Hey folks,
Welcome to another installment of my Q&A.
A number of you asked questions about me the person.
So I decided in order to be not too self indulgent, to do one video covering all of them.
Johnny! Roll the intro!
Jason Schneijder asks, what do I do as a job or education.
Funny you should ask Jason
I kinda do both.
I am a PhD student in history.
I am done taking classes, so now I work on my dissertation, while also making money as a teaching assistant, or TA, and research assistant.
Yes, some of my students have found my videos, but not many.
Jimmy Tyson asks what got me first interested in history.
Was it a historical event, a teacher, or something I always liked?
Mapper Animations asked roughly the same question.
This is a bit of a longer story.
My parents are history buffs, and as a child my summer was spent driving around the United States and Canada seeing any old house or battlefield they could find.
That likely got me most of the way there.
In high school, I thought I was going to be a musician, but I took history for fun.
When music didn’t work out, I had to get back on the education train.
At first I was really into sociology, and considered taking that, but around the time I needed to do applications I came across the podcast Hardcore History.
It nudged me just a bit in the right direction, and made me realize my whole life was basically pointing to history.
I applied and didn’t look back.
Irfaun asks, If you could live in any time period when would it be?
And if you could live in any country in the world what would it be?
I mean, I really like antibiotics and the internet, so now is pretty much the best time to be around, but that feels like cheating.
I think I’d want to be in the 1920s.
There was so much of the future of the world up for grabs, and important struggles to join.
I think I could have had a life of meaning there.
Now, everything is so ambiguous.
As for country, I often dream of moving to Europe.
I’d rather move to a social democracy like France or something, where workers and life is respected rather than hyper moralist, overworked North America.
Soliloquy asks, What are your favorite games (including video games as well as other types of games)?
Right now I play an embarrassing amount of Overwatch, and load up Stellaris when I need something I can do while watching videos or listening to podcasts.
I have other games I poke at now and again.
Diablo 3 when a new season starts.
Hearthstone, usually only arena, until I remember how much of a money grab it is.
Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, and potentially Hearts of Iron 4, usually whichever one got updates most recently.
I even gave Pokemon Go a stab the other night, and will probably buy No Man’s Sky and Crowfall.
I have become a little scatterbrained as a gamer lately.
Omar from Knowledgeable Reaction asks, what historical location/period are you studying for your graduate work?
My original interest was in studying pre-colombian Aztec spirituality, but when I was 2 years into my bachelor’s and found out that I would need to
1. Learn two languages, one of which is only spoken by remote indigenous tribes in Mexico,
2. Change majors from history to anthropology meaning basically restarting university, and
3. Switch schools because my liberal arts school had no anthropology department I decided against that.
I went looking for alternatives, and settled on a really cool project tackling the history of the digital age.
I’m studying how current events become history by looking at the September 11th attacks.
Short story, I’m a nineelevenologist, who also is trying to do history with data, analytics, and automation.
I’m weird.
NuclearElevator asks, “What is your political ideology?”
Listen to the lyrics of the song Imagine by John Lennon.
Basically me.
I’m often accused of being very politically naive, but I want a better world, and have short patience for politics.
Political writers I like are Noam Chomsky, Pyotr Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman.
So whatever pejorative for leftists you want to call me, liberal, socialist, communist, anarchist, hippie, sjw, cuck, I’ll wear as a badge of honor.
Equality for everyone, nobody ever has to get hurt, and liberation to live life as you see fit.
Seem’s pretty simple to me, and everyone else seems obsessed with making it complicated.
Thanks for these questions everyone.
Last weekend I just passed 2,000 subscribers.
The channel doubled in subscribership in less than a week.
So if you can, I have a little survey in the description that you can fill out to let me know what sort of content you want to see.
I have more Q’s to A over the next few weeks, but if you want to send along a question either by commenting or putting it in the google form in the description, and I can keep the series going as long as people want to know things.
Have a good one everybody.