The Recluse Report - October 2024 Part 2

31 October, 2024. 1,325 words.

Happy Halloween, or, as I recently learned because half of my team lives in India and had the day off, Happy Diwali. In either case, I’m following my standard holiday practice of ignoring it completely.

Gaming

Silent Hill 2

Finished Silent Hill 2. It took about 20 hours and I got the “In Water” ending. It’s a fantastic game. Well, let me clarify that a little bit: It’s a fantastic story.

The gameplay, at times, was kind of annoying. Particularly boss fights. The boss mechanics demand a more action-oriented set of controls, but the game did not have action-oriented controls, so it was pretty frustrating. I kept having the mental thoughts to move or shoot right now, but didn’t have the capability to translate that thought into game actions due to constant animation locking, or slow turning, or randomly ineffective dodging. “I definitely dodged that” was a constant refrain while watching my character stand still and get mauled.

In other words, it was just like the Resident Evil games.

It’s a suitable game for the Halloween season, but did I find it scary? Sadly no, not in the slightest. At no point did I jump or scream or feel any tension from the spooky environment. I rarely find video games scary like that. They’re games, man. I’m too busy working to achieve the game goals to bother feeling scared of the dark.

I take that back, there was one time when some creature flew through a closed door and hit me, so I jumped, because I didn’t think creatures could go through doors. That was the only unintentional jump scare in the game for me. The rest of the jump scares were predictable from a million miles away, or completely harmless.

Silent Hill’s whole schtick seems to be making the environment look and feel scary, but it doesn’t take long before you realize there’s no actual threat to your player character. For me, tension is built by gameplay that threatens your progress. Like, say, a Dark Souls game. Spooky environments are largely transparent to me.

In any case, it’s a good game.

What’s Next?

I started playing the first Silent Hill game on a Playstation emulator (RetroArch) to see if I could fill in some extra context I missed in the second game. I don’t think I’m going to reach the end, even though it’s supposedly a short game. Silent Hill is about 95% old-style clunky gameplay of shooting random monsters and 5% terrible voice acting and story that makes no sense. So I have to believe it must have been the sequel that really cemented Silent Hill in the gaming culture pantheon.

I also played some more sessions of Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s kind of an evergreen open-world-ish game, where you can log in from time to time and just wander around. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes there’s a dragon. Usually you have lookup how to complete quests because they’re so unintuitive.

Speaking of dragons, I’m thinking about getting Dragon Age: Veilguard, even though I could not get more than a couple hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition. Maybe the new one will click more. Side note: Are there dragons in Dragon Age? I don’t remember any.

Media Production

I was too distracted by playing Silent Hill 2 to do much with music production. I have a minor goal to write and record one song before the end of the year. I have an idea but it’s not going well so far. It’s absolutely infuriating that I can only effectively do one hobby at a time.

The only good news is that I’ve been keeping relatively consistent with picking up a guitar and practicing for 5-10 minutes every day. I’m not very confident in my guitar playing skills anymore though because the same weak left thumb that limits my game controller usage is also going to stop me from playing too much guitar anymore.

Media Consumption

Roger Waters’ Dark Side of the Moon Redux (2023) (on Amazon Music). I just learned of this, and I know the dude’s controversial and not for everyone but holy jeepers this album is a frickin’ masterpiece if you like musical artistry (as opposed to, you know, fun pop music). I’ve always loved Waters’ writing. I also love that he took a cue from Taylor Swift and had the temerity to remake his own private version of Dark Side of the Moon, one of the most untouchable best-selling albums of all time, which I have to assume was a giant middle finger to the Pink Floyd lawyers. I also love the production on this album. I want to steal this sound. Also Roger Waters’ Lockdown Sessions (2022), which is the same idea but isn’t as good of a production.
The Legend of Vox Machina, Season 3 (on Prime).
Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max).
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast (on YouTube).
Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild podcast (subscription).
Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (on YouTube).
I got into watching Tom Merritt’s Daily Tech News Show again (on YouTube). Watching some of the people who basically invented podcasting with gray hair really makes you feel old.
Daily Tech News reminded me to revisit the It’s A Thing podcast with Tom Merritt and Molly Wood, one of the best podcasts for Gen-X people like me to understand the world of the youngs. I discovered they have a new YouTube channel where they post the livestreams containing all the pre- and post-show stuff.
Taskmaster UK series 18 (on YouTube).
Taskmaster Australia series 3 (on 10play via. VPN).
The Rest Is Entertainment Podcast (on YouTube).

Background audio: I ran out of Taskmaster seasons to play in the background, so I switched to Glass Cannon’s Legacy of the Ancients podcast, which is an unusual choice because the “on in the background” show is usually something I’ve already seen or heard before.

Home Life

I went out to mow before the leaves fell all over everything but, in the typical way that these things happen, my riding mower broke in two different ways all at once. The battery was dead, and the mower deck stopped working.

I can buy a new battery pretty easily, or be lazy and use my little iClever battery to jump start it (obviously I chose the lazy route).

But fixing the mower deck is a different story, since I have no idea what’s wrong with it. I took the mower deck off of the tractor, which is a bit of a chore for me (more so putting it back on, actually). I cleaned everything and checked the belts and all (the belt is relatively new in fact, since I had to replace it somewhat recently). I ordered some new mower blades. Unscrewing the completely frozen bolts to get the old blades off was quite an ordeal.

Anyway, it’s now going into November and my grass is too long, and it’s all covered with leaves, so mission failure all around.

World Context

Israel launched retaliatory strikes against military targets in Iran.
Every daily news report from all networks begins with the vitally important news of where the candidates campaigned the previous day. There’s a lot of manufactured October surprise controversy over a comedian’s remarks at a Trump rally and Biden’s subsequent remarks about the remarks.
This is the last report before the 2024 election. It’s a toss-up, but my reading of 270towin.com is that it’s more likely for Trump to win. However, the safe and cynical bet is that this and all future elections will be decided by courts instead of people.
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).

“We do not need to rebrand October as anything other than the slow slide into holiday misery.” -Molly Wood, It’s A Thing Podcast 341

Bye!