Well, as you can see above, in July, The Obelisk pulled in 228,282 page views from across the world. That’s almost precisely 10,000 more than last month, which, if I’m honest, is perfect. That’s exactly the kind of growth I think is ideal: not some sudden upshot or anything like that, but steady, encouraging and enough to show that the people out there who read keep coming back. If you couldn’t tell by the new header for the site, it’s much appreciated.

It’s been a crazy couple of months, and this summer is a vicious, humid bastard. I expected after the semester ended that there would be some kind of slowdown, and there really hasn’t. Looking ahead to August, I need to finish my masters thesis and complete and independent study class that, were I not a total jackass, I’d have been working on this whole time instead of drinking, listening to music and watching baseball. My own fault, but that doesn’t make it any less overwhelming.

Nothing to do then but keep going. That’s been the thing all along, and that’s what I’m sticking by. Thanks to everyone who stopped in this month. There were visits from a total of 117 countries (US, UK, Canada, Germany and Australia being the top five) and in the States, California was even with June to lead the pack, but NYC still had the most single visits of any city, with Portland beating out Los Angeles to come in second. Maybe that’s not surprising, since half the bands I covered last month were from Oregon, but still, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time that’s happened. Hello, Portland.

New Jersey, my home state, moved up two spots to come in fifth among American states, and in terms of places very far away from where I’m currently sitting, visits from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, New Zealand, Paraguay and Nepal were highlights. I find it completely awesome that someone in Kathmandu has heard of this site. Hello, Kathmandu.

Thanks to all as ever, whether you’re in Chongqing or Philadelphia or anywhere in between, north, south, east, west, whatever. Thank you.

Here’s a rundown of where we’re at for August:

Giveaways: I don’t know how often I’m going to get to do them, but I put one up today for the UK and would like to do more of this kind of thing. I’ve had a couple copies of the Moth Eater/Black Thai split vinyl for what feels like forever waiting to go out. I’ll have to see if I can develop/incorporate some kind of entry form into posts, but in the meantime, if you want to go to the Supernormal Festival, hit me up either by email, on the forum or via Thee Facebooks.

audiObelisk: New podcast this weekend, and it’s looking like next week for the Grifter track I alluded to in the Frydee video post, and hopefully I’ll have more track premieres in the weeks to come. There are still a lot of killer records coming out this year and I really like posting audio on the main page, so I’ll see what I can get going. The site’s kind of in an awkward in-between place in that it’s popular but has no hipster cred (not a complaint), so what I can get is kind of limited compared to some of the bigger names out there. I’ll do the best I can.

Features: This week I’ll be posting an interview with the dudes from Borracho, and the coming weeks will hopefully see chats with Faces of Bayon, Moab, The Quill and Sigiriya (the latter I pushed back at the band’s request so as to more closely coincide with their album release next month). At some point, so help me robot jebus, I’m also going to do a Kyuss Lives feature, though it might not be until September since I want to time it to the NYC show for work. I know I said also I wanted to do an interview with The Book of Knots, but my email was never returned, so I guess that’s a no dice. Too bad, since that record ruled.

In the meantime, I also want to get some Six Dumb Questions stuff going with the likes of Lamprey and Sleestak (both of whom will be reviewed this month as well), though I haven’t hit up either band yet and they could very well tell me to fuck myself. Obviously, whatever comes together, I’ll let you know.

Reviews: I just updated the review list this morning with last week’s mail, and it’s by a manageable 39 reviews that I’m behind. It’s actually one more than last month, but I think I had a bunch of stuff I hadn’t logged yet when I did the numbers last time, so it might have been skewed. In any case, I’m going to keep chopping away, and yeah, it’s frustrating sometimes when I’m not timely on shit, but I figure the flipside of that is extra effort put into the review of whatever it might be. I haven’t heard any complaints yet, but that might just be because no one other than me cares. Whatever.

Blackwolfgoat: Darryl is playing with Totimoshi on Aug. 17 at O’Briens Pub in Allston, Massachusetts, which will be killer. If you missed the news, his former and once again outfit Milligram are going to be supporting Kyuss Lives in Worcester a month and three days later. Badass. Congrats to him and to anyone who gets to see him play, because it’s a treat. As you can see in the sidebar, I have 13 copies left of Dronolith for sale.

The Maple Forum: The latest from Clamfight is they’re going to finish their album this month, so I’m thinking maybe October or November for the release of Volume III, depending on the timing. Also in talks with two other bands for after them, but it’s all pretty nebulous at this point, so no sense in going into detail. In the meantime, Kings Destroy debuted their video for “The Mountie” over at Brooklyn Vegan, and I’d highly recommend watching it.

If there’s anything else, I certainly can’t think of what it might be, so I guess I’ll leave it there. Thanks again to everyone for reading, commenting, posting grammatical and/or factual corrections, etc. As of this post, there are 765 registered users on the forum (some of whom are not spambots), and a total of 38,505 posts in 2,753 topics. Not too shabby.

With gratitude,
JJ Koczan
Hardly Philanthropic Taskmaster

Tags: self-aggrandizing, The Numbers

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 3:22 pm and is filed under The Numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.