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If someone asked you to name the world’s most common plotline you’d probably come up with something like this: a hero heeds a call to adventure—maybe to slay a dragon or protect their homeland—then they cross a threshold into the unknown, where they face tests, conquer a big challenge, and come home with a lesson or a prize. They’ve grown and learned and made things better. They get the girl; they save the castle. They are often a guy.

It’s the hero’s journey, a familiar arc, easy to transpose on different circumstances. Basically universal, right?

Writer Joseph Campbell, who studied mythology and philosophy, named the hero’s journey in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces . He said it was widespread and showed up in every culture.

In the 1980s, Maureen Murdock, a Jungian psychotherapist who was a student of Campbell’s, came up with an alternative plotline, which she called the heroine’s journey . She found that in her therapy work, the hero’s journey arc didn’t encompass everything that her patients—particularly women—were going through. It didn’t answer questions about the roots of their struggles, or what happened after they climbed the mountain and still didn’t feel fulfilled. Or found another, different mountain in front of them.

The last step is acknowledging that there’s never really any dragon, even or any moment when the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.

Like the hero’s journey, the arc of the heroine’s journey comes in stages. The heroine starts by rejecting feminine values because she hasn’t seen a way to be fulfilled as a woman. Success looks like those masculine ideals, like big adventures or running companies, so she chases those. Then, like on the hero’s journey, she faces tests and trials; she finds success and slays dragons. But that’s where the arcs start to diverge.

Murdock says that at that point, on the outside, the journey might look good, but on the inside, as the heroine, you feel hollow, and not true to yourself. You start to get the feeling that your life isn’t quite right. You’ve achieved and achieved and you still seem unsatisfied. She calls that a sense of spiritual aridity . You feel oppressed, but you can’t find anyone oppressing you besides yourself. You might fall into crisis, even though you’ve achieved what the world said you should.

From there, the heroine has to recalibrate and align the ideals she was chasing with the things that feel true to themselves. Murdock calls this “healing the wounded masculine.” I see it as trying to square the pressure of achievement with what feels core, which can be difficult regardless of gender.

The last step is acknowledging that there’s never really any dragon, even or any moment when the journey ends. Instead, it keeps going.

Murdock found that this conceit resonated with many of her patients. But when she brought it to Campbell in the early 80s, his response was, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”

Was I allowed to consider them heroes if they never quite got the prize? Or if they acted poorly along the way?

Which is exactly the kind of thing that happens on the heroine’s journey. You’re dismissed or pushed aside. You face dead ends and distrust and people telling you your voice doesn’t matter, even when you’re pretty sure you’re right.

I found the heroine’s journey when I was researching my book Fierce Country about three women who fundamentally changed American recreation and conservation, but who never got recognition. I’d worked in the outdoor world they’d shaped since I was a teenager, moving from the New England mountains to the rivers of the Southwest seeking sensation and the desire to be outside, but after more than two decades I realized I’d never had role models, or paths to follow along the way, in part because I’d been chasing that hero’s idea of bootstrapping my way through adventures on my wits and strength. I hadn’t let myself look at other kinds of stories. And when I finally realized what I’d missed, I wanted to fill in the gaps.

I became obsessed with the idea of heroes: whose stories got elevated, why I’d never had any of my own. And I kept getting tangled up in the knot Murdock outlined: I’d only heard hero stories that fit Campbell’s mold. But my own dragons had never been straightforward and easy to vanquish. Many of them had been inside my head.

So I went searching for heroes who seemed more relevant to me, ones that had been left out of the canon of stories that get told and retold.

I found the stories of three women who impressed me: Georgie White, the only woman to guide the Grand Canyon for decades, who changed how we get outside and fought against dams; mountain guide Anne LaBastille, who did groundbreaking climate science from her off-the-grid cabin in the Adirondacks; pioneering backcountry skier Dolores LaChapelle, who was also an environmental philosopher who shaped the radical environmental movement of the 1970s. They were all forging what I consider ideal lives outside, tied to the landscape they loved, fighting to protect it. But they seemed tricky, too. Was I allowed to consider them heroes if they never quite got the prize? Or if they acted poorly along the way?

I realized I was stuck in Murdock’s second stage, trying to fit myself into masculine ideas, frustrated when it didn’t feel right for me, or the women I was looking at, because I was still hemmed in by expectations that the arc of achievement would be clear.

The women I was looking at were groundbreaking and adventurous and committed to ideals that I think are crucial, but they were also mean and judgmental and prone to bending the truth. They didn’t get traditional happily-ever-afters and their quests—like Anne’s push to curb carbon pollution or Georgie’s desire to protect the landscape she loved—are still, frustratingly, ongoing. They didn’t get easy resolution, they had to keep pushing against misogyny, dismissiveness and more, but I think that makes their stories more interesting and more real.

