Dekkie’s Q&A - 2,000,000 Takes
I recently reached two million takes, which is a milestone I’ve looking forward to for quite a while. I want to express a major thank you to those who have shown their continuous support or even just taken the time out of their day just take one of my quizzes.
I’ve been on JetPunk since late 2017, having mostly focused on historical map quizzes ever since then, which at times require a lot of research and can take a lot of time to put together.
I was thinking of doing something like a Q&A here when I reached this milestone, though I thought it was better to wait a little until the dust settled a bit with how many people seemed to be doing them at the time.
I will answer mostly anything, though obviously nothing that can be considered personal.
Ask away, I guess lol.
Also, thank you for having organised this Q&A on the message board rather than on the blog section. I definitely think it's a more appropriate to do so.
I was wondering... Do you remember the first historical period that sparked an interest in you that led you to do the colossal amount of research that is now your trademark?
Probably the era of classical antiquity, on which research is still lacking quite a bit and where estimates have to be made manually. Probably the earliest instance of me truly going out of my way to do deep research was probably “100 Biggest Cities in the Roman Empire with a Map”.
This one had so many revisions on not only the map itself but also the population estimates, which had to be redone multiple times. I have no clue how many times this quiz has been redone, but I’m willing to say at least five times.
Outside of Europe, what region's history are you most interested in?
The Bronze Age and Iron Age are definitely periods I also want to lay a bit more focus on in the future.
It’s actually a hobby of mine that developed years after I finished school.
Population estimate wise, the dataset “European urban population, 700 - 2000” by Eltjo Buringh and the book “Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth” by Tertius Chandler have been quite reliable and seen constant reusage. Though not it’s always accurate, considering some estimates are definitely just assumptions or unrealistic (e.g. Firozkoh, ancient capital of the Ghurids, was estimated with a population of 40,000 when the surface area of the town was only about 10 hectares).