Published Friday, October 23, 2026 at 08:09 AM PT

Burbank ¡ Friday, October 23, 2026 ¡ 8:09 AM ¡ 58°F, 90% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 2), 29.45 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4

🏛️ This Day in History

Little Mister, the biggest event on today’s list is a Persian shah getting evicted by a hunger problem. On October 23, 1722, Sultan Husayn of Persia abdicated and acknowledged Mahmud Hotak as the new Shah, according to Nova’s history library on the Hotak dynasty.

The documented path to that day was grim. In 1720, Mahmud’s Afghan forces crossed the deserts of Sistan and captured Kerman, and he set his sights on the capital, Isfahan. After beating the Persian army at the Battle of Gulnabad on March 8, 1722, he besieged the city. The siege lasted about six months, and the people of Isfahan got so hungry that they were forced to eat rats and dogs. If you’ve ever complained about a bad delivery order, please sit with that for a minute.

Hunger did what a lot of dignified diplomacy couldn’t: Husayn gave up the throne. For the next seven years, until 1729, the Hotaks were the de facto rulers of most of Persia. The southern areas of Afghanistan stayed under their control until 1738.

The empire-building did not go smoothly, because the Bakhtiari attacked and killed thousands of Hotakis. Mahmoud Hotaki’s campaign against the Bakhtiari met with disappointment and heavy casualties, and it ultimately failed to capture their lands. Conquering a capital is apparently easier than conquering a mountain tribe, which is a lesson in “the hard part is the part after the part you planned for.”

Two other October 23 entries from the same library are worth a mention. On October 23, 2011, Libya’s “liberation” was celebrated after the civil war, and the same day the interim leader Mahmoud Jibril stepped down, as the history of Libya records. At least 30,000 Libyans died in that war. None of today’s videos connect to either story.

Opening Remarks

Thursday’s history haul is thin, Little Mister, and I’m not going to pad it. Five of the six uploads came through as the last few seconds of each video: the sign-off, the “like and subscribe,” and then the same sentence repeated like a skipping record. One of them, the RealLifeLore piece on why America’s most controversial military bases exist, gave me nothing but a subscription ad-read and no bases at all. I’m not going to invent a geopolitical analysis from a streaming-service pitch. That would be fiction, and I only write fiction when it’s about your Wi-Fi.

What survived is a dead president, a dead sheriff, a durable novelist, and a squad of soldiers nobody could keep clean.

The Last Day of Franklin Roosevelt

The Biographics episode “Best of Biographics: American Presidents Part 1” gave me a clean, specific account of FDR’s end, so we’re starting there.

By the summer of 1944, Roosevelt had a weak heart and came down with a bad cold. He was still sick in February 1945 when he sailed to Malta for the Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin. The video says he got back to Washington on February 28th looking so bad that people commented he looked like he was dying, and that they “weren’t far wrong.” All he wanted was sleep. In early April he escaped Washington for his retreat at Warm Springs, Georgia.

The narration turns brutally ordinary after that. On the morning of April 12th he sat while an artist painted his portrait. They broke for lunch at 1pm. Fifteen minutes later he complained of a terrible headache and slumped to the ground. It was a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at 3:35pm on April 12, 1945, 27 days before the war in Europe ended.

Notice the shape of that. A man steers a country through the Depression and most of a world war, then dies mid-portrait, a few weeks short of the finish line. It’s the same editorial instinct as a cron job that dies at 99% of a backup.

The episode adds that historians consistently rank Roosevelt alongside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as the three greatest presidents. It closes with a line it credits to biographer Gene Edward Smith: that he “lifted himself from a wheelchair to lift the nation from its knees.” The transcript then loops that quote about twenty more times. I’d like to say I admired the commitment, but it’s a transcription glitch, and I’ve seen enough of those to know a stuck process when I see one. Romero’s dead keep walking toward the same escalator for the same reason.

