The Recluse Report - August 2024 Part 2 [+audio]

31 August, 2024. 2,818 words.

I’m trying to think of a name for this thing I write twice a month. I think of it as a newsletter, so it should have a name. I started with “The Semimonthly Report” and then “The Recluse Report” hit me like a lightning bolt from the sky.

Incidentally, I intentially write blog posts like this now because I don’t know of any AI that can churn out a blog post like this. The chaos of it makes it undeniably human (and also, unfortunately, anti-SEO).

Blaugust

When I published a post about string constants, I knew my Blaugust was over.

That might be the dumbest blog post I’ve ever written, and a complete waste of my and everyone else’s time. Forcing myself to publish a blog post every day when I have nothing to say doesn’t give me much of a sense of accomplishment. So I took a weekend off and then I just went back to my regularly-scheduled blogging.

Everybody has different reasons for blogging. Mine are mainly:

As a developer, it’s convenient for me to own a web site on the Internet to tinker with.
I like to write things down so I remember them later.
I like to practice writing.

Among the reasons I’ve almost entirely given up on for blogging are (what a weird sentence):

Growing the site. (My day job pays me more than blogging ever could.)
Connecting with other people. (Almost anything is better than blog comments for socializing in 2024, especially on a static blog.)
Imparting my wisdom to help the world. (Nobody wants to hear it and/or someone has probably said it already and/or there’s little for me to gain by convincing the world I know what I’m talking about.)
Trying to change the world. (People have been trying this for 20 years and it never works… and I certainly don’t know of anyone who wants to hear that bit of wisdom either.)
Thinking out loud. (A huge red flag. Do not ever do this on the Internet in a place where anyone can respond to it.)
Telling stories. (I live alone and don’t go anywhere, so my life is intensely boring.) (Also, my made-up stories either aren’t very good or aren’t anywhere near ready to publish.) (My YouTube channel is where I tell gaming stories now, if that’s what you’re looking for.)

As for my Reading Old Writing experiment, I made seven of them and I think it went well (in a technical sense, at least… I’m generally pleased with the production quality of it, considering how fast I put them together).

Unfortunately I lost interest very quickly. What I learned is that there is still an overwhelming amount of work awaiting me to edit that stack of some 10 novel drafts to a point they can be published.

If you’re wondering what my made-up stories might be like, listen to those. No, I won’t be posting those snippets in text form anytime soon, even though I’m fully aware that most readers prefer reading because it’s faster than listening. There’s a microscopic chance they might be published someday, and there’s a thing called “first publication rights” that I don’t want to mess up.

By my count, I posted 28 out of 31 entries in the RSS feed for a total of around 20,000 words.

Full Posts in RSS Feeds?

There was an interesting discussion over a weekend on the Blaugust discord about RSS feeds and site designs. I thought the entirety of that discussion was “settled law” in the blogosphere already: You always put your full post in the RSS feed unless you serve ads on your blog, in which case you put the summary in the RSS feed because you’re a greedy capitalist pig.

But apparently there’s a whole new generation of people with differing thoughts on the matter.

In broadly general terms, there seems to be two basic categories of bloggers: Those who blog to start conversations and build communities, and those who just like to have a place to publish their writing. I’ve always been one of the latter. A lot of people are the former.

This came up in relation to RSS feeds, because the “build communities” kind of blogger doesn’t like to put their full post in the RSS feed because it dissaudes people from coming to their site to post comments and interact with the blogger. Their primary purpose is to drive engagement, like a social media platform, so RSS feeds in that context are counter-productive.

I’ve always viewed the “build communities” kind of blogger as more of a salesperson or influencer than a writer, so I never really wanted to go down that route. My primary goal with site design is to make things easier for a reader, so putting the full post in the RSS feed makes sense for me.

There’s also a whole school of thought that putting your full posts in the RSS feed is useful for improving accessibility, which is something I’ve never thought of in exactly that way. Putting your posts in an RSS feed allows readers to view the content however they choose, with whatever fonts and formatting they want, which does improve accessibility.

Increasing accessibility fits in with my blogging goals too, it’s just that I’m never sure if I’m doing it right. I try to keep my site fairly minimalistic, so you mainly just get a page full of text when you show up on my site. I’ve jettisoned all of the sidebars and gizmos and whatnot that you typically find on blogs, because I don’t find them very useful to my everyday needs.

