CRPGs, Uploads, and Teeth - December 2025 Part 1

15 December, 2025. 1,782 words.

For the very first time in my life, I both have a garage and also cleaned out the garage enough that I can pull my car into it so it doesn’t get snow and ice on it over the weekend.

It’s not usually full-on winter here until January but it sure has been cold this December so far. It reminds me that my house has sub-standard heating and I hate every second of winter time, always huddled in six layers of clothing, hats, and coats and wanting to go to sleep when it’s dark at 5 pm every day. Not to mention a fun little lifelong condition I’ve had called plantar hyperhidrosis which means my feet are freezing cold blocks of ice because they’re sweating all the time.

Gaming

I’ve started a new project to load up in-progress RPG games and continue playing them. I tend to do this a lot near Christmas and January, for some reason.

Pillars of Eternity, White March DLC Part 2. I’ve done almost everything in Pillars of Eternity, except the White March Part 2 DLC, so I started it. They also added a turn-based combat beta feature, which is pretty cool. I greatly prefer turn-based tactical combat over the “Infinity Engine” realtime combat style that the original Baldur’s Gate forced onto us for all those years.

Disco Elysium. I resumed the game toward the end of Day 2. I have no idea how else to measure my progress in that game. It’s more of an adventure game than a tactical RPG, but I like it, because I don’t have to talk as much, and the writing is deeply fascinating. I’m trying to be a Communist and take drugs.

Divinity: Original Sin. Continuing with my characters at level 4 near the Desolated Farms outside Cyseal. I originally played D:OS in 2017, and defeated two bosses before I stopped, but I either didn’t record it or more likely lost the videos, so I restarted a new game in 2023. This game is hard. Punishingly hard on the Classic difficulty. Case in point, I ran into some undead and my party died.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Last time I played (in 2023 or 2024), I was stuck at the end of Chapter 2, wondering how to progress the game. But I finally managed to stumble through enough events in the Kingdom Management screen to unlock the way to Chapter 3, the Season of the Bloom.

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader. When last I left off, I was just starting off in Chapter 1, working on the Secrets of Navis Nobilite quest, ready to take a recently-fixed elevator up to rescue Lady Cassia. If you like your tactical RPGs with calculus-level math and statistics during combat, Warhammer 40k might be for you.

Admittedly, I’ve been extremely lax in my project so far because, as mentioned above, I typically prefer to huddle under blankets and watch television rather than sit at a desk playing PC games in the evenings.

Media Production

New Uploads

I’ve started another video uploading project. This time I found roughly 150 old RPG videos going back to 2021 of various in-progress RPGs like Pillars of Eternity DLC, Wasteland 2, Solasta DLC, Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition, Disco Elysium, Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition, Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader. And many others.

The common theme of all those videos is I have to read a lot of text out loud, so there’s a lot of “role-playing,” if you will. They’re among my favorite kinds of videos to make, but also the most creatively draining to make.

Failed Mixer

My Mackie mixer seems to have failed in a very annoying way… it still mostly works, but the headphone output somehow is stuck in mono. It’s annoying because that’s where I monitor games when I’m recording. I had to do some reconfiguring to hear stereo game sound in my ear buds again.

So now I’m left wondering if I need to buy a new mixer, or maybe try to rebuild my recording setup without a mixer. I use an old school outboard compressor on a compact mixer to improve the sound of my microphone, but I can probably do something similar directly within OBS. Similar enough, at least. It would simplify my setup to remove the mixer, but it would also be less flexible.

That’s two compact Mackie mixers I’ve had fail. Mackie used to be a reliable brand. Now it seems to be consumer-level plastic junk. I don’t think I’m going to buy any more of them. Maybe I’ll try a Yamaha mixer.

Media Consumption

Pluribus (AppleTV via. Amazon). Seriously, though, what is this show? Comedy or horror? Is it some kind of deep psychological experiment? I haven’t figured out the metaphor yet. Is it about loneliness? Stubbornness? Scientology? Xenophobia? It’s obviously not a science fiction show about alien DNA, because the science of it is nonsense. Anyway there’s still something compelling about it and it’s still a very well-made show. Very visually interesting. Just super slow in the plot development department.

