Endgame Viable

The Recluse Report - March 2026 Part 2

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:59:27 -0400

Time marches on.

Gaming

Haven’t played much lately. I haven’t been in much of a talking mood so that cuts down a lot on the games I play. And I’m not really focused on any particular game right now, so I bounce around a lot.

Not Crimson Desert

Haven’t played it. Prominent Steam reviews and Roger’s posts list a litany of the exact kinds of overlooked quality of life details that I would find annoying enough to return the game.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

I’ve had the RE4 remake for years, but I finally started playing, since I saw that the new Resident Evil Requiem is out.

Resident Evil games can be a bit frustrating, because they’re sort of like action games, in that you have to react to game stimuli to stay alive, but your character’s movements are so limited and so slow that you’re constantly fighting with the controls to make your character respond.

A lot of times you have to die a few times before you work out what you have to do to get through the scene, because there’s often a predictive element to the “correct” responses. It’s always easier when you know what to expect beforehand. It’s a bit annoying to play by trial and error that way, and goes against my natural instincts.

Nioh 3 on PS5

I hooked the PS5 into my main recording setup so I could start recording my progress in Nioh 3. I don’t play very much though. I’m nearing completion of the Tokaido zone.

This “open world-ish” part of the game is pretty fun. However, I’m dreading reaching the next major boss because I know I’ll hate it and want to quit the game. There’s such a radical difference in the skill and dedication required in the boss fights versus the rest of the game.

I recently encountered an optional (I assume) boss out in the world named Mezuki. As usual with Nioh-series games, this boss made me want to rage quit the game. It has yet another new mechanic to learn which I call Dark Forces, which is incorrect but makes me chuckle. I tried a bunch of times and gave up, moving on toward Hamamatsu. Whatever reward it drops can’t possibly be worth it. It’s not blocking progress so screw it.

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker

Mostly dropped off my radar. I have to be really “up” to play this one, since there’s a lot of dramatic reading of quest text.

World of Warcraft Midnight

I completed the fourth chapter of Midnight, entitled Ripple Effects. This represents a grand total of maybe an hour and half of further progress.

There really isn’t a lot of incentive to play World of Warcraft. Every battle is incredibly easy, and I literally press a single button over and over again. So, no tactical challenge.

The story is instantly forgettable. I don’t even know what’s happening from moment to moment, even though I dutifully read every quest dialog out loud. Every NPC is the most generic version of an NPC imaginable.

The loot drops are meaningless. Inventory management is a pain.

So, it’s pretty hard to summon a lot of enthusiasm for continuing to play WoW when there’s almost no reward for the time investment.

Worse yet, videos of World of Warcraft are among the most boring imaginable, because there’s nothing to talk about. “Oh look, I pressed my single attack key again and the enemy mob died again. Glad I came up with that pro strat.” Otherwise I mostly have to stop myself from making fun of the silly story.

The only fun part is trying to read the quest text and match the tone of the NPC’s voice. Lately I’ve been fascinated by one guy who sounds a little like an American Obi Wan Kenobi. But overall there isn’t a lot of quest text to read in WoW.

Ah well. I still feel a minor obligation to continue, since I already started. But I’ve had my fill of WoW for the foreseeable future.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Yeah, yeah, I went ahead and bought MSFS. I don’t know why. Worse yet, I bought a joystick thingy, which hasn’t arrived yet. What a complete waste of money. At least I haven’t bought any of the thousands of dollars worth of in-game purchases.

Media Production

I’m uploading 3 videos a night to catch up again. I didn’t think YouTube would allow that but they seem fine with it.

I got a couple of copyright claims on my Final Fantasy XIV videos, where some random unknown claimant says that FFXIV’s soundtrack music is theirs. (It seems to be the Old Sharlayan music.)

It would be one thing if Square Enix filed the claim, since as far as I know they own the soundtrack copyright. I’d let that go because technically that would be a valid claim, even if it’s bizarre to try to enforce it given worldwide precedent of the last 10 years.

But it’s really galling when it’s some random third party fly-by-night scammer. My channel isn’t monetized so it has no material effect on me either way, but the principle of it is outrageous.

It seems wildly unfair that people can just claim whatever music they feel like, and YouTube does not provide an option in their dispute process to say “this claimant is wrong and actually doesn’t own what they’re claiming.” And the claimant gets to decide if the dispute is valid or not while YouTube stays out of it, so of course a scammer is always going to say the dispute is invalid.

I get that in the early days, people streamed and uploaded copyrighted music all the time and it made sense to err on the side of the claimant, but it seems like an extreme overcorrection that doesn’t make sense anymore.

All I can say is I feel bad for anyone who actually makes a living and depends on money coming in from YouTube or Twitch or any of these platforms. What a thankless grind that life must be.

Incidentally, I crossed 500 subscribers on my channel (after some 10 years), which is only halfway to where I can monetize it!

Media Consumption

Firefly

I’m sure everybody’s heard about the “Firefly Season 2” project by now. I heard about it on the Once We Were Spacemen podcast, which I now have to assume was a big marketing ploy, as pretty much everything on the Internet is now.

Anyway I decided to watch the series and the movie again.

I remember seeing it (mostly by chance) when it first aired, and thinking, “What the heck is this weird thing?” It didn’t really click with me but I didn’t hate it. It was more of a non-event.

I must have re-watched it at some point on streaming or a Netflix DVD or something, but I don’t remember doing so. I say that because when I re-watch it now, the stories are pretty familiar.

The show is certainly unique in that you don’t see very many space westerns. But is it actually good?

Well, again, it’s not terrible. It’s definitely dated. The network meddling is apparent in the tone shifts from comical to serious. The handheld camera work is abominable. The music is silly.

However, the best and most memorable part by far is the ensemble cast of classic archetypes, and the acting performances.

The movie, to my eye, seemed like a better representation of the “vision” of the show than the series was. It was also a really good ending.

So is an animated show a better idea than a live action train wreck? Absolutely. Am I dying to see it? Not really? But I’ll watch it anyway. They are a pretty funny group of actors. It’s one of those situations where the behind-the-scenes actor personalities are more entertaining than their characters in the show.

But I personally would pick Space: Above and Beyond for an animated revival any day of the week.

Speaking of revivals, I heard the Buffy Revival was no longer going forward. Ah well. It probably would have been depressing anyway.

Nuremberg

Pretty good movie, but it started out a lot more lighthearted than I expected from a story about the Nuremberg Trials. It got pretty serious by the end, though.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Finally started watching it. I think I can sum it up thusly: What if Game of Thrones but slapstick comedy? I haven’t finished the first episode yet.

YouTube

I mentioned Pilot Debrief last time, this time I want to mention Mentour Pilot.

I don’t know why I find these highly technical deep dives into flight disasters so interesting, but I do. So there.

Part of it is the standard human fascination with the macabre. Part of it is that it makes me feel better about my own life to hear about disasters much, much worse than anything I’ve ever experienced.

But another part of it is that aviation is just kind of fascinating. The world of the pilot is a world of extreme discipline and training, which appeals to my computer brain. Pilot training, when they start talking about “decision models” and things like that, seems to have a lot of applications outside of flying. It seems generally useful to hear something like “PIOSEE” explained. (A similar model can be found in software development lifecycle, but I don’t think it has a cool mnemonic.)

And it has to be said, this guy is the best I’ve ever seen at transitioning into integrated ads.

Anyway, it’s a good YouTube channel with high production values. Not the usual dreck.

And the guy has a cool accent.

Dave

Another channel I found is called IndoorOutdoorKat, which has a series of videos called “The Suffering of Dave.” I don’t normally bond with Internet cats but Dave is definitely my favorite Internet cat right now.

Dave reminds me of my cat when she’s vocalizing her suffering around breakfast time. I never need an alarm clock because my cat is meowing in my ear the same time every single morning.

UFL Football

I caught a few games of UFL Spring League Football. It’s a lot like NFL football except it’s played in stadiums the size of high school games in front of mostly-empty crowds hehe.

But for some reason they still have NFL-quality broadcast standards with all the 4k cameras and such. There’s a couple of differences I noticed.

First they mic up the quarterback so you can hear his voice and sometimes the coach in the background all through the huddle while the broadcasters are talking. It sounds like a mistake, but they seem to be doing it on purpose. My first thought was: Couldn’t the defense just have someone listen to the broadcast?

Secondly they have a thing called the UFL Drone, which is exactly what it sounds like: A little camera drone zooming around the field that you can see in the background all the time.

And third they like to play a whole concert at halftime, like every game is a Superbowl.

Rules-wise I think the biggest differences are it’s a faster-paced game because of a shorter play clock, and there’s no point-after kick. It’s always a 1-, 2-, or 3-point play from scrimmage after a touchdown, or something like that. And I think I saw a 4-point field goal line marked on the field once for some reason.

Artemes II

NASA is launching a mission to the moon on April 1. This is not a joke. I don’t think.

Anyway, this is the first space mission that looks interesting to me. I’ve mostly ignored all the billionaire space stuff, because it just never felt “real” to me. It just felt like kids playing with toy rockets.

This NASA thing feels real though. I guess because my taxpayer dollars are paying for this one. And NASA innovations tend to filter down to us peons eventually, while I have to assume that Elon Musk isn’t likely to give away SpaceX technology to the huddled masses. So it feels like I have more of a stake in this Artemes II mission.

Like, they’re actually going to fly around the moon. This hasn’t been done since 1972, as far as I know. That’s almost the entire span of my life.

This upcoming flight is much like the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, which was a pretty transformative mission in the history of humankind. The episode “1968” in the series From The Earth To The Moon is one of the best bits of television ever, incidentally. My older brothers are exactly the right age to have followed all that Apollo Space Race stuff, but I missed all of it. Though I still somehow know most of the astronaut names and missions.

I’ve been trying to work out how to actually watch the launch and the mission, because obviously nobody in the news industry is going to give it more than a 30-second blurb. It seems like YouTube is the place.

Home Life

I successfully got the riding mower started again and mowed some of the back yard. This was a minor achievement because last year I was too wiped out from cancer stuff and had yard people handling the yard.

I also had yard people remove a bunch of annoying boxwoods from the back side of the house and they subsequently destroyed my back yard by driving their heavy equipment all over it when it was soggy, turning it into a rugged moon surface covered with grass. Inconvenient.

I’m thinking strongly about getting a treadmill soon so I can try to push myself to do more light exercise this summer. I feel a hundred times better than I did last summer but I still feel pretty weak and atrophied.

UPDATE 4/1: I forgot to mention that I tried out Factor meals for three weeks. I’m looking for ways to ensure I’m getting a steady supply of protein in a decent diet, especially in the week after chemotherapy. The meals were very easy to heat and eat, but I found them fairly mediocre in taste compared to the cost, so I don’t think I’m going to continue.

Cancer Corner

Nothing much to report. At the very least, the cancer is not getting worse.

The last PET scan in fact showed that all previous sites of cancer “uptake” had resolved. I won’t get a chance to discuss the details with my oncologist for several more weeks but I was told it was an “excellent response.”

Treatments will still continue unchanged for the foreseeable future, because the cancer is still in there waiting for a chance to grow again. I like to think of cancer as a mean little alien organism trying to incubate itself inside my body. For now, it seems to be resting.

My oncologist is going on maternity leave soon so my next office visit will probably be with a substitute oncologist. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

On another note, I heard the Iran war could impact the helium supply used by MRI machines. Not cool.

World Context

I never thought I’d see a day where Iranian officials sounded more trustworthy than U.S. officials. But obviously I don’t believe a single word coming from this incompetent clown administration about anything, let alone the Iran war. So no, I don’t believe for one millisecond that Iran was “two weeks” away from a nuclear bomb.

News-gathering in the U.S. is a thing of the past, though, which makes it more difficult to opine much about how things are going with this idiotic war.

As a generally skeptical thinker, I have to hold space for the possibility that everything we’re seeing and hearing is wrong and that it’s actually a great idea to blow up the Middle East for generations, and it’s only Trump’s dementia and Hegseth’s frat boy stupidity that makes it sound like a complete disaster.

World War 3?

