2019 – Year In Review

4,091 views

I had written this article (the one you are reading right now) at the start of December, thinking the stats wouldn’t change much by the end of the year. The only other article I had left to publish was a quick humor piece that I whimsically decided to write based on a few reader comments.  It would probably only be seen by a few of my more loyal readers for a chuckle, and…

Over 3,000 views? What is going on here? Where did this get shared? So many questions. 

Plus now I have to re-do my end of year article ranking!

3,941 views

I’d been meaning to do this for a while, as I had a feeling that it would be quite popular. And, boy, it did not disappoint. Overall this article doesn’t offer much outside of curiosity; the context of the data is just too different. But it seems to really have captured the interest of the community.

1,311 views

When I write something that I know people will take issue with, I know that it’s going to be popular. It was particularly humorous to watch alternating posts from people claiming “no one says that you should always go slow” and people contributing “I have talked to people who say that”.

Also: If you do indeed believe that no one advocates the position I was criticizing, that doesn’t make it a strawman. A strawman is an attempt to change someone’s opinion from viewpoint A to viewpoint B, by constructing a viewpoint C which is clearly inferior to B. The defining feature is that you are using it as misdirection to lure people over from a viewpoint you avoid addressing directly. 😉 

1,281 views

Fun story, on a cross continental flight I decided to add up the number of target mentions in a couple of HEMA sources to kill some time. A year later I found the notes and decided to make it an article; it is hard enough to make sure I always have content to keep up with the release schedule. And then it ends up as the second most popular article of the year! tied for 4th. (Man, this list jumped around a lot in December.)

1,281 views

Evidently talking about physiological topics is proving to be quite popular. I don’t want SwordSTEM to be Sean’s coaching blog, but due to high interest I have some more interesting sport science research topics queued up for the new year.

(This one also broke into the top after I had written the article. I had originally intended to only do top 4.)

1,041 views

Much like the “Slow is Slow” article, people really like to draw attention to how they missed the point. Mostly everyone agreed with the article; furthermore some people expressed shock that anyone would even have considered doing the “umbrella zwerch” at all! Which is another way of saying that they need to go back and read it more carefully. Because the umbrella zerch, as I described it, is the most common way that just about everyone does it!

316 views

It had a sword stabbing through a tank! What more do you want from me?

219 views

Previous articles consolidating stats from historical sources proved to be very popular. This one did not.

582 views

While the page views alone didn’t make this a flop, I was kind of hoping that some people might get upset at this and make the whole thing blow up. Next time I need to draw more inflammatory conclusions and single countries out.

After a lengthy discussion surrounding the exchange in question, and posting of multiple screen captures, there were still individuals who insisted that the hit landed on edge. Which I found mind-boggling. There are some things which are subjective, but I think something like the angle of a sword should be fairly objective to prove. And so I set out to see if I could. 

You can view this as a contribution to the judge training of the HEMA world, or just a vanity project because I can’t handle not getting in the last word. Take your pick.

This was a great chance for me to build on results from previous articles, and actually look at something that would be completely impossible to figure out by intuition alone.