Weekly Update: Streaming Edition

I stopped using streaming services for a few months as I was studying for a certification exam, but as I now have more time in the evenings I’ve been back to watching stuff on my iPad. Here are a few things that I’ve watched over the last month or so.

“Shrinking” (Apple TV) – I bought a new iPad in December and so I got three free months of Apple TV. After I finished watching the fifth season of “Slow Horses” (excellent as usual), I watched the three seasons of “Shrinking”. It’s a wonderful show that manages to be both upbeat and constantly make you cry. The actors, the writing, the concept are all fantastic, and Harrison Ford (like Gary Oldman in “Slow Horses”) steal every scene he’s in. You tend to generally dislike the characters when they first appear on screen, and they gradually earn your respect and compassion, which is refreshing. My last experience with therapy was not good, and all three of the therapists in this show are deeply flawed, if very well meaning. It speaks to the quality of the writing and the acting that despite this I would be happy to have either one of them as my therapist.
“Murderbot” (Apple TV) – I love Matha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series of books that this is based on, so I was apprehensive about this series. After watching the first season I can say that it’s a good series, although it isn’t as good as “All Systems Red”, the novella that it is based on. The novella was adapted for the format, and while the result works and it’s a good sci-fi series, the TV murderbot lacks the humour and heart of the book one. I recommend watching it, and I recommend even more reading the books.
“Lilo & Stitch” and “Lilo & Stitch Live Action” (Disney+) – I didn’t watch the original animated film when it came out and until now I haven’t taken the time to watch it. I wish that I had – it’s an unexpected gem, a lovely story about family, love, being unique and belonging. I generally don’t watch live action adaptations of Disney animated features, but this one was highly recommended and it is very good. The story was changed to update it and fit the format and to update it for the times, and the result is delightful. I highly recommend both.
“Elio” (Disney+) – this Pixar film isn’t one of their classics, but it’s still a cute sci-fi story, with charming humour, and whimsical world-building. It lacks the depth or punch of “Up”, “Inside Out”, “Wall-E” and other Pixar classics, but it’s still a fun way to pass an evening.
“Elemental” (Disney+) – this Pixar film is supposed to be a rom-com but ends up being a preachy and lackluster story about first and second generation immigrants. “Turning Red” dealt with the immigrant story much better than “Elemental” – it was funnier, more interesting, and more relatable. The world-building in “Elemental” is patchy as is the animation (it moves from weirdly hyper realistic backgrounds to almost 2D characters), and I didn’t feel that there was chemistry between the two main characters. The world has some charming moments, but doesn’t hold a candle to that of “Inside Out”, “Monsters Inc” or “Wall-E”, and the humour isn’t really there. It ends up being a mediocre movie, and there are too many good things to watch to justify spending any time with this film.
“Scrubs” (Disney+) – the team is back after years for a new season, and it’s an absolute delight. I like the new interns, and I love how they accounted for the growth and age of the original cast – and yet how at their core they remain the same. The series manages to deal with the many shortcomings of the American health system without becoming preachy, and it still keeps a balance between humour and heart.
“Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” (Paramount Plus) – before this series aired I thought that only Star Wars had “anti-diversity bro” reviewers, but boy was I wrong. The pilot is important story-wise but is far from perfect, but the rest of the series has the Star Trek heart and vibe that are missing from “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Picard”. The mean reviewers seem to forget that Star Trek was always both “woke” and campy, and this series is both (it features a pacifist gay Klingon, which apparently is a bridge too far for the dudes). While I don’t like Captain Ake (I find her mannerisms more annoying than charming) the rest of the cast is wonderful and the cadets grow and evolve significantly throughout the series. This series features the best Klingon episode to date, as well as lovely homage to my favourite Star Trek series, “Deep Space Nine”. I recommend this series, despite the pilot and Captain Ake and her weird mannerisms, as it has a lot of heart, a lot of humour and a lot of good stories and good characters.

Apart from that I managed to get four short runs in this week (my runs are now laps around the bomb shelter) and I went to my favourite cafe and sketched my favourite barista at work:

Watercolours and fineliner on Pith sketchbook

Here’s the sketch before I added watercolours:

Faber Castell 0.3 fineliner on Pith sketchbook

And I’m back to building Lego, as it really helps reduce stress (at least for me). My brother bought me this set for my birthday last year and I haven’t had the chance to build it yet. It took me about two hours:

There’s a nice hidden Star Wars scene at the top of the “T”. Can you guess what it is?

Hoping that the downed airman is safely recovered and this war ends.

