The Recluse Report - March 2026 Part 1

15 March, 2026. 2,364 words.

Is spring finally here? The time changed rather unexpectedly, and winter felt like it was six years long.

Gaming

World of Warcraft

I began playing the Midnight expansion on Monday evening March 2. I was immediately annoyed.

First, a video auto-played unprovoked when you log in giving you a concise summary of The War Within. Neat. You only see it once and then never again; it’s gone forever, lost to the sands of time, never to be found on any menus. Useless.

For me recording videos of my playthrough, it was absolutely infuriating. I logged into a different character specifically to see if there would be some kind of surprise like that, because WoW likes to surprise you, and there was the surprise, but it didn’t play again when I logged into my main character while video was rolling.

Also, can we talk about how badly WoW movies are encoded? It’s like watching a blocky flip phone video from the early 2000s. Good god, people. It’s 2026.

And I say this all the time in my videos but once again I have to mention how awful WoW is at media transitions. They haven’t figured out the absolute basics of how to play a movie without the first bits getting cut off or cutting off some audio from the NPCs or even a super basic crossfade of the audio from the game to the movie. It’s just a hard jarring cut that feels like getting a cold bucket of water splashed over your head during the transition from game to movie. Maybe I’m the only one that cares about little things like presentation.

Luckily I already knew the basics of the story, having just gone through The War Within Recap on the way to getting my character caught up from level 50 to 80.

Midnight starts out almost identical to The War Within, meaning that there’s a big fight and your first quests are running around the battle killing things and helping allies. Kind of lame, but I guess you can’t mess with a winning formula.

The layout of that Parhelion Plaza location was abysmal. It felt like a lot of concentric circles and you could never get from one circle to the next without running around a huge arc that took you through a hundred mobs. There was a conspiracy to keep me from getting where I wanted to go at every turn. There was never a straight line route from A to B. And, of course, no flying. Horribly aggravating.

Anyway, all that annoyance in the first half hour aside, I got through Chapter 3 (of 17) and now I’m questioning why I ever bought this expansion because I’m weary of the WoW formula already. I mean, it’s fine, and exactly what WoW is supposed to be, but it’s just that it’s always the same, they just rearrange the names on the characters.

As of this writing I’m mostly ignoring WoW and wasting my subscription.

Final Fantasy XIV

Haven’t played Endwalker in a while, pretty much exactly where I left off last time, having just returned from Eldis in the past.

I only did a couple of Role Quests. Weird how the Role Quests do not require you to use your Role skills in the slightest, and it’s 100% story. (So far, at least. I’ve only gotten to the level 88 quest, which mostly revolves around Lord Hien and Yugiri.)

Nioh 3

I got Nioh 3 on the PS5. At first, it really annoyed me and I didn’t think I’d play much.

The usual loop went like this: Log into the game after many days of not thinking about it. Try to fight stuff. Realize I have no idea which buttons to press to do things. Die. Sigh heavily because why do developers make games with overly complicated controls. Log out.

Then I got stuck at the shrine right before the first boss Yamagata Masakage (after the unwinnable one), so every time I logged in, not remembering any buttons, I had to kill a Nioh-style frustrating boss and I just couldn’t be bothered to deal with all of this series’s boss fight nonsense.

The cardinal sin of any Souls-like game is when you aren’t allowed to make any mistakes in a boss fight, and Nioh is famous for this. Oops, minor lax in concentration or a minor lag in button input: You’re dead, start again!

But maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m supposed to grind for days to level up before fighting bosses. I was level 3 when I first encountered Yamagata, so I assumed it must be beatable at level 3 without tons of consumable buffs or extra effort.

So I tried some grinding. But it turns out there’s only one enemy to grind on near that shrine, so I killed him 3 times and leveled up to 4 before returning to Yamagata Masakage.

It seemed slightly easier, though the extra point of Constitution had little effect. It was still a tedious chore of avoiding mistakes. But I was able to finally get to the second phase, and after a few more tries after that, I finally got to the point where I could activate the Living Spirit thingy and finish him off.

Then I learned about the skill trees you can buy into to add even more skills to your buttons that you can’t remember. I got the High Stance because I remember using that a lot in Nioh, but I have no idea how to activate it. [I finally figured it out, but I’ll never remember it in a frantic combat or after coming back to the game after a week off.]

Speaking of buttons, why on earth does the bow aiming trigger sometimes when you hit L1 instead of L2?? Kind of irritating in the middle of a fight. [Note: It’s because my finger is slightly low on L1 and brushes the L2 button, which is crazy sensitive.]

Anyway, after the boss, the game expands into sort of an open world kind of thing. Currently I’m finishing up wandering around Tenryu River, overleveling as much as possible before moving on to the next area to the south.

After getting through the frustrating early parts of the game, I kind of like the non-boss parts of Nioh 3. It’s somewhat single-player MMORPG-like. I thought that about Nioh, too, before rage-quitting when I got to that ice lady boss. Sadly I lost all those videos when my NAS crashed.

So that’s where we’re at with Nioh 3.

X-Plane 12

A weird choice for me, but after watching a ton of videos about flying mishaps, I suddenly had an urge to install a flight simulator. But not, you know, the flight simulator (Microsoft Flight Simulator).

I wondered if there were any others, and I found this X-Plane thing. I haven’t played a flight simulator since Microsoft Flight Simulator in the mid-90s on a 386 or 486 PC, so I have little context for what’s “good” or “bad” in a flight simulator, but this one seems pretty good to me.

