100k Views! Thank You!

At some point, I suspect back in late April or early May, this blog hit 100,000 views. A lot of these views come from really old posts that still get the odd hundreds of views in a single day, when spread around on reddit or somewhere. Most of my new posts are very slow burns, as the feed service I was using no longer feeds to my social media, but I know they'll find their readers eventually. I wanted to take a moment and express that I appreciate all the views, no matter how many or few they are. I'm not much of a writer, as my entries clearly display, but this blog has been a great source of solace for me. Hence, Sam's Asylum. It's become a focal point throughout many transitions in my life, and I just hope it's been a resource of many reasons to other people as well. I've tried to make this site as accessible to anyone who needs it as I can.

June of this year will be the fourteenth anniversary of my first post here. Sure, I wish things had gone better, but I'm sure they could have gone much worse. I'm pretty ok with it having ended up somewhere in the middle. I'll just wait to see what the future holds. Even beyond my existence on this world, I hope my insight is useful to someone. I know since publishing many of my posts, especially those often posted across help forums and such, better ways have been found to do what I explained within them. If it gets the job done I'm glad to help, but I would always advise looking for a better, more up to date method.

My initial idea was to chronical my growing interest in thrifting, and showing off what I was finding. I write for TheVintageGamers.com where I had a series called Sam's Scores. There I would show off all the vintage gaming stuff I had found, but I had nowhere to show off the more modern things that site didn't yet cover. Now that website isn't strictly just about vintage gaming, and my blog has turned into more a chronical of my life, my story and my dreams. Sometimes it's a rant, sometimes it's sappy, sometimes it's informative, sometimes it's just plain stupidity, but it's all me. My words, my thoughts all typed by my fingers tip tapping away at the keys while my mind dictates what needs to be written.

So, to all the readers past, present, and future, I humbly thank you for taking your time to read what I've written. I see all the countries you've viewed from. I see whether it's mobile or otherwise. I see what browser you're using, what OS you're using, and even where you were referred to my site from. Thank you. *Sam Elliot cowboy hat tip gif* Thank you!

Some quick stats and oddities:

• First post - June 23 2011
• Total posts - 349 (Including this one - so far)
• Total views at the time of publishing this entry - 106,000+
• Most viewed post - 3234 (Gameboy Color Speaker Repair)
• Most views in a single day - 9806 on August 31st 2023
• Country outside of the US who have viewed my blog the most - Singapore (24,600+ views)
• Oldest Unpublished Draft - September 18 2020

• There is one post with an Easter egg. It looks funny, because it was formatted to have a special message along the left edge. The person for whom it was written couldn't care less, but I had fun making it work.
• Last year I published entries in a certain order to spell out the essentially same secret message on the backend. Again, the person for whom it was done couldn't care less, but I had fun.
• I have written numerous entries simply to get it out of my head and delete, never to be seen.