The eye continues to improve. Computer screen text is getting clearer, and sunlight doesn’t hurt as much. The “new” eye wears out quickly though in front of the computer. It starts to twitch, as one’s eyes do after reading a long time. (At least my eyes do.) It just starts happening within about five minutes. So I’m staying away from the computer except for short periods. Earlier in the year, I found that with the cataract, dark themes (white-on-black text) were easier to read, but since the surgery I’ve found the exact opposite. (181 words.)

Day two of life after cataract surgery was perfectly fine. I went to my followup appointment this morning, where the doctor barely even looked at me before letting me go again. They apparently don’t worry too much about people my age recovering from cataract surgery. But in any case the technician checked my eyeball pressure and I could read the eye chart at I think it was 20/30 through the bionic lens already. (299 words.)

Just a very brief post to say the cataract surgery went well, and the procedure did in fact take about 10 minutes. I felt nothing, saw nothing, heard almost nothing except some classic rock tunes on a radio somewhere. Most of the time was spent signing consent forms, waiting for dilation drops to take effect (they dosed me three different times with dilation drops which lasted all day), and putting an IV in my arm for a sedative. (214 words.)

This is probably the last chance I’ll have to write anything before I get a cataract removed from my right eye. I’ll have scheduled this post to publish Tuesday morning, theoretically about the time of the surgery. I say “theoretically” because there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together and I feel like there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll arrive at the appointment and they’ll tell me, “Sorry we can’t proceed because some random thing wasn’t done right. (593 words.)

Before getting back to Dark Souls, of course I have to finish The Witcher, which I started after I got bored with Battle for Azeroth. I’ve never finished it before. I think I’ve always crashed out of it somewhere in Chapter II. Probably because of all the tedious running back and forth in the Temple District. The first Witcher game gets a lot of flak for its odd combat system (and rightly so), but I’ve never been bothered by it. (1044 words.)

My thumb is finally well enough that I can use a game controller again. This is both good news and bad news. The good news is that I can resume Dark Souls Remastered and finish my casual nostalgia tour, my (latest) video series Magnum Opus. The bad news is that I’m in a terrible place to resume the game. The last time I played Dark Souls Remastered before significant pain in my fingers and thumbs impacted my performance was June 23rd, when I spent all day working on Artorias (technically it only took 1 hour and 35 minutes, but it was spread out all day). (500 words.)

A random Lord of the Rings Online screenshot Even packed full of news as it was, I still neglected to mention in my Saturday post that Athlon is planning to make a new Lord of the Rings Prequel MMO. That is the extent of what we know so far. We can speculate that it will probably be released on console and PC, that it will probably be free-to-play, and that it will probably not even remotely resemble the kind of traditional MMORPG that we actually want to play. (275 words.)

I started to write three or four blog posts this week, didn’t finish them, and didn’t want to post them. Instead I decided to cram all of them together into one summary post for the week. This allows me to post, but without the bother of crafting long essays that have beginnings, middles, or ends, when everything I want to say can be summed up in a paragraph. No wonder listcicles are so popular! (1275 words.)

I mentioned that I was close to giving up on World of Warcraft’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, because the game seemed to have given up on telling me Jaina’s story. Well I finally picked up her story again. It turns out that you have to complete all three Kul Tiras zone story chapters (half of which don’t seem to have anything to do with anything) before a new quest unlocks which begins the followup to Jaina’s cut scenes from the very beginning of the expansion. (601 words.)

The first story thing WoW gave me to do upon reaching level 120 was to go to this Zandalar desert to assassinate some Horde NPCs. I completely forgot to say this in my huge missive yesterday: Blaugust seemed like a great success, congratulations to everyone who participated! Huge thanks to Belghast and all the mentors for pulling all of that together. To all the new bloggers, great job! It doesn’t matter if you posted every day or not. (387 words.)

Back in July I filled a directory with 70 photographs for potential use in Blaugust posts. Last chance to use them! This is Chingoteague. I'm not sure if this is sunrise or sunset but let's just say it's sunset to fit the theme of the post. It’s time to review my performance in Blaugust! Setting goals is only half the battle in self-improvement. The other half is evaluating your performance to see what worked, what didn’t work, and how you can improve for next time. (2723 words.)

This will be my last “spontaneous” Blaugust post this year. I started tomorrow’s “performance review” post a week ago, and then there will be my “what I played this month” post after that, which I started yesterday. I started today’s post … well, today. So since it’s my last one, I better make it good! Um. Okay. Here we go. Any second now, something interesting will come to me. (1008 words.)

Casualties of War aka. Information Technology. This SSD and external USB drive both died last year, both less than two years old. I mentioned my main 2 TB D: drive conked out yesterday morning for mysterious reasons. It’s working again now, but I’m eyeing it suspiciously, because I’ve noticed some odd behavior in my applications and rebooted a couple of times yesterday to straighten it out. I’m not sure it was hard drive related but it could have been. (1093 words.)

Screenshot from the Cyberpunk 2077 web site. Well at least it’s not a post about Battle for Azeroth. But it is another post where I say what I really think instead of what people want to hear, so I’ll probably get in trouble. Like Roger, and late-breaking addition Scopique, I took a look at GameSpot’s Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo. My reaction was a bit less enthusiastic. (Those two links are the only other two reactions I’ve seen to the video, by the way. (976 words.)

Isn't anyone going to clean up this beach? Really bad for tourism. My Blaugust posts have definitely turned into a diary. Not normally what I like to write, but the posts must be posted. I’ve abandoned the concept of playing World of Warcraft by giving the game my full attention. I played for two more hours yesterday while watching Hulu, clicking through the quest text without reading it, blindly killing mobs and collecting drops until the objectives were done. (813 words.)