The Recluse Report - May 2025 Part 2

30 May, 2025. 4,607 words.

Health News

Just to rip the band-aid off, On Friday, May 23rd, I received some concerning medical news about my lungs. A followup CT scan confirmed a tumor. It’s bad, but I don’t yet know exactly how bad it is. To my untrained ear, it sounds pretty frickin’ bad, but I’m trying to remain optimistic while simultaneously preparing for worst-case scenarios.

Here’s what happened.

I mentioned last time and maybe the time before that I’d been coughing a lot and saw an ENT for acid reflux. I think that was part of it, but not the whole story.

By coincidence, I had my yearly physical with my primary care doctor on Thursday the 22nd and brought up the coughing I’ve been experiencing and he recommended I get a chest x-ray, just in case, which was exactly what I wanted him to say. He agreed with the ENT that it could be acid reflux, and he listened to my lungs but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.

In olden times, getting an x-ray meant walking into the next room for a few minutes, but now, of course, with all of our modern advances in American healthcare, it means going to the hospital for a walk-in appointment, signing in on a touch-screen kiosk, and waiting hours for your name to be called while listening to everybody else yelling at the people behind the reception desk. Those staff are truly heroic figures for being on the front lines of customer service where people are at their worst.

Anyway, after paying $500 out-of-pocket (it was 20% off on sale!) and moving to a second waiting room, I finally got the x-ray. The actual x-ray process took a maximum of 10 minutes after two hours of waiting. They took one front x-ray and one side x-ray. I asked for a copy of them on a CDROM, and they all sounded shocked and amazed that I asked for “the disc.” I mean, I just paid $500 for it, why wouldn’t I want a copy of the pictures?

The next day, on the 23rd, I got a call from my doctor saying, “Um there’s a problem with your right lung. You need to get a CT scan and you need to see a pulmonologist.” I’ll spare you the exact description of what they saw on the x-ray because it sounds super scary. Way, way worse than the worst-case scenario I had imagined, which was something like pneumonia or bronchitis.

After digging up my USB CDROM drive and the right software, I was able to view the x-ray images on the disc myself, and yeah, there’s definitely something there, and I can definitely tell it’s my body because of the distinctive kink in my upper spine that has caused me so many aches and pains the last couple decades.

So, you know, interesting times. Time to break out the dry humor as a defense mechanism and downplay the existential terror I feel at starting down roughly the same (terminal) path that my mother did in 1991. I’ve always suspected that my relatively good luck with health would disappear one day all at once, and here we are.

In life, it often seems like multiple problems materialize at the same time, rather than having to face them one at a time. Funny how that is. I also have a cataract in my left eye and I can barely read anymore. I was going to try to get it removed this summer but that just got moved to the back burner. Not to mention some car troubles and some desperately overdue home repairs.

I called a phone number I was given and scheduled a CT scan, but American healthcare means that June 5, some two weeks away, was the very first available appointment. What was I supposed to do for two weeks? Hurry up and wait, that’s what. And try to remain upbeat that it won’t actually be a worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, the only real symptoms I’m experiencing are a crushing headache every day and shortness of breath when I do any kind of physical activity, along with occasional coughing and wheezing, usually at night, and often when I talk.

The coughing is actually better now than it was about a month and a half ago when it got bad enough for me to call the ENT, thinking I had bad acid reflux. Back then, I would wake up in the morning and cough so much I almost felt like I’d pass out, especially during or after eating breakfast, or if/when I tried to talk in the morning. Now, it’s just a minor dry cough, exacerbated by talking and eating, which is roughly what I’ve experienced for many years, even before COVID.

The worst part now, by far, is the nearly continuous headache that has come on in the last month. (It’s been better the last couple of days though, so there’s some good news at least.) I thought it might have been a side effect of the new meds the ENT prescribed, but I’ve stopped taking both of them and seen no improvement in the headaches. So my suspicion is that it’s a reduction in oxygen because of reduced lung function, or stress, or both.

