What's everyone takes down here? Welcome back to another video. Today we are back again with the 2022 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. Today I'm going to be sharing my thoughts and predictions on the first round and I know they have already started but I like doing these videos every year. This is the fourth year I believe I've been doing them and I absolutely love them and I love having my predictions come true and hoping some of these do come true. Now some of the games have already taken place. It is an amazing hockey and this year it's going to be awesome. This year compared to previous years there's some teams that are facing each other for like the third year straight in the playoffs for the first round but there is some other teams that haven't made it in the playoffs in previous years that finally have this year so let's get straight into this. Up first we have the avalanche versus the predators. This is something that I think I've seen a few times now and I talk about this every year whenever this matchup does happen that I would prefer the avalanche to advance over the predators. I do like the predators but avalanche I do like them a lot more. I think they have a lot of more younger talents that I do like so I think they'll come for this one is going to be 4-1 for the avalanche. That is my prediction. Next up we have the wild versus the blues. If you asked me a couple years ago I would have only been saying the blues to advance. Now the wild I'm starting to get on board with them. I'm starting to like their players. They have a lot of great rookies. They have a lot of great talents and I do think that they're going to be showing and dominating in this series and advancing. Now that's something I would not have predicted years ago. I've never been a fan of the wild but they are starting to grow on me. So for this matchup here I'm going to say wild 4-2. Next up we have the flames versus these stars. This here I absolutely love rooting for the Canadian teams. You guys absolutely know this. I am Canadian as well. This one here in previous years I would have probably said the stars because I do like a lot of their talents. However the flames have been pretty dominant lately. They are on a roll and I do think they're going to dominate this series to the point that I think it's going to be 4-0 a clean sweep and that would be really exciting to see the flames advance to the next round with a clean sweep over these stars. I think that would be epic. Next up we have the Oilers versus the Kings. The Oilers are another Canadian team that I always root for. However they don't do the greatest in the playoffs. I'm hoping that they do well in this year's playoffs because that would be awesome to see but I'm hoping that they can do something in the playoffs this year. They have a lot of great players. Evander Kain has been getting hat tricks and in the first or the second game that they've played for this round he got a hat trick. So they're doing great things. I think they are going to advance and they're facing the Kings. Now the Kings are a team that haven't been in the playoffs in the last few years. The fact that they made it to the playoffs this year is pretty cool and I would like to see them advance but against the Oilers I would prefer the Oilers to advance. I'm going to say 3-4. I think it's going to come right down to the last game and I think that's going to be exciting hockey but Evander Kain getting a hat trick and they're dominating. I think it was 6-0 or 6-1 in the last game that I've watched. So I think this one might not go down to the last game but that is going to be my prediction because I want to see some exciting hockey. Next up we're going to go to the East Coast and we are going to have the Panthers versus the Capitals. The Panthers this season were dominating and this is something that's really exciting. I do like a lot of their players and a lot of their talents and I do like the team. It's just usually they do choke but the fact that they dominated this year they won the President's Trophy. They're really doing great. I've been rooting for them all year. I want to see them take the Cup and I think going against the Capitals that's going to be a huge challenge but if they can pass the Capitals and defeat them they are going to advance into hopefully the finals and winning the Cup. That is my prediction but for the Panthers for this round I'm going to say it's going to be 4-3 right down to the last game. I would prefer it not to be going down to the last game because that would be really stressful but I think if it does it's going to be not only exciting hockey but I think it's going to be awesome to see them advance and beating the previous well a couple years now as former Stanley Cup Champions the Capitals. Next up we have the Maple Leafs versus the Lightning. This is a match up here that you guys know I always root for Canadian teams but I'm not a huge fan of the Maple Leafs but in previous years I have been growing. They have been growing on me let's say so they have a lot of great players I do like the team but I'm just not a fan of the Maple Leafs but against the Lightning they've won the past two years of the Cup. I do like their players but I don't like the team for the Lightning so this one here I'm going to say 4-2 for the Leafs that's what I want to see the outcome be. Again I'm just not a huge fan of the Lightning and I'm not a huge fan of the Leafs but I'd rather see the Leafs advance and make it a little bit closer to the Cup not necessarily win the Cup but I do want to see the Leafs over the Lightning advance in this round. Next up is the Hurricanes versus the Bruins this is another matchup that I think we've seen in previous years in the first round so it's pretty exciting that we get to see it once again. Now the Hurricanes you guys know I've been talking about them for years now they are growing on me to the point that I do want to see them advance and make it to either the semi-finals or the finals I think that'd be really exciting but for this one here going against the Bruins I'm not a huge fan of the Bruins I do like some of their players but I don't like the team as a whole and for that reason I'm going to say clean sweep for the Hurricanes 4-0 that would be really exciting to see and I think it is possible because they have a lot of great players and a lot of great goalies so that is something that I do see could possibly happen. In the last matchup we have the Rangers versus the Penguins this one here is going to be a real challenge for who I'm going to be predicting to win and I'm going to say that it's going to be Rangers 4-2 I want to see the Rangers advance I love Zabanna Jett I love a lot of the Rangers players a lot of their young guys as well but going against the Penguins former champions they have Cindy Crosby I think it's going to be a challenge but if they can win that I think they're going to get pretty far in the playoffs so I'm still going to predict the Rangers are going to advance 4-2 for this matchup so these are all my predictions for the 2021 first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs now I know our few games have already started so what my outcomes are that I'm saying in this video by the time I edit and upload this video might be a little bit different some team might already have a few more wins than I would like to have predicted but regardless comment down below who you think is going to advance in the first round of the playoffs what teams are going to advance who you are rooting for in the playoffs this year and also who you think is going to take home the Stanley Cup I'll see you guys in the next video please take care peace


I know you guys have got to be just as shocked as I am that 2021 Wiki Tree Challenge has come to an end. Tonight, I have with me Melanie McCow and on the end there, Dieter Leverence, which we've all talked to a lot during the challenge, down below two of our fabulous captains, Karen Lowe and Emma McBeth. We had Cheryl in here, she might be back. AOMOM is going to try and be with us and she's not feeling it. So AOMOM, if you're out there listening to this, I hope you feel better and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Yeah, well soon, drink all the fluids. Yeah, definitely. And I am going to go ahead and we're gonna start with some of the info we have got going into this year. Now, I know anyone that has participated at least one week knows what these images are or even watched one of our broadcasts. So I'm not gonna tell you all about our ways to collaborate and our spreadsheets and G2G posts, but who knew that all of this would lead to such an outstanding year, like the one that we've had. Of course, Discord, we've had our live chats with WikiTriers from all over the world. We've made friends with a lot of them and it's just fabulous to be able to see people around the clock. Let's see if Cheryl's gonna let us add her back in. Okay, and so we had 12 captains and it kind of doesn't seem like it, but you look at the list and you're like, yeah, that's right. We had 12 captains during the 2021 challenge. So thank you to Azure, Cheryl, Christine, Donna, Emma, Janet, Joan, Karen, Laura, Lucy, Maddie and Sarah for all that you guys did for our guests and for WikiTree this year. Now, at the end of this, we'll be revealing which captain won the physical trophy. But first, let's take a look at a couple of highlights from this year. Now, this one for the top captains in no particular order, they were top five were Cheryl Hess, Christine Daniels, Emma Macbeth, Joan Whitaker and Karen Lowe. It was an amazing year and you guys definitely helped make it that way. Now, most of us remember the first weeks with AJ Jacobs. We started out unfamiliar with the process and the scoring and then things kind of changed a little bit as we tried to improve it at the start of the challenge. But even with all of that, we broke down brick walls for AJ. So we added 21 new direct profiles, 17 nuclear relatives and broke six brick walls. And hey, at the time, if you remember, that sounded like a lot, it was a lot. It did. It was, there was a lot of Polish Jewish folks that week and we learned a lot. Right. And it was our first venture too into the Jewish and the German ancestry. At the start of the year, we had that and then consistently throughout but at the start of the year for some of us, there was a lot to learn. Now we had 41 Wicked Traiers joining in the fund that contributed, including our forest elf, Aowyn, the big boss, Chris and several team members. We forged other friendships along the way and started out what would become a very, very successful year of accuracy. So our very first MVP, most valuable participant of the year is here with us. That was Karen Lowe, great job, Karen. Yay. But over the entire year now, we actually wound up with 27 unique bounty hunters. And of course some of those were showing up on the list over and over again. Dieter, I don't know if you kept track but you were an MVP for an incredible seven times this year. That was awesome. Wasn't it? Yes. With a total of 1106 points those weeks. Now Maddie was just behind them. Unfortunately, she couldn't be here. This is out of the time zone for her also and she's not awake at this time. But she got MVP six times, earning 836 points for her MVP weeks. Donna was the other top bounty hunter in the top three. Congratulations to all of you. Now the highest score, this was crazy.  For bounty hunter during a top week actually goes to Greg Clark with 285 points. He was awarded his very first bounty hunter badge during week 44 for Claire Breson Banks, which was a crazy, crazy big week way to go Greg.  