"Settle Up with Your Downfall"
Sincere Engineer
from Probable Claws
2026
Fuuuuuuuuck, I figured it out. The answer to a mystery that's been bugging me for years. And it ain't pretty.
Okay so the main mystery requires us to break the fourth wall briefly. No strangers to that around here, but still, I figured I'd warn ya anyway. Especially since when I start talking about the blog in a meta sense, I fear that it gets boring, because I assume that no one actually gives a shit about inside baseball bullshit on the blog. Consider yourself warned.
We operate on Blogger. The URL says "blogspot," but that's due to a grandfather clause. From what I recall (and I didn't do any supplemental research to back these hazy memories up), PoYB originated on a blogging platform called "Blogspot," and then at some point, Google LLC Or Whatever The Fuck bought it out, and pushed it under the umbrella of their own blogging platform, called "Blogger." But they didn't change the URL. So you type in "blogspot," but when I go to the interface where I do all the editing and publishing, that's blogger.com.
All that to say that this website that I am typing these words on right now is owned by Google. Been that way for a long time. I am still here due to inertia, and due to the overwhelming horror of even thinking about trying to move over ten thousand blog posts over to a different platform. Plus, it's free. This is the understanding, and ultimately, the first-level mystery here. Why is it free? Why have I been allowed to operate this dumb blog free of charge, free of ads, for almost twenty years? What's the catch? There's always a fucking catch.
When we talk about "what is free on the internet," then what we're really doing is asking who is the customer, and what is the product. You can think about Facebook as a well-known example. Facebook has never charged a membership fee, as far as I'm aware. Though you might get swindled out of money through spam ads and deceit, it's never been Facebook itself asking you to pay money for its services. It's free to use. So what does that mean? That's means that you are the product. In this case, it means that all your personal information is documented and sold as many times as possible, mostly to advertisers but to other even more nefarious entities as well I'm sure. You can think about it like you would a cow on a farm. Why is it that cows are given a free place to stay, free food to eat, free medical care when necessary? It's not because the farmer gives a shit about the cow, it's because the farmer is keeping his product safe, before it is sent to be slaughtered.
So if we're operating for free here on Blogger, then the question remains: in what ways are we the product? Why have we been allowed to languish here in relative obscurity (relative to other websites around the internet) for free, doing as we please in this space? In what ways are we the cows, awaiting slaughter? I don't think it's as simple as the Facebook scenario. I don't think it's as easy to pull our personal information from these words. I've done what I could to prevent people's identifying details from entering the algorithm, and I myself have typed a LOT of personal details about myself, but I'm just one guy, and it would take a lot of effort for to pull the necessary info from my shitty prose for very little payoff (i.e. selling the personal info of ONE GUY doesn't feel worth it to me, from the perspective of someone who sells personal info to advertisers).
I think I have the answer, but let's first talk about a different mystery that's been floating around these parts for the past few years. This mystery has bothered me for a long time, and it's necessary to talk about here in today's post, since it occurred to me the other day, suddenly, out of the blue, that the mysteries have the same exact answer. So put a pin in the first one for a few paragraphs, and let's discuss the second one.
I've mentioned offhandedly a few times over the years that, on the aforementioned Blogger interface where I act as editor-in-chief, there is a tab for "Stats." Here, you can see how many "hits" the blog has, over the last eighteen years, broken down in yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily chunks if you need them, as well as specific visitor counts for individual blog posts. So I can see what blog post has the most traffic, and I can track traffic over the past however long, to see if more or less people are visiting the blog during certain times of the week or certain times in this blog's lifespan.
It's traditionally been sort of a useless tool to me, since the readership of PoYB is not that large. Less than 100 people in my own life are even aware of this website's existence, and way fewer than that are even semi-regular readers. I'm not discounting the idea that there are people I don't know who are semi-regular readers, friends of friends and friends of friends of friends and whatnot. But if they exist, they do not exist in large numbers. They can't. This isn't that type of website. It's just a hobby. At the upper end of reasonable estimations, we could reasonably say that maybe 20 people are visiting PoYB a day, and even at five clicks per person, that's like 100 visits per day. Maybe sometimes people are clicking around and we get a few hundred clicks. That's reasonable. That's logical. And that's not really worth clicking the Stats tab over. Traffic isn't the point! I'm not creating content here! We're just typing for shits and giggles! Who gives a shit!
