Trip down memory lane: The Craftsman himself has Favorites!

I honestly found it really difficult selecting just 5 posts out of all the HL entries I’ve made. Why I find it difficult is because I don’t join the HL contests always, so every time I write, I must have something important and interesting to say. I guess this is me saying every entry I’ve made for an HL prompt entry qualifies as top quality to me. It’s a pity I’m going to have to pick favorites out of my own work.

One thing I should tell you about these favorites I’m selecting though is that they all have one important ingredient in them. Personality. I believe that writing is best enjoyed and read when the reader can feel your emotions or mood reading your writing. So when I write, I try as much as I can to make it sound like a conversation. I’m doing that right now, do you notice it?

Lol I think I'm starting to side-track. Let's look at the craftsman's own favorites now.

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I’m sorry- a statement of accountability

In this post, I went all out to talk about how I see saying sorry, and some mistakes I think people make about saying it. I think people should only apologize when they’re wrong and not for any other reason, especially when dealing with people you have plans to be in long-term relationships with. So this encompasses friends and even romantic partners.

Some people make the mistake of apologizing even when they’re not wrong to keep the peace, and this is wrong on so many grounds, the obvious ones being that some people will take advantage of that and never apologize ever because you’ll do it for them anyways.

I do acknowledge in my post though that perhaps on a few rare ocassions, it might be okay to except this principle and substitute logic with emotion by apologizing even when you’re not wrong. Like I said though, rare ocassions, not regular.

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A purchase worth every cent

I wrote this post to acknowledge that even though I bought my phone for a lot of money, it was totally worth it, especially in terms of the camera and battery life.

Images make an important aspect of your blog, as no one will want to keep reading a blog with blurry and out-of-focus images. Other people also have certain judgments when it comes to authors always using stock images from the internet, even if they’re from free-to-use sites like pixabay. It’s nice to see a few personal images in your post once in a while because there are certain things in your environment you can get a picture of.

For instance, when talking about the Ghana cedi, it would be nice to see me posting a picture I took myself of the Ghana cedi note than some picture I downloaded, because I literally have some of that currency myself since it is currency native to my country.

People that have been reading my blogs know that 95% of the images in my blogs are mine. I take my own pictures and I make a stock photo collection in my gallery of pictures I took to use for my blogs. They might not be as good as stock photos from pixabay sometimes, but they’re mine!

I do this to make my blogs stand out and to make my blogs more original in a way. I didn’t always use my own images though. I picked this up from josediccus who mentioned something about he admires authors who use their own images. He’s one of such creators and I admire what he does a lot.

When it comes to battery life, an 11 Pro Max definitely beats the iPhone X I used to have before, and gives me longer battery life to handle my business as I’m out and about. Another extra thing I love about my phone is the 256GB internal storage it comes with. I’m literally walking around with a mini laptop’s storage capacity. Lol

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Social media, an undiluted doze of pressure

I wrote this post talking about my experience with social media. That experience was mostly about the pressure I used to get from seeing all the pictures of happy successful people my age, while I was still in my early days of University with no idea where my life was headed.

Logging onto Facebook every day to see my colleagues buying the newest cars and getting lit at the craziest parties will do that to you - frustration. So eventually, I made the conscious decision of going ghost on any social media platform(and even people) that used to be that source of pressure for me.

In this post, I talked about how social media almost drove me to frustration a few years back and how I handled it. Tap on the link to read the entire narration.

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Shit, here we go again

The prompt for this week was something about choosing whether or not you’re excited about the resumption of school. Of course, I wasn’t. Now you get the title.

“I love the holidays. It’s my favorite part of the year!”

And this is rightly so because of the many privileges the holidays afford me. I went really in-depth on why I loved the holidays, what they meant to me in this post, and how resumption of school would affect my holiday routine.

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Father of the century

I almost wouldn’t have written for this prompt until I saw my friends in the Neoxian city discord talking about it. I knew I had a lot to say on the topic because it’s something I talk about almost always with my friends- how we were raised and how we can do better when we’re parents. This topic is a little cringy to write about, but some things have to be said.

African upbringing is great when it comes to raising you with morals, but that is pretty much it. As long as you have a roof over your head, clothes on your body, and food in your belly, you’re considered taken care of. I talked about how raising a child on this metric is wrong, and some things I’ll do differently if I ever have my own kids.

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This last bit isn’t part of the contest, but if you’ve ever read any of my entries (or even if you haven’t), you can go through my HL contest entries and tell me if there was a favorite of yours that you were expecting I’d pick, but I somehow didn’t. It’s fair to note that even I found it difficult picking:)

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All images in this post were shot on my iPhone 11 Pro Max and edited on the phone’s default editor.