I’ve heard a lot of talk about World War 3 since Russia invaded Ukraine, and now again with things heating up in the Middle East region. It made me wonder: What do people mean when they say “World War 3”?

For most of my life, “World War 3” meant worldwide nuclear annihilation, particularly between the U.S. and Russia. The implication being that nuclear weapons are a requirement for the label.

However, if you think about it in terms of “a war where more than two countries are involved,” then we’ve had quite a few since World War 2. The Gulf War was one of the more memorable ones in my lifetime.

Or if you think of World War 1 and 2 as thematically connected by German aggression, you’d have to imagine World War 3 would involve Germany again somehow.

The bottom line is that “World War 3” doesn’t mean anything anymore, except as clickbait. Regardless of any of that, “war” doesn’t look anything like it did in World Wars 1 and 2 anyway. Everything’s asymmetrical now.

Incidentally, I saw a press briefing on C-SPAN given by NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy. What a refreshing sight to see a competent government official at a podium.

And now, a funny talking point I thought of after watching Trump’s hilarious cabinet meeting where he ranted about how dangerous Iran was to Americans. Americans killed by Iranian-backed terrorists in the first two months of 2026: 0. Americans killed by Trump’s own government in the same time period: 2.

Looking at the latest No Kings protests, I can’t help but think about how affluent and privileged we are here in the U.S. A couple of months ago, protesters in Iran were shot to death by their government, but here, a protest is just kind of a big party. It has more of a nerd convention feel than a protest feel. It doesn’t really sit right with me to use the word “protest” to describe these gatherings, in the same way I never liked using the word “insurrection” to describe Jan 6. It radically undermines actual insurrections throughout history, and it feels disrespectful to actual protesters in truly horrific countries.

Still waiting around to see if a single Democrat in the entire country might rise beyond the “grit your teeth and cringe but at least they’re not Trump” option.

Bye!

A Day at the PET Scan

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:23:39 -0400

I wanted to try to write more random stories about having cancer. Cancer sufferers are a bit of a secret society in my experience, and I feel like it should be more publicized and normalized, so maybe in the future it will be slightly less terrifying if it ever happens to someone. (Statistically, I think I read somewhere that around 40% of people will get a cancer diagnosis at some point in their life, so it’s nowhere near as rare as I previously thought.)

PET scans are scary to contemplate because they essentially light up wherever you have cancer “mets.” The silent worry being that the scan might reveal additional cancer in your body that you and the doctors didn’t know about before.

This is my second PET scan. My first one last June revealed that my lung cancer had spread beyond the lung and brain to a handful of small bone spots.. a couple of vertebrae and some in the hip area. But it didn’t show anything in, say, the liver or pancreas or any other vital organs. So it was a bummer about the bones, but it could have been a lot worse. Before that scan I had no idea how much cancer was actually in me, and the results felt like it would determine whether I had days, months, or years left to live.

The stakes are a lot lower today, but it’s still pretty stressful.

So here’s how it works, most of which I wrote on my phone while I was waiting.

I arrived at about 8 am. I was told not to eat anything before, but water was fine.

It was the second day after my chemo infusion, and I had woken up suddenly wide awake at 3 am, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Not unexpected because of the steroids I have to take the day before and after chemo day, which leave me pretty wired.

My stomach felt a little weird in those early AM hours so I took a Zofran just in case, which is an anti-nausea med that dissolves on the tongue for chemo side effects. It tastes awful but I’ve gotten used to it. I don’t usually have to take many anti-nausea meds in the days after chemo anymore, but if I feel anything the slightest bit off, I take something just to stay ahead of it. The meds don’t do much after you’re nauseous.

I don’t normally schedule anything in the days after chemo because of general fatigue, but this PET scan slipped through. So I was pretty tired both from lack of sleep and from chemo drugs rolling through my system.

I arrived at the PET scan site, which is a quiet out-of-the-way office in the midst of a large medical center. I’ve been there a few times before, so the “finding the right place for the first time before an appointment” anxiety wasn’t a factor. It took about 30 min to get there in morning rush hour traffic. I live on the wrong side of the city.

I checked in and waited in a small waiting room that might hold 3 people comfortably. This was the pre-waiting waiting room.

About 10-15 minutes later I was called into another waiting room, except this was more of a working waiting room to prepare for the scan.

A technician poked my finger to check my glucose. It was 108, slightly high, but well within limits for the scan. For some reason that’s important to know before scanning.

Then they installed an IV in my right arm (so routine for me now that I barely even think about it) and hooked me to a rolling cart the size of an office copier that looked like a Star Wars robot peddled by Jawas on Tatooine. It whirred for a few minutes as they injected me with the radioactive juice that lights up on the scan. No pain, no side effects.

Then a boring one hour wait while the juice went through my system (I assume–they never told me why the wait). During this time I wrote a lot of this post.

I had to make sure to pee to empty my bladder just before the scan. The toilet flusher scared the hell out of me because I barely touched it and it whooshed really loudly. Strange bathrooms are kind of terrifying, right?

Then a move to a different room for the PET scan itself. They ask you to remove everything from your pockets and take off anything that might interfere with the scan (a zippered hoodie, in my case). I dressed in unflattering stretch pants, slip-on shoes, and a t-shirt because I knew what to expect beforehand. This ain’t my first scanning rodeo.

The scan took about 15-20 mins and is a lot like a regular CT scan, which are fairly quick and easy (compared to an MRI at least).

The main activity of the PET scan is lying on a not-especially-comfortable bed that tracks back and forth through a big ring. For the PET scan, though, it did one or two passes and then it only moves the bed every minute and a half. During which the machine didn’t make any noise. All I heard was the air conditioning in the background. So it feels like they forgot about you until you’re startled when the bed shifts again. There was a pleasant chime at the end when it was done.

Incidentally, there’s always a soothing mosaic on the ceiling of a sky or stars or something to look at during these kinds of scans. I don’t know if that has any positive psychological effect on anyone else, but I just find it puzzling and often find looking at the patterns in the regular ceiling tiles more interesting. If they really want to entertain me, mount a television up there or something.

For me, unfortunately, lying flat on my back on essentially a flat board and holding still is torturous. My neck and shoulder muscles tense up and start screaming at me in 5 or 10 minutes, And For some reason my neck keeps wanting to twist to the right all the time, so I have to keep fighting that. And I have to keep reminding myself to breath. So it’s not especially relaxing, and it feels a lot longer than it is.

After the scan was done I collected all my stuff and left the PET scan room.

I asked for a copy of the scan on a disc, something I try to remember to do, just in case. I find them interesting to look at, though I have no idea how to tell a good gray splotch from a bad gray splotch. If nothing else I can pull images from it for blog posts.

It was about a 40 min wait in the tiny pre-waiting room while they burned the disc, during which I wrote more of this post and I wondered if they’d forgotten about me.

They did. I don’t think it’s common to ask for discs anymore. Maybe someday they’ll figure out USB sticks. On the second try it took about 10 mins.

After that I drove home and went back to work. Kind of. I was pretty exhausted from all the activity on day two after chemo so I took a little extra time to rest up first.

Then it’s just a wait for the results.

In my experience the doctors will only call quickly if they find something bad they need to take action on. If there’s nothing unexpected, they typically don’t call you, and just wait until the next regularly scheduled visit to discuss it.

I expected the test results to appear in the health portal page in a week or so. However, to my surprise, the results appeared on the portal the same day, so I can reveal the shocking truth about they found.

After this short commercial break.

Just kidding.

I’m not a doctor, but my reading of the results indicates that as of today there are no active sites of cancer activity. I read over it a few times to be sure, and even plugged it into ChatGPT to get a second opinion, because AI is our friend. It’s showing all the previously active sites from the first PET scan are now inactive, and there were no new sites found. In short, that’s pretty good news for me.

Still, to be realistic, my treatments are “palliative,” meaning that the disease had already progressed beyond the point where it’s “curable,” and they are just trying to manage the disease as best they can.

Still, I hate to be optimistic, because things could change at any time, but I think things are going about as well as they possibly could be for me because of what I can only assume is extraordinary luck. After about 9 months they’ve essentially halted the cancer progression at the point that it was discovered, and even reversed it a little bit (my lung tumor has shrunk since treatments began, and is no longer constricting any airways).

I continue to feel pretty good, and have no pain directly attributable to the cancer itself (with the possible exception of a little hip pain in the mornings that goes away on its own, but I think that’s more about my mattress than anything else). Anything negative I feel is from treatment side effects; little things like dry skin, congestion or a runny nose, and some minor GI issues now and then. My everyday life is mostly back to what it was a year ago before this all started.

So all in all, a pretty good day in the cancer journey for me.

Header image: Not a PET scanner, just a CT scanner, but it was all I could find in my photos. The PET scanner looks similar but slightly bigger.

Crimson Desert Hype

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:18:32 -0400

I’m trying an experiment in writing in a single topic individual post with a relevant title. A weird concept.

I’ve been hearing people talk about Crimson Desert for what seems like my entire life. Now that it’s actually imminent, I’m hearing more people talk about it in a distinctly hyped manner.

My humble question is: Why? What am I missing?

Not once in the entire history of my knowledge of this game have I ever thought, Oh neat, I can’t wait to play that.

My memory of the combat in Black Desert is that it was overwhelmingly meh. Or I guess mid is what they say now. Or default. Or whatever. I have to assume the combat in Crimson Desert will be based on the same concept: A lot of flashy (and flashing) animations that block the whole screen, but not a lot of tactical depth.

I’ve never been a fan of combat where you press a single button and it looks on the screen like you’ve set off a series of nuclear explosions with your sword, vastly more powerful than what you, the player, actually did. It feels cheap and unearned.

From the videos I’ve seen of Crimson Desert it has the same basic look as Black Desert, which was a hyperrealistic overly-sharpened style that dazzles at first, but then gets old and samey pretty quickly, as there isn’t much variation in the color palette or models or clothing and you start to notice all the seams where nothing quite fits together.

I honestly don’t even know what kind of game it is yet. When I look at the Steam videos it looks like an open world action game, but there’s so much stuffed into the video that it looks like a mishmash of ten different games.

There’s a million different types of flying, there’s fighting with that typical Asian-style where the frame rate keeps slowing down and speeding up at awkward times to throw off your timing, there’s crazy anime combat moves that look way over-the-top silly, physically impossible, and wildly impractical, there’s boss fights, there’s story stuff (though they conspicuously don’t show much of that), there’s outfit customizations (but no character creation), there’s some kind of gambling thing, there’s grappling hooks, there’s petting dogs, and who even knows what else.

Anyway, I don’t get it. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about buying it, but since everyone is so pumped about it, I suppose I have no choice but to jump on the bandwagon and watch the inevitable let down and train wreck from the front row. At the very least I’ll do the standard Steam thing of buying it and returning it within two hours.

But maybe I’ll be surprised and it’ll be awesome. That would be a refreshing change from the status quo.

Post-Post Analysis: I don’t like writing posts this way. It really eats a huge chunk out of my day. I like it a lot more when blogging feels like writing a diary solely for myself, with no thought whatsoever for the reader’s convenience. That’s the fun part of writing; the rest is drudgerous work.

The Recluse Report - March 2026 Part 1

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:22:33 -0400

Is spring finally here? The time changed rather unexpectedly, and winter felt like it was six years long.

Gaming

World of Warcraft

I began playing the Midnight expansion on Monday evening March 2. I was immediately annoyed.

First, a video auto-played unprovoked when you log in giving you a concise summary of The War Within. Neat. You only see it once and then never again; it’s gone forever, lost to the sands of time, never to be found on any menus. Useless.

For me recording videos of my playthrough, it was absolutely infuriating. I logged into a different character specifically to see if there would be some kind of surprise like that, because WoW likes to surprise you, and there was the surprise, but it didn’t play again when I logged into my main character while video was rolling.

Also, can we talk about how badly WoW movies are encoded? It’s like watching a blocky flip phone video from the early 2000s. Good god, people. It’s 2026.

And I say this all the time in my videos but once again I have to mention how awful WoW is at media transitions. They haven’t figured out the absolute basics of how to play a movie without the first bits getting cut off or cutting off some audio from the NPCs or even a super basic crossfade of the audio from the game to the movie. It’s just a hard jarring cut that feels like getting a cold bucket of water splashed over your head during the transition from game to movie. Maybe I’m the only one that cares about little things like presentation.

