The Recluse Report - June 2026 Part 1

20 June, 2026. 1,320 words.

I updated my local version of hugo and suddenly my blog wouldn’t build locally anymore, and my template didn’t work. Sigh. Oh, you tricksy open source developers and your complete lack of concern for backwards compatibility.

Gaming

I haven’t launched a single game in like a month, so nothing to talk about there. In fact, I’ve barely touched my PC at all for any reason, which is why my YouTube upload scripts have stalled multiple times lately, if you’re wondering why my YouTube channel sometimes goes for a while without uploads.

I heard that Guild Wars 3 was announced. Sadly such announcements mean almost nothing to me anymore. To me, MMORPGs are as much a part of history as the Vietnam War and the moon landing. Not to mention the “announce things years before they’re actually ready” thing is quite silly.

However, if anyone could make a new MMORPG that matters in some small way, you’d have to think ArenaNet might be one to do it. However, there’s still no way to avoid any new “live service” game being designed completely around “engagement” and “revenue” and, for some weird reason lately, “extraction shooting,” instead of, you know, “fun,” so I wouldn’t get too excited.

Media Production

Still working on photographing my grandfather’s World War 1 diary. I’ve finished the three diaries, now there’s a lot of letters to digitize.

It’s a fascinating tale. He was one of the million Americans who were rushed over to France for the Meusse-Argonne Offensive in September 1918. He was drafted in April and was marching into the biggest American battle in history (at that time) in September; that’s how fast it was.

He was in a supporting regiment assaulting Montfaucon, which was some of the most difficult fighting of the time. We think of World War I as grotesque hand-to-hand fighting in muddy trenches, but by the time the Americans arrived the trench fighting was over and my grandfather painted a picture of the war as something that was tedious and unorganized and, for the most part, far away from him. But still muddy.

Mostly by luck he managed to miss the worst of the fighting (luckily for me), while still getting wounded by shell fragments and getting gassed and contracting pneumonia. He was in a hospital fighting pneumonia when the Armistice was announced, in a place he called Ward 10, or the “Death Ward.”

He writes in a very articulate but unemotional and blaise tone about everything, like a scientist making observations. (I believe he was a chemistry teacher by trade.) Sadly he died long before I was born, and all of his children are also now dead, so this diary and whatever I can scrounge up online are probably the only things I will ever know about his time in the war.

I recently found a gold mine of digitized records of daily morning reports from his company during the months of his diary, which corroborate everything he wrote and fill in a little more detail of troop locations. Not that I doubted what he wrote because it already fit well with the historical record and I’d found some newspaper archives a while ago. But now there’s even more of the all-important second sources.

Anyway the point is it’s still taking up most of my free time. Not to brag, but in another timeline I could have been a really good historical researcher.

Media

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee Season 3!!!! This is, hands down, the best show on television right now.

I’d love to monetarily support the show and even watch all the Australian ads, but sadly I can’t seem to watch it through VPN in the place you’re supposed to watch it.

Luckily somebody put it on YouTube. Once again, piracy always wins out over inconvenience, a lesson that suits still haven’t learned after I can’t even count how many decades.

And since it took me so long to post this I can report I also rented Project Hail Mary. I liked the book, and I liked the movie. I was skeptical in the first act, because the dude was way more of an unlikable screw-up in the movie than I remember from the book, but it won me over in the second. But the book was better. The audiobook, specifically.

Music

I have to acknowledge the return of Rush to live performance with Anika Nilles on drums. I had heard nothing of this, and just assumed Rush was done forever since Neil Peart died. Then I started seeing crowd videos popping up all over the place, and I, too, was skeptical, but I, too, was instantly won over. Maybe it’s the cancer talking but I found it incredibly emotional.

Two 72 year olds fronting a mostly forgotten rock band (from a mostly forgotten time of musical artistry) and mostly killing it, and what I have just learned is a rising drumming superstar who is now surely set for life, absolutely killing it on some of the hardest drum parts around. Her sound is not Neil Peart’s sound, but it’s so good that it doesn’t matter. What a gift she’s giving to the fans to allow Geddy and Alex to keep playing a little longer.

No auto tune, no dancers, just 3 skilled and practiced musicians (and a background keyboardist now and then) playing complex music with little or no fanfare, and it’s basically note perfect. What a sight to see in 2026.

It reminds me of the recent Artemes II mission: A moment in time that we can all cheer for, that sort of restores one’s faith in humanity. There’s still good people in the world doing good things. The overwhelmingly positive support from the crowds as Annika nails those iconic drum fills is really heartwarming.

I hope they inspire younger generations of musicians.

I know it’s not cool to say this, but I’d like to start reclaiming the public zeitgeist a little bit and declare that 2026 is a year of amazing things so far. (As opposed to the litanies of “this year sucks” that we’ve enjoyed for the last 10 years.)

Cancer Corner

Another three weeks, another chemo infusion. I’m hearing the term “cumulative effects” a lot now.

I’ve had chemo every three weeks since last July, so almost a full year now. The treatments are working and the cancer is no longer active, but I’m starting to notice that the side effects are getting more pronounced after each treatment.

For me, it’s now manifesting as something that feels like a stomach flu the weekend following chemo. My appetite is gone, there’s nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and all the fatigue and weakness that comes with all that. It’s a massive struggle to get any kind of hydration or nutrition into my body for many days, so it’s like going on a 3- or 4-day fast, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.

So I end up sitting around sucking on ice a lot, and eating tiny bits of peanut butter.

Fortunately I’ve been able to schedule some visits to the infusion center for IV fluids, which helps a lot. I’d setup a regular fluid visit on Sunday morning, but I was also able to get in for some fluids on Friday afternoon as well. They hook up a saline bag to my chest port and fill me up with fluids for an hour. It’s a huge help.

As of publishing time I’m back to normal, like nothing happened.

World Context

Not much to say. Our octogenarian president has little power to diminish my daily outlook anymore. It’s like the latter days of Reagan, where everyone pretended he wasn’t obviously declining.

For me, they just need to keep the electricity grid functioning for 5-10 more years. That’s the extent of my expectation of competence from the Federal government. For everything else I’ll pin my hopes on my State government.