The Recluse Report - September 2024 Part 1

15 September, 2024. 1,133 words.

A short one this time because I’ve spent a lot of time writing my DIY Comments series and also writing code.

Gaming

I’m still half-heartedly playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 now and then. I think I mentioned that this was the third time I’d started it. I got to almost exactly the same point that I got to in my first two attempts (the Culling Monsters quest) and started to drift away from lack of interest yet again.

I find the questing and story in Dragon’s Dogma 2 fairly dull. The most fun part of the game for me is just kind of wandering around fighting random monsters in the landscape, finding people to escort from one place to another, stumbling on boss fights in the middle of the forest, and finding random chests or other secrets. It’s somewhat like an old-style sandbox MMORPG in that regard, actually. A little bit like Asheron’s Call, where you signed in and mostly just wandered around hunting monsters and hoping they would drop good loot.

Media Production

Scopique wrote an interesting post: Rabbit Holes: Video Editing for Video Games – Scopique’s

I feel like I was born to respond to that post. I could sit down and write thousands and thousands of words about it. I started to leave a comment but it’s impossible to write a brief note containing eight years of lessons I’ve learned. Anyway I might write a brain dump post about it.

The point is, I’ve been thinking very specifically about video editing for video games a lot with Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s an incredibly boring game to watch after a certain point, and not suitable at all for videos. (Most open world games aren’t.) But I still keep trying to record them anyway because I don’t have anything else to play at the moment.

Unfortunately, while I have tons of knowledge about making better game videos, what I can’t do is tell you how to be a more successful or more popular content creator. That’s not what I’m into. I’m only in it for the art, man. I only make videos for me. That other stuff is sales and marketing which is really squaresville.

Media Consumption

The Rest Is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube)
The Daily Show clips (on YouTube)
Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max)
Guy Mont Spelling Bee New Zealand season 2 (on VPN)
Guy Mont Spelling Bee Australia season 1 (on VPN)
Taskmaster Australia season 2 (on VPN)
Taskmaster New Zealand season 5 (on VPN)
Taskmaster UK season 18 has just begun (on YouTube)
Dimension 20 Time Quangle has also just started, surely the worldwide nerd media event of the year so far (on Dropout.tv)

Home Development

I’ve spent a ton of time working on a new commenting system for this blog. It’s something I’ve had in the back of my mind since I moved to a static blog in 2021, but I finally felt inspired enough to actually start working on it.

I hate to go counter-cultural and say good things about AI again, but AI has been helping tremendously with this. I’ve had the basic ideas in my head for a long time, and know more-or-less exactly how I want it to work, but it’s a real chore to start a new project and look up all the exact syntax and libraries and patterns to use in environments you don’t work with every day.

I’m more-or-less constantly shifting between Windows and MacOS and Linux, using various programming languages and tools, all up and down the development stack, and it’s impossible at my advanced age to keep every idiosyncrasy straight. AI gives me code samples I can work with in seconds and lets me get a prototype up and running quite a lot faster than I’ve ever been able to before.

Larry Wall rightly taught us long ago in that Perl book that the three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Sure, I can write a comment system without AI help, but why would I? It’d be like washing clothes without a washing machine. It’s so much faster and easier. Hopefully by the time governments start regulating away AI, I’ll be ready to retire.

You can read more about that in my DIY Comment series.

Day Job

My team is slowly adapting to the challenging new reality of having 15 people working together across a 13-hour span of time zones. I can’t say it’s a pleasant experience. It’s exactly the logistical nightmare you would expect, and exactly the inconvenience to everybody that you’d expect.

It was such a predictable problem that one can’t help but wonder who thought it would be a good idea to do this. I feel fairly confident that within a year’s time I’ll be reporting that the team has been split into smaller groups in similar time zones.

Anyway, it’s likely that I’ll be starting into more front-end work soon (Next.js Typescript), as that’s the new high priority.

Health and Wellness

I’ve been having a lot of back and neck pain lately. Pretty annoying.

Seeing as how I’ve been feeling poorly a lot lately, I’ve done an introspective catalog of my lifestyle habits and observed that I haven’t eaten very nutritious food for a long time. So I’ve recommitted myself to actually eating food again and I’m dubbing this autumn as the “autumn of casseroles.”

I’ve almost never made a casserole, but it seems like an easy way to put a bunch of the unprocessed foods a body requires to stay alive into one pan, and an homage to one’s childhood. I asked ChatGPT for easy chicken casserole recipes (god no I’m not Googling for recipes are you crazy?) and it gave me four of them: Chicken and Rice Casserole, Chicken and Broccoli Casserole (a staple of my youth), Buffalo Chicken Casserole, and Chicken Enchilada Casserole. I did not spot any glue among the ingredients. I will report back if AI manages to poison me.

World Context

The first debate between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump happened. I didn’t watch it, because I’m a normal person who finds the farcical mockery of previously-important civic institutions unpalatable. Anyway, most of the country decided how they were going to vote back in 2015 or earlier.
Trump has been hanging out with some conspiracist named Laura Loomer lately, and I can’t be the only who thinks she looks exactly like The Red Woman Melisandre. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting the presidential race to veer into the Stannis Baratheon plot arc from Game of Thrones.
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: James Earl Jones (actor).

Bye!