At least, I can fly out of my local airport and recognize the terrain around it. I successfully took off and landed on my first try in a single-engine prop plane, but it was a pretty rough bouncy landing. I’m mostly curious about how to program the automated piloting systems rather than manual flying, though, and that stuff is rather complex.

I’m mostly flying small single-engine prop planes, and those things bounce around in the air like a cork on water and it’s super easy to overcorrect. I’m tempted to buy a flight joystick or something (for, I think, the first time in my life) to try to make it easier but that seems self-indulgent and I don’t really have room for it on the desk anyway.

Media Production

I’m done uploading a huge backlog of videos. Next I have a new huge backlog of MMORPG videos to upload. I tend to record videos at a far higher rate than I can actually upload them, so I may have to bump my script to uploading 3 videos a night instead of 2 for a while.

The next batch is somewhat notable (to me, at least) in that, with the exception of the first 8 FFXIV videos, they were all recorded post-cancer diagnosis.

I was going to embed subtitles with this new batch, but my AI-generated subtitles aren’t quite up to the standards of YouTube’s automatic subtitles. I’m thinking of trying out AssemblyAI for audio transcriptions, because I hear it’s better than OpenAI.

Incidentally, I found a solution to spelling all the Final Fantasy XIV names correctly, and it involves creating a dictionary of all the weird spellings and then asking OpenAI to spell-check the transcriptions. It works pretty well, but it’s kind of slow.

Media Consumption

I have a varied interest in YouTube subjects. It’s probably my primary “social media” site these days, though I almost never read the comments.

Sometimes I like to watch TTRPG actual plays, sometimes I like to watch videos of kittens meeting puppies for the first time*, and sometimes I like to watch videos about horrifying stories of tragic disasters.

I stumbled on a YouTube channel called Pilot Debrief which falls mostly into that last category. It’s a former military pilot guy doing technical analyses of plane crashes and the pilot mistakes that caused them, by going through the NTSB reports and listening to black box recordings and such.

Yikes. It’s fascinating. It’s horrifying. The ones where he walks through cases where a pilot dies and a passenger has to land the plane are particularly terrifying. And the ones where a student pilot is on their first solo flight and a wheel falls off during takeoff. There are no tales in the horror genre as good as these (I am of the school of thought that horror is better when it’s scary, not campy).

I wasn’t crazy about flying before, but now I never want to set foot on a plane again.

Anyway it’s a very information-heavy channel and I think it’s pretty well made. The perfect combination of professional skillset and amateur broadcaster. I also like that you can clearly see the arc of starting out as a beginner YouTuber and getting more professional over time. It’s also pretty funny to see them leaning into all the YouTube recommendations for making your videos more popular as if it’s a piloting checklist. Catchy clickbait title, check. Thumbnail, check. Calls to action, check. Midroll ad, check. Live streams and collaborations, check.

I also learned some new phrases like “aviate, navigate, communicate” and “normalization of deviance.” And now I want to find a way to fit “all the holes in the Swiss cheese are lining up” into any conversation.

* With cute animal videos on random no-name channels, I’m usually wondering the whole time if it’s some demented farming operation where the animals are drugged or mistreated off-camera, something that I can’t find any evidence of but I’m 100% sure is a thing in this hyper attention economy.

Day Job

I’ve noticed a distinct uptick in AI adoption in the last few weeks at work. I think we’re reaching a “second wave” of people who are suddenly noticing that AI is actually amazing at certain things.

It’s no longer just the bosses and a weird fringe of people saying, “Hey people should really take a serious look at this.” It’s now filtering down to the working masses and starting to become embedded in daily operations.

Home Life

One of the side effects of cancer treatment is I have dry skin and brittle nails all the time, and a higher risk of nail problems. So I ordered a fancy new fingernail and toenail clippers from EDJY to try out.

I had to change almost every product that touched my skin in any way (shampoos, soaps, laundry detergents, towels), and this is another part of that journey.

Cancer Corner

I have good news about the rather ominous findings of a hip MRI I mentioned last time, where two previously unknown spots of metastasis were discovered. The question was whether those are new spots or not, essentially whether or not it indicated disease progression.

My oncologist has informed me they believe they were there all along, and they only showed up on the MRI now because it’s the first time we’ve done an MRI on that area, and it’s the most sensitive scan for finding bone issues. So good news there.

I’ve already gotten my regular chest/abdomen/pelvis CT scan and I’m still going to get a PET scan later in March to check for new disease and I’ll get another hip MRI in three months to look for other changes.

Otherwise everything continues as before, with chemo treatments every three weeks and an expensive, thankfully insurance-covered pill every day. But it’s a further reminder that cancer is a constantly-evolving process that works at a cellular level, completely hidden from my (or my body’s) ability to detect.

It occurred to me that I’m approaching the one-year anniversary of my diagnosis in a few months, which is a notable milestone.

World Context

I have quite a lot of fun imagining the Russian national anthem plays any time the current president says anything in any clips, like it’s a Family Guy cutaway gag.

I wish I could think of a way to convey how incompetent this Republican administration sounds. I can’t imagine a world where anyone takes him or his cabinet or any Republican seriously. Even as they’re sending all their political foes to Siberian gulags it still sounds ridiculously funny. I wish I had the skills and ambition to translate the hilarious skits playing in my head into videos.

Anyway, I remember when I was embarrassed about George W. Bush’s demeanor on the world stage. Now I’d take Rumsfeld over Hegseth any day of the week.

But don’t worry, Democrats will still find a way to lose in 2026 and 2028, because most of them are still living in the 2000s and convinced the lofty ideals of democracy and the Constitution are important to voters.

Bye!