The Recluse Report - January 2025 Part 1

15 January, 2025. 1,548 words.

Oh wow the half-month point snuck up on me. That was a quick couple of weeks.

Gaming

I don’t have a main game for 2025 yet. The only game I can think of that I’m looking forward to for the entire year is Pathologic 3.

I believe I’ve played Dragon’s Dogma 2 for an hour or two so far, as part of my continuing effort to not forget about it completely and leave my YouTube series unfinished, a constant looming threat.

I broke out RimWorld to see if I could re-spark the obsessiveness I had for it in 2018. I played hundreds of hours, recorded tons of video (most of which I never uploaded) back then. I rewatched some to try to remember how to play, and why I was so excited about it at the time. Is it possible to recapture that magic? So far, not so much. Every previous time I’ve tried to play RimWorld since 2018, I get bored and quit in roughly 15 minutes or less. Will this time be different?

Media Production

Just the standard daily upload routine. I completed uploading my Silent Hill 2 series, while the Dragon’s Dogma 2 series continues. In order to drag out the DD2 uploads so that I can potentially finish playing the game before I run out of videos, I’m also uploading a series of miscellaneous games I played here and there in 2024.

My experimental scripts to use the OpenAI API to generate video descriptions continues apace. I personally find it amazingly useful and a huge time-saver. I typically just have to edit a few words here and there (usually names) and off it goes. Yes, you are correct, it’s nowhere near as good as the descriptions I could write, but that’s not the point. The point is I don’t have to waste my time doing a chore I hate. The future is now!

I’ve been pondering making RimWorld videos again. I think it would be really fun to make some condensed RimWorld story videos. The potential for drama in RimWorld is high. But the games are too long for raw video. It would be great if I could condense the life and death of a colony built over some 25 hours down into the best bits in an hour, but the amount of video editing work is too daunting.

But I find it an interesting challenge to think of new workflows that allow me to be as creative as possible without dealing with any of the drudgery that I don’t want to do. In this case, how can I edit while playing RimWorld, so I don’t have to go back in and do the intensely time-consuming editing of a two hour video down to a half hour afterward? (During that editing time I’d rather be playing RimWorld.) But without missing anything that happens live? It’s a difficult problem because so often those alarms blare out of nowhere in RimWorld and if you’re not recording, you miss it and the live emotional reaction.

I’m thinking of some ideas even as I’m typing. Like what if I had two copies of OBS running, one to record everything and one that I’m constantly pausing and editing out the boring parts on the fly. If I miss anything I can drop it in from the full recording. Hrm. Experimentation will be required.

Media Consumption

Regulars

Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild and Legacy of the Ancients (subscriber podcasts).
Glass Cannon’s Campaign 2 (YouTube).
Beast Games! (On Prime.) I forgot to mention this last time, but I can’t think of any other show that so perfectly encapsulates the exploiters and exploitees of American culture with such high production values.
The Rest is Entertainment (YouTube).

Occasionals

The Stowaway (Netflix). Could have been a good character drama, if the screenwriter had had more than a second grade science education. I thought it was decent acting though, in spite of the laughably unrealistic scenario.
The NFL wildcard weekend playoff games (various channels). Brought to you by Gambling. Gambling: It will fix everything! (joke reference) As it turned out, the Washington/Tampa Bay game on Sunday night was the best one, and not just because Washington won a playoff game for the first time since 2005.

Day Job

Sigh. Things are getting back into swing after the holidays. Trying to adjust to life after two of our best engineers left, while receiving constant pressure from leadership to make impossible things happen faster than ever.

Home Life

This section really should be called something more like Home Life instead of Health and Wellness. So I’m changing it. There. Changed.

A Smart Watch

I’ve never once thought I needed a smart watch. I haven’t worn a watch in some 35 years, not since high school. The last watch I can remember wearing was an extremely dorky Casio calculator watch.

After school, I couldn’t come up with any compelling reason to wear a watch when I’m always, 100% of the time, from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, for the past 35 years, always within sight of a computer screen that has the time in the corner.

And even when I can’t see a computer screen, I can usually guess the time of day within 15-30 minutes.

So, after that logical progression, I bought a smart watch.

It dawned on me that a little computer attached to my wrist could be useful for things unrelated to time of day.

My original impetus was to use it for two-factor authentication, because I never have my phone handy when some web site or game launcher asks for those 6-digit numbers. It turns out, though, that Google Authenticator doesn’t run on my smart watch, and there are some legit security reasons not to use a watch (or any non-lockable device) as an authenticator anyway. So that was out.

But I use countdown timers a lot, and having one on my wrist is pretty handy. Because again, I cannot stress this enough, I almost never have my phone within reach when I want it. (This is because I’m in my house all the time and I typically travel from room to room quite frequently throughout the day, and very rarely remember to pickup my phone and carry it with me.)

Another thing that is turning out to be more interesting than I expected is all the “fitness” stuff built into watches. Just strapping a watch to my wrist instantly tripled the number of steps I get every day! (Because the phone only counts steps when it’s in my pocket, which is not very often.) It measures heart rate and skin temperature and can tell when I’m in REM sleep, which all seems a bit scientifically sus to me but it makes some pretty graphs.

Food Prep

I’ve been doing a spectacularly good job of minimizing garbage pre-processed food intake so far this year, if I do say so myself. (It actually started in December.)

By which I mean taking the time to make scrambled eggs instead of just eating one of those frozen breakfast biscuits. Or making a sandwich for lunch instead of just eating one of those pre-packaged lunch things from the store. Or making a minimal effort to make something out of chicken or beef for a week of dinners instead of just eating those pre-packaged dinner things from the store. Also making a fruit smoothie sort of thing in the afternoon.

The improvement in energy levels is extremely noticeable, especially during these winter months when I would normally be wanting to go right to sleep immediately after work is over. It really sucks that those nutty “diet and exercise” things actually do have tangible positive effects on the human body.

World Context

2025’s first terrorist attack occurred in New Orleans.
I forgot to mention this last time: The South Korean president was impeached after he tried to declare martial law. Unlike the U.S., where presidents can be impeached all day long with no consequences whatsoever, in South Korea, impeached presidents actually get suspended and there’s a trial to determine if they have to leave permanently.
I mean should I start a countdown to the American invasion of Greenland? Would that be funny? Maybe. There’s a seed of a conversation that’s worth having about the global strategic future of the rapidly melting Arctic Circle, but Trump World derailed the conversation into a clown show of tweets and a divisive, laughable meme in seconds.
Wildfires around Los Angeles caused massive damage, loss of life, and, most importantly to the idiocracy, a firestorm of political zingers.
Confirmation hearings of Trump’s reality show clown cabinet have begun. There’s a lot of ineffectual performative bluster from Democrats for the cameras, but so far there’s no indication that anyone in the Republican wing of the Clown Senate won’t rubber stamp them. I think I’m going to be using the word “clown” a lot in the future. I can’t stress enough how little respect I have for the vast majority of elected officials in the federal government right now.
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).

Bye!