Friends, I've been busy as all hell this week.
My wife and daughter Hannah went to Bar Harbor, Maine, leaving me to water the plants, watch the dog, and mind the house. Not a big deal, really, except that I've also been working, swimming, and gearing up As For Football for Week 1 of the college football season. Thankfully it rained pretty consistently through the back half of the week, but finding an extra half-hour to water the plants became a real challenge on Monday. In addition to everything else, I wound up doing three podcasts this week, two for AFF and one to promote AFF and The Return of Dr. Necropolis.
All of that was great, but it definitely kept me jumping.
Thankfully, things slowed down later in the week, giving me enough time to breathe a little.
1. You Seemed to Like Last Week's Column
Last week's column garnered 134 readers as of this writing. That's not a patch on what Five Things used to do back in the day, but it's not bad for 2026. I post here way less often nowadays, mostly because of how hard it's gotten to get the word out about little projects like this one via social media. It's therefore understandable that folks are out of the habit of reading this thing.
That's something we've can work to fix.
Back before I did AFF, wrote here a lot and frequently garnered hundreds or even thousands of readers on some of my more popular posts. But like I said, that was back when I posted stuff here several times per week and long before social media companies started throttling link-sharing to force content back onto their own platforms.
If you share just pictures, those guys are happy to show those pictures to your friends because that 100% drives their traffic and therefore their ad revenue. Nowadays, though, if you share links -- or anything else that takes you off the big social media sites -- they'll throttle your stuff to the best of their ability. AFF actually had a link blow up a bit a couple of weeks ago, and Facebook told me we needed to promote it -- as they often do -- offering to let it reach as many as *2* additional readers.
Friends, it had already gotten as big as they were going to allow it to get, pretty much no matter what.
If you make content for your own sites, it's best to think of social media as a shakedown. This is part of why I'm trying to post more content here. I need people thinking my writing and especially my book ahead of its release, and we're just not going to get there by posting about it on the Faceyspaces. But if we can get folks in the habit of reading Five Things on a Friday, that will provide a much more effective launch point.
2. Beers with Engineers
Bert, the show's host, initially said he was planning to schedule the episode for November. But then the interview went so well that he told me he might move it and run it sooner. That was cool. I agree that the conversation was a lot of fun. Not much about my book, but we talked quite a bit of sports, both college football and racing sports in which we actually competed.
3. How to spot a psychopath (The Guardian)
"People from very different fields say alarmingly similar things: there’s one question about whether the interviewee had themselves ever been frightened of a persistent predatory personality (bear in mind that these weren’t victims, they were seasoned professionals) and the answers came back: “I constantly worry that he will ruin my career” (from an HR person); “I worry that they will … want to seek revenge” (from a social worker); “I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed” (expert practitioner from the charity sector). These and arguably every statement from the interviews are so extreme that you can’t imagine saying them socially because you would sound mad – which some testimonies explicitly address. “People can’t get it. People who don’t work in our fields … often don’t hear about or see the kind of evilness perpetrated on others, and just can’t believe it. Whereas, unfortunately, it’s commonplace in my work.” (That’s from one forensic expert practitioner)."
Fascinating article and arguably the basis for the adage that you should always stand up to a bully. Because to a large degree, these folks survive and thrive by being so awful that bystanders literally cannot believe how awful they are and try to explain it away. This is the same idea we see in propaganda, where the Big Lie is SO BIG that people can't help but believe it precisely because it's so outlandish.
What's worse is that our understanding of these personality types largely comes from studying low-functioning prison populations. However, plenty of these folks are high-functioning, ruinously successful people.
Anyway. The article is a great read if you've got a little time.
4. Bee Gees Blanket the World (Spotify)
We used to do Friday Hair Metal back in the day. This doesn't exactly count, and yet, I was totally psyched when I saw that they'd just put this album out. The album starts with a Saturday Night Fever retrospective, but there are thirty-nine songs here. I dug it.
5. UMass Beat Rutgers Last Night
If you missed this game, it was incredible. The Minutemen used an read-option power running game, punctuated by just enough downfield passing, to get out to a 27-7 lead at halftime. They never looked back. They absolutely smoked the Scarlet Knights right in their own building. Incredible.
To put this in perspective, UMass went 0-12 last year and 1-11 the year before. They have been truly awful. They came into last night's game as 30+ point underdogs. They snapped a freaking 16-game losing streak last night!
That's all we've got this week. Happy Friday! Enjoy this weekend's college football, and let me hear from you. More to the point, consider subscribing to my Mailing List to keep up with the latest on Dr. Necropolis.
If you're wondering, the best thing that *I* wrote this week is Beat Bryant: 4 Keys to Victory Over the Bulldogs over at AFF.Com. You can give that a read if you're so inclined.
Thanks. See you next week!
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