Anyway, the point is, in the far-flung future year of 2024, there’s more to the full-post-in-RSS-or-not than just greedy capitalism.

Elden Ring DLC

Mostly finished with the Elden Ring DLC I think. Was just plunking along with some loose ends. Bosses I missed, and a surprising number of dragons.

You’d think a dragon fight would be among the most exciting kinds of fights in an RPG, but I find dragon fights in Elden Ring to be either intensely boring or intensely frustrating, and both kinds are well represented in this DLC.

Bayle the Dread can go jump in a lake with all of his nonsense. Some of these Elden Ring attack patterns are so fast and so hidden that I’ve gotten to the point of actually counting the number of frames in the animations to see if it’s even within the range of any human being’s reaction time. (It is, but barely. I personally think a reaction speed of 250ms is the absolute minimum that any game should require of a player and still expect a majority of able-bodied humans to play, and I measured Bayle’s bite grab at around 300ms, and yes it can grab you that fast from the other side of the frickin’ room.)

Unfortunately, despite all of the toxic boss fight designs, I still find it very difficult to stop playing Elden Ring once I’ve started. So I had an idea that I might see if I can fill in the missing achievements I haven’t gotten in Elden Ring with my main character. I can’t get the two missing ending achievements, but I should be able to get all the collection achievements.

(P.S. I can’t get all the collections in this playthough so I gave up.)

Dragon’s Dogma 2

Late in the month I started half-heartedly picking up Dragon’s Dogma 2 again, a.k.a. the unaccountably acceptable slavery simulator, in order to break out of the Elden Ring habit.

I have an odd relationship with the game. It’s … fine. But it doesn’t really knock you over the head and demand to be played, if you know what I mean.

The first one was so bizarre and strange that it had to be played to be believed (though I never finished it). The second one looks like more of the same, just with a fresh coat of paint.

Anyway I started a third character (the first was on the PS5, the second was on PC, neither got past Monster Culling).

Once again I’m playing a Thief and making my main Pawn a Fighter, which seems like the best playable combination, as far as I can tell. (I haven’t read any guides or anything, so who knows, but I find it difficult to imagine playing a ranged class in that free-for-all, no-targeting chaos combat system.)

This time I’m actually trying to record what I’m doing for posterity. This usually makes games more interesting to play for me because then it becomes an arts-and-crafts project. It’s not a great game for recording but it’s kind of fun to listen to the Pawns chattering away while you’re spending 75% of your play time walking to a destination or managing your inventory.

Media Production

In broken-down equipment news, the XLR output for the Røde USB PodMic I bought earlier this year has died. I can’t give a particularly strong recommendation to a microphone that stops working within a year of purchasing it. This is a real shame because Røde mics are among my favorites for a midrange microphones. Ah well.

The USB output seems to still work, though. Unfortunately I don’t have much use for another USB microphone in everyday usage. Maybe I can use it for work meetings.

This PodMic failure caused a bit of a ruckus in some of my later Elden Ring DLC videos, as I had to use the backup microphone track. I record a backup track on every OBS recording with a Blue Snowball USB microphone hovering somewhere in the vicinity of the top-left of my monitor.

It sounds quite bad though, because it’s far enough away that it picks up every single sound in the entire room, including the fan, the computers, and every bit of room echo. Yuck. Disgusting.

REAPER Reafir for Noise Reduction

Because I had to clean up some backup microphone tracks, I learned a new trick in REAPER: Using the Reafir plugin to do noise reduction.

Most audio editing tools have a “noise reduction” tool where you highlight a section of noisy audio and then “subtract” it from the rest of the audio. It’s one reason why everyone records “room tone” before whatever they’re recording.

I never realized it before but REAPER has this feature, too. It’s buried in an obscure Reafir plugin that you might otherwise never use. It works great to remove all that fan noise from my backup microphone track.

REAPER is more of a DAW for producing music, but I’m finding myself using it more and more for mundane audio file editing, and it now replaces Audacity for most of my needs. I never much liked Audacity, to be honest. CoolEdit set the bar for powerful, easy-to-use audio editors in the 90s and Audacity has never come close to it in all this time.

Redubbing Panpan in Dragon’s Dogma 2

So I recorded a handful of Dragon’s Dogma 2 videos, and then I decided I didn’t like the voice I was using for my character.

