The Public Square for April 2025

Attention Citizens!

A little housekeeping up front.  

Patreon is requiring all creators who are getting paid per-video to switch over to a monthly billing schedule.  No action is required on your part, but I just figured that I’d mention it here just in case anybody missed the news.  I am scheduled to make the switch on June 1st, 2025.  If you’re interested, I’ve explained all of this in more detail over on the Patreon.

With that out of the way, this month I’ve decided to do a quick Q&A with some of my subscribers from Patreon.  

Q&A

Justin Frese asks…How much more do you plan to cover Rome? Do you think you’ll clear the rule of Augustus and call it there?

• I’m very careful never to plan more than 2 or 3 videos ahead.  So with that context you should know that I’m not actively working on anything related to ancient Rome at the moment.  

  I do that because I don’t want to pre-commit myself to covering any subjects if I don’t have the fire in the belly.  I think the videos turn out better if I follow wherever my interest and enthusiasm is taking me at the moment.  

  With that being said, I do want to eventually get around to covering Roman Emperors.  But whenever that happens, the tone of the videos will definitely change.  

  With the Rome videos I made so far, I could reliably tell you what happened month-to-month from like… 59 BCE to 27 BCE.  The ancient sources in the late Republic are EXCELLENT, unparalleled at any other time in Roman history.  Once we get into Augustus’s reign, the ancient sources start to deteriorate dramatically.  By the year 12 BCE, there are entire years where we’re mostly like “yeah we don’t really know what happened.”  The primary sources get spotty and unreliable.  By the time we get into the 2nd century it’s even worse, there are entire decades where we don’t really know what happened.  I’m thinking specifically of the reign of Antininus Pius.  And then in the 3rd century it gets even worse, we’re stuck making a bunch of educated guesses and relying on archeological evidence.  

  That’s a long winded way of me saying that if I were to start covering Roman Emperors, the videos would begin to move faster and faster, as there is less and less reliable information available.  It would be impossible to go into as much detail as I did with the Caesar videos.  Since that “shift in tone” begins around the year 31 BCE with the Battle of Actium, that seemed like a natural spot to take a break.  

  I think that eventually I will go back and cover more Rome, but again, I only plan 2 or 3 videos ahead, and none of those videos are currently about Rome.  

Svennie asks…Do you think it’s sensible for one to think of Mark Antony as an Emperor? With the hindsight of how later power sharing agreements in Imperial history worked?

• I wouldn’t call Marc Antony an Emperor since he had very little power over the Senate and People of Rome, but I do think that since Octavian was unable to project his power to the east, and Antony was unable to project his power to the west, it would be logical to say that from… let’s say Philippi to Actium, 42 BCE to 31 BCE, the Roman Empire was functionally split into two separate states.  I think I reflected this when I made the videos, I showed them as basically separate states on the map.  

Lewis Mullarkey asks…Do you ever feel like you never get to cover all the details you want to in a video? Is there a process on what gets included for you to tell the story?

• I always write the long (and boring) version of the video, and then cut it through revisions until it feels right.  So I never get to cover all of the details, but that’s by design.  I have difficulty seeing what does and doesn’t belong until I have it written in a draft in front of me.  

  It’s just part of the process though, it’s never bothered me.  

  The one exception is the Work video, where late in the process I lifted like 7-10 solid minutes of stuff that I really liked, because it killed the whole flow to go on a 7-10 minute detour.  I think I’m going to spin that topic off and make it into its own video, I’m still workin’ on it.  

Jakov Vodanović asks…Would you rather have been born randomly in the Middle Ages or randomly today? The question is motivated by your video "Work".

• I mean, if I were randomly born in the Middle Ages there’s a 50% chance that I would have died as a child, so I would much rather be alive thankyouverymuch.  

  But the point of the video was that the Industrial Revolution was terrible for workers.  Would I rather work in a dangerous 18th century textile mill for 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week, or do literally anything else?  I would rather do literally anything else.  At least Medieval serfs were allowed to live their lives.  

  Speaking of cutting things out through revision, the the first draft of the Work video had a long section about the Factory Act of 1833.  I had to write it all out before I could see that it was kinda beyond the scope of the video.  

Robert Griffith asks…It appears that over time, your more recent videos have a bit more commentary showing your own views on the topic covered, rather than just a straight telling of the facts. Is it just that you're more confident than when your channel was new? Or do you feel like this is a change your audience appreciates?

• Is that true?  It might be.  I think I’m just better at writing now.  I never want the videos to sound like I’m reading a Wikipedia article, it’s important that my own analysis informs the tone of the video.  I wouldn’t really describe that as “commentary,” it’s more like “I’ve spent time looking at all of the facts, and these are my conclusions.”  

  If anything, I’ve learned to be less subtle in my writing.  If I want the audience to walk away with a certain conclusion, it’s not enough to just bury it in the middle of a paragraph.  I need to say it, then show it, then point at it, and then say it again.  