Selver, Patty Waldron, Robin Baker and Roy. So thank you to all of you and congratulations on making that MVP list this year. Now, though we've recognized the top scoring participants each week, there's also been so many wiki-triers that have added value to the challenge. They've let their time, their expertise and their skills in ways that we couldn't have duplicated anywhere. And I'd like to say a big thanks to the following projects. And I'm sure I'm missing some, but these ones for sure I know we're there for us this year. So we had Canada, England, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden and Wales, not necessarily in that order. I know we relied heavily upon the Netherlands help, Dieter for our German help and a few other people in that project. England, always a big one, they're on so many trees. These projects and their project leaders have been an incredible help throughout the challenge and hopefully will be for the 2022 challenge as well. Oh, Emma says, thanks to the US Black Heritage folks too. Yes, I know. I know we just had so many groups that have done a lot of good in the challenge and helped us out. Now we've had a nice variety of experts too throughout the year. I know I'll miss some, but these are people that volunteered at the very start of the year before they even knew what they were going to be getting into to volunteer their time. And so that's Kitty Munson Cooper, Ava Kajawa, Chris Ferrielo, Joe Whitaker, Yuhaswini, Amy Gilpin, Dieter Leverance, Frank Yatzik, Jelena Eckstat, Norbert Gitzel, Afon Hoot, Astrid Spargerin, Maureen Fern, Edwin Ruffel, Marguerite Beers, Lave Christensen, Evelyn Astow, Rich Devlin, Maria Lundholm, Leonard Van Hofton, Hilary Gadsby, Ole Selmer, Kylie Hase, and Isabel Martin. Thank you guys all so, so much. I mean, we're hoping that you're going to, I'm working on it. I might lose my voice, Emma, you may have to do the second half for me, but we're hoping that they definitely want to help out this next year now that they kind of know what's involved. Now, another part of the challenge dynamic we couldn't have done this without is our quieter participants. And these are the wiki-triers that have kind of shied away from the spotlight, but they have been there consistently for us. And their help in finding those articles and fleshing out the biographies and motivating us has just been a really important part of it all. And so here's just a few of the names on that list. And I'd like to thank Anne Browning, Anne Guglick, Deb Johnston, Donald Lindgren, Eileen Robinson, Elaine Weatherall, Ellen Smith, Aya Winwalker, Isabel Caruso, Jackie Erdos, John Tyner, Kathy Evans, Kathy Nava, Kay Knight, Maggie N., Michelle Warren Hood, Michelle Enke, Nick Donnelly, Nicole Adams, Robin Baker, Steven Tomasowitz, Thomas Kuhnlein, and Tommy Buck. And our very own Olesh Tertnack, our server and report whiz. He has always been there behind the scenes and we definitely couldn't do this without him. So we also had, yeah, I see Chris down there talking in the chat. So he's definitely here. We have the continued support and recognition of Chris Ferrielo. Now with his usual amount of humor, he has made sure to post each of this week's challenges to the genealogy squad. He's also popped into Discord channels frequently when he wasn't participating to let us know how well we're doing. Thank you, Chris. Here we have, and we all had so much fun this year saying, okay, I'm this many, 11th cousin to this person and 22 degrees from there. Now people suggested throughout the year that we should see at the end of the year how these guests are all related to each other. Because after all, we're all cousins, right? Well, Maddie and I worked quickly to get this chart made up that showed the relationships. But I couldn't quite figure out how to show it or it wouldn't just be a chart with a bunch of Xs, which would be too small for you to read on this. So I went to the one person. I knew you could come up with something if it was possible. And that was our data expert, Alish. And what we quickly found out is that there's no way to show all these relationships in a really cool graphic because of how many guests are connected to another. And here you just see an example. This is CeCe Moore. That's every guest that we've had this year that she was related to. And if you go to the category for our guest stars for this year, you can see which ones you're related to or which ones you are just certain amount of degrees from. Now, this is not all the connections. This was just the green line or the closest cousins and the red lines are the furthest. So for example, CeCe has a line to her closest and CeCe has a red line to her furthest away cousin. Now, if we would have done every connection there would have been like hundreds of lines there and you really wouldn't have seen anything it just would have been a blob. And I mean, Alish just kept trying to find ways to, he worked for quite a long time on this. And luckily he's creative and patient. So we kind of worked together at the end and this is what he came up with. Now here you can follow the week number and I'm gonna post this where people can go in and look more closely. But here you can follow the week number and see where the next connection is starting with week one, going to week two. These are still the greener the line, the closer the connection, the red line obviously is a far one. Now we did have some that did not connect to cousins. And Melanie, I know you see your name is up there. She's like, you don't have to tell me, I already knew. And they are connected to the global tree but AJ, Daniel, Ellen, Skip, Jared, Johnny, Lewis, Marion, of course, Melanie and then Nathan were not connected to any of the other guest stars. So this just means that we have to try and get some more of those sideways lines done and we're gonna find a way to get them connected to us somehow so that we can work on. Now I am gonna say that these are our totals for this year. And you guys, every time I thought you were done amazing me and you did the huge tremendous job, you do something else. And these numbers really reflect that. So this is for the entire year of the challenge. Now total points are 22,468, created ancestors are 3404, created relatives are 10,308, bounty points, 8,690, profiles edited, 31,915 profiles edited, which is just crazy. And then total edits over the year was 126,382. So just totally nuts. Let's see if I can remove that down. See who we have left. We lost Emma for a minute. We never got Cheryl back. Okay, so I am going to start with the first question for somebody and Melanie, let's go ahead and start with you. What was your favorite part of the challenge? What was your favorite part of the challenge? Ooh, that's a tough one, because it's like, I think I'm a little bit biased to probably be in a guest star and having my tree done for the week. That was definitely an absolute pleasure. But I think overall, even just doing the challenge as a volunteer, I think just any excitement when you can share something that you found, just see how someone's like, just like eyes, just like eyes, just like eyes, just see how someone's like eyes just light up and just giving someone back. I remember when Amy, Johnson Crow, got really emotional over the Johnson line connection I helped look into. That was really the moment, because that's the moment I live for every day when I work with clients is just being able to give someone back a piece of their heritage. Right, you know, and that is such a big gift to give somebody and we've done it over and over this year, I know a few of our guests have cried, but I think sometimes we get just as emotional, you know, we feel like, I mean, we feel so much closer to them by the time we're done and this is just a crazy, crazy fun way to do this and to share our skill and everything. Do we have Cheryl and Emma back yet? I'm back. Can you hear me? Okay, yeah. Do you wanna take the next question or do you want me to ask you a question? What is one thing you learned this year that will help you in upcoming years? Yeah, let's give that one to Karen. You want me to do it again, Karen? Okay. Yeah, sorry. We're having some fun times at our house too, so please hit me with the question again. I sure will hit you with it. What is one thing you learned this year that will help you in upcoming years? Oh, you know, I was gonna say that one of my favorite things this year was how we got to learn to do research in new places. You know, I started the year not being very familiar at all with, say, like Polish-Jewish records and I learned a lot about how the efforts of the Jewish Records Indexing Project has made that so approachable for English-speaking Americans to get into those records and have some findings or English-speaking English speakers around the world. And similarly, that you can get into Dutch research and go to WIWASWI and with the attention that other countries and other organizations are paying to indexing their records, it's just amazing what can be accomplished. So I think what will help me is, is it just the confidence and the willingness to try a new location, a new culture that I don't know anything about and see what's available, you know. That was a good answer, Karen. Do you wanna give Dieter the next one, Cheryl? Sure. Are you ready for me, Dieter? Yeah, I think so. Okay, what set of records location-wise was the hardest for you? That's different because I used several pages to search the records, but if you see the Lutheran directors in Germany, there are 400,000 records, about 400,000 and 120,000 are online. So sometimes it's very hard to find something because less than one third is online available. That's the biggest problem we have. Otherwise, I like to read those old records. For me, it's easy. Most of them I can read fluently without any problems. I was very impressed with the work you did this year, Dieter, just amazing. Sometimes for me were long days because 10 hours were nothing to work in the challenge. And I must stop. My wife said, okay, come down and help me now. There were seven of the people incredible. It was not, it had so much information for them, but it was possible to put that online in that one week. The time was too short. Yeah, it is. I'm sorry, Mende. There were a lot of brick walls we wouldn't have made, Dieter, without you on the challenge. Yeah, I would have find more, but as I said, the time was too short sometimes. And I stopped mostly midnight, half past midnight, and then okay, I did mistakes. I see it's all next day that I did mistake. It's translating and transcribing so that I came, you must stop at some time. Sorry, my English is not so good. I speak to not enough English. Chris, Deer is a machine, he says. Yeah, we're okay because you communicate well in English and we love your skills in German. I know we had so many trees this year, though. Trees, they're part of the tree where a week was just not enough for any of us. And you get to the end of the week and you're desperately trying to get that last profile done. And you're like, no, or I want to get this brick wall done. I know it's a lot of times when we had a week off, which wasn't very often this year. And people spend it still trying to touch up things even though they didn't get points for it. What do you have next, Cheryl? Okay, let's see what our next question is. I think this is a good one for Emma. Which set of records did you feel the most comfortable with? That's an obvious one. Definitely be the French-Canadian ones. Those are the weeks where my score was way higher. And as Karen and