Happy New Year from the Dice Mines!

 

"Do you think they have Holmes-made pumpkin pie?"

A lot of you wrote in to inquire about yesterday's post [Does anyone believe me when I imply that I've received feedback or do you all see through these claims for the sham that they are?] I mentioned the baleful god of Blogger OCD without quite explaining the significance of it. You see, for the first several years that I maintained this blog, my end of year post count was always a number divisible by 6. I'm not sure when I became conscious of this, but I do know that I spent the last week of 2015 scheming to achieve 24 posts for the year. 

Then came December 2016. I started the month with an admittedly meager count of 18 posts on the year; all I had to do was sit tight until January and I was good for the year. But with one week to go, I decided to fly in the face of superstition; I posted an unlucky 19th post on Christmas day featuring Erol Otus's famed photo of the KEEP on the Borderlands, as seen above. Maybe I was trying to spur myself on to crank out 5 more posts in the week between Christmas and New Years--if so, it failed as inspiration. Or maybe I wrote that post months earlier, set it to auto-post for Christmas Day and forgot all about it. That was seven years ago, who can remember that crap?

The fallout has been tragic. Even though 2016 was my least active blogging year at the time, I have never achieved even that low standard in the years since. And only once have I managed to achieve another multiple of 6. True nerds will note that just last year I posted 13 times, missing the mark by just one post once again, but on that occasion, that 13th post came out in July; I had more than 5 months to come up with a few more posts, I just... didn't.

And so it is that, in hopes of fending off forces beyond my understanding, I am here typing this pointless, uninformative missive on New Years Eve. May the new year bring you all peace and prosperity, so long as it's divisible by 6.