Didactic Mind, Ep 116: Train of Consequences

Happy 2024, brothers and sisters! May the peace and blessings of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with you this year. The podcast that follows is, admittedly, a couple of weeks late - I originally intended to record it on New Year's Day, but that didn't happen, due to family commitments and other things. Nonetheless, here we are with the relevant podcast to kick off 2024.

The first thing to say is, New Year's day marked - no joke - ELEVEN YEARS since I started doing this shitposting thing. That is not an exaggeration. The original Didact's Reach Blogger site launched on Jan 1, 2013. That evolved eventually into the current Didactic Mind site, podcast, and Telegram channel. So we are now into the twelfth year of this whole... journey, if you want to call it that.

Most blogs and sites do not last more than 11 weeks, never mind 11 years. As I point out here, I do not do this for anyone other than myself - I literally do not care what most people think about my writing - but it is nonetheless rather rewarding to learn that other people get value from what I do, and appreciate the output.

So, as always, thank you very much for your continued patronage, site visits, comments, and community participation. If you want to engage more with the content, then be sure to join the Didactic Mind Telegram channel, which is quite a lot of fun for pretty much everyone involved. It is a small, but highly lively, community that regularly engages in hilarious banter and cross-posting of ideas. And Telegram is simply a great platform that combines the best features of Twitter, WhatsApp, and a long-form site, while offering other features that are far better than any of its competitors.

As usual, I will provide analytics for my site and podcast here, so you can get an idea of how this site stacks up against everyone else (hint: not great, but that's fine).

• Total pageviews of 153K in 2023, which is a 41% decrease against 2022's 260K, and is unsurprising given the much lower rate of poasting;
• Total of 31,602 unique visitors across the site, which is down about 27% relative to 2022's 43.6K, and again, for the same reasons;
• Total of 440 comments across 255 posts, which is a decrease of 39% and 16%, respectively;
• Posts averaged 1,086 words each, making them significantly shorter than what we saw in 2022;

The geographic distribution of the site's readership continues to be highly global, but predominantly US-centric:

The Didactic Mind podcast also had a decent, though not great, year - due largely to much lower frequency of recording:

• 2,623 total downloads, down 26.2% against 2022, with over 8,500 total downloads all-time;
• A more or less steady subscriber base of about 126 Telegram members of the Didactic Mind channel;

All in all, a year of struggles, at least in some ways, and I go over some of these in the podcast. I also discuss what 2024 might hold for us, and how we can prepare for what promises to be a very challenging year ahead.

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Protect Yourself From Big Tech

I make some pretty incendiary statements in this podcast, and in most of my podcasts. I can only do so because I take steps to protect myself from the Big Tech companies, and preserve my identity. You need to do the same – this is no longer optional, because if you don’t, the gatekeepers WILL come for your head.

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• Buy yourself a proper Bible;
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