The Recluse Report - February 2025 Part 2

28 February, 2025. 2,029 words.

After another bout of cold weather and snow, there are now signs of spring returning. The last week has been fairly mild weather up into the 60s.

Gaming

Dragon’s Dogma 2

Breaking news: I played more Dragon’s Dogma 2! PanPan rides again! Actually jogs. A lot. Anyway, I got to what I thought was the last couple of quests in the main story (after the big iron golem thingy), and then I thought I’d complete all the side quests that will supposedly get locked out if you finish the main story. Then I got bored with the side quests and decided to finish the game. Somehow I ended up fighting a big dragon twice. But I got to the credits.

I finished the game at level 40 and felt extremely overleveled. There were very few times in the entire course of the game where I felt the slightest bit challenged by any of the game systems. I did exactly nothing to optimize my character. Combat was easy for the vast majority of the game. Crafting was useless from start to finish. The story made no sense at any point as plot threads were started and abandoned at regular intervals (I think it must have been mistranslated? Whatever happened to Sven or Disa?!?). Dragon’s Dogma is the weirdest, most opaque RPG franchise that has ever existed, as far as I’m concerned. It’s impossible to figure out how to do any of the quests without reading a guide.

Avowed

I impulsively bought Avowed when I saw it on Steam one day, Obsidian’s new first/third-person action RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Pillars of Eternity is a “must play” game in the single-player CRPG space, in my opinion, especially if you ever liked the original Baldur’s Gate.

Avowed is a totally different type of game, and it has a little bit of a janky AA vibe (you know, where everything clips through everything else and your foot movement never quite matches up with the ground and the gravity is like you’re on Mars), but it’s fun so far. It’s in the vein of a Skyrim, but set in Pillars of Eternity’s Eora universe. You’ll recognize a lot of the lore if you’ve played PoE (otherwise, 75% of the words in the game will be gibberish because it’s one of those fantasy worlds where they invent a new word for literally everything).

Anyway Avowed might be my next video series.

Steam Next

Surprise, surprise, there was another Steam Next demo festival. It’s hard enough to look at a huge list of available games and try to divine which ones might be fun, innovative, and engaging over 30+ hours, when you know for sure that only 1 in 1000 is going to be worth your time, so I have no idea what it’s like to get excited about looking over another huge list of demos.

That being said, I would have tried the Solasta II demo, but I know for sure I’m going to buy it when it comes out, so why spoil anything.

Media Production

Like flicking a light switch, I suddenly started back into video production mode. Weird how that works. One day, I have no interest in playing games or talking about them, the next day, I’m playing games and talking about them.

I got a new lightweight hypercardoid XLR headset microphone (an Audio-Technica PRO 8HEx Hypercardioid Dynamic Headworn Microphone), but it doesn’t sound very good. It’s too “thin.” It’s fantastically light and easy to wear, though. (But it does not have headphones, it’s just a microphone.) The other bad news is that it’s a little awkward to wear with glasses. Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I’ve switched my OBS video encoder settings to the new-ish NVIDIA NVENC HEVC encoder, which is supposedly higher quality/more efficient/better compression. I tried the new AV1 encoders (the cutting edge of the video future, apparently), but my recording PC CPU (from all the way back in the dark ages of 2016) is way too slow to handle them.

Media Consumption

Regulars

Beast Games (Amazon). The last episodes got quite boring, because they slowed down and tried to make us viewers get to know the final contestants. Unfortunately, all the contestants are idiots, so I don’t care about any of them. What I care about is laughing at their terrible decisions and their constant zeal for gambling and losing, and how they’ve represented their respective generations in the worst possible light. It was much better in the beginning when the games were quicker.
Severence (AppleTV via. Amazon). Must-see television. Unfortunately serial television is nowhere near as good as episodic television when you only get to see one episode a week, so the episodes go in and out of my brain almost immediately, because I know it isn’t a completed piece of entertainment. Much better to binge the whole season of serial television at the end, but then you risk getting spoiled.
Last Week Tonight (Max). John Oliver is hit or miss with me. He’s funny, but I find that he, like many late night hosts, frequently goes past the satirical and sarcastic lines into hysterical territory.
The Rest Is History (YouTube). They were doing episodes on King Leopold II’s exploitation of Congo.
The Rest Is Entertainment (YouTube). Creative control of James Bond sold to Amazon, yikes!
I clicked on some Smosh Beopordy videos and now Smosh is the only thing that’s in my recommendations. There’s a lot of nutty shouty party games on Smosh Games. Millennials be crazy.

One-Offs

Trying a different heading every time until one sounds right.