One friend described the heroine’s journey as if the hero’s journey went to therapy—reflective and aware of context. I think that might be true, but it’s also as if the hero kept living past a single quest. Those women are heroes because they didn’t just fight a battle then come home to glory. They kept fighting even when the rewards were hard to grasp, even when their narratives weren’t tidy.

I think we default to well-known stories and familiar plot beats because it’s reassuring to feel like good will win over evil, that we’ll have a happy ending. But that’s not the way life works. And it’s misleading and kind of boring to think it might, in storytelling and otherwise. I don’t want to keep cramming stories into the constraints of the hero’s journey. I want to let them be messy and complex and ongoing.

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Fierce Country by Heather Hansman is available from Hanover Square Press.

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Windows 11's July update has arrived

It packs some smart features, including pausing updates at length and a new recovery option

This patch also cures a nasty bug that slowly eats more and more drive space, but there's an issue to be aware of for Dell laptop owners

Microsoft has released its monthly patch for Windows 11 and the July update is a biggie, packing a feature that I've been awaiting for quite some time.

That would be the ability to pause updates on Windows 11 Home – beyond just a short period of time, which has been the only choice to date – and there are some other impressive additions from Microsoft here.

I'm going to pick out my top four features introduced by the July update , as well as rounding up some of the other more notable changes here. I'll also highlight an important bug fix that has been deployed for a nasty flaw that eats your drive space – along with a warning for some of those with a Dell laptop (who may not get this update for a good reason, as you'll see).

As ever, these changes were seen in the last optional update (June preview), and most of these features are being rolled out gradually, so you may not see them right away after installing this update (indeed, you may have to wait a while based on how the update winds blow regarding your exact PC configuration).

1. Pausing updates

(Image credit: Shutterstock) Sometimes you want to hold off installing an update because of a bug that you're nervous about potentially affecting your system, and up until now, Windows 11 users have only been able to avoid any given update for five weeks.

Okay, so that's a fairly long time, but what if the bug is one of those persistent and niggly affairs that Microsoft takes an age to fix? You may want to delay the update beyond five weeks, and now you can. The catch is that you'll need to continually renew the delay for every 35-day period, but nonetheless, you can now keep an update at bay for as long as you want. (Well – until you're forced to update to a new version of Windows 11, that is, when support runs out for your current version).

2. Point-in-time restore

(Image credit: Getty Images) Another neat addition is point-in-time restore, a new recovery option that you can employ when something bad happens to your PC and you can no longer reach the desktop. Point-in-time restore lets you roll back a non-functioning system to a previous working state. It reverts to the "full system state" meaning that all your apps, files, and settings are recovered as captured at that previous time.

Hopefully this is a feature that you'll never need, but if you do, you'll be very glad of it. Note that the system backups obviously take up drive space, with older backups automatically deleted after 72 hours by default. Also, if you have a system drive that's smaller than 200GB, you'll have to enable this feature yourself (as it won't be turned on automatically due to potential space issues – note that you can specify a maximum amount of storage space used).

3. Fewer annoyances with widgets

(Image credit: Windows/Unsplash) The July update is making the widgets panel 'quieter' by which Microsoft means that it has cut out a lot of clutter. The main change is that by default the panel just displays your widgets and Microsoft has got rid of the promotional nonsense in terms of ads and the MSN feed. Notifications and taskbar badges are also minimized by default, and widgets no longer open when you hover over them.

There are some other streamlining moves here, and even if you don't use widgets, I think this is a noteworthy change as it shows the direction Microsoft is now heading in with Windows 11 – chilling out on the upselling as was previously promised (if not entirely banishing it).

4. Screen tint

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Ham patipak) Windows 11 has been graced with a number of accessibility improvements in the July update, first of which is a new screen tint ability. This does what it says on the tin, allowing you to tint the screen with a choice of colors to help reduce eye strain, or to make text more easily readable. You can adjust the tint intensity, and this is a very useful addition that'll save people from downloading a third-party app to get these kinds of color overlays.

Other features in the July update

(Image credit: TechRadar) There's quite a lot going on here aside from the above major moves, and that includes Microsoft boosting the speed at which File Explorer launches (helping Windows 11 to feel more performant overall).

There's a whole lot of work on the Bluetooth front, too, as Microsoft notes: "This update improves reliability and performance when connecting to and using Bluetooth devices." That includes better driver stability, improved audio routing for calls via Phone Link, and more.

File Explorer has also been honed to be more reliable, and Microsoft has implemented a performance tweak to the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) that means PCs will shut down more promptly. If you've ever sat staring at your computer while it takes 20 seconds to shut down, wondering what on earth it's doing, that kind of behavior will hopefully be a rarer occurrence going forward.