Luckily I already knew the basics of the story, having just gone through The War Within Recap on the way to getting my character caught up from level 50 to 80.

Midnight starts out almost identical to The War Within, meaning that there’s a big fight and your first quests are running around the battle killing things and helping allies. Kind of lame, but I guess you can’t mess with a winning formula.

The layout of that Parhelion Plaza location was abysmal. It felt like a lot of concentric circles and you could never get from one circle to the next without running around a huge arc that took you through a hundred mobs. There was a conspiracy to keep me from getting where I wanted to go at every turn. There was never a straight line route from A to B. And, of course, no flying. Horribly aggravating.

Anyway, all that annoyance in the first half hour aside, I got through Chapter 3 (of 17) and now I’m questioning why I ever bought this expansion because I’m weary of the WoW formula already. I mean, it’s fine, and exactly what WoW is supposed to be, but it’s just that it’s always the same, they just rearrange the names on the characters.

As of this writing I’m mostly ignoring WoW and wasting my subscription.

Final Fantasy XIV

Haven’t played Endwalker in a while, pretty much exactly where I left off last time, having just returned from Eldis in the past.

I only did a couple of Role Quests. Weird how the Role Quests do not require you to use your Role skills in the slightest, and it’s 100% story. (So far, at least. I’ve only gotten to the level 88 quest, which mostly revolves around Lord Hien and Yugiri.)

Nioh 3

I got Nioh 3 on the PS5. At first, it really annoyed me and I didn’t think I’d play much.

The usual loop went like this: Log into the game after many days of not thinking about it. Try to fight stuff. Realize I have no idea which buttons to press to do things. Die. Sigh heavily because why do developers make games with overly complicated controls. Log out.

Then I got stuck at the shrine right before the first boss Yamagata Masakage (after the unwinnable one), so every time I logged in, not remembering any buttons, I had to kill a Nioh-style frustrating boss and I just couldn’t be bothered to deal with all of this series’s boss fight nonsense.

The cardinal sin of any Souls-like game is when you aren’t allowed to make any mistakes in a boss fight, and Nioh is famous for this. Oops, minor lax in concentration or a minor lag in button input: You’re dead, start again!

But maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m supposed to grind for days to level up before fighting bosses. I was level 3 when I first encountered Yamagata, so I assumed it must be beatable at level 3 without tons of consumable buffs or extra effort.

So I tried some grinding. But it turns out there’s only one enemy to grind on near that shrine, so I killed him 3 times and leveled up to 4 before returning to Yamagata Masakage.

It seemed slightly easier, though the extra point of Constitution had little effect. It was still a tedious chore of avoiding mistakes. But I was able to finally get to the second phase, and after a few more tries after that, I finally got to the point where I could activate the Living Spirit thingy and finish him off.

Then I learned about the skill trees you can buy into to add even more skills to your buttons that you can’t remember. I got the High Stance because I remember using that a lot in Nioh, but I have no idea how to activate it. [I finally figured it out, but I’ll never remember it in a frantic combat or after coming back to the game after a week off.]

Speaking of buttons, why on earth does the bow aiming trigger sometimes when you hit L1 instead of L2?? Kind of irritating in the middle of a fight. [Note: It’s because my finger is slightly low on L1 and brushes the L2 button, which is crazy sensitive.]

Anyway, after the boss, the game expands into sort of an open world kind of thing. Currently I’m finishing up wandering around Tenryu River, overleveling as much as possible before moving on to the next area to the south.

After getting through the frustrating early parts of the game, I kind of like the non-boss parts of Nioh 3. It’s somewhat single-player MMORPG-like. I thought that about Nioh, too, before rage-quitting when I got to that ice lady boss. Sadly I lost all those videos when my NAS crashed.

So that’s where we’re at with Nioh 3.

X-Plane 12

A weird choice for me, but after watching a ton of videos about flying mishaps, I suddenly had an urge to install a flight simulator. But not, you know, the flight simulator (Microsoft Flight Simulator).

I wondered if there were any others, and I found this X-Plane thing. I haven’t played a flight simulator since Microsoft Flight Simulator in the mid-90s on a 386 or 486 PC, so I have little context for what’s “good” or “bad” in a flight simulator, but this one seems pretty good to me.

At least, I can fly out of my local airport and recognize the terrain around it. I successfully took off and landed on my first try in a single-engine prop plane, but it was a pretty rough bouncy landing. I’m mostly curious about how to program the automated piloting systems rather than manual flying, though, and that stuff is rather complex.

I’m mostly flying small single-engine prop planes, and those things bounce around in the air like a cork on water and it’s super easy to overcorrect. I’m tempted to buy a flight joystick or something (for, I think, the first time in my life) to try to make it easier but that seems self-indulgent and I don’t really have room for it on the desk anyway.

Media Production

I’m done uploading a huge backlog of videos. Next I have a new huge backlog of MMORPG videos to upload. I tend to record videos at a far higher rate than I can actually upload them, so I may have to bump my script to uploading 3 videos a night instead of 2 for a while.

The next batch is somewhat notable (to me, at least) in that, with the exception of the first 8 FFXIV videos, they were all recorded post-cancer diagnosis.

I was going to embed subtitles with this new batch, but my AI-generated subtitles aren’t quite up to the standards of YouTube’s automatic subtitles. I’m thinking of trying out AssemblyAI for audio transcriptions, because I hear it’s better than OpenAI.

Incidentally, I found a solution to spelling all the Final Fantasy XIV names correctly, and it involves creating a dictionary of all the weird spellings and then asking OpenAI to spell-check the transcriptions. It works pretty well, but it’s kind of slow.

Media Consumption

I have a varied interest in YouTube subjects. It’s probably my primary “social media” site these days, though I almost never read the comments.

Sometimes I like to watch TTRPG actual plays, sometimes I like to watch videos of kittens meeting puppies for the first time*, and sometimes I like to watch videos about horrifying stories of tragic disasters.

I stumbled on a YouTube channel called Pilot Debrief which falls mostly into that last category. It’s a former military pilot guy doing technical analyses of plane crashes and the pilot mistakes that caused them, by going through the NTSB reports and listening to black box recordings and such.

Yikes. It’s fascinating. It’s horrifying. The ones where he walks through cases where a pilot dies and a passenger has to land the plane are particularly terrifying. And the ones where a student pilot is on their first solo flight and a wheel falls off during takeoff. There are no tales in the horror genre as good as these (I am of the school of thought that horror is better when it’s scary, not campy).

I wasn’t crazy about flying before, but now I never want to set foot on a plane again.

Anyway it’s a very information-heavy channel and I think it’s pretty well made. The perfect combination of professional skillset and amateur broadcaster. I also like that you can clearly see the arc of starting out as a beginner YouTuber and getting more professional over time. It’s also pretty funny to see them leaning into all the YouTube recommendations for making your videos more popular as if it’s a piloting checklist. Catchy clickbait title, check. Thumbnail, check. Calls to action, check. Midroll ad, check. Live streams and collaborations, check.

I also learned some new phrases like “aviate, navigate, communicate” and “normalization of deviance.” And now I want to find a way to fit “all the holes in the Swiss cheese are lining up” into any conversation.

* With cute animal videos on random no-name channels, I’m usually wondering the whole time if it’s some demented farming operation where the animals are drugged or mistreated off-camera, something that I can’t find any evidence of but I’m 100% sure is a thing in this hyper attention economy.

Day Job

I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in AI adoption in the last few weeks at work. I think we’re reaching a “second wave” of people who are suddenly noticing that AI is actually amazing at certain things.

It’s no longer just the bosses and a weird fringe of people saying, “Hey people should really take a serious look at this.” It’s now filtering down to the working masses and starting to become embedded in daily operations.

Home Life

One of the side effects of cancer treatment is I have dry skin and brittle nails all the time, and a higher risk of nail problems. So I ordered a fancy new fingernail and toenail clippers from EDJY to try out.

I had to change almost every product that touched my skin in any way (shampoos, soaps, laundry detergents, towels), and this is another part of that journey.

Cancer Corner

I have good news about the rather ominous findings of a hip MRI I mentioned last time, where two previously unknown spots of metastasis were discovered. The question was whether those are new spots or not, essentially whether or not it indicated disease progression.

My oncologist has informed me they believe they were there all along, and they only showed up on the MRI now because it’s the first time we’ve done an MRI on that area, and it’s the most sensitive scan for finding bone issues. So good news there.

I’ve already gotten my regular chest/abdomen/pelvis CT scan and I’m still going to get a PET scan later in March to check for new disease and I’ll get another hip MRI in three months to look for other changes.

Otherwise everything continues as before, with chemo treatments every three weeks and an expensive, thankfully insurance-covered pill every day. But it’s a further reminder that cancer is a constantly-evolving process that works at a cellular level, completely hidden from my (or my body’s) ability to detect.

It occurred to me that I’m approaching the one-year anniversary of my diagnosis in a few months, which is a notable milestone.

World Context

I have quite a lot of fun imagining the Russian national anthem plays any time the current president says anything in any clips, like it’s a Family Guy cutaway gag.

I wish I could think of a way to convey how incompetent this Republican administration sounds. I can’t imagine a world where anyone takes him or his cabinet or any Republican seriously. Even as they’re sending all their political foes to Siberian gulags it still sounds ridiculously funny. I wish I had the skills and ambition to translate the hilarious skits playing in my head into videos.

Anyway, I remember when I was embarrassed about George W. Bush’s demeanor on the world stage. Now I’d take Rumsfeld over Hegseth any day of the week.

But don’t worry, Democrats will still find a way to lose in 2026 and 2028, because most of them are still living in the 2000s and convinced the lofty ideals of democracy and the Constitution are important to voters.

Bye!

The Recluse Report - February 2025 Part 2

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 18:38:05 -0500

I’ve given up trying to write unique titles for these posts. Thinking up a title is literally the worst part of blogging. Second only to finding images.

Gaming

World of Warcraft

I don’t know why I’m suddenly into World of Warcraft, but I don’t like it.

The problem is that questing and leveling up in WoW is pretty fun, but it goes by so fast and then it’s over. So you keep trying to chase that leveling high by doing all the other busy work in the game, and you quickly realize it’s just busy work and it’s not actually fun, but you keep trying to do the grind every day thinking maybe it’ll become fun if you just keep doing it over and over and over again, but it’s never fun, and you end up feeling sad and duped.

Anyway, for some reason I got three characters to level 80, my main Night Elf Hunter, my venerable old Gnome Mage who I keep wishing was fun to play but Mages are uniquely annoying to solo with, and a brand new Blood Elf Paladin I just created for no apparent reason except I had a bunch of level 70 boosts to burn and I’d never played a Paladin before. It’s the first time I’ve ever had more than one character at the current level cap.

In the search for interesting content to do, I realized I’d never done any of the quests to unlock the fancy schmancy race-class combinations, so I started doing those. And I’m running around looking for all the purple diamond quests that unlock stuff.

It turns out that going through the War Within Recap instead of the real campaign doesn’t unlock all the things, so I’ve been running around unlocking flight points and stuff.

I’ve been doing some Delves, which are actually pretty fun. They’re like miniature solo-or-duo dungeons. A great addition to the game that they should have added twenty years ago.

I even installed World of Warcraft on my MacBook Pro, and it runs quite well there. Why? I’ve no idea. I’m almost never going to play it on my MacBook Pro, because it’s actually a major pain to play MMORPGs on a trackpad, but it’s there just in case. I had to increase my TimeMachine backup storage space because of it.

I had intended to start playing Midnight on Saturday, February 28th, but, you know, “war were declared.” [UPDATE: Also, it turns out you don’t get early access with the cheap edition, so nevermind.]

Final Fantasy XIV

After I realized I was just wasting time grinding for nothing in World of Warcraft, I went back to Final Fantasy XIV.

So I’m continuing to march through the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest, at an average of about 25 minutes per quest. I’ve now completed over 80 of the ~100 MSQ quests, before going into the post-Endwalker patches.

