I previously wrote under the handle An Actual Goblin. Well, for the past few months I’ve had zero motivation to update that particular blog, and there’s a few reasons why.

I lost interest in my niche

One, I mostly wrote about Dungeons and Dragons 5E. I love DnD, but over this past year, DnD has made itself very difficult to love.

To recap:

• WOTC attempted to shut down the Open Gaming License, which would have hamstrung the homebrew community.
• WOTC proceeded to send the Pinkertons to the home of a streamer who erroneously received a new MTG pack ahead of schedule. Generally, not a good look.
• WOTC proceeded to publish AI art after promising that they wouldn’t.
• WOTC proceeded to lay off a large portion of their staff.
• I wasn’t a huge fan of the new books.

I began to notice it around May of last year, when Bigby’s dropped and I just couldn’t get excited about reading it.

I still love playing DnD, and I’m still part of a couple of honestly wonderful groups, but I’m not really convinced that DnD loves me back, and I’m not optimistic for the future of the brand. Plus, I had to sunset my home game after life got in the way. So it just feels like the time to hop off and let Pathfinder subsume me.

I started working a job that wasn’t a great fit

I’m pretty good at blogging! Unfortunately, blogging for work did not make me better at blogging for my hobbies. Instead, it drained all of my remaining blogging energy.

Plus, I was working odd hours to meet with colleagues overseas and my already goofy sleep schedule was suffering. The people were fine, but there was just no clearing the timezone hurdle. I would wake up to dozens of messages from my overseas colleagues and feel pressured to address everything right away, even though that wasn’t required of me. I’d try to get things done early to get ahead of the 6-hour-time-difference bottleneck, but that left me working bizarrely long hours (the longest I clocked was 4 AM to 6 PM).

For the first time in my professional life, I was starting to fantasize about quitting my job and was struggling to care about my own side projects. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to waking up early, writing, going to work, and hopping off with more energy and ideas than I had when I started that morning.

My old blog wasn’t very professional

I normally don’t care if my personal blog about Dungeons and Dragons looks professional to prospective employers, but I did wonder if it was starting to hold me back.

Because of industry standards at my previous role, I wasn’t able to use my professional writing as a work sample. (I worked for an infrastructure manufacturer, and sharing configuration instructions would have been a huge no-no).

I mainly wanted to be able to show that I write regularly, have strong insights, and know how to format content. So, in the absence of sharing confidential work documents, I let some employers look at my blog instead.

Regrettably, not everyone I worked with was cool with my choice of username and icon. So here I am, with a more palatable, generalist username and a more palatable, generalist aesthetic.

I picked up new hobbies

And they didn’t make as much sense on An Actual Goblin as they would on a dedicated blog, or a general personal blog.

Like, it’s cool that I have a blog for DnD stuff, but I’m really not sure that it would jive as well with my newly-gained interest in pentesting or my interest in learning to code so I can build my own plugins and eventually completely stop using WordPress.

No offense to WordPress users, but not being able to do literally everything I want even in the HTML editor is really throwing off my groove.

2023 was generally a bummer and I needed a change

I’m going to yada yada my year. My PII got stolen, I got laid off, I got a new job but it wasn’t a great fit, my dog died, I got covid again, home repairs, my taxes increased, rent is up, and I had to look for a new job (twice) in a market that was somehow worse than the one I entered when I graduated in Winter, 2019. You know, right before COVID lockdown caused unemployment to spike to almost 20%. Somehow, my job hunt was easier when I had no experience whatsoever, and the entire world was on lockdown, than it was in 2023.

I can say that it all worked out in the end, but I’m still trying to parse if it really did or not. All I know is that 2023 was the year that kept on giving, and taking away, and taking more away, and taking more and more and more away.

Anyway, I didn’t have a lot to talk about that I thought would be insightful or interesting. I just felt like a huge killjoy. So I didn’t write much – unless it was for work.

Enter the new site

So I thought, ah, screw it. I know I was given advice to niche down and keep my art and writing separate. I know I was given advice to niche all the way down and stop going on tangents about dogs on my DnD blog or tech on my dog blog.

Well the problem with that is that I now have to look like 3-5 separate people online in order to write in all the niches I am interested in. And that meant maintaining 3-5 websites and 3-5 personas, which meant doing 3-5 times the work to maintain everything.

Or I could just make my niche “being a weird person with a lot of oddly-specific hobbies.” Refuse to Choose calls this being a scanner. I’m going to be a contrarian and say that humans just aren’t built to have only one interest and trying to squeeze myself into a little box isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all me.