NoBeast – { feuilleton }

MMMM

Post number four thousand coincides with Roy Batty’s birthday, so happy birthday, Roy. Best not wish him many happy returns… It’s also David Bowie’s birthday and album release day but he’s receiving enough attention for that already.

WordPress always sends a statistics summary at the end of each year. The stats for 2015 looked like this:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 900,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 39 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was January 18th with 3,460 views. The most popular post that day was The gay artists archive.

No surprise about the most popular section of the site which frequently gets double the traffic of any single post. Input to that section of the blog has fallen off over the past year but I do have a couple more posts lined up when I get a spare moment.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2015.

1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
3 Phallic casts 2011
4 Compass roses August 2011
5 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006

The phallic casts post had a huge spike of traffic on New Year’s Day for some reason. Some of the attention for these posts will be from Facebook but since I don’t have an account there—and Facebook also hides their referral details—you can’t be certain. As always, my thanks to everyone who takes the time to read and to comment.

Nine

Celebrating nine years of interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms. As before, a look at the annual delivery of stats from WordPress is instructive.

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 970,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 42 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was August 30th with 4,215 views. The most popular post that day was Index, fist or manicule?

Most posts here hit between 2,500 to 3,000 visits a day although the annual total is down on last year. I have Google stats indexing this site but I can never be bothered logging in to see how they compare. WordPress has the advantage of delivering stats to your blogging dashboard.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2014.
1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006
3 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
4 Gekko Hayashi revisited December 2012
5 The art of Oliver Frey July 2009

The gay art posts always beat everything else, and NoBeast is the most popular post for another year. Russia’s current crop of authoritarian goons may regard gay sex as horribly un-Russian but NoBeast gets consistently heavy traffic from VK, the Russian social network.

The top referring sites in 2014 were:
1. twitter.com
2. facebook.com
3. ficbook.net
4. pinterest.com
5. mentalfloss.com

Twitter and Facebook referrals are all very well but the way they hide what people are looking at means they’re no help to people running websites. Anyway, thanks as always for reading, referring and commenting! Here’s a few musical nines:

• If 6 Was 9 (1967) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• Nine Feet Underground (1971) by Caravan
• Nine Moons In Alaska (1971) by Beaver & Krause
• Party 9 (1973) by Faust
• Katzenmusik 9 (1979) by Michael Rother

Eight

Dharmacakra in the Sun temple, Odisha, India.

Celebrating eight years of interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms. These days WordPress conveniently prepares a page of stats at the end of each year, and since I generally use the blog anniversary to record the posts of interest this is how things worked out over the past year:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 1,000,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 43 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was February 12th with 6,374 views. The most popular post that day was The gay artists archive.

This was more than a million fewer visits than last year. Nothing to do with me as far as I can tell. I read somewhere that Google had tweaked their algorithms which may have resulted in a fall of traffic. I’ve also noticed a lot less comment spam in the past year, something you seldom see at the front end thanks to filters.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2013:
1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
3 Phallic casts May 2011
4 The art of Oliver Frey July 2009
5 Magicians September 2013

Some of your most popular posts were written before 2013. Your writing has staying power! Consider writing about those topics again.

Okay, WP! Everyone is always after the erotic stuff. No surprise there although there was less of it in last year’s top five.

That’s 210 countries in all! Most visitors came from The United States. The United Kingdom & France were not far behind.

As always, my thanks to all those blue countries for reading and commenting. Here’s Neu! playing After Eight.

Gay octopus sex

So now that I have your undivided attention… You’d think someone would have tried a male variation on Hokusai’s notorious Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (1814) before now but if they have I’ve not seen it. Hokusai gives us a father-and-son pair of amorous octopuses but the smaller creature is missing from this picture by Tumblr user Joapa. Nice use of texture to give the feel of an old comic book page; if the online poster manufacturers weren’t so prudish I could imagine this doing brisk business. Those wanting more of the boys-and-tentacles micro-fetish are directed to the art of NoBeast for whom { feuilleton } burns an undying and ever-perverse flame. Joapa tip via Homocomix.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Poulpe Colossal
• Abysmal creatures
• Fascinating tentacula
• Jewelled butterflies and cephalopods
• The art of Rune Olsen
• Octopulps
• The art of NoBeast

The art of Hyeyeol

Butterfly.

Hyeyeol is the nom de l’art of a South Korean woman whose work was drawn to my attention by regular commenter Wiley (thanks!) and a suggestion that some of the homoerotic imagery is reminiscent of the elusive NoBeast. I agree, and feel there’s also a similarity to Takato Yamamoto in the blend of stylised decoration, bondage boys and Eros/Thanatos pairings. The Hyeyeol website has four gallery sections while more of her work can be seen at deviantART.

No title.

Libido.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Takato Yamamoto
• The art of NoBeast