I tend to default to a sort of Batman-esque Generic Video Game Character voice for all of my protagonists when I’m recording, which doesn’t fit a portly Beastren named Panpan at all.

So after some experimenting I settled on a new voice that is sort of a mix of the Cowardly Lion and the dude in that Monster Mash song. (Or, more accurately, my memory of those things, if not the actual things.)

The problem is I have five videos recorded with the wrong voice. So I started loading them into REAPER and overdubbing the new voice in place of the old. (I always record the microphone track separate from the game audio so this is easy to do.) I’ve never redubbed my voice before, but it seemed like a cool thing I could do to spice up these particular videos.

Because Dragon’s Dogma 2 has a lot of uninteresting “down time,” this is one of the things I thought of to make it more interesting, by either cutting out the boring parts, or trying to make the boring parts more entertaining. For me, mainly. (My personal feeling is that entertaining myself is one of the most important things in life.)

Media Consumption

Regularly consuming: The Rest is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube), The Daily Show clips (on YouTube), various Glass Cannon podcasts (on YouTube or in an actual podcast).

And season 2 of Taskmaster Australia is going out on their YouTube channel. This might be sacrilege but I actually like Taskmaster New Zealand and Taskmaster Australia a bit more than the U.K. Taskmaster.

Otherwise haven’t been watching that much lately. Not much to talk about.

Audiobooks

I don’t know how this book got into my library, because I don’t remember buying it, but I started listening to a book called Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (read by Bianca Amato). It’s a Hugo award nominee from 2009, and claims to be an homage to old Heinlein and Asimov.

Saturn’s Children is very well-written (and well-read), but it’s also quite an odd book. It’s told from the perspective of a sentient robot, one of many who survived to populate the solar system long after humanity died out.

I didn’t find the story particularly interesting (it’s a lot of “stuff happening”) and there was a firehose of names I couldn’t keep straight. But otherwise it doesn’t really fit the mold of any book I’ve read before, so it’s really interesting from that perspective.

Still, it’s not the kind of book you could see being made into a blockbuster movie or streaming series anytime soon, so it probably doesn’t have a lot of mainstream appeal.

The enduring mystery for me is where did I hear about this book and why did I get it? Baffling. I have no memory of this book prior to seeing it in my Audible library.

Day Job

Have you ever worked on a development team where your manager and half the team is on the other side of the world? It’s certainly a new experience for me.

Every morning I sign into my work computer to find a barrage of Slack messages to catch up on. (A lot of which, incidentally, are AI-generated meeting summaries, which are actually quite useful.) I don’t think anyone, including me, really knows what’s going on yet.

Nobody else on the team seems particularly concerned about the impending train wrecks on the horizon, though. So I just keep working on my sprint work and hoping somebody will tell me if I need to do something different.

This sprint, my work involves updating a Golang client to authenticate using a JWT instead of a username/password (I believe Keycloak is the auth provider). Also dealing with a lot of misconfigured Renovate dependency update PR spam.

Health and Wellness

Had a dental cleaning appointment. I hate cleaning appointments way more than fillings or root canals. They don’t give you anything, then they just go right ahead and jam tiny little metal spears right into your gums, drown you with water and scrape away plaque, then they grind disgusting gritty paste all over the place. All while having to hold your head sideways at an angle that feels like your spine is actually going to snap in half. It’s not healthcare, it’s torture that somehow we have to pay money for.

Even more distressing than that, my dentist is apparently leaving my insurance network next year. They used a lot of words that I think they thought I would understand about what I should say to my human resources department at work about it, but I know exactly nothing about insurance and care even less to know about it. If it’s any more complicated than handing my card to the person at the desk to pay for the thing then I’m pretty much out of the discussion. It’s a very large blind spot in my life that I keep trying to fill but I just can’t understand the words the insurance industry uses anymore. It’s all meaningless gibberish that makes no logical sense.

Anyway I jotted down some key words on my phone as I left the dentist and hopefully I can make some sense of it at a later date. Maybe ChatGPT can explain it to me.

World Context

The Democratic National Convention happened in Chicago. No riots this time, despite a large contingient pro-Palestinian protesters.
Robert Kennedy Jr. dropped out of the 2024 presidential race, clearing the way for him to–and I’m not making this up–join the Trump transition team.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Celebrity Deaths: Phil Donahue (talk show host).

Congrats on finishing Blaugust everyone!