I discuss all the time, it's like fish and a barrel. If you know which parish, you can find the entire family and who knows how many generations, generation after generation after generation. So yeah, I tried to stop by any time I saw someone had French-Canadian and have a little fun with their records. Now for you, which one would you have picked as the hardest set though, Emma? Well, all the ones that, like the last one that we did for marriage, I couldn't even touch that. Like I just sat back and watched people because I was like, I don't know what you're talking about or what these records are or where you would find them or, yeah. And also I'm not familiar with Jewish genealogy to any extent. So anytime that, like when we were working with Lewis and Marion and other weeks, I just kind of stepped back and I learned a lot from just getting back and listening to the discussion and where people were picking up. Like, you know, I mentioned the candle tax that you brought in that last week. I was learning a lot about what is available, what isn't available and how they manage the types of records for Jewish genealogy. I think the Jewish genealogy for me was one of the saddest ones to actually dig into and the findings that we got out of the weeks. Some of it made me cry when I was reading parts of it. I think that's probably one of the most interesting ones. The weeks that I did. I don't know about everybody else, but... Yeah, I remember we wrapped up with Johnny Pearl on Holocaust Remembrance Day. And so of course that part of Jewish history is just devastating. And then looking at families with all the infant deaths, you know, and the one whose parent knows that things aren't certain, you know, even today with modern medicine and we look back just a few years and there's just so much loss in some families. Yeah, some of those big families, you know, and only three or four of the children would grow to adulthood and actually marry.  They took care of the children in the home.  They'd get up the next day, feed the kids and, you know, help work the farm. And I mean, just really sad. It was right around that same period, there was a special on TV with one of the survivors that actually saw her brothers and sisters being killed. It was right around the same time we were doing the research on that and to watch her talk and us researching at the same time. I was very emotional about that. So it was rough. Okay, we had a question here from Paul and he says, how do I get my brick walls in my tree to be worked out or just certain people? Now for the actual challenge, Paul, we had this year we had genealogy stars. So they were anybody that was an influencer in the genealogy world or an actual genealogist in the genealogy world. Now next year, we're taking that out to be celebrities, you know, and unfortunately, I mean, we have some just super, super outstanding stars of our own on WikiTree, but anybody that uses WikiTree already as a primary tree can't be a guest anyway. So even if they did fit into one of those slots, you know, like we can't take Emma because she's already been working on WikiTree with her own family. But you know, you can always get in touch with one of the project managers and see if they'll do a mini challenge based around your tree. And sometimes you can get a lot of work done that way. Right, or even just asking questions in our forum, I'm just always amazed by the knowledge and the generosity of our members even when there's not a certain project and a score sheet. I've posted letters that were in like Germanic influence cursive Yiddish, you know, or like I said that mid 1800s cursive Russian that are just indecipherable to me as an English speaker and gotten answers back, you know. So even if you're not in the challenge, just use those forums or hop on our Discord server. And that's not just for the challenge, it's available to all of us. What else do you have for us, Cheryl? All right, I think this'll be an interesting answer. Do you have a favorite guest star? Melanie? Melanie, yeah. You can't pick yourself, Melanie.  Or your PIC. That's true. Ooh, I was thinking of the ones that we worked on everything. I would say, I think I actually really enjoyed working on Lisa Lissons' tree. Hers I found to be just pretty interesting. I think there was a lot of variety there, which was nice. Okay, Karen's question, partner in crime. And that would be David Lamber. So she's my co-worker, I keep it my co-worker, so she could not pick him. Yeah, David was my partner in crime at the famous table 41 at a conference when we sat together and had a big trivia contest over dinner. Yeah, and Lisa's was, I thought interesting because I think we was probably one of the more difficult ones for the US was a lot of Southern research. So that definitely proved to be a nice challenge, which was good. See what we can kind of cover. I think a lot of people will probably agree with Emma only because he's so well known that Dr. Henry Lewis Gates when he took the time to come and be on our show, that was pretty incredible. He was a lot of fun. Right. And those folks like Dr. Gates and C.C. Moore, who will, of course, a lot more attention has probably been paid to Dr. Gates's personal tree and we've had whole television specials about it, but the opportunity to work together and to make these guests who are such excellent researchers and writers say, wow, I can't believe what you found. That's fun. I mean, if you all worked on my tree, I would be amazed, but not that surprised if you found a lot of great stuff, but someone who's had so much attention and just show the power of wakitry and how there's always something new to discover. Right. Dieter, did you have a favorite? I don't remember the name, but I remember the week because he had, or she had, I don't know, anchors from Prussia and there's a man who needs from Prussia. They learned a lot of new things because man who needs baptized their children with 18 or 20 years or something like that. It was very different to other weeks. So that week I liked very much because I for myself learned a lot. Right. I don't know the name. I don't remember the name. Yeah, and I know it was shocking because usually when you find a baptism for somebody, it's around the time of their birth or within a day or two. And here we were seeing like families were baptized or they were 18, 20 years old before they were baptized. So it kind of made it hard to look for those records. You didn't know when that was gonna occur. Better late than never is always fine, Betsy. It's fine, we're glad you made it. Now I'm gonna go ahead and ask a question. Melanie, have you formed friendships during the challenge that will continue on in 2022? Oh, absolutely. I think I've met a lot of friends along the way and some of them I think I've been talking to pretty regularly ever since just getting on Discord. Close to almost a year ago, roughly. So I mean, figure like last, I think I got involved like last April or so. So yeah, I mean, I definitely think that there's a strong friendship that we find with a lot of other people on a wiki tree, especially here on this challenge. Okay, now I have to ask though, besides me, how many people when we had a week off went into Discord with draws? Or went, oh wait, I want somebody to look at this marriage for me. Oh, nobody's in the Discord. But what do you mean with draws? I'm always on Discord in the day. Well, we were in there, but you know what I mean? We weren't doing the challenge, active challenge chat. Yeah, I think I was always in Discord too, Emma. I think the only time it was when I was actually booted out of the challenge one, but I was still in the general chat, you know? So I mean, it's funny because I think my friends have been like, I'm gonna take Discord away from you if you don't stop. Yeah, that's one of the very first things I do in the morning is get my Discord light turned on so everybody knows that I'm there. Nice. So let's talk about what that means. What do we mean by Discord? As far as our chat platform. Yeah, it's so cool. I saw someone who said Discord withdrawals, right? So that's the chat server system that we use. Right, and Eileen, I don't think any of us ever actually leave Discord because we are so used to chatting in it now. I definitely think it's an improvement over when we were doing Google Hangouts or just using the Google Mail groups, you know? And so it really wasn't a dynamic conversation. It was kind of delayed. And then somebody could say something back and then you had to kind of wait and now it's all live chat, you know? Which is what we're used to in other parts of our life. So it makes sense. We could also do that with WikiTree. Yes, and I know every time we had a week off or even sometimes when it was out of, completely out of my expertise, I would just pick a different challenge which often was our US Block Heritage project, you know? So there's always something going on, even if not the challenge or this project doesn't excite you. There's something else that will. Okay, Cheryl, we have another one? I think we do. Do you feel that the work we did improved the accuracy of WikiTree? You wanna take that one, Emma? Yeah, I'm like shaking my head, yeah. Yeah. Even like, so with French Canadian, for instance, we have extensive French Canadian community at WikiTree already, which means we have extensive family lines already on there, but that doesn't mean they're always accurate. So when we came, you know, you know how things can get convoluted and mixed up and especially when everybody has the same first name and it's easy to get people confused. So one of the great things was, as we were adding new people, we were also cleaning up some of the older, like going back within the lines and making sure it was accurate that we had all the sources we could possibly find and we were nipping branches wherever we needed to and taking two people who were conflated and separating them out. And this isn't just a WikiTree thing. This is an every website everywhere that has family genealogy on it thing. And so it was a great opportunity for us to spend dedicated time cleaning up the branches and making them as accurate as they possibly could be for future generations to come along and have that. So that was one of my favorite parts about what we did is we weren't just adding new, we were cleaning up and doing the deep stuff that takes time and we were only doing it in a week, which was amazing. Yeah. Now, Karen, how would you answer that same question? Do you have anything to add? Oh, I would say that is definitely true. Just the diligence that people put into the work and when we had lines that already existed to go back through every step. And how carefully we looked at, I saw Chris commenting about the Lakapo week and how even up to what we, Mindy was trying to finalize the slides and get ready for the broadcast and we thought we had this whole line going this way, which of course is also a student documented on Wikipedia. And then at the last minute, we were like, no, we're gonna swing the connection over this way. I think we've made a mistake and added 20 ancestors from a related line. I would say that was our closest tree chopping to the live cast that we had all year. That was like heartbreaking. Right. But it wasn't working. Right, to say, oh, this whole line and it's so easy to do with. And that's the critique that so many people have of our wonderful collaborative global trees is the accuracy. And so shining a light on that this year has been really great. Okay, now Lewis has a question. He says, I'm curious what guess you were able to connect up to the main tree that