The Recluse Report - October 2025 Part 2
1,113 words.
Happy pagan or saints whatever, commercialized cosplay sales bonanza, and/or diabetes and tooth decay appreciation day.
Gaming
I heard Amazon is shuttering New World and leaving the MMO business. I seem to recall from the very beginning, I thought New World was nothing more than a test bed for Amazon’s game platform technology, so I can only imagine they’ve finally done enough testing that they can now justify focusing on the much more lucrative business of building game engines while jettisoning the time-and-resource-consuming customer-facing nonsense. Everyone in the software industry knows that serving customers is the absolute worst part of the process. Anyway, look for “Powered by Amazon Lumberyard” or whatever coming to a game near you. If, you know, anyone ever makes an MMORPG ever again. At this point I doubt anyone in the industry even remembers what an MMORPG is.
I continue to shuffle slowly through Ghost of Yotei and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on the PS5 from time to time.
I also grabbed a few more free or discounted titles from my mostly-wasted PlayStation Plus subscription, such as the ever-popular Goat Simulator 3, a game I previously avoided because of the mere fact of its title, but which is actually kind of fun. You know, when it’s free.
Others from the PlayStation Plus parade of play-an-hour-then-abandon games include Skyrim, Medieval Dynasty, V Rising, and Overpass.
A surprising find, however, was a PS5 game called Cocoon, which is a fun, simple, and innovative puzzle-solving sort of game. It’s always a treat to find a game that doesn’t hold your hand, but still teaches you how to play through cleverly-designed gameplay. These sorts of finds are like, what, 1 in a 1000 games now? Maybe?
I tried Battlefield 6 on Steam but after I saw that, as with most every military shooter since the beginning, the enemies are about 5 pixels tall and blend entirely into the background, I saw no reason to continue. I returned it having not even finished the first mission and not trying multiplayer. Maybe I’ll get it again after I have my cataract surgery at the end of November (and after the one month waiting period to get new glasses).
I also finally tried Path of Exile 2 but it’s exactly what I expected it to be… a standard ARPG that I’ve played a thousand times before and don’t need in my life any more. Granted, the tiny characters on the screen were excruciatingly finely detailed. But I returned it.
I reinstalled No Man’s Sky for a while and played with a Survival game or two. It’s a fun game for keeping the hands busy while you’re watching football. God forbid we should ever again have to endure the mental trauma of sitting quietly while watching a television program. I swear I’m not naturally ADD but modern technology has somehow forced it into me as a learned skill.
But my “main game”* right now, if you can call it that, is The Outer Worlds. I saw that The Outer Worlds 2 is coming soon, which reminded me that I never really played the first one, so I re-installed it. It’s cute, though I find the comedy a bit try-hard at times. But it’s fun. Very Fallout 4.
* “Main game” status is subject to change at any moment.
Media Production
In trying to record The Outer Worlds I identified a number of deficiencies in my newly-revised recording setup, which consists of my gaming PC and a secondary recording PC.
Something that continually baffles me is how flippity-flopping hard it is to split the audio from a game so that you can both hear it and also send it to a second PC to record it. It’s a stupefyingly easy concept, both in analog and digital formats, that is nearly impossible to manage on your average out-of-the-box PC.
In my previous recording setup, I was only able to do this by enabling monitoring for the game audio in OBS. So essentially I was listening to the game on the secondary PC, not the gaming PC. It works great, except for some noticeable delay in the time between you see something happen on your game screen and the time you hear it in your ear buds. For many games, it’s not a problem. Start to venture into the realm of fast-paced shooters, though, and it gets annoying.
For the newer recording setup, I wanted a way to split the audio so I could send the game sound to the recording PC and also to my mixer where I could listen in headphones.
The first thing I tried was the venerable VoiceMeeter Banana product from the dinosaur days, which somehow still works on Windows 11. It gives you a virtual audio channel which you can route to multiple hardware destinations. A perfect solution! Except for the audio buffering, which renders it essentially useless for gaming.
After that I had no choice but to start hanging audio interfaces off of both the gaming PC and the recording PC. Using a Focusrite Scarlett on the gaming PC, I can output sound to my mixer and also to the inputs of another Focusrite Scarlett on the recording PC. A bit of an old school analog solution, and I also have to buy a number of TRS 1/4" cables to minimize noise.
And after all of that I still have a new problem I haven’t solved, which is how to overdub on an existing recording using the same microphone as when I’m recording live. I was able to do this easily on my old setup, but it’s turned into a thorny problem in the new setup for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet.
Media Consumption
Solar Opposites. I somehow stumbled upon this obvious spin-off of Rick & Morty. It’s … a lot like Rick & Morty, in the sense that it’s pretty much non-stop random chaos for 22 minutes an episode. But hey, it’s new to me.
Otherwise it’s mainly been NFL football games on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday.
Cancer Corner
No new developments. Cancer progress remains thwarted in body and brain, as of the last scans. My oncologist is optimistic for a good prognosis, though realistically that scenario unfortunately falls a bit short of completely eradicating the cancer and living forever.
It is known that cancer eventually develops resistance to treatments, and treatments need to be rotated to remain effective. So while everything’s good right now, anything could change at any time, depending on what the cancer decides to do.
For the moment, I feel pretty good, better than I have in a while. I’m even slowly clawing some weight back on.
Bye!
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