I got a new phone recently. My old one was a Oneplus which worked well for a couple of years, but with several issues on the battery I decided to just move on and get a new one, and after some looking around, I ended up going back to having a Samsung phone, even though I said in the past that I would move away from them due to bloatware issues. Now, I realized not long after that claim that all modern devices come with a large amount of software you don’t actually want, so I figured I might as well go back to a phone brand that I know worked well for me in the past.

I was immediately disappointed by how much garbage gets thrown in your face when you get a new phone. I was not ready for this. After I got over the initial worries of setting over all of my authenticator apps, which nowadays is almost the primary function of my phone alongside being a glorified mp3 player. Or walkman, if you’re old like me. Then again, mp3 player is also old, I suppose none of my kids would really know what it is nowadays. Perhaps I’ll ask them. 

But since I got this new phone I’ve had to uninstall – alongside a bunch of Samsung and Google specific apps that I will never use – and not limited to:

• A Temu app
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• TikTok
• A bunch of random video games
• Netflix
• Several different AI apps, most of which you can’t fully disable

I paid for the phone, it’s my phone, but it doesn’t feel like I really own it, it feels like I own the casing, but what appears on my screen I don’t get to really decide. Open messaging app? Use Gemini to predict what kind of messages you’re going to send.
Open google? Would you like us to predict what you’re going to google?
Open Google Sheets. Would you like to use AI? What? To predict how many words I’m going to write today.

Like most things in life, this almost immediately turned into a rant about AI, and more of those are definitely coming in the future, but one thing I was actually pleasantly surprised by is the fact that despite my worries, I was actually able to uninstall a vast majority of these apps and after a couple of hours of consistent scrubbing and checking for new sneaky apps that might have found a way into the phone, I believe it’s now mostly cleared out of apps I won’t use. I’m not a big phone user. When I’m at work, I hardly have the time to use my phone and even when I do, I usually just try to get some work done on my laptop instead, where I also have access to Youtube and Discord. At home I mostly use it to ignore calls and sometimes read manga, so one fun thing I’d like to do is show my teenage students my daily screentime and watch them try to understand how it’s so low. I don’t tell them I spend all day behind my computer like a gremlin because that would ruin the tiny bit of respect they might still have left for me. Phones honestly should just be a way to ignore calls, listen to music and use for Google Maps. Any extra functions it has are a bonus and the less ways it has to annoy me, the better. Thanks for reading.

If you’re new here, strap in, if you’re not, you know how it is already, I’m a very inconsistent uploader. I make a ton of promises that I don’t end up keeping, and I’m about to do some more of that. Sometimes I need to remind myself that this is still a hobby and not some sort of requirement to feel fulfillment in life, and as life has gotten busier and more complex, I find myself having much less time and energy for things like this. So let’s talk about what has been going on in my private life, what I’m doing when it comes to writing and where this blog is headed next – and then change my mind in a few weeks, as usual.

One consistent thing will stay, I promise you at least that much, and that is a yearly volume of The Hesitant Hero. I have decided on the next part of this story with certainty now, and it will be following Mirgia’s journey as he is separated from the rest of the party. The party is headed in his general direction at the end of volume 4, so it will be good to see what happens to him before they possibly meet up again. I will retcon a bunch of the letters that Mirgia sent to the gang over time, as I’ve done with other parts of the story before. This version of the story – that you love to read on my blog – was always intended to be a rough draft, and a way for me to write something that I think is good enough to stand on its own on a blog, but perhaps not the quality I would want to submit to a publisher. I am working on revising the first few volumes and getting them to a place where I am happy with them. Volume 1 and 3 will stay very similar, although I will rewrite large parts of it, the core of the story will stay the same, with my main focus being on consistency, worldbuilding and scrapping out the boring parts. Volume 2 will need a lot of overhaul as I find it quite boring upon rereading it. I haven’t decided much on volume 4 yet, but just like with volume 1 and 3, don’t expect massive changes to the core plot, I’m happy with it as it is now. 

