The Recluse Report - April 2025 Part 1

16 April, 2025. 1,065 words.

Sorry, I prioritized filing taxes yesterday over blogging.

Gaming

I wanted to watch the Smosh Resident Evil 8 videos, because I watched their Resident Evil 7 videos. But in order to do that, I had to play it first. (I very rarely watch people play games that I haven’t already played before.) I’ve had it forever, but never played it. Well, I played through it. Pretty good game. Resident Evil 7 was claustrophobic and scary and gory and kind of hard, Resident Evil 8 was easy and more like a horror-themed fantastical action blockbuster. 8 is to Aliens as 7 is to Alien, if you will. For good or ill, it’s a sequel to 7, so play that one first.

Sadly, the Smosh Resident Evil 8 videos aren’t that good. They showed little interest in the game, and that makes for a boring game series. It’s no Smosh FNAF, that’s for sure.

Otherwise, I played a bit more Kingdom Come Deliverance II. It’s a chill game, walking around in the wilderness listening to the sounds of nature, except the parts that are frustrating as hell, which is anytime you have to interact with a quest or fight anyone.

Media Production

When I started Resident Evil Village, I noticed there was an option under Display Settings to enable HDR, and I thought, “Hey I have an HDR monitor, I’m going to turn that on.” So I did. It looked pretty cool. And I recorded three videos.

And then I realized that the mirrored HDMI output from my gaming PC did not automatically downscale to SDR, and I recorded three videos that looked absolutely borked upon playback. They looked absurdly over-saturated with extreme contrast, almost like the videos were posterized.

And then I fell down a rabbit hole into the world of recording HDR game videos, which is a world I did not realize was so dern complicated. To make a long story short, it’s not easy to record HDR videos with OBS. With my recording setup that uses a second recording PC, it’s almost impossible without an HDMI splitter. Unfortunately the disadvantages of using an HDMI splitter are numerous (not the least of which is you have to find a very specific kind of HDMI splitter to avoid things like random audio dropouts).

I successfully recorded HDR video when I ran OBS locally on the gaming PC, after making sure the OBS settings are exactly right, but recording games on the same PC you’re playing on sucks. The number of times I accidentally alt-tab or otherwise ruin the game screen is just absurd. Not to mention the difficulty of seeing and monitoring OBS while you’re recording.

In any case, you either setup everything to record for HDR or you setup for SDR, and you never want to switch back and forth. I would have expected that HDR video support would be a lot more common these days, but I guess it isn’t. It’s a major pain in the butt.

It looks really good, though. HDR, that is. Stunning difference.

Media Consumption

Wheel of Time season 3 (Prime).
The Last of Us season 2 (Max). Haven’t seen any trailers but I’m predicting they’re going to go into The Last Of Us fan fiction territory and not the second game’s story. The first episode has been out a day and of course I’ve already seen spoilers on YouTube, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. OH SHIT I STARTED WATCHING IT AND ABBY IS THERE IT’S GAME TIME THIS IS NOT A DRILL PREPARE FOR HIGHLY ENTERTAINING EXTREME VIOLENCE AND HEARTBREAK.
I dunno, I probably watched other stuff but I didn’t write it down. I continue to watch a lot of Smosh content on YouTube like a mindless puppet. Their lineup of comedians and improv in the last two years is pretty good imo. Watching people do improv well is kind of like watching a magic trick to me.

Day Job

For all the anti-AI folks out there, you should know that my employer sent out an email recently that basically made it mandatory for engineers to incorporate AI code generation tools as part of their daily workflow. So if you’re a programmer trying to get a job at a major software company, you’re probably going to need that skill.

Cursor is the new hotness at my job right now, and yes, it’s very good at turning ideas into working code. The only viable reasons I can think of not to use AI code generation assistance in programming are purely ideological or just plain stubbornness. It’s like refusing to use a dishwasher (actually I knew someone who hated dishwashers). When you run across someone refusing to use AI in programming, it’s like running across someone with deeply-held religious beliefs proselytizing, and you just want to nod and smile and back away slowly.

The Python and Javascript folks are rejoicing with Cursor, but unfortunately it’s a fork of Visual Studio Code, so it’s not quite a full IDE, and it’s less of a nice place to live for Java development. That’s the only drawback I’ve seen so far. My company developed their own internal AI chat plugin for IntelliJ, which is okay, but nowhere near as good as ChatGPT.

Home Life

In health news, every time I talk above a whisper, I start coughing. Well not every time, but frequently enough that it interferes with daily life. Most times I eat anything, I start coughing. It sucks.

I’ve been trying to drink copious amounts of water and chamomile tea, which does seem to help slightly, but tea is disgusting in large amounts. Cough drops help a lot, but obviously there aren’t enough cough drops in the world to keep one in my mouth all day every day.

Anyway I have an appointment to see an ENT next week.

World Context

Too many fiascos to cover. Constitutional crises, secret police abducting people off the streets, tariffs crashing the economy, blatant insider trading, ludicrous propaganda press briefings, etc. Reality show government. Everything changes week to week. Not a great time to be a lifelong government skeptic. Or maybe it’s the greatest time to be a lifelong government skeptic. Luckily I don’t have to interact with government too much.

Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Celebrity Deaths:

Bye!