instantly gave them dozens or hundreds of new ancestors. And I think that's actually too many to respond with just a name or two there, Lewis. And looking back through the year, right? I mean, we had so many of them that we did that at least on one or two of their lines where the lines were already existing. We worked our way out carefully. We proved the line and jackpot. We hit a line that's been there for a long time. And all of a sudden they've got 115 new ancestors on that one line and you're just like, wow, wow, okay. It's stunning. And then that takes them so much further back in their own personal trees, back to the profiles where the projects are covering and protecting them and some really beautiful profiles. And I noticed a lot of those guests that had those instant ancestors, I guess we'll call them, were really ones that had maybe some early New England roots especially for the ones in the United States. I found that once we kind of connected them with the gateway ancestor, we were able to really sometimes even bring them back into England, for example. So that's a good example of like how we were able to bring a lot more is you get those published lines that have already been documented so long and now it's just connecting the dots. And Dieter, what do you think would be the cutoff range for finding accessible records for the German people? Like for each area there's, you can't find anything before 1800 or do you have kind of a century or an area where you think there's a cutoff? Yes, the cutoff for whole Germany is a 30 years war. The most record starts after the 30 years was in 1650. Most of them 1670, 1690, only a few go before the 30 years war. So 1620, 1600, one Catholic from 1550, from Ebbe is mostly, but it's very hard to have a lot of things are destroyed. And for the Eastern Territories and Brandenburg, East Brandenburg, a lot of things are destroyed during the Second World War, 1945. There's a lot of things burned. So you will find them never again. So the 30 years war, the Second World War, where the two breaks, the most secret noise. Now, Emma, how would you go ahead and judge that with your project, the Black Heritage Project? Because I'm sure anything, or there were enslaved persons, anything before that especially would be difficult. Well, the big wall that everybody thinks of is the 1870 wall because enslaved people were not enumerated officially until 1870, but what you find when you really work on black genealogy extensively is people were recorded in more ways than you could imagine. So one of our goals is we're working to pull those documents out that aren't necessarily indexed and get all these people documented because the records are there, they're just not easy to access or quick to access. Now, I know early on this year, when we had Sherry Passi and we came across some US records just location-wise that there wasn't a lot of availability. I'll tell you what, and we all say that we learned a lot this year, but I love those Quaker records. I'm so in love with those Quaker records that everything that could have possibly happened within somebody's life was in those Quaker Minute meetings. And we just found so much for those people where we wouldn't have found anything without them. You didn't necessarily have census records, they were destroyed, the vital records weren't there, nothing else was there, but you could dive into those Quaker records and go through those meeting notes and just find everything out about somebody's life. Now, Patrick says I'd like to see a discussion about accuracy. So just what is the standard of proof expected before recording of birth and death certificates? And I think that really depends on the area the person's in and how legitimate the source is. So you wanna keep in mind that you want records, hopefully, that are done as close to the event as possible. So you may have somebody when they marry and it says they're 21 years old and it's perfectly acceptable to use that as a birth estimate and just not mark it as exact. But at least that is a vital record, but that's not as good as something if you can find the baptism when it says they were born yesterday and baptized today. You know, and once you get into the pre-1700, it really depends on the project.  It was a huge undertaking a few years ago that the projects went through and set up what reliable sources are for their particular projects and the different era so that you would know, you know, hey, this will work, but this won't. And you know, and it's not to say don't use anything else, they can be good tools or clues to help you find what you do need. But you know, you really wanna look at what the era is and you know, which project is covering that if you have questions. And then would you say, because I know I would, that there are projects where oral history just has to be believed, you know, I find particularly with black and indigenous people that you know, if a woman is saying this is the father that that may be the best evidence that we have, particularly in the case of enslaved people with white fathers, you know, the woman knows and this is the story that has been handed down through the generations and to me, that's the proof, you know, that we have to use these oral interviews sometimes or family knowledge and I wouldn't want to leave people out of our wonderful genealogy community because they come from a culture where birth registration came very late to that country or you know, these written records just aren't gonna be there for your family. Yeah, and I do agree. And sometimes, you know, I don't even know if it's in the wiki tree help anymore, I'd have to look at used to be that sometimes the oral history is an acceptable source but there again, you're looking at what the source is and when that person was living. So, you know, is this somebody saying I have a story passed down about my eighth, sixth great-grandfather was the baron of this and you're like, no, that's not an acceptable source. Now, if somebody says my grandmother told me that so and so had this happen, she was living during their time and so, you know, yes, that may be the only source there is for that. We have a Daughters of the American Revolution sister who just joined our chapter and she has a generation where that's pretty much what it is. You know, she had her mother was the grandmother was enslaved and the male was the plantation owner or his son. And so, you know, that kind of had to be taken into account and it made it a little bit difficult, you know, but if you do a thorough analysis on it and you're documenting that analysis and where that information came from that can make all the difference in the world. And you're wonderful that society is not excluding someone who would have traditionally been excluded but welcoming and saying, yes, that is the documentation. That's what's available and that's what we accept. And Lewis is asking or saying what amazed me most was how many brick walls were broken for long-time expert genealogists such as James Tanner. And I do agree, you know, and sometimes when we do these brick wall bounty points, it's not necessarily something that they have done wrong or they didn't figure out. Sometimes it's just that they haven't been back to that line for a while or, you know, other times it's not that we are correcting what they did it's that we're correcting what we did. And I actually was surprised because I had somebody tell me at the end of the year that they weren't aware that you got bounty points for correcting a mistake on Wiki Tree. And if it was a relationship with a direct ancestor that was definitely bounty. Trust me, I gave those points out all year. There were enough people that knew that and they were getting those points, you know but sometimes we were just correcting what we had and, you know, we're not 100% correct. Just like my genealogy is never gonna be completely done Melanies is never gonna be completely done. You know, Wiki Tree is never gonna be 100% perfect but we just keep striving to make the accuracy keep up with the amount of new profiles and whatnot. I'd have a few empty spaces on my nine generation chart still.  I'd be leaning over on to how full it is. Yeah, that's my Slovenian line. And then, you know, with James Hannah it was fun and I do wanna say, you know one of the things that I left out is we did have so many people throughout the year and now for one thing, the Family History Library and I'm not gonna talk bad about them because we just absolutely love them to death but it's really difficult when you're doing a challenge like this and you have so many records that are locked away and every time you get a look at something it's like, nope, you gotta be at an affiliate or nope, you gotta be at the library but for the last two months of the year, you know, for this last part we've had people that could go ahead and look those up for us and made themselves available now like Melanie or Kathy that have done that for us but, you know, Melanie, this is what we did before as I go. Karen, we can't get at this. It's not accessible and Karen would drive to where her Family History Library was which was not open due to COVID. Well, big, you know, the original FHL Mecca here in downtown Salt Lake City. So that's really fun. You know, we took some selfies there and had to post them in the Discord chat. Yeah, and she'd sit in the parking lot and look the stuff up for us.  Let me give you some records. So we did have some challenges and we definitely had people going above me on with James Tanner. Of course, we had one of our members that wasn't even signed up for the challenge. She hasn't been signed up all year as Lutz and she went ahead and, you know, accompanied another member and actually drove to the courthouse and to the, you know, two different counties to where the records were and looked through it. And, you know, and then I did let Mr. Tanner know afterwards that if he wants more, there was more there. It's just that that was done at the very end of the week. And so, yeah, talk about a time crunch. But we have had so many people that have done those things, gone, oh, that cemetery's near me. Let me go look. I think I can get a photograph. You know, people have just gone above and beyond with what they've done for the challenge this year. It's incredible to see what our community does. I think it makes me think we should revive. We have a, like a genealogical kindness set of categories that aren't really used on the wiki tree. And it would be fun to have more folks just identify what region, you know, is local to them what resources they have access to that are difficult. Yeah, and I know, you know, we tried at one point trying to put things on. There's an obsolete page somewhere on wiki tree that was like, oh, I can, I have these books and oh, I have, I can go these places for you, you know, but there's just so many different needs on wiki tree. There's, and so many people that have their own resources, you know, that there's no way we could put it together on a page and make it meaningful. So then you kind of go back to using the G2G where you just have to go, hey, you know, hey, I need a German translation and Dieter isn't around, somebody quick, you know, and hope somebody's looking and following the German roots tag in the G2G, you know, but what a great resource pool that is to have the rest of the community just out there. Louis, yes, there was always a time crunch on Wednesday. I'll tell you a little bit of a secret, don't tell anybody, but in my instructions where I had to write things down, like in case God forbid, I knocked on when something happens to me tomorrow, somebody could do my job next week.  