I’ve completed the Elpis zone, and I’ll be honest, I don’t understand any of the lore drops going on here. It’s so complicated and full of unfamiliar names, and multiple names per person, that it’s pretty hard to keep track of it all. Is this person an Ascian, a Primal, or a Diety? Or an Ancient? Or all of those things? Or some of those things? Who even knows any more?

I can’t look it up either, because somebody will spoil something about post-Endwalker or Dawntrail. It’s not like you can click a button in wikis to say, “Only show me information as of Version X or Y.”

I have to mention the Venat solo duty. It sucked. Every combat encounter has been stupefyingly easy, and then suddenly you get run over by a raid-level boss encounter with a bazillion hit points. Whatever happened to games slowly ramping up the difficulty curve? But no, it’s apparently a flat line of casual simplicity and then a knife-like spike of craziness for one quest.

I tried it three or four times on Normal, completely sure it would end when I got her down to 50% and then she’d say something like, “Oh wow, you’re way better than I thought, let’s stop now.” But then at 50% it launches into a whole new phase of shooting down floating balls before she charges up. I didn’t get enough of them and died, and then I was like, okay screw this complete nonsense.

Next time I retried it on Very Easy and it … still wasn’t very easy, because it was still way harder than anything that had come before it, but it was easier and the final ball phase was more manageable and I survived and moved on.

I can’t imagine playing through that with any kind of magic caster class, where you can’t move. There’s so, so much dodging of AOEs and you have to run for your life constantly.

Anyway, due to all the XP bonuses I had in effect prior to level 90, my character has already reached Bard level 92. I predict I’ll be level 94 (maybe even 95) by the time I can actually start Dawntrail.

Media Production

I’m reaching the end of my huge burst of uploads of old CRPG videos, and now I can start turning to a new huge burst of uploads of MMORPGs.

In the hopper for the next upload run will be Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker videos, one per Main Scenario Quest, and World of Warcraft videos where I speedrun through Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and The War Within to catch-up from level 50 to level 80. Hint: World of Warcraft makes objectively worse video content, as it ends up looking like pew-pew arcade game nonsense with no stakes whatsoever. After twenty years they have only made minimal gains in the “telling a story” department, and they simply cannot figure out how to play a cut scene without a jarring and janky audio or video transition that cuts off part of some dialog.

Not really media-related, but kind of: I fell into a rabbit-hole of trying to get OpenAI to spell all the bizarre unpronouncable names in Final Fantasy XIV correctly when it’s transcribing my videos to summarize them (e.g. Hythlodaeus does not often transcribe to the correct spelling).

Long story short, I couldn’t figure it out (though I had a new idea tonight). The best thing I could come up with is to make a humongous list of all the ways AI will spell the names wrong, and then do a text replacement to the correct spellings. Unfortunately it’s easier to go through and proofread the description summaries.

I did find out that if I said the spelling of the bizarre names out loud when I encounter them in each video, AI will spell them correctly. So there’s a tip for anyone using AI to transcribe. But that’s pretty lame in a game video, and there are literally dozens of them in every FFXIV video.

Cancer Corner

Last time I mentioned an MRI to look at my hip after I mentioned some morning pain in the general area to my oncologist. Well, I got the test results, and they’re a little concerning.

The MRI showed three areas of “marrow replacement” which is consistent with cancer metastasis. One was the left femur neck, which I already knew about and had radiation treatment for.

But the other two spots, at the top of the right thigh bone, and in the pelvic bone, were previously unknown and did not show up on a PET scan last June.

So it’s a little concerning. Why didn’t these two new spots show up before? My oncologist is current investigating and consulting with a “tumor board,” and has ordered another PET scan.

That’s all I know at the time of this writing, and I probably won’t know much more until the end of March. Cancer diagnosis is a bit of a slow-moving process. I’m no expert, but I can see where it could indicate any number of things, ranging from not so bad to maybe more bad.

In any case, I don’t feel worse, and I have not been inundated with calls from my doctors to take immediate action, so I take that as a relatively positive indicator. The hip pain I feel in the morning feels more like an unrelated muscular issue to me, but maybe I’m self-deluding.

World Context

I watched the State of the Union address, something I don’t normally do (regardless of president), because I wanted to see it before I started seeing all the reactions to it. In politics, that’s the optimal way to maintain some independence from influency influencers.

Obviously I didn’t watch it live, that would be crazy. I went to C-SPAN the next morning and played it back on 1.5x speed.

Still, it didn’t take long before I got incredibly bored and concluded it was yet another spewage of non-stop self-indulgent bullshit. Not dissimilar to most SOTUs, but this one was obviously turned up to 11.

To fight the urge to turn it off, I went to another tab and started watching cat and dog videos on mute while I continued to listen to the SOTU in the background. I recommend it.

What did I think? Who cares? SOTUs are stupid and obsolete. I don’t need the president telling me the state of the Union. Especially this one. And Congress sure doesn’t need the president standing there lying and embarrassing the country for over an hour and a half. But it’s tradition, and we all know this administration is all about American traditions.

I am, however, baffled for the second year in a row why a single Democrat set foot in that chamber for the SOTU, the very room where rioters assaulted Congress and this president subsequently pardoned them for it.

Oh yeah, and this minor thing: The U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran again. For … reasons?? I wonder how much of Trump’s cryptocurrency profits will be used to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the price of this war.

Bye!

The Recluse Report - February 2026 Part 1

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:51:49 -0500

There’s a big controversy about Discord starting to crack down on age verification worldwide, or something like that. I found out about it on Discord.

I can’t say I’m surprised. It was a great run for 5 or 10 years there but letting the huddled masses onto the Internet has definitely proven to have been a huge mistake in hindsight. I assume that’s not a controversial viewpoint.

Gaming

Ashes of Creation

Since Intrepid Studios just imploded in dramatic fashion, I dug out the game again and recorded three videos for the historical record.

I don’t personally think the game was a scam or a cash grab or anything like that, but I do think it was mismanaged, had an inexperienced development team, and they probably bit off way more than they could chew. From the outside, the end result of those two situations looks roughly the same. But I can’t see anyone in this day and age sinking 10 years into a game project as some kind of long con.

I don’t know anything or particularly care about the business side of it or any of the personalities involved; I can only make some educated guesses about the development process based on looking at the game and noting technical issues I see.

There are multitudinous writing issues, so I don’t think they had a particularly strong writing team. It varies widely from “this part isn’t bad” to “somebody copied this from their phone without fixing autocorrect mistakes.” Which seems like a particularly troublesome oversight for a game that primarily presents its storyline through writing.

I can only assume somebody made a decision that the story didn’t matter, and all the players were going to speed-click through the quest dialogs anyway, so they haven’t bothered to do much editing to date. If that’s the route they wanted to go, there are better ways to facilitate that playstyle than wasting your time writing quest text.

I think my overarching impression is that whoever the creative and technical leads were didn’t have a lot of experience in the MMORPG space. I got the impression they hadn’t been keeping up with trends in the genre, or were trying to make something vaguely like what they remembered from their youth, or simply didn’t play MMORPGs. It felt like I kept seeing problems that have been solved over and over in the last 20 years of the genre, like they were starting over from scratch making a game from 2005 without any of the knowledge learned since then.

Anyway the Steam page is plastered with bright red negative reviews telling everyone to force Steam to give refunds, but my take is this: It’s unlikely any of those employees are going to get paid for their last days at Intrepid, but it seems even more unlikely if they have to pay back all the customers too. So I kind of don’t mind losing a few bucks to say, “Hey Intrepid, save your non-existent money for the people out of a job maybe.” That’s why everyone bought this on Kickstarter in the first place, right? To donate money to the devs making the game? An act of charity? Because they couldn’t convince any real entrepreneurial backers to fund their game?

Evenshor

I saw Tipa mention Evenshor, and I hadn’t heard of it before, so on the strength of just the post title, I looked it up, and I thought it was one of the best ideas for a video game I’ve seen in a long time.

The only problem is that it’s emulating EverQuest instead of, you know, the good MMORPG from the 90s. (That being Asheron’s Call.)

I only played a short time, but I can report that it’s a dead ringer for playing any MMORPG before around 2000. Watching computer-generated general chat and guild chat is hilarious. I was even able to ask a question in guild chat about how to give things to NPCs and got an answer!

It’s not going to have much longevity, but it was a fun diversion.

Nioh 3

I tried it out, but I think it suffers from all the same problems as Nioh 1. I was offput when it upended an encyclopedia’s worth of keys and abilities on my head at the beginning, which isn’t exactly my jam. I like games with simple controls that are hard to master, not complex controls that are hard to memorize.

I’m probably going to return it on Steam, and maybe get it on the PS5. [I did.] In any case it’s unlikely to be a video series on my channel. I’m just not that into it.

Final Fantasy XIV

I continue to plug away at the Endwalker main scenario quest. I’ve just started the block of level 86 quests. I think I counted 40-something quests remaining before going into the post-launch quests.

I’ve fallen short of my goal of doing three quests a day though. Each quest takes me about 20-25 minutes, when reading all the text out loud.

My character reached level 90 about halfway through the MSQ, with all the XP boosts in effect.

World of Warcraft

On my journey to get ready for Midnight, I’ve leveled from 50 to 60 through about a zone and a half of Shadowlands, from 60 to 70 through a zone of Dragonflight, and from 70 to 80 in The War Within Recap. Grand total of playing time has been maybe 12 hours? It doesn’t take long to level in World of Warcraft Retail.

Unlike Final Fantasy XIV, you don’t have to actually complete the expansion story in WoW to move on to the next expansion. In fact, with the exception of the War Within Recap, it’s almost impossible to complete an expansion’s story because you out-level the content in about five minutes.

I can’t comment on the new housing system because I’m uninterested, except that at looks exactly like what you’d expect housing in WoW to look like: Awkward.

I can comment on the War Within Recap, a streamlined version of that expansion which allowed me to hit all the story highlights on my way from 70 to 80, while cutting out all the boring kill 10 rats quests along the way.

I enjoyed it, and I wish there was a similar “recap version” for every expansion. In fact, I dare say that every MMORPG should implement some kind of “recap” alternative for every expansion, made for alts or players catching up later. It’s a rare situation where I think something from modern WoW should become an MMORPG genre staple, but that’s one of them.

In a nutshell, I’m ready to play Midnight when it launches and now I’m just grinding for Twilight currency and new gear in the pre-expansion event.

I vaguely remember there’s reason to frown on playing/talking about Activision/Blizzard games now, but rest assured I hate all the things I’m supposed to hate (whatever they are). But I typically reserve my useless retail activism in gaming for Chinese-developed games and Tencent. I just find most breakout Chinese games look like they’re transparently copied-and-pasted from previously popular western games.

(I say useless because maybe only 1% of gamers are old/savvy enough to understand anything but pew-pew-pretty-colors-take-my-money when it comes to games, so a handful of people making a stand is hardly a formidable force for change.)

Whatever happened to Microsoft buying Activision/Blizzard anyway? Oh, they completed it, that’s what happened.

Project: Gorgon

Yeah, I tried Project: Gorgon again since everyone’s talking about it.

I got off that stupid starter island, which is more like a prison if you ask me, with that constant cacophony of Humble Bundle sound effect library sounds clanging in your ears all the time, and that was as far as I got. It looked more-or-less exactly like I remember it from however many years ago I played it, virtually unchanged in every way.

However I’m happy to report the mouse-turning bug was nowhere to be found, so it’s actually playable again.

It’s cute but it’s nowhere near as fun as Final Fantasy XIV or even World of Warcraft. It might dazzle a 1997 audience coming off of Ultima Online and give 1998’s EverQuest and 1999’s Asheron’s Call a run for its money, but unfortunately it’s 2026 now.

Stars Reach

I dug out Stars Reach again since I’d recorded some videos of Ashes of Creation and other miscellaneous new MMORPGs.

Stars Reach is seriously early, early, early access. It’s barely functional, in my opinion, though admittedly, I didn’t see many bugs. And most of the features that are in the game are the same features you’d find in any of a hundred survival games. It’s not exactly bursting with fun things to do at the moment.

Not to mention I just heard they’re laying off developers. Not a great sign.