Journaling Under Stress

We have this vision, this ideal of journaling. It’s a ritual, perhaps done while sitting in a comfortable chair in a room with a lot of books and just the right ambience, our leather-bound journal resting on a antique desk, our expensive fountain pen poised to write our thoughts in the perfect handwriting.

There’s nothing wrong with that vision, with wanting that experience. There is joy in writing using a great pen on beautiful paper.

But this isn’t what this post is about. It’s about journaling in a poorly lit bomb shelter with little privacy and the journal balanced precariously on your knees. It’s about the soldiers who journal in the battlefield, writing in the margins of their Bible. It’s about the patient journaling in their hospital bed, using an exercise book and the cheapest pen they could find (because the good stuff gets stolen). It’s about the achingly tired parent scribbling a few words when their child finally drifts to sleep.

Journaling provides an immense and lasting source of comfort to those who regularly practice it. You gain insight, clarity and perspective when you journal. It is most needed when life deals the worst blows, the toughest challenges, yet at precisely those moments the mind balks at the very idea of picking up a pen and writing things down.

Writing doesn’t come naturally to us. It requires effort, it always comes with friction. The very act of writing means that you have, at least momentarily, not merely surviving, but reflecting, planning, detaching yourself from the current turmoil of your life. Writing will never be natural, mindless, effortless – that’s why people pick up their phone and doom-scroll to numb their pain, instead of journal their way through it. Writing means walking into the pain, describing it, facing it, dealing with it. It means that you have to think about what it is you are going through instead of avoiding it.

There is no “life-hack,” no shortcut, no magic pill that will make journaling easy. Anyone who promises you quick and easy ways to journal when you really need to, when life deals your a bad hand, is wasting your time. You will need to force yourself to sit down and write. Techniques like setting a timer, using reminders, chaining habits (journaling right after you perform a habit that is already ingrained, like brushing your teeth) can help, but you will still have to overcome the resistance to writing that you’ll have every single time you sit down and journal. It’s the same kind of resistance that you encounter when you exercise – your mind will find every excuse there is, every alternative activity there is, just to avoid doing what’s good for it. That’s just how it is.

If you’re wondering where to start, how to put into words the overwhelming experience you’re in, I can make a few suggestions:

Ground yourself. Start by writing the date, what day it is, what time. How much time has passed since whatever is started. Your location. Your physical situation. Stick to dry facts. This should be relatively easy to write down, it will get you started and it will give you a bit of your sense of self back.
Lists are your friends. They’re easy, they allow you to track things without worrying too much about the connections between items or sentences. If just pouring everything on your mind onto the page seems daunting, lists can help. List actions you did or plan to do. List people you saw that day. List what you ate. It doesn’t matter – anything you write is worth writing down.
Don’t judge, don’t edit. Nobody cares. Nobody is marking this. Make grammar and spelling mistakes, typos, be mean and vulgar, curse, write sentences that go nowhere. Everything that’s on the page is out of your mind, and everything that’s out of your mind gives you more breathing room. The point of writing is writing, not producing masterpieces for future generations.
If you can, try to find something funny or interesting or kind that’s happening around you and write it down. A young man trying to impress a group of young women in a bomb shelter by performing card tricks. The two X-Ray technicians that try to make everyone around them laugh by clowning around as they rush from bed to bed in the hospital with their portable X-Ray machine. The young woman who paid for part of the groceries the old lady in front of her in the line couldn’t afford.
Try to find a few things that you are grateful for even now. The point isn’t to be a Pollyanna, it’s to convince yourself that it is worth trudging on, putting one foot in front of the other. It’s the difference between letting yourself give up on your life, and finding enough strength and light to keep going on. The darker your life is, more important this is.

I don’t normally publish excerpts from my journals, as they are private, but in this case I thought it might be useful to see a few snippets of what journaling under stress looks like.

Journal excerpt from my first hospitalisation in an Internal Medicine ward. Written in bullet-point (i.e. list) format on a Moleskine using a gel ink pen.

Journal excerpt from a few days later. I was suffering from cancer related stress disorder at the time but it would be months before I realised it and got treatment. Journaling allows present me to see things that past me couldn’t see at the time.

Messy handwriting because I wrote this balancing my journal on my lap, cramped in a chair in the corner of a bomb shelter packed with people.

If you happen to be in an extremely stressful situation, I hope this post helps you find a way to journal through the experience. I promise that it’s worth the effort.

Happy Passover

Quick Cafe Sketches

Quick cafe sketches done between the rocket alerts.

Schmincke Random Grey 2026 Watercolour

Once a year Schmincke, the German art supply company (makers of the best watercolours in the world) produce a limited edition colour out of the leftover pigments they have. The pigments come from their pastel production- which uses almost 100% pigment.

