Another interesting read that I enjoyed, but what's with me and consuming stories with protagonists that share a phenotype? I have no idea (I do).

So to start off, I think I'll do the usual of recapping the story shortly. To be honest, I feel quite lucky to having been able to procure the last few hundred chapters for a small fee after those korean corporate bastards took it down. So yeah, Novelpia? Suck my balls.

Also, to get it out of the way—yes—this is a superhero-ish novel. No, I do not like the majority of them, and no, the Em-Dashes are not there because of AI, real people tend to use them.

Anyhow, the story is about Blanco Artreia, a child test subject kidnapped from Spain to be experimented on by a government funded group trying to unlock a process to manifest select abilities within anyone. The name Blanco comes from Remy, a child Blanco befriends, who gives her the name due to her platinum blonde hair. The surname of Artreia comes from—surprisingly—the head of the research complex, Messier Artreia.

“How in the heck,” I hear you ask.

Well, our little Blanco is a bit special. Dun du dun—yep—she has been reincarnated and to her luck, knows a few things, but really just so surface level that it doesn't follow in the footsteps of your typical “reincarnated nerd min-maxes” novel.

Alright, but how does this help the situation of our protagonist? Well, she is quite intelligent and makes it her mission to prove her elevated value to her captors almost immediately, which then leads to her betting her life that she can make a breakthrough if she's given the resources. The earlier guy, Messier, a pragmatic and whimsical fellow, allows her to do so.

This leads to Blanco being excluded from tests for the time being and given a small team of researchers to do whatever. And she doesn't waste this chance, using a brief description from the book the world is based on to try to work out a way to force abilities onto people, actually killing more of her fellow subjects in a few weeks than the scientists in months.

The desired result is soon reached though, as Blanco practically pushes another subject to their limits, who, through sheer willpower, manages to survive. Right after, Blanco personally executes them. Why? Well, that subject my friends was Ellie, the sister of the 'real protagonist', Arwin. A tragic character who died after being kidnapped in broad daylight, sending the story's hero on their journey. Blanco, seeing people as nothing more than static 'things' on a page, doesn't want to interfere in these happenings, so she consequently ensures that Arwin's sister doesn't survive.

While doing a lot of spitballing, Blanco's intelligence is pretty clear from the get-go, however, after she uses the method she just developed on herself, she becomes a person of interest, manifesting an amalgamation of one of the strongest abilities she had read about in the book.

At the same time, her only friend, Remy, suddenly collapses. Turns out, the headaches she had been complaining about for a few weeks was actually a brain tumor.

Blanco's exit from the facility under the sponsorship of some shadow-government group was all but guaranteed at this point, so she hacks out a deal to have Remy cryogenically preserved in exchange for her loyalty.

From here on out, the story explores the next 8 years, as Blanco reaches adulthood, remarking on her excellent academic ability and progressing detachment from reality, letting herself be trained in combat by the same mercenary organization that had taken her and even going on such missions herself for 'live experience'.

Skip ahead a few months and she is enrolled into a prestigeous university for 'heroes', her identity finally having been forged by her backers. She quickly identifies and befriends Arwin and his friends, becoming a part of their friend group and team. Basically squatting on them until the moment they collect an artifact she needs before stabbing them in the back.

The rest is as you expect, Blanco does shady shit in the background, her friends are completely oblivious but supportive. She detaches herself futher from reality, making her number one goal to escape the fake reality she thinks she is in, but never along the way forgetting her original goal of curing her friend Remy, an on-going plot that I think the author handles really well. Because, while Blanco sees Remy as basically another 'fake person', her attachment to her is stronger, leading to Blanco wanting to escape the fake reality she perceives with her.

By the end, Blanco had in total been responsible for millions of deaths, pitting people against each other and literally stabbing everyone she knew in the back, at the end finally coming clean to her 'friends' before nearly murdering all of them, stopping only due to her getting the artifact she wanted.

She then kills a few hundred homeless people, perfecting a way to cure her friend, before trying it on the real deal, thawing Remy from cryo and removing her tumor permanently. But not even getting a second of respite, Remy is immediately kidnapped by Blanco's former 'friends', intending to do the maximum damage they can to Blanco's state of mind.

Waking up Remy and confusing the poor kid by basically cramming into her brain that she had been on ice for the last decade, they basically inform her of everything her friend had done to get to the point where they are at now. They don't really need to antagonize Blanco either, her actions pretty much speak for themselves.

When a near psychotic Blanco shows up and wrecks everything, she is forced into a confrontation with her most important person, a very well written encounter that I frankly think reflected the deeply layered character complexity the story had built up to that point.

Blanco, as pleaded to by Remy, turns herself in, literally admitting to all her crimes, but funnily, due to her massive connections, gets 8 years in what amounts to a super-powered daycare due to her absurd ability which had also evolved over time, making her powerful enough that her confinement was entirely by choice.

Of course, 8 years is nothing, a reflection of multiple legal loopholes and corruption at large.

Blanco herself doesn't change much though, and I appreciate that. She isn't remorseful, she doesn't feel guilty at all, her state of mind hadn't really changed at all. At the end of the day, she only 'atones' (whatever that means when you had personally killed thousands and millions by proxy) due to her attachment to Remy. Using her time in the blacksite she is relaxing in to develop her theories on how to leave the fake world around her, hopefully with Remy.

Using the help of some aliens (Would take too long to explain) and an acquaintance whose ability can manufacture anything so long as he sees its blueprint, she manages to leave the world and it's dimension with her friend at long last, stopping at a metaphorical door between dimensions.

Stepping through the door we never get to see the other side of, Blanco ends her story on a monologue about the Truman Show and then uses her most iconic line one last time “A comfortable lie, or the uncomfortable truth?”, basically explaining to the reader that in a perfect story, this would be the part where the protagonist and her friend live happily ever after, but in reality, returning to the boring and dysfunctional world we live in, they would struggle to make ends meet, needing to acquire new identities, working odds jobs and so forth.

Honestly, as with a lot of these works, I cannot truly explain to you how good this story is. There is 300 chapters worth of world-building and characterization that I just skimmed over. But I would say that the author has made a really exceptional work, establishing a character that feels grounded and human, but also a character that stays true to herself. If anything, her character progression was downwards. And I haven't even mentioned the miriad of side characters that give this story so much life. That's how thought-through and well developed this story is.

In the end, I adored this story. It really connected with me and drew me in. It had so many cliché story genotypes, but never followed them, truly presenting new concepts and scenarios, subverting expectations and making the story feel fresh.

The version I read was terribly translated in bulk by GPT, but even then, the content of the story was just so exceptional that I didn't care.

When translation models improve, I will scrape the korean version of this novel and make an improved translation of it, it really deserves it.

