The Recluse Report - February 2025 Part 2

1 March, 2026. 1,669 words.

I’ve given up trying to write unique titles for these posts. Thinking up a title is literally the worst part of blogging. Second only to finding images.

Gaming

World of Warcraft

I don’t know why I’m suddenly into World of Warcraft, but I don’t like it.

The problem is that questing and leveling up in WoW is pretty fun, but it goes by so fast and then it’s over. So you keep trying to chase that leveling high by doing all the other busy work in the game, and you quickly realize it’s just busy work and it’s not actually fun, but you keep trying to do the grind every day thinking maybe it’ll become fun if you just keep doing it over and over and over again, but it’s never fun, and you end up feeling sad and duped.

Anyway, for some reason I got three characters to level 80, my main Night Elf Hunter, my venerable old Gnome Mage who I keep wishing was fun to play but Mages are uniquely annoying to solo with, and a brand new Blood Elf Paladin I just created for no apparent reason except I had a bunch of level 70 boosts to burn and I’d never played a Paladin before. It’s the first time I’ve ever had more than one character at the current level cap.

In the search for interesting content to do, I realized I’d never done any of the quests to unlock the fancy schmancy race-class combinations, so I started doing those. And I’m running around looking for all the purple diamond quests that unlock stuff.

It turns out that going through the War Within Recap instead of the real campaign doesn’t unlock all the things, so I’ve been running around unlocking flight points and stuff.

I’ve been doing some Delves, which are actually pretty fun. They’re like miniature solo-or-duo dungeons. A great addition to the game that they should have added twenty years ago.

I even installed World of Warcraft on my MacBook Pro, and it runs quite well there. Why? I’ve no idea. I’m almost never going to play it on my MacBook Pro, because it’s actually a major pain to play MMORPGs on a trackpad, but it’s there just in case. I had to increase my TimeMachine backup storage space because of it.

I had intended to start playing Midnight on Saturday, February 28th, but, you know, “war were declared.” [UPDATE: Also, it turns out you don’t get early access with the cheap edition, so nevermind.]

Final Fantasy XIV

After I realized I was just wasting time grinding for nothing in World of Warcraft, I went back to Final Fantasy XIV.

So I’m continuing to march through the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest, at an average of about 25 minutes per quest. I’ve now completed over 80 of the ~100 MSQ quests, before going into the post-Endwalker patches.

I’ve completed the Elpis zone, and I’ll be honest, I don’t understand any of the lore drops going on here. It’s so complicated and full of unfamiliar names, and multiple names per person, that it’s pretty hard to keep track of it all. Is this person an Ascian, a Primal, or a Diety? Or an Ancient? Or all of those things? Or some of those things? Who even knows any more?

I can’t look it up either, because somebody will spoil something about post-Endwalker or Dawntrail. It’s not like you can click a button in wikis to say, “Only show me information as of Version X or Y.”

I have to mention the Venat solo duty. It sucked. Every combat encounter has been stupefyingly easy, and then suddenly you get run over by a raid-level boss encounter with a bazillion hit points. Whatever happened to games slowly ramping up the difficulty curve? But no, it’s apparently a flat line of casual simplicity and then a knife-like spike of craziness for one quest.

I tried it three or four times on Normal, completely sure it would end when I got her down to 50% and then she’d say something like, “Oh wow, you’re way better than I thought, let’s stop now.” But then at 50% it launches into a whole new phase of shooting down floating balls before she charges up. I didn’t get enough of them and died, and then I was like, okay screw this complete nonsense.

Next time I retried it on Very Easy and it … still wasn’t very easy, because it was still way harder than anything that had come before it, but it was easier and the final ball phase was more manageable and I survived and moved on.

I can’t imagine playing through that with any kind of magic caster class, where you can’t move. There’s so, so much dodging of AOEs and you have to run for your life constantly.