In 2024 the made an acrylic Random Grey. In 2023 the Random Grey was a pastel.

This year’s Random Grey is a watercolour. It’s a warm grey, granulating, and semi opaque. While I normally prefer cool or neutral grey’s, this colour looked interesting enough for me to give it a try.

The paint comes in a 15ml tube and though it’s a series 1 pigment it cost double the price of Schmincke’s usual series 1 watercolours (note: professional watercolours are usually priced differently by the kind of pigment they use. Blues tend to be more expensive than earth tones, for example. Schmincke’s series 1 are the cheapest and series 4 the most expensive). I’m not surprised as it’s a limited edition, but if you’re just looking for a warm grey Random Grey isn’t the most cost effective option.

I filled three half pans with Random Grey (one for me and two to gift) and there was plenty more to go around, so if you’re interested in this watercolour but are price conscious you can try finding other artists in your area that would be willing to split the tube. Schmincke’s watercolours are superb and it’s very easy to fill a pan or half pan with paint, let it set for a day or two and then use it.

The shade really surprised me. Yes, it’s a warm grey, but it’s not too far away from a neutral grey to become unusable for all but certain lighting conditions. It does not have that yellowish brown tinge that makes warm grey’s so… atmospheric. I enjoyed using this pigment, its granulation and layering possibilities enough to add it (at least temporarily) to my watercolour palette.

Is this a bit of a gimmick? Yes. Is it also a fun and interesting grey to have around? Also yes. I look forward to mixing and combining it with some pinks and reds and seeing what comes out.

Note: I sketched this on Pith paper, which is not watercolour paper. On watercolour paper Random Grey’s granulating properties will be even more pronounced.

Book Review: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

Queen Demon is the sequel to Witch King, and starts where Witch King ends. Like the previous novel, this epic fantasy has a double narrative structure: in the present Kai and his companions follow up on Dahin’s theory of the Hierarch’s Well and the origin of the Hierarchs themselves. In the past, Kai becomes the Witch King, a leader in Bashasa’s rebellion, and faces some very difficult personal choices.

The pace is slower and more ponderous than in Witch King, because Wells spends more time developing her characters. We learn more about Dahin, Kai’s relationship with Bashasa, Bashasa’s role as a leader, witches, demons, hierarchs and expositors. We see less of Sanja, and I still feel like I want to know Zeide and Tahren more, but all in all Wells spends less time world-building and more time with the characters in that world. The scope of the tale may be heroic and epic, but we get a lot of small moments and individual choices.

Witch King was excellent. Queen Demon is very, very good. It’s not as punchy as its predecessor, but it’s still very well written, interesting and remarkable in the depth and complexity of character it manages to develop in such a relatively short time.

It does feel like a book that requires a sequel, unlike Witch King, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Wells has written a fantasy that is good enough to justify time away from her fabulous Murderbot books – and believe me, that’s high praise indeed.

Book Review: Walk with Weight by Michael Easter

I think that Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis is one the best self-help books around. I know that’s not saying much, as most self-help books aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, but The Comfort Crisis got me to change several things about my life that made it measurably better.

So when I saw that he’s published another book, this time about rucking (walking with weight, or yomping) I immediately bought and read it. I am interested in rucking as a form of cross-training for my running, and I think Easter is a capable writer, good at making scientific papers and ideas accessible to a general audience. My expectation was that this book would be a useful guide to getting more into the habit of rucking, and in a way I got what I wanted. The issue was that I also got a lot of what I didn’t.

I’ll explain.

If you know nothing at all about walking with weight, then this is a good book to get and read. However, if you have some familiarity with rucking, I think you will find this book a disappointment.

The issue is twofold:

Unlike in The Comfort Crisis there’s a lot of repetition and padding and fluffing to get the word count up. This is basically two or three blog posts inflated into a book.
Easter spends a lot of time selling merchandise from his partner company, WalkFully. The hilarious thing is that if you go to the WalkFully website you will find that the vests and backpacks he so enthusiastically touts are nowhere to be found. He currently sells a fanny pack (a form of carrying weight not mentioned anywhere in the book) and some minor weights.

So is this book a complete waste of time? No. There are still two or three blog posts worth of good content in it. There’s just also 100 extra pages of needless fluff – fluff that should have been replaced with an actual rucking experience Easter went through. As someone who regularly goes on long hikes in the wilderness, Easter just should have discussed his experiences if he needed to get to a certain page count. It would have been much more interesting.

If you’re completely new to rucking – this is likely worth the time and effort (it’s not a long book).

If you’ve started rucking or read about it a bit – you’d probably still get some use out of Walk with Weight. Just be prepared to skim most of the first part of it.