A major bug fix – and Dell laptop problems

There's some good news for those of you who have been suffering at the hands of a mysterious bug that eats storage space (due to an out-of-control database file). This is fixed with the July update ( the cure was in the June preview before it ), so you can grab this to resolve the issue (hopefully).

There's some bad news on the bug front, though, namely that you won't get this update on some Dell devices with Intel CPUs, as Microsoft has blocked it due to the July patch causing all sorts of weird issues. I say it's bad news, but at least Microsoft caught the problem and has prevented the update from being piped to those machines.

Microsoft informs us: "This update might not be available for a limited number of Dell devices with Intel processors due to an incompatibility reported by Dell that can potentially cause unexpected shutdowns, poor performance, increased heat, and battery drain. We are working together with Dell to prevent the affected models from experiencing the issue and plan to release a resolution for affected devices in the coming days."

So, if you were wondering why you couldn't get this patch on your Dell laptop, now you know. You'll just have to sit tight for now until Microsoft and Dell get this ironed out.

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Kirby and Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai and Square Enix are celebrating the 43rd anniversary of the release of Nintendo's first major home console, the Famicom.

As Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda are fresh off celebrating their 40th anniversaries, and Donkey Kong celebrated its 45th last week, Nintendo's first proper home console – not counting the single-game Color TV-Game series, which had been released beforehand – the Famicom celebrates its 43rd today. While it would take another couple of years for the console to arrive as the NES in North America (and another couple on top for the UK), the Famicom dropped in Japan on July 15, 1983, with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye in tow.

Sakurai, whose sole NES credit is directing Kirby's Adventure, which was one of the final Nintendo-published releases on the system, posted on Twitter (via machine translation) wishing the console a happy 43rd anniversary. He added that the platform – despite consoles releasing before and after – had the biggest impact on him as a game creator.

Square Enix also posted a short video celebrating the release of the classic console, showing the original Final Fantasy booting up on the platform (with a Dragon Quest box sitting off to the side). The two most iconic and influential JRPG series of all time both started on the platform, making it a crucial place for the genre.

Back in 2023, Sakurai released a video about the Famicom on his 'Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games' YouTube show, where he dubbed it "perfect". The director opened the video saying, "I can proudly say I've developed a game for the Famicom, aka the Family Computer. That makes me pretty lucky!"

Sakurai bought the console in 1983 – owning one of the earlier models which featured square buttons instead of the circular A and B buttons seen by the time the NES was released. As for one reason the console remains such an iconic part of his life, he points out the massive leaps in game development back then, using the gulf in scope between 1983's Mario Bros. and 1985's Super Mario Bros. as an example.

He points out that there are a number of game developers like Nier's Yoko Taro, Devil May Cry's Hideki Kamiya, Kingdom Hearts' Tetsuya Nomura, and Doom's John Carmack who are the same age as Sakurai, "but only a small handful of them ever actually developed a game for the Famicom."

Sakurai adds, "If the Famicom had never existed, the shape of the modern game market – really the entire video game industry – would be completely different." And that even though the games are easily available and may seem quaint now, Sakurai says, "what I really want to stress is that at the time, it truly was an absolute dream machine."

Super Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai sometimes "sounds exactly like Goku," ex-Tekken boss says: "A Saiyan who genuinely believes he's just another ordinary human"

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The patient: A 14-year-old boy in the United Kingdom

The symptoms: The teen was brought to his family's general practitioner because he felt unusually tired. His doctor asked about the boy's eating habits and described him as a "fussy eater" in notes from the appointment. The doctor also indicated that the teen had no symptoms other than tiredness, according to a report of the case .

Tests revealed that the teen had mild anemia and low levels of vitamin B12 , which comes from a person's diet because the body does not produce it. The body needs vitamin B12 for maintaining the health of red blood cells and the nervous system. The teen's doctor provided dietary advice and prescribed supplementary B12 injections.

What happened next: Later, at age 15, the teen began developing problems with his sight. An eye exam detected no abnormalities, and the ophthalmologist was unable to determine the cause of the vision loss, which worsened over time. When the patient was 17 years old, his general practitioner referred him to a neuro-ophthalmologist for further testing. (Neuro-ophthalmologists can assess vision problems related to the nervous system.)

Additional vision tests showed that the patient's visual acuity — a measurement of a person's ability to accurately see details from certain distances — was 20/200 in both eyes. In other words, objects that would be visible to a person with normal (20/20) vision at a distance of 200 feet were not clearly visible to him beyond a distance of 20 feet. Vision of 20/200 or lower falls within the parameters of legal blindness, according to the American Foundation for the Blind .

