snared another subscriber

Another Substack subscriber today. I'm now working desperately on material for the paid side of my Substack; I also hope to have something up by Sunday night over at the Test Central blog—a blog I'd made expressly for quizzes, tests, answers, and explanations. At least one quiz for the hoi polloi, that's what I'm hoping for. Of course, I've made things difficult for myself by making each quiz super-randomized (read all about it here), so a lot of work awaits me.

I don't know whether I'll be this rigorous for the other courses I have planned for eventual appearance on Substack (Religious Studies 101 for the masses, Interreligious Dialogue, Philosophy of Religion—which I expect to be, ultimately, the most popular course). None of these courses will be as profound as the course I'd taken as an undergrad and grad student, but they'll cover most of the major issues relevant to each subject area. So they might be worth taking a peek at, and the exams will still be worthy of the courses.

I suspect I'm going to keep accumulating free subscribers for a while (several months) before I reach a "critical mass," and some of those subscribers start switching over to being paid subscribers. It'll be a psychologically significant day when someone I don't know becomes a paid subscriber. I am, of course, happy and grateful to have people who know me going for paid subscriptions, but I know that a lot of that is motivated by politeness, charity, sympathy, solidarity, and loyalty. A stranger who pays for a subscription, by contrast, has decided on my Substack's merits based on his own reckoning, not because s/he knows me.

In unrelated news: I finished watching "Battlestar Galactica." Two urges are at war within me: to write logorrheically because there's so damn much to say about the series (and much of it falls inside my wheelhouse, i.e., religious studies and religious diversity), and to try to keep this review under 3000 words, unlike my recent review of "Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning," which was almost 7000 words in length. My "KPop Demon Hunters" review was a tad over 2400 words—much more reasonable.