Anyhow, that's all. I would tell you to read it, but you can't. Until next time!

Wow, a game review! Yep, I have some colorful thoughts about this game I have been non-stop grinding for a while now. A love-hate relationship of magical proportions! Major spoilers ahead for the story.

Picked up the demo as soon as it came out, and even though I had some gripes with the VA, I enjoyed the gameplay so much that I bought the full game. Now, after a week of straight up not being able to put this game down, I have finished the game with the 'Making new memories' ending.

First off, I loved the story concept. The mystery took a while to intrigue me, but the more questions arose the more invested I became in it. Searching for lore bits and basically collecting every document like a hawk. In all honesty, I loved this. The written wills and documents just give so much more context to the world and had me constantly begging to uncover some new kind of super secret truth.

Of course, this goes hand in hand with the exploration and combat. I had so much fun exploring literally every meter of the map, that I didn't even progress the main quest until it was absolutely necessary. I fished all fish (Best NPC Clyde, fucking fight me), collected all cans and did every side quest. It was an absolute blast. I cant remember the last time I had so much fun just exploring shit. This is the first game in a while I have bothered to play as well, so I put all my time into it.

Before I start with combat, I do wanna give a shoutout filled with hatred to the people who designed some of the platforming/parkour in this game. While I loved some it and it was very reminiscent of HZD, it was janky at best, completely annoying at its worst. For example Raphael Space Center, in the laser room, you'll be forced to learn that EVE's jump distance is a bit far. Once you get over that however, you need to quickly press a button before you are laser'd to death. The button however is right next to a laser, you also have a laser coming from behind, so you have limited space to move and this game's tolerance for interaction is so goddamn narrow, that if EVE's face isn't planted into the button, you cannot activate it. To maneuver her into a suitable position, you have to turn her very slightly. Turns, which she does in big angles or in a way that makes her run into said lasers. Second shoutout is to the Hints team who literally had a hint for everything that didn't need one, but left out the triple wall run in the wasteland. Would've been good to know before spending 20 minutes trying to cross without double-jump!

On the combat side, I had a lot to learn. And while I still haven't completely mastered the entire system, I have become pretty good compared to when I started and got absolutely destroyed by like every single enemy I came across. My gripes here are the controls and hit registration. For example, I barely used any of the burst skills/functions. They look absolutely cool, but considering how hard the game already is, reaching to the ALT key and one of the four numbers is just impossible while in a constant forward momentum confrontation with bigger enemies or bosses. Especially considering that usually beta skills are all I needed combined with the dodge burst counterattack. Enemies felt frustrating, but never unfair- yeah no, fuck those gun-headed robots. Honestly, they just stun-lock you and the devs put swarms of them next to each other to increase difficulty. Not to mention that those robots, like a select few enemies in the game, cannot be stealth attacked! They just know that you're behind them and begin combat. Pretty frustrating.

Now bosses (generally). They were fun, and forced me to become better and better as I progressed. Like combat checkpoints. At the very end of the game however, they become pure bullshit, which I will get to later. For now, what I would like to say is that Tachy mode was at times critical for me to succeed, yet it didn't always work. For example, a lot of the time, using Tachy skills/attacks while a boss is in animation (which they are all the goddamn time) the hits don't register, it's basically up to chance if it puts a dent in the boss HP bar. Not to mention when bosses enter another stage and I have Tachy active, they won't play their stage progression animation unless I stop hitting them. Which results in me doing absolutely zero fucking damage to the boss, getting my Tachy energy depleted and immediately get thrown into some kind of stage-starter bullshit attack. Not cool.

Lastly, parry and dodging. The concept of using upgrades, better gears or better spines to increase the chances of a 'perfect' parry or dodge just seem off to me. Shouldn't the actual performance of the player matter here? What if someone doesn't spec into that vs someone who does? It seems like something I think should have been a static thing and not something to 'upgrade'.

Musically, the game is excellent. I love the soundtrack and through multiple 8+ hour sessions, I never got tired of it. Which is amazing considering that every area has one song playing most of the time. But all of them have this calm, soothing vibe that will not annoy you and are actually able to be on repeat for hours. Add the little variations, like how in some parts of the wasteland the song becomes more vocal and in others more instrumental, I can only praise the musicians and the people who thought out the entire sound planning in this game.

Now to the three parts which I loathed and just find the most depressing. The story, dialogue and the VA.

I'll start with the VA, it's bad. I think the only person who really improved over the game is EVE, but even then she has so much tonally inconsistent dialogue. The worst offender of this being Lily.

As for Adam, same issue, but a lot worse considering how most of his dialogue has a 'sly' beginning or end tonally. It doesn't just sound uncanny, but also sounds like he is inches away from gaining an asian accent. Still, the biggest issue remains the tone, how it sounds and where it's used. A lot of exclamations sound dry, are not correctly timed within the cutscene or are too over the top for the context. I don't want to dog on the VAs much however, for all I know they could've gotten bad descriptors in their scripts with bad equipment. But I do want to say that this ruins most if not all scenes in the game. Whenever I played the main quest, my immersion was broken.

And that's not the end of it. The dialogue is atrocious! EVE is relatively free of this, because she usually just reacts to whatever is happening at the moment. But Adam and Lily's dialogues are just painful to hear. It's a combination of out-of-the-blue lore-dumping, third person narration of events the player IS ALREADY SEEING HAPPEN and inappropriate/over the top reactions to a certain context.

This combined with the already terrible gestures (which again, just almost always don't fit the context or are over-the-top) creates a waterfall of terribly executed scenes, almost all of which that make up the main storyline of the game. For example, people cheer, Lily does an over the top happy jump, a second later the VA says “yes” in a tone completely different from the scene and then painful silence until the next person says something.

Overall, VA, dialogue and gestures had broken much of the immersion I could've gotten. Every scene felt, fake, had no emotions behind it due to how it was executed. The inconsistency in these three critical pillars just didn't make me connect with the characters in the moments I should've. I'm not taking the piss, but I genuinely felt more emotion reading Legionnaire logs than the main story. A story which, oh boy.

For the story, again, the execution was just bad. I loved the sets, the maps, the enemies, the logs and everything around it. Up until the moment the game had to execute it and take the whole thing home. The story, in my opinion, was too lore dumpy. We got three fetch quests and then the game was over (In simple terms). Take for example Orcal. Mysterious, cool introduction. Who is he? What is the giant repository in Xion, who built it?

Outside of Xion we have literal swaths of logs speculating that he is up to something evil or that the sentinels are doing human/naytiba experimentations, or that the cradle is a lie. We even had a guy give us a side quest that put Orcal at the end in a very bad light. But all EVE does whenever she finds something like this is “Hmm, interesting”. Like those Free Xion people who were massacred by Sentinels. EVE goes “May your memories live on” and then just doesn't confront Orcal. Why? This happens all the time. Like with the Raven logs, EVE just seems very weak-minded, like an adult who doesn't know that 2+2 is an equation and not a type of food.

