“It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.” — Julius Caesar
Today is the one-year anniversary of the Dark Sport website! No roses, please, just money… Heh heh heh.
After more than 300 posts, including a good two dozen stories, we — Dark Sportsters and I, Greg Nikolic — have reached a milestone of a sorts.
I believe the global cultural sphere is currently going through a dry spell. One in which people are hesitant to go even a millimeter outside their long-established comfort zone. I don’t know what could cause such a thing, but the evidence is all around us: in drying-up blog stats for visitors, in a lack of new musicians and successful breakout movie hits, in a general malaise infesting our ideasphere.
I’ll give you an example. There is a feature on WordPress which allows you to search the wordpress blogosphere for the kinds of posts you’d like to see. Normally I’d get 10 visits a day from newcomers curious about my work. Now I’m down to 1. That’s a 90% reduction in traffic, and it’s more than a statistical anomaly — it’s noteworthy.
I’ve stopped posting physical ads for my site around the city because, while the stubs containing the website address sometimes get taken, nobody follows up on viewing it. The situation is that dire.
I should be getting much higher numbers of viewers for the quality of site I put up — for free. There was actually a day when I got ZERO visitors. That was staggering to me. Usually I get at least some, but to get nobody? Fuck. What is going on?
So, in celebration of my site and in condemnation of the pussies who are too afraid to visit it, I would like to give a big shout-out of pleasure and affirmation to you who are reading this and a big FUCK YOU to those who are too conformist to snap out of a social weather trend like this that is drying up experimentation with new media. You don’t know what you’re losing.
correction
There were more than 300 posts. This number has been rather severely reduced by the process of elimination. Only the best remained.
Dark Sport 
Culture is frozen. I know just what you mean. Music this year is shit. Political climate is inhospitable to art. I feel it in my own creative block. Our attention is a hole the size of a pinhead and it’s being fucked by a supermassive galaxy of bullshit. information overload. AI is NOt helping. There are AI bots here on WordPress pumping out regurgitated regurgitations of irrelevant bullshit. I’m going to war against them… Happy anniversary.
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I think the floodgates will open up and there will be a mini-Golden Age after this period of dryness lets up. One can only hope.
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Congratulations on reaching the one-year anniversary of Dark Sport, Greg. Writing every day is incredibly challenging. I’ve done it for many years and still do. Keep going, because reading and writing remain fundamental to understanding the world and ourselves.
I don’t quite agree with your view that creativity is lacking today. I think you might just be looking in the wrong places. Modern society is overwhelmed with information, which makes incredible things much harder to find amid the flood of content. It’s like the world is turning into a kind of “Library of Babel,” where there’s so much material that gems are easily lost.
This also echoes Byung-Chul Han’s idea that “the excess of information desacralizes the world.” In a way, it’s not that creativity is gone, it’s that it is buried beneath an avalanche of data and noise. As I always tell writers, keep on writing.
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The creativity may be there, but the audience is playing it safe, is what I’m saying. They’re not trying out new things in their experiential repertoire; they’re going with ancient standbys. That’s the sense I get.
Thanks for the congratulations, though. I really appreciate it.
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top post, Greg; yes, I’ve noticed a general cultural malaise which is reflected in the lower stats for blogs; but we creatives must stay virile and inventive as ever so traffic will grow !
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It’s good to be confirmed in this; it’s easy to dismiss it as being just one’s figment of the imagination; but, as you’ve personally seen, all sites have taken a hit, as far as I can tell. Only the hardcores remain, although I got to double digits in my visitor count today so I’m happy 😉
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you’re starting to get a readership, Greg; soon you’ll have a swathe of stalwarts 🙂
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Something keeps interfering with my site’s tremendous growth potential. I hit all the sweet spots — relatable articles you can savvy, cool short stories, sex and violence, melodic poems — and yet my readership ebbs and flows like an irregular tide. Sometimes I get okay visitor numbers; other times it’s shit. I just don’t know what to do about it. If I was a published author of popular mainstream fiction, my site would have thousands of times more viewers than it does. I try to advertise on the street for my site, but people don’t follow up on the stubs they take off the posted sheets. At least I got a new subscriber today on my circle of regulars, bringing me up to 26… a Brit, from a Commonwealth country like you and I, John. 🙂 I keep trying. That’s all one can do.
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that old proverb still ring true, Greg: slow and steady wins the race; you gotta have faith, as George Michael says: keep on posting quality material; I remember slogging away in the low twenties for quite a while — then BAM!!!!
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Thanks for the advice, John. It’s not difficult to go on because I love what I do, and I think it shows. BTW, I just wrote a longer piece on politics as a game which you might enjoy. Give it a read and leave a comment, telling me what you think (sincerely; criticism is more than welcome).
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heading off soon for a family dinner, Greg; will have a look tomorrow if it’s no more than a five minute read —
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