Media Consumption

Super Bowl LX

You won’t have any way of knowing this, but for the record, I predicted the Seahawks would win in a romp. I imagine most thinking sports fans did. The Patriots looked a lot like the Commanders of last year: Playing way above their actual capabilities, benefiting from a softer schedule. While the Seahawks looked unstoppable.

Holy crap I just learned about Ring Search Party in a Superbowl commercial?!? Thank god I don’t buy Internet-enabled security devices. Listen to your Gen-X elders: Don’t buy Internet-enabled security devices! Also, don’t stab yourself in the eye with a fork. Because apparently we have to explain things that should be really, really obvious.

Otherwise, AI deepfakes were all the rage in Superbowl commercials. And yes, they all look fake, but I guess visual effects are supposed to look fake now? Since literally all of them do.

And it turns out I was right about the game. The Seahawks were in charge the entire game, and the Patriots never had a chance, except for a couple of minutes at the beginning and a brief spurt of life in the 4th quarter that saved them from getting shut out completely.

As for the Bad Bunny halftime show, it was okay. As a musical performance, it seemed pretty fake and overly-produced, as many Superbowl halftime shows do. I’m way too old to appreciate modern pop music that’s produced more for the Busby Berkeley visual choreography while the music itself is an afterthought. I, for example, almost never watch music videos. There were some cool beats though. But I wouldn’t recognize any of it if I heard it again.

Anyway that’s it for NFL football until the end of summer, unless you count that spring football league.

Home Life

Cold Snap

It was weeks of cold weather, where the temperature stayed at or below freezing, so snow and ice was just sitting on the ground everywhere forever. My driveway was a solid sheet of ice.

My new SUV has exactly zero difficulty in the snow, so it’s no big deal for getting around, but it’s still pretty annoying. I’m not a big fan of cold weather, what with my house being quite chilly in the cold.

The other annoying thing is how you go to the store sometimes and the bread and eggs and meat shelves are completely empty when there’s a 50% chance of less than half-inch of snow in the forecast. It’s comically stereotypical South-in-the-snow behavior.

Times like this make me feel quite lucky to have grown up in a fairly pragmatic family.

The cold finally let up on February 9, when the high temperature climbed all the way into the 50s for the first time in forever. The day I’m posting this, the temperatures are supposed to be reach 60 all week.

Stray Dog

A strange thing happened: A stray dog hung out at my house for a few days. Well, she had a collar so I suppose I should say “unsupervised” dog.

I went out to the front to try to get the last of the snow and ice off my front sidewalk, and I noticed a little white dog curled up next to my front porch in the sun. She got up and wandered away from me into the back yard, and that’s when I noticed a rather distinctive set of teats that immediately made me wonder if this dog had just given birth.

The dog then plopped down in the sun in the back yard, watching and waiting.

In any case, I’ve never seen a stray dog hang around my yard before. The few I’ve seen are always passing through on their way somewhere else. Stray cats are far more common around my house.

The little dog disappeared late in the afternoon, then reappeared again on my front porch two days later. She’s a pint-sized beagley hound mix.

My instinct is to try to befriend her and see if she needs any help, but I don’t really want a dog in my life. (Mainly because I don’t want a pet that outlives me, which seems especially cruel.)

Then again, she’s moved away the couple of times she’s seen me, so she may not want help. It’s been a couple of especially cold days, I haven’t seen her again, and I’m worried about her. Hopefully she found her way back to whoever put that collar on her, and she didn’t freeze to death out there somewhere in the woods.

Cancer Corner

Nothing new to report (which is good). I mentioned this last time but I had another brain MRI which showed everything the same as before (which is good).

The only notable thing to say about it is that one of the earplugs wasn’t quite in and MRIs are frickin’ loud without earplugs.

I also had an MRI of my left hip area as a precaution. I mentioned to my oncologist that I had some pain in my left hip in the mornings when I get up that goes away after I move around a bit, and she wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything going on there. It happens to be the same area where I had radiation on a bone spot in my left femur neck, and that spot has been unremarked-on in any followup CT scans.

Bye!

MMORPGs and a Polar Vortex - January 2026 Part 2

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:01:53 -0500

This time I started the blog draft document early, so there’s lots of rambling.

Gaming

Guild Wars Reforged

I don’t have anything to say about it, just that everybody seems to be playing and talking about it. I personally never “got” Guild Wars, so I don’t feel much interest in replaying it, though I have hovered over the buy button a couple of times.

I made an effort with Guild Wars 1 somewhere around 2017 or 2018, made some videos about it, realized that it was way, way too hard to consistently make edited videos like a YouTuber (which is why literally every YouTuber hires an editor first thing), and that was the last time I ever thought about Guild Wars. (1 or 2, honestly.)

Project: Gorgon 1.0

I’ve seen a few obligatory sentences here and there about Project Gorgon launching a 1.0 version, so I guess I’ll mention it too.

However, I’m not going to pretend I’m going to play that game again because the last time I tried to play it, there was a bug with mouse turning that was so bad I literally couldn’t play it, and it went on for months, and I have no understanding of how they couldn’t notice or fix it. It seemed like a searing indictment of their software engineering experience at the time.

Anyway, it’s still out there I guess if you want to play it. I think I bought an Early Access edition on Steam some years back. I remember it being a very niche game, though, unlikely to have any mainstream appeal.

Me being the cynical type, I imagine the 1.0 release is probably a last-ditch effort to make some money to keep the project running a little longer before the inevitable collapse, as these 1.0 releases of early access projects so often are. (*cough* Crowfall *cough*.)

Speaking of last ditch efforts, I also haven’t touched Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach in a while.

UPDATE 2/1: I just saw Ashes of Creation is imploding before it even gets to 1.0.

Final Fantasy XIV

I’m continuing to play Final Fantasy XIV, though not as much as before. I had a minor slowdown because I may or may not have picked up a minor cold–because it was slightly worse than the “normal” congestion I get the weekend after a chemo infusion, but then it was also unusually frigid, so who knows–which gave me a scratchy throat and made it difficult to record dialog. Especially when the story happens to be focused on super high-voiced Loporitts at the time.

In the Endwalker story, I just got back from the moon. I’m guessing it’s near the halfway point? Because of the extra XP I’m getting from the Preferred World+ status, I’m almost level 90 already, while the quests are still level 84.

I had to go through the first trial of Endwalker, The Dark Inside, which was the first time I’d had to venture back into the world of the Duty Finder in four years. I’m sure they’ve given explanations about why they can’t do the 8-man trials with the Duty Support system, but I can’t think of any technical reasons they couldn’t extend the work they did for 4-man dungeons to 8-man trials.

It took about three days to summon up the ambition to wait in the queue, and on the third day, after waiting two hours, a really fun aspect of MMORPGs that really makes the game fun and I’m so glad I got to experience the fun of sitting around waiting for two hours in a queue because that’s the real fun of MMORPGs, right? I’m so glad they preserve that essential MMORPG player experience by not letting you do 8-man trials instantly with the Duty Support system. Anyway I finally got to do the trial.

I had looked up some info on the basic mechanics, but there’s no substitute for being there. Everything happened way faster than I expected, the second phase was on us in the blink of an eye, the platform was rotating and the stars were raining AoEs, and I was a little rusty after four years of not doing any of that, you know? So I died a couple times. Luckily some others messed it up, too, and it wasn’t just me.

Anyway we wiped on the first try, but got through it on the second try after one of the healers put a mark on his head so we could follow him, which was a huge help. On the second try I only died once right at the end when I happened to be standing a step too close to the tank buster. As always with FFXIV, it’s kind of fun when you know what to do and get all the dance steps right, but I’m not waiting in a queue for two hours to do it again.

Endwalker Story So Far

To summarize the story since last time, we arrived in the shattered remains of Garlemald* to help, only to get a mixed reaction from the locals.

In the end, all the tempered in Garlemald–basically zombies who were made into slaves by Fandaniel’s towers–were de-zombified when all the towers fell, leaving the entire Garlemald region teetering on the brink of self-destruction, as half the people are starving to death, while the other half are recovering from zombification. The Allies decided to step in to help, and I’m sure there won’t be any political ramifications for that later on.

* Garlemald is FFXIV’s version of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, for the uninitiated–up to now, the Unambiguous Evil Empire.

Meanwhile, Fandaniel and Zenos set big bad primal dude Zodiark free on the moon, then I took care of it (in the aforementioned trial), and that somehow triggered the Final Days and the beginning of the end of all life as we know it.

Fortunately the moon is actually a big spaceship so everyone back home can ride to safety in a massive moon evacuation, run by industrious rabbit-like lalafells called loporitts. No, really, that’s what’s going on.

Returning from the moon, me and the Scions vow to stop the Final Days, however, so the moon evacuation plan won’t be necessary.

Also G’raha Tia keeps throwing himself semi-romantically at my character in cut scenes, like he did in Shadowbringers. Every time I’m told to rest, somebody knocks on my door and interrupts my night off with a cut scene.

It wasn’t at all clear to me why Fandaniel needed to erect towers all over the world and temper all of Garlemald, by the way. In the end, Fandaniel and Zenos just teleported to the moon and knocked down the last ward imprisoning Zodiark with a single blow. Why didn’t they just teleport up there and knock down all the wards that way? I’m sure there’s a deeply complex fan lore explanation, but it wasn’t very obvious on the surface.

Also, why was only Garlemald tempered, when those towers are everywhere? Is it because they were … offscreen? But that doesn’t explain why all of the elephant people in Thavnair weren’t tempered.

Eh, this is why you can’t look too closely at the story.

World of Warcraft

I saw something about a Pre-Patch Something Or Other for World of Warcraft, which sounded like there was an imminent expansion that I hadn’t heard of.

It reminded me that I hadn’t played WoW since before the big level squish thing, and WoW is the other one in the Top 2 of dependable MMORPGs, and wouldn’t it be cool to play a WoW Expansion at launch time, one of the two universal shared experiences in MMORPG gaming left in the world (the other being a FFXIV expansion launch, which I’m guessing might be coming later this year sometime?).

I know, I know, there are other MMORPGs with expansions all the time, but let’s be real here… every other one is a niche experience for superfans only, and you’re not likely to ever hear about them unless you’re tuned into MMORPG news sources. (I honestly hadn’t even heard of the last two WoW expansions.)

Anyway, when I logged in, my “main” WoW solo character, a Night Elf Hunter dating back to c. 2006, whose never been in a guild, the only character that’s been through every expansion (kind of), was level 50. I don’t remember what it was before. A hundred something? 120 maybe? I’ve somehow managed to lose every single video I’ve ever recorded of WoW so I have no way to check. (The last time I mentioned playing World of Warcraft was after Battle for Azeroth.)

There was something called a “Catch-up Experience,” which I’d never heard of. I also had four level 70 boosts available.

I think the new Midnight expansion starts at level 80, because it comes with a level 80 booster. I just went ahead and pre-ordered it, which presumably will give me access to all the previous expansions I missed, too. My general plan is to level my Hunter so it’s ready for Midnight.

Battle for Azeroth was the last one I played when it launched. According to Wikipedia, there’s been Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and The War Within since Battle for Azeroth. I remember skipping Shadowlands, but this is the first time I’ve heard of Dragonflight or The War Within.

I played the Catch Up Experience for my level 50 Hunter, which puts you into an instance of The Arathi Highlands where Jaina and Thrall give you a handful of kill 10 rats quests with 50,000 other people competing for the same mobs, and you get a full set of item level 50 gear, and in my case gain a level. I don’t know when you’re supposed to get item level 50 gear, but it said my previous pre-squish gear was around item level 17 or something like that.

During the Catch-Up Experience, I learned there’s a whole new mode of flying that seems considerably worse than it used to be. Now your mount has its own action bar and it will fall out of the sky if you don’t keep hitting the spacebar now and then.

Immediately after leaving the Catch Up Experience and plopping me into Stormwind Keep, I was funnelled into some NPCs to tell me about a Trading Post and Trader’s Tender, which sounded like something made for people who think games are only vessels for trading collectibles. I can’t see myself ever interacting with that system again.

Then I stumbled around Stormwind Keep for a while trying to avoid getting forced to the Dragon Isles (which seems to be the new defacto starting point for everyone and everything), until I finally found the guy who takes you to the Shadowlands expansion content.