But at the end of the day, the main quest kicks in, Orcal is suddenly at his death bed and then he lore bombs his entire existence onto us with no buildup whatsoever, and the player is supposed to go “oh no”. And that's the crux of my issue, nothing in this story gets sufficient buildup to have a meaningful end. I just “don't care” that much, y'know? Adam being another great example of this. Constantly monologuing, annoying me with tips and insanely obvious remarks to the point of me wanting to strangle him.

He was supposed to be the magnum opus of buildups in this story, yet all we got was him acting like a chunni every once in a while before fucking off to the main nest and then, again, lore bomb his entire existence. We never really got to know the guy, no heart to hearts, the game just tells you that you're inseparable friends but the connection was never made. Tell, don't show. And it's just pathetic as well how he poses as this goodie-“I did everything for humanity, sowwy”-guy, but goes “whoops” when he is confronted with the potential millions of humans he has killed by proxy of the naytiba. Not mentioning that being the Elder, he does fuckall to stop it and no one care, because the writers tell you he is 'good'. (Also, he literally knows that raven is about to and is massacring Xionians and does nothing. Like, what the fuck?) Same with Lily, all these side quests about other people's stories and not one for her? Heck, multiple? How am I supposed to connect if she acts like a puppet on strings (my earlier critique on the behaviors) and then literally 2 seconds before the ending goes “Oh, I have a sister I guess.”

The end boss, which I got, was the robot one. Yes, I took Adam's hand, because as much as I've come to absolutely despise him, the logs of all the dead people made me hate Mother Sphere much more. Anyhow, fuck this boss. Seriously. Hey, I even had fun beating the shit out of Raven, but this boss was just pure bullshit. Poor attack signaling, too much forward momentum and an absolutely absurd HP pool. This was not a “fun and challenging” boss, this was a fucking annoyance. I got it down to about 30% health, which is where I gave up (consult what I've said about combat/Tachy mode) and just gave EVE god mode.

I usually don't cheat and frustrating bosses/enemies are part of playing games. But this was enough bullshit for me and I decided that I would rather like to “have fun” and complete the game, rather than remember this boss more than the amazing hours of exploration leading up to it.

This is the leadup to the biggest disappointment in the game so far, Mother Sphere. I hate her, but I want to get to know her. I read so much about her, the reverence, the irreverence and the speculations. Mother Sphere was hands down the biggest overarching plot element, and what did I get in the end? Jackshit.

She just shows up, tells you that you half-succeeded and half-fucked up and then leaves without elaborating. Which again, is ruined by horrible dialogue making me think she is open to co-existence and then the next moment we get an entire airborne squad sent on our asses. Like, WHAT IS IT? The truth of the naytiba should not be the only thing answered in the entire game. I want to hear the other side too or just anything so that I could get a better read on her!

Leaving one of the two overarching points in the plot completely without an answer just makes Mother Sphere an unreasonable and purely evil character by the end of the game. It's so goddamn frustrating that we never interact with her, let alone get the opportunity to do something about her smug ass sitting up there in space.

There is certainly a charm to open endings, but like everything within the main story, this is executed terribly! You can't tell me that you had literally every person under the sun lore dump their entire story within two sentences of meeting you or on their death, but the MOST important character doesn't even get a shred of character depth? Adam coming out should literally be the half-way point, the second half hearing Mother Sphere for what she has to say. But no, we never get any meaningful info. Mother Sphere in its entirety has got to be the biggest letdown for a character I have ever experienced, bar none.

I even hear that in other endings, it is revealed that earth is surrounded, so what's the point of ending it here. All-in-all we literally just had a city massacred to merge with a chunni to become some human demigod, meanwhile Mother Sphere is still out there doing who knows what and the Naytiba are still just roaming around and making earth a living hell. How is this a good ending? How is this any ending at all?

Innnnnnnnnnnn conclusion, I loved the mystery of this game, I loved every single piece of collectible lore that I found and most of the NPCs like Rox or Clyde. The exploration made me fall in love and overall I can say that I had an absolute blast playing this game. The graphics were amazing and spectacles like the orbital elevator were just awesome to explore. On the other hand, the main story, which all of said environmental story telling is linked back to, is terribly executed, rushed and unsatisfying. The Beginning was weak, the middle part is where the game shone for all of it's better qualities and the end is where it all returned to an absolute letdown.

Please don't misunderstand, I love this game very much, probably a game I will 100%, but I think I enjoyed the 'written' story and the concept of it more than what was executed. If we get a second installment of this game, I wish for Shift Up to invest way more effort into their voice design, dialogue and their story direction. And especially with how disappointed I am with the lack of Mother Sphere, I really do want a second installment.

TL;DR: I really love this game, it's environmental story-telling, but I think it heavily lacks in good execution and direction.

Honestly, I was hesitant on doing a book review on this novel, but I'm gonna because for one, it's completed, and secondly, it's better as a whole than most.

“Almost a year since last post and it's another book review?? What happened in 2025?!” I hear you ask. Still, I plead for forgiveness. I was busy with life and IRL stuff and maintaining the site is enough work as it is (Page speed insights make me proud ;D).

Anyway, enough yapping. What's 'I Become a Secret Police Officer of The Imperial Academy' even about and why specifically have I chosen to write a review on it here?

Well, first off, it's a completed novel, so I can give my opinion on the work as a whole and not just a part of it. Who actually wants to read a review glazing a novel that was written before it had a shit ending? Not me.

Secondly, this novel, as the last two, had peaked my interest in it's unique writing. In this case, it wasn't the world building or even the side characters, these are all insanely bland.

It's the protagonist, Ellen.

Ellen is the mentally unstable spawn of two ruthless nobles she called her parents. She had two siblings, Julian, her brother and Alicia, her sister. From an early age both Ellen and Julian had been groomed by their parents to take over the family business, which was being responsible for the network of secret state police across the fictional country both she and Julian lived in.

Alicia avoided this through being just unnaturally adored by her siblings and her parents.

But calling what their parents did grooming is putting it lightly, it was basically hardcore abuse. Between fighting to the death with her brother multiple times and losing limbs since she was little for her 'training', both Ellen and Julian became extremely good at their jobs.

But while Julian managed to suppress his abysmal childhood by trying to fix his life and settle down, Ellen became explosively unstable, taking drugs to calm her worsening psychotic episodes.

In this hell, Alicia was Ellen's only crutch and escape, and also the only person that could effectively reprimand her. It kept her grounded, and so Ellen managed to continue to dance on the brink of insanity, until – of course – disaster struck.

