Hello there! Happy Thursday and first day of August, folks. For many of us, this means it’s time for Blaugust, the grand festival of blogging started and continued to be run by the super huggable Belghast. If you’re interested, I recommend going and taking a look at his posts for more information. It’s never too late to join the community, whatever you blog about. New or old. All are welcome… with the usual caveats.

So, I realise I messed up a bit when I changed my URL from Dragons & Whimsy to The Dragon Chronicle as the old feed won’t alert you to the change and I haven’t managed to get the URL redirect from the old domain working yet. So I want to apologise for that! I know there are folks who would have been following me before who now probably have no idea where my blog went, but at least a bunch of you know through Discord, Mastodon, and Twitter posts, and my Blaugust participation, and we’ll make some new friends.

To those of you who don’t know me: Hi, my name is Hannah, I go by Jaedia online and I’m a thirty-something woman from the UK who has been blogging for so long I couldn’t tell you when I started! Well, that’s not strictly true. I had a LiveJournal I barely used, until I discovered some blogging platform (whether it was WordPress or something else, I couldn’t tell you) around the age of 15. Then I picked up World of Warcraft blogging in 2009, ended up starting a book blog a couple years later. And I had Geocities and Angelfire websites and even little free web pages dating back to my single digit ages. I have been around for a while in some form or another.

These days, I like to blog about lots of different things. I very often fall into book blogging, as reading and book collecting are big passions of mine, but I also like to write about video games, tabletop RPGs, my life as a disabled person, movies, and all sorts! I would love to extend a little further, even. Perhaps talk a bit about cross stitch, live streaming, music. I have ideas for posts of a review nature, list articles, life update type posts, but I also really miss riffing off of news that interests me, sharing my thoughts and opinions about things going on with the things that I enjoy. Every year that I do Blaugust, I lay out my grand plans, and then inevitably do not have the motivation to go through with it. So instead, I have simply just laid out a few of my ideas ideas for the kind of content you might be able to expect from me. As for my Blaugust plans: If I can publish a couple of posts (including this one) and have some fun interacting with the community, then I will have done exactly what I set out to do. I’m already off to a great start, hey?

To get a little more specific on my likes, my favourite genres are horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, in that order. Horror has been creeping up the rankings for me over the past few years in a big way, as I got more and more into the genre, and I’m coming to realise it is now my favourite genre. However, my “branding” has always been magical and draconic, and so when I decided to rebrand, get a new blog name and thus change the URL, I kept the dragons. I really had to. I basically wanted to “mature” the theme a touch. Yes I know the graphics are still pretty cutesy, I couldn’t resist! But talking all things horror on a blog called “Dragons and Whimsy” forever felt a little bit wrong to me. And now I’m a lot happier with my space.

In books, horror is now my go-to genre. Occasionally I might dip my toe into fantasy and sci-fi, I also can enjoy literary fiction, thrillers, cosy romance, historical fiction, and I’m willing to give most things a go, though non-fiction is a struggle. But horror always seems to hit the spot.

I’ll play all sorts of kinds of video games. I’m still hooked on the MMORPG genre, for those of you who recall the Lazy Sniper/Jaedia’s Menagerie days! I also love RPGs, simulation games (life sims, management, realistic), visual novels, adventure games… oh all sorts! I will generally try just about anything, because so often games can surprise you. I love a game that feels new and fresh. It doesn’t have to be unique, but I want a game to feel it, if that makes sense. That said, I don’t have much experience with classic gaming. I grew up with an Amiga and played a lot of Lemmings and Trolls, then we got a PC where I played The Sims, Sabrina games, a couple strange point and click games, just… a lot of odd but cheap games I found in PC World. So I don’t have the nostalgia for the old console games, and I never personally found the charm in pixel graphics. I struggle a lot with games that feel “dated” and so retro gaming is something that doesn’t 100% appeal to me. Never say never though, I’m always curious about the things that other people love. Unless it’s PvP. I do not have the reaction times for PvP, it just makes me feel crap. Nah.

Er.. right! Other things I enjoy. I like to cross stitch while watching things. I tend to prefer big pieces that can take time to complete so I don’t have to faff as much with changing projects, and I’d love to share my finished pieces with you at some point! I’ve actually never done that on this blog. I will watch movies, series, anime, Youtube, Twitch streams. Sometimes I try to listen to podcasts or audiobooks, but I lean towards things to watch for some reason. I’ve got pretty good at following along inbetween stitches, can even manage subtitled movies on occasion, though the stitching goes much slower.

As for the more intimate details about myself. Well I’m disabled due to fatigue (not diagnosed with anything because the NHS is truly rubbish at listening and helping) and some pain (not constant, but most activity/standing for any length of time triggers it), but mostly it’s energy levels. I have depression and anxiety though hallelujah I’m finally well-medicated and feeling fairly good in that area. I’m Asexual. I’m married to a Welsh man (that’s Dan, if I ever mention him) and we live in South Wales. And I’m originally from the East Midlands in England.

And I stream on Twitch! I use a PNGtube model at the moment, though I’d love to get a custom Vtube model at some stage. And I consider myself an MMO variety streamer. This means that I play a lot of MMORPGs, and I love to check out what different worlds have to offer, but I also stream a variety of games. In fact, perhaps I’m more variety than MMO on Twitch, to look back at my track record over the years. It’s tough to keep regular streams going because of my fatigue, I just can’t do it on many days and if I push myself, I pay for it afterwards. But I’m super proud of myself for picking it back up in April of this year and keeping a pretty regular cadence of 1 or 2 streams per week, and I have plans to do even more as well once I’ve worked out my limits and worked out exactly how to go about these things.

I think that’s about all I feel the need to share for today. I have been enjoying chatting with some of the new peeps who have joined this year’s Blaugust and I look forward to chatting with more of you in the comments and through Discord and Mastodon, and seeing what you have to share on your blogs! Happy Blaugust, folks.