I’ve praised WoW for many years for their ability to keep their game technologically up-to-date, in terms of graphics and game engine stuff. But man, their media transitions are still firmly rooted in 2000s-era jankiness. The screen blinks weirdly, bits of dialog get cut off, things are out of sync, odd delays, crazy resolution shifts between pre-rendered cut scenes and in-game cut scenes. It looks and feels absolutely awful, and it’s such a horrible first impression for a new expansion. FFXIV is a vastly superior multimedia experience.

Also, and I’m sure I’ve said this many times before, but I find WoW’s story almost entirely opaque. I chatted with ChatGPT about this: I asked it to summarize the main story of WoW expansion by expansion, and almost none of it looked familiar to me, despite having played every expansion up to and including Battle for Azeroth.

I asked ChatGPT why I didn’t remember the story, and it explained that’s because the “main story” is mostly revealed in raids, and that’s it. If you just run around doing quests, you apparently never see the main story, which matches my personal experience of the game.

World of Warcraft tells its story like a TV series where the finale is paywalled, the middle seasons were optional, and the recap episode never aired. -ChatGPT, either making up something funny, or citing something funny, who can say.

Which is weird. Another reason I think FFXIV is number 1 of the Top 2 remaining mainstream MMORPGs. The main story of FFXIV, like it or not, is impossible to miss.

After playing about an hour of Shadowlands quests in The Maw, my Hunter is already level 54 in the first zone. I’m just assuming there’s supposed to be 10 levels of Shadowlands content, then 10 levels of Dragonwhatever content, then 10 levels of War Whatever content.

The point is, I seem to be leveling rather quickly, and it feels like I’ll be able to skip past Shadowlands after maybe two zones (I think there’s five zones in Shadowlands?).

The combat is stupefyingly easy, too, after getting that item level 50 gear from the Catch Up Experience. (And after finally remembering how to summon my Hunter pet, and after adding that single-button damage rotation action to my bar.)

By the way, I was forced to look at the new housing system, even though I have no interest in it. It looks exactly like what you’d expect WoW to do with housing… it doesn’t really fit, and all the good spots are already taken anyway.

I mentioned somewhere previously that I hated skill trees and I wished there was a button I could click to just pick the best skills. Well, it turns out there is such a thing in WoW, and I could not have been more delighted to find it. No more randomly picking things from a skill tree I can’t be bothered to study!

Anyway, as of this posting, I’ve reached level 58 in the first couple zones of Shadowlands. There’s lots of extra XP stuff active, not to mention all the Mysterious Satchels raining from the sky with extra catch-up gear so you can out-level whatever content you’re doing in mere hours.

Pre-Patch Twilight Stuff

On a different character, a level 45 Mage, I tried out the Pre-Patch stuff, which takes you to a place called Twilight Highlands, which I have no memory of and my character has never been before.

You get a handful of quests dealing with and infiltrating a Twilight Cult, which, again I’ve never heard of before. Or at least I don’t remember hearing before. Then you’re turned loose and expected to run around the zone doing world events, or whatever they’re called in WoW, popping up around the map. You get some kind of currency with which you can buy exclusive gear and pets and whatnot.

I haven’t seen the events yet, but it reminds me of the Pre-Legion Invasion stuff, which was honestly one of the most fun experiences I can ever remember having in World of Warcraft.

You guessed it, the Twilight Stuff also drops tons of XP so my level 45 Mage turned into a level 49 Mage in almost no time. It’s nowhere near as fun as the Pre-Legion Invasions, though. Nobody has beaten the Rift-style gaming experience from Rift, and yet for some reason nobody ever does it anymore. Too much fun, I guess. Gaming is supposed to be a chore in the modern era.

Home Life

Brrrrrrr. It was an unusually cold December here, but the latter part of January is cold, what with the much-villified “polar vortex” hanging out here. It started with the first big snow of the year on the weekend. If you get your weather from commercial sources or social media, I imagine it would have been the most frightening impending natural disaster you’ve probably ever experienced.

The grocery store was certainly in full apocalypse mode, with the shelves completely barren of milk and bread and meats. But since I just go to plain old no-advertisements weather.gov, it was just like any other winter of my entire life where there’s a potential for snow and ice, and I simply prepared for a few days of inconvenience, rather than the end of days.

I got maybe 2-3 inches of fine powdery snow Saturday night, then all day of sleet on Sunday, then freezing rain on top of that Sunday night. At the end of it, there was a solid block of ice on my (brick) back steps, that persists to this day.

I got through the weekend without losing power, so I thought I was out of the woods, but then I looked at the week’s forecast and every day the high temperature is below freezing and every night the low is down into single digits. Yikes. A full week of that is highly unusual for my area, and it’s way too cold for my heating systems to keep up, so I’m going to be extra grumpy this week.

When I finally ventured out to the store on the fourth day following the snow/sleet/ice storm, the ice was still so thick around my house that the SUV did not even break through the surface as I drove over the white sheet where my driveway was. The neighborhood road was a solid chunk of about an inch of rugged ice. (Outside the neighborhood, the roads were completely fine.)

And there’s supposed to be some snow again this coming weekend. Grocery store apocalypse!

In other news, I had a rare fox sighting the morning after the storm. At least one fox lives somewhere near my house, presumably in the woods, and I only know this because they go skittering through my back yard about once a year. This time they scampered across the snow-and-ice-covered yard in the morning so it was very easy to see. Naturally I didn’t have a camera handy, and you only have about 5 seconds to find one before they’re gone. They don’t hang around.

Cancer Corner

I had another brain MRI recently, and the results showed “stability.” Which means that I continue to have a hole where they surgically removed one tumor, and two 5mm spots that are “stable”, which is what’s expected. (A stable metastasis is one that isn’t growing, but they can’t really tell if it’s still cancer cells or just scar tissue.) I’ll continue to get brain MRIs periodically because lung cancer really likes to spread to the brain.

As far as I can tell, I have no cognitive issues from these invasive tumors. Though every time I misread a word or mispronounce a word while recording a video game, I wonder if it’s brain damage.

This is my third or fourth brain MRI I’ve had, and they keep noting an area of “encephalomalacia” in my right posterior cerebellum, which I think means an old scar. I wonder if that’s from the time I whacked my head on a steel beam as a kid.

World Context

So I haven’t mentioned the world in a while, and I feel like I need to resume meeting the bare minimum of what I can do as a citizen by talking about what’s going on in hopefully a reasonably sane way.

Hoo boy has it been a roller coaster. The kind of roller coaster that hurtles into a hellish abyss that burns all of its occupants alive.

I’ve never felt so much like my federal government is completely out of control and rampant with incompetency. I’ve never seen a national party so intent on destroying the reputation and credibility and value and power of America on the world stage. While ruining as many Americans’ lives as they can on the way. To be so oblivious to history and all that the United States has built around the world (arguably) since the beginning of the last century, to be so deeply buried in their own social media bubble, and to be so transparently adamant on chucking it all away for a quick buck, is both difficult to comprehend and simultaneously exactly what you’d expect a modern voting population to produce. I’ve never been so glad that there are state and local governments between me and that insanity.

Here’s just a handful of recent events. This all happened within the last month.

The U.S. kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation for … reasons? I’ve never once felt threatened by Venezuela, but apparently we need to bring the full force of the U.S. military to handle a few boats and mean tweets. Forget all the countries out there literally chanting “Death to America,” or the ones with indicted war criminals invading their neighbors, let’s get the one with, you know, some drug boats.

And then there was Greenland. I thought it was a joke. One of those things Trump throws out to distract from his more serious mafia shakedowns. But no, he really means to take Greenland. To be fair, I’m not against the idea of the U.S. owning Greenland. (Or is it Iceland?) I do see it as a strategic resource worth having. But the current U.S. strategy is absolutely pathetic. And the president’s rambling dementia speech at Davos was equally pathetic. When are people going to start throwing shoes at him in these world events?

That’s already old news, though. Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota is the hot topic now. There have been not one but two state-sponsored executions of U.S. citizens by ICE (or DHS?) agents in Islamist terrorist masks. Normally I’m relatively pro-law enforcement, but not so much when they’re getting their uniforms and tactics from Al-Qaeda.

Normally I’d be talking about waiting for an investigation to run its course. But there’s not going to be any investigations because the feds put their laughably made-up investigation results out in public within minutes, smeared the victims, covered up and buried the evidence (except, you know, all the video), and no doubt have their autopens ready to sign blanket pardons for any agents involved. And–I’m speculating here–I can only assume they’ve given the assassins a big pay bonus. It’s hysterically, ludicrously, over-the-top corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-Constitutional.

I haven’t even mentioned the “Board of Peace,” which could not possibly sound more like a criminal Legion of Doom if they tried. I mean, they extended an invitation to the aforementioned indicted war criminal invading its neighbor.

And I don’t even want to think about what ol’ Dementia Donny might be scripting for the Iran chapter of his ongoing reality show, what with all the U.S. military assets steaming for the Arabian Sea. I’m sure that’s waiting on standby to blow up the news cycle if things get too sticky in Minnesota.

Anyway. I’d love to look at the Republican viewpoint and consider it with reasonable reflection. I honestly tried to find some independently verifiable official evidence (i.e. not a tweet or a TikTok)–anything that would sway a reasonable person–that Operation Metro Surge had done anything positive in Minnesota, but it’s really hard to find.

But in the interest of fairness, I will report that I found a DHS press release from December 4, 2025 that identified twelve “criminal illegal aliens” arrested in Operation Metro Surge after four days. One of whom was “driving under the influence.” Worst of the worst, yo. (To be fair, most cited more serious crimes.)

And here’s another press release from December 5, 2025 listing seven more arrests. And from December 12, 2025, ten more. (Renee Goode was executed on January 7, then DHS went into press release overdrive. Perhaps they thought that murdering U.S. citizens wasn’t the lasting legacy of Operation Metro Surge they wanted to leave, a crime so heinous that one might possibly consider labeling such things the “worst of the worst.”) January 8, 2026, 13 more. January 12, 2026, 10 more. January 13, 2026, 6 more. January 14, 2026, 6 more. January 15, 2026, 5 more. January 16, 2026, 12 more. January 19, 2026, 13 more. January 20, 2026, 10 more. January 22, 2026, 10 more. January 23, 2026, 8 more.

To be clear, I’m not sad to deport most of those folks. That would be my preference, all things being equal. Especially if they’re already in jail… I can’t see the logic of a state refusing to turn over the people already in jail, but I also don’t know all the facts of that because everything is so distorted right now.

But I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if any of those press releases are true and verifiable. Given the pack of lies this administration normally spews on a daily basis, it’s impossible to believe anything they report anymore. (I will leave unsaid my vague suspicions that I saw the same mug shot photo more than once in those press releases, probably due to mistakes from this mistake-prone administration.)

I’ll also leave it to the reader to decide if deporting those so-called “worst of the worst” (those damn drunk drivers!) is worth the cost of tearing up communities, trampling our Constitutional rights, and murdering activists with impunity.

There is some reporting that the administration is unhappy with the PR of their agents carrying out mafia-style executions of U.S. citizens on the streets, and they may be changing course in Minnesota, so that’s some good news I guess.

And that’s how we’re ending this blog post. Have a great day!

The Recluse Report - January 2026 Part 1

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:41:16 -0500

It’s one of those days where I wake up wide awake at 4 am, mainly due to the steroids I have to take before and after chemo infusion day. On this particular morning I notice that it’s January 15 and it’s the day I usually publish a new blog post, so I better get to writing something before the sun comes up.

And oops, I forgot to post this yesterday.

Gaming

Most of my free time this year so far has gone into playing the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion. I have no idea where all this MMORPG energy came from.

I can report that FFXIV is still the best traditional MMORPG. The combat systems are perfectly balanced between casual and hardcore, and you can engage with them at any level you choose. The story is super duper anime themed but it’s mostly engaging, if lengthy. Endwalker swings between “power of friendship” nonsense and scene-chewing cartoon villainy nonsense and then goes into really interesting historical geopolitical allegories and cultural commentary.

Media Production

As per tradition since the start of Stormblood, I’ve been recording my journey through the Main Scenario Quest of Endwalker.