Influenced by outside factors, corruption and general unrest, one day, demons, who have lived in the capital of the fictional country went berserk. Of course, this wasn't all demons, basically a minority, but that didn't matter. The damage was substantial. People were ripped apart alive, burned, beaten, stabbed and general chaos befell the capital.

In this chaos, on an outing with her family, Ellen witnesses her parents burning to death, but quickly processes the situation with minimal sorrow. Alicia however, oh boy. Well, expectedly, she dies. Not very horribly, but after being fatally wounded, she bleeds to death in Ellen's arms.

This is the moment Ellen is kicked off her safeguards and begins her genocide.

She might not have been as successful if Julian hadn't survived, but he did. His lover however, did not. Ellen uses this grief to her advantage to use her brother's brain to exact her own revenge. Leaving Julian to organize the process itself, while she went out on field-work.

The plan? Basically kill everything that wasn't human, full stop. And to her credit, she goes through with it. Killing, men, women, children, babies, hidden demons and their human sympathizers, executing and torturing these poor people in the worst ways possible.

To state the obvious, this novel is twisted beyond belief.

We view about 99.9% of the novel through Ellen's perspective, and it's amazing.

Not the barbaric slaughter of untold thousands of children, families and innocent farmers mind you. But her perspective of it all.

This novel exists for an unreliable narrator, which Ellen is. Her psychology is so understandably twisted, it's fascinating. It's the entire reason this worked hooked me and kept me engaged. Everything else is so mediocre I don't even want to spend time mentioning it, and I won't.

Ellen does horrible shit throughout the novel, put regression into the mix and she has probably commited the same genocidal act at least a dozen times over.

But this is where I fell for this work. As the author actually knew how to write a character that was so twisted yet so pitiful.

Through her eyes, we see how Ellen descends into insanity. Not cringeworthy insanity, but sad delusions, psychosis and eventually suicidal tendencies. How ever much she justifies her actions to herself, she still feels extremly guilty and aware of what she is doing.

Her emotional dilemma about trying to save the sister that cannot be saved, the guilt over the untold millions she has killed time and time again, and the slow realization that she cannot save her sister is soul-crushing.

Every life she lives comes to this conclusion at it's end, which is the point at which Ellen commits suicide. Of course, Julian is usually long dead by this point, either killed by the righteous hero of their fucked up world or taking his life himself.

Ellen doesn't care at this stage anymore, she dehumanizes herself for her actions and for having lost her anker to reality, her sister.

The 'good guy', Theo, is first an ignorant bastard, playing with unearned power and is dead set on 'punishing' Ellen for her crimes. He, of course being an unstoppable force, succeeds.

Unfortunately for him, the world turns back every time Ellen dies, right back to the outing where her sister dies.

And while Ellen forgets, only remembering small flashes of her previous lives, Theo retains his memory and eventually goes insane as well. The novel is pretty good at portraying how an already mentally unstable and a perfectly sane individual can both go insane, and in what way.

Anyhow, after killing all demons a dozen times over in different gruesome ways and failing to save her sister every time, eventually Theo gives up and tries over and over to plead with Ellen to stop.

Ellen of course just does as always, either going through with her genocide, getting killed by Theo or just blowing her brains out before anything even starts.

By the end, both Theo and Ellen are completely exhausted, Ellen having regressed so many times already that she started remembering her old memories. And Theo, just being torn between the urge to kill Ellen and the despair of knowing it won't change anything.

And so, after god knows how long, Ellen is persuaded to live. But she only agrees if Theo marries her, which he, in his despair, does do. Of course, they don't love each other.

Ellen reluctantly gives up on saving Alicia, suppressing her suicidal thoughts and guilt to hopefully get out of the hellish loop she's been living in.

As for Theo, knowing that after Ellen comes to that conclusion the regressions would stop, keeps her on suicide watch and ties her down in life as best as he can, out of pity, hatred and guilt for his own failings.

Of course they have a third wheel, that being Ellen's best friend Ethel, but she is not that integral to the story, even though she is probably the only person Ellen actually, romantically loves.

To be honest, the end of this novel was good. My expectations weren't ruined, the story didn't retcon anything or change tone half-way (Looking at you PDKSM >.>) and overall it managed to convey/tell the story it wanted in a satisfying manner.

Actually, kudos to the author for managing to write such in-depth and actually interesting internal dialog for Ellen. It's 90% of what makes this novel excellent in my opinion.

And also, thank you for shitting on philosophers! No, really! I love how well educated Ellen is, pulling out some philosophical quote that might sound insightful (actually well known quotes), but then goes “Do I really want to be judged and live by the words of a creepy recluse who complained about married women before blowing his brains out?”. It's fucking hilarious, resonates with my own opinions and I love it.

In conclusion, should you read this if I sparked some interest in you? Yes, absolutely, do read it, it's a great psychological novel.

Can you read it? No. It was struck down by a DMCA claim this monday...

Do I have a copy? Hell yeah.

So hit me up on matrix and I'll slide it to you for free.

Well then, until next time! :D

Next book review. I know right? What could make me write another one of these after raising my expectations for good material with Adonis?

So, to hit it off, 'She Was Both Called God, as Well as Satan' is a psychological/fantasy story, for me at least. It's of course not as polished as something like Adonis, but it has it's own concepts that I haven't really seen anywhere before, and to the author's credit, it's executed very well.

Although the main character disappears for a while at the later parts to let other characters go through their arc, they're present through most of the story. Well, it is about them.

In summary, the main character, nameless, is hundreds of millions of years old in an immortal body. She lives on an indestructible artificial island and spends her days doing things to keep herself entertained. Her infinite lifespan coupled with her boredom and the way that it's written really puts you into the mindset of this person, who is for all intents and purposes, dead inside. For example, she spends months, completely motionless, staring at an insect in her garden as it lives through it's entire life. Having done so, she then laughs and dances for the next few years non-stop.

It's clear that our main character is about to go insane, however, that happens perpetually, because technically, she has gone absolutely bat shit insane millions of years ago, but her engineered body chemically doesn't allow her psyche to break. So, she's basically edging insanity until the heat death of the universe and beyond.

The explanation for all the wacky science stuff is also very well written. It portrays an advanced and superior human galactic empire. One where all needs and pleasures are met, where immortality is a given and where people are lab grown from their parents' DNA with the vast knowledge of everything already implanted into their cybernetically enhanced brains. Of course, they're also massacring the entire universe and it's various races as well and they are overwhelmingly winning. To put it simply, not a single human dies while they eradicate trillions of other lifeforms. So yeah, pretty wh40k-ish until this point. However, there comes a time when humanity collectively decides that they have done everything there is to do, achieved everything there is to achieve and known everything there is to know, so they collectively kill themselves.

