The Recluse Report - April 2025 Part 2

4 May, 2025. 2,227 words.

Gaming

Shadows of Rose DLC

I started the Shadows of Rose DLC for Resident Evil Village but I found it a bit frustrating so I gave up on it. It was a lot more of a “run from enemies” instead of a “shoot enemies” vibe, which I find annoying. And there wasn’t much story along the way to keep me interested.

The Quarry

I had purchased The Quarry, one of the dime-a-dozen Supermassive horror pseudo-games that are more in the vein of visual novels, some years ago, and I randomly decided to play it because I wanted a game to play where I didn’t have to talk much. You can always count on Supermassive games to fill any silence with dialog or ambient industrial noises. It was just like every other Supermassive horror game: Good graphics, questionable writing, fun to watch, not the slightest bit scary (fun-campy-horror not scary-horror… to this day I still don’t understand why people associate “horror” with “fun” and not “existential terror,” but they definitely do), all choices are random and you can’t ever steer the narrative the way you want.

However, The Quarry has one of the best credit sequences ever in a video game. Not since the song at the end of Portal has there been a better credit sequence. I’m talking about the Bizzare Yet Bonafide podcast that played over the credits, performed by Emily Axford and Brian Murphy of NADDPOD and Dimension 20 fame, an inspired casting choice for a paranormal podcast duo performance. Truly magnificent.

This is the fifth Supermassive game I’ve played, following on the heels of Until Dawn, Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes. (I haven’t yet played The Devil in Me, and I think I heard there was a new Dark Pictures Anthology game coming?) They are all pretty much exactly the same formula, same cheesy scares that are infinitely predictable and aren’t scary, they churn them out like a low budget horror movie studio. But they’re kind of fun to watch.

The Devil in Me

The Quarry reminded me that I played three of the Dark Pictures Anthology, but hadn’t played the fourth one, The Devil in Me. So I started on that one, using a dice roller to randomly choose character decisions (which I also did for House of Ashes). I haven’t quite finished it, but so far I think it’s the worst one. I would probably rank them: 1) House of Ashes, 2) Little Hope, 3) Man of Medan, 4) The Devil in Me. (Man of Medan is a close contender for worst one, though.)

In case anyone’s wondering, I did record them all but I won’t be uploading them because scary game videos don’t work unless the player is scared, and I have exactly zero scared reactions over the entire course of all of these scary games, because they aren’t the slightest bit scary to me.

Oblivion Remaster?

There was a surprise drop of a Remastered Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on Steam. Surprise to me, at least. Where everybody else played Skyrim to death, I played Oblivion to death, which is why I found Skyrim fairly meh and, to this day, have only played the main story exactly one time with little or no side questing. Whereas in Oblivion I played every quest and went to every square inch of the map. Anyway, it’s tempting to buy it, though I already recorded most of Oblivion already. My only question is whether they updated the voice acting or does the whole game still consist of only three voice actors talking to each other without even bothering to put on different voices. [ChatGPT Search assures me they added more voice acting, so I may be unable to stop myself from buying it.]

Media Production

I was going to use the Shadows of Rose DLC as a test case for recording HDR game content, but it turned out to be a disaster. I have to record the game video locally on the gaming PC, and I’m just not setup well to do that.

I worked out a method if I had to do it, but it involves combining audio commentary recorded on the recording PC with game video recorded on the gaming PC and that’s just a nightmare post-processing scenario. Nobody’s got time for that, unless they’re getting paid a full-time salary for it.

Media Consumption

The Last Of Us season 2 (on Max). The current must-see television. The Last Of Us Part II was one of the best stories of all time in gaming. The show isn’t as good, but it’s not bad. My biggest problem with Bella’s performance as Ellie is that she capture’s Ellie’s violent and stubborn side well but she’s entirely lacking Ellie’s whimsical and vulnerable side. You know, the side that made us love her character in the first place. But I have to be lenient because a significant plot point of the second game was making us not like what Ellie has become.
Wheel of Time season 3 (on Prime). Season 3 concluded. Near the end of the third season was the first time I felt the familiar “who are these people and where are they and why are they here and how is this related to anything again?” feeling from the books, but in the show. Felt like they were jamming a ton of story into minutes of screen time, especially in the last episode, and it felt like whiplash. Like I have no idea why we visited Tanchico in this season at all, or why we went back to Two Rivers for a Helm’s Deep battle. They were great moments in the books, but they seemed irrelevant to current events of the show, like they existed just to give the actors something to do. There were huge sections of the books that felt like side quests that could be deleted from the show. Anyway we’ve reached territory where I don’t remember what happens in the books, so I’m struggling to fill in the missing pieces myself. I continue to resent every moment they make me feel like Rand is a sympathetic character, because I always rooted for that arrogant martyr-complex prick to fail in the books. I think the main question the books try to answer is, “What if the chosen one is an absolute tool and never learns anything?” I do seem to recall that Sian Sanche lived a full life after she was stilled, but I understand why they gave her a heroic sendoff in the show because her storyline was largely tangential thereafter. And I also seem to recall that Morraine’s story came to a fairly abrupt end somewhere around this point, too, but I can also understand why they wouldn’t want to kill off the biggest talent on the show. Update: I hear that book readers really hate the show but I don’t think it’s that bad. I like it better than the Tolkien show; I can’t even get through the first episode of the second season of Rings of Power.
I started watching the U.S. version of Have I Got News For You on Max, but it’s rather bad compared to the UK version. There’s something about the U.S. version that makes me think they aren’t knowledgeable enough to really sink the knife in with the political satire, so it just feels blandly simplistic like late night talk show monologues.
Critical Role’s Wildemount Wildlings (on Beacon) was kind of funny but also felt a little forced.
Black Mirror season 7 (Netflix). A typical season of hit-or-miss episodes, but I thought three of the episodes were really good.

