The Recluse Report - February 2025 Part 1

15 February, 2025. 1,590 words.

Gaming

My apathy for games continues. Most evenings and weekends I’d rather watch or listen to a show of some kind than play a game.

I did purchase Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, though I haven’t launched it yet. I also bought Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II last year, installed it, and haven’t yet launched it. Those two games are my entire backlog right now.

Other people are talking about Civilization VII and the upcoming Monster Hunter: Wilds, but I don’t have any plans to get either.

Media Production

Not uploading anything to my channel at the moment, because I’m not playing anything. I played one more episode of Dragon’s Dogma II but I figured I should store up a handful before I start uploading again.

Just today I got a new XLR headset microphone I want to try out. So far I don’t like it.

Media Consumption

Regulars

Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild and Legacy of the Ancients (subscriber podcasts).
Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (on YouTube).
Critical Role Campaign 3, the final episode (Beacon.tv). I found it a bit dull and haven’t yet finished it. At no point in Campaign 3 did I understand what anyone was doing or why they were doing it, so naturally the touching finale didn’t land for me either.
Various political podcasts (on YouTube).
The Daily Show clips (on YouTube).
Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max). (Mostly just the monologue and the New Rules, less so the guests and panel.)
Severance (Apple TV via. Amazon). Just catching up to this phenomenon. Binged the first season, which was excellent. Now watching the second season, which is also good. Big time Lost vibes. Hopefully it won’t collapse under its own weight like Lost did.
Mythic Quest (Apple TV via. Amazon). Since I got an Apple TV subscription through Amazon for Severance, I started watching Mythic Quest which I had also heard was good. It’s a pretty funny and charming workplace comedy, though the video game elements are far in the background.

Others

NADDPOD Dungeon Court (podcast). Catching up on recent episodes.
The Staircase (HBO Max). The miniseries based on–one might even say, in some parts, copied wholesale from–the documentary. The documentary was better. Nothing particularly new about the case, except the Owl Theory which I don’t remember hearing before. It seemed slightly more biased in favor of the prosecution than the defense.
American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson (Netflix). Despite living through that time, I didn’t obsessively watch the O.J. Trial every day on Court TV like everyone else in America, so I found it an interesting summary. It wasn’t as good as that American Crime Story series though.
Superbowl LIX (FOX). I didn’t particularly want either team to win, so it was pretty hard to get excited about the game. The Eagles absolutely manhandled the Chiefs in the first half, in a way that looked like they were beating up on children every play. Nobody knows what happened in the second half because everyone stopped watching when it was obvious nothing was going to change.
Surviving Black Hawk Down (Netflix). A new three-part documentary about the Battle of Mogadishu, one of the most-documented U.S. battles since World War II. Nothing new, really. Just another telling of it. Unrelated but one of my favorite tellings of the battle is The Operation Room’s animated version.
Malbatt: Misi Bakara (Netflix). The above documentary reminded me that there was a Malaysian movie I wanted to see about the Malaysian soldiers who were part of the U.N. convoy sent in to rescue the Americans, and this was it. It’s basically Black Hawk Down, except on a significantly cheaper budget and from the perspective of the Malaysians. So, you know, the American soldiers are portrayed as over-the-top arrogant dicks and their accents are hilarious, like most foreign depictions of American soldiers. But it was an interesting new take on a little-known part of the battle.
Greyhound (AppleTV via. Amazon). You can usually expect a movie with Tom Hanks in it to meet a certain threshold of quality, and this one does, albeit barely. It’s 100% plot-driven with almost no character development, and the vast majority of the words in the dialog are long streams of naval commands and jargon, but I found it entertaining nevertheless. Mainly it was one big homage to the technical skill of Navy crews during World War II. I don’t know how it was filmed but it looked like the entire thing was filmed cheaply in front of a green screen, kind of like the Star Wars prequels.
Masters of the Air (AppleTV via. Amazon). Speaking of Tom Hanks homages to the greatest generation, this one was in the same category as Band of Brothers and The Pacific. The show is pretty good, although I don’t think it’s quite as good as those other two.

Audiobooks

Destructive Reasoning: The Authorities, Book 2 by Scott Meyer (read by Luke Daniels). I don’t remember a single thing about the story, it was just Luke Daniels talking in different voices for 8 hours. I had roughly the same reaction to Book 1, but I’d forgotten that.
The Tar-Aiym Krang: A Pip & Flinx Adventure by Alan Dean Foster (read by Stefan Rudnicki). A book from my youth. Alan Dean Foster was sort of the Brandon Sanderson of his day, a journeyman writing a lot SF/F books that were okay, but not award-worthy. (I just learned he’s still alive.) I remember liking the Pip & Flinx books and the Spellsinger books. Hearing it now, it’s nowhere near as enthralling as I remember, and Stefan Rudnicki doesn’t sound right for the material. He sounds like one of those audiobook narrators who is just barely a step above an AI narrator–the kind that have the right kind of tonal quality to their voice, but don’t have a lot of acting skill, so it sounds only slightly better than a reading of the dictionary.
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie (read by Steven Pacey). I liked the First Law series, but I’m not really vibing on this one very much. I remember nothing of the First Law story, but I remember thinking it had rich, interesting characters. But I’m not seeing that in this one so far. Uninteresting characters just kind of doing stuff without much explanation of why it matters doesn’t make a very compelling book for me.

Day Job

Most days I sign into work and spend my morning reviewing Slack threads on what’s happened overnight with the half of the team on the other side of the world, and what major changes in team direction have happened since the previous day. Frequently I try to do code reviews in the morning to help expedite work by the India half of the team, and I sometimes get into chat sessions trying to answer questions from the less experienced India developers with their work items. That takes up anywhere from a third to half of my day.

Most team-wide meetings are scheduled right around noon my time, which is night for India, but morning for San Francisco. For me, it’s lunch time, and I frequently don’t get a chance to eat lunch until 1-2 pm. I eat a bigger breakfast now.

Most of the time I only get started on writing code in the afternoon, but it depends on meeting schedules. Meetings interrupt my programming time at about a 1:2 ratio, meaning that for every half hour meeting it subtracts an hour from my programming time, if not more.

World Context

I feel like it would be weird not to talk about the new administration in blog posts that are semi-auto-biographical. It’d be like not mentioning the pandemic in 2020. Trump is the only thing anyone’s talking about in this country, or trying desperately hard not to talk about.

It’s been about a month now living in the new lawless U.S. illiberal democracy. So far, it’s comical and incompetent and corrupt and unconstitutional, but there’s been no immediate impact on my daily life.

There’s no sign of any opposition from Democrats, who remain hopelessly anachronistic. There’s been some pushback from the judiciary against the first four weeks of executive tyranny, but lawsuits take years to resolve, which is far too late to stop a persistent agenda to sow chaos.

No time for me to dwell on the federal government, though, because, while you all are lamenting that there’s no viable candidates yet for the 2026 Congressional mid-term elections, let alone the next presidential election in 2028, I’m already in the middle of the 2025 campaign season for the Virginia gubernatorial election just around the corner in November, which will be the next bellweather for the country’s future.

Hopefully my state will still be a good place to live after Trump and Elon finish decimating all of the federal government’s credibility, effectiveness, and world power.

It’s impossible to summarize the Trump chaos on a daily basis. Here’s just one of an endless parade of examples: The America First, anti-war administration announced a plan to pave over Gaza and build a beach resort town. It’s just crazy enough to … get a lot of Americans killed.
Seriously, there’s nothing else in the news anymore. Maybe other things are happening in the world or even in the U.S., but we’d never hear about it.
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).

Bye!