A fairytale about the feeling of waiting on the edge of massive existential societal tragedies you are powerless to prevent, the way that we scapegoat the victims of broader societal failures as if they were the Cause, and the way that we treat children who will never grow into a “conventional” adulthood.
Thank you to everyone who followed along as I was sharing the pages for these past couple months! <3 :_:
German company Kärcher has used its high-powered pressure washers to create an enormous Godzilla on the Iwaya Kawauchi Dam in Saga Prefecture, Japan, to celebrate the dam’s 50th anniversary. Godzilla will remain on the wall for 2 to 3 months.
I’m glad I lived to see pressure washing art, that’s a massive upgrade from writing “wash me” on a dusty car’s window
When I criticize jk Rowling do not assume I always hated Harry Potter. I knitted hogwarts house scarves. I got my first binder to dress as Draco Malfoy for Halloween. I reread the books multiple times. I read probably every pottermore article there was at the time.
I’m not here to validate your smug feelings about not liking a children’s book series 20 years ago. I’m here to discourage others from spending money on it and to give myself and others words and space to work through some feelings. I’m a trans person that made Harry Potter one of my cornerstone interests. One of my favorite things. I’m not some cis person doing cope.
Harry Potter was a big thing. Like. Big in a way that’s difficult to fully understand. It still is. If you were caught up in it during your formative years it’s normal to need to process all of the horrid things now associated with it.
Having to burn down the house you grew up in is going to be hard even if it turns out that the house was always rotten from the inside out. Even if it turns out that the foundation was made of straw. But the destruction and deconstruction must happen if one hopes to move on and move forward. That’s why I talk about it at all.
60% of U.S. workers don’t have a 'quality job,’ according to new research: The results are 'sobering’
A majority, 60%, of U.S. workers don’t have a “quality job” that provides basic financial well-being, safety and other factors, according to new Gallup research that covers more than 18,000 workers across industries, occupations and types of employment.
“The top line results are definitely sobering,” says Maria Flynn, president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, which helped lead the research. “While the labor market is creating jobs, not enough of those jobs are really allowing workers to thrive.”
Hey folks! Apologies for this coming out late – alas the pedant household has been struck by a nasty cold that has made keeping up with work this week quite challenging. No post this week, on account of it being Christmas time. May you all have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holidays or simply Friendly Season’s Greetings, whichever is your preference!
We’ll be back next week with some Tolkien (I am planning to post up the text of my keynote, “Tolkien and Éowyn Between Two Wars” which I delivered this past week at the 2025 Prancing Pony Podcast Moot) and then we’ll be back to finishing out our discussion of hoplites in the New Year.
In the meantime, this is normally the spot in the calendar where I do a bit of ‘year in review’ so let me indulge in that. 2025 set a new record for traffic on the blog – it looks like we’ll end up around 4.25m page views, at last dethroning 2022 which had held the record.1 The most popular post this year by far was “Why Archers Didn’t Volley Fire” with more than 140,000 views. The distant-runners-up (but still doing quite well) were “Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold,'” and “How Gandalf Proved Mightiest.” Meanwhile I was pleasantly surprised that the series on “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” also pulled in a decent number of readers despite being a pretty technical-in-the-weeds series without a strong ‘pop-culture’ hook. It ended up the year a bit short of 300,000 page views split over its 10 parts and subparts.
In the New Year, my plan is to get to a lot of lingering Patron requests, including the winners of the ACOUP Senate poll. We’re going to get some discussion of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, some on of how ancient polytheism interacts with ancient states and some of mercenaries and other things. I think 2026 is probably also the year for the nearly inevitable Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV (in which you can look forward to some praise but perhaps some sharper criticism of the Paradox approach; HoI4 is a remarkable game but it has some remarkable problems too).
Everyone say thank you american indigenous people for cultivating corn, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, squash, and anything i missed. Makes life more meaningful globally
Yes actually I will not shut up about how these foods are from the Americas/cultivated by the people there, and did NOT exist in Asia, Africa or Europe before the 1490s, there was an absolute food revolution going on in the 1500s. Whatever you think is traditional food for your country? Check again, you’ve maybe only been using that ingredient for maybe 500 years. Here is the full list of crops, it is very interesting :))
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