It really isn't explained, but basically across the universe all humans just vanished into thin air in an instant, leaving behind their incredible technology and territory. I don't find this bad writing. I mean, if these fuckers are literally immortal since birth and the only way for them to die is by choice, then doing so by somehow dissipating isn't that far-fetched. Anyways, not every human decides to kys, but at the end only a handful remain, a few thousand at best. These people of course start dropping like flies over the years until there are only two humans left, our main character and her neighbor. The story actually begins with the announcement that her neighbor has decided to die, so yeah, she's all alone now.

Enough background info. Let's get to the meat of the story, new humanity. As our main character suddenly finds her new exciting hobby of watching things live and die, she basically scans the entire planet and finds that new humanoid creatures have started evolving on earth. This leads to her watching them through multiple drones for hundreds of years. They slowly develop more and more and make ships to travel the seas. A few of these ships bumping into the barrier that our main character's artificial island is surrounded by and thus sinking. The new humans basically make a religion around her, then antagonize her for everything wrong in the world and set out to vanquish her. However, they always leave defeated, not even denting the protective barrier.

Meanwhile, we also have the plotline follow humans as they discover 'magic', which later turns out to be just malfunctioning nanites scattered across the world. Upon a bit of tinkering, our main character realizes that the new humanoids have developed a biological organ to use said nanites to do their bidding, however unbeknownst to the neo-humans, at considerable cost. See, what our MC finds out is that the process by which the humans use 'magic' is terribly inefficient, polluting the surroundings with too much leftover nano-junk. This pollution in turn leads to animals mutating into gigantic monsters, hellbent on killing anything that has a 'magic organ' and purifying the waste left behind by human 'magic'. Of course, no one other than our MC realizes this, but she doesn't care one bit. Intervening in such a matter would be the biggest disappointment in her 'watching over everything' hobby.

So, of course humanity blames everything on the unknown 'god' residing on the island again, making our MC quite proud and happy to watch her 'children' trying to figure things out. They attack again, unleashing gigantic amounts of 'magic' and pollution with it, basically sealing their fate. Skip forward a few years and human settlements are fortresses, isolated from each other and under constant threat of extinction by wilder and bigger monsters, still unaware it is their own fault. From here on, the plot goes away from our MC and focuses on two sub-protagonists. One is a religious zealot who believes our MC to be his god, branded a satanist and sent to die in the wilderness by the monsters and the other a researcher who actually starts thinking about why the monsters scientifically exist, leading her down a tragic rabbit hole.

One thing these two characters have in common is not being attacked by the newly mutated animals/monsters. That is because if the 'monsters' don't detect a magic organ in a human and with it pollution, they behave quite docile unless provoked. Our religious friend was born without an organ due to a mutation, while our researcher gal' cuts out hers in a shady alley by some doctor. They both go through their arcs, which I won't expand upon, but they're really well made.

Meanwhile our protagonist is torn away from her fun hobby when earth's defense grid reports to her that the united armies of the universe have finally come to take/destroy earth, the homeland of the devils that had almost eradicated them before vanishing. They arrive in a giant fleet of spaceships, their technology not having improved one bit, only managing to scrap some human technology on the surface level together. However, they themselves think of it as advanced tech, much to the amusement of our MC. Well, you can guess what happens next. The allied fleet arrogantly enters the solar system, nearing earth. Some generals talking mad shit about defeating humans, when in reality humans just fucked off by themselves, never to be actually defeated.

Anyways, our MC reaches her breaking point when her fun little activity is on the verge of being disturbed, so she orders all hidden military fabs on earth to produce warships and to go to war with the enemy fleet. Of course, fabrication AIs first improve older earth warship models before pumping out a few hundred thousand ships within minutes, quickly dwarfing the allied fleet which only consisted of about a hundred thousand ships. Our MC goes on to the biggest ship, her command vessel, in full uniform and just starts fucking shit up. Well actually, more like the AIs fuck shit up. She delegates control of her entire fleet to a super intelligent warring AI, which then goes apeshit, sending the allied fleet to Valhalla.

In the end she makes a half-hearted and very one sided truce with the allied forces. She will give them a piece of human technology (technical documents, etc.) in exchange for leaving her alone. The other side agrees and leaves, only to implode over fighting about the newly acquired technology. That was the short lifespan of the unified universe v2.

Back to our new humanity, they evolve exponentially. Conquering the stars, gaining immortality and walking the same path as the ones before them, never being able to pierce the protective barrier of the artificial island. I mean, how could they? Their entire progress relied solely on nanites developed by humans. So in a way, they were much less advanced, not discovering actual technology.

Anyhow, this humanity as well slowly but surely disappears, our MC watching it happen with joy, until one day, the last 2nd gen human arrives at her barrier. This human tries breaking through endlessly with sheer determination, which sadly doesn't help her. However, our MC, finally feeling a small bit of loneliness, reduces the output of the barrier until that other person finally breaks through.

They get acquainted with each other to the point of the 2nd gen human becoming her neighbor on the island. Our MC shares with the other bored and immortal person her hobby. They discuss until they both notice something exciting. A group of humanoids lighting a fire in the wilderness. Seemingly, the cycle of humanity starts anew and thus the story ends.

All-in-all the thing is a fun read and much better in reality than how I summarized it here. If, you're interested, definitely give it a read. I personally got some few thoughtful moments while reading it and thoroughly enjoyed our main character and her story.

As I've said at the beginning, this was genuinely something new when I read it and to this day is one of the most unique pieces I've managed to read. There are a lot of preexisting elements like “hurr durr humanity bad”, but generally it paints over those overused concepts with fresh paint, that being our character. She is so uninteresting that she becomes interesting.

Yes, I've seen multiple flat characters that are supposed to be 'dark' and to not show emotion. This itself has become a ridiculously overused trope, being used to justify bad character writing, “Oh my character is uninteresting and lame b-because thats his/her thing. What a cool character, right??”. However that's not the case here. The character is actually well written, which makes her behavior and flatness justifiable and actually cool to read. Add in her little moments of wackiness and pure insanity, it just combines into a well built character.

Overall, I loved the concept. There is only a very small amount of works that try to tell a story from an omnipresent view point, truly, and a lot of them fail. Either with bad character writing or not being able to cope with the perspective they're writing from. This work is the only I've found to date to execute on this concept well enough. Hence I made this post to just share my fondness for this unique piece of work.

So, verdict? A solid 9/10. It's not perfect, but it delivers on a very well executed concept. Until next time :D

Well, one thing led to another and I decided to switch domains on a whim at 6pm.

Why? Well, to be honest, it was an impulsive decision. I was doing stuff on my file server and the name “nocx420” just hit me like a cold breeze.

Sure I didn't have an issue with it before, but we all grow out of our phases and reflect on our cringey decisions don't we? Well, that's what happened here. I just found the name too cringe and impulsively bought a new domain.

