Okay I’m getting pretty impatient now. I want to be fully recovered right now please. The new eye is better after another day, but still a bit blurry and hard to focus on a computer monitor for any amount of time, especially text. It gets better every day, but it’s still a chore. I can see the television from a chair halfway across the room fine, though, so I’ve been watching (and re-watching, in fact) The Americans, and I started playing a little bit of The Last Of Us (Remastered) on the PS4. (185 words.)

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. I don’t think I ever lost consciousness, however my memory of the actual procedure is a bit hazy and I was a bit wobbly for a little while. If the procedure hadn’t been explained to me beforehand, I would have had no idea what they did. I can’t logically explain it but I couldn’t see or feel a thing except some colors and shapes in my vision for a few minutes. I never even saw the doctor who did the procedure. I can only presume they put something over my eye(s) to limit my vision, but I have no memory of that. Anyway then they wheeled me out, put a clear plastic shield over the eye, unhooked everything, and I was outta there. I go back tomorrow morning for them to check everything, and that’s it. (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. And of course we’ll have to charge you for wasting our time. Have a nice day!” There were a lot of logistical things to coordinate (getting a “permission slip” from my regular doctor, getting eye drops from the pharmacy, etc.). I _think_everything is in place as I write this (Monday), but who knows? I’m very good at imagining all the things that could go wrong. (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. It’s weird, but it’s not difficult to comprehend how it works. You point at an enemy and press the left mouse button. What could be simpler? It’s just that you have to press the button at the right time, or else the game yells at you and your guy just stands there. The temptation is strong to simply spam the left button like you would every other game, but you have to wait until the cursor turns yellow before you can click to get those chain attacks. (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). He was the last boss I could defeat. (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. My own personal prediction based on context is that it’s going to be a cookie-cutter shovelware game designed to grab as much money from players as quickly as possible, somewhere in the vein of a game like Black Gold Online, my go-to example of such. (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! I rather like the process of keeping a draft open throughout the week and just throwing sentences into it now and again as they occur to me. (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.)