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All of the articles and guides on how to build an audience say that the most important thing is consistency. I'm not very good at that, so let's move onto the next most important thing - data.
You're supposed to acquire data on what works and what doesn't work, so that you can tailor your subsequent posts to gain the highest level of engagement.
Part of me rebels against the general principle of this. Harvesting success purely as a means of harvesting more succcess, a neverending and increasingly meaningless hamster wheel of creativity-as-assembly line, optimising my own self-worth to produce more and more clicks.
But at the same time - when number go up, I like - so what's a blogger to do?
Last week I added a subscribe link at the bottom of the post, and I gained a subscriber. Sometimes I do this, but sometimes I forget. Could it really be such a simple fix?
Does including an obvious link to subscribe (like the gigantic one at the start, not visible to existing subscribers, which I didn't realise I could include until I was editing this) increase subscriber acquisition, or was this just a coincidence? This is the kind of the thing I should have been collecting data on.
But I've not been, which is why I have now been forced to draw such clear attention to it, in an attempt to accelerate the process. With that in mind - do subscribe, here, here and also here. And anywhere else that there's a link in this post. I'll pop them at random points. There will probably be a few in the intro before this as well. If you're already subscribed then ignore them, but if you're not, then good luck negotiating the minefield of hyperlinks which will give you no choice but to sign up.
In the meantime, let's get down to the fourth quarter-final, featuring UCL and Christ Church. The winners would be facing Trinity for a place in the semis, while the losers will have a crack at Open to stay in the tournament. If you want to watch the episode before reading the rest of the review you can do so below.
First points go to Izzatdust, who recognises a list of books with the word capital in the title. A full set of bonuses on art nouveau follows, before Lowe hits back with a starter on Bolero. Wotton gets excited by the idea that one of the bonuses on Australian animals might be quokka, but Lowe convinces him its tasmanian devil, and he's right. 25 each.
Another for Izzatdust wins UCL a bonus set on the 1590s (not a decade I can say I know too much about, though UCL breeze through it). A stupendous buzz of Goya from Hall keeps their momentum going, but they struggle with a bonus set on bodies of water in French. Hall grabs the picture starter too, and they manage two of three, failing to recognise the emblem of the city of Portsmouth (something else to add to the list of random things I know only through football, because it matches the club badge).
Wotton hits back for Christ Church with pitch drop (that's not a sign up link, I swear), which is the world's longest running lab experiment. It involves pitch, a derivative of tar, which is the world's thickest known fluid with a viscosity more than one hundred billion times higher than that of water.
A sample of it was put in a funnel in 1930 and left to drip. Thus far it has done so 9 times. This is probably one of the world's greatest scientific bits - having been going on for nearly a hundred years.
It reminds me of the time when I was at Inverness swimming pool and watched as a crisp packet was blown onto a ledge by an air vent. It stayed there for more than a day. This might sound like a non-sequitur, but when I googled that experiment the crisp packet came into my head straight away. We watched it for hours - it had reached a state of perfect equilibrium and it felt like it was never going to come down, just like the dropping pitch.
The crisp packet only lasted a day or so, but to us it was like pitch drop - a heroic attempt to fight back against the Universe's desire for constant movement, constant improvement, inducement to the recruitment of new mem...bers...
What have I become?
What would the crisp packet think of me?
A second starter from Wotton wins a bonus set on Malay culinary terms. Embarrassingly I didn't clean up on this despite having lived in Malaysia for six months. Oops. I also missed Reynolds number a minute later despite having a degree in chemical engineering (of which the Reynold's number is pretty much king). Not my day.
Hall did one of my favourite things on the music starter, prefacing his answer with 'I'm wrong, but'. He was, and Wotton punished him, but three negs from Christ Church allowed UCL to pull away over the next few minutes, building up a lead of 125 points.
The Oxford quartet closed out the game with a 75-20 run, bringing their score up to a respectable 130, but the damage had already been done.
UCL 200 - 130 Christ Church
If Christ Church want to beat Open then they'll have to cut down on the incorrect interruptions, but the potential is definitely there. Trinity vs UCL should be a banger, too. See you soon for Manchester vs Imperial, and for one last time, like and subscribe!
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