Homeland (Disney+). I think the picture’s a little better on Disney+ than Netflix? Maybe it’s 4K instead of 1080. Anyway one of the episodes on Netflix was distorted and unwatchable so I switched. Unfortunately I lost interest during season 5. It went to the same well quite a lot.

The Mighty Nein (Amazon). We get it already! You like anime! Anyway they somehow managed to make the second campaign, which I thought started out fairly good, kind of dull. The extended runtime really drags down the energy. I wonder if Nott’s voice sounds different because of the throat thing Sam Riegel went through. I kind of lost interest after 3 episodes.

Let It Be (Disney+). The original movie about the making of The Beatles’ Let It Be album, which apparently hasn’t been available for 50 years. I’d always heard Yoko was around a lot but yeesh, I didn’t realize that meant she was literally sitting next to John all day every day. The legend of “the rooftop concert,” which everyone my age and above should know as well as they know the moon landing. I’ve always thought Paul McCartney was an underrated prodigy-level musician and singer, and this film proves it. He was on a different level from the others.

Get Back (Disney+). Peter Jackson’s extended remix of the Let It Be film footage. What an absolutely priceless treasure for music historians. The music industry sure has changed a lot. I can’t even imagine a similar documentary about any current pop acts. Like what would a documentary about the making of the last Taylor Swift album look like? There would barely be any music in it. It’d all be about marketing, ticket price scandals, dance rehearsals, and a lot of DAW screens and plugins. (Ha.. there is a new documentary about Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.)

Napoleon (forgot). Ridley Scott’s epic about Napoleon, somebody I actually don’t know much about. And after watching this movie, I still don’t. Partly because the movie is incredibly long and boring. It does a great job of stultifying what could be a fascinating story. Also, the subject matter is so vast that they end up fast-forwarding through all the major events. Is he a hero or a villain? I don’t know what the movie thinks or what history thinks or what I think.

Taskmaster Australia Season 4 (YouTube and TVNZ+). I still like the Australian and New Zealand versions of the show better than the original. I started out watching this season when they came out on YouTube but I got impatient and went to the VPN and TVNZ+ for the rest of the episodes.

I think I’m supposed to be excited about the new season of Stranger Things but I genuinely can’t remember anything that happened in seasons 2, 3, or 4. In fact, I don’t think I ever finished watching season 4. The first season was great, the second season was okay, but 3 and 4 wasn’t worth retaining a single memory from, so I can’t say I’m dying to see season 5 of Random 80s Stephen King Nostalgia Show. The fact that every commercial seems to have some kind of Stranger Things tie-in makes me even less interested in watching it.

Cancer Corner

I had a minor return of skin rashes on the chest after the last round of chemotherapy, and I had a bit of a problem with two sore toenails, both of which are known side effects of treatments. Otherwise I feel fine and no news is good news with cancer.

As this post is publishing, I’m awaiting the results of a CT scan to check progress. I have a disc of the scans and looked at the pictures myself, but obviously I can’t make heads or tails of it. [Update: The results are stable, no new cancer progression.]

While watching NFL football this year, I sometimes see a commercial saying that even former smokers who quit years ago should get routine screenings to check for lung cancer. What I wish they’d say is that everyone should get routine screenings for lung cancer, because you don’t actually have to smoke to get it. But they actually recommend against lung cancer screening for people who never smoked, because supposedly the risks of a false positive outweigh the benefits. Sigh.

Teeth Extraction

In a tangentially related story, I’m having two back teeth extracted. When you have some small spots of cancer in various bone parts like I do (two vertebrae and a femur neck), they want to put you on a bone strengthener drug, which is apparently great for bones with cancer. As yet I’ve felt no symptoms from the bone spots, but the goal is to keep me from ever feeling symptoms.

However, bone strengtheners are hated by dentists, because it can cause infection complications in the jaw bone, or something like that. So my oncologist wants me to finish all my dental work before they put me on this bone strengthener.

That means no more “trying to save a tooth” with complicated and time-consuming root canals and crowns and stuff, which they tell me may or may not work in my case, and might only last a few years anyway. It means yanking the two teeth out and being done with it, and not being able to chew on the left side anymore.

Which, honestly, isn’t that big of a deal, since I haven’t been able to chew on my left side for years now anyway.

They can make an “appliance” for me, but I assume I won’t be chewing any steak with it.

Bye!