Now the name “cennepal” is something I just pulled out of my brain and liked the sound of. I've been using this username for quite a while now actually and thought multiple times about changing everything over to it. But it never really happened because I felt like it would be a pain to rebrand most of my stuff, which in the end was. Also it's apparently the name of some nepalian organization. Figures, but still, funny imo.

So now we have “cennepal.net”, a proper name and TLD. Although it did cost a bit more than an xyz TLD, I'm very satisfied with having a recognizable domain.

Moving all the baggage like my file server and blog was quite easy thankfully, however certbot decided to wreck my nginx config in the process of unlinking my old SSL certificates which was not fun (˃⤙˂).

My matrix server of course had to go along with all media and account data. You can't really do anything about it due to the way it handles its encryption, but thankfully it went off without a hitch due to having a friend in a few private servers I wanted to rejoin. To be honest, it went better than expected.

The problem child is of course of my own making. The adonis subdomain. Yeah, you guessed it right, all static links. Well, fuck. I'll re-link everything once I'm in the mood, but oh boy, today's not it.

So yeah, new domain new me xd. Till' next time.

Well, I never intended to read something longer than the bible in this lifetime, but here we are.

So, what in the heck is Adonis? Well, it's a korean fantasy/romance/action novel series. It spans 12 volumes with over 4500 pages. Of course, I started reading without being aware of this funny little fact. Another funny fact is that I'm a very obsessive reader, meaning if I don't finish something in one go, then I'm not putting it down. It's an understatement to say that I instantly got hooked on the story. The character building is slow, but pays off massively towards the mid point. The world and it's mechanisms are, and I emphasize, VERY detailed. Not in the way of filling chapters upon chapters with useless information and stalling the story, but by having a known system for everything being encountered. Every nook and cranny of this series is packed with the history of a world that doesn't exist. To say the least, I was taken aback.

By the time I realized that one chapter took on average 3 hours to read, it was too late. The next 3 weeks of pure reading began. I slacked off on anything not important and school work, and was reading 24/7. This is what I meant by me having very bad reading habits. Anyway, I was done with the series in roughly 3 weeks. I'm honestly very grateful for this piece of work being fully translated on a professional level. It was a delight to read every chapter. So thanks Sephi, you're a true hero.

The action is very dynamic and detailed. It really hits home reading a fighting sequence after building up all of the prerequisite knowledge to understand what's going on. The entire system of magic and energies behind the combat is even more interesting. I mean, I was expecting the default cookie cutter 'Mana this' and 'Mana that' explanation, but then it just went off the rails hard. The entire magic system in the series ties back into the storyline, majorly. This series goes very in-depth into mythology, gods, religion and creation. So don't worry, every little thing in this series, whatever or whoever it may be, can be rationally explained, and will be explained. There are characters at the beginning, who I didn't really give much attention to coming back at the end to drop major revalations, and for good reasons as well! Noone is a surface level character, even if they seem like it. It's insane the amount of depth everything and everybody named in this series has. The main characters Ianna and Arhad are very nicely polished and honestly quite dull at the beginning. That's why it's just pure joy to watch these people grow and broaden their horizons to then finally achieve their goals. As the very last sentence in the series states, this is their tale of mutual victory.

From the middle towards the end, the main characters get a little too lovey-dovey in my opinion, but that is strongly negated by the insane pressure this series builds up at the end. Now that is how you write the good stuff! Higher stakes, higher risks, uncertainty and despair! This author pulls it off like it's a walk in the park for him. I felt so euphoric after reading through this series. The melancholy did kick in the next day, but after reading so much of this series, the end didn't feel rushed or drawn out. It was perfect and it knew when it was time to close the curtains. This gets an absolute 10/10 from me, hands down longest thing I've ever read.

Lastly, because I'm very touchy about losing data and especially stuff like this, which is hosted on a random wordpress site that could disappear any second, I decided to take steps to preserve this masterpiece. After more than 3 days of work, tada! You can read the entire thing on this custom webspace I've made for it! I'm honestly very happy with how the formatting and ToC turned out. Well then, until next time!

So, I just played through Remedy's newest masterpiece, Alan Wake 2. (Major Spoilers ahead)

Also, as a fair warning, what follows is an incomprehensible manic episode (i.e. my writing), that may be hard to understand given that I give zero context.

After being blown away by Quantum Break back in the day because of its physics, I got interested in Remedy games. I must say that I'm a sucker for good writing, and Quantum Break is anything but that, but it's still very ambitious and cool, just like Control. Oh boy, Control. I can't even say how much I love that game. While lacking in variable gameplay or replayability, it's such an awesome and weird game to experience. Not to mention the graphics, which made my RTX 3050 want to commit sudoku—heck, it still only goes to 80fps on my 4070, but maintains a very stable framerate without any microstuttering. But front and center was the story, paranatural entities being tied in from Alan Wake 1, paranaturalism being normalized, categorized, and integrated into our world by this obscure federal branch. I could honestly fangirl about Control itself for hours, but not today.

So, Alan Wake 2, what's the big deal? Basically everything. This game was thirteen years in the making, has fun combat elements, and the story is so well written I could literally melt into Sam Lake's script if I saw it, AND it has even better graphics. The game begins by introducing us to a guy, a Taken, crawling out of Cauldron Lake and making his way through the forest, before being shot, his heart cut out, and left strapped to a picnic table by a bunch of cultists calling themselves the Cult of the Tree. From here we cut to our main character, FBI Agent Saga Anderson, and her partner Alex Casey. Saga, unbeknownst to her, is part of the Anderson and Door family tree, making her by all means a parautilitarian demigod, and then there is Casey, a poor guy whose entire life has been heavily influenced by Alan's writing in the Dark Place because he has the same name as Alan's fictional detective character Alex Casey. So our little paranatural gang drives down to Cauldron Lake and meets Deputy Mulligan and Thornton, who show them to the crime scene and provide some funny banter while at it. After determining the victim to be Robert Nightingale from Alan Wake 1 and examining the crime scene, Saga and Casey go down to the lake and examine their surroundings, Casey commenting on an unusually huge tree, which will turn out to be an overlap. At the roots of this tree, Saga finds a page of a Manuscript written with a typewriter and edited with a pen. This page seems to describe all the events that happened so far, as if they were prewritten and even writes about what Saga and Casey think. So, yep, that's our boi Alan, and if pages are washing up from the lake, then stuff's about to go down. Saga and Casey leave through the “shortcut route” on which there is an FBC monitoring station, no surprise there. At the end of the trail, they exit via a door in the fencing, which of course makes clear the presence of the FBC and states that the forest and lake were fenced off due to “volcanic gas.” Something I find so cool is that Casey mentions being stonewalled by the FBC when inquiring about Alan Wake, an inquiry which you can find in the Investigations Sector in Control! So cool.

