No, this entry isn’t about how Chinese scientists have made their very own versions of DC Comics’ Shaolin Robot. That part’s wild but incidental to the topic at hand.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes this site gets hits, which I chart at every year-end as self-reflection on what I’ve done over the previous twelve months — what worked, what didn’t, which entries got looked at most, which times did SEO seemingly help even though I never give it much thought, etc. By and large, as a stats junkie I get what I need from the WordPress dashboard, even though I’m confident the results are typically a more accurate measure of how many search engine crawlers acknowledge MCC’s existence, as opposed to gauging attention from real people. But same as in video games, a score is a score, and I’ll take whatever points I can get.
At least, that was my philosophy until a few days ago. Site traffic has been weirdly, consistently higher than usual ever since our Dragon Con 2025 cosplay galleries, though live human interaction remains as catatonic as ever. But a funny thing’s been happening since November 6th: that already-boosted activity inexplicably quintupled. None of those hits were referred here from social media or another site, either — they just materialized from nowhere and then disappeared into the night, like ghosts shouting “BOO!” just to amuse themselves.
I looked a little harder at the other dashboard sections that I usually take for granted and noticed a new anomaly: over 85% of my everyday traffic is suddenly, inexplicably coming from China.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 