Presumed Innocent (AppleTV via. Amazon). Pretty good series, and a very different tone from the movie of the same name based on the book of the same name. If you’re watching it to find out if the ending is different from the movie, as I did, I can tell you that the ending is different, but I still guessed it. (I don’t know if it’s different from the book, though.) I don’t know why there’s going to be a second season, unless they’re turning it into an anthology, which honestly isn’t a terrible idea.
The Gorge (AppleTV via. Amazon). The weirdest Valentine’s Day meet-cute movie ever. The story was preposterous drivel that sounded like it came from the mind of an 8-year-old, but I thought the Trent Reznor music was pretty good. Most of what I’ve seen on AppleTV so far has been good, but this one was a bit of a dud. (I saw a review that reminded me I should nevertheless praise this movie for at least being an original non-franchise story, even if it didn’t work that well for me.)
SNL 50th anniversary clips (YouTube). Pretty funny, mostly nostalgic.
Zero Day (Netflix). Bad. Really, really bad. Laughable, in fact. Besides the technical part, the real life political drama that we live through every day is far more engaging as an entertainment product, rendering most fictional political dramas obsolete. Smacks of yet another show written by and for people who have never experienced the world outside of a Twitter feed.

Home Development

This is heavily inside baseball, but I’ve (finally) updated my video post-processing scripts to use one master configuration file for all project directories, which can be overridden for each individual project. As opposed to before, where I had to keep copying a gigantic configuration file to every new project directory even though 95% of the settings where the same all the time.

The configuration sets things like audio mixing settings and encoding settings and directory names on a per-project basis. Each “project” is a series of videos that eventually get turned into a YouTube Playlist.

Someday I want to publish my scripts (they’re in Python) but I’m too embarrassed about how messy they are right now. I’m a professional programmer, I can’t be putting out garbage code.

Day Job

Who even knows what’s happening anymore. I spend about 50% of my time writing Java code and the other 50% of my time trying to figure out how we can possibly make any progress on our deliverables when we have so many dependencies causing us to wait on other teams. There’s also a fear that the amount of Java work is diminishing fairly quickly, leaving nothing but Python work or Next.js Typescript work. Neither option is very appealing to me personally for various reasons (the Python work is mostly data analysis and the Next.js work is often ill-defined because there isn’t yet a product owner with a clear vision for the frontend). And incidentally we’ve been under a crushing company-wide moratorium for several months now that prevents us from any production releases until we implement a series of unhelpful hoop-jumping checks in the deployment pipeline that give us green checkmarks on leadership dashboards. And oh by the way, coming up soon, we’ll be having to shoehorn some kind of AI integration into a product that clearly doesn’t need any AI integration, because that’s literally the only thing the company cares about anymore.

Home Life

I was working on casseroles for a while, but I’ve been in a soup phase lately. As always, my version of cooking is based on the founding principle of “never spend too much time cooking or eating” so my version of soup is to pour many things purchased from a store into a pot and turn on the heat.

In this case, it’s chicken soup, and I make it by cooking a couple of chicken breasts, cutting them up, then putting them into a pot with: lower sodium chicken stock, some water, frozen vegetables (my store has a very convenient vegetable soup mix), a can of diced tomatoes, and a small can of “heart healthy” (lower sodium) cream of chicken soup, and let it cook for an hour or so. The end result is a pot of soup that lasts me about five days, and I have to believe is marginally more healthy than store-bought cans of soup.

Next I’m going to try a vegetable beef soup which will be essentially the same, except substituting beef broth and chopped-up beef for the chicken.

World Context

Incidentally, I’ve started an experiment with something called Ground.news which purports to give a “balanced” aggregation of news stories from sources across the political spectrum.

It’s been 39 days in Trump’s Russia-First administration. I know the whole Russian interference thing in 2016 was blown out of proportion, but it’s really easy to see why a rational person might wonder if Trump is a foreign asset considering he was cuckolded by Putin and surrendered American interests to Russia within a month of his second inauguration. Siding with Belarus and North Korea along the way. What’s next, Mr. Trump, selling nuclear weapons to Iran?

There’s a lot of things to criticize Trump for (and even an occasional thing or two to commend him for, believe it or not), but with my biases of being a child of the Cold War firmly on display, this has to be the most embarrassing American loss on the worldwide stage in our history. Worse than Vietnam, worse than Korea, worse than Afghanistan. Just wholesale surrender and abdicating any semblance of being a superpower, right out in front of everybody.

Then again, it’s entirely possibly Mr. Trump could (and did) go from calling Zelensky a dictator criminal one day to welcoming him into the White House the next. So it’s really hard to figure out where to direct one’s righteous outrage against the government when conditions change radically every day, as if our country is being led by a drunken sailor staggering from one rail to the other, vomiting word salad everywhere.

The Weave? More like The Stagger, amirite?

There is no more news, because we live in a reality game show now.
However, I did hear that the Pope got pneumonia. As of this writing, he’s recovering.
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: Gene Hackman (actor), Michelle Trachtenberg (actor).

Bye!