Then I received a call from my doctor on a Sunday saying he’d seen my June 5 CT appointment and he wanted me to get the CT scan a lot sooner than two weeks and would update his order to “stat” instead of “routine” and I should try to call the number again on Memorial Day to reschedule it sooner. That sounds … kind of serious. If it didn’t sound serious before, it definitely does now. Dude, I’m trying to stay positive, here! It doesn’t help when your doctor sounds nervous and calls on a Sunday.

I called the scheduling number on Memorial Day and, surprise surprise, they weren’t open on Memorial Day. The next day, I was lucky enough to re-schedule a new appointment for the following day, Wednesday afternoon on the 28th… but I had to drive much further to get it.

So I drove 25 minutes away to an emergency room in the correct hospital network and got the CT scan. (An adventure in and of itself, because I thought my car might breakdown on the way there.) A “contrasting CT scan” to be specific. That’s the kind where they give you an IV of some kind of contrasting dye so the blood vessels show up better on the scan. The dye gives you a weird feeling of internal heat, and that’s when I learned how fast blood circulates around the human body, something I never realized before. They injected the dye in my arm and I was feeling it in my legs mere seconds later. Weird.

Anyway they did the scans and I returned home. They said it could be 4-5 days before someone reads the results. So I hurry up and wait again, hoping I don’t drop dead in the meantime, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to proceed with normal daily life with this Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

About noon on Friday, the 30th, I received a call from my doctor saying that he had called “them” three times trying to get them to read the CT scan sooner. (A primary care doctor, I’ve learned, is not much higher than a patient on the hierarchy of importance in the healthcare system.) A few hours later I saw the results of the CT scan in my online medical portal, and lets just say it’s a lot more scary-sounding words. The chest x-ray was definitely not a false positive, and it sounds like it’s a bit beyond the “we caught it early and it’s no big deal” stage.

Again, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just speculating. But I’m almost surely hospital-bound at some point in my future.

So not to sound too morbid, but if I don’t ever post again after this, you’ll know why. That sounds like an overreaction when I read that back, but I’ve never dealt with anything this potentially serious before. As you can imagine, it’s fairly overwhelming. I wasn’t prepared for this, but then, who is?

I started posting vlogs on my real-name YouTube channel. If you happen to be a family member or know who I am, just search for my name on YouTube (use “thomas” instead of “tom”) and you’ll get more timely updates. It’s a lot easier than trying to write it down.

Most of the rest of this post was written before May 23rd, and, frankly, none of it really matters to me anymore.

Gaming

The new gaming PC continues to work well. Not much else to say about it. Gaming PCs either work or they don’t work, and that’s the extent of the conversation. The next time you think about it is when you run out of room for installing games. I haven’t completed installing stuff on the new PC or rearranging my living room area, so there’s just a bunch of computers and tables strewn around with wires between them.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

What a roller coaster of emotions this game is. One day, I love it. The next day, I absolutely hate it with a burning passion and fully rage quit playing. I see all the positive reviews, and there’s only one universal comment that I wholeheartedly agree with: The music is amazing.

The story? I’m still in Act 2 so my views might change, but I felt like the quality plummeted in Act 2, and it went into plotlines and characters that I couldn’t care less about, not to mention changing the goalposts of the actual gameplay. Honestly I feel like they must have inserted Act 2 to artificially stretch out the game.

Everything about the combat system is completely undermined by one design decision: Almost every attack animation is designed to be a huge slap in the face to the player. A big Nelson-from-The-Simpsons HA-HA! moment. I’ve never seen such trolling from attack animations before. The number of fake-outs and feints they throw at you to get you to dodge at the wrong time is comically over-the-top. It’s impossible for me to feel any respect for it.

I simply can’t understand how modern game designers can’t tell the difference between fun, satisfying tough-but-fair gameplay and maddening, repetitive, time-wasting tough-but-unfair gameplay.

I’ve also never seen a video game where all three difficulty settings are equally infuriating. That probably stems from the fact that there really isn’t much difference in the three settings, except in the amount of damage you receive, so it’s all pretty much the same no matter which one you pick. The settings should have been labeled: “Die occasionally before you learn the dodge timing,” “maybe die before you learn the dodge timing,” and “die a frick-ton before you learn the dodge timing.”

Pick easy? You have to slog through combat for what feels like hours even though there’s little chance of dying. “Story” my butt. It’s “still mostly combat” difficulty, to be sure. Don’t let the advertisers fool you.

