The Recluse Report - October 2025 Part 1
1,079 words.
Well I made it to my birthday. Otherwise not much to report on the cancer front. As of the latest scans, no further progression, and some shrinkage.
Gaming
I bought Ghost of Yōtei on the PS5. If you liked the first one, you’ll surely like the second one. (I never finished the first one, though I didn’t dislike it.) It’s your basic open world game with stock standard open world game mechanics that are exactly the same in every open world game, so if you’ve played literally any Ubisoft game in the last 20 years, you’ll find it very familiar. That being said, there are a lot of cool aesthetic and cinematic choices peppered throughout. It’s a bit more button mashing than I like in sword combat, though. I prefer the far less complicated stealthy kills.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it or not but I’ve also been playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla now and then on the PS5. (Speaking of stock standard open world games.) It’s where I last left off in the Assassin’s Creed series. It’s okay, though I couldn’t care less about the story (except the modern story parts, which were always the best parts of the game for me).
It’s a sad reminder of what once was. The days where the first game (the venerable Assassin’s Creed 1) absolutely blew the doors off of what anyone thought was possible in a third person video game are long gone. I still remember being absolutely gobsmacked at how many NPCs they rendered on the screen at once and how smooth and fluid the parkour mechanics were at the time. It’s depressing that all those amazing gaming innovations are so passé now.
Media Consumption
Superman. I did finish watching the new Superman movie. Let’s just say it wasn’t for me. Never have a seen Superman portrayed as someone who must surely be the worst person in the entire world to be around. For a while, I honestly thought, that they were trying to make Lex Luthor the relatable hero of the movie, in some kind of ironic upending of the genre formula.
Critical Role Campaign 4 Episode 1. Holy wow did they start out leaning hard into a grimdark heavy plot. Usually the start of a new campaign is a celebratory time, but the first hour started out quite literally like watching a funeral. Not figuratively literally, but literally literally.
Somber music in the background, not a trace of humor, not even the vaguest hint that anyone was having the slightest bit of fun at the table. Tons of fantasy names and places that nobody understands yet, the classic too-much-lore-at-the-beginning epic fantasy problem, where you have to start skimming ahead until you can find some kind relatable character or story thread to grab onto. It’s lucky they provided a list of the player characters on their site beforehand because it’s almost impossible to pick up who anyone is just from watching the show.
It’s not unusual for a campaign to start a little awkwardly, where everyone feels the weight of the moment and everyone’s nervous and uncertain. But it seems like you could minimize that by acknowledging it as you go, instead of trying to power through it and pretend everything’s fine.
The thing that originally made Critical Role so good was that it captured the “friends at the table” vibe really well. Now it’s all show business and absolutely none of the players’ personalities are allowed at the table anymore. It just looks like such a drag to be there now, like everyone is on their best behavior auditioning constantly for their parts, and they’re terrified to drop character for even a second. You can tell how hard they’re working because when they switch to the after-show, the whole act drops instantly and everyone’s laughing and joking and having fun again. Where’s that energy during the episode??
I find it baffling that they put so much production effort into the show but they don’t cut out the very distracting and interrupting few minutes of musical chairs when people enter and leave.
And randomly, the new background is cool but I find it a bit too busy. I wish it was a little more unfocused. The players don’t stand out. Luckily I only listen to them.
Also, the new Advertisement Playhouse thing is absolutely awful. The most painfully awkward thing I’ve ever seen. Just do regular commercials.
But, you know, I’m still going to watch it (i.e. listen to it). But yeah, so far it’s not really my vibe. The Glass Cannon Network does a much better job of capturing the kind of tabletop gaming vibe I’m interested in.
Weapons (rented on Amazon). I heard this was good so I broke with tradition and rented it while it was still on the second-tier pricing ($9.99, as opposed to $19.99 or $4.99). It was good. Possibly even great. Great direction. Lots of visual storytelling.
Taskmaster (YouTube). This season cracks me up because I keep thinking, “Wait, they got Doctor Who to be on this season!” Surely I can’t be the only one thinking that Phil Ellis is the spitting image in both appearance and demeanor of the Ninth Doctor (the best one).
The Black Hole (Disney+). Yes, that old one. I heard someone reference it and I wondered if it was on Disney+ and sure enough, there it was. This is a movie that I don’t think I’d ever actually seen before, but had a vivid and complete memory of every part of it because of what ChatGPT is telling me was The Black Hole: The Illustrated Storybook, a picture book I had as a kid. It turns out the movie is absolutely awful and the picture book is the preferred way to experience the story. (I have a similar story for the animated Lord of the Rings movie, which I’ve never seen, but know every frame because of a little purple fotonovel.)
NFL 2025 Season (cable). Ongoing NFL football games in the 2025 season.
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu). Somewhere in the past couple of months I fell into watching this modern-day Murder, She Wrote. It’s not amazing but it’s fairly entertaining, in a this-reminds-me-of-my-mom-watching-CBS-primetime-in-the-80s kind of way.
Thursday Murder Club (Netflix). Speaking of retired folks solving murders, I’ve heard about Richard Osman’s book series for a million years but I finally noticed the movie on Netflix. It was pretty good. I see why it’s popular.
Bye!
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