2025 is just about wrapped up, isn’t it? What a year it has been for everyone. But also a big one for me.
I finished and published a new book. I visited (for both work and pleasure) Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Missouri, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and Chicago (again), among other places. Participated in a performance by the Kronos Quartet. Sold a house. Moved to France. I visited Luxembourg, flew back to New Jersey for a week for an event, and gave (two) talks at the Sorbonne, was on a panel at Cité internationale universitaire, and did a book launch at Sciences Po. And I did a bunch of podcasts and interviews relating to the book.
By my count, I published 19 “substantial” posts to Doomsday Machines (and one in-depth post to Restricted Data). That’s about once every three weeks on average, which is both a bit less than I intended and a bit more than I expected given the disruptions of preparing to move.
Each of the posts have so far received between 3.7k views (my most recent one, Christmas at Ground Zero) and over 7.5k views. Most of them are around 6k views. Which is pretty good, I think? (My most popular post on the blog, so far, is the one I did on The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”, in November 2024, with 64k views, but that one was almost predestined to go viral due to its subject matter.)
My two most popular posts of 2025 were: Civil Defense and Preppers, and Trinity Goes to Hollywood, both with over 7k views.
I don’t really have “personal favorites” but I was also really pleased with What if NUKEMAP had been made in the 1960s? and The first portable digital nuclear weapons effects computer, just because the tech is fascinating and to my knowledge had not been written about before.
In the new year, I would like to round how my “brief history of Preppers” series with a post on the rise of “Survivalism” in the 1970s, and then there will be one more post about the transition from Survivalists to Preppers the 1990s and early 2000s. I have a few more interviews scheduled — they take more preparation than one might think, and take longer to edit that one might think, but I really enjoyed my interview with Cheryl Rofer. I have a couple on my mind for the spring, if I can make the schedules align.
I’m hoping to write about some more nuclear fiction soon, as well; I have a lot of thoughts and notes, some on recent media (I’d like to write something on both Fallout and The Last of Us, as post-apocalyptic games turned into shows) and some less-recent media. I’d also like to write some more posts about the game, which is often on my mind but a lot of the work has been put on “pause” as a result of the move (and some difficulties getting students hired, sigh). I have a number of other things that are in states of partial completion, as always, that just need to be pushed out the door.
Paid subscribers also received 32 Weekly Wasteland Wrap-ups (including this one), which is a little less than my target of once per week, but the summer of 2025 in particular was an overly-busy one on my end (selling the aforementioned house, moving to the aforementioned France, etc.).
I am not going to try and count how many photos of Lyndon were posted (there is only so much time in this world) but my sense is that I post between 1-3 per wrap-up, so it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 or so. (For this year-in-review, you get a bonus photo! I want to give the people what they crave!)
Overall, it has been quite a big year for us, a big juncture in life. The preparation for moving was exhausting in every way, and so of course was the actual move, but it has been really quite wonderful once executed, in spite of the inherent uncertainty and the challenges involved. In most ways it has been easier than I expected, but I tried to go into it with realistic expectations…
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