So yes, Wednesdays were always a crunch, always. Well, Nancy, that's something, you know, you're talking about the collateral families and the younger siblings, but that's something that will happen naturally on WikiTree and especially with the upcoming year and we've got these connectathons, we've got three of them this next year, you know, for those profiles where we just didn't have enough time to get all the, you know, we went down a rabbit hole and we started adding all the siblings and their spouses and everything, you know, those kids can be added later on and it's just another way to eventually improve our tree. What I think is really valuable is that anybody that's Heather Tree done, being able to go into the Discord after the fact can help you see like what maybe what hasn't been finished. It's kind of like gives you almost like a to-do list in a way, so that's something maybe we can see if we can maybe pin like almost like a to-do list after the fact if anybody had like, okay, here are the things we know that haven't been done or something like that, you know. I found that's helpful. Yeah, or the space page. Yeah, or the space page kind of like, hey, I didn't get a chance to add ex-siblings and all that too, but sometimes just going through and just seeing the flawed process helped me see, you know, maybe where there's more work to be done. Well, that's one of the things too that kind of ties into, you know, where I'm encouraging research notes. And I do and there's so many people that are awesome at them, but sometimes I see this conversation, conversation in Discord, you know, flowing and it keeps going and then you look at the profile later and there's nothing. There's like nothing written down. You guys, even if it's negative evidence, if you say I looked through all three of these sources or sites and there was absolutely nothing, write that down on the research notes. If you say I looked in this site, that site, that site for the marriage record and couldn't find it and then you find it later, don't go back and delete the other notes because the person that, you know, is related to that ancestor or the people rather that are related to that ancestor are gonna wanna see that and go, oh, well, that's why I couldn't find it there. It's not there. It's not just that I couldn't find it. You know, it's really not there and they wanna see that or they go, hey, I wanna try and find this marriage record on my own. You don't want them to go back through and spend all the hours that you've already spent on something and, you know, basically which is wasting their time because they should just be able to look for other resources. Now, Cheryl, are you with us? I sure am. Well, what did you enjoy most about the year? I learned a lot this year, just researching the different, like Germany. I have a lot of German families. I enjoyed following Dieter and what he was doing. Like I said, the Holocaust, that was very emotional for me. I just learned a lot. I gained a lot of friends with this challenge that I wouldn't have if I hadn't done it. It was just very fulfilling for me. Right. And I think, you know, we've all had that same sort of experience with it. We just, we've met a lot of incredible people if we didn't work with them before in a project, you know, we got to work with them this way. And it's just really fun. I think seeing the different resources everybody has and we all learn so much off of each other. You know, we all have our own experience and our own skill sets. So it's really good to be able to share it. It's kind of fun to be watching TV and you see CeCe Moore on there solving a mystery. And then you could say, I worked on her tree.  Yeah, and Kathy is bringing up an important point, you know, which was, and I know we have this several times throughout the year is, you know, we research, search our own trees and we want to do everybody. People are looking at, oh, well, how are we going to prove the great grandparents if we can't do the grandparents? Well, you can. And you know, you're more than welcome to put private notes in your own private computer, but don't put them out there online because, you know, we are trying to respect the privacy of the living people and many of them, their grandparents are still living, you know, or if their grandmother died, they're still siblings or if it was recent, it may still be painful, you know, and really that special close relationship is meant to be honored by the person themselves that stems from them, so which would be our guest star. So, you know, even if you're just bursting to go add the 12 kids, you know, or the deep dark secret you think you found out about a grandparent sibling, please don't, because I'll tell you what right now is sometimes I have like literally felt ill from it. I have to go and I have to disconnect those people and I have to undo that work because we have given our word that we will not work at the grandparent level and, you know, and we need to uphold that. But it breaks my heart to have to take some of these research that they put a lot of time in and take it back off the tree and I'm telling you it's just, let's just not, because I mean, yeah, we just need to save that for the guests to do their own information and share their own experiences, yeah. Yeah, I think that was a lesson for me to learn as well because, you know, so often now when I'm working on other lines, I might add anyone who's passed away more than 10 or 20 years ago. And part of it I learned when talking to someone else is that some of this is just their work to do. Like I can't hardly work on these lines without reaching out to other researchers outside of Wiki Tree who are working on them. And it's not my place to be, you know, talking to Claire and Melanie's second cousins and asking them all these questions about their family. You know, that's for them to do. Yeah, Steven, it is very phenomenal how much of an impact that, you know, that we can have. And I mean, this last year has just been so incredible. You know, I worked a lot with different projects before we started the Wiki Tree Challenge and with a lot of different people. And so that part of the interacting was not new to me. You know, and I knew that there was just so much available in our community as far as being able to reach out and get specialty help and, you know, get advice. But just watching how all of that has been brought together into this challenge, you know, and how people have expressed how much that they can do for others is incredible.  I mean, this is all, I remind the guests, this is all for free. This is, you know, nobody's getting charged for this. If you have 35 people working on your tree, you got 35 people working on it for nothing. And they could be doing something else. So they're doing it because it's their own passion and, you know, out of the goodness of their own heart. We're not bringing the dog back, Chris. Yeah, we have two dogs over here that are trying to have some stand up. Yes, Luther. And we're gonna be ending here in a minute, but this is definitely our last live show for 2021. I'm sure you guys have seen the sign up for the first guest we have, which is Jimmy Wells in the new year. And that'll be on January 5th, and we're really excited about that. It's gonna be a little bit different, but you're also gonna see a lot of things that just really look the same. So, yeah, definitely sign up if you haven't done so yet. So are we ready for the big? I wish I had the physical trophy to show, but I don't, I'll do a drum roll. And our winning captain won from two different directions this year. And so that was interesting. Now, we had it, and if you read back through it, you know, I think some of us had something set in our mind and it wasn't necessarily what the intention was at the beginning of the year, but there were two different totals that were available. And there was either the total for the entire year or for that captain.  That's where I got those top five totals. But also, if you look at the very highest scoring week, that one week that was the highest scoring over the year, this captain had that week as well. So they kind of won it from two different directions. And this person will be getting an actual physical trophy that we'll list off for each month, who, which one had the highest scoring week and who the MVP was for that week. And so that's kind of exciting. It's not going to just be, you know, their winning week, it's gonna have information for the entire year. And once again, they do get a physical trophy. So as soon as we can, we'll post a picture of that, probably in the G2G, so you guys can see it. And now for our captain of the year, this was Joan Whitaker. And that's off to Joan and her team. It was incredibly close with some of them. Emma, you were of course really high scored. Cheryl's team was really high scored. And so it was kind of a touch and go at the end there, but that's how it worked out. So congratulations again, Joan. Janet Weil was her assist this last year. Janet will be taking her own team for next year. So hopefully we'll see good things from that. And I know we're gonna have another fabulous year. Anybody else have anything they wanna add to that? Just lots of congratulations. Congratulations Joan, a job well done. And a job well done to all the captains. It's a lot of work that you put into it. And it really shows and another year's coming. So we'll see if Joan can keep her first place or if she'll have some competition behind her. So, but I think it'll be a fun year ahead and you have a whole new lineup of people that are gonna be coming in. Yeah, and I agree with that. There's still gonna be a whole other exciting new year. And who knows what it brings. Some of these week challenge weeks we're gonna go into not really even necessarily knowing a lot about them. Just looking at the few that I have looked at already. Some will be just like this year we'll have a good foundation of a start. But it's gonna be doing something else. We're gonna be making connections. I'm focusing on that instead of, you know, brick wall ancestors. So it'll be fun to see how this plays out. And I want to thank all of our captains. Once again, they worked really hard this year. Kept everybody motivated, kept things going. For all of the participants, thank you so much for putting your time into this week after week. Some of you guys have been with us all year doing this. Our MPPs, definitely and our specialists like Dieter, thank you so much. You know, we couldn't have done it without that specialized kind of help. Oh, and Betsy says thanks to Mindy for, yeah, I just kind of keep a little of everything going in the background, so. There's something we should add. Wow, just thanks to Mindy. There's the amount of work you put into this every week, you know, phenomenal effort and keeping everyone organized and getting your own hands into the research as well. Such an honor to get to work with you and to get to know you better. You're here and you put so much heart into it too and it really shows with everything you do.  It's been an absolute pleasure working with you on so many different levels and I think that, you know, this challenge wouldn't be what it is without your work. Well, I definitely appreciate it. I agree with everything you guys said. It has been an amazing, awesome year and I'm just glad that I get to share my passion with others while we do this. So I think we'll go ahead and say goodnight for the evening and you guys watch for us and January for that first challenge week, we'll be back. Happy new year. Happy new year.


