse, my social media endeavors have created a significant number of followers who know much about what's on this blog without actually having to visit it.

My profile page on Google+ has one statistic I really don't understand. Somehow I have four and a quarter million "views" on Google+. That's 100,000 views for each follower, which is evidently meaningless, or 9 views for each time the blog has been viewed. What gives? My posts on the site are all public, but that doesn't begin to account for more than 4 million views. I suspect Google is not only looking at page views of my blog (which is hosted by Google's Blogger), but at individual views of photos on the blog as well. Certainly many blog posts contain multiple images. Anyway, that's my best guess for now.

My Google+ Profile Page, October 4, 2014

November 1, 2014 Update:  Scarcely four weeks later, all-time page views on the blog have increased by 14,000 to 479,000, while views on Google+ have increased by nearly 250,000. I still don't understand what is going on, but Google+ is on fire.

My Google+ Profile Page, November 1, 2014

Note:  If you like, you can follow me on Twitter. It's a good way of finding out when I update old blog posts, among other things.

Why not follow me on Google+ too? Check out my hashtags.

Let's hear it for the hundreds! All the previous Attempted Bloggery centennial posts are at your fingertips:

Blog Post No. 100
Blog Post No. 200:  A Shaggy Dog Story
Blog Post No. 300:  From the Libraries of Searle, Koren, Booth, and Saxon
Blog Post No. 400: The Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 500:  The Second Attempted Bloggery Quiz
Blog Post No. 600:  What I Do When I'm Not Blogging
Blog Post No. 700:  The Many Hazards of Blogging
Blog Post No. 800:  Think Locally, Blog Globally
Blog Post No. 900:  The Blog I Was Meant to Write
Blog Post No. 1000: Happy New Year, Lurkers and All!
Blog Post No. 1100:  The Power of Google

Blog Post No. 1200:  The Ukrainian Situation

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Donald Duck Merchandise

Here's a small sampling of merchandise featuring Donald Duck. These items were seen last week at Walt Disney World. Donald's irascible personality always makes him a best seller.

"This is my happy face" baseball cap

"I don't tweet, I quack!!!"
T-shirt

The same idea on a trading pin:

"I don't tweet, I quack!!!"
Disney trading pin

Bad Donald and Good Donald

"Donald's Better Self" (1938)
Walt Disney Productions

Note:  Unlike Donald Duck, I do tweet. You can follow @doc_nad on Twitter.

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Sheldon Cooper's Twitter Milestone

I never thought I'd say this proudly, but....

Sheldon Cooper and I now have something in common! My Twitter account has reached 101 followers, so I can boast that I've achieved the same exalted milestone as the most socially inept character on television's "The Big Bang Theory." One might even be tempted to say, "Ooh, 101! Air's gettin' a bit thin up here!"

One-hundred one Twitter followers! Zero dalmatians.

Of course, the number of one's Twitter followers is not exactly a scientific measure of popularity or indeed of anything in particular. Many Twitter users follow you not out of any keen interest, but rather out of a desire to have you follow them in return. What's the point of all that? To date I have followed 484 others on Twitter, mostly, but not entirely, out of genuine interest. Some of the mutual following that goes on is part of a polite give-and-take. This exchange is a quirky social media convention Sheldon Cooper would surely never be a party to, and that alone makes his tally of 101 Twitter followers considerably more impressive than mine.

"The Big Bang Theory"

Season 5, Episode 12

Sheldon and Amy's Date Night 

Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper

Mayim Bialik as Amy Farrah Fowler

Kaley Cuoco as Penny

July 18, 2014 Update: I now have 200 Twitter followers. I still don't get it.

Note:  My Twitter account was created mainly to promote this blog, although today I use it for other noble purposes as well. You can follow me on Twitter here. In fact, more people choose to follow me on Twitter than on this blog, almost five times as many. Make of that what you will. I myself haven't quite figured it all out.

If you care to, you can also follow me on Instagram here. Instagram is still new to me, but at this time I am not using it consistently for any blog-related activity. Generally, I share my Instagram photos on Twitter anyway. Is this at all confusing?

You can catch up with my few blog posts on the subject of various social media here.

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New to Instagram

I have a new Instagram account which I just learned how to use. While I'm not much of a photographer, what I do snap looks much better with this application.

I don't think this account will have very much to do with Attempted Bloggery, but who knows? My Twitter account, on the other hand, should keep you up to date on both this blog and the Instagram account.

My photo of the Verrazano Bridge on Instagram

Note: You can follow me on Instagram here.

Follow me on Twitter here.

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