  A recent example that comes to mind is the The July Revolution video.  The stuff about the French state becoming less stable as Charles X turned towards authoritarianism was not present in the early drafts.  That was the big conclusion that I came to as I did all of the research for that video, which was supported by most of the historians that I was reading.  I felt that understanding that point was the key to understanding the entire period, and so late in the writing process I went through the script and really hammered at it.  I was kinda hinting at it in the early drafts, but I never actually stopped and hit the audience over the head with it.  

  Does the audience appreciate this?  Uh, I honestly don’t care.  The work speaks for itself.  :)

Luna Eris asks…I thought your video on the Haudenosaunee was very compelling. Have you considered returning to the western hemisphere and covering the state apparatus and command economy of the Inca?

• Thanks!  I have a special fondness for that video too, I really enjoyed writing it.  

  I’ve had A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru, by Louis Baudin sitting unread on my bookshelf for a couple of years now.  The plan has been to read that book and see if that book sparks an idea for a video, but I haven’t got around to it yet.  

rasmus sjørslev asks…Do you have a video topic you have tried to make multiple times but never been able to make work? 

• Not really.  I make a real effort to read widely, and by the time I start to actively research a subject I usually have a pretty good idea of what direction I’m going in and which books I’ll be leaning on.  I never start the actual research process if I’m still 50/50 on whether or not it’s going to turn into a video.

  I will say that a few years ago I got really interested in the British movement to abolish slavery.  I kinda thought that there might be something there, but I couldn’t really figure out how I would make an interesting video about 50 years of political activism, so it never became a video.  But I never formally started the research process, I was just reading for my own purposes.  A tiny bit of that stuff made it into one of the Congress of Vienna videos, just because I found it interesting.

  But now, I think I have a better idea of what I should do if I want to talk about the British abolition of slavery.  That may make an appearance in a future video.  

There were A LOT of good questions, I just picked a few of the ones that stood out.  If I didn’t get to you, despair not, we’ll do this again some time.

Progress Update:

The script for the next video is done!  My math says that it’s going to be approximately 55 minutes, which is…long…but that’s just how it is.  

I’ve been slightly sick with a sore throat this week so I’ve been putting off recording the voiceover, but that should happen within the next few days.  Then I’ll be spending a while editing the audio and making last minute changes to the script before I lock it in.  Both the audio stage and the animation stage should take a little longer than usual, just because dealing with a ~55 minute monster makes everything take longer.

Books I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine, by Barry Strauss

  • I remember reading Strauss’s book The Death of Caesar years ago, whenever it was that I made the video about Caesar’s assassination, and being really impressed with how well written and fun and kinda cinematic it was.  I bought Ten Caesars way back then and it’s been sitting on my to-be-read shelf ever since.  

    The book is 10 short biographies of 10 Roman Emperors, ~30 pages each.  I expected to just breeze through it and enjoy the writing and not really learn very much, but I DID learn stuff, and it’s kinda great?  I somehow didn’t know before that when Augustus died, he posthumously adopted his wife Livia, which obviously has really powerful implications about her sharing political power with her son Tiberius.  Did not know that before!  

    I always struggle with the Roman Imperial family trees, they make me a little cross-eyed, especially with all of the inter-marrying.  I always need to cheat to remember which one was Germanicus and which one was Britannicus.  Something about how Strauss wrote it really made it click for me this time though.  Very helpful.  

    He was also very rude toward Edward Gibbon throughout the book, which was amusing.  

    Apart from this book, a very unlucky month for reading!  Four abandoned DNF books!  Frown!  Sad!  

Films I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• The Red Shoes (1948)

  • It was raining for days and days and days so in desperation I rewatched a movie about GIVING YOUR LIFE TO ART, LET’S GO.  

    I think I’ve seen The Red Shoes 7 or 8 times, and it’s one of those movies that just keeps getting better the more you watch it.  Once you know the plot the movie gets better, and then once you know the recurring imagery and the symbolism it gets even better, and then once you’ve memorized the various musical leitmotifs it gets even better.  

    The ballet sequence might be the greatest thing to ever be captured on film, every time I watch it it honestly makes me want to cry just from the POWER OF ART.  And then the ending that calls back to it…  I can’t think of another movie like this, it’s really transcendent.  I watched it again the following evening like a true freak.

• The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

  • I hate it when I see a mirror version of myself on a bus and then drop dead.  Happens more often than you’d think.

    A perfect movie, but I’m unlike The Red Shoes, I’m too stupid to understand the ending.  

Music I’ve Recently Enjoyed:

• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

  • I’m a long time Nick Cave enjoyer, and Wild God (2024) might be his best album in 20 years.  The song Wild God is the one I keep on coming back to, but the whole album is great.  Do I really understand what it’s about yet?  Not really, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the music.  Now I’m in a Nick Cave mood and so I’ve been listening to Get Ready For Love on repeat.  

• The New Pornographers

  • This month while I was writing I listened to a lot of Twin Cinema (2005), and for some reason for several days in a row it was just The Bleeding Heart Show on repeat.  It worked, the writing got done.  

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America Delenda Est.