But I'll idly click the Stats option every once in a while anyway, and sometimes I'll notice strange spikes. There might be a day when we have like 3000 hits. Why? This is what I've been thinking about for literally years now. It happens often enough that I notice it, and it bothers me. It'll happen for like four days in a row, and then it will stop for days or weeks, before happening again. It's pretty obvious that the numbers are inflated for reasons outside of people literally visiting the blog to read what's written on it. It doesn't make logical sense for a Tuesday to have 200 clicks and a Wednesday to have 2500 clicks, especially when the post on Tuesday is a blog post about the fourth-most popular Fleetwood Mac album and the post on Wednesday is some hack creative writing blabber about a forgotten American sitcome called 'Til Death.
For a while, I had visions of, I dunno, a skeleton crew in the Blogger cubicles getting a notification that there is still one blog on their servers that is being updated daily, and those clicks coming from that staff, either out of curiosity or out of professional duty. Something like that. I wasn't sure whether I should be worried or not. I sincerely don't know what the entity of "Blogger" even looks like. Are there even workers assigned to that department? Or is it just an empty shell that can run on its own?
The suspicion has ratcheted up significantly over the past couple weeks. The Stats tab has gone off the chain. As of this writing, we've had about two straight weeks of approximately 25,000 hits per day. 2500 was illogical, but 25,000 is just laughably false. C'mon. There's no reason for it. The blogging itself is still steady, but no one is reinventing the wheel here. We're not "viral," because there's nothing that could go viral even if that was the goal, which it's not. And if you'll recall, individual blog posts get tallies too, so it would be one thing if we got 25,000 hits and a Bruce Springsteen retrospective said "24K" next to it, but it doesn't. At the end of the day, something like that usually says "8." Not eight thousand, but eight.
It doesn't make sense... until it does. Folks, I figured it out. These two mysteries are the same. They have the same answer. Why we are allowed to play around on Blogger for free and why there has been an increase in traffic, they are both related, inexplicably intertwined. The truth hit me like a ton of fucking bricks the other day. It's all so fucking obvious. Why haven't I thought of this before?
Google is using Puke on Your Birthday to train its AI.
Think about it. It all makes sense. The training tool is visiting PoYB to take the words written here for its own purposes, and that's what's bumping up the traffic. And Google is heavily (and disastrously) invested in improving their AI, which can read through pieces that humans have written in order to improve, and so why not use this resource, Puke on Your Birthday, where actual humans have written tens of millions of words, millions of real-life sentences typed by human hands? I can't even use the word "steal" here, because we're on a website owned by Google! For free! We are the product!
What if that's the reason Blogger still exists? It's the only reasonable explanation. There is literally no other reason that such a useless dumb bullshit website could hold any value. Our words are here, and the company that owns the words is using their robot to suck up everything we have created. And there's nothing we can do about it! This is the world that we have built. We have typed and typed and typed and all this time we have been sitting in the goo pods from The Matrix, living a lie while our brain power is sucked into the machine.
There's not really an upside to any of this. I have taken great pride in this body of work over the years, and it makes me feel like a chump that there's some underlying nefarious purpose to it. I also cringe at the idea of some AI bot taking on my writing voice, at the very least because that means that my voice is no longer unique. Worst of all, it feels like our fate here on this website is now irrevocably tied to the fate of AI, which as we all know is a bubble, and I fear that when that bubble pops, we'll pop right along with it.
What other option is there, though? I get a six-gig file sent to me every month, containing within it a full copy of the blog. I've always considered that an emergency option, moving away from Blogger onto some other platform. It's probably not as easy as it sounds, either. I'm sure if I ported everything over to Wordpress, there would be some jacked-up error with the formatting that would require me to manually fix 10,000 blog posts, and I'm not looking to choose to do that anytime soon. And as we discussed at some point earlier, I'm slowing down on the blogging but I'm not in any position to stop. Too much of my emotional wellness and overall sanity is tied to the act of typing in this space. I don't know what I would do if I was forced to stop. That feels like an exaggeration, but it's unfortunately true.
I could also just... give up caring. Accept the fact that this is the world that we live in. That the bad guys won, and that they have branded us all cattle, and that there's nothing we can do to prevent the slaughter that is headed our way. Might as well enjoy the free room and board while we wait.
