Tag Archives: Trivia Crack

My Top 10 Most-Viewed “Don’t Blink” Blog Posts

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As someone who makes a living analyzing the data, I know better than most that the numbers don’t lie. However, when it comes to my own blog posts, I like to think that the entries I write that are near and dear to my heart will perform the best. And when they don’t? Well, something must be wrong with the data, obviously.

To be honest, I don’t go that far, but I sure am glad that I have a decent analytics program on the backend of my blog that gives me the hard data. If not for that, I might convince myself that my readers liked my fortune cookie blog post more than they actually did.

Tonight, based on complete objectivity and in the spirit of the 10th anniversary of this blog, I am going to countdown my top 10 blog posts according to all-time page views. My personal top 10 blog posts will be revealed later this month but this evening is about you and not me. So let’s pull the 10 most-viewed blog posts out of the 2,000 that have been written over the past decade.

10. Why I Don’t Like Trivia Crack (Jan. 11, 2015) – Remember this app? Well, I hated it, and judging by the popularity of this blog post I think a lot of other people did too.

Remember this? I wasn’t the biggest fan of Trivia Crack.

9. Happy 32nd Anniversary, Mom and Dad (Aug. 16, 2013) – I think my parents just have a lot of friends because I have no other idea why a simple blog post like this would rack up so many views. Perhaps it was the clown photo? This summer they will celebrate their 40th anniversary.

8. To Buy the Bucket of Popcorn or Not? (Jan. 13, 2014) – In this post I debated back and forth about whether I should purchase a $19.75 tub of popcorn from Carmike Cinemas that would be refillable for just $3.75 throughout the year. Obviously I wasn’t the only one who faced the dilemma. Read he post to find out the decision I made.

A few years after writing this blog post, I ended up buying the bucket and refillable soda cup too

7. Feeling Bad for Coach Carty (March 31, 2015) – During the Spring of 2015, I wrote a series of blog posts in support of Sean Carty, my high school football coach who was screwed out of his job. The posts were widely shared in the Mead community and I like to think that they played a small part in Carty’s reinstatement as head football coach.

Me standing with Sean Carty in Missoula probably in 2012 or 2013

6. Our “Bar Rescue” Tour (March 1, 2015) – Sidney and I went on a nerdy tour that all “Bar Rescue” diehards dream about. We traveled to North Carolina and visited three different bars that Jon Taffer transformed on his show. What an experience!

Sidney and I inside Klick’s 22, one of the bars featured on “Bar Rescue.”

5. The Battle of the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Creams (May 15, 2016) – It brings a smile to my face that this post still racks in the views on a daily basis because it was so much fun to write. Sid blind tested five different chocolate chip cookie dough ice creams and ranked her favorites. The results will shock you!

This is the lineup of different cookie dough ice creams that Sidney tasted.

4. Instagram Spam (April 9, 2013) – Hey, guess what? Instagram had a spam problem back in 2013 too. I sounded off about the different types of spam that plagued Instagram and by doing so struck a chord with thousands and thousands of other people who were fed up as well.

I wrote extensively about Instagram spam in a 2013 blog post.

3. The Pros and Cons of Living in Myrtle Beach (May 3, 2015) – This blog post helped establish me as some type of Myrtle Beach relocation guru. I can’t count all the direct messages I received (and continue to receive) from people asking questions about the city. The comments on the post itself are also vast. I realized the influence of this post one day when I was giving a presentation at CCU. After I finished, a new employee came up to me and said she had read my blog post, consulted with me about some questions she had, and then made the decision to move to Myrtle Beach based off the post and what I told her.

Living in Myrtle Beach is awesome, but it has its pros and cons just like any other place.

2. A True Professional: Barry Anderson (September 25, 2012) – Barry Anderson was the best mascot in the NBA during his many years behind the Benny the Bull mask in Chicago. Prior to the Chicago Bulls, Barry was Monte at the University of Montana. Although my time in the athletic department didn’t overlap with his, Barry would return for Homecoming during the years that I was running the mascot program. I got to know him and respect him. This blog post I wrote that highlighted the man behind the mask was read enthusiastically and frequently by the thousands of Benny the Bull super fans.

This guy is a hero to many.

1. The Truth About a “Bar Rescue” Experience (April 17, 2016) – The opportunity came open to explore some questions I had about my favorite show and I was able to convert it into the most-read (by a large margin) blog post in the history of Don’t Blink. Each day this blog post receives tons of traffic, especially on Sundays when marathons and new episodes of “Bar Rescue” air. It is frequently linked on fan forums and reality TV message boards. I would like to thank Maria Bedient for telling me her story and setting the record straight on so many things. This is simply the blog post that keeps on giving.

