Fireside Friday, September 25, 2026

Hey, folks, Fireside this week! We’re now well into the Teaching Paradox series on Hearts of Iron, but as you may have noticed, the structure of those posts means they tend to be quite chunky (the first two have both been right around 10,000 words) and longer posts take time. Thus, a fireside this week to balance out, before we move from HoI4‘s purely military layer to its strategic, political and economic layer. Ollie looking like he is about to give his own lecture, presumably on the importance of sufficient pets and nuzzles. For this week’s musing, I want to talk about a series of videos on ‘realistic’ worldbuilding I’ve seen floating around online from a channel called “The Grainbound.” The channel seems to regularly hit the hundreds of thousands of views on its videos and I’ve seen them floating around among friends and in other contexts which makes me think they’re getting pretty wide distribution in the fantasy-worldbuilding space. They are, after all, decently well-produced…