Anyway, after arriving in Bright Falls to question some witnesses and to examine Nightingale's corpse, Rose, from the first game, speaks to Saga as if she knew her and tells her that her daughter died, which is not true, yet anyway. This is only the beginning of the Manuscript slowly rewriting reality. The next stop is, of course, the police station where Saga examines Nightingale's corpse and finds a new Manuscript page in his torso, describing Nightingale murdering, being a Taken, and where to find his heart, which the page claims Saga would seek out. Upon trying to hand more pages from “Return” to Saga, Sheriff Breaker gets blinked out of reality by Mr. Door. This is followed by Nightingale's corpse sitting up and killing a few officers in the morgue before Saga shoots him multiple times, after which he collapses and phases out of reality. From here, Saga and Casey return to Cauldron Lake, which is now flooded by water from the lake, running into Ilmo Koskala, one local prominent tour guide and business owner, and Steven Lin from the FBC, who is busy making repairs to the FBC's monitoring station. Inside the now-open station is only one note from Steven describing that the local cultists are sabotaging their equipment. Upon going further into the forest, Saga and Casey separate. Saga is currently searching for Nightingale's heart to perform a ritual to open an overlap at the previous big tree Casey mentioned, and Casey is exploring the forest. After completing the ritual and going into the overlap, Saga loses contact with Casey and kills the Taken Nightingale. This is followed by her accidentally getting in contact with Alan, and after exchanging a few broken words, she gets transported back to Cauldron Lake, where the flooding has now receded. Upon coming back, reality shifts again and the lake blips Alan back to reality. Alan, of course, not being in a right mental state, takes a while to normalize and even doubts his escape from the Dark Place. Which I would too, I mean, come on, the guy has been stuck in a Nightmare Dimension for thirteen years specially made for him by a void capable of manufacturing dimensions on a whim. After bringing Wake back to Bright Falls, Saga, Casey, and Alan level with each other about what they know, but mostly Alan does the talking because, of course, he would, he knows a lot more. This flows into Alan looking at a puddle and remembering his time in the Dark Place, or recent time, as in, how he got out. This is the point from which the player can freely choose whose story they want to play. You need to play both Alan's and Saga's part before arriving at the end, but generally there is a lot of flexibility, like being able to play through all of Alan's memories before hopping back to Saga. So on and so forth.

Alan's story consists of his struggle with his never-ending nightmare, being helped by Mr. Door, disguised as a talkshow host, inspiring and entertaining for his own reasons. Alan is also guided by visions of Saga whenever she's in an overlap, and this will eventually lead to Saga summoning Wake back to reality using the Clicker, back to the time she first found him. Saga is helping Wake so Wake can rewrite “Return” and save her family. Mr. Door is helping Wake because Wake wrote Saga into “Return” as the hero, and wouldn't you have guessed it, Door is Saga's father, so while still providing help, he is pissed at Wake. And then there is Alice, Alan's wife, faking her death, jumping into the Dark Place to help Alan from the background.

Saga's adventure takes her through Watery, Coffee World, and Valhalla nursing home. Watery and Coffee World are basically Saga exploring her rewritten past and searching for her trailer where she “used to live.” There she meets Tor and Odin Anderson, who aren't affected by the story as they are implied to be paranatural humans. They are a fun pair, and I would go into their stories, but I'm not built for that. They converse with Saga about their family connections and how they've missed her, which she brushes off as just the story changing reality. After leaving “her trailer,” Saga sees Mulligan in a cultist mask staring at her than walking away. Well, it turns out Thornton and Mulligan are both part of the Cult of the Tree and have accidentally killed an innocent woman they mistook for a Taken and dumped her body down a well. This left them with such guilt that the Dark Place could invade their beings, turning them Taken. Saga fights them and wins.

For my sanity's sake, I'm going to cut this short. Alan gets taken by the FBC, Ilmo turns out to be a cultist, who themselves are a kind of neighborhood watch killing Taken and paranatural entities that could endanger their towns. Saga goes to the police station where the FBC took Alan and almost gives him the Clicker. Alan turns into Scratch, who is Alan's evil double and who wrote “Return” in the first place. After making Scratch return to the Dark Place, Saga tries summoning the “real” Wake with help from Tor, Odin, and the Clicker. It works; however, as mentioned before, this summons Alan to the point where Saga met him, meaning that Scratch is just Alan with the Dark Presence inside of him. After Scratch arrives on site and manages to absolutely decimate everybody, he takes the body of Casey and takes the Clicker, throwing Saga into the lake in the process. After using the Clicker to start the process of rewriting reality to what he wants it to be, Scratch throws it away, but Alice retrieves it as the place it was used at became an overlap and thus allowed her to reach for it. After a really touching monologue by Alan, he enters the Dark Place again trying to find a copy of “Return” in Scratch's dream reality so that he could read the ending and rewrite it. I leave out a LOT here, but that's exactly what he does at the end, at the cost of his freedom. So he is back to square one, but not quite. As it turns out, he isn't in a looping nightmare; he's in a spiral, which means that there is an end, somewhere.

Ok, I'm done. I actually wanted to write about every aspect of the game I love so much, but then started just summarizing and I couldn't stop. Now that I'm here, after writing for the last one and a half hours, it's finally out of my system. As a conclusion to this borderline insane post I would recommend you to play Alan Wake 2. It is truly a fantastic game and hands down has the best narrative writing of 2023.

Automatically renewing a certificate isn't that hard, is it?

SSL, I love it, you do too, when it works. If it doesn't, well then you just scoff and think to yourself “How could THEY mess this up? it's just a certificate. Even I have automatic renewals enabled!”. Well, I can proudly say that I have lost those bragging rights approximately one week ago when my certificates failed to renew for my site. Today at about 1AM I went onto my site to quickly realize that all my certs were expired as of 10 days ago. I tried not getting out of bed, but ssh on my phone didn't really cut it. So I powered on my notebook and looked in my system logs to find that certbot tried to renew my certificates, but couldn't because nginx was enabled. This makes sense considering I set up all my certs ahead of time without specifying what kind of webserver they're used by, so certbot just assumed that port 80 would be free to use. A quick palm to the face and one python3-certbot-nginx later I could finally renew my certificates with certbot renew --nginx. The lesson I learned is to never trust certbot when it tells you that it will automatically update certificates. Now I hope that certbot will continue to use the nginx renewal method from now on, but if it doesn't then I'll just make a cron entry for it. In conclusion, never make fun of someone's missing SSL because one day you will be that guy.

I was kinda debating myself if I should make this into a full-fledged blog post because of it's length, but I think I am obligated to write this because of my previous arogance in relation to other sites.

