July challenges, new phone, Zelda, and fake Casios - W27

A lot of stuff going on, a new title format for my weeknotes, and other things that happened from July 1 to 7, 2025.

Welcome to the new weeknotes! Going forward, I think I will title them according to what happened, instead of just the same “Week Notes XYZ”

I want to try expanding a little more on things. So instead of a couple lines, you can consider each more like short blogposts inside a bigger blogpost.

Some feedback I got from my survey—which you can still answer if you want!—is that some of you simply skip weeknotes, for one reason or another. Giving the post a proper title may be a good way to know at a glance if you may actually care about what it will be about!

Some weeks are obviously more boring than others, but maybe having to come up with a title will also make me come up with better, more interesting topics to bring up here!

JulyReply & SmallWebJuly

I saw a couple of great challenges popping up for July, and I just wanted to let y’all know I am trying to participate on this! Alongside some great people too.

JulyReply was started by Robert Birming, I already have some good blog posts bookmarked that I’d love to reply to here, not much for this one.

The second one, SmallWebJuly is seemingly easier, and yet, challenging. I feel like I already do a lot to participate exclusively in the small web, the most time I spent outside of it is on Discord, but the community I interact with is nothing but friendly and positive, which means I don’t really want to leave it, despite the many, many caveats with the platform.

I think this is not only about being a part of the small web, but making the web a smaller part of myself. Life goes on in the real world too, and being more present is something I keep trying to achieve day after day.

These are the rules I’ll personally adopt.

• Less than 30 hours of YouTube (combined) - I try to stop using YouTube as much as possible, I keep saying that over and over, but I think progress is being made; only 25 hours were spent on it last month via Tubular. Of course, it’s still a lot, but it is less than an hour per day!
• Minimal time on big social media - Yes, I have some accounts in Meta platforms, I’m sorry. The exception is WhatsApp, I still need to use that constantly. Reddit only for search queries, too.
• Go to the gym again - I took June off pretty much, and last week too. I want to go back and get into a routine again, it is always something that makes me feel good in the end, but starting is a pain, and the time, maybe I’ll just excercise at home? But I already paid the year, so I’ll try to commit.
• Trying to minimize phone screen time (hard mode) - This one is the most difficult one, but I will try. I’ll probably deviate to Nintendo Switch, but more reading wouldn’t hurt either.
• Actually clean up my bedroom (ultrahard mode) - It keeps being a mess no matter what. I’m just lazy and end up misplacing things.

New phone who dis?

I’ll probably write a bit more about this later, but yeah, I got a new phone, again. And it was for the exact same problem as before: the power button has ghost button presses, and bootloops the device at random.

I already had the itch to switch anyway, because I just didn’t feel fully happy running the horrible HyperOS skin on my Xiaomi device. It wasn’t too bad, but it just had a hiccup here and there that I wasn’t a fan of.

The phone I bought? The Nothing Phone 3(a), a midrange device featuring the second cleanest stock firmware available: NothingOS, only behind Google Pixel phones. The experience has been remarkable for me, the extra features are quite nice and thoughtful. The only annoyance is the addition of an AI button. But I’ve managed to remap some functionality into it using Key Mapper and now serves as a camera button. Now only its positioning is a bit annoying, but not a big deal.

Getting rid of old stuff

I bought a new desk months ago, but I have not moved the old one from my bedroom, until this week! I am giving it away to a family friend, since their daughter is starting school soon, and she needs a desk to do her homework on.

At the same time, I have a desktop computer I haven’t touched in ages, for some reason. This is the device I used late in my my high school years, and during university as well. I even made heavy use of it during the covid pandemic, since that’s where I first started playing around with Linux and Godot back then.

Nowadays, I mostly stick to my laptop, I just don’t have a use for the power it provides, and it’s old anyway, it’s not like it’s that much more powerful or needed.

I intended to use it as a server, but realistically, I won’t get around to it, and resurrecting my Raspberry Pi 4 would be better anyway, for my usecase.

So, goodbye desk, and computer too, soon enough.

Watching F1 (I don’t know what’s F1)

My sister loves Formula 1, she got into it quite a bit, and some friends from church invited us to watch it, so I went along.

Honestly, I don’t follow this that much. Sometimes a race will be on TV because my sister put it on, and I’ll watch along and get some excitement out of it, I only know Checo Perez from RedBull because he is Mexican and everyone loves him, but now he’s not racing anymore and yeah I know some other names but it’s not something I really follow.

I didn’t even know this movie existed until I saw the first few minutes of Apple’s event (the same one where they announced the new Liquid Glass interface) and thought “my sister is going to want to watch this, won’t she?”

Behold, it happened, so we went to the mall and watched it.

The movie wasn’t too bad! I rather enjoyed it. At no point in time did I think “they used CGI for this” at all, the races felt grounded and were a joy to watch. The story itself was kinda interesting too, but it felt a bit dry to me, and I always had that feeling of Apple wanting everything to look as nice as possible everytime.

Maybe it’s just good cinematography, but I couldn’t shake that feeling away. For example, mild spoilers incoming: There’s a scene in Las Vegas where they play poker, and instead of using poker chips, they use transparent glass beads to bet. Like, what? Only Apple would ask for something like that. 🤣

Of course, everytime a real driver showed up, my sister (and most of the theater) went crazy, Checo Perez, Carlos Sainz, Lewis Hamilton and many others had some cameos here and there.

Overall, not a bad watch, I’d say.

I also watched one more episode of Death Note, by the way!

