The Recluse Report - December 2024 Part 2

31 December, 2024. 2,012 words.

It’s the end of the year once again. I’ll do a different post on goals for 2025, although there’s a significant part of me that doesn’t want to publicize them, knowing how embarrassing it’ll be to write that I haven’t done any of them by the end of 2025.

Gaming

Football

The unthinkable has happened and I’ve suddenly become interested in football again. American football, that is. Sports! The most exciting live entertainment since D&D actual play shows. (Seriously, I can just feel through the screen that nobody believes me, but they are structurally quite similar forms of entertainment, if you think about it.)

Why, you ask? Largely because my grandfather’s favorite team the Washington Commanders, who have been a non-factor in sports (except for the name controversy) for some 30 years now, are suddenly 11-5 with one game to go (there’s 17 games in the NFL season now… who knew?). They even clinched a wildcard playoff game (probably against the vile, hated Eagles boo). Unfortunately this year’s NFL is so lopsided that an 11-5 record just scrapes into the #7 seed in the conference. (It’s conceivable they could move up to the #6 seed, depending on how other teams fare in week 18.)

More to the point of this blog, this rush of enthusiasm led to buying a Madden game for the first time in my life. It was on sale for like twenty bucks.

The last computer football game that I remember playing was a little Amiga number called Gridiron! by one Bethesda Softworks, somewhere in the late 80s or early 90s. It was just a bunch of dark circles running around on a green background, but it somehow had shockingly realistic physics, and you could play against another person over a modem. Truly futuristic stuff.

Screenshot of Gridiron! — Image blatantly stolen from myabandonware.com

Anyway Madden 25 crashed constantly on my PC, so I returned it and bought it on the PS5, where it was also on sale for about twenty bucks, and where it runs much better. It’s fun, but I wish I could create my own leagues of random teams and random players, instead of it being one gigantic advertisement for the NFL Store.

I sought out some other alternative football games on Steam, which all happened to be on sale or really cheap.

Axis Football 2024. Meh gameplay and comically awful announcer voices, but you can make your own leagues and it can play against itself.
Legend Bowl. A decent throwback to 16-bit graphics football games, if you like that sort of thing.
Mutant Football League. Hilarious fun, two thumbs up.

I could find no other possible contenders for football games, unless I wanted to go into the world of college football simulators, which I assume just makes every play a random chaotic fire drill of unprofessional nonsense. (P.S. I don’t like college football.)

Steam Sale

In the Steam winter sale, I picked up Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time since I played it for an hour and returned it in 2021. The cyberpunk genre is still a million miles away from my general vibe, but at least this time I’ve managed to reach six or seven hours of play. Sadly, because I restarted three times, I’ve experienced almost zero actual gameplay yet, because the game is 90% cut scenes and tutorials and walking and driving in the beginning.

I also picked up Tales of Arise, another demo I played when it came out and decided to skip. Haven’t yet gotten beyond the first hour (which is, as far as I can remember, the bleakest opening video game setting I’ve ever seen, disguised behind all that upbeat anime).

Neither of these are going to work for the channel. Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t exactly a family-friendly game. Tales of Arise is a lot better in that regard, but I don’t see much opportunity for role-playing so far.

Media Production

Nothing much new in media production, except I tweaked my OpenAI-based video game description generator scripts a little bit. It costs a bit of money to use the OpenAI API, so I figured if I could generate the transcript of my commentary track locally instead of sending it to OpenAI, I could save a bit of cash and time. So I re-enabled the OBS closed caption plugin, so now every video I record has a corresponding SRT file with it that I can upload to OpenAI to use as the basis for the video description.

I setup a new upload schedule for a bunch of “miscellaneous” games I’ve played in 2024. A lot of games I played once or twice or three times before moving on.

In terms of YouTube projects I’m still looking for my next great game playthrough for the channel, assuming I ever actually finish Dragon’s Dogma 2, a game I keep avoiding playing. I have to admit I’m getting bored with my own videos. I have no idea why those handfuls of people keep watching them. My best theory is that they’re good for falling asleep to.

I’ve been using an Audio Technica condenser mic for a while, since the PodMic broke, but I find it really annoying to use fixed-position mics while playing games. It’s hard to find a good position for them that doesn’t obscure a certain percentage of the screen. Not to mention that I’m using a cheap motorized sit-stand desk for gaming now, so sometimes I stand up while I’m playing, and I have to adjust the boom every time I adjust the desk. So I want to go back to the AT dynamic headset.

