About Me: A Deeper Introduction

 Hi again! I wanted to use this post to give readers a deeper introduction to some of my hobbies. First up, Magic: the Gathering:


These pictures show a few of my cards. The deckbox, sleeves, and card next to them are my main deck, a commander deck with Rakdos, Lord of Riots as the commander. The deck is themed around the Cult of Rakdos and has a beatdown aggro strategy, using black and red as the colors. My commander is signed by Matt McDougal, lead vocalist of the beatdown band Boundaries, one of my favorite metal bands. The graded card is the only one I (currently) own, that being a ripple foil Azlask, the Welling Scourge from the collectors edition 5-color Eldrazi deck from the set Modern Horizons 3, a deck that is currently worth almost $500.

Next, I'll share some of the highlights of my record collection:


These pictures depict two of my favorite records in my collection: Burying Brightness by the beatdown band Boundaries, and Seneca by the Appalachian country-folk artist Charles Wesley Godwin. As I mentioned in my initial About Me post, the only kinds of music I listen to are metal and Americana. Boundaries is one of my favorite metal bands (beatdown is a subgenre of metal), and Charles Wesley Godwin is my favorite Americana musician (Appalachian country-folk is a subgenre of Americana). Charles Wesley Godwin is currently the only artist whose entire discography I have, and I'm currently working on completing Boundaries' entire discography as well, with my next collection project aiming to focus on the deathcore era of the deathcore/voidgaze band The Acacia Strain.

Next, I'll share about my other musical hobbies:


In addition to listening to metal and Americana, I also occasionally make attempts to write my own songs. I play both guitar and banjo, with my go-to guitar being a Schecter Omen Elite-8 Multiscale, an 8-string extended-scale guitar, and my banjo being a simple 5-string Zenison banjo. I am currently working on some music for a style I call "roughcut", which I plan to be a fusion of beatdown-deathcore and country-folk, and I'm also trying to work on some voidgaze as well. In addition to playing guitar and banjo, I also do vocals. I can do clean vocals (basically just regular singing) and extreme vocals, but I prefer the latter and tend to use extreme vocals when writing music (extreme vocals referring to gutturals, false chords, fry screams, etc.).

Lastly, I want to share my favorite book/author:


H.P. Lovecraft was the father of cosmic horror literature. His stories, often called the Cthulhu Mythos but referred to by Lovecraft as the Yog-Sothothery, paved the way for many different writers, and he actively encouraged other writers to add their own stories to his mythos. Despite being notoriously xenophobic even for his time, Lovecraft was undoubtedly one of the best writers of all time, if not the best, and certainly was one of the most influential, inspiring all sorts of stories, movies, songs, and games. His work has reached a wide variety of people from all sorts of different backgrounds. This book is a complete collection of all the stories he wrote for his mythos.


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