So in this video, we're going to talk about how to make yourself in destructible. How to build a situation where no matter what happens in your life, no matter what situations arise, you always have a way out. You always have an upwards graph.  Most people's lives look like this and then the moment something bad happens, boom, they crash, it all goes to the ground, sometimes even negative and there's no security, there's no abundance.  You want your income to look like this. You want your love life to look like this. You want your health to look like this. Every part of your life should be in an upwards cycle. Now, how do you actually create this situation? How do you make a situation where you're invincible? Well, most people, as you can see, do know how to get to the ups. So they take action, some sort of action that keeps them up or at least floating. What that means is they do know how to sustain at a minimum whatever they have in their life, whether it's their paycheck, whether it's their health, whether it's their marriage, but if you don't put enough actions, obviously over time it will deteriorate. So you wanna start with the 10X rule. We always wanna start with 10X actions. That is the basis for any form of growth. So that means is start multiplying the amount of actions you're taking in your life to improve the different areas that you personally care about. So you wanna have better health, make sure you work out 10 times more. You wanna have a better income, make sure you make 10 times more phone calls, 10 times more emails, more messages, more everything basically, and the same with your love life. You wanna have a better love life, call your partner more, talk to them more, send them cute messages all the time, improve things, do the actions that work on your relationship, then improve your relationship, but do them more often. So that's one part of the equation. That's the up cycle. How do you deal with the down cycle? How do you actually protect yourself though from the downs? Because that's something that I experienced for a long time. I would take these 10x actions and I would see a sudden strong growth in my life. But then what would happen is all this momentum would go up and then I would bump into a wall, the obvious dip that happens to people, but then the dip would kill me. The dip will bring me back down, sometimes even lower than the point that I actually started on. So how do you avoid this? How do you create a situation where you're invincible financially in your marriage, in your health? The answer is you wanna have a plan to be a backup for every single condition and situation in your life. What this means is not that when you set goals, you wanna start having all these exit plans and plan Bs and what if I fail? Whenever you go for a goal, always go for that goal and go all in on that goal. I'm not saying to have a backup plan for your goal. I'm saying have a backup plan for your life. So for example, what happened to me was I would get into a bad mood. I would get into this kind of crappy mood because I didn't sleep enough because I was overworked because something bad happened because of a bad thought and then would spiral down into this crash. What I did over time over the years was learn my patterns, learn how my brain works, learn what brings me up and makes me go back into a very fulfilled, a very creation type mood. Even right now I'm on two hours of sleep which is not healthy but I did make that decision yesterday. So I've learned over the years how to manage that, how to make sure that I don't crash. So for this example, whenever I'm on two, three hours of sleep, what happens is around the noon, around 1, 2 p.m., I start crashing in terms of my mood and this is almost exactly that time. Right now we're at around 3 p.m. in Israel time. So because I know my patterns, because I've built my plan Bs, because I've built my backups, I know this is gonna happen. So when I feel that bad mood approaching, I'm like, oh, I know this is the bad mood and I know how to correct it. So what I do is I start taking more action, I start focusing on my goals again and that's how I reverse a bad action, a bad pattern.  You need to notice these patterns in your life and write down an actual document where you write down all the bad situations that occur in your life and then write down a solution for every one of them.  I know people don't like to do that, but think how do I get out of this situation? What patterns do I have? I'll give you another example. I have a pattern that's related to bad ethics. Whenever I don't tell somebody the exact truth or I hide something from somebody or I did something bad and then I don't wanna confront it, what happens is I get very introverted and I just don't talk to anyone. So in these situations, what I learned that works best for me is two things. One of them is to actually confront it, is to actually say this is what I did and it's not okay to actually admit my fault. And when I do that, I find that it releases me immediately from that introversion. The other thing that I found that works really well is to force myself to talk to somebody, maybe a good friend, maybe my wife and then tell them about that. When I do that, it immediately helps me see the right action to take and then it prevents the download spiral that would sometimes last in my life for sometimes an hour and sometimes a few days, sometimes weeks or months.  The same thing here. If you have a bad pattern that happens in your finances, your relationship or your health and you do not take care of it, you do not plug it, you do not take it out from the root and learn how to deal with it as long as you do not confront it whenever you're gonna have an upcycle in your life, you're gonna crash in the future and then all those gains will be lost. So have you actually earned anything? No, because if you invested in the stock market, let's say that the stock market right now is at 1,000 points and then it went up to 1,400 points. So that means you made 40% on your money. But then what happens if it crashes and you didn't realize your profits, you basically, it got up and then it crashed and now you're at basically 800 points. So you're 20% less than what you started. It doesn't matter how high you got, it matters how high you are right now. So make sure you have a solution for all of these patterns. Let me know if you have any questions about this topic. This is something that I'm very, very good at and I would love to help you and answer your questions. So feel free to check out my e-book at the description. I sell it for 9.99, it's on sale. Basically, my entire life story, all the major lessons that I've had is gonna help you in business, in your life and in your marriage. Check it out. Also, I am affiliating from Gankardone. He is my biggest inspiration for the last three, four, five years. Basically, I read the 10X rule about 12 times now. It just keeps increasing all the time and so you can check out his stuff also and I would love it if you purchased some of his stuff because again, every single purchase I made with Gankardone has been an amazing investment that improved my life. So thank you for checking out the video and I'll see you tomorrow. Make sure to like this video and subscribe if you haven't. Thank you very much. See you soon.


Now that Castlevania has wrapped up its final season, I thought I'd look back on the series as a whole. I should mention up front, although they're calling season 4 the last, the producers have openly discussed how they plan on telling more stories in the Castlevania world. So I think it's pretty much a guarantee there is more Castlevania on the way, likely just focused on other characters. But today, we'll be looking at the existing four seasons, and as a complete story, what worked, what didn't, and what did I think of it overall? First I have to credit this series with being my gateway into anime. Up until I saw Castlevania, my understanding of anime basically went as far as the little bits of Dragon Ball Z I caught on Cartoon Network in middle school. I assumed that like most animation, it was geared towards children. Then I saw this. And this. Definitely not for kids. It taught me the value of animation by telling a story with mature themes that could never work, especially not as a series in live action. Even putting aside the insane visuals when it comes to the supernatural elements, there isn't a stuntman on earth that could pull off Trevor's acrobatics with the Morning Star, especially not on a TV series budget. The fact is, animation opens the door to a treasure trove, or a Trevor Trove, of stories that would be impossible to tell, especially in series form if you limit yourself to live action. And sadly, at least in America, animation has been off limits to adult storytelling with comedy as the exception. But as pretty much everyone besides me was already aware, that is not the case in Japan. Sure there are plenty of anime geared towards children, but there are also plenty tackling adult subject matter, and Castlevania, produced in America, is certainly not the first. So after devouring the measly four episodes of season one, I went hunting for more animated series telling stories liberated from the limitations of live action, and now four years later, more than 90% of what I watch is anime. Anyway, I'll get back to talking about Castlevania in a moment, but I thought this was worth bringing up because I doubt I'm the only one who had this experience. So I wanted to make sure I credited Castlevania with hopefully opening the door to more of this form of storytelling here in the US. Okay, back to Castlevania. First quick warning if you haven't seen the show yet, there will be plenty of spoilers in this video. For the next few minutes, I'll stick with pretty light spoilers and will warn you before I dive into deep spoilers to discuss the story and ending. Okay, now for real, back to Castlevania. The first thing I noticed about this show when it released in 2017 was that it is a cool show. Within the first few minutes, we're introduced to the idea that Dracula is a reclusive scientist who combined magic and technology to create a teleporting castle. As a sci-fi fantasy and horror fan, seeing all three seamlessly combine so quickly was just awesome, and this sense of discovery continues throughout the series. Just about every episode gives another small bit of worldbuilding that makes the universe of Castlevania feel like a real place that you want to explore further. To name a few other examples, there's this scene in season 2 where Syphus describes Enochian as the language all others originated from. Her knowledge of the occult language is what allowed her to open the gate to the Belmont hold. And this is just one instance of many where the show hints at the exact logistics and mechanics of the magic which runs their world. Another great example of worldbuilding is this scene in season 3 where Hector reads a vampire book and is fascinated to see discussion of vampire philosophy. He realizes that these creatures actually have their own culture, separate from humanities. These little bits of worldbuilding are such an important part of the show that help to elevate it beyond just horror action. So circling back to what I said about my first impression of the show being cool, that's what I meant. If you're part of that small slice of the human population that loves a genre matching of sci-fi and horror, this show expertly scratches that long neglected itch. The next thing about Castlevania that came as a breath of fresh air is its villains. More than any other film or series I've seen in recent memory, I found that I could sympathize with and understand the villains motivations. Watching the bishop burn Lisa Teppish at the stake, I felt Dracula's rage. Now he took things a little farther than I probably would have, but I could understand his initial motivation. He was understandably angry and took out his rage on the entire human race. It's not a logical decision, it's an emotional one, and the scary thing is, unlike your average human, when Dracula has to thought, eff it, I hope everyone dies. He has the power and influence to actually make it happen. As an example of a well-known villain that didn't work quite as well for me, look at Thanos. Rather than emotion, he is a villain that likes to believe he functions on logic. The problem with a villain that purports to be logical is that you can start to reason with them in your mind. Like Thanos. You're telling me that in this world of gems that let you control reality, and nanotechnology that lets you materialize Iron Man suits out of thin air, there's no way we can create enough resources to sustain more than 50% of the population? I'm not really buying it. Not to go on a tangent, but in the comics, Thanos' motivation was a little different. He was in love with death, and to impress her, he kills half of all living beings. As far as villainous motivations go, that one actually works better for me personally than the one we saw on screen, because there is no logical argument for taking over or destroying the world. You don't become a villain for rational reasons. You do it for emotional reasons. In the case of comic Thanos and Castlevania Dracula, that emotion is love. And in Dracula's case, the rage that follows when your love is taken away. As opposed to movie Thanos, that logic is a little harder to argue with.  