Pick hard? It will still take hours because you’re going to die several times when you encounter new enemies because it’s impossible to visually react to a new enemy’s attacks when you’ve never had a chance to study and practice their timing (which essentially means learning which parts of their attacks to ignore). So now, the hours of wasted time will be extended because of running back to the combat encounter and starting over again.

Pick normal? It’s not much different from Hard, to be honest, except you can survive three or four hits instead of one or two. But you’ll still die sometimes, and boss fights are exponentially harder and deadlier than trash mobs until you figure out when to dodge.

But if you start on Hard and switch down to Normal, it feels very easy and you end up feeling that endless chore of combat again. No matter which difficulty level you pick, the game feels extremely easy once you internalize when to dodge, even on Hard. Replaying any portion of the game on Hard feels like ez-mode. It’s only “hard” the first time you encounter a boss or enemy.

Regardless of which difficulty you play on, there’s no reward or achievement for any of them. You’re just picking the least bad option, which, for me, initially meant Hard. At least there’s a small sense of accomplishment or relief from slogging through an hour-long fight, not just a crushing sense of boredom from meaninglessly clicking the same buttons repeatedly for an hour.

Lately I’ve switched back to Story, where I can spec all my points into attack power to try to shorten the fights a little bit.

Overall it reminds me a lot of the pre-remastered Mass Effect 1 or The Witcher 1… the parts in-between the cut scenes was a chore to get through.

This is exactly what I was afraid of when I got this game, but I was fooled into thinking it would be okay after seeing the first 5-10 hours. So, so many games would be a thousand times better if they ended at or before 10 hours.

Anyway I’ve rage quit Clair Obscur so many times now and slunk back to it later, realizing I was overreacting and just wasn’t in the right mood. When I start getting impatient to progress through the game (to see the story play out), I start getting mad when the game throws up all these arbitrary and unfair and un-fun road blocks that can’t be surmounted without time-consuming repetition.

To make matters worse, the story took a turn starting in Act 2 that I wasn’t too fond of, so my interest has dwindled. They shifted the focus to characters I couldn’t care less about for inexplicable reasons.

The point is I’m not super anxious to continue playing it right now.

Elden Ring: Nightrein

I tried Elden Ring: Nightrein for a little over an hour on the 29th and 30th, up through the obligatory mandatory death, the new Roundtable Hold, and a couple of failed expeditions. My hot take is that it’s sort of like Monster Hunter World in the Elden Ring universe. You can play it offline solo but it’s pretty clearly designed for 3-player co-op, so I don’t know if I’ll play it much.

There are significant changes in mechanics from Elden Ring that I don’t particularly like. Steam reviews are already Mixed, typical of the overly-cynical game community, but it seems fine to me, if you like fighting stuff using the basic Elden Ring combat mechanics (which is pretty good). But it’s not Dark Souls or Elden Ring. I feel very little compulsion to keep playing it, except there’s nothing else to play right now.

Media Production

I don’t see how a playthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would make a good video series, so I don’t even think I’m going to upload my videos. Unless I spend a bunch of time trying to make an abridged series just to document all the ups and downs of playing the game. But then, I should make a backup of the videos to YouTube. It just sucks to upload something I know isn’t very good. I get really mad and rant at the lunacy of the game design fairly frequently, and I don’t like uploading that stuff.

People get really touchy when you criticize things that seem obvious to you, but everybody else only sees it as haters being haters. Also sometimes you have a bad day and gaming problems excessively rub you the wrong way, which has happened a bunch with Clair Obscur. Literally every time I see an enemy pull a spear back and just frickin’ stop there it makes me want to flip a table.

Anyway in light of the lung thing, I can’t really talk very much without descending into coughing, which isn’t very conducive to making videos. I’ve tried to hide it the last couple of months with judicious use of a mute button, but the coughing comes on so suddenly now that I can’t reach the mute fast enough any more. So, probably not going to be recording much more.

Media Consumption

Question: Is Andor the new The Wire or Breaking Bad? That one show everybody is like “you’ve got to watch this!” but they gush so much about it that you don’t want to go anywhere near it? I watched like 10-15 minutes of the first episode of season 1 last year and felt no desire to continue watching it.

Anyway I don’t have Disney+ so I’m not watching it. Everything I watched on Disney+ last year immediately disappeared and I have no memory of any of it. Which, to be fair, is what happened to me with The Wire, too, a show I watched every episode of and loved but could not tell you a single thing about it now. I think there were some disgruntled cops in it.

The Last Of Us season 2 (Max). The second season is now over, but the The Last of Us Part II is only half over. I think they’re getting the “essence” of the game’s story right, in particular the whole purpose of this first part being to train us that Ellie isn’t a hero and isn’t particularly bright. I distinctly remember thinking Game-Ellie was an idiot most of the time in Part II, and I remember wishing for her to make good choices but she almost never did, until the very end of the game. Anyway 99% of the online community discussion is nonsense, but I too think Bella Ramsey is the weakest link in the show. I’m looking forward to season 3, because I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but Abby’s story is far superior to Ellie’s story in Part II. There is a lot of hate for season 2 online, just as there was for the second game. Most of it is laughable. A lot of it boils down to “it’s not a shot-for-shot remake of the game and why did they have to change it because it was perfect and we hate change.” I’d opine that it should have been left as a game but otherwise it wouldn’t have reached a wider audience.

American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden (Netflix). The most comprehensive documentary I’ve seen of that whole thing. A lot of people would be appalled by CIA military-types like Cofer Black, and I certainly wouldn’t want to have a Thanksgiving dinner with him, but I find them pretty funny and I also find it somewhat comforting to know they exist, as long as they’re on my side.

The Studio (AppleTV via. Prime). It’s not that great but it’s kind of funny. The main thing I watch it for is the clever one-take camera work. I’m always watching the background of the shot to see when they switch the stunt doubles in and out, instead of whoever’s talking in the foreground.

Nosferatu (2024) (Amazon rental). I know little of the history of the silent film except that it was caught out as an unlicensed theft of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and still somehow birthed the horror genre. The new one is pretty good quality cinema. Expect a lot of creepy gothic music, period costumes, sets, and cinematography, slow pans, pushes, and pulls that test your television’s frame-rate conversion capabilities, black and gray palettes, rubbery prosthetics that remind you of ET, and over-the-top Victorian and Transylvanian accents. And rats. Lots and lots of rats. Also, cats that you expect to be Chekhov’s Cats but aren’t. The basic OG vampire stuff. Back to the basics. It’s the kind of rare old school movie that looks like it was made more for the director than the audience.

Mickey 17 (Max). Pretty funny and imaginative. Goes to a very different place than I expected. But I have a minor problem with movies that portray their villains as comically sociopathic and stupid.

American Sniper (Netflix). Because it was leaving soon. Not bad, though I was extremely distracted while watching it.

Fountain of Youth (Prime). Formulaic treasure hunt stuff starring Natalie Portman and John Krazinski, two people you would never expect to lead a Davinci Code-style movie like this, and who, in fact, aren’t believable in the slightest. Not funny, not interesting, not good acting or writing or directing, but successfully passes the time.

Something Something Tylenol Murders (Netflix). I didn’t realize that was still an open case. Lots of speculation about a Big Pharma cover-up but that feels pretty conspiratorial to me, fueled more by confirmation bias than any real evidence.

The Guilty (2021) (Netflix). Bold move to make a whole movie about Jake Gyllenhaal sitting at a computer, talking on the phone. You know where most of the budget for the movie went. Anyway it wasn’t terrible, and I was fairly invested in it. Would like to see the original version someday.

Flight Risk (Starz trial). What a pickle! Adequate thriller. Predicable at every turn, but not the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

Probably others that I’ve already forgotten. In the latter days of May I’ve been watching a lot of stuff because it’s the only way to keep my brain from spinning out of control while I can do nothing but wait for further medical results.

I get served a lot of history-related YouTube videos now, and sometimes I click on things that look interesting. I have to say there’s something infinitely funny about some Gen-Z or Millennial nerd cosplaying in Army fatigues talking about World War 2 tanks like he’s writing a Reddit comment. It’s funny as hell to see people nerding out about guns and war in a way that previously only would have been seen with people talking about something like Star Wars or anime.

