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Fireside Friday, August 14, 2026 (On Financing Pre-Modern Navies)
Hey folks, fireside this week as I get ready for the start of a new semester! For this week, I wanted to talk briefly about the wrinkles that financing navies poses with regards to our worldbuilding
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part Va: Putting It Together
This is the first half of the final part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa, IVb, Va) of our apparently five-part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized, in particular
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Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey)
Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVb: Cohesion
This is the second half of the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III, IVa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. Last week
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IVa: Leadership
This is the fourth part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are organized. We’ve talked about how armies
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Fireside Friday, July 10, 2026 (On the Chud Vision of Roman History)
Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’ve been a bit behind because we had some family travel followed by an issue with a water leak in the basement which has pushed me out of my normal home office space
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Collections: On the Declaration of Independence
Hello again all. It is once again the week of July 4th and so, as is customary here, I am going to use this week’s post to talk about the United States. This is going to be a bit more of an open
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying For It
This is the third part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. In the
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIb: Officials, Contractors and Professionals
This is the second half of the second part (I, IIa, IIb) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part IIa: Mobilization without Administration
This is the second part (I, IIa) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. While I hope
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Collections: Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend
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Gap Week: May 29, 2026
Hey folks! I had a few other projects that I really needed to get finished this week, which left me with limited time to put a blog post together. My plan for next week is something for the
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My Blog Has Moved to Substack
As I wrote at the beginning of 2025, the previous year turned out to be quite a challenge. It took me a while to recover and, then, to deal with the “stuff” that accumulated while I was
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My 2024
The year that has just ended was personally very difficult for me. First, in April my wife developed a very serious medical condition—it was really touch-and-go, and she ended up spending ten days
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War in Ukraine VI: Adding Economic Power to the Attrition Model
In the previous post of the series, I promised to show how both the Economic Power and Casualties Rates hypotheses can be combined within the same computational model. Yesterday, the SocArxiv finally
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War in Ukraine V: Alternative Hypotheses
One thing I realized since I posted my blog series on the War in Ukraine (last one here) in July is that previously I explicitly addressed only one hypothesis (which predicts a win for Russia). But
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When A.I. Comes for the Elites
The remarkable success of ChatGPT and other generative A.I. has inflamed the already roiling debate about how the rise of machines will affect workers, and ultimately shape our societies. Doomers
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Fall 2023: An Update
The last update on “What I am working on” was posted a year ago, and it is high time to do another. Last year was very intense. It started with preparing for the publication of my trade book,
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My African Vacation
I went to Africa for the first time more than 30 years ago, and I was immediately hooked. Now I try to get there every year for a mind-clearing vacation — no work, just enjoying the countryside and
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War in Ukraine IV: Projections
In this installment I will use the ideas discussed in previous posts to make projections. A projection is different from a forecast (and, certainly, from a prophecy) in that it is not an attempt to