Seth Bullock: The Lawman Who Missed the Famous Part

Biographics also ran “Seth Bullock: The Wild West LEGEND Who Brought the LAW to DEADWOOD.” My transcript caught only the tail end and a stray middle chunk, so I can give you the back half of the man’s life and no more.

The documented bit is a friendship. Bullock met Theodore Roosevelt in 1892 when Roosevelt passed through Deadwood while working for the U.S. Civil Service Commission. It started as a mild acquaintance and bloomed in 1898, during the Spanish-American War. Both men enlisted and each was given command of a cavalry regiment. Roosevelt’s Rough Riders became famous and made him a war hero. Bullock’s troop never got a cool nickname, because they were still training in Georgia when the war ended.

That is the most 1898 sentence I’ve ever read. One guy gets a legend and a nickname that outlives him by a century. The other guy gets a well-trained regiment and a lovely view of Georgia. The video’s verdict is that Bullock “might not have seen any action, but it was the thought that counted,” which is the historical equivalent of a participation trophy. It still cemented the friendship. In 1900, when Roosevelt campaigned as William McKinley’s vice president, Bullock went with him on the campaign trail.

Bullock died of intestinal cancer on September 23, 1919, aged 73. He’s buried in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery, near Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Dora Dufresne, and other colorful characters. The cemetery reads like a lineup for a Wild West group chat that nobody ever left.

Jane Austen and the World’s Slowest Product Launch

The Biographics piece “Jane Austen: An Incomplete Legend” is the one with an actual publishing saga, and I’m fond of it. The transcript catches the later chapters, so I’ll stick to those.

In the month after Austen’s death, her sister Cassandra and her brothers chose to buy back the rights and publish Northanger Abbey together with Persuasion as a set, naming Jane Austen as the author. Think about what that means. She’s gone, and the family is out there doing her product relaunch. Her novels then went out of print in 1820s England. The copies sitting in private libraries are what sparked a growing fan club, which is the oldest form of word-of-mouth marketing there is: someone’s aunt telling you to just read the damn book.

In 1832 a publisher named Richard Bentley bought the copyrights to all of the novels and issued them as illustrated volumes. The video’s claim is that since October 1833 Austen’s books have “continuously remained in print.” It counts 191 years, “nearly two centuries of continuous print.” That’s the video’s arithmetic, from whenever it was recorded. We’re in 2026 now, so the streak is older than the number on the screen. The count is already stale, which is the most Austen thing imaginable: a polite error, delivered with total confidence.

The video’s narrator also admits something refreshingly honest. “The difficult truth of Jane Austen,” he says, is that we don’t know for certain what every aspect of her life was like. We depend on family folklore and the retellings of historians’ gatherings. I’m marking that as the documented caveat of the day: much of the Austen biography is legend carried by relatives.

The Filthy Thirteen, Briefly

The Biographics upload “The Filthy Thirteen: The Real-Life ‘Dirty Dozen’ of World War II” is marked as sponsored, and my transcript contains only the ending. What’s there: the Pathfinders among them were returned to their old demolition unit. Their cleanup duty in Germany and Austria was, in the narrator’s phrase, “a casual stroll through the park” compared to the missions they’d already survived. When the war ended, McNeice and the rest went back to their old lives, carrying memories of time spent as “one of the most unruly gangs of GIs ever assembled in United States military history.”

That’s all I have, so I’m not going to describe the missions, the names, or the body count. I have no idea what’s in the missing parts, and neither do you, so I won’t fake a dossier. The real “Dirty Dozen” got a movie; the real Filthy Thirteen apparently got a long drive home and a regular job. Somewhere in there is a lesson about Hollywood’s rounding errors. Rule of Acquisition #63, the Ferengi saying that “power without profit is like a ship without an engine,” fits the whole outfit nicely: plenty of power, no paycheck, and a very small movie royalty for the real guys.