Home Life

Flat Tire Saga

Prior to all the medical stuff, I discovered the front right tire on my car was fully flat, a big fat 0 psi. Luckily I realized this before I’d left my subdivision, when I noticed an odd noise from the right side of the car, and didn’t drive all the way to the store and back on a rim.

I had to replace it with the spare donut tire in the trunk. I also had to learn what a “tire key” or “wheel lock” was, something I don’t think I’d ever dealt with before, at least not on this car (a 2009 Honda Accord). It’s the kind of thing you learn about once every 15 years and then promptly forget again. One of the lug nuts requires a “key” in order to dissuade people from stealing your tires, a possibility I’ve never once considered, since, as far as I know, I don’t live within the borders of any criminal chop shop enterprises. I don’t remember asking for them on this car, but it’s probably one of those things they throw in along with 50 other things nobody wants in a package deal.

At least now I know, in any future new car purchases, not to get wheel locks if I can help it, because yeesh what a pain in the butt finding that key was. First I had to take a picture of the wheel and the lug nuts and upload it to ChatGPT to even find out how to remove the keyed lug nut, then I had to commence an extensive search of the interior of the car for the hidden dashboard compartment where the lug nut key had been resting untouched for some 16 years since I bought the car.

The cause of the flat was a very obvious roofing nail. ChatGPT informed me, after I took a picture of it and uploaded it, that it was in a location close enough to the “shoulder” of the tire, that it would likely prevent the tire from being repaired, and it would have to be replaced. Which, as it turned out, was correct.

The spare donut tire was also fully flat when I pulled it out of the trunk, by the way, so I’m really glad I wasn’t on the side of the road somewhere changing the tire, because the spare would have been completely useless. (Luckily, I’ve never had to change a tire out on the road somewhere.) A lesson for other car-owners, I suppose… check that your spare tire is actually inflated now and then.

I was able to inflate the tire with a Cycplus tire inflator that I bought some years ago, a handheld battery-powered device made mostly for inflating bike tires but also happens to work on car tires (and riding mower tires). I bought it because I got sick of trying to find places out and about in the world, at gas stations mostly, to inflate tires. A lot of them are coin-operated, and I don’t know about anyone else, but I almost never have coins (or any other form of cash) on me.

So an appointment with the dealership I made. Which, speaking of AI, the appointment was made by talking to an AI agent on the phone on a weekend. Or possibly the most computer-sounding human ever. I think it’s the first time I’ve interacted with the new Agentic AI that is taking the business world by storm, replacing customer service people with AI agents. This will free up huge swathes of young people to keep pursuing their dreams of becoming TikTok influencers so it should be a win-win for everyone, unless Republicans have their way and young people have to start putting screws into iPhones for minimum wage. Neither option sounds like a great career path for young people, if you ask me.

I haven’t lost my tire-changing skills. I was able to drive to the grocery store and back once on the spare donut without incident, and then to the dealership repair appointment later in the week.

Anyway I got the flat tire fixed at the dealership, which gave me a fun opportunity to sit in a waiting room for over an hour listening to a podcast. It felt weird to wear earbuds in public. I only used the left one so I could still hear the room around me. They replaced both front tires and did an alignment. Still need to get an inspection and get the alternator checked out.

Although in light of the lung issue above, that all might be a moot point.

Day Job

I have to admit, receiving distressing medical news does not put one into a good mindset for going to work normally, and definitely doesn’t put one in a good mindset for concentrating on abstract programming work. Especially when one has a splitting headache every day. I’m going to need to talk to my supervisors about this and will probably need extended time off. I just don’t know when.

World Context

So Joe Biden has prostate cancer, and Jake Tapper wrote a book about how everybody tried to cover up his decline for the election. My response is a resounding noooo duuuuuuuuuuh. That’s your bombshell report? How dumb do you think we are? We can all just read the Wikipedia page about FDR’s last term, it doesn’t take a TV investigative journalist to figure out they were trying to do the same thing.
How’s that Panama invasion going?
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
George Wendt (actor), Loretta Swit (actor).

Bye!