The Recluse Report - November 2024 Part 1
1,290 words.
A short one because I don’t have much to talk about. Where I live, the spring and fall seasons are quite short, so fall is already turning to winter.
Daylight savings ended, which means it’s dark and cold all the time and I hate everything and just want to sleep until March. It feels like there’s only about thirty minutes of daylight each day.
All is despair and bleakness, same as last winter and every other winter before it.
Leaves are falling all over my yard and the year’s biggest outdoor operation has been ongoing to get rid of them. Armed with my newly-repaired riding mower and a “lawn sweeper,” I can make fairly quick work of them without having to expend too many calories or ruin my back.
Unfortunately it’s currently raining which might significantly impact what I’d hoped would be the final weekend of leaf deportation. Ha. See? Political words taken out of context can be funny! Sometimes! In rare cases!
In social media news, I know everyone’s saying Bluesky is good now, and I even found a Tweetdeck-style interface for it called deck.blue, but I dunno. I’m just not feeling it. I’m in a “just let the 2000s Internet die already” kind of mood. It’s never coming back.
Like I said, all is bleakness and despair from now until spring.
Gaming
I heard about Until Dawn on the Blaugust discord, so I played the new PS5 version, which I generally liked except for the quirky movement controls and the dollars-spent-per-hour-played ratio.
Then I found the Dark Anthology Supermassive games were on sale on Steam and started playing Man of Medan. Surely, I thought, it would be of a similar story quality to Until Dawn, which was also originally a Supermassive game.
Welllllll…… for one thing, it’s not a remake, so it’s got that janky old-style Resident Evil fixed camera nonsense. Beyond that, it seems like only two of the voice actors were making an effort. The story makes no sense, there’s no payoff of any setups, there’s no character development, it’s just easily-guessable jump scares in vaguely scary settings and completely random narrative choices.
Still, it successfully passed the time.
Next I launched into Little Hope, the next in the Dark Anthology series. I like it significantly better than Man of Medan, but now on my third of these games I think I’ve pretty much memorized the script for every future game. (Oh no! Everyone got separated for some hand-wavy forced reason! Who could have foreseen it?) Anyway, the character work is better and the Salem Witch Trial theme lets me test my prior Salem knowledge base.
I finished Little Hope and … well, I have some unkind thoughts about the resolution I got, but I won’t trouble anyone with that. I get that they’re not trying to tell good impactful stories with these things.
I kind of wish there was a setting in these games to let the game make all the choices randomly, so I could just watch. Now there’s a potential good use for agentic AI*: Playing these interactive-movie-type games on autopilot, so we can just sit back with the popcorn.
I’m getting a bit weary of the Supermassive formula, if you can’t tell. I need to look for something else.
The Top Sellers list of games on Steam looks very bleak to me right now. More bleakness and despair! The next game I’m genuinely looking forward to is Pathologic 3 in 2025.
* Generative AI is old news, by the way: Agentic AI is the new buzzword to know.
Media Production
Been recording Supermassive games, but I’m not going to bother uploading them. The only reason to upload horror games is to entertain people with how scared you get, but I haven’t found them even a tiny bit scary. Somewhere along the way the horror genre morphed from horror to slapstick.
Media Consumption
- Lots of live election coverage. Mostly CNN, C-SPAN, and BBC, and I found some livestreams, and then later a bunch of podcast reactions.
- Just found The Franchise (on Max). In the grand tradition of Larry Sanders and Veep, it’s now time to lambast superhero franchises. I personally can’t get enough superhero parodies. Not since the old Hollywood westerns of the 50s has a movie genre been so thoroughly beaten to death.
- Taskmaster UK series 18 (on YouTube).
- I watched Taskmaster Junior on YouTube but I dunno, man. Kids aren’t very good comedians. Also it has a mildly exploitative vibe doesn’t it? Like where and how are their parents involved? I think it would be a lot funnier to see shots of their parents’s eager faces watching from the sidelines, desperately wishing they were on the show instead.
- Taskmaster Australia series 3 (on VPN). Wouldn’t it be great if they could stagger these seasons so there’s a continuous stream of English-speaking Taskmasters on year-round?
- Sampled some of the recent Critical Role campaign 3 episodes where they’ve brought back campaign 1 and 2 characters.
- Watched a good (though I wouldn’t call it great) movie called The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix, a rare occasion when I didn’t feel like I was wasting money on Netflix. (It was inspired by having recently heard an episode of The Rest is History about the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention.)
- I’ve been listening to some episodes of The Rest is History podcast about World War I, my favorite war. Everybody has a favorite war in history, I assume?
- The Rest Is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube).
- Glass Cannon campaign 2 podcast (on YouTube).
- Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild and Legacy of the Ancients podcasts.
- I’ve listened to a huge sampling of political-themed podcasts in the wake of the election, but I doubt any of them will stick long-term. Experts tend to say the same things about politics all the time, if you hadn’t noticed.
Health and Wellness
It’s been tremendously hard to concentrate on anything since the election. It’s a daily effort to detox from news feeds. And I’m not even that worried about the election results. I’m just a news junkie at heart. I don’t think I’m clinically ADD, but I do find it very easy to learn to become addicted to constant stimuli by habit, and un-learning habits can be difficult even without any diagnoses.
Anyway two weeks later I’m finally getting back to some normalcy.
Unfortunately the cataract in my left eye has reached the point of making all vision-based tasks extremely annoying and headache-inducing. Anything in the near field looks like vaseline is smudged over the world. Really makes reading computer monitors super fun.
I had hoped to wait until next year to get it removed but I’m going to be very grumpy until then.
World Context
- Did you hear? There was a U.S. election. Republicans won the popular vote, the Electoral College, the presidency, the Senate, the House (probably), the stock market, the World Series, and the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
- Actually the Dodgers won the World Series, beating the Yankees in five games. That was last month, but I forgot to mention it, which is representative of the thrill of baseball.
- In other shocking sports news, the Washington Commanders have a 7-3 record after ten games, only a half game behind the Eagles. They’re actually in solid position to not only make a wildcard playoff game but possibly even win the NFC East division. That … never happens.
- Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 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: Quincy Jones (music producer).
“How hard it is to accept the truth.” -Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Democratic National Convention, 1968.
Bye!
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