Endgame Viable

What a surprise, I forgot to publish again.

Stick a fork in it, it’s done. What an absolutely embarrassing display from the Washington Commanders in Week 9, the exact thing we’ve come to expect for the last 30 years. Proof positive that last year was the most unbelievable fluke in American football history. What a waste of time it was to watch football again this year.

The Commanders were absolutely blown out by the Seattle Seahawks 38-14 on Sunday Night Football. There was never a single moment that the Commanders were competitive for the entire game. I turned the game off before halftime. It was worse than the score indicates, even worse than the Chiefs game, where they at least showed up for the first half. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how much the outcome of the game was never in doubt from the first five minutes of play. The Seahawks dominated every aspect of that game, while the Commanders played like children without a coach.

And hey, guess what? Jayden Daniels got hurt again. Again. For the third time this season. Rumor has it he’s out for the rest of the season. It’s probably for the best because there’s exactly zero chance the Commanders are going to make the playoffs this year, so they might as well rest him and start planning for next season. And by the way there’s also a huge stack of other major injuries with the Commanders, from running backs to receivers to defensive ends.

Turn the lights out, the party’s over.

In the rest of the NFC East, the New York Giants lost to the San Francisco 49ers 38-24, winning the race to the bottom of the division for another week.

The Dallas Cowboys hosted the Arizona Cardinals on Monday Night Football, a game that many decades ago would have been a division game, believe it or not. The game put me in the unenviable position of having to root for the 2-5 Cardinals, a team that, with very rare exceptions in the 2000s, usually fades into obscurity and mediocrity. But lo the Cardinals looked great as they won 27-17, making it a three-way race for last place in the NFC East.

The Philadelphia Eagles had their bye week and didn’t play.

Honestly there’s really no point in continuing these blog posts. It’s just going to be “hey what a shock the Commanders lost” every week. The only thing in doubt is whether or not they will end up going from the NFC Championship game last year to last place in the division this year.

Happy pagan or saints whatever, commercialized cosplay sales bonanza, and/or diabetes and tooth decay appreciation day.

I heard Amazon is shuttering New World and leaving the MMO business. I seem to recall from the very beginning, I thought New World was nothing more than a test bed for Amazon’s game platform technology, so I can only imagine they’ve finally done enough testing that they can now justify focusing on the much more lucrative business of building game engines while jettisoning the time-and-resource-consuming customer-facing nonsense. Everyone in the software industry knows that serving customers is the absolute worst part of the process. Anyway, look for “Powered by Amazon Lumberyard” or whatever coming to a game near you. If, you know, anyone ever makes an MMORPG ever again. At this point I doubt anyone in the industry even remembers what an MMORPG is.

I continue to shuffle slowly through Ghost of Yotei and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on the PS5 from time to time.

I also grabbed a few more free or discounted titles from my mostly-wasted PlayStation Plus subscription, such as the ever-popular Goat Simulator 3, a game I previously avoided because of the mere fact of its title, but which is actually kind of fun. You know, when it’s free.

Others from the PlayStation Plus parade of play-an-hour-then-abandon games include Skyrim, Medieval Dynasty, V Rising, and Overpass.

A surprising find, however, was a PS5 game called Cocoon, which is a fun, simple, and innovative puzzle-solving sort of game. It’s always a treat to find a game that doesn’t hold your hand, but still teaches you how to play through cleverly-designed gameplay. These sorts of finds are like, what, 1 in a 1000 games now? Maybe?

I tried Battlefield 6 on Steam but after I saw that, as with most every military shooter since the beginning, the enemies are about 5 pixels tall and blend entirely into the background, I saw no reason to continue. I returned it having not even finished the first mission and not trying multiplayer. Maybe I’ll get it again after I have my cataract surgery at the end of November (and after the one month waiting period to get new glasses).

I also finally tried Path of Exile 2 but it’s exactly what I expected it to be… a standard ARPG that I’ve played a thousand times before and don’t need in my life any more. Granted, the tiny characters on the screen were excruciatingly finely detailed. But I returned it.

I reinstalled No Man’s Sky for a while and played with a Survival game or two. It’s a fun game for keeping the hands busy while you’re watching football. God forbid we should ever again have to endure the mental trauma of sitting quietly while watching a television program. I swear I’m not naturally ADD but modern technology has somehow forced it into me as a learned skill.

But my “main game”* right now, if you can call it that, is The Outer Worlds. I saw that The Outer Worlds 2 is coming soon, which reminded me that I never really played the first one, so I re-installed it. It’s cute, though I find the comedy a bit try-hard at times. But it’s fun. Very Fallout 4.

* “Main game” status is subject to change at any moment.

In trying to record The Outer Worlds I identified a number of deficiencies in my newly-revised recording setup, which consists of my gaming PC and a secondary recording PC.

Something that continually baffles me is how flippity-flopping hard it is to split the audio from a game so that you can both hear it and also send it to a second PC to record it. It’s a stupefyingly easy concept, both in analog and digital formats, that is nearly impossible to manage on your average out-of-the-box PC.

In my previous recording setup, I was only able to do this by enabling monitoring for the game audio in OBS. So essentially I was listening to the game on the secondary PC, not the gaming PC. It works great, except for some noticeable delay in the time between you see something happen on your game screen and the time you hear it in your ear buds. For many games, it’s not a problem. Start to venture into the realm of fast-paced shooters, though, and it gets annoying.

For the newer recording setup, I wanted a way to split the audio so I could send the game sound to the recording PC and also to my mixer where I could listen in headphones.

The first thing I tried was the venerable VoiceMeeter Banana product from the dinosaur days, which somehow still works on Windows 11. It gives you a virtual audio channel which you can route to multiple hardware destinations. A perfect solution! Except for the audio buffering, which renders it essentially useless for gaming.

After that I had no choice but to start hanging audio interfaces off of both the gaming PC and the recording PC. Using a Focusrite Scarlett on the gaming PC, I can output sound to my mixer and also to the inputs of another Focusrite Scarlett on the recording PC. A bit of an old school analog solution, and I also have to buy a number of TRS 1/4" cables to minimize noise.

And after all of that I still have a new problem I haven’t solved, which is how to overdub on an existing recording using the same microphone as when I’m recording live. I was able to do this easily on my old setup, but it’s turned into a thorny problem in the new setup for reasons I haven’t quite figured out yet.

Solar Opposites. I somehow stumbled upon this obvious spin-off of Rick & Morty. It’s … a lot like Rick & Morty, in the sense that it’s pretty much non-stop random chaos for 22 minutes an episode. But hey, it’s new to me.

Otherwise it’s mainly been NFL football games on Thursday, Sunday, and Monday.

No new developments. Cancer progress remains thwarted in body and brain, as of the last scans. My oncologist is optimistic for a good prognosis, though realistically that scenario unfortunately falls a bit short of completely eradicating the cancer and living forever.

It is known that cancer eventually develops resistance to treatments, and treatments need to be rotated to remain effective. So while everything’s good right now, anything could change at any time, depending on what the cancer decides to do.

For the moment, I feel pretty good, better than I have in a while. I’m even slowly clawing some weight back on.

Bye!

Last week I declared that the Dan Quinn/Jayden Daniels dynasty in Washington is already over, which means that going into week 8 it was fairly certain that the Washington Commanders would lose to the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday night. So to minimize the damage and keep any hope of reaching the playoffs alive, we need to see The New York Giants win over the Philadelphia Eagles, and the Dallas Cowboys lose to the Denver Broncos. The first is unlikely, the second is possible.

Unfortunately, the Philadelphia Eagles did not cooperate with my plans as they trounced the New York Giants 38-20 at home in the early Sunday game. The Eagles improved to 6-2 and remain uncontested in the NFC East, while the Giants fell to 2-6, their season effectively over unless they decide to tear off a 10-game winning streak (they also lost their star running back Skattebo to a season-ending ankle injury).

Speaking of injuries, is it just me, or are there so, so many injuries in NFL football now? It seems like there’s way more than ever before. It might just be that the players have learned to stay down if they feel the slightest twinge of pain after a play, leading to a lot of play stoppages for things that turn out to be nothing. I keep reading that major injuries are way down in the NFL, but I have no way to confirm or deny that. All I can say is it sure seems like one or more first string players leave every single game at some point.

Back to the NFC East, in the late Sunday game, Denver absolutely mauled the Dallas Cowboys 44-24 at Mile High Stadium (and it was not as close as the score indicates), so the Cowboys dropped to 3-4-1. Great news in the Commanders’ chase for second place in the division, but rather concerning considering the Commanders have to play those same Broncos in Week 13 after their bye week.

And in the last game of the week, the great hopeless endeavor, the Washington Commanders and their last-place-and-it-shows defense traveled to Arrowhead Stadium (or whatever it’s called now) to play the resurging Kansas City Chiefs on Monday night. There was no chance whatsoever that the Commanders would be competitive in this game for even a single quarter, let alone four quarters. But they still have to play the game. There’s always a chance, right? That’s what sports is all about… that crazy improbable chance that the underdog could actually win. And then…

Well, the Commanders lost. As expected. They came to play and were shockingly competitive in the first half, though they had several missed opportunities. But then halftime happened, they apparently left the game early, and it was all Chiefs in the second half. They made the Commanders look like the college games where everyone runs around with no idea what to do. I turned the game off after the third quarter. The Commanders dropped to 3-5 and remain in third place in the division behind the hated Cowboys, and only one game ahead of the hapless last place Giants.

On a side note, when that dude started the National Anthem, I didn’t think there was any chance he’d hit those high notes, but dern he nailed it. (I’ve always thought the U.S. has one of the hardest-to-sing anthems in the world; those notes go all over the ding-dong place.)

I need to think about a backup team to root for, one with a realistic chance of making the playoffs. Geographically speaking, the Baltimore Ravens, Carolina Panthers, and Tennessee Titans are the next closest teams to me. I’m fond of the Jacksonville Jaguars for reasons I can’t fully explain. I think it was from back when they had the bruiser quarterback Steve Brunell. And I like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, except during that one time Tom Brady was the quarterback. So it would probably be one of those teams, if I were to pick. Oh, and I like the Buffalo Bills, too. How can you not root for the one team that lost four Superbowls in a row?

Week 8

If it’s good enough for George R. R. Martin’s blog, it’s good enough for me.

For the purposes of my blogging, I’ll just be focusing on the NFC East conference, because it’s where my legacy home team the Washington Commanders play. Since the Commanders actually played well last season and unbelievably made it to the NFC Championship game, a feat nobody could have imagined in the last 30 years of misery, I suddenly find the NFL fun to watch again.

I had intended to do one short post a week, but, you know, posting blog posts is such a drag and I kept forgetting, so I combined everything I wrote into this one post.

Unfortunately, Week 2 in the NFL 2025 season went about as bad as it could possibly go from my perspective. Here’s all the NFC East happenings.

My legacy home team the Washington Commanders lost convincingly to the Green Bay Packers in a road game on Thursday night, a jaunt broadcast on Amazon Prime with a crew of young, hip presenters. That dropped Washington to 1-1 on the season so far. The Commanders didn’t look all that great to my eye. Their defense seemed a bit porous, which is funny because they supposedly worked on their defense in the off-season.

Then the New York Giants played at the Dallas Cowboys in an early game on Sunday afternoon, which turned into a shootout. Sadly, the Cowboys won. The Giants dropped to 0-2 and the Cowboys reached a mighty 1-1.

There are two NFL teams that I reflexively root against except in extremely rare circumstances, and one of them is the Dallas Cowboys, so I was not best pleased with the Cowboy’s literal last-second heroics in overtime.

The other team that I always root against is, naturally, the Philadelphia Eagles. Fly, Eagles, Fly, indeed. Straight into the sun, for all I care. The Eagles are particularly galling when they have an objectively great Superbowl-defending team.

