The Recluse Report - November 2024 Part 2
1,360 words.
I made an official Bluesky account for endgameviable.com, but I doubt I’m going to use it unless there’s a way to post automated notifications to it and/or embed things in my blog. Oh, there is a way to embed posts.
I made an account, are you happy now?
— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable.com) 2024-11-19T01:54:30.312Z
Gaming
Wilhelm and Bhagpuss have been doing a good job keeping everyone informed about the Stars Reach alpha testing and I have to say… well, the same thing I said before, which is that the game sounds like No Man’s Sky, which is a game that is already out and that I have already played. I haven’t read anything yet that makes me think the MMORPG genre is on the cusp of a big new revival.
For myself, I’ve been playing the Dark Pictures Anthology games from Supermassive. I finished Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes. Personally I thought the first one was the worst one, the second one was better, and the third one was even better.
I also dabbled a little bit with Satisfactory, but I find games that start out with hours of laundry lists of rote tasks to do kind of, well, unsatisfactory. I keep hearing it’s more than just that, but I don’t know how many hours you have to play before that part kicks in.
I played some S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, which is sort of a shooter/RPG combo somewhat in the vein of an open world Far Cry with a rather dramatic development history, but it’s crazy difficult. I mean, the first three combat encounters in the tutorial take place in near total darkness, so you can’t even see what you’re shooting at. The second combat encounter is some mutant that turns invisible and only reappears as it’s biting you. And oh by the way they’re all bullet sponges so you have to sink like five clips of assault rifle ammo into anything to kill it. And, naturally, they kill you in just a couple of hits. Anyway I don’t know how much more of that trolly nonsense I can stand. Unfortunately I accidentally left it sitting on a settings screen for four hours so I can’t return it.
Oh and I tried the new Alone in the Dark remake, which is okay but it’s yet another in the style of Resident Evil where you wander around looking for keys and items to combine and unlock other things and so forth. The original Alone in the Dark predated Resident Evil, though.
In other words, watching garbage television is a better use of my free time than playing games lately.
Media Consumption
- Still listening to more political-themed podcasts than I normally do and way more than is necessary, but it’s always instructional to see what the losing side is thinking in the wake of an election loss. Most of these are centrist-ist. Centrism has a bad rep, but it’s still where you find the least yelling and the most intelligent analysis of issues.
- The Bulwark (on YouTube). So-called Never-Trumpers, among the dramatically increasing numbers of Republicans who opposed Trump but aren’t in office anymore so they don’t matter. It’s a firehose of analysis from this channel; somehow they post about fourteen videos a day. Anyway the main three folks are generally likable, and I think they have a nice variety of views circling around the center/left. They tend to lean on clickbait thumbnails though.
- The Rest is Politics US (on YouTube). It’s a reasonably centrist journalistic-style perspective. I love everything Katty Kay does in the news biz. (Sadly you have to put up with The Mooch, who I don’t love nearly as much, but at least he’s a voice a realism.) (I also like the main show The Rest is Politics but it’s more European-centric.)
- Politics Politics Politics (on YouTube). Because it’s just refreshing to hear people talking in full sentences about politics from far outside the bubbles of the news and politics and activism industries. It’s kind of like what a Thanksgiving dinner talking about politics could be, except where everyone doesn’t just yell over each other. I personally like the bluntness, and not sugar-coating what’s going on. I also like that it’s more of an old-school-style podcast, from before podcasting turned into a commercial media industry. Justin Robert Young is loosely associated with the descendants of that Leo Laporte world of TechTV people who built the infrastructure of podcasting and streaming and new media into what it is today, but aren’t famous except with 2000s tech nerds.
- Watched Twisters (rented on Amazon). It was okay, but mostly the same as the first one. Also re-watched Twister, which was better, because Van Halen and acting.
- Watched a movie called Infinite (on Prime). Kind of. It was not okay, and quite boring, and I only paid attention to maybe 1/3 of it.
- Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max).
- The Daily Show clips (on YouTube).
- The Franchise (on Max). Hilarious stuff. Best thing on television.
- Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild podcast.
- Taskmaster Junior (on YouTube), but I’m rapidly losing interest because I don’t find it particularly funny or interesting to watch kids pretending to be adults on Taskmaster.
- The Rest is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube). They had a really good discussion of BlueSky recently that aligned pretty closely with my thoughts on social media.
- Critical Role campaign 3 (on YouTube).
- Glass Cannon Podcast campaign 2 (on YouTube).
- Glass Cannon’s Legacy of the Ancients podcast backlog now and then.
- Taskmaster Australia season 3 (on 10play via. VPN).
- Watched most of the new Night Court revival, which is okay, in a sad, sitcoms-used-to-be-funny kind of way.
- But mostly I’ve been re-watching the old Night Court on Prime Freevee. That show was completely nuts, and one of my favorites. It evolved from a serious, touching dramady in the first couple seasons to complete absurdist insanity by the end.
Day Job
You know that feeling when you’re on an engineering team and the chief architect and most knowledgeable subject matter expert decides to leave the team? Yeah. That.
Health and Wellness
I had a filling removed and replaced at the dentist. It takes forever to get appointments with my dentist, which is very annoying, but at the same time I’m loathe to change dentists because I have such a unique and complicated dental history.
Also, there are some insurance changes happening which I don’t fully understand because insurance is impossible for normal humans to understand. Apparently a lot of dentists around the country are moving from in-network to out-of-network because dentists are unhappy with what insurance is paying them. The end result is that I’ll have to pay the dentist, then insurance pays me. As opposed to the insurance paying the dentist. Or something like that. Who knows anymore. I can’t wait until AI just handles all of this for me. I’m a stereotypical absent minded professor type, I simply cannot force my brain to think about those kinds of things.
World Context
- Biden allowed U.S. weaponry to attack Russian territory, a pretty significant escalation in the Ukraine War, by my armchair reckoning (nevermind the extremely silly-sounding ATACMS acronym that makes you want to burst out laughing during every serious war report). Russia responded with a stern message in the form of a scary new medium-range ballistic missile, perfect for delivering nuclear payloads to NATO-range countries.
- The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for leaders of Israel and Hamas. Everybody definitely took it very seriously. (They also issued an arrest warrant for Putin last year.)
- A cease fire was announced between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
- As a side note, the news media definitely learned their lessons after all that soul-searching they did after Trump’s first term and … ha, just kidding. Every news story is already “here’s what Trump said or tweeted today” and all media around the world is treating him like he’s already president.
- Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: War between Israel and Hamas (since 10/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
“Twenty bucks, same as in town.” -Running Night Court gag.
Bye!
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