Strays, Witchers, and the Mundane March of Cancer Care - November 2025 Part 1

17 November, 2025. 1,528 words.

Yeah, I changed the title.

Gaming

I haven’t played too many PC games lately. A bit more The Outer Worlds, but since I’m trying to record it, it’s kind of a chore to sit down and play it when I don’t particularly feel like talking. Almost every time I finally do get over the hump of deciding to launch the game and play, it’s a perfectly fine and enjoyable experience, it’s just that making that decision seems monumental when there’s so many other things to do.

Otherwise I mainly just casually tinker with PS5 games now and then, which requires no effort. I got Stray on the PS5 and played a few hours of it. I remember being so psyched to play it when it came out on the PC. Back then I played maybe an hour or less, saw immediately what the rest of the game would be like, and never touched it again. It’s much better suited for the PS5. It’s cute if you like cats, but I wouldn’t say the gameplay is deeply substantive.

I also just installed Abiotic Factor on the PS5, which seems like a rehash of Half-Life? But it’s got building mechanics? I don’t know yet. Anyway, it’s got horrible controller UI: The lazy use-the-controller-to-move-a-mouse-cursor UI, which for some inexplicable reason started to become popular some years ago.

It’s actually quite hard any more to find a game that doesn’t demand you watch a bunch of cut scenes to setup a story. On the PS5, I just want something to do while I’m listening to a football game. I can’t watch cut scenes and watch football at the same time, so big tent AAA games tend to get shunned, or else I mercilessly mash the “skip” button in whatever dialogs or movies start to play, so I can get to the unthinking gameplay part.

Case in point, I tried to replay Baldur’s Gate 3 on the PS5 but there’s just so much story and down time in between the combat encounters that it’s just not worth the effort. I wish there was a way to select combat encounters from a menu and just warp right to them. Ah well.

Media Consumption

The Witcher season 4 (Netflix). I thought the first season was brilliant (mostly because it filled in all the missing details the games never did), but the second and third seasons were terrible random nonsense that they seemed to be making up out of thin air and stretching out to the point where almost nothing happens in the entire season. I’ve since learned that the seasons are based on the books, and the first season’s superior episodic nature was simply because they were based on short stories instead of novels. Oh well.

I didn’t hate the new Witcher actor, and I didn’t hate the fourth season. Considering the season isn’t really about Geralt, the fact that it’s a different actor is hardly noticeable since he’s only grunting onscreen maybe 20% of the time.

But once again, they stretched it out to the point where almost nothing actually happens for the entire 8-episode season, in the typical Netflix style. At the end of the final episode, I was like, that was it? Geralt just walked around for a while, accomplishing nothing. Ciri ran around with the Rats, having a college freshman “finding herself” experience, and didn’t really do anything. Yen just kind of talked to sorceresses about missing portals and tried to kill Vulgarfartz (except that one time she chose not to kill Vulgarfartz when he was unconscious, presumably after seeing the thickness of his plot armor). Otherwise nothing actually happened for the entire time. Ugh.

Anyway, it was a reasonably diverting watch, it’s just that it’s pretty forgettable because, as mentioned, nothing actually happened until the very end where they did a cliffhanger for the next season. It’s all filler, no substance, just background noise, nothing to talk about around the water cooler except how angry you feel at having been cheated out of any kind of story resolution. Typical Netflix binge-watching fare.

A House of Dynamite (Netflix). I love a good nuclear post-apocalyptic story, but this one failed to convince me. I liked it up until the first time shift, then it increasingly lost plausibility for me, since I had time to think about the unfolding plot (not once, but twice, as it turned out).

The film didn’t convince me that a single nuke from an unknown source required an immediate overwhelming retaliatory strike. In the old days of the Cold War, it was understood that the retaliatory strike was a response to an overwhelming preemptive first-strike, not just one random nuke nobody could identify.

What would be the point? Nuking Chicago doesn’t in any way diminish the U.S. capability to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. The reason for the rapid retaliation before the missiles hit is that the incoming missiles are about to wipe out the U.S. capability to respond, which was definitely not the case in this movie. So the rational thing to do is wait, find out who launched the nuke, and then respond accordingly.

Anyway I kept saying “but why” at the screen a lot toward the end. Also I didn’t particularly like the time jumps or the end, because the whole reason we’re watching is to see what happens when the nuke hits, not to see the same backstory three times.

Go find HBO’s star-studded By Dawn’s Early Light if you want a better version of roughly the same cautionary nuclear tale, where a full-scale U.S. retaliatory strike makes a lot more sense.

Pluribus (AppleTV via. Amazon). I’ve only seen the first three episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new show. I’m not sure what to make of it yet. It’s very, very slow-paced. The tone ping-pongs back and forth between humor and horror. It’s not at all clear what it’s trying to say or where it’s going. Most damningly, there aren’t any compelling characters I want to root for yet. But it’s well-made.

Audiobooks

The Last Wish. The Witcher season 4 reminded me that there’s so much that isn’t explained and doesn’t make any sense in the latter seasons of the show, that I thought maybe if I got the books, things like how competent people can get stuck in the middle of a river on a ferry boat and why an unnamed queen needs to cross a bridge might seem less inexplicably random.

The audiobooks are competently narrated, which is good because the translations are heavy on the -ly adverbs. It’s a throwback to the old sword-and-sorcery genre that isn’t seen much anymore. It’s kind of like grimdark but, you know, not so grimdark.

Cancer Corner

Having cancer is kind of mundane and routine at this point. I continue to feel better, while still knowing full well that there is cancer in my body. It’s an odd paradox.

I just completed my seventh chemotherapy treatment on the 11th, which is also fairly routine now. Except you never know exactly how long the waiting time will be. I successfully navigated another round of the “bad days” where I feel queasy and exhausted (usually Thursday and Friday).

My next CT scan is December, so until then all I know is that the cancer is “not progressing.” There are only three basic states of cancer: 1) It’s not there, 2) It’s not progressing, or 3) It’s progressing.

The treatment goal in my case is to halt/reverse progression for as long as possible. So “not progressing” is a win.

I’m trying to work in some light exercises into my routine but I’m pretty bad at remembering to keep up with exercises. I have no idea how people do that.

Cataract Surgery Soon

In other medical news, by the time I post my end-of-November post, I should have completed cataract surgery on my left eye. It’s been bothering me for a couple of years, but it’s been particularly bad this year. I should have gotten it removed last year.

I’m almost functionally blind in my left eye as I’m writing this. I can’t even read the biggest letter on an eye chart with that eye. A laptop screen is just a big smudge of lights and darks. For posterity, I made an image to try to simulate what a computer screen looks like through my left eye right now.

I can tell it’s a laptop, but that’s about it. I can usually see better in most situations by closing my left eye. I’m far-sighted in my right eye (where a cataract was removed in 2018), so I effectively can’t read or see much of anything within arm’s reach without glasses.

The point is, I’ll be taking a step closer to getting back to some normal eyesight by the end of the month and I can’t wait. I feel like I’ve been living with a gauze shroud covering half my face most of this year, and I can’t wait to lift that shroud.

Random Things I’ve Noticed

Everybody on television says “welcome in” now instead of just “welcome.” What’s up with that? Why do sudden, widespread shifts in phraseology happen?

Bye!