The Recluse Report - March 2025 Part 1
1,436 words.
Once again we find ourselves scrambling to catch up with writing a post. It’s never a good sign when I forget to prepare the document early in the writing cycle. If I don’t have a blank document available to jot down thoughts every day or so, it’s going to be a major chore to write the post at the last minute. Blogging is such a chore, why does anyone do it?
In climate news, we are leaving the winter months, otherwise known as the worst time of every year for me, and it’s looking like spring is returning and there might be an end to months of misery. Daylight savings time began so there’s an abundance of daylight and the world is normal again. (In my old age, I don’t like being awake when there’s no sun outside anymore. Long gone are the days of my youth when I was awake more at night than during the day.)
Gaming
I picked up Monster Hunter: Wilds on the PS5. I don’t know why. Just because it was there. At first I found it somewhat meh, and wrote a fairly lukewarm impressions post.
But I find myself enjoying it, against all odds, and wanting to keep playing it. The story and characters are unappealing (I don’t even know anyone’s names, I just keep referring to them as, for example, “Big Hair Belly Girl”), but the monster-fighting part is kind of fun, and it’s a vastly improved user experience from the previous Monster Hunter games I’ve played. No fluff, no stakes, just bashing monsters with a giant sword (or whatever) while a cat companion meows at you periodically.
In fact, I like it so much that I surpassed the threshold beyond which my left thumb starts to ache from using a controller too much and I have to take some days off playing.
Therefore, I had to find a mouse-and-keyboard game to play on mandatory thumb-rest days. I had started Avowed last time, but it turns out I very quickly found myself uninterested in playing further. Nothing really wrong with it, there’s just not much of a hook.
I tried to install Monster Hunter: World on PC again, to continue the monster-hunting vibe, and found it a horrible experience to play with mouse and keyboard, and I really missed the streamlined gameplay of Wilds. So I doubt if I’ll get very far in World this time either. Most of my previous playtime was on a PS5. According to video records the last monster I killed was a big spiky Radobaan, so that’s how far I got.
I decided to finally start Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, a game I’ve had downloaded and installed for over a month now, but never launched. In all this time, I haven’t heard a single person talking about it. The first game wasn’t exactly a mainstream darling. It’s the kind of game you either like or hate.
Naturally the night I wanted to play KCD2, Big Patch 1.2 had just dropped, so Steam had to download a 62.3 GB patch. That’s not really a patch, by the way, that’s a complete replacement.
But I eventually played for about an hour. The first game had a pretty good story hook to start out with, the second game doesn’t. Let’s face it, Henry of Skalitz ain’t no Geralt of Rivia, commanding the screen with his presence. The whole sword combat system came rushing back to me in the first tutorial, and I questioned my own sanity for wanting to try to re-learn it. Nothing appears to have changed in the second game, mechanically speaking, for good or ill. (Including the inexplicable catastrophic drop in frame rate during cut scenes.)
So I thought I’d probably never play it again, but then Saturday morning rolled around and I played a second session of KCD2, and found myself getting invested in the story. Possibly because there were a lot of flashbacks to the beginning of the first game, which was the best part of that game.
Also, there’s a dog companion in the second game, which I don’t remember being in the first game, and who doesn’t love talking to their dog companions in video games.
To round out this section, here are some games I’ve uninstalled recently: Grand Theft Auto V (still can’t get into GTA like I used to), Tales of Arise (played about an hour, never felt like returning to it).
Media Production
Uploading the final videos in Dragon’s Dogma 2, don’t really know what to do next. I thought it would be Avowed but I quickly lost interest in it. Maybe Monster Hunter Wilds but I didn’t really start recording like I would publish them until some 10 hours into the game, so maybe not.
There’s really only one style of game that’s perfect for game videos, and that’s blind Souls-like playthroughs, and there just aren’t any to do right now. So I’m kind of stuck.
Media Consumption
I fully forgot to write down most of what I’ve been watching.
- Mostly the same stuff as I wrote before, although I haven’t been listening to podcasts as much.
- Severance (AppleTV via. Amazon).
I just saw there’s a third season of Wheel of Time on Amazon. Was there a second season? I don’t remember it, but I assume I must have watched it. Before watching season three, I’ll make a prediction that this will be the season where the quality of the show drops precipitously because of budget cuts, the standard path of most streamer-made shows.
Home Life
Two stories.
First, I bought a new mattress on the Internet (it was on sale). I’ve never done that before. It was weird to think that something which came in a relatively small (but heavy) box could expand to the size of a mattress, but it did. So far it’s a great mattress and I sleep much better. It’s a Bear Elite Hybrid mattress, if you’re interested. (Previously I used a fully memory foam mattress, which I hated.) But it’s a lot taller than I expected, so I need to follow this up with an order for a low-profile foundation. Dealing with mattresses is one of those chores that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish when you live alone, incidentally. Mattresses are pretty big and heavy (this one especially), and so are foundations. Also, getting rid of old mattresses or foundations is not exactly easy, either, especially if you don’t own a big enough vehicle, or unless you’re one of those weirdos who just throws them by the side of the road in the middle of the night.
Second, my car battery died. This is a regular occurrence in my life at this point. I’d noticed it getting weaker over the winter, failing to start in the morning and so on, but I figured I’d just get a new battery at my next car inspection, which is due about now. Well, the battery had other plans and went from “weak” to “fully dead” before I got to my inspection, the way modern batteries do. I had to rig up my iClever external battery to jump start and run the car just long enough for me to drive to and from an auto parts store for a new battery. Luckily it was a short trip and I didn’t get stranded anywhere. More perils of living alone in exurbia*: If your car dies for any reason, you’re pretty much screwed.
* I only recently learned the word “exurbs,” which is a good descriptor for where I’ve lived about half of my life (the other half was in suburbs). Somewhat less population-dense than suburbs, but not fully out in the country where you could literally hunt for food in your back yard. Still, you really need a working vehicle to live in this kind of area.
World Context
I made a concerted effort to back off of checking news daily, so I don’t have many sarcastic barbs this time. Since Trump thrives on attention and all of his policies will inevitably self-destruct from incompetence and public backlash, this seems like the best opposition strategy for now.
- Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
- I noticed that Wikipedia stopped listing Gaza in the “ongoing events” so I’m removing it from my list too. Technically there’s a cease fire, but obviously tensions have existed since before I was born and will continue undoubtedly for the rest of all of our lives.
Will I remember to make a new blank document for the next post or not?
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