I watched a few movies while I was taking a four-day Easter weekend break:

Companion (on Max). Hilarious but way too long. The subject matter should have only been an hour episode of something like, say, Black Mirror.
Passengers (on Prime). Neat-looking and a cool premise but didn’t go anywhere near deep enough into the massive psychological trauma and horror that should have ensued.
Planned to watch more movies on Easter weekend because I bought a new TV stand but I became annoyed putting it together and didn’t.
Gladiator II (on Prime). The first movie I watched after completing the new TV stand. (It’s the kind that’s like a cart you can roll around.) A serviceable flick but not particularly memorable. I had much the same feeling about the first one, which I’ve only seen once and don’t remember very well. In fact I think I paused this one with some five minutes remaining and never felt the need to return to it.
A Netflix documentary about the Oklahoma City Bombing, something I already knew about, but it’s the 30th anniversary. One might argue that this bombing, along with the Waco debacle, sits near the beginning of the timeline of America’s descent into partisan madness. Sadly, at the current end of the timeline, the anti-government conspiricists are now running the government.
A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054 (Netflix). Netflix is really good at this sort of disaster porn documentary. Somehow they got three episodes out of one plane crash in Brazil. I think I only watched two of the three episodes though.
The Menendez Brothers (Netflix). Just when you think Gen-Z couldn’t get any more perplexing, I learned that there’s some TikTok trend wanting to release the Menendez Brothers, which made me realize I didn’t know much of anything about the case. (Like the OJ case, it happened at a time in my life when I paid zero attention to current events.) So I went looking for a pre-TikTok documentary to give me a primer on the case, and it was surprisingly difficult to find one. Basically impossible. This one gave me the general overview, but it definitely felt like part of a general PR push to exonerate the brothers (since it contained interviews with the brothers themselves). My feelings about it are complex, but in a nutshell, I don’t think they were wrongly imprisoned, but I wouldn’t be that upset if they were released now. I’m roughly the same age they are, and I’m a totally different person now than I was in 1990.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (Netflix). Then I watched the second season of the Monsters anthology series which was about the Menendez Brothers. It was pretty good (good acting performances, that is), although oddly comedic in tone. I think they did a fairly good job of conveying ambiguity about the brothers’ motives, but at the end I think the show opined that the brothers were lying the whole time, bucking the TikTok trend.

Home Life

ENT Doctor Results

The great ENT doctor appointment has been completed, and the verdict on my throat is in: Kind of. At least, step one is complete. The ENT doctor stuck a fiber optic scope up my nose to look at my throat and did not see anything but what he called “benign” issues, mainly redness and irritation at the top of the esophagus, which is probably caused by stomach acid. He’s going to put me on two meds, one for stomach acid, and one for mild allergies because I’ve also been experiencing some shortness of breath and wheezing lately. (I’ve wondered if I somehow picked up a cold or covid a while back and didn’t realize it.) Hopefully that will allow my throat to heal and then I’ll go back and see him in a month. After that, probably the dreaded “lifestyle changes” (mostly less acidic/spicy food, and/or elevating my torso when sleeping).

Unless the meds don’t do anything and it’s something else.

Not the instant gratification I was hoping for, but I shouldn’t be surprised because I’m constantly disappointed by how the human body is not as easy to debug and fix as a computer program. At least he ruled out infections or growths, which was what I was worried about.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little I had to “fight” to convince the doctor I was actually experiencing issues. My baseline assumption about all doctors is that they never believe their patients, as if they are a typical tech support person who refuses to listen to a customer. It probably worked in my favor that I was struggling not to cough while talking to him.

I’ve started an extensive diary in the hopes of tracking how these new meds are helping (or not). I’ve worked out some “tests” I can do to track my progress, or lack thereof, which mainly involves reading passages from The Hobbit and recording how much I cough while I’m doing it. Weirdly, despite this technological age we live in, keeping a “diary” is harder than you might think. I decided to use an Obsidian document on my MacBook.

So after about a week, sadly I haven’t noticed much change from the new meds. But I have to remember that I’m old and don’t bounce back from injuries very quickly anymore, so maybe it will take a long, long time to heal an acid-burned esophagus. Also my extensive diary stopped after a couple of days because keeping up with a new habit every day is basically impossible.

World Context

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

Bye!