It's Been Fun
News for December 1, 2025
We’re closing up shop here at Trivia Factorial.1 This post is divided into two parts—a quick discussion of why we’re shutting down and what comes next, and then a retrospective on this little chapter of my life.
What Happened, and What Comes Next
As the Trivia Factorial publishing schedule over the past few months has probably shown, I’m no longer finding the energy to write these newsletters. We’ve always played fast and loose with our ostensible mission to publish twice a week. 2025 has proven to be uniquely challenging, and I’d rather call it a day than continue to be wildly inconsistent.
Some logistical items:
If you are one of the folks who paid for a subscription to Trivia Factorial in support of our efforts (thank you!), you’ve probably noticed that I paused your subscription back in October during our hiatus. I set up that pause to last through January 31, 2026. Before that date comes, I’ll be turning off paid subscriptions altogether. I am not sure exactly how that will go (Substack and Stripe have always been a bit opaque to me), but the intent is that you won’t be charged again. Please reach out to me if there’s some issue down the line.
I’ve removed the paywall from all of our old posts. For the near future, the entire Trivia Factorial backlog is free to read. Here’s a link to the archive:
It’s entirely plausible that I wake up one morning and decide to delete Trivia Factorial and all of our old posts, so no promises about the archive remaining out in the world.
If I ever start another trivia publication in the future, I will probably use this e-mail list to let you know. (For example, I once spent a few hours sketching out a Trivia Factorial daily calendar.)
Remembrance of Things Past
In October 2021, I thought it’d be fun to send around trivia questions with “hidden connections” themes a couple times a week to a few dozen of my family and friends. That effort turned into 300+ newsletters over the course of four years, read by hundreds of folks. It’s been tremendously fun to challenge myself to come up with newsletter themes; hopefully you’ve enjoyed some of them.
These were my five favorite editions of Trivia Factorial (in no particular order). I won’t spoil the themes, so you can play along (or play along again) if you’d like.
In terms of just writing a really solid, “by the numbers” hidden connection theme, I think the Trivia Factorial platonic ideal was “Trivia Newsletter CCXLIX: Making a Sandwich” (recap).
This one was a little more “out there,” but I think the singular effort I am most proud of is “Trivia Newsletter CLXX: SLIGHT DELAYS” (recap).
I always felt like I was better at writing newsletter titles than I was at writing trivia questions. “Trivia Newsletter CCLXVII: Dallas Flyers Club” (recap) is a title I was really pleased with.
I think I enjoyed playing with the “form” of these newsletters more than our audience enjoyed my efforts. With respect to the goofy and off-the-wall newsletters, “Trivia Newsletter CDIV: You’re Just Making Things Up” (recap) was my favorite.
I’d like to think that “Trivia Newsletter CCXXXIV: The Friendly DJ” (recap) and the resultant recap to Question #6 best encapsulates what I was trying to do here—take something you’ve probably heard of and cast it in a more interesting light in a way that tried to dignify the original work.
If you play LearnedLeague, consider playing the Hidden Connections 5 MiniLeague that starts up in January; you’ll see some of my work in that ML. If you just want to play more hidden-connections trivia, consider Ken Jennings’s new book, The Complete Kennections: 5,000 Questions in 1,000 Puzzles, which contains 1000 hidden-connections sets.
I am really, really proud of what we did here for a few years. It would be preposterous to say that Trivia Factorial made the world better; yet, it made my world better, and that will have to do. Thank you to our guest posters; to everyone who listened to me kvetch about this newsletters; to everyone who wrote in with a kind word; to everyone who wrote in with a not-so-kind word; to you, for reading along.
Let’s close with a quote from 17776:
I wonder if there’s a single place in the whole world that’s never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there’s no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that’s where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.
You run and run and run and you keep turning pages and none of them are empty. They’re all full of stories. There’s nowhere left to write.
I think I’m just a bookmark.
One consequence of suddenly closing down is that there isn’t a proper recap for the prior newsletter. The newsletter title was “As a Signal-light, One.” The answers were GREEN, NEVER, FIN, LEGO, and MARY. All of those are words that might precede “LAND” (as in Greenland, Neverland, etc).
Question #6 asked you “Echo the work quoted by this newsletter’s title and use a TWO-WORD PHRASE to indicate where each of the answers to Questions #1 through #5 might be found.”
“As a Signal-light, One” is from “Paul Revere’s Ride,” the poem by Longfellow:
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
Our title told you that there was one signal-light, which meant that you had to tell us that all five answers could be found “BY LAND.”
Had there been a newsletter tomorrow, the answers would have been some mix of THANKS, BLACK, SMALL, CYBER, and GIVING, for Thanksgiving and the silly consumer-ish holidays that succeed it on the calendar (Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday).
End of an era!
Really liked your posts. It will be missed. Wishing you good luck.