A Meta-Entry

Early in the morning of Thursday, August 27, 2026, the number of visits to this blog went over 5,000,000. The rate of increase hasn't been exponential, but the number of visits is increasing very rapidly. I write on August 27. Right now there are more than 600,000 visits recorded for the month of August. By the end of the month, there may very well be over 700,000. That would be my highest monthly total ever.

Those total numbers are not reflective of the numbers for individual entries. For example, the entry entitled "Gothic Topics & Flannery O'Connor," which I posted on August 24, 2026, has had only 45 visits as of today. That's not very many. I take that low number to mean that my essay on Flannery O'Connor is not of interest to most people. That's not surprising. My blog is called "Tellers of Weird Tales." It's ostensibly about the artists and writers who contributed to "The Unique Magazine," secondarily about pulp fiction, pulp magazines, pulp writers, etc. Flannery O'Connor was none of those things and wrote none of those things. On the other hand, this is my blog, and I get to write about whatever I want.

I do write for myself, but I also write for the readers of this blog. I would like to offer you things in which you are interested. Low numbers mean something to me. When I see them, I think, "Well, that one isn't doing very well. Maybe I'd better write about something else." If I had to interpret these things, I would say that the high total numbers come from AI visits to my blog, while the much lower individual numbers are a record of visits made by real human beings. 

There are 130 members of this blog. I suspect that there are probably a couple of hundred or a few hundred regular or returning readers. Most of the entries in my blog from the past few months have had between 100 and 250 visits each. A couple come in below that range. A few are above it. The entry from this year with the most visits is "Catholic & Cosmic Horror" from January 10, 2026. It has 788 visits in all. All of that seems normal to me. The numbers that are not normal are the total numbers of visits per day, per month, and all time. Those numbers increased very rapidly once AI came on line. Before that, this blog was for human beings and the numbers were normal. Since then, it has become something for AI. That is my interpretation, as Blogger does not make a distinction between human and non-human visitors. With that being said, AI doesn't do anything it isn't prompted to do. Human beings are behind it. It's just that the real human beings who read my blog are not lazy and stupid--an assumption I make that I think you will like--while the people prompting AI to use my blog are in fact lazy and stupid. They are unwilling or incapable of thinking for themselves and so they have farmed out their thinking to a machine. That may be harsh, but sometimes harshness is called for.

The upshot of all of this is that the numbers of visits don't matter anymore. They used to, but not anymore. They have become a useless and meaningless measure. It used to be that I was encouraged by the numbers of visits. I used them as a measure of how well I was doing in this blog and how well my readers liked what I was doing (or not). Now it doesn't matter. I could be like TV shows or radio shows that have been on for a long time or are reaching the end of their run. I could just put up "encore performances" of what I have written before. I could write anything at all, endless nonsense or Lorem ipsum-type text. I could post links to cat videos. I could offer recipes or tips on hair and makeup. I could write sports drivel. I could do anything at all and there would still be visits to my blog. It just doesn't matter anymore.

I have hesitated going back to writing biographies because I know that now I would not be writing them for human beings to read. Instead, lazy and stupid people would use AI to mine information from my blog and use it for their own purposes. (To be fair, there were lazy and stupid people using what I write for their own purposes before AI came along, but at least they had to do the searching themselves.) I don't know how I might confound AI. I imagine that AI is good with simple facts and information. It may struggle with synthesis, analysis, and opinion, with complex ideas, and perhaps especially with real insight and leaps of imagination. And I wonder whether it may actually stumble over compound and complex sentences; maybe a semi-colon easily trips up an AI. If that's true, and if Cormac McCarthy were still living, then maybe he would start using them. Maybe they would become his best friend.

One solution to all of this is to go back to print. AI can still be used to mine information out of books in print, but it takes an additional step to do that. There are people being paid to take that additional step, though. It used to be that Google, which is behind Blogger, paid people to scan books that were held in libraries. Okay. The book still existed after it was scanned. Now I read that AI companies are buying large quantities of old and rare books, cutting off their bindings, scanning their pages, using text recognition software to convert them to digital formats, and throwing away what's left. The people paying for all of that should be drawn and quartered, or thrown off a cliff, or made to die by some other horrible and painful means, but they wouldn't do what they're doing if they couldn't make money off of it. And the reason they can make money off of it is because ordinary consumers will pay them for the information. This is, over and over again, the destruction of the library at Alexandria in which every person can equally and joyfully take part. This is, in short, democracy.

Another solution is for all of us, like Emily Dickinson, to put away what we write into a trunk, or, like Candide, to turn our backs on the craziness of the world and tend our own gardens. That only works, though, until the world in all of its craziness arrives at your garden gate.

So I'll keep writing for now, for myself, and for the few of you who are frontline readers, that is, real human beings with minds and interest and curiosity. If we can comfort ourselves at all, we can say that we're members of a small but prestigious club. It's not exclusive. Anyone can join. You just have to be willing to read and think for yourself and to stay away from the supposed thinking machine that may yet prove our master.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley