Endgame Viable

It was a great week for the Commanders. For once the stars aligned, and they actually took advantage of it.

First, the Cowboys collapsed and lost in overtime to the Arizona Cardinals, leaving them at 3-5.

Then, after an absolutely awful start falling behind 10-0 to the Eagles on Sunday night, the Commanders remembered how to play football and rattled off 27 unanswered points over the rest of the game to get a much-needed win over a struggling divisional opponent. And for once, they aren’t last in the division anymore.

So after starting about as bad as you could possibly start a season, the Commanders are somehow just 2 games behind the first-place Giants in the NFC East with 10 games left.

Next up are the Rams at home, a tough opponent, though thankfully somewhat less tough than the preseason predictions indicated. Still I only give the Commanders a 50/50 shot to win. The Commanders have yet to put together a full game of solid football. They teeter wildly between competitive professionals and circus clowns from quarter to quarter (and/or from play to play).

ChatGPT was getting tiresome to use for this solo AI fantasy league thing. I kept telling it to finalize the week’s results and it kept saying it will do that and then it … didn’t do that. And when I explained that it should have all the information it needs to make all the calculations, it agrees and says “you’re right, I should be able to do better.” And then it … doesn’t do anything. I had to berate it for a long time before I got full league week 7 results.

So I’m trying to migrate my league to a local Antigravity project. I also added head-to-head matchups against the other CPU players because that’s apparently a common thing, and asked the AI to name all the CPU players after Breaking Bad characters. I had some trouble getting it to use actual NFL 2026 data for the calculations, and I haven’t verified any of this data beyond a very cursory look, but here’s what it came up with for week 8.

On the advice of ChatGPT I replaced the Vikings defense with the Jacksonville defense, which turned out to be a good idea. And I put Jayden Daniels in as my quarterback just so I have some connection to my actual team in my fantasy team. He’s just about the only fantasy-worthy player on the Commanders.

These standings were sort of retroactively calculated by looking back at weeks 1-7 with a fixed lineup per team. Not really a clean solution but it worked out great for me and it would be weird to start at 0-0 in week 8. (I have no idea if the AI calculated the first 7 weeks correctly or not.)

My alternate teams, chosen on the off chance that the Commanders don’t make the playoffs har-har, were hit or miss.

The Jacksonville Jaguars crushed the imploding Indianapolis Colts 42-7, solidly leading the AFC South by 3 games at 5-2 and looking like a playoff shoe-in.

The Buffalo Bills beat the luckless Baltimore Ravens 36-10 at home, staying ahead of the Patriots by a game in the AFC East at 6-1.

The Seattle Seahawks lost to the surging Chicago Bears at home on Monday night 34-17, falling to 4-4 in the NFC West, 2 games behind the 49ers.

The Carolina Panthers lost to the Green Bay Packers on Thursday night 27-19, but still somehow lead the NFC South at 3-4.

I don’t normally watch college football because it always looks like a huge scramble of incompetance to me. Kids just running around with a busted play every down, that kind of thing. (It’s not actually that bad, but that’s my bias.) And usually, one team murders the other team, so the game’s usually over by the end of the first quarter.

But I watched two college games on Saturday that turned out to be good games that went to overtime. I got to see the crazy college football overtime rules in action. It’s crazy.

I’ve been hearing about fantasy football for a million years, but I’ve never had the vaguest clue how any of it worked. So I turned to ChatGPT.

I was looking for a way to play by myself, without having to, you know, have friends or log into a gambling-centric web site or whatever. ChatGPT pointed me to a couple of options but none of them seemed quite right. In the end, it said, “If you want, I can run a league right here with CPU opponents starting in week 7.”

Usually, AI suggestions aren’t very helpful, but this one actually was. So I started my own fantasy league with AI. Mainly I was just curious about how the drafting and scoring worked.

Here’s how my first week went.

Scoring: Full PPR

Week 7 MVP: Bucky Irving — 23.0 points.

I was like 7th in the draft order so all the good players were gone before I could get anyone.

96 points sounds awesome until you compare it to how the rest of the AI teams did.

Was it the most fun I’ve ever had in football? Not really. It didn’t really affect my enjoyment of watching a football game one way or another. Football is intrinsically entertaining.

The Commanders had a bye week so they didn’t play. Local sports media continued to have plenty to say about their week 6 49ers game and the future of Dan Quinn.

The Giants won. Boo.

The 2-4 Cowboys played the 2-4 Eagles in an inexplicably not-flexed Monday night game. This is the worst possible game matchup for me because I have to root for a tie, since I don’t want either team to win. In the end, Dallas won decisively and moved into second place in the division.

After the bye week, Washington plays Philadelphia at home in what has to be a must-win game. I dare say that almost every game for the rest of the year is a playoff game for the Commanders.

Since the Commanders’ season is all but over, we need to find some alternate teams to root for.

The Carolina Panthers were blown out by the Tampa Buccaneers but somehow remain atop the NFC South at 3-3.

The Seattle Seahawks took care of the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night. They’re second in the NFC West at 4-2, behind the 49ers.

The Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars had a bye week.

I broke down and pre-ordered World of Warcraft: Forever, and took a quick look at the beta. I made a Dwarf Hunter and played a couple hours in that same old starting zone that I remember from 2006, which was the first time I played World of Warcraft.

I was mainly looking to find out what the game was supposed to be, because it wasn’t at all clear from the promotional material. It sounded like basically the same game as WoW Classic. So what was the point of it?

And to be honest, after playing a bit, it looked like the same game as WoW Classic.

But then I loaded up the actual WoW Classic and played the same Dwarf Hunter starting zone. Then it was more clear what they’re trying to do with Forever.

WoW Forever is basically WoW Classic except with a modern UI for people who don’t want to punish themselves just finding quest locations. The quests are highlighted on the map and the enemy mobs are highlighted and so forth. It’s like the WoW Retail UI overlaid onto the WoW Classic grind.

To me, it’s a big improvement. WoW Classic’s lack of amenities is pretty annoying. It’s why people made addons.

But otherwise, it’s the same quest flow as 2006. Which means you have to kill fourteen mobs in the first handful of quests.

Yes, I said fourteen. A staggering amount of mobs to kill at that low level when pretty much all you have is an auto-attack.

So it’s all the combat grind and repetition from 2006 with a 2026 UI.

Not a terrible idea, I guess. If I wanted the nostalgia of playing WoW, without the self-flagellation, I’d certainly pick Forever over Classic.

But as I mentioned previously, it’s not very solo friendly.

There was this one quest where you had to clear out a hobgoblin camp and click on a thing for a quest. If you’re by yourself, the enemies spawn faster than you can kill them at low level.

You’d think, since game developers constantly tell us how social MMORPGs are, people would naturally group up to tackle the challenge more easily and share experience and kills and whatnot. I witnessed exactly zero groups tackling the challenge. We just kind of swarmed over it individually until the necessary critical mass of players was achieved, and everyone grabbed the quest objective as best they could. It was everyone for themselves. Nobody stuck around after they had gotten the quest objective to help other players.

I wish I’d been recording it, to show the reality on the ground to all the game devs still clinging to the idea that people want to group up with strangers.

Anyway. WoW Forever looks to be the best version of WoW Classic available.

Unlike week 5, where nobody in the NFC East won, in week 6, everybody in the NFC East lost.

I enjoyed watching the Philadelphia Eagles lose their fourth straight to the Carolina Panthers in the early game on Sunday. But it sucks about the Jalen Hurts blood clot. I had a blood clot scare myself. It’s no joke.

At the same time on another channel, the New Orleans Saints defeated the New York Giants, despite late game heroics from newly traded J.J. McCarthy of all people.

On Sunday night, the Dallas Cowboys traveled to Green Bay to play the Packers. It was a right thrashing and the Cowboys lost decisively.

It was the second week in a row where the NFC East was served on a platter to the Commanders. Monday was a day full of hope. All they had to do was beat the 49ers. The odds were slim, microscopic even, but that “any given Sunday” saying is real, right? After all, the hapless Cardinals actually beat the Rams on Sunday, and the Titans even won their first game of the season.

So, on Monday night, the Washington Commanders had the unenviable task of traveling all the way across the country to play the 5-0 San Francisco 49ers, the team most everyone ranks #1 in their power rankings, for the final NFC East game.

Pregame, I allowed myself to hope. I listened to sports radio analysis (which is on YouTube now) during the week that suggested that it was actually possible for Washington to pull off an upset. In the hours prior to the game I felt that giddy feeling of one possible future: The upset of a lifetime, the underdog knocking out the heavyweight, the craziest, most unbelievable win of week 6.

And then the game started. The 49ers marched down the field and scored with ease on the first possession. The Commanders were barely even in the first half. They looked like little children playing against the massive grown man bodies of the 49ers, like one set of players was twice as big and hitting twice as hard as the other, like the two teams belonged in completely different leagues. Every time a 49er caught a ball, there were no Commanders even on the screen, they were so wide open. Superstar Jayden Daniels was caught easily every time he tried to run. It was 20-3 at the half and the game wasn’t as close as the score might indicate.

Then there was the second half. It started much the same as the first, and it looked like the entire rest of the game would be garbage time, but then at the end of the third quarter, the Commanders decided to start playing tough and clawed their way tooth and nail to score two touchdowns. They had two chances to score a go-ahead touchdown at the end of the game, but failed both times.

Typical Washington. Chances galore. Dumb luck going their way. Penalties going their way. Can’t capitalize.

Also typical: Shooting themselves in the foot. They actually scored a game-changing touchdown on a first down run, but it was called back because of a facemask penalty.

Ah well. Final score 23-17. Two weeks in a row, nobody in the NFC East won a game. The only team going to the playoffs is going to be the division winner.

Next up for the Commanders is a bye week, then Philadelphia at home, then the Rams at home, then a road game at the Giants. The way those teams are playing this year, those are all winnable games on paper, and two chances for the Commanders to claw their way from the cellar of a terrible division.

P.S. Man, Commanders fans are rabid for Dan Quinn to get fired. I just can’t get into that kind of sports fandom. Can you even imagine being so deep into confirmation bias that you’re convinced the head coach of a professional football team didn’t know it was fourth down? The dude’s not going to get fired in the middle of the season and why would you want that kind of chaos for your team anyway. They’ve got too much to deal with already.

P.P.S. The big stars in the national sports commentary media are big time snarky trolly provocateurs. Watching anything sports-opinion-related on ESPN during the week, for example, is complete toxic brain rot. Even the normally sane, but aging old school Sportscenter guys are on the “did he actually not know it was fourth down” train.

Another post I started last week and I’m trying to kick out of my drafts before it gets too old.

What if Carrie but Stranger Things and cyberbullying PSA and 8 hours instead of 2?

That was my impression of Amazon’s new 8-episode series Carrie.

Stephen King is near and dear to my heart, so I usually consume whatever comes along out of his works. Carrie was Stephen King’s first hit, and it was a pretty short novel if I remember right. Nowhere near enough for an 8-episode series.

So they added a lot. I mean, a lot. Whole new characters and storylines. At one point it even turned into a Battlestar Galactica cast reunion.

Was it an improvement? Not really. The original is a tight, almost Biblical parable. The reimagination is kind of a mixed bag of messages and a setup for … something.

Because it was so long, Carrie’s trademark march toward tragedy was almost a background plot, which sucked a lot of the tension out of it. Especially the middle part.

The middle part was largely a campaign against cyberbullying in school, and the dangers of social media on young minds. Not a terrible idea, but a side track to what I consider to be the main story theme, which revolves around fish-out-of-water Carrie, a rigidly traditional mom, teenage social awkwardness, and a tragic misunderstanding at a prom.

In the end, it wasn’t bad. I was engaged throughout. I thought the performances were solid, and the character decisions justifiable.

But I found many scenes uncomfortable to watch, especially in the first half, which I attribute to my foreknowledge of how the story would later turn out. It’s not fun to watch one character obviously exploiting another character, nor is it fun to watch characters self-destructing.

However, the series felt a little exploitative of the source material. Like it existed only to setup a new cinematic universe that nobody asked for, and a second season that goes into territory that can’t possibly be any good. A classic streaming situation where the first season has a perfectly good ending, but they somehow have to keep making new seasons anyway because business, baby.

P.S. I used a picture of Stephen King for simplicity, though I know he had nothing to do with the production. A picture of Mike Flanagan would have been more appropriate.

We’re back in our old habits of writing posts and then failing to publish them. This is from last week.

I tried out Mortal Shell 2, a Souls-like that had some pretty good Steam reviews.

While it looked nice, I didn’t like the first game very much. The “shell” gimmick just didn’t work for me.

This new game is nothing like the first game, though. The shell thing has morphed into a generic “ultimate” ability that depends on which shell you’re using. And it’s a lot more of an open world sort of map design.

But the worst thing is the combat. The combat is pure chaos because you’re usually facing multiple enemies at a time. If you’re familiar with the Souls-like combat formula, that should cause you to sigh and groan, because it’s exactly as annoying as it sounds.

Souls-like combat is usually defined as being designed for 1-on-1 duels with one enemy at a time. You literally “lock on” to one target at a time. There’s supposed to be a feeling of control as you work through each combat encounter. It’s kind of like a fighting game, except in 3D space.

In a “standard” Souls-like game, facing multiple enemies at once is usually considered a failure condition. You’ve approached a combat encounter wrong, pulled too many enemies, and now you have to scramble to survive.

In Mortal Shell 2, facing multiple enemies at once is the norm. But being a Souls-like, you don’t really have many tools for fighting multiple enemies at once. So it’s just a chaotic scramble to survive all the time, and it’s not very fun. They give you a gun but it, too, can only shoot one enemy at a time.

The game looks very nice, though. But, like the first game, it doesn’t “feel” very good. It has that AA “Unreal Engine demo project” sort of feel to it, where the character models don’t really seem to fit into the world very well. The feet are always clipping through the ground, you get stuck on the terrain every ten steps, etc.

There isn’t much in the way of loot, and the character progression is a bit mundane. Basically, it does not meet the minimum requirements for an adequate Souls-like for me.

I tried out AION 2, which is a free download on Steam. It starts out exactly the same as every Asian MMORPG that has ever been made, complete with the virtual girlfriend simulator character creation.

I haven’t gotten very far. It’s just not very appealing on the surface, so it doesn’t make me want to dig deeper to see what’s there. At the beginning, there’s absolutely nothing to distinguish this game from any number of other Asian MMORPGs I’ve seen in the past. Revelation Online and Astellia Online both come to mind. The characters look the same, the classes look the same, the world looks the same, the combat looks the same, the lore sounds the same.

The story is unmemorable and poorly translated. Loot is pretty disposable.

The combat is trivial: Click the left mouse button repeatedly. For variety, you can click the right mouse button. There is exactly zero chance you will lose a fight in the beginning. It even drinks health potions automatically for you. It’s almost an idle clicker game.

The combat difficulty ramps up eventually, or should I say the difficulty spikes up out of nowhere, but since you didn’t need to learn anything to get to that point, it feels like arbitrary punishment.

It’s good for one and only one type of gaming experience: The kind where you don’t have to use a single brain cell and sit passively letting the lights and sounds wash over you for however long you’re willing to endure it. Which, to be fair, is perfectly fine now and then, but I typically don’t get very far in those types of games anymore.

Oh, and you can look forward to Barrens-style general chat the entire time, as the number of free-player trolls is rather high.

So in short, it’s not likely to replace Final Fantasy XIV as the only MMORPG I still like to play.

A tie. It ended in a tie.

Somehow that’s worse than losing the game.

The stars were perfectly aligned going into the Washington Commanders week 5 game Sunday.

First, the Cowboys were destroyed last Thursday night to start the week. Delightful. I didn’t watch it live but I really enjoyed the recap.

Then, the Eagles lost in the final seconds on Sunday morning in London. It was an ugly game and both teams looked pretty bad. The only bright spot was the Jaguars kick holder single-handedly rescuing 3 field goals from bad snaps.

So the previous games could not have gone better. Then it was time for the New York Giants to play the Washington Commanders, a home division game. If Washington wins, the records between the four teams in the NFC East are all knotted up and everyone’s within a game of each other. It’s anybody’s division. Theoretically.

The Commanders led for almost the entire game. They were leading by two touchdowns at one point. Then they collapsed in the fourth quarter and the Giants tied the game to send it to overtime.

The Commanders continued to suck in overtime, but somehow they escaped the Giants first drive when they missed a field goal. They did nothing with their own overtime possession. On the Giants’ second overtime possession, the Giants were driving and in range to kick a field goal to win the game in overtime. After the first two possessions, the next score wins. Miraculously, the Giants fumbled. Washington recovered and drove down the field in four plays, making it into easy field goal range with the clock running out and no time outs left. They were going to squeak out a win after all.

They had first and ten at the Giants 26 with 55 seconds left. They called a run. They made a couple yards. They didn’t hurry. They stood around. They called a final play on second down with less than 15 seconds left. Jayden Daniels inexplicably tried to run up the middle. He got maybe a yard. With the clock ticking and no timeouts, the Commanders could not get back to the line to spike the ball. Time ran out with the Commanders well within easy field goal range, which would have won the game.

So the game ended in a tie. The most infuriating result possible. It felt worse than a loss. To be ready to win the game and then … not win the game. Mystifying. Stupefying. And pretty annoying.

The Commanders were in the perfect position to pick up a game on every single team in the NFC East, and were winning the game fairly handily through three quarters, and they blew it in spectacular meme-worthy fashion. Based on how they played at the end, they should have lost the game, but somehow were gifted a chance to win anyway. Now they’re the laughing stock of the football world, the subject of every YouTube and network commentary segment this week, the one and only talking point of the NFL world, and there’s no change in the NFC East standings. Sigh. Welcome to Washington football.

Fans are talking about firing Dan Quinn. Personally I think it’s 100% on Jayden Daniels for plainly forgetting they didn’t have a timeout. JD5 is a great quarterback but he still has a lot to prove to me. He looks like an undersized injury-prone stick figure compared to all the other football players on the field, for example. Every play you think he’s going to get a career-ending injury.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, next up, the Commanders travel to San Francisco for what is sure to be a shellacking by the 49ers in front of the world on Monday night. I don’t do predictions but I’d guess 35-9 49ers. The Commanders are no match for them. To win would be even more of an upset than the win against the Seahawks.

So to summarize, the Commanders lost the two winnable games going into next week’s unwinnable game, then they get a bye week. Their season is basically over. The only glimmer of hope is that everyone else in the division is playing terrible too.

This is why I stopped watching football for so many years. Seeing Washington make these kinds of mistakes over and over again is pretty soul crushing.

George R. R. Martin used to blog about football every week, so that’s my excuse. It’s still early enough in the season that we can entertain dreams of the Commanders being competitive.

But NFL Week 4 kind of sucked.

The Washington Commanders, who I now call the Washington Catastrophes, already lost their starting quarterback Jayden Daniels. In London, they lost their backup quarterback in the first quarter and had to play the rest of the game with their third string quarterback. The dude had like one good completion for the whole game and they lost definitively.

The only consolation is that the Eagles also lost. But the Giants and Cowboys won, somehow leaving the Giants as the division leaders.

The season is already slipping away for the Commanders. Of course now they’re going to rush Jayden Daniels back into the lineup and he’ll probably hurt himself again and that’ll be that.

Even “super intelligence” can’t think of an appropriate title for this mixed bag of disparate topics. (I ended up writing the title myself.) A major problem with blogging like this is that people will skip it immediately if it looks like a “newsletter” style of post. At least that’s what my statistics tell me.

Anyway I’m still here, trying to adjust to the impending time of year when all I want to do is go back to sleep the minute I wake up. How many more months until spring?

In my continuing attempts to catch up before Evercold, I’ve started into the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker 6.1 Main Scenario Quest with my brand new Hrothgar Warrior of Light. Thus continuing what I believe is my longest-running video series I’ve ever uploaded (9 years, 363 videos so far), documenting the MSQ quest-by-quest going back to the start of Stormblood. What I read seems to be accurate: 6.1 is a good starting point for a new character to come in.

The return to the simple adventurer lifestyle was quite quickly supplanted by lofty talk of Reflections and The Thirteeth and Voidgates and so forth, so my initial excitement for a less, you know, “Final Fantasy”-sounding story for a while was almost immediately dashed. In a moment of inspiration, I recently called this type of plotline a “Final Fantasy slurry.” Can we not raid one set of ruins for treasure without it turning into a whole thing?

To be honest, the vast majority of FFXIV “gaming” has largely consisted of reading quest text and running from one place to another place. Glorified visual novel stuff. I haven’t done very much of the more traditional style of gaming where you make decisions and problem solve and overcome obstacles for quite some time.

The rest of the MMORPG world is talking about World of Warcraft Forever. I signed up for the beta but I don’t think I got anything for it. I’m curious, but not curious enough yet to drop everything and pre-order it. However, it could well be the closest thing to a high-profile “new” AAA MMORPG that we will see for the rest of our lives. The MMORPG community seems to be treating it as such.

The little bit I’ve read about it makes me think that WoW Forever is not going to be designed to be very solo-friendly though. Not at first, at least. Once they see engagement plummet and learn the entirely predictable lesson that 95% of the player base still prefers grouping-optional, non-PvP content, I’m sure that will change.

I suspect I’ll try it at some point, but I crash out of WoW pretty quickly. I gave up on Midnight after only a handful of videos. These days I prefer games that make good video recordings (or more precisely, that make good audio recordings), and WoW just isn’t good for that.

Speaking of the MMORPG community, I will note a couple of articles on Massively OP that caught my attention:

I have to admit I don’t remember what happened to ArcheAge, but I do remember that I enjoyed playing ArcheAge for some time around ye olde 2015. Are there not one, but two new ArcheAge games in development? A quick look at their web pages and a quick consultation with ChatGPT makes me think that they will only resemble the original ArcheAge in name only.

I saw the words “action combat” on ArcheAge Chronicles so that pretty much makes it an automatic failure before it even launches. Or at least, an automatic extremely short-term MMORPG.

I hate to be negative, because I’m always called out for it, but I simply can’t help seeing the reality of the world before me. When was the last action combat MMORPG that remained in the MMORPG zeitgeist for years and years? I honestly can’t think of any. Maybe TERA?? Whatever happened to TERA? [Last-minute editor’s note: Also Black Desert.]

I just don’t think anyone has yet solved the problem of how to make action combat “feel good” in an MMORPG, and at this point it’s hard to justify any optimism that it will ever happen. Most of the time they try to wallpaper over the lag and positional issues with extremely flashy, pixel-obscuring lights and explosions. Even Dark Souls multiplayer, the action combat blueprint for most of the industry, isn’t perfect. But hey, maybe ArcheAge Chronicles will finally be the one to crack the code. Good luck to them.

Oh lastly I wanted to mention the impending worldwide extinction event known as Grand Theft Auto VI. I will quite likely be buying it and trying it out, though I haven’t really been into the whole GTA thing since I guess it was San Andreas.

But I’ve been hearing so much about how many genuine gaming innovations are in this game, and I can’t help but reward AAA studios that continue to attempt to move the gaming industry forward beyond just “more microtranscations.”

Oh and lastly for real, I just downloaded Mortal Shell 2 to see if there’s anything to it. I bounced off of the first one pretty quickly. I found that it looked fantastic, but it felt awful in terms of game mechanics.

But maybe this new one will be my next quick-thinking problem-solving game.

For the folks who were waiting patiently for my daily game video upload, I noticed that my script had been throwing errors and I hadn’t uploaded anything for a week. I should probably work out some way for that script to notify me when something goes wrong.

Not that you missed much. It stopped in the middle of my extensive 3-session EverQuest Legends spree.

By the way, I mentioned a while back that I was building a new REAPER DAW workstation. I completed that, but almost immediately found myself interested in other things. So that’s on the back burner again. Sigh. Quite annoyingly, my interests are constantly changing.

In sports news, week 3 of the 2026 NFL season is in the books.

The Washington Commanders pulled off an upset win at home against the defending Superbowl champion Seahawks to avoid a third loss in a row to start the season. After dropping their first two road games against divisional opponents, and losing Jayden Daniels to another elbow injury, it was looking suspiciously like their season was already over. But there’s still a glimmer of hope for a serviceable season, especially after the Eagles were embarrassed by the Bears on Monday night, and the Cowboys lost a thriller to the Ravens in Rio.

Next up for the Commanders are the Colts in London (what is up with trying to export the NFL to the rest of the world?), then a road game at the Giants, two winnable games. Which they hopefully will win because after that is a road trip to San Francisco which does not sound like a winnable game.

I’m just exiting the worst part of chemotherapy cycle 22. Prior to that, I completed radiation treatments on my right hip for an area that they were calling an area of progression. However, my oncologist made it sound like it could possibly have been there all along. They weren’t sure.

In any case, they ordered a new Guardant blood test to see if anything had changed in terms of the genetics of the cancer, to see if they need to make any adjustments. My next PET scan is scheduled for late in October.

Other than chemo side effects, which typically hit me a couple days after the infusion and last three or four days, I remain fairly unaffected by the whole thing. (Not counting the time commitment of driving out to all these outpatient appointments.) The lung tumor that started everything is currently inactive and “treated,” as they call it, apparently akin to a lump of dead cells. However it’s not entirely clear to me if it’s dead forever or just sort of dormant. Cancer is complicated.

How long this reasonably good status continues is anybody’s guess.

I haven’t mentioned the state of the world in a while. Honestly it’s not a top priority in my life.

There’s so much non-substantive idiocy coming out of the American political scene that it’s impossible to wrap your head around it. The only sane reaction, it seems to me, is to ignore everything, vote when it’s time to vote, and go about your day. (Truly: I honestly believe that most controversies are manufactured to generate reactions (aka. “engagement”), so if we stop reacting, the ludicrous controversies will eventually return to normal levels of boring political scandal.)

I find it pretty amusing that both political party labels are so toxic now that candidates no longer identify which party they’re running for during the deluge of political ads that I see during football.

There simply isn’t any political news or commentary content that doesn’t jump at every daily Twitter story of the day. It’s gotten to where I have to watch an Australian comedy show “Have You Been Paying Attention” to find out what’s happening in the world.

And finally a video I stumbled upon that made me laugh a lot. I have no idea why it was recommended to me, and have never heard of this guy before. But I’ve seen a handful of other “Gen-X content” sort of videos lately–e.g. shorts of a dour Gen-Xer asking young people “how hungry was Duran Duran?” and “what did Huey Lewis want?”–so maybe it’s because I watched those.

That’s my generation! We just kind of don’t care about pointless things. I work in a huge corporation but luckily I don’t have to endure any of that. (Not yet at least.) I would have that exact reaction if I did.

I finished the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest, at least up to 6.0.

I don’t know what comes next, but I understand there’s somewhat of a story “reset” after this point.

I’ve been wanting to change my main character for a while, but I’ve never found a good time to do it. It always felt weird to experience the Main Scenario Quest with a different character, since it’s always been my old character (pictured above) saving the world and building relationships with the Scions. I’ve even tried to age her a little bit with each expansion to make her look older and wiser. But the conclusion of 6.0 seems like a fantastic time to retire one character and swap in a new one, because it really felt like The End of the story.

I’ll have to come up with some hand-wavy headcanon reason for why my new main character has all the memories of the previous main character, and why all the Scions think the new character is the old character. (A major defect in the FFXIV story presentation… their expectation is that you’ll use the same character from the beginning to the end of time.)

Final Fantasy is all into souls, so it isn’t that far-fetched to imagine the old main character fell into a coma but their soul got shoved into the body of a new main character because “something something aether transferrence.”

Anyway here’s some highlights and lowlights from the expansion.

P.S. I finished speedrunning my alt Machinist character through Endwalker so that I can switch to it for 6.1 and beyond. I had previously bought him a Shadowbringers MSQ skip, and recently I bought him a level 90 job boost for Machinist so I didn’t have to grind from 66 in dungeons for weeks, so then I was able to pick up the Dawntrail Viper job at level 80 and use that for the MSQ run.

It took about 16 1/2 hours, not counting the roughly nine total hours of waiting time for The Dark Inside trial and the roughly three total hours of waiting time for The Final Day trial.

But he’s now ready to take over starting from 6.1, Newfound Adventure.