Mainly this involves reading out all the unvoiced dialog and trying to give the stoic nodding characters a tiny bit of life. (One day, I wanted to go back and record A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, too.)

I bought some in-ear monitors, which is a fancy schmancy term for good ear buds, where the wire goes back over your ears instead of just hanging down for everyone to see. You see them a lot on people recording YouTube-friendly podcasts, instead of bulky headphones.

They sound amazing. They’re kind of a pain to put on. And they aren’t noise-cancelling, but they’re noise-blocking, since they fit so snugly in the ear, which means I can’t hear my cat knocking things over during recordings anymore. Or burglars. Or tornadoes. Things like that.

Noise-blocking headphones are a bit spooky. I’ve never understood how people can wear them walking around out in the world where any bad thing can happen at any moment. I personally rely heavily on my hearing to know what’s going on with my surroundings.

Media Consumption

I don’t remember watching anything lately. It’s either gaming or television, never both.

I still have a selection of Glass Cannon podcasts I listen to, and an assortment of YouTube channels I halfheartedly keep up with. I just found the Slow-Mo Guys, for example. And an amusing and mildly offensive channel commenting on NFL football called ThatsGoodSports. (I’m pretty sure all sports content is mildly offensive. But being from Gen-X, I have to admit I kind of miss mild offensiveness.)

Oh, yeah, and NFL football has just entered the playoffs leading up to the Superbowl, so I’m watching that. All my teams and picks are already out, though, so I’m fairly ambivalent about who wins now. I’m just happy the Eagles lost in the wildcard round. It’s important to always root against the Eagles in NFL football. If I can teach the world anything, it should be that.

Day Job

I haven’t mentioned my job in a while, which is mainly for two reasons: 1) It’s fallen a bit on my life priority list what with the cancer and all, and 2) It’s actually been quite boring for a while now.

I moved to a new team about six months ago and haven’t actually been doing much software development (it was right when all the medical stuff was in full swing, so kind of a lot all at once). Mostly I’ve been debugging other teams’ cloud infrastructure builds and destroys, which involves reading and diagnosing a lot of JSON and YAML and some Python, which is not really my thing.

It’s one thing to work on your own infrastructure, which is necessary to get your application to run at peak performance, but it’s quite another to work on somebody else’s infrastructure running services you couldn’t care less about. Especially when most of your job is reporting, “Yeah it’s not finished because it’s broken and somebody other than us needs to fix that, and yes I know nobody has time to fix that, so I guess our work is done here. See you next status update.”

Anyway the point is that it’s not really software development work, and it’s very slow and boring and not very engaging and not an especially fulfilling career path. Which, on one hand, was perfect during the months of trying to figure out my new health situation, because I didn’t need to spend much mental bandwidth on work. But on the other hand, now that I have more mental bandwidth it’s a bit soul-crushing.

But!

In the last sprint I had an actual software engineering work item, and it was super cool. Now that the medical stuff has settled into a routine, I can focus more on computer stuff. So I was deep in the weeds of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, but in a way that benefited my team’s service.

In as generic terms as I can think of, I was working on tests that run in a test pod against our API service pod, which is used to validate every deployment to all environments. (A requirement to pass all of leadership’s “safe change” mandates.) The hard part is establishing connectivity between the test code and the service code in all the various Kubernetes environments. There’s a local environment, an “ephemeral” environment, then the more persistent dev, stage, and production environments.

Anyway it was fun, engaging, and I learned a ton. It wasn’t easy either, because this stuff isn’t documented very well in the weird company-specific environment I work in. It’s always a challenge to learn new engineering things, and especially to learn things that will apply to any job and not just your current company’s job.

That’s one reason I tend to shy away from my company-specific AI nonsense and stick to learning e.g. OpenAI APIs.

Cancer Corner

Nothing really new to report. Things are stable. Christmas kind of sucked due to a confluence of getting two teeth pulled the week before and a chemo infusion two days before, so I lost a few pounds there, but things are back on the right track.

Bye!

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Update

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:00:16 -0500

I continue to play Final Fantasy XIV every day as if I’ve been doing it all along, and didn’t ignore it and all MMORPGs for a solid four years. How long will this strange pro-MMORPG phase last?

I can’t be bothered to edit my blog posts into coherent prose anymore, so they’re mostly just raw information dumps at this point. Here’s another one. If you want easier-to-digest content, you can always use the AI summary feature of all the RSS feed readers out there.

Main Bard in Endwalker

I previously gave up on leveling a brand new character to 80 to play through Endwalker, and went back to my main Bard. Here’s the gist of the story so far.

The enemy for this expansion is the Telapheroi, a “tempered” army created by Fandaniel and the deposed, resurrected Zenos. (I think: All opinions about FFXIV story subject to change because it’s very inscrutable.) They’ve built a bunch of towers around the land which are going to … I don’t know, destroy the world, or something.

First we arrive in Old Sharlayan and get a tour of the city. I did that four years ago. I don’t remember much.

Next I had a choice to go to Thavnair or stay in Sharlayan. Four years ago, I picked the option that seemed most non-standard and went to Thavnair to investigate the Tower of Zot, which is the wrong choice according to all the Internet guides. I can only assume they split the MSQ to divide the player base at launch time.

Anyway, out in Thavnair, a local alchemist named Nidhana built some devices to protect everyone from the Tower, but on testing it, Fandaniel rudely kidnapped her and stuck her into a tower wall, while I watched and did nothing despite all my Chosen One Hero Powers.

(FFXIV is thick with obvious plot holes you have to ignore. The amount of times that people are saved by some deus ex machina offscreen magic or people or not saved because your character conveniently fails to act are innumerable.)

Then I returned to Old Sharlayan for some good old-fashioned library research and politics. The Forum and the twins’ dad are up to no good and working on some secret project down in Labrynthios. In the end, the Scions are banned from conducting any further research in Old Sharlayan. And we met the twins’ mom.

So the Scions returned to Thavnair and assaulted the Tower of Zot, destroying it and rescuing all the elephant people who had been kidnapped. That was the first dungeon instance of the expansion, which I of course did with the Trust (solo) system. On the final boss, it had quite a challenging set of dance mechanics for a leveling dungeon, and it took two tries.

Instead of attacking each tower individually, the Allied commanders decide to relieve Garlemald and attack the Main Big Evil Tower, so off we go to one of the most inhospitable places in the game, weather-wise. (Though there are no mechanical detriments to the cold.)

The twins, Alisaie and Alphinaud, try to force their help on the locals, with dire consequences. (I’m almost positive the exact same thing has happened before–they never learn.) Then the twins are taken prisoner by the shattered remnants of Legatus Quintos and the Garlean 1st Legion, who really hate us, and try a sneak attack without any soldiers, food, or heat, because compromise is unthinkable. But then they’re forced to surrender and Quintos can’t handle the shame of it.

Last night I left off with Strange Bedfellows, the one which unlocks the Aetherite in Broken Glass and unlocks a ton of side quests for Aether Currents. It’s numerically about 1/3 of the way through the 6.0 Endwalker quests.

I figure if I can do three MSQ quests a day, I’ll be done with Endwalker in, oh, a couple of months? Whew. The MSQ is soooo long now. Each one takes 20-25 minutes when you read everything out loud and don’t skip anything. And frankly, you don’t do much of anything, except run from place to place, read dialog, and watch cut scenes.

Machinist Leveling Continued

I continue to level my new Machinist character in my off time, mainly when I don’t feel like reading dialog out loud. Maybe I’ll switch over to him when I get to Dawntrail. (Except the thought of running through Endwalker a second time is rather appalling.)

The bottleneck from 50-53 continues.

52-52. The Keeper of the Lake (50 ilevel 90). 52 -> 52 3/5.

52-53. The Keeper of the Lake (50 ilevel 90). 52 3/5 -> 53.

Level 52 job quest.

The bottleneck eases up once you reach level 53. Levels 50-53 is a bit of a slog.

53-55. Sohm Al. First Duty Support dungeon with the familiar Scion NPCs. Felt like it took forever.

Incidentally, the recommended gear button now keeps changing my gear to lower item level gear so I can’t get into dungeons, which is pretty annoying.

Level 54 job quest.

55-56. The Aery.

Level 56 job quest. Ended up about 56 1/2.

I like the “feel” of the new character. The lion dude has pretty good animations. (My affinity for an MMORPG character depends a lot on how good the model’s run animations are. You spend like 95% of your time staring at your character’s back while they run, after all. If they have an odd gait, it’s a real turn-off.) The Machinist is kind of a fun DPS class.

The Hunting Bottleneck

With some ways to go to reach 57, I thought I’d take on some Clan Hunts in Foundation. And this is when I ran into a huge road block, because they weren’t unlocked yet. It’s something you don’t get with a Tales of Adventure MSQ purchase.

In order to unlock the Heavensward Clan Hunts, you need to have unlocked the A Realm Reborn Hunting, and in order to do that, you have to increase your Grand Company rank to Second Lieutenant.

And that’s a lot of Company Seals you have to gather. Second Lieutenant is eight promotions, which start at 2,000 seals and go up by 1,000 each from there.

So how do you get Company Seals quickly? Great question, with unsatisfying answers. You can start with your Grand Company Rank 1 hunting log, which got me a couple of promotions.

Then, a huge road block: The Rank 2 hunting log requires you to achieve a rank of Sergeant Third Class, which is two more promotions, or about 9,000 company seals.

By my calculations, the only way to gather these Company Seals is to grind FATEs. You can’t do Expert Deliveries until you reach the rank of Sergeant Second Class. Supposedly there’s a daily Random Duty that gives out a ton of Company Seals but ugh playing with other people, no thanks.

I explored a bunch of different places to find a good balance between simplicity and seals rewarded, to maximize seals/hour. For example, low-level FATEs are super easy and fast, but don’t reward many seals, so you have to do tons of them. The FATEs around Revenant’s Toll are slower, but still easy, and reward about 200 seals each. At level 56, the ones around the first zones of Heavensward are soloable (except the bosses), and reward nearly 300 seals each.

So pick your poison. No matter which you pick, it’s a boring grind. Or maybe you like that kind of thing. You just turn off your brain, listen to a podcast or something, and suddenly it’s an hour later. But you still can’t get a promotion because you need a lot of seals.

It’s horrible, but I think it’s also necessary. You really need to unlock Hunting. It’s a vital source of XP. Wish I’d thought about it earlier.

56-57. I gained a level just running around doing FATEs. Most of that XP came from two FATE-related achievements.

57-58. The Vault. Very close to 59.

The level 58 job quest(s) got me to 59.

59-60. The Great Gubal Library.

When I finally gained enough Company Seals from FATEs (I was in the Dravanian Highlands) to buy my way to a promotion to Second Sergeant, that’s when things finally opened up and I could get things rolling to unlock the Hunts. The Rank 2 Company Hunts unlocked, which quickly got me another promotion.

Then the Expert Delivery missions unlocked, and I could dump a ton of excess dungeon gear to the vendor for a bunch more Company Seals.

Then I did a couple of company quests, which involved a couple of dungeons, which I needed to do to unlock the ability to get more promotions. After it all I reached Second Lieutenant, the goal I’d been trying to reach after all the grinding.

Then the coveted Let The Hunt Begin quest, which unlocked the Let the Clan Hunt Begin quest over in Foundation. Also, a few other Hunt-related quests could be unlocked, since I was already level 61.

Finally off to Kugane to unlock Stormblood 1 Star Veteran Clan Hunts.

And now I’m ready to level through the Stormblood levels.

Resuming Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker After Four Years

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:56:35 -0500

I’m as shocked and appalled as anyone, but I got into Final Fantasy XIV again, for the first time in four years. Playing an MMORPG again? Playing that genre that’s been dead and buried for almost ten years? Playing like, a lot? Outrageous!

This is the three-day story of how I started a brand new character in Final Fantasy XIV to play Endwalker, got really into leveling them up to 50, and then completely lost interest in leveling them after 50 when the experience curve dragged to a crawl. Then I went back to my main to resume Endwalker.

