The Recluse Report - January 2024 Part 2

31 January, 2025. 1,785 words.

Anything happen since last time?

Gaming

It’s been persistently sub-freezing most of the last couple of weeks, which saps any energy I might have for doing much of anything in the evenings.

But the handful of times I’ve booted up something on the gaming PC it’s been RimWorld.

I need to revise my anti-hype for gaming in 2025, having previously only seen one game to look forward to all year. That one game is Pathologic 3. Pathologic 2 was such a bizarre and unexpected game world that I look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

But now I can report that I’m looking forward to not two but three games in 2025.

The second one is near release, and it’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. The first one was a bit of an impulse buy, and I have a vague memory that it was controversial for some reason I don’t remember, but I played the whole game and had fun learning the unorthodox game systems. My main memory is that the end of the story sucked. Re-reading that post, I apparently had a lot more complaints about it, but it definitely wasn’t the factory-produced same-as-all-the-others kind of game that is so popular these days, so I’ll give them another shot.

The third one is Solasta II, which doesn’t have a release date yet. I assume it will basically be the same as Solasta 1, except with improved graphics and UI and quality-of-life features. Otherwise I hope they don’t mess with the formula too much, because the tactical systems are pretty good already.

Remember when I used to write posts summarizing games I played so I could link to them in future posts like this one? It was kind of useful when I did that. Too much of a bother now.

Besides, what am I supposed to write in a post about, say, Dragon’s Dogma 2? I walk around a lot and fight variations of the same goblins and harpies around every corner of every road using the same two or three combat abilities I’ve had since the beginning of the game, listening to the same lines of dialog from my pawns repeated endlessly, all while pondering the hidden meaning behind a story that makes no sense culturally or politically. You play two or three hours of Dragon’s Dogma 2 and you’ve pretty much seen the rest of the game. Hard to make 1000 words of riveting prose out of that.

Media Production

Ran out of videos to upload, thanks to my persistent disinterest in playing more Dragon’s Dogma 2. Sorry if anyone’s out there dying to see the end of that series.

I also gave up on an alternate workflow for recording RimWorld videos. Too much work. The story of the rise and fall of a RimWorld colony can be compelling drama, though. Surely there must be a way to deliver that kind of content in an efficient manner.

Media Consumption

Regulars

Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild and Legacy of the Ancient (subscriber podcasts).
Various political podcasts (YouTube).
The Rest is History’s series on General Custer and the Battle of Little Big Horn (YouTube). Surprisingly–or perhaps not surprisingly since it’s impossible to know everything about everything, or even anything about everything–I knew almost nothing of substance about this famous event.
Beast Games! The best reality game show for our dystopian times. I can’t stop laughing when I’m watching it. “I deseeeeeeeerve money!” cries literally every contestant.
Critical Role Campaign 3 (Beacon and YouTube). I think the final eight hour episode of campaign 3 is coming up next week. Wouldn’t surprise me if they stopped doing campaigns with the core group after this. I get the feeling they’d much rather work on animated shows than D&D actual plays.
The Rest is Entertainment (YouTube). Should I watch The Traitors? They keep banging on about it like it’s the best reality show ever, but it doesn’t sound like it would be any good.