When asked, the patient denied using drugs, alcohol or tobacco, and his eyes showed no signs of disease, nor were they scarred or injured. The results of a neurological exam were normal.

However, blood tests showed that his red blood cells were enlarged , which can suggest vitamin deficiencies. His blood levels of copper and vitamin D were lower than normal. Furthermore, elevated concentrations of the amino acid homocysteine and methylmalonic acid — compounds that B12 helps to break down — further hinted that he was deficient in the vitamin, as at earlier examinations.

The diagnosis: The patient admitted that he was no longer taking the recommended B12 injections. (The case report did not indicate exactly when he had stopped.) His body mass index ( BMI ) was normal, and he was of average weight for his height. But because his B12 levels were low, the doctors questioned him about his diet.

National Eating Disorders Association

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He replied that he could not tolerate certain food textures; as a result, since elementary school, he had avoided most foods. For years, his daily diet consisted of fast-food french fries, white bread, potato chips, sausages and processed ham.

This diet lacked vital nutrients, leading to a condition called nutritional optic neuropathy , a rare type of vision loss that is often caused by severe deficits in B12 and other B vitamins. It causes atrophy of the optic nerve, which relays information from the eye to the parts of the brain that process vision. Copper deficiencies have also been linked to this type of optic neuropathy and to enlarged red blood cells, according to the report's authors.

The treatment: The doctors prescribed the teen supplements to correct his nutritional deficiencies and referred him to mental health services to treat his food aversions, which the doctors identified as a type of eating disorder.

Following treatment, the patient's vision did not deteriorate further. However, there was no improvement in his sight. Nutritional optic neuropathy may be reversed when caught early, but if the optic nerve becomes atrophied, the vision loss is permanent, the physicians explained in the report.

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What makes the case unique: Nutritional optic neuropathy is rarely caused by dietary deficiencies alone. Historically, cases in the medical literature have generally been associated with malnutrition caused by war and famine . More recent cases have usually involved both nutritional deficits and smoking or abuse of alcohol or drugs .

In some instances, this type of neuropathy results from inflammatory bowel disease or bariatric surgery, which limit the body's absorption of certain nutrients. It can also stem from restrictive diets that are not adequately supplemented with missing vitamins and minerals.

The teen's case is also unusual because his normal BMI masked the vitamin deficiencies that caused his blindness. In other words, doctors may have overlooked his dietary deficits because his weight was within a normal range.

Moving forward, "nutritional optic neuropathy should be considered in any patient with unexplained vision symptoms and poor diet, regardless of BMI," the authors wrote in the report.

For more intriguing medical cases, check out our Diagnostic Dilemma archives .

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.

Can you guess the diagnosis in these strange medical cases? Find out with our diagnostic dilemma quiz!

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The UK is proposing a social media curfew for ages 16 and 17

Access would be blocked from midnight to 6am by default

However, teens will be able to change these settings if they wish

Having already announced plans to ban under-16s from social media apps early next year, the UK government is now proposing a midnight social media curfew for young people aged 16 and 17 — though parents seem less impressed with this latest idea.

As reported by the BBC , the suggested curfew would run between midnight and 6am, and would be combined by certain "addictive" features being disabled in apps like Instagram and TikTok at any time of day. Those features would include infinite scroll, for example, and videos auto–playing when loaded.

The measures will be "crucial in helping young people get the sleep they need, focus on school and college, and spend more quality time with family and friends," according to Technology Secretary Liz Kendall. They're also intended to provide a gentler 'on ramp' to these apps for kids turning 16, having previously not had any access.

Changes are also going to be enforced for AI chatbots, which will be required to encourage regular breaks for under-18s, and to have safeguards in place to prevent "dangerous, misleading, or unverified mental health advice" from appearing. The moves are being made after a pilot scheme involving more than 300 teenagers and their families.

Teens can opt out

Keir Starmer to announce midnight social media curfew for teenagers from r/ukpolitics

There's not much detail in the government's announcement, so questions around mechanisms and timing have yet to be answered. It's possible the target date for this is the same as the under-16s social media ban – springtime (March, April, May) in the UK.

What's different to the social media ban is that the curfew timings and the removal of addictive features are going to be optional. While app developers will be told by the government to have these restrictions in place by default, teenagers will have the option to disable them if they wish.

Reactions on Reddit suggest the measures will end up being "ineffective and useless", with one poster comparing it to speed limit warnings for cars — very easy to ignore. Commenters also point out that this may require more age verification, and that existing parental control tools already exist to block social media access for kids at certain times.

"How is it any of the government's business what time anyone uses social media?" reads one post , while another calls into question allowing 16-year-olds to join the army but not letting them on social media past midnight.