Media Consumption

Regulars

Various politics shows (YouTube).
Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (YouTube). Apparently they are planning to discontinue it next year because the Pathfinder Gatewalker AP is not very well-liked and the PCs keep getting killed.
Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild (subscriber podcast). (They just had their second annual Christmas Party on Twitch.)
Critical Role Campaign 3 (YouTube and Beacon). I think they’re nearing the end of it? It’s hard to tell, because it doesn’t feel like there’s any stakes because I’ve long since lost track of what the story is about. I can only think of one memorable episode of campaign 3 (the one where they were 100% certain to TPK if not for one PC’s sacrifice). I hate to diss the show that popularized actual plays and opened the door for literally everyone else, but I’m teetering on the outside edge of their current audience demographic, which now seems to be nothing but theatre nerds, cosplayers, and shippers.
Night Court re-runs (Prime). Now in season 9, but running out of interest.

Assorted

Carry-On (Netflix). A not very good thriller about Jason Bateman talking to a TSA agent a lot. The only conceivable excuse for this movie getting made is to give people a new meme to argue whether it’s a Christmas movie or not.
Squid Game (Netflix). I completely missed the Squid Game mania when it first came out, so I was determined to get caught up in the mania for the second season. So I watched the first season. Most of the shock and emotional impact was lost on me since I’d already heard so many details about it beforehand, but I can see why it was so popular. (Acting in Korean shows is way different from acting in American shows, though… I mean everything is turned up to 11 and there’s no such thing as subtle performances.) Then I watched the second season, ready to embrace a new round of absurdity. Sadly, the first season was better. The second one was like, “Well, the story was completely finished in the first season but it was a huge hit so I guess we need to keep going anyway.” Similar problem as The Boys. Still, it wasn’t terrible. It’s just that there’s no way to replicate the first-of-its-kind innovation of the first season.
Glass Cannon’s Legacy of the Ancients (subscriber podcast). I skipped ahead to season 4, or I’ll never catch up on it. It’s not as good as Blood of the Wild, so I only listen now and then when I’m going to the store and back.
Viva La Dirt League’s GameDev series (YouTube). I don’t mention VLDL much but I often click on their video game parody videos, as I think they’re one of the originals, and they have that uniquely quirky New Zealand vibe. Anyway they’re big enough to have just started a new subscription service like everyone else is doing, and they started a new series about game developers for a major MMO company. It’s basically a rip-off of one of the later seasons of The Guild. It portrays video game developers as what vocal anti-capitalist players on forums and Twitter think video game development is like, rather than what it actually is like, so it has a bit of a way over-the-top stereotype vibe that’s kind of hard to stomach (the CEOs are all evil cash grabbers, the programmers are all insane over-the-top nerds, the community managers are the only normal people, blah, blah, etc., etc.), but still, it’s kind of funny. Not their best work, though.
Glass Cannon’s Haunted City (YouTube). I was sampling this Blades in the Dark actual play series. So far I don’t think I’d like playing Blades in the Dark, but it’s a fun cast to watch. I think it’s generally accepted among the actual play community that Ross Bryant is among the best actual play role-players in the world, so anything he’s in is worth a watch.

Day Job

It’s the holiday downtime at the day job, so nothing to talk about. Christmas and New Year’s fell on Wednesdays, so I ended up working only Thursday and Friday for the last two weeks of the year. I had a week off early in December, so I honestly didn’t work that many days overall in December.

Late-breaking developments: Turns out another team member is leaving. It’s really a great sign when two people on your team leave, for what I assume are the same reasons that I’m a bit pessimistic about the team’s future. Have I mentioned that my direct supervisor is in India and it’s almost impossible to manage the logistics of a team that spans 13 hours of time zones?

Health and Wellness

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to make my own pasta sauce, better known as “spaghetti sauce” in my uncouth cultural background. So far I haven’t had much luck. Everything I do just tastes like tomatoes, which isn’t right.

This is part of my ongoing effort to make more food and eat less processed food, and following up on my casserole autumn, my theme for winter so far is Italian food. Normally I would just buy a bottle of pre-made spaghetti sauce but at my age that’s like injecting poison directly into my blood stream. Instead I’m trying to make it from cans of tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, which I’d like to think is marginally better. But it just ain’t right, and ChatGPT is not helping much.

World Context

Republicans tried to shut down the government over Christmas with their gross incompetence yet again, this time with an assist from a ketamine-fueled Twitter rant by unelected co-president Elon Musk. Luckily, Democrats, the party of never learning, were there to shoot themselves in the foot again and gift Republicans a holiday victory, averting a shutdown with a last minute continuing resolution. It’s hard to use so few sarcastic barbs to describe the absurd political reality we live in.
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: Greg Gumbel (sportscaster), Linda Lavin (actor–Alice), Jimmy Carter (president). Just some of the HUGE 70s and 80s names I missed in 2024: Shelley Duvall (actor), Donald Sutherland (actor), Teri Garr (actor), Dabney Coleman (actor), Martin Mull (actor), Richard Lewis (comedian), Louis Gossett Jr. (actor), Terry Carter (actor).

Happy New Year!