When publication becomes survival, academics serve Khorne—the god who measures worth in output alone. Your h-index is your kill count.

Khorne is not the god of mindless rage. He's the god of throughput, the patron saint of endless publication campaigns where motion replaces meaning.

In this episode, we examine how academia's productivity culture creates Khorneate worship: REF panels as blood altars, h-indices as kill counts, and publication pipelines that never end. We explore how individual academics fragment papers to maintain submission cycles, how departments compete on output metrics, and how universities transform scholarly work into accountable units that can be counted, ranked, and fed into league tables.

Khorne offers relief through simplicity—your worth is visible in your CV. But his campaigns never conclude. Completion becomes dangerous. Exhaustion becomes proof of seriousness. And the institution learns to confuse productivity with purpose.

From Reviewer 2 as eternal nemesis to grant applications as siege warfare, this episode traces how mobilisation logic pervades every level of academic life—until the only question that matters is "Are you producing enough?"

Blood for the Blood God is not a battle cry. It's an accounting identity.

More details are available in the book, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GCFWD29C

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