Occasionals

NFL Playoffs (various channels). As every sensible prediction predicted, the wheels came off the Washington season as they lost to Philadelphia in the NFC Championship game. Washington gave the game away by making three turnovers. Ah well. Will they be able to followup on this season’s success and play well next year too? Based on the past 30 years of the franchise history, definitely not. But maybe things are different now.
The Greatest Night In Pop (Netflix). A fantastic documentary about the making of that We Are The World song, which was a massive cultural touchstone for my generation. As someone who has actually recorded songs, in a pre-DAW era even, it was fascinating to see how they managed to wrangle so many disparate artists in one night.
Ghost in the Shell (Prime, Pluto TV). I almost never watch anime, so I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of classic anime movies since 1980 that I should watch. This was one of them. I started out watching Ghost in the Shell 2.0 on Prime, then I switched to the original 1.0 version on Pluto TV about halfway through. It was … okay? I guess? The quality was impacted somewhat by the English language dubbing, which was not very good.
Princess Mononoke (Max). Another ChatGPT recommendation, I would describe this as Lord of the Rings for anime. Anime films are neat-looking and all, but this is a good example where they don’t make much logical sense. I always feel like I’m missing some major cultural context that isn’t explained anywhere in the plot, so you just have to accept that it’s normal for giant talking boars to turn into wormy demons when they’re killed with iron musket balls.
American Primeval (Netflix). I love a good western epic, so I gave this one a try, not expecting much, because it’s Netflix, which ain’t exactly prestige TV. But I found myself engrossed and binged the whole thing in one long night. I thought it dragged a bit around episodes 4-5, but I enjoyed it. Didn’t know much about the Utah War before, so it was also interesting historically.
Godless (Netflix). After American Primeval, Netflix wanted me to watch Godless, another western epic, which, weirdly, also referenced the Mountain Meadows massacre, and ended with … well, you’ll find out if you watch them both. I think I may have watched Godless before, or started to watch it, because parts of it were familiar. It’s really slow-paced. It’s 7 episodes that could have been cut in half, in my opinion–a looooong slow burn, and you know exactly where it’s heading right from the beginning, too. Luckily there’s Lots of good character performances in the long takes. Classic western stuff, with a few modern twists.

I just picked up some audiobooks to listen to. Stay tuned.

Browsing for audiobooks is a horrible experience, by the way. Every time I look, especially in the science fiction and fantasy sections, there’s a new series of 10 books from some author I’ve never heard of that takes up most of the “bestsellers” page, and the descriptions of said books sound like somebody’s first NaNoWriMo draft, or just flat out AI-generated. I feel like we all owe Dan Brown an apology for making fun of the writing in his books. In hindsight, he set the bar for the mass market literary world.

Home Life

As mentioned, the cold has sapped all my energy. It snowed once but it’s been so cold that it never melted and there’s just been a layer of snow and ice over everything for weeks. Yuck.

Late in the month it finally thawed out back to tolerable winter weather.

World Context

Hoo boy folks. Buckle up.

A cease-fire and hostage exchange was struck in the Israel-Hamas war.
TikTok was banned! Then it shut down! Then it came back! All the kids are moving to RedNote, the literal Chinese Communist social media app! Next, they plan to protest smoking laws by blowtorching their faces off.
On his last day, Biden issued preemptive pardons for his family and key targets of the incoming Trump Administration’s kangaroo courts. It’s unclear yet whether they will help or hurt, but it’s pretty clear Biden’s legacy is in tatters.
The Quadrenniel Crowd Size Competition took place on the 20th, more commonly known as the Presidential Inauguration. It was moved indoors because of the cold, to the very same Capitol Rotunda that was attacked on Jan 6. Let’s just say opinions varied on the substance of the event, and the seating arrangements of tech billionaires.
Trump issued a stack of executive orders on his first day. Many of them have titles that make you laugh, like this gem “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”. Others are a little less funny, like this one “hey purge anybody from the government I don’t like” or this one “hey use the military more.” Or this hilariously self-contradictory “hey let’s stop weaponizing the government by investigating the previous administration immediately.” “Twice.” Then it goes back to the silly. “I hereby order the heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker.” “Look, my loyal supporters, I wrote a memo to make America great again! What an easy job!” Many of them you can imagine being written in crayon.
In South Korea, impeached president Yoon Suk Yeol is facing trial for declaring martial law in December. I wonder what it would be like to live in a country where impeachment had consequences.
Chinese company DeepSeek released a cheap, Open Source AI chatbot that tanked AI stocks and ended American AI dominance overnight. Whoopsie. Don’t worry I’m sure our new administration is prepared to mobilize the full force of writing some mean tweets to handle this crisis.
As everyone expected, and obviously by design, Trump generated a hurricane of news every day, and it’s impossible to keep up with it. Far too many sources to cite. It’s going to be like a new verse of We Didn’t Start The Fire every week. ♫ Pete Hegseth, DEI, Trade war with Columbia, Blackhawk crashed a plane. ♫ I wish everyone luck in their journeys to find reputable, untainted independent journalism on substack or podcasts or whatever, because you sure aren’t going to find it on social media or cable news.
No word yet on the impending annexations of Greenland or Panama or Canada.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), 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: David Lynch (director).

Good luck!