The Recluse Report - August 2025 Part 2

18 August, 2025. 2,498 words.

Congratulations Blaugustians! Holy crap, 168 participants?!? That’s nuts. Sadly I haven’t been keeping track of anything in the Discord or the posts.

Health Update

I have some good health news to share for a change.

I got the results of my first post-treatment CT scan and I can report positive progress in the molecular battle against my overzealous cancer cells.

After two and a half months of various treatments, here is the score card: 1 brain tumor was physically removed in early June. The surrounding tumor bed and 2 additional brain tumors were zapped with radiation in late June (via. something called Gamma Knife). 1 bone metastases in the left femur neck (hip) was zapped with radiation as part of a trial study in early August.

And now, the new CT scan shows that the 1 large tumor in the right lung, presumably the root cause of everything, has shrunk by almost half its volume after the chemotherapy started in July. (It’s still pretty big, it’s just significantly smaller.) Several smaller spots of metastases in the lungs have also shrunk and/or disappeared from the scan.

That means the treatments are working.

Which is pretty good news, if you ask me.

I’m editorializing here with no medical training, but this feels like especially good news, because I was told this combination of pills and chemotherapy is only effective for a maximum of two years before the cancer cells adapt to it. So these results after only a month and a half still gives me another 22 months to work with.

Basically everything has improved EXCEPT… one area of metastases in the T5 vertebrae has grown a bit. I don’t feel any pain or symptoms from it, at least not that I’m aware of. It’s concerning but not that concerning, according to my oncologist. They’ll keep an eye on it. I’ll have another CT scan near the end of September.

In short, this is the best news I’ve heard since I heard that I qualified for the daily EGFR pills. This is the first time I’ve had scientific confirmation that all this work is actually doing something.

I’m by no means out of the woods, and treatments will continue for the foreseeable future, and a “curative” outcome (as they say in the hospital biz, meaning eradicating every cancer cell completely) is still unlikely, but I feel some confidence now that I could end up in the portion of lung cancer patients that have better outcomes than not, which is about as good as it can get.

As a point of comparison, at one point, I was told if I had done no treatments I might not have lived another six months.

Anyway, physically I feel okay and remain able to work and function independently, within certain limits. I’m not running any marathons, for example, but I can go to the store and handle all of the basic necessities. I’m even coughing less, so I may actually be able to make a return to game videos someday.

From the outside, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell anything’s wrong with me. The biggest visible change is I’ve lost 10-15 pounds since last year, and I have some mild rashy spots here and there from the drugs. Also, I just buzzed all my hair off so I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Gaming

Gaming notes written earlier on my phone while getting pumped full of chemotherapy drugs for the third time:

I think I mentioned I was going to try Balatro on my phone a while back. I did, and its pretty fun and engaging. However it’s not a long term kind of game for me. After a while, you start to understand the patterns and it turns into a game of trying to get bigger scores, which isn’t really my thing. But its definitely a good little game and I understand why it’s so popular.

I fell off of playing Death Stranding 2. I got through the first boss fight and remembered how annoying the boss fights were (it always feels like you’re playing with one arm tied behind your back while wading hip deep through molasses). With no compelling story hooks (yet?) I don’t feel much incentive to continue. The magic of experiencing the first game for the first time is long gone.

While I was getting Death Stranding 2, I saw the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster on the PS5 store for around $5, so I got that as well. I’ve only played a little bit, though. It’s quite a lot like the original, which I already played. Everybody says 2 is the best one of the series but I always thought 1 had a much stronger story, even if the gameplay was weaker.

I’ve missed a lot of the gaming zeitgeist over the last several months, but I saw some mentions of Funcom’s new Dune game. It never occurred to me to try it, because I assumed it was a re-skin of Conan Exiles, a game I enjoyed (solo) when it first came out in early access, but grew tired of as I became able to build enough gear to go wherever I wanted. So I assumed Dune: Awakening would follow the same progression. (The same progression as most survival-type games based off of the ARK model, honestly.) Maybe I’m wrong. What would it hurt to try it? Solo, of course.

What else? I haven’t played any more Nightreign, which was the last pre-cancer game I remember getting. Its just not very solo-friendly unless you like a lot of repetitive work, and the rogue-like elements aren’t that fun for me.

What should I play next? I think there were some other games I was looking forward to this year. Pathologic 3 is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, and Solasta II, but I fear that might not arrive until 2026.

Otherwise I have an assortment of partially-finished CRPGs I can return to. And I have a bit of a hankering to go back to Roll20 and find a virtual tabletop campaign to join. I’m tempted to find a paid game in the hope it would encourage everyone to take it more seriously, but I see a lot of mixed reviews about paid games, so I feel like it would do little to reduce the complete random chaos of finding a decent group.

Here ends the phone notes.

Dune: Awakening

I did, in fact, try Dune: Awakening. It’s exactly what I thought it would be. I rented a private server, played the tutorial up to the point where you’re supposed to use some kind of tool to zap a rock that’s blocking the entrance to a ship, spent five minutes trying to figure out how to do that with no instructions, got frustrated and annoyed, then quit.

I played a grand total of 40 minutes. Maybe I’ll go back someday but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The sad future of what passes for MMORPGs these days still looks pretty bleak to me.

Solo TTRPG Play

A random side rant.

I see this floating about in the ether now and then: Play D&D without a Dungeon Master! Simulate Dungeon Master decisions so you, the solo player, can play without finding someone to do all the hard work!

For example, I saw Jeremai doing a series along these lines.

But these solo RPG endeavors are always wrong. Wrong, wrong, and more wrong. They’re basically choose-your-own-adventure books.