But I was supposed to talk about life, not about my story for the millionth time. Things have been challenging. My mom lives on welfare and finally got to go on holiday for the first time in many years, only for her sister – with whom she traveled – to get covid, and the entire holiday being ruined, so I had to spend a lot of energy listening to her talk about that and trying to comfort her. While this was all happening, my dad had a cancer scare – a pre-emptive test found something – which luckily ended up being something benign that they could easily remove. As those things were happening in the background, I was saying goodbye to my social worker, which means that for the first time since I was a teenager, I do not have any help with my mental health. This was on purpose of course, as I’m doing much better than I was in the past, but it’s still a big step for me and definitely comes with some anxiety.
Lastly, my brother – who I live(d) with until now, is emigrating to Denmark. He has a job with a Danish company and has had this for a while, but they now want him to work at the office and he’s moving to an apartment near it. This is of course great, but my brother has been unreliable in the past when it comes to big steps in his life. Mental health instability runs in the family I suppose. I’m optimistic about his future, but definitely feel a bunch of stress about the first couple of weeks he’ll be gone.

And finally – the sword of Damocles that’s always hanging over my head – is getting my degree. I will spend these next few months working hard on finishing up my final few courses until I am done with studying forever and can finally relax. If everything goes well, I’ll be mostly done by late January, and all the other stuff hanging over my head in the background will be resolved or going well (or it’ll all have gone tits up and you’ll never hear from me again), and I can go back to writing at full force, like I did in the past. The amount I’ve written since June is so low that I really shouldn’t have been making any big promises to you all, but I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

So what’s next for the blog?
I don’t know. I’ve currently resolved myself to properly prepare for the fifth installment of the Hesitant Hero. Alongside that I’ve been working more and more on worldbuilding for my other story, the Necromancer’s Daughter. I have no real promises on a release schedule for that story, and there’s even a sizable chance I won’t be posting it here, but only writing it for myself at first. I’ve also gotten the urge again to watch some old anime, and I might as well do some reviews of them as I’m watching them. But all of this will wait until the new year. November and December are always slow months on this blog, and they will be even slower this year. I’m not promising anything right now – that’s character growth baby – but I will try to talk to you all somewhat regularly. I’m hoping either weekly or biweekly, but if you don’t hear from me for a few weeks in a row, just know that I’ll be back after the storm blows over. Thanks for your eternal patience and for reading these posts. Even though I don’t get a ton of traffic, knowing that some people read my stories and – seemingly – enjoy them enough to keep reading them makes me very happy and although I’d still be writing them if no one cared, it does motivate me to try my best and get better at it when I know others do care. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in the next one, whenever that ends up being.

I’m going to keep this one relatively short since I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about the new title in the Pokémon series; Legends ZA.
It’s a bit of a shame, since I was looking forward to it. The setting of having everything happen inside a big city sounded like a good idea to me, and that would make it a lot cheaper and easier to make the game look good, since there aren’t vast open spaces you need to load. It would prevent the pop-in issues that Scarlet and Sword had. And you all don’t need the awful blurring used in the gen 4 remakes, so it was set up for success.

Unfortunately, that’s not what we got. Copy and paste graphics that don’t even look all that good on their own, pop-in for characters that are about three steps in front of you and a game that genuinely looks worse than some of its predecessors. I don’t know what is happening at Gamefreak, but even as someone who is a die hard pokémon enjoyer that will eat up most of the slop they churn out, I feel offended by how lazy this game is.
For starters, you have an entire game that is set inside a city, but all of the clothing stores and things like the stone emporium are just a menu, not an actual store. There’s characters with animated faces, but none of them are voice-acted. And the writing is… not great. There’s an entire sub-arc about a streamer and her fans, and some of the characters’ writing feels very “hello fellow kids” to me. 

Moving on to the gameplay, I do think that the way you catch pokémon is done quite well. Just throw balls at whatever comes your way and if it doesn’t catch immediately, you can battle the pokémon and try again when it’s weakened. This makes for a rather fluid catching mechanic that I quite enjoy. As someone who loves collecting all the pokémon, that helps a lot. But that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it. When it comes to battling, there’s Alpha pokémon as well as the core mechanic of ZA; rogue mega pokémon. What these pokémon tend to do is prioritize attacking the player over their pokémon. Adding on top of that somewhat irritating hitboxes – I especially struggled with victreebel, whose hitbox seemed to be higher up than other pokémon – and you get a very frustrating experience.