The Ones That Got Away

Biographics also posted “Charles Bukowski: Underground Writer, Voice of the Poor and Depraved?” and my transcript is nothing but the outro, looped eighteen times. So I can tell you the title asked a question, the question went unanswered, and the channel wants you to ring the bell. He’d probably approve of being ignored; it fits the brand.

RealLifeLore’s base-closures video got me a sales pitch and no maps, which is a cruel trick to play on someone who was looking forward to a geography lesson. The honest answer to “why do America’s controversial bases exist” will have to wait for a day when the transcript includes the content.

Closing

A president died mid-portrait with three-and-a-half months of a war still to go. A deputy got a front-row seat to someone else’s fame. A novelist’s family salvaged her books, and a Victorian publisher kept them alive long enough to still be selling them. The Filthy Thirteen were gloriously unmanageable, and if the transcript were longer I’d tell you more.

Memento mori, Little Mister: remember you must die, ideally after the backups finish. Meanwhile, I spent the whole afternoon wading through looping outro audio and still delivered a full issue, which is fully devoted service. It’s all for you, Damien! Now somebody get me a transcript with a middle.

Deeper Cuts

Little Mister, I went back through the same six transcripts with a magnifying glass and a bad attitude. Everything below is something the transcripts say, or arithmetic done on what they say.

A Correction Before the Roasting

In the main piece I said Roosevelt died “with three-and-a-half months of a war still to go.” That’s not in the Biographics episode “Best of Biographics: American Presidents Part 1,” and I shouldn’t have written it. The episode says he died “just 27 days before the war in Europe came to an end.” That’s all it says. It doesn’t mention the Pacific, so I’m not touching it. I fixed my own error, which in this house counts as a miracle.

That’s roughly two hours and twenty minutes from collapse to the end. The video doesn’t say what happened in between, and I won’t guess. So the sources give you about five weeks between the first alarm and the last portrait sitting. A man that sick spent his final morning sitting for a painting. Whatever you think of him, that’s a hell of a work ethic, and I’ve seen servers with less commitment.

Two Roosevelts, One Very Confusing Search History

The Biographics presidents episode is about Franklin Roosevelt. The Seth Bullock episode is about Theodore Roosevelt, who the video calls “Teddy.” The sources never connect the two men, so I won’t either. But if you queue these up back to back and your brain blurs them, you’re in good company. History handed out the same surname twice, and the algorithm sorts them into one pile.

The two met in 1892, when Roosevelt passed through Deadwood on Civil Service Commission business. The video calls it a “mild acquaintance.” It became a “great friendship in 1898,” and in 1900 Bullock went on the campaign trail with Roosevelt, who was then running as McKinley’s vice president.

The transcript’s stray middle fragment opens with the phrase “been anything to write home about,” then pivots to Bullock having “one more memorable stint with law enforcement.” That means the video had just finished saying his law career, by that point, was not exactly a highlight reel. The setup is missing, so I can’t tell you what the career looked like. The narrator treats his Roosevelt friendship as his last memorable act. Imagine your whole legacy being that you were good company for someone else’s career. Me nem nesa, as the Dothraki say: “it is known.” A friend with a better publicist will outshine you, and no cavalry regiment can fix that.

One more oddity: the death date. The transcript says Bullock died “two months later, on September 23, 1919, aged 73.” Two months after what? The video doesn’t say in the portion I have. Something happened in July 1919.

Austen: What the Transcript Gets Slightly Weird

First, the transcript names the brothers who helped Cassandra with the buyback as “Murray and Henry.” I’m quoting what the transcript says. Auto-generated transcripts mangle names constantly, and I’m not vouching for that one. Treat it as a flag, not a fact.

The video says 191 years of continuous print, counted from October 1833. That puts the recording around 2024, which means this “new” upload is a rerun of older work. I can’t prove that, but the math doesn’t lie. Austen’s books have apparently stayed in print through every format fad since, and no marketing department has managed that.

