On August 11th, 2021, I released my first video on YouTube. It was an overview of an upcoming Homebrew Campaign Series. From then on, I released all sorts of videos in many categories. I talked about books, movies, shows, games, tabletop roleplaying, life, and a million other things. I didn’t have a niche, and that was very deliberate. I was experimenting and just trying to have fun while I figured out what I wanted to do.It’s a year since I started, and a lot has changed. It’s time to reflect on all of that and discuss what I’m planning for the future. I’m pretty excited to get into it, so let’s go ahead and get started right away!

A couple of months back, I released a video about my least favorite tropes. Chief among them was (and is) the Chosen One trope. This trope’s presence in a story is almost guaranteed to put a bad taste in my mouth as soon as I pick up the book, and it’s bound to get at least one star docked. Today, I want to take a closer, more analytical look at this trope. I’ll talk about what it is, what it means for stories, and how I feel about it as a whole.

In today’s post, I’ll be listing out the top five shows I have watched recently so that you can stop scrolling endlessly through your litany of streaming platforms searching for something good to watch. You’ve probably heard of many of these and had people tell you to watch them, but if you haven’t gotten around to them yet, I’m here to tell you to bump them up on your watchlist.

It’s been a while. Well, it’s actually only been a month, but it felt like a long month. My July was absolutely packed; I accomplished more in just a few weeks than I have in several years, so let’s talk about everything I’ve done since we last caught up. From hiking a mountain in Colorado to passing exams here in Kansas City, I feel like a totally different person than I was when I released my last post! Amidst all this, I was reading John Gwynne’s The Hunger of the Gods, so I’ll be giving some of my spoiler-free thoughts on that book in this post, too.

No one presents conflicts quite like villains, and they’re the topic of today’s conversation. See, while almost every villain presents a conflict, not every villain is going to be great. What is it, then, that makes a villain great?

Today, I’m going to be doing an essay regarding the two main kinds of magic systems in fiction: hard and soft. I’ll explain what these are, give some examples, and then dive into the pros and cons of each system. This isn’t really a “which is better post” because that’s really up to each reader’s personal preference (and because we all know that hard magic systems are better, don’t we?).