I don't care, I'm mad. Or as Dracula put it, there are no innocence, not anymore. You can't really argue with that. Through at least the first two seasons, I loved Castlevania's handling of its villains. Dracula, Hector, and Isaac felt like fleshed out characters with real motivations besides mustache twirling villainy. Once you get into the second half of the series, the villains didn't work quite as well for me, Carmilla in particular. By season 4, she does spell out her motivations pretty explicitly to Lenore, but in Dracula's case we saw his motivations, and showing always works better than telling. So the show is cool, it has mostly great villains, and somehow I've gotten this far into the review without talking about one of the show's main draws, the action. The fight scenes in this show are some of the best I've seen. First off, even though the series is animated, the action has a sense of realism to it, like the characters and weapons have real weight behind them. When Trevor takes a punch, you feel like you're watching someone take a punch. When he throws his morning star, every twist and turn of the whip feels like some version of physics is at work. When Saifah, Trevor, or Alucard impale a particularly nasty creature with an icicle, dagger, or sword, it truly feels satisfying. Also, thanks to the myriad of creature designs, along with the array of magical and physical abilities, every fight scene feels novel. We rarely see Trevor fight the same foe twice, so the fight scenes never become boring. We are constantly seeing Trevor and Saifah combine their abilities in unique ways to defeat whatever foe they're facing. The only complaint I have about the fight sequences is that, sometimes the rules can become a little unclear. For example, we see Alucard has super speed, and we see that he can maneuver his sword with magic, so even if restrained, he can kill. So if I'm thinking a little too hard, then sometimes, when I watch Alucard physically straining himself in hand-to-hand combat, I want to say, dude, just sit back and magic your sword to cut the guy in half. Stop working so hard. You get the same issue with Saifah, where she'll occasionally take out a few monsters at once with some impressive magic. And it's hard not to wonder why she doesn't use abilities like that more often. I usually didn't find this to be too distracting, but especially in the last two or three episodes, it became a little harder to ignore. There was so much action in those last few episodes, so in the span of only a few minutes, you might see one of these abilities on display, and then minutes later wonder why they're not using it again. Anyway, it's not a major complaint, and one that could easily be solved with a few one-liners like, wow, that move used up all my mana, won't be able to do that one again for a while, or something hopefully more elegant than that. One more thing I'd mention about the fight scenes is that they show real progression. One risk that a lot of fight scenes succumb to is that they'll just have two people punch each other over and over, and then one side loses. In better fight scenes, like the ones in Castlevania, we see both sides take damage. They compensate for their wounds. They get tired, and ultimately, one side edges out a victory. This progression adds to the sense of realism and satisfaction when our heroes persevere. Okay, so I've said a lot of great things about aspects of the show and its style. What about the story? This is where I think the show suffers a little. That's not to say it's bad, but where a lot of what I've talked about so far, I'd call great, the story I'd say is more like fine, or good. There were definitely moments of greatness, but I think it was a little uneven and oddly paced when you take it season by season. By the way, this is where I start getting into spoilers, so I'll give you three seconds to bounce if you haven't seen the show and plan on watching it. And I'll use those three seconds to remind you, if you want a refresher on the series, check out my detailed Seasons 1-3 recap by clicking the card in the upper right corner. Okay, on with the review. The first season was a little odd, and then it was so short and felt entirely like setup. I felt more like Season 0 than Season 1, but in terms of setup, it was great setup. I already complimented the groundwork they laid for Dracula, again, excellent villain, and showing how he turned on humanity in that first episode was perfectly executed. What about the protagonists? Honestly, I find them less interesting than the villains, but I don't necessarily mind that. Like Batman, being on the side of good usually means you have some steadfast principles you stick to, which sometimes just isn't as interesting as the moral gray areas you reside in as a villain or anti-hero. So putting interesting aside, I liked the protagonists, and the voice performances behind them. Trevor, Syfa, and Alucard are all likable in their own way, and the antics between them made for great levity that is sorely needed in the bleak world of Castlevania. Having said that, there were aspects of their personalities, or backstory, that I think would have been interesting to explore further. For example, Trevor was shown to be totally apathetic at the start of the series. So much so, he was willing to watch everyone in Greshit die without lifting a finger to help them. So, where are your plans? Find some more food, find some drink, get drunk, eat some food, move on. Or maybe find a tall tree, sit in it, watch the show before I move on. The good little people dying horribly, all that. However, he very quickly decides to take up arms and embrace the Belmont creed to fight the darkness that threatens humanity. It was emotionally satisfying to watch this transformation, but I can't help but wonder what it would have looked like if Castlevania took its time with Trevor a little more. As it stands, it'd be hard for me to point out exactly what caused Trevor to change his mind after years of living as a drunk. Was it just hearing some wise words from an elder and first-hand witnessing the corruption of the church? Personally, it didn't feel like quite enough for me, or at least feels like a missed opportunity to spend more time on that transformation. Similarly, the character dynamics between Trevor, Seyfa and Alucard progressed pretty much exactly as they were telegraphed early on. Alucard and Trevor are frenemies that you know will become allies and true friends. Seyfa is disgusted by Trevor, but you know she'll make him a better man and they'll fall in love, etc. You could have predicted all of that in season one, and that's exactly how it panned out. Again, it's not exactly a complaint because I enjoyed watching it happen. Just like knowing Jim and Pam will end up together didn't make it less satisfying when they finally did. But some surprises along the way would have been nice, especially when the protagonists are already outshined by the antagonists in terms of being interesting and in terms of transforming as people along their journeys. Returning to the overall season by season arc of the show, like I said, season one was great setup, especially for Dracula. Then season two, up to the ante. It introduced a cast of characters that made the dynamics on the villain side even more interesting with Carmilla, Hector, Isaac, and Godbrand. Hector and Isaac were especially fun to watch. One of the best things a story can do is make you wonder. And the moment these characters are introduced, you do exactly that. The moment I saw two humans in Dracula's war court, I couldn't wait to find out what that's all about. How do two humans reconcile with planning the genocide of their own species? I was immediately captivated by them and especially when it came to Hector, enjoyed the conflict of feeling bad for him while simultaneously hating him. I felt bad as both Carmilla and Dracula manipulated him, but I also hated him for aiding and abetting and slaughter of innocent people. On the protagonist side, like I mentioned already, things were a tad less interesting. Not just in terms of the character's growth and evolution, but also just in their actions. On the villain side, we had a season of betrayals, changing loyalties, characters being forced to question what they're fighting for, fun stuff. On the protagonist side, we watched people go to a library, thrilling stuff. Of course, I'm oversimplifying, but looking back on season two, it really did not feel like Trevor Siphon Alucard did a whole lot. Still, like I said, the series had moments of greatness and ultimately, that's where the Belmont hold led. Once Siphon pulled Dracula's castle to them and we got the face off against Dracula, things kicked into high gear and we saw some great storytelling. First, the action was, as always, excellent, especially once the fight devolved into a one-on-one match between Alucard and his father. It was a fantastic dynamic battle with some iconic moments. Just look at this. This room bathed in red moonlight as a father brutalizes his own son. Then the action fades into the background and we get an incredibly emotional and powerful moment when Dracula becomes lucid. He realizes he's thrown Alucard against his childhood bed.  The terror and sadness when he finally understands what he is doing. Probably the greatest moment of the series and in terms of hero-villain battles, it set the bar so high, I don't think the series was able to reach it again. Sure, there were some incredible battles after that and some of them certainly outshined this one in terms of visuals and just pure awesomeness, but in my opinion, none of them carried the emotional weight of Alucard versus Dracula. So to recap, season one was a great prologue. Season two was excellent on the villain side, a little less so on the hero side, but ultimately led to a fantastic climax with the Alucard-Dracula battle. Then we get to season three, which was sadly my least favorite of the series. My main issue with it was, again, the heroes not doing a whole lot and their journey being pretty predictable from the beginning. First, let's talk about Trevor and Cipher. They find themselves in Lindenfeld and the keywords there are find themselves. Once again, they're fairly inactive here, wandering around and just happening into an adventure within the first minutes of their arrival, it becomes clear something strange is going on. The monks of the town are doing something weird at the priory and once the judge learns who Trevor and Cipher are, he asks if they can investigate what is going on. The first issue is that it's pretty predictable, at least generally what they're up to. They're trying to bring Dracula back. As an audience, it felt like, of course that's what they're doing.  Also, their investigative skills ultimately led to, screw it, let's just bust the doors down and see what the hell is going on in the priory. So it felt like a lot of treading water just to get where we ultimately knew we were going to end up. There was some cool stuff along the way, like the infinite corridor and the idea of a creature consuming souls in order to open it.  Allucard's story was similarly frustrating and then it felt like treading water so we could get to an ending we knew was coming. He's hanging out at his castle when two vampire hunters, Sumi and Taka, show up at his door asking to be trained. Maybe I've just seen too many movies, but the moment he agreed to train them, I knew they're going to turn on him. That becomes especially clear when they become impatient with Allucard with holding information. So I again became impatient watching nine episodes, just waiting for an ending that I felt pretty certain was coming. I might have been more forgiving of this if it led to some important character transformation for Allucard, but even though it was hinted at, I don't think that really happened. The season ends with Allucard putting Sumi and Taka on sticks in front of his castle, exactly like his father, hinting that he may be starting to distrust humanity just like Dracula, but ultimately, as we see in season four, it doesn't take long for Allucard to get back to being a hero. So in hindsight, it feels more like they just weren't sure what to do with Allucard in season three. Over on the villain side, where they shined in season two, I thought they lagged a little in season three as well. Carmilla, Striga, and Miranda just did not earn the same emotional investment that Dracula did. So right off the bat, Carmilla is less interesting to watch when she's not in direct conflict with Dracula. Further, it felt like a lot of setup. We spent the season watching Carmilla prepare for a war, then the season ended before the war began. That may have been fine, but we at least needed some kind of emotionally satisfying climax. In season two, everything led up to Allucard versus Dracula. In season three, it all led up to Trevor and Saifah versus a nameless night creature. Don't get me wrong, it was a great battle, but it wasn't personal. It felt more like slaying a villain of the week. There was also Lenore turning Hector into her slave. Some of that was enjoyable because we got to see a vampire acting different than any other vampire we'd previously seen. But it once again felt like we know where this is going. Let's get to the point. Lenore was clearly manipulating Hector from the start and finally at the end of the season, Hector ends up with the slavering on his finger. To me, the most interesting story in season three was Isaac's. Once freed from serving Dracula, even though he did so willingly, Isaac's next steps were pretty unclear. So I was curious to see where he'd go and the story did not disappoint. Similar to Dracula, Isaac's villainy is born from an emotional place. He was horribly mistreated and is unable to hone his anger any further than at the entire human race. But unlike Dracula, we actually get to see his ideas challenged. I was fascinated when early in the season, a ship captain explained the flaws in Isaac's master plan, pointing out how yes, you can wipe out human cruelty through genocide, but in doing so, you also wipe out human kindness. It's a simple point, but I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see how Isaac, steadfast in his desire to end the race, would respond to it. I was on the edge of my seat again later in the season when Isaac speaks to one of his night creatures. This was a fascinating conversation. Up to that point, night creatures were mindless beasts from hell. If one of them could speak, what would they say? Throughout the season, I watched Isaac with a close eye because he was the character that showed the most potential for change, something which would be fully realized in season four. Speaking of which, season four, the final season, how did it all wrap up? Did they stick the landing? I definitely think it was an improvement over season three. Similar to how season one teed up a more exciting season two, season three did the same for season four. Rejoining Trevor and Seifah, we find them growing weary over the weeks following their departure from Lindenfeld. Over and over, they find and prevent various people from resurrecting Dracula. Trevor's frankness in displaying his annoyance was very in character and a great example of why he's so entertaining. This line here was particularly memorable.  