New Poll.

Hi. I'm Samhildanach. I'm a man, I'm in my twenties, I've gotten the degree I actually want, I've got an extra degree I don't need, I've got a job I like, but the hours are pretty unforgiving, and I'm busy all day, I'm from the US, and that's all I'm willing to affirm about myself. My name isn't Sam Hill, but if I ever published an actual book, that's probably what my pen name would be. Read more on my username in the next section. Anyways, I'm not a professional writer, but I do think of myself as a writer, as I think most writers should. Maybe someday I'll write an original novel and try to get it published.

My pen name, 'Samhildanach,' means 'equally skilled in many arts,' which was an epithet assigned to the Irish god, Lugh, after he earned his place in the Tuatha De Danaan by not being the best at any one thing, but by being as good as the best at everything. Actually, it should be spelled "Samildanach," but I misspell all my usernames so that I get to use them even when I'm not the first to claim them.

My profile picture is a Yu-Gi-Oh card called Cybertech Alligator. He's got 2500 attack and costs one tribute to normal summon, just like Summoned Skull. Only he's cooler. I know of the card and have an emotional attachment to it because of a game called Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos: Joey the Passion. In it, you start with a deck filled with amazing spell and trap cards and some of the worst monster cards ever (though there are several good ones, too). The only way to get more cards is to beat Joey in a duel. You get one card for a single duel, and three cards in a best two out of three match duel. For some reason, you can acquire multiple copies of limited cards (cards that you can only place 1 copy of in your deck). Anyways, I got this game when I was like, 8 or something. Maybe I was six, maybe I was ten, who knows. Anyways, you start with like 45 cards or something, and there are a total of 771 cards, and there are loads of utterly crap normal monsters. If you don't know about Yu-Gi-Oh, allow me to sum up the feeling of getting yet another garbage normal monster. Yugioh is a trading card game, where you have cards and battle the opponent. There are monster cards, spell cards, and trap cards. (And like Xyz shit and synchro summons and all manner of ridiculous things if you're playing with the new rules, but that's not in Joey the Passion) But anyway, imagine this: You can play one "monster card" per turn. In your deck of 40 cards, roughly 20 of them are "monster cards." Of those, there are ten that are "normal monsters" and ten that are "effect monsters." Like the name implies, "effect monsters" have additional effects that do things, normally making them more useful. But "normal monsters" don't. All they have are ATK and DEF values. The highest attack value I've seen on a "normal monster" that you can summon without tributes is 1900, and the highest defense I've seen is 2000. But most are a balance, like 1700ATK/1150DEF. So imagine spending fifteen minutes dueling this guy to get a card, only to receive a normal monster with 900ATK/200DEF. There is literally nothing redeeming about the card. It's utterly useless. The feeling is soul crushing. Anyway, when I first got the game, it was for Christmas, and normally my family travels to my Grandparents house in a different state right after Christmas. I installed the game on their computer, played it, and won CyberTech Alligator, and it's a "normal monster" that requires one tribute, which is where you sacrifice a monster to summon a stronger one, and it's got 2500 ATK, like I said, and that's extremely high ATK for a 1 tribute monster. It was awesome. But then we went back home, and my 8-year-old brain was forced to realize that CD-ROMs don't save data to themselves. The game saves data locally, on the computer. Meaning Cybertech Alligator was not on the disk, it was on my grandparents computer in a different state. Actually, I've recently found out that this game is extraordinarily picky with its data. Different users have different data which is sort of hit or miss, but even the same user using Administrator mode to run the program will save the data somewhere else. Anyways, it's been 17 years since this game was released, and that may or may not have been when I got it, and I've never again received Cybertech Alligator. That's why the card is special to me, and that's why it's my profile picture.

Wow. Long Yu-Gi-Oh! rant, there.

My stories:

-Currently focused on:

Ascension (PJO) - Kind of my flagship story. I started writing it just a few months after quite a big depressive episode. Then I stopped writing it for something like two years, over which time I matured a lot, I feel. I reread the story now, at the start of 2021, and go, "Wow, this was my best work?" I'm sure I'll feel the same way in another two years, too. Update as of 11/23: yeah, I feel the same way. Only I haven't improved much in the meantime.

Have Another Round on Me (PJO) - A cute little story made up of a bunch of tiny drabble like things. Each chapter is its own story, and each is precisely 108 words, according to fanfiction.net's document manager. I plan to stop adding chapters once there are 108 in total. May I suggest chapters: 1, 22, 24, 28, 29, and 36. Those are my favorites.

-Planning on coming back to:

Duty First: Rise of a God

Guardian of Sanity: Redux

Shangri-La

The Highland Drake

-Won't come back to:

A Bargain to Change the World - It's too weird, even for me. It's practically a stream of consciousness.

Guardian of Sanity - There's a rewrite of this going up, so once it is eclipsed, this version will be removed.

Favorite Quotes (or Quotes to Live Your Life By):

"Do you know where you are going?"

~Helpful Guard, Dungeon Siege II

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."

~Tom Waits

"Three rules from your sensei:
One: Outsource your feelings.
Two: Limit your training to be task-specific.
Three: Assign regret to those accountable."

~They Might Be Giants

"Mr. Hughes says, 'Live and learn.
Dig and be dug in return.'"

~Mono Puff

"gay fish yo"

~Anaklusmos14

"And they sang to remember; and they danced to forget."

~Coyote Run

"Sometimes, things just don't work out."

~My father

"Good things come to those who wait, but only what is left behind by those who hurry."

~I don't remember. Abraham Lincoln or something.

"There's always a bigger fish."

~Qui-gon Jin

"I could shake my tiny fist
And swear I wasn't wrong
But what's the sense in arguing
When you're all alone?"

~They Might Be Giants

"Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

~They Might Be Giants