Hey guys! Apologies for the late turnout – sadly the Pedant household has had a nasty cold which has made it quite difficult to keep up with work this week. No post this week, being Christmas time. Wishing you all a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or just a friendly season, whichever you prefer!
We’ll be back next week with some Tolkien (I’m thinking of posting the text of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” that I delivered last week at 2025 The Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) and then we’ll be back to finish our discussion of hoplites in the new year.
In the meantime, this is usually the point in the calendar where I do a little ‘year in review’ so let me indulge. 2025 set a new record for blog traffic – it looks like we’ll hit around 4.25 million page views, finally dethroning 2022 which held the record. This year’s most popular post Until now With over 140,000 views was “Why Archers Didn’t Fire a Volley”. Distant runners-up (but still doing quite well) are “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold'” and “How Gandalf Proved the Mightiest.” Meanwhile I was pleasantly surprised that the “Life, Work, Death and Farmer” series also attracted a decent readership, despite being a pretty technical series without a strong ‘pop culture’ hook. It ended the year with just under 300,000 page views, divided into its 10 sections and sub-sections.
In the new year, my plan is to get a lot of mentor applications, including the winners of the ACOUP Senate Poll. We’re going to have some discussions about the end of the Late Bronze Age, some on how ancient paganism interacted with ancient kingdoms and some with mercenaries and other things. I think 2026 is also an almost inevitable year. Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV (In which you expect some praise but perhaps some sharp criticism of the paradox approach. HoI4 is a remarkable game but also has some notable problems).
Published by
View all posts by Bret Devereaux
Published