Murphy’s Law in Reno is depicted on the fifth season of “Bar Rescue” and is the bar where Maria Bedient worked.

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Talk about random, right? One thing I have learned about authoring a wide-ranging blog is that you never completely know what will resonate with your audience. After 10 years, except for “Bar Rescue,” I am not 100% sure what will become a fan favorite for years to come and what will bomb. It is a good thing that I have patient readers who tolerate the many posts that don’t always hit the mark. This has been fun! Don’t Blink.

Why I Don’t Like Trivia Crack

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Right around the start of December, one of our student workers told me to download a certain game on my smart phone. Alexandra advised me to get Trivia Crack, a quiz app that allows users to test their brains against the brains of friends and/or strangers in head-to-head matchups. I took her recommendation and downloaded the game.

This is the logo for Trivia Crack, a very popular app out right now.

This is the logo for Trivia Crack, a very popular app out right now.

At first I was only playing Alexandra. Then I went home to Spokane and introduced my brother to it and soon enough I was playing him. Then some other people joined in. Later, my girlfriend hopped in on the fun. More random Facebook friends started challenging me. Before I knew it, I had several Trivia Crack games going on at once. During the holiday break I attended to all of the various individual games like I was one of those chess masters going from board to board. But then my holiday break ended and I flew back to the South and work started again. At about this time, I stopped caring about Trivia Crack.

When I went from lots of free time to very little free time, it was a no-brainer to cut back dramatically on Trivia Crack. But even if my holiday break was extended and I got even more time to live like a worthless bum I probably would have still cut back.  Why? Because Trivia Crack just isn’t a very good app.

My Trivia Crack profile.

My Trivia Crack profile.

If you can imagine a cross between Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire smashed into a smart phone app, you got yourself Trivia Crack. The goal is to correctly answer a multiple choice question from six different categories across varying disciplines before your opponent does. To help along the way, based upon the amount of points you have, you are afforded the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire equivalent of lifelines where you can increase your chances of guessing the correct answer. You can chat with your opponent during the match and you can share pretty much every aspect of the game to your social media accounts.

Sounds fun, right? So what makes it not a very good app? Let me start with one word: Ads. Trivia Crack is overrun with long, annoying ads at every corner. Now I used to enjoy Kate Upton in her Game Of Thrones commercials but Trivia Crack pretty much killed that for me. I have been forced probably no less than 1,000 times to watch Kate yelling at the top of her lungs while riding her horse through the screen of my iPhone. It has lost its luster. But this is just one of the ads. Trivia Crack has way more ads than your normal app and these commercials get in the way of the game flow.

Trivia Crack also has the most annoying sound effects you can imagine. If you don’t have your phone on silent and you open up the app you will hit yourself in frustration. The theme music for Trivia Crack is brutal. The sounds produced for spinning the wheel, picking answers, choosing wrong answers, choosing right answers, losing games, and winning games will drive you crazy. Sometimes you can’t escape these annoying sounds because whereas you were considerate enough to silence your phone, your friend (or brother) sitting right next to you playing the game wasn’t.

Additionally, the game zaps the battery from your phone like no other. When I open the app or when I spin the wheel, I can just feel the percent of my charge going down. If you were on a 30 minute taxi ride, you would do your phone’s battery a big disservice by playing Trivia Crack non-stop the whole journey.

But the absolute worst part of Trivia Crack centers directly on what the game is all about…the questions. The word “consistency” is an absolute afterthought in this game. You can go from the most laughable easy question in the world to the most obscure, specific miniscule piece of knowledge that even a genius wouldn’t know. When I was in Spokane, my brother turned his iPhone in my direction to a Trivia Crack question that had a photo of the American flag with the text reading “What country does this flag represent?” At the other end of the spectrum, I have received a question asking me to identify the age at which some random composer started to play the cello with the options being 2, 3, 4, or 5 years. I have had questions asking me for such specific geographic information in some random country that it wouldn’t even make the Double Jeopardy $2,000 clue. I am not kidding you, the questions in Trivia Crack are absolutely all over the board. I honestly think the questions compromise the integrity of the game. I know there can’t be professionals writing them, but maybe the users who submit the questions should get certified in something.

An average question in Trivia Crack.

An average question in Trivia Crack.

Trivia Crack was fun during the span where I had nothing to do for 14 days but it doesn’t deserve my time now that I am a functioning member of society again. If changes are made, I might give it 15 minutes of my time late at night while laying in bed but until then, no thanks. Don’t Blink.