2024 Year-Ender

If you are aware of all Internet traditions, you remember that the end of the year is the time when Bookandsword Blog posts about the state of the author and the state of the blog. There is a lot to talk about!

The first of my series of articles on linen armour was finally printed by Boydell & Brewer (those who have done know). I wrote most of the second article on linen armour, and turned my conference paper on ancient sieges into another article. I sent my second book to some publishers in Canada, the USA, and the UK and hope to announce more details in the coming months.

I bought the materials, drafted, cut, and sewed two worstead garments in a few weeks last winter, then drafted, cut, and sewed a woollen garment in a few weeks this December. I made some shields and painter’s panels and am yet to experiment with gesso grosso or chalk gesso.

Correspondents asked me to comment on a scene from a draft of a fantasy novel, a sixteenth-century shipwreck, and on disc armour from Syria to Iberia. I geeked out with scholars about felt armour from Thucydides to Nicephoros Phocas, whether assegai and lancegay have the same etymology (ask my Doktorvater about Syria and Assyria).

While I no longer travel around the world like Carmen Sandiego, I attended a Zoom meeting at the Tower of London, and met Liv Albert the host of one of the biggest podcasts on ancient myth just before she moved out of my home town to try her luck in Toronto.

Some of the books and cloth which I had to leave behind in Austria were destroyed in a basement flood, and some job opportunities did not work out (although others did).

Traffic on the site was about the same this year as last year except for the massive load of attention from Hacker News (and the glorious link from the Army Rumour Service). Visits from Hacker News were about equal to visits from Google, and visits from the most popular personal site were about equal to visits from the most popular social media site (Facebook). Since there are many claims that independent sites have been downgraded by Google, and many new substack blogs chasing the glamorous and profitable carer of a pundit, I am proud that I have kept my readership.¹

This is the midnight—let no star
Delude us—dawn is very far.
This is the tempest long foretold—
Slow to make head but sure to hold. 

Stand by! The lull ’twixt blast and blast
Signals the storm is near, not past;
And worse than present jeopardy
May our forlorn to-morrow be. 

Rudyard Kipling, “The Storm Cone” (May 1932)

There is room for a diversity of strategies for helping the public evaluate claims about the past. All of it makes a contribution, no matter how local it might feel in the moment. After all, you don’t know whether one of those kindergartners won’t be an archaeology prof some day, or whether one of the puzzled onlookers on the subway, as you sing your Quetzalcoatl polka, accompanied by your friend on accordion (evidently), is in fact the editor of a major newspaper in your country.

Andre Costopoulos, 11 October 2024 https://archeothoughts.wordpress.com/2024/10/11/should-real-archeologists-appear-on-pseudo-archeological-tv-shows-like-ancient-aliens-and-ancient-apocalypse/

The end of the year is also a time when Book and Sword Blog talks about the state of the world and the state of the web, and as long as I have been blogging those have been gloomy. The Korean people and parliament have defeated their president’s attempt to impose martial law but are still fighting to get him out of office, the worst person in Syria is now in exile with a jumbo-jet full of greenbacks, and Vladimir Putin learned why naming a heavy-lift cargo ship the MV Sparta III is a bad idea. There is an indy web renaissance but corporate social media and the quadrumvirate of Visa-Mastercard-Paypal-Stripe still exist and become even more vicious. When people believe that the end-times are nigh, they don’t worry about how to keep their business or their grift going for decades to come. This year I saw many creative and articulate people announce that they were coaches or counselors or gurus because its so hard to get paid for creating and sharing knowledge or skills or beautiful things. And my local friends who stopped taking precautions against airborne infections keep getting sick.

People in cities with university educations tend to teach each other that they, collectively, should have opinions on all kinds of national, international, and global issues, but not how they, individually, should become informed and act to change them. People who are the loudest at calling their audiences to action often seem actively ignorant about how to get policies enacted (their way of writing and talking seems to hurt their cause and damage their coalitions). I don’t know how to spot the few who are effective unless I know them in person and are involved in their cause face to face, and I don’t talk about most of the things I do face to face on the Internet. A year ago I wrote about how “The 2010s were a difficult decade which destroyed our ability to believe in some solutions to problems, but did not provide alternative paths to follow.” Some thinky talky people who like corporate social media are whispering the black magic and rummaging around for the incantation to summon the blue fire but that path is not for me either.²

What I can do is reach an amorphous global community of scholars and impress people face to face. Those people are mostly in Victoria, BC so they are never going to offer me a six-figure advance on a book or set me up in a sinecure with a salary. But equally, they won’t make me push some fashionable nonsense in exchange for those resources, neither the desperate posturing of people with power in old institutions, nor the terrifying unmasking of people in new institutions who think the future belongs to them.

Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.

Dorothy Thompson, “Who Goes Nazi?” Harper’s Magazine, August 1941 https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/

I have or can buy or borrow more books than I can read (although books from Russia are harder to buy than they were a few years ago). I have a sword that dances like Excalibur and a steel cap that can laugh it to scorn. A short bike ride away along roads that were just a dream when Fort Victoria was founded ago I can buy groceries that would make Apicius salivate (have you ever cut open an apple grown without modern worm controls?) I can listen to a professional performance of any music composed in the last hundred years, and stare into the dreamy wine-dark depths of some spherical garnets, or the galactic sparkle of some high-grade lapis lazuli. My life is not conventional but it is luxurious and independent.

For this winter and spring I will try a bi-weekly schedule of blog posts as I focus on other types of writing and other areas of my life.

(scheduled 28 December 2024)

1. eg. Charlie Stross (“the blog had, until 2020, very heavy traffic — 300,000 unique visits/month, up to 5 million/year — putting it in the same league as a small-to-medium magazine website, not a regular blog. Lighter than boingboing or slashdot, but still at the high end for a personal blog. That has fallen off a long way since Google decided to declare war on blogs a couple of years ago”), Josuha Tyler of Giant Freakin Robot (“After relaunching GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT in 2019, the site grew to a readership of more than 20 million a month, through 2021 and 2022. Then Google decided they didn’t want independent publishers around anymore. … No one can find our site to read it so that 20 million unique visitors is now a few thousand a month. Nearly every independently owned entertainment news publisher is in the same situation, in one way or another.”), and Ben Fox of shepherd.com (a site which seems to exist to make money by affiliate links, so its downgrading by Google might have other reasons). Edit 2025-01-01: Satire site The Beaverton found that other sites altered the deal like they always do (“Our two main traffic drivers: Facebook and Twitter (we will never call it X) have algorithms that suppress political satire and do everything they can to stop people leaving their website to go to ours. Online advertising rates have plummeted. Instagram throttles any post with a link to our merch store.”) ↩︎
2. Examples: ¡Do Not Panic! (“The information didn’t matter. The information doesn’t matter!” – ponder how we all remember times when information changed our behaviour, but some shadowy others are supposed to be immune). Stripe Press via The PSmiths (If you embrace a bubble and blow it bigger and bigger, you can get rich like Isaac Newton in the South Sea bubble!) or Musa al Gharbi (deserves more thoughts than I can spare on a topic that I do not write in public about, but notice that his eloquent sermon is backed by one link per word pointing to the awesome evidential power of social psychology studies). ↩︎