5th Anniversary Update

TRANSCRIPT:

Good evening folks, Happy 5 years of podcasting to me! At least officially. Sure, the first thing on this feed came out on April 27th 2020, but longtime listeners will recall that the show celebrated its official launch on June 29th 2020, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and so has accordingly celebrated its official anniversary on that date annually. Whether you’ve been listening for 5 years or 5 seconds, thank you and I hope you’ve been enjoying it, and maybe picked up some cool tidbits along the way. Unfortunately, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, this isn’t the Q&A episode I had planned for the occasion. As you know if you’ve heard me give any of these admin updates before, with 5 kids under 12, Vice-Pope Mrs. Popeular History and I are in an extremely busy season of life. Even in that usually busy context we’ve been unusually busy the last few weeks, honestly, primarily with fun stuff like dream job, family vacation, and sports–congratulations in particular to Catherine the 8U softball champion and her team–but bottom line I’m not remotely where I had hoped to be on podcast things at this stage, and frankly the next few months aren’t looking great either. And yet, I am determined to keep my commitment and very gently get back to producing regular content for you. So, in addition to seeing that Q&A episode, and all my lingering Sede Vacante content appearing on this feed in the next few months, sometime in July you’ll also be treated to the first episode of the long-awaited new rexypod: Habemus Pointsam, ranking all the Papal Transitions from from Peter to Linus to from Francis to Leo XIV. Now, because seriously, two podcast feeds? In this economy? No. That show will live on this feed, and it’s going to be a monthly release moving forward. So yes, regular content is returning! Nor, of course, will I stop there, as Cardinal Numbers will be coming back as well. Hopefully this year, though I offer no guarantees at this stage. I think my mental goal is to have it ready to resume by the time Pope Leo creates his first new batch of Cardinals, whenever that may be. Speaking of Pope Leo, he confirmed earlier today that his ecumenical hopes match my own, telling a delegation from the Ecumenical Patriarch: “I assure you of my desire to persevere in the effort to restore full visible communion between our Churches”. So we’ll see what comes of that, with the stage being better set for a lasting reconciliation than, well honestly, than any other point I can think of in the last millennium. Which is not to say there aren’t challenges, there will always be challenges to Christian unity.

Anyways, you can also *eventually* expect the completion of my Catholic worldbuilding series, though I will decline to hazard a guess as to a target date on that for now. Let’s get some regular content going with Habemus Pointsam in July, and then Cardinal Numbers, and then we’ll layer on the worldbuilding after that. Now, the biggest difference you will start to see–err, hear–is ads. Rather than get a second job which would make all the future plans I just outlined completely untenable–quality content takes a LOT of time, folks, I’m instead opting to turn my recently increased listener base into a modest revenue stream that will help keep the lights on around here moving forward. From hosting fees to research costs to sweat equity, this has production costs, which ads will help cover.

The good news is you don’t have to listen to the ads if you don’t want to. There will be a free ad-free feed, because I’m a big softie and a librarian who believes in making good information as easy to access as possible. And so, moving forward, while this feed will have ads by default if you go to patreon.com/popeular you’ll be able to click a handy button labelled “Join for free” and boom presto, with just a name and an email address you’ll have access to an ad-free feed as a free Patreon member. Once that rolls out, let me know if you have any issues by emailing popeularhistory@gmail.com and I’ll help you get things worked out. Or, you know, even if you don’t have any problems and you just wanna say hi: I love hearing from you guys. I don’t like paywalls, and I don’t want to make you listen to ads, so this is the compromise, a free registration to keep getting ad-free content, and those who are zoning out right now, or those who think of it as a roundabout donation, well, they can support the show simply by tolerating ads on this feed. Of course, *another* option to support the show is to take the next step and become a *paid* Patreon subscriber, but seriously, I get it, don’t sweat it if that’s not where you’re at. The free option has your name all over it, go for it and thank you for listening! Spread the word! I’ll see you all in July. Thank you for listening, God bless you all. Thanks, Joe!