Monsters from the Id 怪獣大悪脳

Nobody figured out what it meant, huh?

I guess that means you get to keep the cookie. :)

So, um, what's it mean?

Love,

Hanna

I think it's more of a case of most people don't leave comments.

怪獣 = Kaiju It's translated 'monstous beast' or 'mysterious beast'. Godzilla is the epitome of Kaiju.

大悪脳 I couldn't tell you want the Roman versions of these Japanese words are. I looked them up with Sherlock's translation tool. Individually they mean 'big bad brain'. I don't know if the meaning is changed when they're put together.

So the whole thing is basically:

Monster Big Bad Brain

-and therefore-

Monsters from the Id (If you accept the idea that the Id often hides our darkest thoughts and desires like is suggested in the movie "Forbidden Planet" where the phrase is from.)

I gues that means I get the cookie!

                           .---. .---. 
                          :     : o   :    me want cookie!
                      _..-:   o :     :-.._    /
                  .-''  '  `---' `---' "   ``-.    
                .'   "   '  "  .    "  . '  "  `.  
               :   '.---.,,.,...,.,.,.,..---.  ' ;
               `. " `.                     .' " .'
                `.  '`.                   .' ' .'
                 `.    `-._           _.-' "  .'  .----.
                   `. "    '"--...--"'  . ' .'  .'  o   `.
                   .'`-._'    " .     " _.-'`. :       o  :
             jgs .'      ```--.....--'''    ' `:_ o       :
               .'    "     '         "     "   ; `.;";";";'
              ;         '       "       '     . ; .' ; ; ;
             ;     '         '       '   "    .'      .-'
             '  "     "   '      "           "    _.-'

Okay, you mentioned it, so I'm going to ask. Cause it's driving me mad wondering why. (I guess this is question-and-answer-thread.)

Why don't people leave comments?

Now, I'll try to answer my own question and you can tell me what you think.

That somehow we (at WCTRFF) are doing something wrong. That we're not providing a homey atmosphere. But I've done near everything I could possibly think of. I reply nicely to everyone who comments (not out of desire to make more people comment, but because I'm just so desperately pleased they bothered to leave a comment), we try to have an extremely liberal comment requirement (i.e. none, people don't even have to leave a name in order to comment, but since MT3, we do moderate them, but people didn't leave comments before, so that can't be it). I just don't know what we're doing wrong. It seems like only 1 out of 100 visitors will leave a comment. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

I actually (I'm ashamed I had to do this) went to the Neverwinter Vault to the comments page and asked people who have nothing but high praise for Vaughn there, but who do not say a single word on our site, to leave comments for Vaughn. Like giving flowers to your girlfriend on an anniversary. It's really hard to blog stories sometimes and not get any feedback. Especially when I'll post something completely trivial and then seven or eight people will comment. Vaughn sees that and thinks people don't like her, but in truth people really really like her. They just don't say so on our site.

Since I posted that on the vault, like 7 to 10 people have finally "come out of the closet" and said really nice things about Vaughn. The same stuff they say on the Vault. Am I going to have to do that for every module that Vaughn reviews? It doesn't seem right and it doesn't seem fair.

But I'm curious why you think people don't comment. Because the reasons really elude me. I see like for instance Jay Allen's site (obviously he has a zillion times more visitors than we do) and he will have almost hundreds of comments on some of his posts. Maybe that's a bad comparison, because his audience is bloggers who are used to leaving comments on blogs whereas our audience is NWN players who are used to forums and maybe the blog-way-of-doing-things confuses them. But behind-the-scenes, a blog is no different than a forum. The information is just presented differently. Are blogs presenting information in a way that discourages anyone but true-blooded bloggers from commenting?

Whew. My head hurts now.

(thank you for explaining the Big Bad Brain Monsters) :)

I figure we're looking at a couple of factors. The biggest one be percentages. Only a very small percentage of visitors will post comments to any given website.

When I posted my "Lossless Is Good" look at Apple's new Lossless Audio Codec and it wound up on MacSurfer, I literally had something like 840 visitors in one day and 3 comments. And two of those were from people who were really looking to pump me for work.

I get the most comments from you--we already "knew" each other from the Mac NWN Forums--and from my friend Ariel who I went to college with. So in that case it's a friendship thing.

Most people want the information and move on. That simple. It's not that they don't like you. For the past couple of weeks I seem to get about 30 to 50 visitors a day based on my Site Meter stats. And I don't usually get any comments. But I still get those numbers of visitors day after day. The majority come in from Google searches but still, I do have a few repeat visitors. It's not that people don't like what I have to say. They just take it in and move on.

I think one big factor in larger numbers of comments is celebrity. My man Wil Wheaton, (One day we're going to run into each other at a convention, or on a studio lot, or at a restaurant, and I'm going to go all blubbering fanboy.) he has stated in interviews that he gets 100,000+ visitors a week. Before he took comments offline, it wasn't unusal for him to get 100 comments per post. Most were of the "Right on!" or "That's so cool!" variety. I think some of that is the celebrity factor there. But still the percentages are not very high. You're talking roughly 13,000 visitors a day, and only 100 of them leaving comments.

You'd probably find a similar thing with someone like Jay Allen. He's a celebrity in the MT community. He probably gets a lot of traffic.

There's also the New Kid On The Block factor. I'm not saying we're a cheesy boy-band. We've only been at this since March. It takes time to build up lots of regular who become "friends" or at least familiar. Then the comfort level goes up and there are more comments. Like between you and I.

So those are my thoughts.

It takes a lot of time to build an audience for a blog. There are just so many of them out there. Good ways to get the flow going are:

Comment on other blogs. Intelligent comments, not "Me too" or "Cool". People will click on the link and come visit.

Solicit feedback in your posts. "What do you think?"

Post interesting things that people typically won't find elsewhere.

Join a couple of webrings. This will increase traffic. Plus it will be people that are interested in that topic (of the webring).

That's my unsolicited 2¢ :)

Those are great suggestions. Thanks, Melissa. I still think you have one of the coolest looking sites around.