I've recently decided to migrate all of my stuff to a new provider.

So let me preface this by saying that my previous hoster, Avoro, is a really great host with very fast and nice support staff. However there is always competition and it was only a matter of time before something worth of interest popped up. Now this doesn't necessarily mean that I was unhappy with my service, I just simply found something better. At this point you probably guessed that I was about to mention Hetzner, a hosting company which is also heavily recommended online, and after making an account and exploring around for a bit I was pretty shocked to find that for the same money that I am currently paying for my former server, I could get the same specs with an extra 40GBs of space. Did I actually switch because of 40GBs? No it's a bit more complex than that. At first I thought that for the same money an extra 40GBs would be awesome, especially for my file server and matrix server, as those services take up a considerable amount of space over time, which can be managed, but still, 40 Gigs is 40 Gigs.

The thing that made the final push was ease of use, hands down. I went to their server ordering page to configure a server with the same specs as the one I currently have at Avoro and I was pleasantly surprised to find a load of config options like being able to configure the firewall, which my server goes through (not something like ufw, which is on the server), setting up ssh pubkey auth automatically and if I needed more space, renting seperate volumes which then can be mounted on my instance. On top of that they also have a beautiful website with far more precise monitoring and overall information than what I have at Avoro. Additionally, when I finally get some stable income, I can expand my server and it's resources as I see fit. Sure, Avoro gives you the option to expand, but it's very limited to specific configurations and expensive the more you deviate from said configurations. On Hetzner I can literally just decide one day that I want a server with 64GB of ram, a ton of cores and 4 2TB volumes and it's no problem. Not to mention that for a tiny fee they automatically backup my server, which is far better than Avoro charging on a per-backup basis. These backups of course are not even tied to my server, so I could just buy a much bigger server like a dedicated one and load one of my backups onto it. In conclusion, to explain my decision, three things: Ease of use – Good price – Future proof.

After buying my server at Hetzner I got pretty excited to set it up, but of course I do stuff like this at midnight, so I had to go to sleep, which was a bit difficult with the urge to get up and hop on my PC. Well, morning rolled in and my first waking thought was to get to school as fast as possible so I could start working on moving stuff from my old server to the new one, lucky me I saved the ssh key for the root account on my phone so I actually could login. Installing nginx and copying over the website was a breeze and I got it done in like 5 minutes. I also updated my DNS settings to point to the new server so I could setup TLS and imported my old nginx config which I had to retweak a little. I did a fresh install of my file server which was a bit annoying, because installing node is a pain. After giving up on using apt or pip, I added Volta, which beautifully setup everything and yarn would finally start without any errors. The last task was to install matrix, and oh boy was it a pain. Nothing worked and no matter what way I installed it, it just didn't want to properly start or reload, or anything really. This was partly my fault, because I desperately wanted to have delegation on my new homeserver. Delegation basically means that any event or connection is routed through cennepal.net, but the actual matrix install is at matrix.cennepal.net. This turns my name from “@german:matrix.cennepal.net” to “@german:cennepal.net”. Looks much prettier, but makes for a nice little headache when configuring nginx. Anyway I did persevere and matrix runs like butter now, so that's that. I had also moved my two private discord bots over which means that my old server is now empty.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with how fast I managed to get everything back online and to think this all started by being insulted on matrix. Anyway, it feels good to finally write about something again, although I expect it's gonna be a little while before I do so again.

The DB or Deutsche Bahn, which is basically the single entity controlling the traffic of passenger trains across the country is incredibly bad at it's job. So here's my little “adventure” with them.

I took a sightseeing trip to a city this week and it was a nice time, sadly getting there and coming back home wasn't. At 7AM I took a train to another city, because I had to catch a connection with another train which would then have taken me to my destination. The ride to the connection takes about half an hour with of course at least five minutes of delay. The train was a bit packed, but I get that everybody needs to go to work so I wasn't that bothered, the AC however was off, which meant that it got real hot in the train real fast and everybody started sweating like hell for the next 30 minutes. After arriving at my connection, I took the train to my final destination, which was also packed, but because it had two floored wagons I could find a place on the top. This train was very nice, it had AC and I could finally sit down. The seats were a bit tightly built so it wasn't very comfortable to sit there for two hours, but I managed and it wasn't that bad. After arriving I wanted to visit a nearby palace, because I heard that it had a nice garden. Luckily for me there was an information booth right in front of me as I got down from the peron. The guy there told me to to just take a certain train which would get me to the garden place faster than a bus.

After getting on the train I already had a bad feeling. The display, which showed the trains route, didn't have my destination on it, but I thought nothing of it until we drove by said destination. Apparently I wasn't the only one going there, because there were people also confused as to why the train didn't stop there. Now we where driving to a totally different city and all we could do was wait. But it gets worse. On the train ahead of us somebody pulled the emergency break and opened the door on one of the wagons which meant that people out of panic started wondering onto the tracks. This wasn't a small issue either, in total we had to wait for an hour to get going again in a train with no AC on and a lot of people. Arriving at an unknown city I had to find a train back to where I came from, which I did and even better it went straight to my original destination! With one hour of wasted time, I noodled around the city and decided to head back home at around 6pm. There was a train coming at 6:36pm which was the only one going to my connection from my current location so I had plenty of time to kill. I browsed a bit of reddit until over the intercom, some girl who I can barely understand, announces that my train was cancelled and that they're sorry for the inconvenience. Yeah, it's a bit of an inconvenience when you can't get back home I would say.

Whatever, surely there must be a train that goes to my connection as well right? Nope. My next move was to consult google maps on how to get back home and it actually found a way, with only one more connection somewhere in the middle of nowhere. It was a relief and with an hour delay the train arrived. It was also a two floored wagon train, but it was made by DB and not a third party company so of course the upper floor was the entire first class, which meant that hundreds of people had to squeeze together while half the train was empty. Cool. When I arrived, I got on the train to my connection which was not that full and I could even find a seat. Now comes an even better part, halfway to my connection the train conductor announces that because of delays in their traffic they're going to separate the train and only the front half of it will continue to my connection. I was in the last wagon relative to the driver so I thought that I was in the back of the train. Everyone thought this as well and they began pouring out at the next station and trying to enter the front through the doors. I was doing the same until some guy, a real legend, told me that, in fact, we were in the front part of the train. I got confused, but ended up trusting him and stayed in my seat. A little while later everybody started flooding back in, which meant that the he was right and I still had my seat so I didn't have to stand. Nice save. After arriving at my connection I could finally take the train to my home town, which was literally empty. With AC on and everything being quiet it was very therapeutic and got me to calm down after everything. Originally I would have arrived at 8pm, which turned into 10:30pm. Incompetence and mismanagement. I never thought that I would be writing this soon again, but it seems like these things just keep coming.