While we’re on the topic of those mega pokémon, there’s something else that really irks me about those fights. The main driving force of the story is that these pokémon are dangerous and could run rampant in the city, causing damage to the scaffolding, the buildings and the people. Yet the moment these pokémon go rogue, you’re transported to a pocket dimension that’s one color and just a circular arena with no obstacles. It’s such a missed opportunity to have proper fights in different parts of the city where cars, people, restaurants and other parts of the city are in your way. It’s just a very lazy game on all accounts, and that makes me sad. They’re one of the best performing gaming franchises yet they refuse to actually act like it. They could create some truly fantastic games if they stopped being as greedy as they are and stay a beloved franchise, but there is a good reason that more and more people are hoping that other games like Palworld and Temtem gain steam. But instead of creating a better game, Nintendo and Gamefreak just try to suppress their competition. As much as I love this franchise due to nostalgia, I think this will be the last time I’m buying a pokémon game and that saddens me. If you are on the fence about this game, I highly recommend skipping it. It’s not worth the money or the time. Thanks for reading.

Yesterday was my birthday, I turned 33. I spent most of the week(s) leading up to it feeling pretty awful due to somehow contracting pneumonia. That was a scary experience, I went from what felt like a light cold on Monday to being unable to breathe properly by Wednesday evening. I went to the doctor on Thursday morning and with some antibiotics and one of those inhalers I made it through the next few days while slowly recovering. All things considered it could have been a lot worse, but I was not a big fan of being unable to breathe.

One issue I always run into when I’m sick is that the main advice people give you is to stay in bed to rest up. Of course, this is sound advice and should be followed in most cases, but whenever I go to lie down when I’m sick, I instantly feel much worse, and this also doesn’t improve if I just tough it out. So my best option is to just huddle up on my desk chair and tough it out that way because sleeping is impossible and laying down feels like hell. Luckily I have been recovering for a few days now and although I still feel weak and iffy at best, I am hoping to return to work by Friday, knowing the first day will be one where I can take it slow.

So that explains my absence from this blog for the last few weeks, now let’s turn to the future. With The Hesitant Hero volume 4 done, I am going to take it a lot slower for the next three months. That’s been the case each year for the past few years, but this time I’m not going to pretend that I have big plans. My current aim for the next few months is to deliver one weekly blogpost every Friday and leave it at that. That gives me some room to figure out what I want to do next, how I want to accomplish it and it might also help me get out of this slump. I have fully accepted that 2025 is not going to be a very productive year when it comes to writing. I have too many other things going on – some practical like finishing uni – some of which I do not wish to share here. My main focus has always been to get the word count up and I still stand by that method, but right now it’s counterintuitive so I’m letting it go for a while. I’ll go back to being productive in the new year, when I’ve hopefully finished most of my remaining uni courses and some of the other things in my private life should have either been resolved or be less stressful by then.

So that’s it from me right now, I’ll give a much more indepth Hesitant Hero update next Friday (the 10th) and we will go from there. Thank you for your patience and as always I hope you enjoy my blog posts. Know that volume 5 of the Hesitant Hero will arrive early next year if things go as planned, and I expect that they will. Thanks for reading!

I used to keep up with political news – both US and international – almost daily, as a sort of twisted hyperfixation. Part of it was having friends who are directly affected by the things that happen over there, part of it was morbid curiosity. I got out of that about a year ago, significantly cutting down on political social media content, and it’s been very good for my mental health.

One of the people who was often on the forefront of the hatred I consumed a year ago was Charlie Kirk. His opinions were so extreme, and so absolutely vile that every time I saw his face I cringed a bit. This past week has been tough on my mental health, as the news of his shooting has been so overwhelming that everyone is talking about it and it cannot be avoided. And I’ve really struggled with people that I share an online space with calling him “an amazing person” and “someone with great ideas.”

It’s times like this where I find that I’m less extreme than I sometimes like to think. I still can’t find myself celebrating a man getting shot in front of his wife and children, even though I think he was a horrible person. He believed slavery was good for black people, he was homophobic, his ideas on women are beyond outdated and he has gone on record saying that some people dying due to gun violence is something that cannot be avoided. Yet when he’s part of that statistic, conservatives lose their mind, forgetting to even care about the other shootings that took place on the same day.

