The Recluse Report - June 2025 Part 1

16 June, 2025. 521 words.

Just a short update. I’m still here. I have more information about the lung tumor I mentioned last time. It’s been a tsunami of information and activity quite frankly. Most of the news I’ve received is not especially good, so I’ll spare you the gory details, but at a minimum I will say it’s been confirmed to be cancerous.

I was in the hospital June 3 - June 9 having–I can’t believe I’m saying this–brain surgery. It went well, and I’m back home now, awaiting further test results. I have more (outpatient) procedures scheduled next week, and there will likely be a litany of outpatient treatments after that, depending on how test results come back.

I’m fully overwhelmed with all the new information and how to process it all. It feels like my old life is over and a new life has begun, without any consent from me.

I’m being purposely vague because if I write it out in full detail, it sounds scary and like I’m at death’s door, though luckily I don’t particularly feel that way. I actually feel better today than any time in the last month or so.

So, positive steps are being taken, it’s just a maddeningly slow process of hurry-up-and-wait. I have been lucky to get the process moving fairly quickly though. But I’m only on step one of about five hundred.

Needless to say, my gaming and writing and most everything has dropped off to nothing. Most of my focus is day-to-day, eating decent meals, getting enough rest, staying hydrated, basic stuff like that.

I tried Nightreign some weeks back but it didn’t really click with me for solo play.

I’ve been watching Andor seasons 1 and 2, and I think I’m almost at the end of the second season now. Everyone is correct, it’s a very good show (except they tend to throw away the first two or three episodes of each season with a meaningless prologue), but is it good Star Wars? There’s the real question.

I have much the same feeling I had when I watched Rogue One: It’s a great movie, but it would have been better without the Star Wars IP getting in the way. I rarely see things like “Yavin Base” and jump up excitedly shouting “hey that’s from the other thing!” I only think, “Oh okay, that doesn’t matter at all to the story, whatever.” Anyway, your mileage may vary.

I also started watching For All Mankind on AppleTV via. Amazon Prime subscription. It’s a really good show, however it’s less of an alternate history science fiction and more of an alternate history socioeconomic study.

Which is fine, it’s just that I don’t know who it’s for. I often wonder that. Who is honestly still out there looking at a show like this and learning for the first time, “Oh wait, you mean women can be astronauts?” No, trolls on Twitter don’t count.

Anyway it’s a really good show. Every episode is like Apollo 13 where there’s building dramatic music by the end that makes you cheer for human ingenuity and triumphing over adversity.

That’s it, bye!

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