The Recluse Report - January 2025 Part 1
1,047 words.
It’s one of those days where I wake up wide awake at 4 am, mainly due to the steroids I have to take before and after chemo infusion day. On this particular morning I notice that it’s January 15 and it’s the day I usually publish a new blog post, so I better get to writing something before the sun comes up.
And oops, I forgot to post this yesterday.
Gaming
Most of my free time this year so far has gone into playing the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion. I have no idea where all this MMORPG energy came from.
I can report that FFXIV is still the best traditional MMORPG. The combat systems are perfectly balanced between casual and hardcore, and you can engage with them at any level you choose. The story is super duper anime themed but it’s mostly engaging, if lengthy. Endwalker swings between “power of friendship” nonsense and scene-chewing cartoon villainy nonsense and then goes into really interesting historical geopolitical allegories and cultural commentary.
Media Production
As per tradition since the start of Stormblood, I’ve been recording my journey through the Main Scenario Quest of Endwalker.
Mainly this involves reading out all the unvoiced dialog and trying to give the stoic nodding characters a tiny bit of life. (One day, I wanted to go back and record A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, too.)
I bought some in-ear monitors, which is a fancy schmancy term for good ear buds, where the wire goes back over your ears instead of just hanging down for everyone to see. You see them a lot on people recording YouTube-friendly podcasts, instead of bulky headphones.
They sound amazing. They’re kind of a pain to put on. And they aren’t noise-cancelling, but they’re noise-blocking, since they fit so snugly in the ear, which means I can’t hear my cat knocking things over during recordings anymore. Or burglars. Or tornadoes. Things like that.
Noise-blocking headphones are a bit spooky. I’ve never understood how people can wear them walking around out in the world where any bad thing can happen at any moment. I personally rely heavily on my hearing to know what’s going on with my surroundings.
Media Consumption
I don’t remember watching anything lately. It’s either gaming or television, never both.
I still have a selection of Glass Cannon podcasts I listen to, and an assortment of YouTube channels I halfheartedly keep up with. I just found the Slow-Mo Guys, for example. And an amusing and mildly offensive channel commenting on NFL football called ThatsGoodSports. (I’m pretty sure all sports content is mildly offensive. But being from Gen-X, I have to admit I kind of miss mild offensiveness.)
Oh, yeah, and NFL football has just entered the playoffs leading up to the Superbowl, so I’m watching that. All my teams and picks are already out, though, so I’m fairly ambivalent about who wins now. I’m just happy the Eagles lost in the wildcard round. It’s important to always root against the Eagles in NFL football. If I can teach the world anything, it should be that.
Day Job
I haven’t mentioned my job in a while, which is mainly for two reasons: 1) It’s fallen a bit on my life priority list what with the cancer and all, and 2) It’s actually been quite boring for a while now.
I moved to a new team about six months ago and haven’t actually been doing much software development (it was right when all the medical stuff was in full swing, so kind of a lot all at once). Mostly I’ve been debugging other teams’ cloud infrastructure builds and destroys, which involves reading and diagnosing a lot of JSON and YAML and some Python, which is not really my thing.
It’s one thing to work on your own infrastructure, which is necessary to get your application to run at peak performance, but it’s quite another to work on somebody else’s infrastructure running services you couldn’t care less about. Especially when most of your job is reporting, “Yeah it’s not finished because it’s broken and somebody other than us needs to fix that, and yes I know nobody has time to fix that, so I guess our work is done here. See you next status update.”
Anyway the point is that it’s not really software development work, and it’s very slow and boring and not very engaging and not an especially fulfilling career path. Which, on one hand, was perfect during the months of trying to figure out my new health situation, because I didn’t need to spend much mental bandwidth on work. But on the other hand, now that I have more mental bandwidth it’s a bit soul-crushing.
But!
In the last sprint I had an actual software engineering work item, and it was super cool. Now that the medical stuff has settled into a routine, I can focus more on computer stuff. So I was deep in the weeds of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, but in a way that benefited my team’s service.
In as generic terms as I can think of, I was working on tests that run in a test pod against our API service pod, which is used to validate every deployment to all environments. (A requirement to pass all of leadership’s “safe change” mandates.) The hard part is establishing connectivity between the test code and the service code in all the various Kubernetes environments. There’s a local environment, an “ephemeral” environment, then the more persistent dev, stage, and production environments.
Anyway it was fun, engaging, and I learned a ton. It wasn’t easy either, because this stuff isn’t documented very well in the weird company-specific environment I work in. It’s always a challenge to learn new engineering things, and especially to learn things that will apply to any job and not just your current company’s job.
That’s one reason I tend to shy away from my company-specific AI nonsense and stick to learning e.g. OpenAI APIs.
Cancer Corner
Nothing really new to report. Things are stable. Christmas kind of sucked due to a confluence of getting two teeth pulled the week before and a chemo infusion two days before, so I lost a few pounds there, but things are back on the right track.
Bye!
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