Porn, linux distros and cat pictures

I may have made a small mistake.

A while back, I regged up an account for myself on Academia.edu. It is a good place to find academic papers, excerpts and pdf reprints of some of the theoretical writings surrounding Japanese popular culture. You need to be registered to download these as pdfs.

Perhaps I spent too much of my life in University. I have two master’s degrees, a whatever BA, plus an honors undergraduate degree in Fine Arts; the infamous BFA. As there used to be no PhD in the Fine Arts, this counted for something. Also, I have very little artistic talent in the conventional sense, so I often feel that the BFA is my “best” degree. And yes, the few solo shows that I have had have been well received. I cheat; I think things out then work hard at it.

As an academic, I am probably a wash-out. I am sloppy, hate academic rigor and find too much of what goes on within the walls of academe boring and pointless. Big fan of University clubs though; they were fun.

So occasionally I will review and/or incorporate a sloppy review of an academic paper that I find important when I “go on about something“. When I feel really bored, I might indulge in sophomoric exercises, such as seeing how the second part of the Genshiken rates on the Bechdel Test. One evening, I decided to post a list of all the search terms that wordpress.com captured, from search engines queries used to find my blog. The I uploaded a pdf of the post to Academia.edu

Porn, linux distros and cat pictures; not even.

This blog gets a modest 30-50 visits a day. I am guessing that perhaps %5 – %20 of theses visitors are here to read odd little essays that go on and on about manga, anime and the like. The rest must be disappointed, or at least puzzled:

Where iz de hawt steamy pr0ns?

I should just delete that post and the pdf version of it on Academia.edu. All the traffic just goes to show that the long-in-the-tooth, circa 1996 page view boosting trick of hiding search words in a transparent frame behind your page’s main text still can work, especially if you are running a p0rn site. But I won’t delete them. Not yet. I want to see what happens next. Welcome to my latest conceptual art piece, and yes, since I have the ticket, it is as “real” as any other work of conceptual art.

Note my finely honed hipster irony.

As well, the fandom that Kio Shimoku tells stories about is marked by the curious fact that their weird little stories are chock full o’ schmex. The adult content is part and parcel of how the stories pose questions of identity and behaviour. They map the shape of their readers’ hearts.

No schmex, no force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

In a similarly curious way, both dumps of “raw data” listing the search terms, plus the way these terms attract further searches, prove the point, while begging further questions. Neverending earthly desires. The page-view stats are flattering. Maybe some of them really are here for the posts? Nice to be fancied. Top %1.

Team Muda blasts off at the speed of light!

I would like to thank the Academy.

 

PS: For those of you who feel that I have wasted your time with this post, here is something -neat!- found in a pile noted by Dr. Ogiue Maniax.

 

 

A bit later: Since I am dropping videos into my posts for no reason, here’s a magnificent ear-worm that just drifted into view:

(And for those of you unfamiliar with the original, you will not find anything close to this tune or song or even the complete linear dialogue that makes up the song within the Monogatari animes. The entire arrangement of the music, clipping the dialogue to build the vocals, autotuning and beat matching, cutting the video clips, all of it, is a magnificently hacked fan production!)

Enjoy!