100 Again, For the First Time
Today marks the 100th consecutive day that I have posted to this journal. The streak started on August 29.
If you've been reading this forever and have wasted a lot of your brain cells on memorizing random details of my journal, you may recall that I've done this before from January 1 to April 10 of 2014. Or at least, I thought I had. Upon revisiting the 2014 archives, it appears that I did 100 posts in 100 days, but I actually missed February 12 of that year completely and doubled up on posts for March 12. So, close but not quite.
Of course, I didn't wake up on August 29 and say "you know, what I'm going to start a Livejournal streak." I happened to have time that week and topics ready to go, and then when Sunday rolled around again I started my PKT25 series. Suddenly I was well into September and I thought, well, I could probably do a post every day this month. So that happened, and it was October, and I cranked out ten posts in a row about touring the Phi Kap house, and suddenly I had a substantial streak going. I burned off a lot of small one off topics that I had been saving, and none of this would have been enough to keep the streak going this long, but then I happened to notice the LJ user rating had dropped from my customary place in the thousands down in the high hundreds.
Now, the user rating is something I've basically ignored ever since it was instituted. I mean, I actually know (in person, no less) theferrett and catvalente and later bart_calendar, all of whom were in the top 100 back when LiveJournal actually had people on it, and I certainly never had that kind of community and commenting on my posts at any point. But in this much reduced LiveJournal landscape I happened to notice I was in the 700 range after about a month and a half of steady posting, so I decided to see where I could the rating to just by posting every day. It turns out that the answer is around 270, which is where I peaked earlier this week. I'm at 282 as I write this, which puts me on page 15 of 6837 of the list.
I have no idea what goes into the algorithm for this rating, but I assume it's some combination of "how often you post", "how often people commented" (rare), "how often people HEARTED a post" (even rarer) and "how often people read it". That latter number may not be very high, as I got a cyrillic language email from LiveJournal that appears to show how many views my top posts got, and the range was from 40 to 120. Most of that driven by the PKT25 series, which I've txted to some of my fraternity brothers. Since I interact with basically nobody on LiveJournal (kylecassidy is the only person on my friends list who posted during the streak), it seems improbable that it will go much higher just from posting, especially in a world where the user ratings are sent out in what was presumably Russian instead of English.
Somewhere in here I also realized that my prior "100 days in a row" streak was marred, so then I knew I had to at least hit that milestone, and here we are!
I have no idea how long I'll keep this streak up, but I see that if I post daily through the end of 2021, I will have made more LJ posts than I did in any prior year, even counting 2004 when I was posting one liners on it all the time. That seems like a worthwhile goal. I think that the overall quality of my posts is also dramatically better than they were in 2004 or even 2014. At this point my "house style" has more or less set in, and I had almost no posts that I would describe as "filler" in the last 100. Also unlike 2014, there were basically no few last second posts in this streak. With Birdie around, I don't have any spare time to waste, so I've planning things out and writing them well in advance during my limited free time. Remember, anything posted precisely at 1:00pm was pre-recorded, and a quick jaunt through the archives for the last 100 days will show that was most of them.
And yes, this streak is much more impressive to me than my spanish learning streaks.
If you've been reading this forever and have wasted a lot of your brain cells on memorizing random details of my journal, you may recall that I've done this before from January 1 to April 10 of 2014. Or at least, I thought I had. Upon revisiting the 2014 archives, it appears that I did 100 posts in 100 days, but I actually missed February 12 of that year completely and doubled up on posts for March 12. So, close but not quite.
Of course, I didn't wake up on August 29 and say "you know, what I'm going to start a Livejournal streak." I happened to have time that week and topics ready to go, and then when Sunday rolled around again I started my PKT25 series. Suddenly I was well into September and I thought, well, I could probably do a post every day this month. So that happened, and it was October, and I cranked out ten posts in a row about touring the Phi Kap house, and suddenly I had a substantial streak going. I burned off a lot of small one off topics that I had been saving, and none of this would have been enough to keep the streak going this long, but then I happened to notice the LJ user rating had dropped from my customary place in the thousands down in the high hundreds.
Now, the user rating is something I've basically ignored ever since it was instituted. I mean, I actually know (in person, no less) theferrett and catvalente and later bart_calendar, all of whom were in the top 100 back when LiveJournal actually had people on it, and I certainly never had that kind of community and commenting on my posts at any point. But in this much reduced LiveJournal landscape I happened to notice I was in the 700 range after about a month and a half of steady posting, so I decided to see where I could the rating to just by posting every day. It turns out that the answer is around 270, which is where I peaked earlier this week. I'm at 282 as I write this, which puts me on page 15 of 6837 of the list.
I have no idea what goes into the algorithm for this rating, but I assume it's some combination of "how often you post", "how often people commented" (rare), "how often people HEARTED a post" (even rarer) and "how often people read it". That latter number may not be very high, as I got a cyrillic language email from LiveJournal that appears to show how many views my top posts got, and the range was from 40 to 120. Most of that driven by the PKT25 series, which I've txted to some of my fraternity brothers. Since I interact with basically nobody on LiveJournal (kylecassidy is the only person on my friends list who posted during the streak), it seems improbable that it will go much higher just from posting, especially in a world where the user ratings are sent out in what was presumably Russian instead of English.
Somewhere in here I also realized that my prior "100 days in a row" streak was marred, so then I knew I had to at least hit that milestone, and here we are!
I have no idea how long I'll keep this streak up, but I see that if I post daily through the end of 2021, I will have made more LJ posts than I did in any prior year, even counting 2004 when I was posting one liners on it all the time. That seems like a worthwhile goal. I think that the overall quality of my posts is also dramatically better than they were in 2004 or even 2014. At this point my "house style" has more or less set in, and I had almost no posts that I would describe as "filler" in the last 100. Also unlike 2014, there were basically no few last second posts in this streak. With Birdie around, I don't have any spare time to waste, so I've planning things out and writing them well in advance during my limited free time. Remember, anything posted precisely at 1:00pm was pre-recorded, and a quick jaunt through the archives for the last 100 days will show that was most of them.
And yes, this streak is much more impressive to me than my spanish learning streaks.