It likely isn't terribly noticeable, but we've been slowing down here.
From Life Magazine, January 6, 1910.
The Great War is wrapping up and with it daily posts almost certainly will as well. It's not that we haven't enjoyed tracking things on a frequently or even daily basis from the Columbus Raid forward, it's just that we have no intention whatsoever of going forward with that sort of thing from November 11, 1918 on. This isn't "This Day In History" blog. We've already done a "Today In Wyoming's History" blog and that is more than enough (and we still add to that from time to time). Indeed that one turned into a book (which you should buy. . . Christmas is coming up).
I did give some thought to continuing on with this sort of thing after World War One to catch the end of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic but I'm not going to do it. History doesn't work that way. It may seem that things are compartmentalized, but they aren't. For Americans the Punitive Expedition flowed into World War One, which was my point in keeping this blog going like I was on frequent posts, often with century old newspapers, and then the Spanish Flu came up in the midst of it and because of it, but the so did Prohibition, and so did the revelry of the Jazz Age. That's how life really works, but that's not how a student can approach it really.
So as we "countdown" the days to the Armistice, we're also counting down the days of daily posts of the "today. . ." type entry.
You may have noticed that things have actually slowed up already. That was inevitable as the end of the war became sort of a vague running fight as it became obvious that the Central Powers were done. So there were no more big battles, and hence none to report on. The end of World War One, in fact, began to resemble the end of World War Two, in which units simply advanced day after day, some units encountering stiff resistance, some encountering surrendering German (or Austrian, or Hungarian, or Ottoman) troops. So that sort of entry has slowed up. After the last really huge event of the war, which has slowly started, the Kiel Rebellion, there isn't a lot to read about as the war was mostly just Allied soldiers marching on foot and getting into occasionally fights. Things didn't happen more quickly, quite frankly, as in World War One all of the armies mostly advanced by foot still. By World War Two, just a little over two decades later, the Allies were advancing every day in 6x6 trucks, which speeds things up a lot. So blog entries here, while still daily, have actually slowed up.
But other things have as well. For one thing, after three years (also about the start of the Punitive Expedition) we deleted our Reddit Account.
Deleting on Reddit means that the account is truly gone. You can't restore a deleted Reddit account.
I had really mixed feelings about Reddit to start with, and I still do. I mostly don't like it. It claims to be the Front Page of the Internet but it's really the 7th Grade Home Room While the Teacher is Out of the Classroom, of the Internet. It's a mess and mostly deserving of a poor reputation. But I did like the "100 Years Ago Today" Subreddit. Nonetheless, we're out the door and not posting there anymore. And we can't, as we deleted the account.
Deleting it wipes out the temptation that would have been there to keep on keeping on, and frankly I was getting sick of Reddit. The point at which you feel you have to post on some page on the net daily like that is when you should get out and wipe out the temptation. I can post here when I want to. I don't have to every day and in fact there's been years prior to 2015 when months would go by between posts. I don't see that happening now (unless a certain event which I'm hopeful for does occur, in which case there will be big changes here indeed), but that is the case. Being a blogger is supposed to be fun avocation for when you can't be outside, not a job. A lot of Redditors don't seem to realize that.
Indeed, that's why in my view even the allegedly very best sites on Reddit are mostly junk. They're prisoners of their moderators who take their positions all too seriously and often, if you can check up on them, have thin qualifications indeed. The supposedly good Ask Historians subreddit, for example, mostly wipes out posts with dictatorial moderating. If you bother to look it up, you'll find that one of the moderators is a grad student studying the historiography of the sexual history. . . something only an academic could care about and which qualifies you not to be a moderator, but rather a barista at Starbucks, barely. In that fashion the subreddit reflects the nature of academic historians who tend to detest historians who aren't academics, as if they own history, even though their own fields of study often render their work, frankly, utterly meaningless. I haven't checked up on all of them and there's no reason for me too, I should note, but this is sort of emblematic of the that site, which is supposedly one of the best Reddit has to offer.
Not that I'm picking on that one alone. The History Subreddit is junk as well with no effective controls, which is typical of most of Reddit (and oddly has one of the same moderators). The Subreddit dedicated to Catholicism is a Rad Trad war zone in which absurd flights of fancy about returning the world to a mythical golden age when the world was ruled by pacific Catholic monarchs who cared only about their people are taken seriously, even though thinking like that retards serious thinking. The economic Subreddits are haunted by adherents to all of the ridiculously absurd adherents of every wacko version of Socialism that were the pets of 19th Century Socialist thinkers who mostly sat around Paris coffee shops smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee before switching to wine about 9:30 in the morning, discussing their latest socialist/anarchist/winniethepoohist theories before stumbling to the beds of their paramours around 1:00 p.m (although the Distributist subreddit had some thoughtful posts on it fairly regularly). About the only thing worthwhile on Reddit is the 100 Years Ago Today sub, but as for about a week I was vaguely feeling "well I have to post there", it was time to make it so that I couldn't. About the only thing really left worth noting was the daily death toll for British Empire nurses due to the Spanish Flu, and that was just depressing.
I thought about doing the same thing with the Twitter feed we have here, but it doesn't have the same "gosh we must post" aspect to it and is easier to ignore. The Pinterest account associated with this blog is the same way. There is one, but it mostly serves as theoretical advertising back to this site when we have an interesting photograph in a post that we accordingly link back to that site. Pinterest, quite frankly, is even bigger junk than Reddit, which is saying a lot, as its a random mishmash of crap.
Anyhow, this blog will in fact live on after November 11, 2018, and it will feel weird not track daily events. But at that point my purpose for doing that will have departed and I won't keep doing that.
This returns us back to the original focus of the blog, which was theoretically research, or actually research, for a novel that was set in the Punitive Expedition. While starting off on that it occurred to me that my desire to be accurate in the novel was difficult as there were a lot of things I just didn't know about, particularly on the details and warp and woof of daily living. The blog has served to fill in a lot of those details and I will say that the 100 Years Ago sub did as well (as has the great A Hundred Years Ago blog which we'll continue to lurk on and post entries back here on), but mostly accidentally for the Subreddit as I posted photographs that I started looking up in 2015 and then read the articles, mostly those posted by a Redditor called "The Alaskan" who wrote really interesting posts on it. He dropped off, however, and then reappeared, and then dropped off, even though he's a site moderator (and that was a well moderated site. . . but one now advertising for moderators. Another frequent poster called Michael Noir also did interesting daily posts but he suddenly dropped off as well (another reason for us to depart, as we don't want to be the only one carrying the ball on it and certainly don't want to feel obligated to do so). Perhaps everyone in the group who posted regularly came due to World War One, and indeed the sub itself notes that it was set up to study WWI by the originator, much like this blog was set up for a similar purpose. If so, perhaps it's served its limited purpose.
Anyhow, with the end of the Great War this thread will return more to its original format, which will also mean reduced posting. Frankly, if it carried on with daily stuff, it'd get really boring, if it hasn't already. That may mean that the readership drops off, but we're not a subscription based newspaper with bills to pay from our daily publication, so if that's the case, so be it.
Another reason, we'd note, that this we're doing this is that life is busy and we've been busy with life. Blogs are just a hobby and once a person feels compelled to blog they're a problem. We've had a super busy couple of years and as a result it's been surprising that we've posted so frequently. Btu there are things to do, and they need to be attended to. So focus here has been dropping off.
Not that the blog will go away. Rather, the posts will be more like they were the other day when we ran a couple on hunting during World War One. They'll go back to focusing on that earlier time, but not on an anniversary type basis.
