From Ian's video today it sounds like he's doing a lot of headstamp shit. The amount of original research that you'd have to do for a book on Warlord-era Chinese pistols is mind-blowing.
I think he was genuinely surprised at how well his books & publishing project has done; the success of which blew the door open to achieving the goal behind his original website, which was mainly archival.
Ian has always been more of a research sperg than a shooting sperg; so given the opportunity to crawl through arms room archives & auction houses, or make brutality/2-gun, or manufacturing/gunsmithing content.....
Ian's also been itching to revisit the Arisaka, which his father wrote a book on as well. And given the absolute state of weeabo waffenfags, no doubt that's been bumped up his priority list.
The fact that his books and Headstamp vaulted to the front of firearms publication in terms of quality & desirability, almost purely through crowdsourcing (both financial & information), is fairly amazing.
I think the distance also started about the same time as Karl's polycuck gf, I suspect that might be a factor too. I know I can't really respect a person after I find something like that out about them, so that's my head cannon.
That's likely the most visible factor, but I think it's more of a professional call; their friendship is old enough that it'll probably last, no matter how insufferable Karl gets.
I think the older one gets, the more likely it is that one of our friends goes that route. I prefer as well, not to be seen in public with them.