Anyway, due to all the XP bonuses I had in effect prior to level 90, my character has already reached Bard level 92. I predict I’ll be level 94 (maybe even 95) by the time I can actually start Dawntrail.

Media Production

I’m reaching the end of my huge burst of uploads of old CRPG videos, and now I can start turning to a new huge burst of uploads of MMORPGs.

In the hopper for the next upload run will be Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker videos, one per Main Scenario Quest, and World of Warcraft videos where I speedrun through Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and The War Within to catch-up from level 50 to level 80. Hint: World of Warcraft makes objectively worse video content, as it ends up looking like pew-pew arcade game nonsense with no stakes whatsoever. After twenty years they have only made minimal gains in the “telling a story” department, and they simply cannot figure out how to play a cut scene without a jarring and janky audio or video transition that cuts off part of some dialog.

Not really media-related, but kind of: I fell into a rabbit-hole of trying to get OpenAI to spell all the bizarre unpronouncable names in Final Fantasy XIV correctly when it’s transcribing my videos to summarize them (e.g. Hythlodaeus does not often transcribe to the correct spelling).

Long story short, I couldn’t figure it out (though I had a new idea tonight). The best thing I could come up with is to make a humongous list of all the ways AI will spell the names wrong, and then do a text replacement to the correct spellings. Unfortunately it’s easier to go through and proofread the description summaries.

I did find out that if I said the spelling of the bizarre names out loud when I encounter them in each video, AI will spell them correctly. So there’s a tip for anyone using AI to transcribe. But that’s pretty lame in a game video, and there are literally dozens of them in every FFXIV video.

Cancer Corner

Last time I mentioned an MRI to look at my hip after I mentioned some morning pain in the general area to my oncologist. Well, I got the test results, and they’re a little concerning.

The MRI showed three areas of “marrow replacement” which is consistent with cancer metastasis. One was the left femur neck, which I already knew about and had radiation treatment for.

But the other two spots, at the top of the right thigh bone, and in the pelvic bone, were previously unknown and did not show up on a PET scan last June.

So it’s a little concerning. Why didn’t these two new spots show up before? My oncologist is current investigating and consulting with a “tumor board,” and has ordered another PET scan.

That’s all I know at the time of this writing, and I probably won’t know much more until the end of March. Cancer diagnosis is a bit of a slow-moving process. I’m no expert, but I can see where it could indicate any number of things, ranging from not so bad to maybe more bad.

In any case, I don’t feel worse, and I have not been inundated with calls from my doctors to take immediate action, so I take that as a relatively positive indicator. The hip pain I feel in the morning feels more like an unrelated muscular issue to me, but maybe I’m self-deluding.

World Context

I watched the State of the Union address, something I don’t normally do (regardless of president), because I wanted to see it before I started seeing all the reactions to it. In politics, that’s the optimal way to maintain some independence from influency influencers.

Obviously I didn’t watch it live, that would be crazy. I went to C-SPAN the next morning and played it back on 1.5x speed.

Still, it didn’t take long before I got incredibly bored and concluded it was yet another spewage of non-stop self-indulgent bullshit. Not dissimilar to most SOTUs, but this one was obviously turned up to 11.

To fight the urge to turn it off, I went to another tab and started watching cat and dog videos on mute while I continued to listen to the SOTU in the background. I recommend it.

What did I think? Who cares? SOTUs are stupid and obsolete. I don’t need the president telling me the state of the Union. Especially this one. And Congress sure doesn’t need the president standing there lying and embarrassing the country for over an hour and a half. But it’s tradition, and we all know this administration is all about American traditions.

I am, however, baffled for the second year in a row why a single Democrat set foot in that chamber for the SOTU, the very room where rioters assaulted Congress and this president subsequently pardoned them for it.

Oh yeah, and this minor thing: The U.S. and Israel started bombing Iran again. For … reasons?? I wonder how much of Trump’s cryptocurrency profits will be used to reimburse the U.S. Treasury for the price of this war.

Bye!