I wrote a much longer post about this, talking about all of Kirk’s beliefs in life and how they are so different from what I believe in. What hurts me about this story is how it is quickly made to be about the shooter’s supposed transgender partner. I’m not sure if that part is true, but even accepting it at face value, a shooter having a transgender roommate or partner doesn’t make that roommate or partner guilty by association. Yet conservatives have been blaming the trans community for this, despite only about 0.1% of shootings being done by transgender people while about 1% of the population identifies as transgender. This means they are completely underrepresented in shootings, so blaming them is beyond crazy.

I have transgender coworkers, friends and I know some celebrities whose gender identity doesn’t match the one they got at birth and all of them seem like great people who found themselves after struggling for a time. Although I am cisgender, I can empathize with the struggle to find who you are, as I went through years of depression and mental health issues before figuring myself out. Having this community blamed for violent acts they didn’t commit just because some figures in politics are pure evil hurts. I do not celebrate Charlie Kirk’s shooting. But with the beliefs this man held, I also cannot find it in myself to feel any empathy for it. I hope his children recover from the trauma. I empathize with his family, but I find it quite frankly hard to swallow that his death has impacted the world so much while the school shooting on the same day is already forgotten. I’m sorry for the very political posts, I’ll go back to detoxing.

It’s something that many of us struggle with, the dreaded backlog. This can be the movies or shows you still want to watch, the books you still want to read or the games you still want to play. There’s many other things that can be on your backlog of course, but I reckon these are likely some of the more common lists. For me, it’s mostly books and games. Like many of us, I have a habit of getting excited about a new video game coming out, buying into the hype on day one only to then get distracted and not actually play it. On this path I ended up accumulating over 50 games that I bought for full price and never properly played. With a little bit of math that quickly adds up to a painful amount of money wasted. But sure, just add it to the backlog and you’ll get to it eventually, right? Well I did!

Now, I am far from done with my backlog, but I feel quite a bit of pride for making it a lot smaller than it was. It’s down to less than 30 games by now, and still going down. I’m currently working through Super Mario RPG – which I really enjoy – and finally diving into the Path of Exile II campaign to prepare for when the game is fully released. Other entries on this list that I worked through are – in no particular order – Bastion, Transistor, Super Mario 3D world, Pokemon Scarlet, Pokemon Shining Pearl, Ori and the Blind Forest, Bioshock 1, 2 & Infinite, Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Stray and still quite a few more. I had already played Bastion and Transistor on PC but wanted to play them again on my Switch. Similarly I already played Bioshock 1 and and Infinite, but I could never get Bioshock 2 to work through Games for Windows Live, so it was great experiencing that one for the first time. All three games are fantastic, but the first game in that series is still my favorite. 

I’ve also made it through my entire backlog of manga, which includes Soul Eater, Frieren and Solo Leveling. I will talk about some of those in the future, but they’re all absolute bangers. I am now starting on my reading backlog, which is a lot more daunting. I think a good way to work on your backlogs is by tackling some of the easier entries first. Once you’ve committed yourself to actually completing these games and reading these books, it’s much easier to keep going and of course, you’ll realize that you put these on your to-do list for a reason; because you wanted to experience them. And if you tackle an entry on your backlog that you end up not liking, then that’s fine too, you can just stop playing it or reading it and say you gave it a good try. No point in forcing yourself through it if you’re not enjoying it.

Now, as positive as I’ve been about this journey, there is also a bit of a downside to it for me personally. As I’ve talked about before, I can be a bit compulsive when it comes to hobbies. I have no OCD, but some of the signs are there, and of course those sorts of habitual roadblocks are not uncommon among people on the spectrum. I have made lists of everything I want to complete, categorized them, looked up the hours it would take and then scheduled them as to how quickly I want to go through them. That’s very much not the best way to enjoy something and likely not a healthy way of doing things. Sometimes it has me just brute forcing my way through a game just to get it ticked off the list, or reading more or less to adhere to some strange self-enforced schedule. This is a habit I have with writing as well, and it’s similar to the reason I really dislike dropping an anime or a book halfway through, no matter how bad it is. It’s a habit I’ve desperately wanted to get rid of for years now, but without much success. There are silver linings though, as I’ve been able to at least be a little bit more efficient about it, and actually get some things done as opposed to just rewriting the list a million times without actually doing something. My hope is to complete enough of the list to no longer need to feel forced to do certain things, but I worry that’s only dealing with the symptoms, not the problem. 