If you’re an experienced rucker, skip this book. There’s nothing new that Easter can teach you here.

Either way, carry on…

March 2026 Currently Inked Pens

I haven’t had the time or headspace to post this until now, but here’s March spring themed currently inked fountain pens.

Lamy Vista medium nib with Pilot Iroshizuku Kosumosu ink. I wanted a pink ink in rotation and this is a new pen that I wanted to use. Kosumosu is a lighter pink so it benefits from wider nibs.

Franklin Christoph 45 Sage fine nib with a J. Herbin Vert Pré cartridge. Spring means grass green ink and Vert Pré fits the bill perfectly and works well with this pen. It was a little light at start but darkened with time.

Kanilea Pen Co Haleakala Silhouette fine nib with Sailor Studio 224. I haven’t used this pen in a while and I like grey inks, which is why I almost always have one in rotation. Sailor 224 is one of my favourites.

Leonardo Officina Italiana Mother of Pearl fine flex nib with Graf von Faber-Castell Deep Sea Green. I love this pen and this nib and I haven’t used this grey green ink in a while.

Lamy 2000 medium nib with Sailor Black. Workhorse pen with workhorse ink.

Book Review: Stone and Sky by Ben Aaronovitch

Aaronovitch is back in form with this 10th instalment of the “Rivers of London” series. The series has been muddled, mediocre and meandering since Aaronivitch finished the “faceless man” part of it (the first seven books of the series, most of them very good), but this one flows well and is a fun book to read.

Peter Grant is in Scotland, with his whole extended family (Nightingale, his wife Beverly, his twins, his parents, his father’s jazz band and their manager, and his cousin Abigail) in a bit of a contrived mission to take a family holiday while looking into some strange cryptozoological incidents. There’s the familiar wry Peter Grant humour and Abigail sass (the narrative is split between the two), imaginative world-building (this time with mermaids and selkies) and a nice set of villains to catch.

The setting is interesting, the final battle is suitably epic, and I like Abigail’s new mermaid girlfriend. I think Aaronovitch is facing the issue where there are so many books in the series and so much history to it that it’s sometimes hard to follow who is who and what happened when, but he does a decent enough job of keeping the readers informed about the most crucial parts of the past. Abigail’s brother’s death lies heavy over this one, and Aaronovitch handles her grief with subtlety and heart.

If you’ve read the other books in the series you’re bound to love this one. It does still suffer from the “oh boy, big bad things are coming in the future, look at all these vague portents” issues that the past few books in the series have had. It’s clear that Aaronovitch want another villain in the calibre of the faceless-man but isn’t able to come up with one. It also has the usual overdose of architectural descriptions that you see with other books in the series.

Another peculiar thing about this book is the name. Stone and Sea or even Sea and Sky would have been better than Stone and Sky. You’l understand why once you read it.

A solid addition to a good urban fantasy series, well worth the read for series regulars – but if you’re just getting started, go to book one of the series, the excellent Rivers of London.

Book Review: Witch King by Martha Wells

Martha Wells is a phenomenal world-builder, and she knows how to create brilliant characters that you just can’t help rooting for. She did it in the Murderbot series and she’s done it again in Witch King.

The titular character, Kai, a demon prince, is captured and entombed by unknown enemies. As he frees himself, his witch friend Ziede, and street urchin Sanja, the three go on a quest to find Tahren, Ziede’s wife, and figure out who was behind the conspiracy to capture them. The narrative splits early on, with the main thread following current events and the search for Tahren and her brother Dahin, and a secondary thread following the past – Kai’s origin story and the story of the Rising World Coalition.

Wells knows how to write a fast and intricate narrative, and the conspiracies of the present and rebellion of the past unfold independently and yet somehow also mirror and enmesh with each other. There’s a lot Wells says here about friendship, belonging, loyalty, and courage, but none of it feels obvious, didactic or forced. Relationships are earned here, as are your affections towards Kai, Ziede, Sanja, Dahin, Bashasa and others.

The world-building is rich and dense, with no “standard” human/clothing/culture/architecture. Wells walks us through it, but there’s no hand-holding here. You are meant to jump in and immerse yourself in her world, learning about it as the plot speeds you along. It’s disorienting for the first chapter or two, and then it just flows. You end up wanting to spend more time in this world, exploring it, really getting to know its people, cultures and geography.

The only minus in Witch King is that you don’t get enough time with certain characters. I want to know Tahren and Tenes more, I want to see the group in their home at Avagantum. This is why I immediately bought the second book in the series, Queen Demon, once I finished this one.

A superb fantasy book that is hard to put down and is well worth your time.

Writing at Large

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