What I want to do is play solo D&D without the players. I want to be the Dungeon Master, and simulate the player actions and decisions. I want to do the hard part. The fun part. The creative semi-improvisational storytelling part. The exact opposite of what everyone else wants to do, apparently.

It’s frustrating. Every time I see a “solo TTRPG” thing, I have a brief moment of hope, but it’s always the wrong way around. Why is everyone always wrong about everything?

TTRPG Campaign Creation

I saw Scopique talking about making a The Secret World TTRPG adventure, which reminded me about my own fantasy campaign setting I’ve been dabbling with for a year or so.

I assume this is a thing that basically everyone of a certain age–us people who memorized every page of the original, antique TSR D&D books as a kid–does out of regular habit. It’s a holdover from back in the days when the most fun part of D&D was creating your own worlds and maps to play in.

Anyway I got out Obsidian recently and started plunking away at my sandbox world full of quest hooks again. Obsidian is quite well suited to creating a campaign setting, if you didn’t know. I’d like to see better export options, though. I sprung for the Sync subscription so I could work on it from my MacBook, my Android phone, or my Windows desktop, wherever I happen to be sitting at the time I think of something. It’s cool stuff.

I also sprung for an Inkarnate subscription so I could play around with making some maps. It’s not as fun as drawing on a piece of paper, though. Someday I need to figure out how to use handheld drawing implements again.

I kind of want to make it a fairly system-agnostic campaign setting, one that should work with D&D 5e, or 2024, or 3.5, or 1e, or especially one of the new-fangled OSR offerings like DCC or Shadowdark. That’s my goal, anyway. There’s no magic to it, it basically just means trying to keep the worldbuilding elements separated from the stat blocks.

The key to homebrewing a campaign setting is not overthinking things and getting too far into the weeds. There’s no point in spending days fleshing out the deep, dark backstory of the butcher’s wife and her ties to the criminal underworld if the players never talk to her. So I’m mainly just jotting down ideas and moving on.

It’s hard, though. You really want to dive into those deep, dark backstories. It’s fun.

Anyway, the point is that I’ll be ready for that day when someone says, “Hey can you run a game for us?” Har, har. I crack myself up.

Media Consumption

Watched The Accountant 2. It was good enough to watch the whole thing but I remembered the first one more fondly. This one seemed more comedic and unnecessary.

Watched John Wick 4. The thing about John Wicks 2, 3, and 4, especially 3 and 4, is that they’re filled with really cool, unmissable, top-quality stunt work, but they’re also really, really boring to watch. Honestly the behind-the-scenes features are better than the movie itself. This is also the problem with writing fight scenes in books… they’re kind of boring to read, unless you keep them really tight and fast and skip most of the details. The fight itself is usually unimportant, the outcome is what matters to the story. That’s my philosophy anyway. I won’t ever write and haven’t ever written a fight scene where every distinct punch is described in vivid detail and they go on forever.

Watched a movie called Last Breath on, I think, Amazon Prime. I saw Woody Harrelson in the cast and figured how bad could it be. It was okay. Not terrible, not the greatest. Interesting story though.

I think I watched another movie or two but I forgot what they were.

I’ve seen the first four episodes of Alien: Earth and my general opinion is that it’s okay but nothing special. The danger of most long-running franchises is that when they start adding new stuff because they have to keep building on the original, it doesn’t really feel like the original thing anymore. I’ve never thought of immortality as a theme of interest in the Alien world.

The “on all the time in the background” media is currently the zillion seasons of The Simpsons on Disney+/Hulu, or as I call it, Guess The Guest Celebrity Voice and/or Which Character Is Tress MacNeille This Time. I’ve never been a huge Simpsons fan, so this is the first time I’ve ever re-watched any episodes since seeing them on an actual television when they came out. They’re mostly okay, usually in the realm of “nothing special but passes the time.”

During the earlier seasons of this The Simpsons rewatch, with fresh eyes, I was struck by how much I loathed Homer Simpson and his unrelenting stupidity… it fell way short of being funny. Advancing a story plot by having a character act dumber than rocks just doesn’t sit well with me. It got better, though, mostly. Anyway, if nothing else, it’s a good way to do a year-by-year review of all pop culture history since I was a teenager.

Home Life

Notes on home repairs written earlier on my phone while Carboplatin courses into my superior vena cava:

In addition to all the outpatient cancer treatments I’m getting, I’m working on some long-overdue home repair projects that have been hanging over my head and stressing me out for a long time. (By “working,” I mean “paying contractors for.”) The goal being to get all stress out of my life except cancer-related stress. [I had considerable help from a friend in getting all of this setup and running. There’s a reason it’s taken me so long to get these things done and it’s because I suck at it.]

In July, a lawn care company did a fair amount of work outside to clean up all the crazy overgrown bushes and weeds around the house, and they’ve also been taking care of the mowing since then. They also cut down, hauled away, and stump-ground several trees that were problems for various reasons. I prefer to keep trees but these were either damaged or threatening the road or just dropping tons of leaves every fall, and the company wasn’t charging very much (imo) to cut them down.

At the end of August some roofers will be installing new shingles, and repairing any damage they find in the process. There are at least three spots where water has been leaking through. [This has now been completed. They replaced one fairly large section of roof in a particularly troublesome spot.]

At the same time, a mold remediation company will be going through the attic and working to deal with mold and water damage. They’ll be tearing out insulation and chunks of ceiling from several rooms. They’ll also be disinfecting the whole house, so I’ve scheduled a couple nights at a nearby hotel which, miraculously, allows me to bring my cat. [This is also done now, and it turned out I didn’t actually need to leave my house, because they worked on only one half of the house, leaving the other half free for me and the cat.]

After that, I’ll have to find someone to repair the ceilings in affected rooms.

Ding! Carboplatin done, time to go home.

Bye!