Returning to gaming

In preparation for my Top 25 Videogames of All Time, I decided to return to some of the old favorites of mine, for now, that was Hades and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Hades is one I just play sporadically, last time I played multiple days in a row was in March this year, before that it was December, 2024, and before that, August of the same year. So, it’s not a game I return to commonly. Still, during my latest streak from July 3 to today, I’ve managed to defeat the last boss two times in a row! I’ve managed to progress more in the story, at last. It’s been great, and I’ve tried some new cool strategies. I’m still sticking to the bow as my main weapon, but it’s wild how varied it can feel depending on the boons I get during a run.

Of course, the main dish ended up being The Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild.

Last time I played it was in June, 2024. According to my last autosave in the game. I don’t think I did a lot though, since last time I mentioned it on a blogpost, was in February, 2024. More than a year ago, either way.

After failing again at one of the boss fights—Thunderblight Ganon is a nightmare—I decided to head elsewhere, and to adopt a more relaxed gameplay style known as just walking around until something catches my fancy.

This way, I stumbled upon a foggy forest, and discovered one of the coolest zones in the game. I have been playing around and finding secrets here and there. I am still not a fan of the breakable equipment, but honestly the wonder, exploration and freedom of this game is above and beyond what other games can only grasp. Even after 50 hours of gameplay, this masterpiece still manages to hook me. I’ve completed some of the shrines I’ve found in the forest, but I still need to discover a couple others, still hidden somewhere in the woods.

Hollow Knight hasn’t stayed behind! I played 5 hours in a day, since I asked for a day off—more on that down below. I mostly focused on grinding for Geo, upgrading some charms, and defeating one of the DLC boss fights, practicing to defeat Grimm, from The Grimm Troupe. This was a fantastic challenge, and I to see how I went from a complete noob, to actually demolishing without breaking a sweat, was fantastic. It really felt like learning a dance given the patterns and design of the fight. I am looking forward to facing it again. I still have a long way to go to beat the Trial of the Fools though.

In other news, I also played Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros Ultimate.

A graduation in the family

I asked for a day off last Wednesday, because I wanted to go to my sister’s graduation! She is done with high school and will study University in another state hours away from home. I’ll be an only child once again!

After the event, some flowers and goodbyes, it was BBQ time! We tagged along a few other families with students who graduated as well, and had some great, unhealthy amount of meat!

I also played a lot of Hollow Knight there. A friend had their Switch too, and I saw him playing Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus, a game he borrowed from me and finally got around to it, it loooks fun! I look forward to trying it out some day.

Fake Casios strikes once again

I know I should stop trusting cheap prices from online sellers, based on past experiences but I couldn’t help it. I was meaning to buy a digital watch for my sister due to her graduation, and another one for my dad, since his birthday is coming soon.

So I got them, but they arrived and both of them were in a different box than usual, both boxes had the exact same barcode on them even though the watch models were different, and the displays looked both a bit darker than they should. The buttons were flimsy and the metal strap even more so. I concluded they were fake, and now I have to refund both of them.

Thankfully, it is super easy to do so, and I’ll ship them back later today. I decided to buy new ones from the official Casio website, and I went for slightly more premium variants too, and added another watch for myself while we were at it. I had a 20% off coupon that still worked because of my birthday last month, and I made good use of it! The Casio A168, L700 and A130 are on the way!

Not a lot of reading

I continued with Nemesis Games for a few more chapters, but I didn’t have enough time to read, or I replaced reading with gaming for the most part. Still enjoying the story though, Amos is quickly becoming the true protagonist in this adventure!

Also fully catched up with DanDaDan, which continues to be a pretty crazy mess, and one chapter of Hunter x Hunter where we are seeing the origin story of one of the main antagonist groups in the manga, it’s much more wholesome than I thought, and I love the added complexity to their dynamic.

Around the web

What, am I changing my “Week Links” to a new title too? Well, YES!

Blog posts

• Where Hope Takes Light - With a title like that, do you really need me to explain? Just go and give this small post a read. I saw it mentioned on a snippet by Marisabel
• My Weird Habits - Normal people are the weird ones, or that’s what I like to think!
• The July experiment: week one - a phone detox challenge thing, honestly, the fact Manu uses his phone less than 2 hours a day consistently without breaking a sweat is insane to me. It’s 2 pm as I write this (I’ll publish it until the night) and I already went past 5 hours of screen time.
• Social Dissociation - sometimes we are so unique and different, than regular people seem alien to us. Might as well mention some of my old posts about being a cultural outsider and struggling to explain my hobbies.
• How To Bully Your Friends Into Using Signal - I don’t know if I would actually be able to pull this off, but hey, give it a go and tell me how it went.
• my personal canon - I stumbled upon this blogpost and I think it’s a pretty interesting idea! So I thought I may participate in the future, it may even count as one of my JulyReplies!

Videos

• Check out my OLED Nintendo Switch Lite - A 3rd party screen for the Switch lite that is probably better than the original, but is it 100+ bucks + taxes better than the original?
• My Dad’s still beating Dark Souls as his first videogame - This man doesn’t cease to amaze me. Being on your 60s and making progress in one of the hardest games of modern times, crazy.
• The Windows 7 Smartphone - I hadn’t seen a video by Michael MJD in a while, this was a joy to watch! What a funny little device, I hope he installs Linux on it.

Final thoughts

Hey, it’s over! What did you think of this format? I thought it was fun, but it also happens to have been a pretty busy week, I wonder how it will fare when things are less eventful.

I also got a haircut, and other things like that, no card games this time around, sad times.

This is day 93 of #100DaysToOffload

https://fosstodon.org/@joel/114815601199116701