The Recluse Report - October 2024 Part 1

16 October, 2024. 1,580 words.

A day late because of pure laziness.

It’s impossible to deny that autumn is upon us now, with the temperature dipping down to the point where switching the heat pump from cooling to heating is becoming mandatory. (It’s funny how a temperature variation of roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit inside the house is all it takes for me to go from hot to comfortable to freezing.)

Gaming

Wilhelm took a look at the Stars Reach pre-alpha pre-game thing or whatever it is. It looks intensely boring to me and I can’t imagine it turning into anything other than the most generic No Man’s Sky clone imaginable. But hey, that’s what games are now: Developers making copies of other developers’ games and marketers pretending it’s something we haven’t played a thousand times before.

Speaking of which, I can’t even get past the Steam description of Throne and Liberty before not bothering to play it. You know the state of the MMORPG industry is stagnant when you don’t even want to waste the time downloading a free game. One glance at the generic fantasy models and the generic fantasy combat animations and the generic overly bright flashing lights on every sword swing is enough for me to know there’s no long-term value there.

There was a big expansion for Diablo IV but I think I’ve mentioned before that sort of idle-clicker ARPG genre is mostly dead to me. I just can’t abide sitting in front of a game and not using my brain at least a little.

I played maybe one or two sessions of Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s really hard to get excited about playing a game where it takes a literal half hour to run from one place to another place. Unlimited fast travel: It was invented for a reason.

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 looked like a rare instance of a high quality game being made by competent professionals, so I bought it. Only afterward did I realize that it was an appropriate title for Halloween season. Anyway, I’ve never played any Silent Hill games before or seen any of the movies.

So far it’s exactly the same style of game as the Resident Evil remakes, except moodier. Same puzzles, same frustrating combat, not the slightest bit frightening to this jaded old veteran of the horror genre. I’m about 12 hours into it (in Brookhaven Hospital, to be precise).

It’s a pretty good game for its type, but I’d probably recommend the Resident Evil remakes over this one, if you had to choose one or the other. Resident Evil is a bit campier story-wise, but I think the gameplay and puzzles are slightly better. Silent Hill takes itself a bit too seriously with the ambient horror moodiness, and the story is very slow and doesn’t make much sense (yet?).

I assume at some point it will all click. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure how this franchise made it into the cultural lexicon.

Media Production

I mentioned last time about losing all my 8-track ADAT master tapes, but a most amazing thing has happened: I don’t need to find the tapes, because I found a set of projects from 2013 where I had done digital and analog transfers of the tapes into REAPER! For unknown reasons, I had buried them underneath a shockingly inaccurate directory name.

So, I must have discarded the tapes thinking I didn’t need them any longer (still, a weird thing to do and I wish I hadn’t–especially weird since I still have an ADAT deck to play them). Consequently, I no longer have to figure out how to get AI to isolate the tracks of my own songs. Which is good, because Spleeter doesn’t work very well.

The challenge now is taking the raw audio tracks from the tapes and syncing them with the original MIDI tracks again. I don’t have any of the original MIDI equipment I used, but I have all the song projects with all the MIDI tracks. Somehow I need to recombine the audio tracks with the MIDI, because these were recorded long before DAWs existed and you could record audio directly into a computer alongside the MIDI. Back then, you had to synchronize audio tapes with MIDI using external sync devices.

Long story short: I’ve embarked on that journey of re-assembling my old songs into new REAPER projects. Made some progress with about three tapes worth of music so far.

One thing I hadn’t done in 2013 was transfer my collection of 4-track cassette tapes from the early 1990s into computer files. So another thing I did, before discovering the lost 8-track files, was dig out my ancient Yamaha MT120 multitrack cassette recorder and the box of cassette tapes in the closet, which still works over 30 years later, and start transferring them into REAPER.

It worked for a while, at least. Until something made a loud snapping sound in the tape player machinery as it thunked to a stop after rewinding a tape. Then it no longer played tapes. I got most of the tapes transferred, at least.

I imagine it would be a relatively simple fix if I took the player apart and could find replacement parts (probably a belt), but who has the willpower for that anymore? We live in a time of throwing away broken things instead of repairing them.

Anyway, I tend to think about music production every year when it turns to autumn, as it signals the year is ending and I haven’t yet done anything musically. This year is no different. The problem is that it’s almost impossible for me to work on something “a little bit.” I either go full bore on a project 24/7 until burnout sets in, or I ignore it in favor of something else. Sigh. It’s not a productive way to live life.

Media Consumption

David Gilmour’s Luck and Strange album (forgot to mention this last time)
- Side note: Pink Floyd just sold their catalog to Sony for a pitiable $400m, a bargain-basement discount after Roger Waters has been acting like a typical Roger Waters the last few years and tanked their brand. (One could almost believe he did it on purpose, but he’s been extremely anti-war and anti-establishment his entire career, no matter the cost. It’s a major theme in a lot of Pink Floyd songs.)
The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 (on Amazon Prime).
Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild podcast, every Monday.
The Glass Cannon Podcast, Campaign 2 (on YouTube).
I finally watched the first episode of Rings of Power season 2, but it’s really difficult to stick with it. They keep focusing on Sauron and the elves but they’re making no effort to help the viewer care in the slightest about them. In my personal opinion, the whole point of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and high fantasy in general) is to follow the story of the hobbits (you know, the relatable ones) as they navigate the big scary world of other-worldly sorcerers, elves, and evil. I can’t say I’ve ever wondered about Sauron as a person.
The last of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee New Zealand season 2 (on ThreeNow via. VPN).
Taskmaster U.K. Season 18 (on YouTube).
I just learned there’s a season 3 of Taskmaster Australia! (on 10Play via. VPN).

In the always-on-in-the-background category, I’ve completed the entirety of the Taskmaster U.K. series run (again), and have moved on to Taskmaster Australia and New Zealand (again). I also went through some newer episodes of Richard Osman’s House of Games on YouTube.

Day Job

I don’t even really know what to say about my day job right now. I’m just along for the ride, trying to be a model employee who helps solve problems instead of creating more problems, hoping not to get dragged too far into the nightmare of trying to organize a worldwide team of software engineers of vastly disparate experience levels. Someone, somewhere made the classic mistake of trying to throw more software engineers at a product in order to speed up delivery, and now we’re all stuck with the consequences.

Health and Wellness

My back is much better, but I still have that feeling like it’s just on the verge of getting worse again if I’m not careful. So I’m trying to do all my back exercises and not sit at a computer for excessively long periods of time.

World Context

Hurricane Helene caused considerable deaths, damage, and flooding, and weirdly morphed into a political hot topic for those desperate to manufacture an October Surprise. Hurricane Milton also rolled over Florida soon after, but it turned out to be less newsworthy in the long-term.
After weeks of air strikes, Israel invaded Lebanon, which is pretty bad. Then, Iran fired missiles at Israel, which is even worse. Now there’s talk of Israel attacking Iran, which is even worser. The Middle East continues to top the worldwide most-trending wars list.
There was a debate between vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and J.D. Vance that nobody cared about because it was too civil, but somehow the news still hyped it as the most important vice presidential debate in history, a claim for which there was no realtime fact-checking.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War between Israel and Hamas (since 10/2023), War between Israel and Hezbollah (since 9/2024), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Celebrity Deaths: John Amos (actor).

Bye!