What the hell is Mastodon ftw! doing with 109 views in 14 days? Given that I am not a Mastodon fan-site and most of my friends and acquaintances don’t really care for Mastodon’s brand of prog-metal, this makes virtually no sense. It would make sense if I wrote a post called “Smushed-face cats and hand-drawn tools” and got a billion hits in one day, but this is crazy.

Thankfully Wordpress has a killer plugin called Wordpress.com Stats, which gives me data to turn into this:

As you can see, there was an unexplained spike in Mastodon post views in Mid-April. Because I’m kind of a data nerd, I find this interesting and kind of irritating in its inexplicableness (YEAH, IT’S A WORD). Maybe if I was a slick web developer I would be all like “oh yeah, that’s just your mid-April prog-metal traffic spike… GUH.” Unfortunately, I’m just a simple caveman embedded software engineer so all I can say is “it’s odd”.

I did some web traffic archeology and discovered that the search terms most used to find Realvelour were “mastodon”, “borat”, and “mastodon images”. This is congruent with the traffic, but doesn’t make the situation less weird because it implies that people are specifically searching for Mastodon and coming across my site. Like they go to Google, type in “mastodon images”, and Google says “OH, y0u sh0uld t0t3s ch3ck out Re@lv3lour.c0m… th3y h@v3 this *one* @rticl3 you would lik3″. I think not. I’m pretty sure Google talks like that, though.

Long story short, I found something that makes this all very sensible: a Spanish language metal discussion board linking to the image of Mastodon and Borat I posted. Realvelour.com is linked in a post, followed by a bunch of Spanish commentary. I’m sure it’s NSFW so don’t go trying to Google translate it at work or anything. It turns out somebody from Costa Rica found this image, posted it to a chat board, and started driving all sorts of Spanish metal traffic my way. Win? I’m not sure. All traffic is good traffic, but I’m pretty sure the Venn diagram for metal fans and kitten/tool drawing fans looks like this:

Otherwise known as what? That’s correct… the null set.

hoot.