Hey of us! Apologies for this popping out late – alas the pedant family has been struck by a nasty chilly that has made maintaining with work this week fairly difficult. No publish this week, on account of it being Christmas time. Might you all have a Merry Christmas or a Blissful Holidays or just Pleasant Season’s Greetings, whichever is your desire!
We’ll be again subsequent week with some Tolkien (I’m planning to publish up the textual content of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” which I delivered this previous week on the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) after which we’ll be again to ending out our dialogue of hoplites within the New Yr.
Within the meantime, that is usually the spot within the calendar the place I do a little bit of ‘12 months in evaluation’ so let me bask in that. 2025 set a brand new file for visitors on the weblog – it appears like we’ll find yourself round 4.25m web page views, eventually dethroning 2022 which had held the file. The most well-liked publish this 12 months by far was “Why Archers Didn’t Volley Hearth” with greater than 140,000 views. The distant-runners-up (however nonetheless doing fairly properly) had been “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold,’” and “How Gandalf Proved Mightiest.” In the meantime I used to be pleasantly stunned that the collection on “Life, Work, Demise and the Peasant” additionally pulled in a good variety of readers regardless of being a fairly technical-in-the-weeds collection and not using a sturdy ‘pop-culture’ hook. It ended up the 12 months a bit wanting 300,000 web page views break up over its 10 elements and subparts.
Within the New Yr, my plan is to get to plenty of lingering Patron requests, together with the winners of the ACOUP Senate ballot. We’re going to get some dialogue of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, some on of how historical polytheism interacts with historical states and a few of mercenaries and different issues. I feel 2026 might be additionally the 12 months for the practically inevitable Educating Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV (in which you’ll be able to look ahead to some reward however maybe some sharper criticism of the Paradox strategy; HoI4 is a outstanding recreation however it has some outstanding issues too).
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