Would you do that? Oh, exactly.  They need to start helping people actually rebuild. I loved this development and thought it was a great way to gear up for the series finale. I also think it helps bring together a lot of what the show has to say thematically. I'll talk about that more later. Meanwhile, a town near Alucard's castle begs him for help in fending off night creatures. As I pointed out earlier, season three seemed to set Alucard up as potentially taking after his father, but it didn't take much convincing for him to play hero for the small town. Before that though, there is the amusing realization that he's becoming Trevor Belmont. Once he joins forces with the town, we watch a relationship blossom between him and Greta. If there was any risk of Alucard losing touch with humanity, his relationship with her, whether it eventually turns romantic or not, and his communion with the town, definitely brought him back. If I ignore Alucard's season three arc, then I enjoyed the evolution of his character in season four. He's become the exact opposite of his father, rather than a recluse in his castle, he's turned it and the Belmont hold into a community where he is anything but alone. Further, he seems to have dedicated himself to the protection of humanity. Jumping over to the villain side, we see a lot of transformation with similarly mixed results when you consider where we were in season three. First, looking at Hector and Lenore, we find them in a very different situation than what we saw in season three. The end of season three saw Hector falling to his knees, proclaiming that his life is over with Lenore's slave ring on his finger. She laughs over him, saying she made him her pet. Hector seemed to be in a pretty precarious situation. Then in season four, we find that things are not bad for him at all. We knew that he'd have free reign of the castle and would be kept comfortable, but the dynamic between him and Lenore changed considerably. It does not seem at all that she sees him as a pet, but instead seems to look at him as a confidant. At times, she even seems to look up to him. I definitely buy that their relationship could end up in this place, but it's such a significant shift from where we were last season, I really would have liked to see that change happen rather than having the dynamic shift between seasons. But accepting that something happened between seasons we didn't get to see, I enjoyed what we did get to see from them in season four. Hearing Lenore pontificate on the nature of vampires and finding it incompatible with humanity's need to grow was pretty fascinating. Then watching her take those steps into the sunlight was another beautiful and memorable image from the series. On par with Dracula realizing he's murdering his own son. I also think it speaks to the larger themes of the show. Vampires represent our base desires to simply consume and survive. However, humans have an innate need to do more than that. With Dracula and Carmilla gone and with Isaac now set on building the world rather than destroying it, humanity has been freed from those base desires. They can now focus on building and moving forward, something a vampire has no business doing. Lenore saw that and realized she has no place in the new world. She made her peace with it and gave herself up to the sunlight. I thought it was a masterful end to her arc. I think they just skipped a few steps in getting there. Speaking of Isaac, I felt his arc reached a satisfying conclusion as well. He always came off as an intelligent person. So I found it convincing that traveling the world would lead him to a reasonable conclusion. I.e. committing genocide in your own species is probably not the best path. The transformation was a little on the nose in that we literally saw Isaac talking to himself, explaining his entire character arc out loud. Like I said before, showing pretty much always works better than telling. Otherwise, I like where Isaac ended up and we got a great showdown between him and Carmilla. Similar to Lenore's demise, this duel felt thematically appropriate. Isaac represents growth, while Carmilla represents consumption and regression. So they will of course have to fight and wow, their battle was epic. Visually, the battleground alone was beautiful. The glowing blue room with the vibrant red pool of blood is splashing as they fought. Further, I complimented the series on its ability to keep every fight novel. That was certainly true here as well. Isaac's night creature is seamlessly stepping into the fight to assist him throughout the battle is something I've never seen before. It was a great fight, an entertaining one, and a fitting end for Carmilla. By the way, I didn't talk a whole lot about Striga and Miranda. They had a nice ending, which definitely put a smile on my face, but on the whole, they felt oddly inconsequential. It seemed like we were gearing up for conflict between them and Carmilla, but never actually got it. Also, I have to shout out Striga's day armor, visually striking and just awesome. Now let's talk about the secret big bad of the series, death, actual literal death. And by the way, anytime someone pointed that out in pretty much those exact words, definitely got a chuckle from me. Oh my God, that is actually death. Why, that's supposed to be the Grim Reaper himself. That's what death looks like. Like as an audience, it's crazy that death is showing up, but in the reality of the show itself, it's just as crazy for them. So how did I feel about the Trevor versus Death battle? Visually awesome. I started off by saying this show is cool, and this entire sequence definitely embodies that. You have death attempting to shove Dracula and his wife's souls into a hermaphroditic Frankenstein. Why?   Then for death itself, I thought it was one of the best designed incarnations of the character I've ever seen. The performance was also fantastic. I'll never forget the delivery of this line. Why is it that only human hands can reach into hell?  So clearly I viscerally enjoyed the whole battle, but while I enjoyed it, I also had one eyebrow raised at the fact that Trevor versus Death as the climactic battle of the series felt a little random. Prior to season four, we had very little mention, if any, of death as an actual being in their world. It felt a little like he was quickly introduced because we needed to find a way to up the ante from the Dracula battle.  And as I mentioned a few times already, the Alucard versus Dracula battle carried so much dramatic weight because of all the groundwork leading up to it. We had essentially none of that for death. Just a few lines from Trevor describing who death is, so it all felt a little out of left field. True, it's revealed that death was pulling some strings longer than we realized, but that's the risk you take when relying on a mystery like this. If death's presence was revealed earlier in the season or series, we could engage with him as a villain like we did Dracula, and his battle with Trevor would have felt more organic. However, the show went for a twist, which means we only got to live with death's presence briefly. And in my opinion, it was a little too brief to the point where it felt distractingly out of left field. Even in this moment, my heart was breaking as Trevor yelled to Saifah. Just remember, Trevor is a terrible name. That was a great way of telling us that Saifah's pregnant and Trevor knows it without actually saying it. It was a beautiful moment, but at the same time, I had that one eyebrow raised, thinking, wait, why does Trevor need to go sacrifice himself? I kept thinking I was missing something, but I don't think so. I think Trevor just saw he had an opportunity in that moment to kill death, and he should take that chance while he has it. But it just felt odd, considering death has been around since the beginning of time, I personally need a little more reason to understand why here, why now? Not to beat a dead horse, it just felt a little out of nowhere. All that being said, once I got past that, it looked awesome and was as visually impressive as the series often is. Finally, the ending. In a show as bleak as this, was anyone expecting a happy, optimistic ending? I definitely was not, but was very pleasantly surprised when we got one. Trevor shocked everyone by surviving the battle, Saifah is pregnant, Alucard is no longer alone, Isaac is going to build a new world, Hector is going to write a book, Dracula and Lisa are alive? Though I'm sure there's an awkward conversation to be had between them on how Dracula spent his time after she died. But that's for another time. All in all, these characters went through a lot. We saw so much death and destruction. Thematically, it felt right we end on a positive, uplifting note. It felt earned to me and I appreciated it. Speaking of death and destruction by the way, something I didn't touch on much is the gore in this show. Some of the most violent images I've ever seen were in Castlevania. In fact, the only time I've ever been flagged for having a video potentially unsuitable for ads was in my Castlevania recap video where said gore was on full display. Just to comment on it briefly, I think the gore worked for this show. We needed to feel the unfairness and absolute brutality of the world to know what vampires are capable of and what our heroes are up against. The shocking images of dismembered women and children right from the start of the series? Express that in a way words never could. To wrap it all up, I'll conclude by saying, I really like Castlevania, but I stopped just short of loving it. At its worst, I was a little bored or frustrated by the story while still enjoying my time with the characters and marveling at the visuals. At its best, I got the whole package. Great visuals and engaging story and something which carried real emotional weight. It combined some of my favorite genres, horror, fantasy and sci-fi, though also included a surprising dose of comedy. And although I was disappointed by some missed opportunities in their development, I loved the characters we took this journey with. Trevor especially made for a great gateway into the world, often saying exactly what we were thinking. And I'm excited at the prospect of the series continuing in some form. Although it's unclear what it'll look like, it sounds like some kind of future series is all but guaranteed. I assume whatever it is, we'll follow a new set of characters, but I'd love for them to revisit some of these characters as well, even if it's just in the periphery of a new story. Anyway, let me know what you thought of the series, were you satisfied with the ending? Whose arc was your favorite and what are you hoping to see in a new series? Drop it in the comments and we'll keep the conversation going. I also have some more Castlevania videos on the way, so make sure you like, subscribe and hit the bell icon to keep up. With that, thanks for watching and see you on the next one take.


We live in a world where it is difficult and or impossible for some people to find one day to rest and for others to find six days to work. We work either all the time or not at all. We're desperate for our next big break, giving us space to catch our breath or see our name in lights. It's one thing to live in this world where our work or lack of work gets in the way of our rest. But it's another thing to perpetuate this restless existence without even asking why or at what cost.