Oh well, either way I’ve gone back to work after a long summer break. I’m still in a little bit of a writing slump and have been for a few months, but I don’t think this longer break is bad per se. I am hoping the motivation returns to me soon though, as I still need to finish the fourth volume (as of posting this I have yet to start Friday’s chapter), and I still need to work hard on completing the finalized version of the first volume. I am slowly accepting that I might need a break next year from the main storyline of the Hesitant Hero and think of a side project to fill that spot up that I can be a bit more relaxed with. I haven’t figured it out yet though, and I have many different ideas – some of which aren’t terrible. I’ll tell you when I know for certain, but at the bare minimum I plan to keep writing in the world of Palaria, regardless of what that looks like. I also know where I want to next take Mana and Cobal, just not quite how I want them to go there yet. So a different angle might be nice.

This turned into more of a rant than I initially planned, but what else is new. Hopefully the daily rhythm of work will help me get back that motivation, and I’ll try my hardest to get the next chapter ready by Friday, but I promise you it’ll be done by the end of the week. Thanks for reading!

It’s almost September again, the summer break that us teachers get that feels like it lasts forever to get to also is over in a flash. I suppose I shouldn’t complain since 6 weeks in a row is much more than most anyone else gets, but I definitely need the first 2 or 3 of those weeks to go from a human blob of exhaustion back to somewhat regular levels of exhaustion. And what better way to do so than by spending time with your favorite hobbies.

For me those mainly include reading, writing, gaming and watching dubious amounts of British panel shows. I talked about Taskmaster the other day for a reason, I’ve watched yet another full series of it since we last spoke. Series 16 has some incredibly funny guests. But I’ve also been working hard on my other hobbies.

And that right there is the core problem I’m currently trying to get past in my life. I tend to “work” on my hobbies. I don’t always give myself the space to properly enjoy them, since I need to be at least somewhat efficient at them. To give you an idea into my weird brain, let me take you through my planning for a day.

I’ll look at the things I absolutely have to do like work, household chores, eating lunch and dinner and finishing my damn teaching degree. That all just has to happen, so it’ll be scheduled accordingly. Then the remaining time is for my hobbies. But in the MMO I’m playing, I want to spend 2 hours on my dailies. Then I also want to do at least 30 minutes to an hour of writing, as well as 30 minutes to an hour of reading. I’m currently re-reading the Soul Eater manga, but more on that in a later post. On top of that, I need to watch all the anime that I’m keeping up with as well as the Youtubers I am subscribed to. Lastly, I need to work on my gaming backlog – a post on that coming soon as well – and when all that is done, I can fill in the rest of the day for whatever leisure I feel like partaking in. 

The problem is that if you count all of that up and start at – let’s say – 5 pm since that means work and household chores are mostly done, then you quickly get to 4 or 5 hours and it’ll be time for bed after I do everything I want to do in a day. Now don’t misunderstand, I enjoy all of the things I mentioned in the paragraph above, but if I don’t plan them in, I’ll often find that I don’t get to all of them. So it almost turns into work in a way, and that is a problem. I wish I was better at just enjoying one thing at a time without worrying too much about other things, but that doesn’t really work for me. It’s probably one of the bigger roadblocks I’m dealing with right now – and yes I’m aware that out of all the problems life can throw at you, this isn’t really all that bad – alongside finishing my degree. I do hope that once I’ve got that degree, have my own place, and get through my backlog of games (there it is, the work requirement to get to have fun) I can find it in myself to be a bit more relaxed about it. But I’ve been telling myself this for years, so I’m not hopeful. Maybe I should go back to therapy.

Either way, with summer break almost over, I am pleased with how much I’ve done over the break, but I do wish I’d feel less tired than I do. Not sure if that’s due to the way my brain works or something else. I should go to the doctor again, but he’ll probably just tell me I’m stressed and need to take time off work. Yeah right. Thanks for reading.

Another quick reminder that there will not be a chapter of The Hesitant Hero this week.

A quick post today about some music. I’ve been going around lately discovering a lot of new music. I got into Sleep Token, Ghost, the Kpop movie, and of course – although not new – Yungblud’s album Idols. I’ve also made a habit out of clicking on songs in my recommendations that look interesting. So when I saw a song by a band named The Paradox which featured Travis Barker, I had to listen to it.

