Tag: Advice
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Take Back Your Mind
The world is filled with noise. Talking heads spewing propaganda disguised as news. Clickbait sites screaming for attention. Outrage mongers twisting your heart to become more like theirs. A never-ending stream of pop-ups and notifications and messages, all urgent, all demanding your time and energy. In the face of such madness, there is only one…
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Tired Tropes: The Potato Protagonist
If a potato has more personality than the protagonist of a story, the writer is doing it wrong. The best stories are driven by their characters. The best characters aren’t two-dimensional constructs of excessive verbiage, but a reflection and amplification of the myriad facets of humanity. Characters must resonate with readers, acting, talking and thinking…
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Three Essential Mindset Books for the Modern Man
There are three books every modern man must read today. These books are not for the faint of heart or weak of will. They are not soothing feel-good diatribes designed only to part your money from your wallet. These books are forges for the soul, created to scrub away your weaknesses and temper your spirit…
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Martial Analysis: Mindset
Before the first punch is thrown, the fight is won and lost in the mind. There are many, many instructors out there discussing a plethora of techniques and drilling down into the finer points of how to properly employ them. There are likewise many teachers who stress timing, footwork and distance. Technique, timing, footwork and…
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Tired Tropes: the Tsundere
Welcome to Tired Tropes, in which I dissect popular tropes I find annoying. While tropes are tools, they can be overused or done badly, and Tired Tropes are especially gregarious examples of them. Here, I take on the tsundere. The tsundere is a staple of Japanese media. She—for the overwhelming majority of tsunderes are female—is…
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The Two Kinds of Story Conflict
Conflicts drive drama, and drama drives stories. The heart of every story worth reading is a clash between the protagonist and the antagonist, each seeking opposed goals. Protagonist-antagonist conflicts can be described in two ways: symmetrical and asymmetrical. The type of conflict defines each party’s strategies and the overall direction of the plot. A symmetrical…