A New Character

On Friday, I decided to start a brand new character in Final Fantasy XIV. I wanted to resume playing the Endwalker expansion, which I had barely started four years ago, but I just wasn’t “feeling” my old main character anymore, and wanted to do something completely different.

(A minor defect of FFXIV is that all of your “alts” are actually on the same character, so there’s a lack of character variety (and a paucity of storage for 20+ jobs worth of gear). The game doesn’t lend itself to playing multiple characters, unless you have a lot of free time or dedication.)

I ended up making a big lion dude, which I haven’t seen before.

For this new character, I wanted to get to level 80 and the start of Endwalker, so I could play through the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest with the new character.

I wish I’d started this way sooner in my two-week holiday vacation, instead of waiting until the last three days. I had no idea I’d get so into it. But quite quickly, FFXIV sunk its hooks into me. Something about having an achievable goal that you can incrementally make good progress on is very satisfying.

But first, I had to find a server to build a character on. The Aether data center is pretty much full, and I couldn’t make a new character there, where all my other characters are. (I only have one main character but about a hundred test characters, most of which are level 25 or under.)

I ended up creating a character in the Dynamis data center on one of the Preferred Worlds. There’s three North American data centers now, which I think is triple the amount when I last played four years ago. (Incidentally, there were still plenty of queues logging into the new one.)

The thought of going through the full MSQ from the beginning is quite daunting, so to get started, I bought a Tales of Adventure boost thingy for $14, which unlocked the Main Scenario Quest all the way through the end of Shadowbringers, ready to start Endwalker, which is roughly where I last left off on my old main character. It’s insane how cheap it was.

It’s important to note, though, that the Tales of Adventure boost doesn’t level your character at all. After applying it, you’re still level 1. It just unlocks all the tools and locations and dungeons that you’d get from going through the Main Scenario Quest. And flying.

It might not sound like much, but I think of it as a time savings of some five thousand million hours. (An absolute steal for $14.)

But you’ll still have to invest some days (weeks?) grinding through class and job quests and dungeons to get at least one job from level from 1 to 80, before you can actually start Endwalker.

There are purchase options to level jobs too, but it looked like they would only level a job all the way up to 90. I only wanted to go to 80.

Leveling Notes

Here are my notes from the process, for future reference.

I tried a few different classes to start with. I had trouble picking one, because there’s only two that I actually like at the start, which is Archer and Lancer. But I’ve played those to death.

I realized that what I really wanted to do was get to 50 so I could switch to one of the Heavensward jobs I’ve never really played before (e.g. Machinist) the rest of the way. The quickest way to do that is to stick with one thing and stop switching back and forth, so I settled on Lancer to ride to 50.

I wish they’d put in ways to start the newer jobs from level 1.

Levels 1-50

Getting from 1 to 8 is almost automatic with the level 1 and 5 class quests, combined with hitting the Hunting Log targets that are usually right in front of you.

Getting to 10 for the next class quest is a little annoying, what with mostly chasing down Hunting Log targets.

The worst part is getting from level 10 to 15. The Hunting Log helps but it’s not enough. I ended up doing a couple of random side quests, but it was a big bottleneck in the road.

At level 15, I was able to do the first dungeon Sastasha with the Duty Support system, and then the levels started rolling in. I think I was pretty close to 20 when I got out of the first dungeon. You get the regular dungeon experience, a first-time bonus, a 30% bonus from an earring I have, and a Preferred World bonus. It’s a lot.

From there, it’s alternating class quests and dungeons up to level 30 and the start of the specialized job quests: Copperbell Mines, then Halatali, then Haukke Manor got me to level 33. I didn’t note down the exact levels, unfortunately, but it was pretty straightforward.

I noticed that there were some simplifications to the dungeon boss mechanics: I don’t know if those are specific to the solo dungeons or if they’ve changed the regular Duty dungeons, too. I’d swear there was a brand new boss I’ve never seen before in Copperbell Mines, but my memory could be faulty.

At the end of day one I’d reached level 33 and unlocked the Dragoon job, and the Gysahl Greens chocobo companion thing (not that there’s much need to use it with all the dungeon leveling).

At this point I’ll pause and praise the Duty Support system. It’s 100% viable to run the leveling dungeons solo with an AI party, and it takes basically the exact same amount of time and effort as a random PUG. (Well, slightly slower, since the tank isn’t trying to speedrun it.) (Balanced out by the fact that there’s no waiting for DPS queues.)

The next day (Saturday), I continued my leveling project, and took more careful notes.

33-36. Braflox’s Longstop.

Then the level 35 job quest.

36-39. The Sunken Temple of Qarn.

39-41. Cutter’s Cry.

Then the level 40 job quest.

41-44. The Stone Vigil.

44-46. Dzemael Darkhold.

Then the level 45 job quest (two of them for Dragoon, and thank god the Tales of Adventure unlocked flying).

That left me at level 46 2/3, just short of the 47 required for the next dungeon. Ugh. Now what? Hunting?

Yes! Completing the Rank 2 Hunting Log got me to level 47. Way faster than finding quests. To this day, I still don’t understand why side quests in FFXIV give so little experience points that they’re an absolute waste of time unless they give out unique rewards.

Moving on. First, a break for lunch.

47-49. The Aurum Vale.

49 1/4. 3/4 of a level short of 50. Ugh.

I didn’t want to chase all over the world to complete the Rank 3 hunting log, so I tried The Thousand Maws of Toto-rak, a level 24 dungeon, hoping that the First Time Completion bonus with sync would be enough to get me to 50. It wasn’t. I left the dungeon at about 49 5/6.

I completed three hunts in the Rank 3 hunting log, which got me to 50. (I should have just done that instead of the dungeon. Each hunting target gives a lot of XP.)

Then the level 50 job quest. (Incidentally, I killed Estinien in the last Dragoon quest. Huh. Puzzling.)

After getting the gear set, my Dragoon item level was only 61. Not enough to get into level 50 dungeons Snowcloak (80) or Keeper of the Lake (90). [It turns out this was not a problem after all, because you can just buy level 50 jewelry to up your item level right away.]

I noticed there were no more positional actions with Dragoon up to level 50, at least not that I saw in the tool tips. Did they remove that? Or does it only take effect later? It meant I could just stand still during every fight, which is nothing like I remembered.

I should note here that somewhere along the way, I got a 1,000,000 gil bonus for playing on a Preferred World. And the Tales of Adventure gave me 500,000 gil worth of tokens to sell. More than enough money for teleports and buying miscellaneous gear as needed.

Machinist 30-50

Upon getting any job to level 50, according to my calculations, I can unlock the following jobs:

Machinest (MCH)
Dark Knight (DRK)
Astrologian (AST)
Red Mage (RDM)
Samurai (SAM)

Since I’ve never played Machinest or Red Mage, I think I’ll go for one of those. Machinist, sadly, begins at level 30, so I may skip that one. My new character is a big lumbering oaf of a Lion dude, so I like the idea of dressing him up as a caster.

I went to Foundation and unlocked Machinist, Dark Knight, and Astrologian, the Heavensward jobs. It’s two quests each, and they all start at level 30 (boo). Luckily you don’t need to actually know how to play those jobs to pass the duties.

Then to Ul’dah to unlock the Red Mage, which begins at level 50 (yay), and more importantly item level 86: Enough to enter Snowcloak (80).

Incidentally, I wondered if I could have started immediately by unlocking the Heavensward jobs and skipping to level 30 right away, but, while you can accept the initial quests at level 1, it isn’t long before they require a level 50 war job to continue. Same deal for the Red Mage.

There’s often a gap at level 50, 60, 70, 80, and presumably 90+ as well, as there’s a big jump in item level to accommodate endgame progression. That is, there’s a huge jump in item level from level 50 to level 51, etc. I worried I’d have a problem there, but it turns out I just went to Foundation and bought some jewelry which bumped my item levels up to the point I could do any level 50 dungeons. Easy peasy.

Time for watching football, and switching to the PS5 for mindless grinding.

Honestly the Red Mage mechanics haven’t ever clicked with me, and I’ve already played Samurai before, so I decided to try to get Machinist from 30 to 50.

Machinist 30-33. Haukke Manor.

Machinist 33-36. Braflox’s Longstop.

I did the level 35 job quest.

Machinist 36-39. The Sunken Temple of Qarn.

Machinist 39-41. Cutter’s Cry.

End of day two. And day three (Sunday) begins.

Level 40 job quests (there were two for Machinist). I ended up a couple of ticks away from 42, so I went outside in Coerthas Central Highlands and killed three monsters to get to level 42.

Machinist 42-44. The Stone Vigil.

Machinist 44-46. Dzamael Darkhold.

Ended up at about 46.8, just short of 47. The Level 45 job quest (there were two for Machinist) got me over into level 47.

Machinist 47-49. The Aurum Vale.

At this point I can report that the Machinist is decent. It’s very similar to the Bard in terms of mobility, just with different animations. Has a pretty big burst DPS feature, which the Bard doesn’t have, and I think it has a better AoE action than the Bard. But it lacks the party utility of the Bard (so far).

Now stuck at about 49 1/3. No hunting logs for the Machinist. What to do? I suppose I could just repeat Aurum Vale, which could theoretically get me to 51.

Machinist 49-50. The Aurum Vale (abandoned after two bosses).

Level 50 Machinist job quest (there’s actually three), collect level 50 gear set. Buy a level 50 weapon with item level 115. From here, the job quests are every two levels. (50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60.)

Machinist After Level 50

And now things start grinding to a halt.

Machinist 50-51. Snowcloak (50 ilevel 80). Only a single level from this dungeon, sadly. Maybe I should have picked the other one.

Unfortunately the level 51 Heavensward dungeon isn’t yet selectable with Duty Support, so the first solo Heavensward dungeon isn’t available until level 53. Until then, it’s Snowcloak or Keeper of the Lake.

Machinist 51-51. The Keeper of the Lake (50 ilevel 90). Did not gain a level! Yikes. Getting less fun. This is the only dungeon to spam until level 53, so we’re looking at two or three more times in this one.

At this point it’s pretty clear that you’ll need to settle in for the long haul getting a job from 50 to 80. Two dungeons with first-time bonus and I only gained about 1.5 levels. Kind of sad that the Main Scenario Quests aren’t available for their experience points.

Dungeons are fun but repeating them over and over again isn’t fun.

Machinist 51-52. The Keeper of the Lake (50). Finally, a second run got me to level 52. I’d estimate it will take three more runs, at least, to get to level 53, where I can start on the first Heavensward dungeon. I can’t think of any faster way to do it. (It’s about 30 minutes per dungeon run.)

At this point I’m running out of enthusiasm for the grind and thinking I’m just going to go back to my main character, who is already a level 80 Bard, and consign this experiment to the dust bin where it belongs.

CORRECTION: It only takes about 20 minutes to run through Keeper of the Lake. The next run, the next day, got me to 52 3/5, with the rested XP bonus. So maybe I gave up too soon.

Conclusion

In short, leveling up to 50 is fun and only takes a couple days. You could possibly even do it in a day if you’re more aggressive than I am.

Leveling above 50, however, is a real chore and takes considerably longer. For future reference, those One Hero’s Journey job boosts are well worth the money, which are currently on sale for $17.50.

Remember when everyone hated the idea of buying your way to the endgame? I can’t even imagine spending so much time slogging through an entire MMORPG of fetch quests and cut scenes again. It’d be well worth the time savings even if it was $100.

These days I think they should just build the option into the new character creation screen to let you pick which expansion you want to start at. Then just automatically create the character at the right level with the right gear to start immediately. Surely there’s nobody left playing MMORPGs that still thinks their time spent playing is a valuable commodity?

Back to My Main

This whole thing started because I wanted to continue Endwalker from where I left off four years ago, so I returned to my trusty main Miquot’e character on the Aether data center, who is already a level 80 Bard, to continue with the Main Scenario Quest in Endwalker. (No other job is above 60, though, as I recall.)

I last left off in 2021 exactly eight quests into the story before I stopped playing. I vaguely recall it was frustrating to log into the game at the time because of all the queues at the start of Endwalker.

As of this writing, I’ve completed a whopping seven more quests in the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest, and have reached level 81 Bard. The vast majority of the first 15 quests, by the way, are just watching cut scenes and running back and forth.