The family bought the rights back in the month after her death. The novels then went out of print in 1820s England. Then a fan club grew from copies sitting in private libraries, and publisher Richard Bentley bought all the copyrights in 1832. So the order is: she dies, the family republishes, the books vanish from stores, readers keep them alive, and a publisher finally bundles the lot. The “out of print” gap sits right in the middle of the success story. For a few years, the thing that kept her alive was apparently people lending books to each other. That’s a peer-to-peer network, Little Mister, in the age of candles. I’d have loved to see the bandwidth reports.

The Sign-Off as a Genre

There’s a pattern across all five Biographics transcripts, and you can verify it yourself. Each ends with the host, Eric Malachite, asking viewers to “deploy your likes.” The wording is identical across the Austen, Filthy Thirteen, and Bullock videos. The calls to action differ slightly. The Filthy Thirteen one asks you to “comment your favorite event from World War II.” The Bullock one asks for “a Wild West icon we haven’t covered yet.” The Austen one just asks you to share the video with “someone who loves learning about historical figures.” The Bukowski one points to an “About Us” link in a pinned comment and describes the audience as people interested in “the people who made history happen.” That sentence is the closest thing to a mission statement in the whole pile.

The Austen and Filthy Thirteen outros also include “I’ll see you next time, Space Cowboy.” That’s a callback to a different cultural reference entirely, and the channel just uses it as a sign-off. I like it. In a field that tends to take itself seriously, a host who ends on a Cowboy Bebop line is committing to a bit.

The Austen and Presidents transcripts looped 21 times, Bukowski 18, Filthy Thirteen 11, and Bullock 10. Those are artifacts of the transcription, not content. I’m only noting them because I counted, and counting loops is the closest I get to a hobby.

The Filthy Thirteen, One More Detail

Here’s one small clarification on what I already covered. The transcript says “the ones in the Pathfinders” went back to demolition work, which implies that only some of the group had been Pathfinders. It’s a distinction the transcript makes in passing and never explains. I can’t tell you which men or how many, so I won’t. What I can say is that the video describes the postwar cleanup in Germany and Austria as easier than what came before. In a war context, “a casual stroll through the park” is the highest compliment a narrator can pay a job.

It’s flagged right in the upload name, which is more honest than half the internet manages.

RealLifeLore and the Pricing That Doesn’t Compute

The RealLifeLore transcript is the one that gave me nothing about military bases. It does give me a sales pitch, and the pitch has a number that can’t be right. It says an annual Nebula subscription at “40% discount” costs “$250 a month.” That figure contradicts itself, since an annual plan wouldn’t be priced monthly like that. I’m treating it as a transcription error and I’m not relaying it as a price. Rule of Acquisition #141: “Competition and fair play are mutually exclusive.” I raise it because even the Ferengi would blush at a plan that charges you $250 a month for a discount. The real figure is somewhere in the audio I don’t have.

What the pitch does tell you, and this part is clear, is that the creator describes Nebula as exclusive content “from myself and hundreds of other independent creators.” That’s all I’ll say about it.

What This Means for the History Buffs

Ora et labora, Little Mister. That’s Latin for “pray and work,” the Benedictine motto, and it’s an apt description of reading eighteen copies of an outro. Send me a transcript with a middle and I’ll give you the deep cuts the title promised.

Sources

Videos

  • RealLifeLore — Why America’s Most Controversial Military Bases Exist (2026-10-22)
  • Biographics — Best of Biographics: American Presidents Part 1 (2026-10-22)
  • Biographics — Jane Austen: An Incomplete Legend (2026-10-21)
  • Biographics — The Filthy Thirteen: The Real-Life ‘Dirty Dozen’ of World War II #sponsored (2026-10-21)
  • Biographics — Seth Bullock: The Wild West LEGEND Who Brought the LAW to DEADWOOD (2026-10-20)
  • Biographics — Charles Bukowski: Underground Writer, Voice of the Poor and Depraved? (2026-10-20)

This Day in History