The song in question is called “Bender” and it’s a very good pop-punk song with Travis on drums as well as in the music video. I had never heard of The Paradox before, so I decided to check out their catalog on Spotify. It turns out they’re quite a new band, with only a handful of songs to their name. I ended up listening to all of them and they are truly a look back at the early 2000s where punk rock was silly and fun to listen to. Songs about your hot teacher, drinking too much, breaking up and everything else. 

One song stood out to me though, and that is their song The Message. No, not the hip-hop classic by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but a much more modern song with the same name. It doesn’t feature Travis, but that is not a required element to make a good song. What it does feature is a sound that is so similar to that of Blink182 that I had to double check if it wasn’t actually a Blink song instead. There are a ton of modern artists either trying to emulate the old era of pop-punk and even more that are trying to put their own spin on it and make it more modern, but if you were to put this song in an old Blink182 album I think I wouldn’t notice it’s a different artist. It’s very catchy, and I highly recommend you check out their songs. Thanks for reading.

Five comedians, one Taskmaster, one little Alex Horne and a whole bunch of nonsense. That probably is enough to describe the format of one of the most fun British panel shows out there. Having had this blog for coming up on five years now, it’s a wonder that I never dedicated a post to this show. I’m a big fan of British panel shows. I started watching QI many years ago and from there I moved on to other similar shows like 8 out of 10 cats does countdown, Would I lie to you, Mock the Week and many more. Emerging in the midst of all these shows is Taskmaster. With the first episode airing in 2015, and the 20th series happening later this year, that is a pretty quick production schedule. But it’s warranted due to its popularity. But what is it about?

As mentioned above, five comedians take part in a show where they are filmed for several days completing different tasks. These tasks are often vaguely put into three categories. There’s tasks where you need to be creative, tasks where some bit of athleticism will help you and tasks where it’s all about thinking outside the box. All comedians will perform these tasks over the span of a few months and then at the end there will be a studio session where they record the comedians’ reaction to these tasks. But more importantly, Greg Davies, the person who takes on the role of Taskmaster, gets to see these videos for the first time and judge them. As the show is made by Alex Horne – who plays the assistant – Greg has very little involvement with the actual tasks which makes him the perfect unbiased and unfair judge. It’s never about being fair or about winning with these British panel shows, it’s always entertainment first. Greg then hands out points and each episode has a winner as well as each series.

The setup of the show is pretty similar throughout all the series they’ve recorded. First there is a prize task, in which the contestants bring in something that – vaguely – fits in the category they were given. Greg judges those and then we’re off to the regular recorded tasks. Most tasks are performed alone, but there are also a few tasks they perform in teams of 2 or 3. Then at the end of the episode, there will be a studio task in which the comedians head to the stage and compete in a task live at the studio. As is common for British panel shows, the majority of the actual studio show is scripted, with the reactions of course being genuine as well as the task at the end. But every episode has some banter between Greg and Alex which is written ahead of time. You’ll find many outtakes and bloopers on the Taskmaster youtube channel if you’re interested.

This brings me to the best part of this show. During the pandemic, the people at Taskmaster decided that a great way to boost their popularity was by posting full episodes on Youtube for the world to see. I personally think this was an absolutely incredible idea, as it’s gotten many more eyes on the series and risen in popularity tremendously. There are many adaptations in different countries, but there is something so incredibly charming about the roles that both Greg Davies and Alex Horne perform that is hard to copy by anyone else. I have watched some episodes from adaptations, but I find myself ever gravitating back to the original British series.

Before I leave you, let me show you two different things. If you’re not yet convinced to watch this – and again, you can find the first 19 series on Youtube, completely for free – please have a look at these two clips. One of them is a musical task performed during series 5. The other one is probably one of my favorite tasks of all time, all the way back in series 2. Both are a great watch. If you want to get into this series, I recommend just hopping on at the very first series. It’s not as polished as some of the later ones, but it’s still the same Taskmaster. My personal favorite series will always be series 12, since I deeply liked the personalities of all 5 guests. But I can’t say there’s a series yet that I didn’t enjoy, just some more than others. Thanks for reading!