Anyway, to round out the NFC East, the much-touted “Superbowl rematch” late game of week 2 was the Philadelphia Eagles at the Kansas City Chiefs. And I, for one, now have an excellent reason to hate Taylor Swift’s fiance, after watching a certain Chiefs touchdown bounce off his hands into the arms of an Eagles defender. It wasn’t a blowout like the Superbowl, but Philadelphia won fairly handily, which did not silence the Chiefs critics crying that the dynasty is dead. Philadelphia is now 2-0 while the Chiefs dropped to an anemic 0-2 on the season so far. And the television announcers were very vocal all weekend about how many times a team that started 0-2 made it to the Superbowl. 3 times since 1990, out of 279, according to ChatGPT.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that my favored team lost while my two most despised teams won during week 2, it turns out that Jayden Daniels, the Washington Commanders phenom quarterback, sprained his knee. I hear tell he’s going to try to play anyway, which, of course, reminds me of the mythically-hyped RG3 (Robert Grifin III), who tried to play hurt, only to hurt his team tremendously and end up with a short, forgettable career. My advice would be for Daniels to sit it out for at least a game. They’ve got Josh Johnson as backup quarterback, a name I recognize but don’t really know anything about. [It was actually Marcus Mariota. I got Johnson from Wikipedia, where he’s listed second even though he isn’t.]

The Washington Commanders easily handled the Las Vegas Raiders in an early game, improving their record to 2-1. I was happy to see the Commanders started backup quarterback Marcus Mariota instead of trying to let Jayden Daniels play with a gimpy knee. He did well except that one time he fumbled the ball. The defense looked pretty good, too.

At the same time, the Philadelphia Eagles won their early game against the Los Angeles Rams at the literal last second with a blocked field goal attempt, staying on top in the division at 3-0. What a disappointment. I spent that whole time chortling about how the Eagles had been losing for the entirety of the game time and then, bam, they won in the end. Ugh.

In the late game, I was pleased to see the Dallas Cowboys shellacked by the Chicago Bears and drop to 1-2.

Rounding out the NFC East on Sunday night, the Kansas City Chiefs finally got a win against the New York Giants, who dropped to 0-3 on the season so far.

So, after three weeks, the Commanders maintain second place in the division, a game behind the Eagles.

Week 3

Things went almost as bad as it was possible to go in the NFC East.

The Washington Commanders lost to the resurging Atlanta Falcons, dropping to 2-2.

Simultaneously in the early game slot, the Philadelphia Eagles won yet again, going to 4-0 on the season so far.

The New York Football Giants won, though it’s not that meaningful in the division, because it was their first win of the season at 1-3.

And while the Dallas Cowboys didn’t win against the Green Bay Packers, they didn’t lose either, ending the game in a 40-40 tie after overtime. The Cowboys move to 1-2-1.

So Washington remains in second place in the division, but they fell two games behind the Eagles.

Week 4

NFL Week 5 went pretty well for the NFC East, from the perspective of a Commanders fan, that is.

In an early game, the Philadelphia Eagles lost to the Denver Broncos, dropping to 4-1 on the season. Yay! It’s always cause for celebration when the Eagles lose! Nothing is more satisfying than seeing the teams with the most obnoxious die-hard fans lose. Now they’re panicking up there in Philadelphia after losing, you know, a single game. Delightful.

In another early game, the Dallas Cowboys beat up on the hapless New York Jets, improving to 2-2-1 on the season. Obviously, we all love to see the Dallas Cowboys humiliated as well, but it’s simply beyond the scope of reality to lose to the Jets.

And finally, the New York Giants lost to the New Orleans Saints, dropping to 1-4 on the season. I’m ambivalent about the Giants but I’m happy to see them stay down there at the bottom of the chart.

Then, in a late game, the Washington Commanders defeated the L.A. Chargers to improve to 3-2 on the season, moving them up to just one game behind the Eagles in the NFC East (with two games against the Eagles much later in the season). It looked dicey for the first quarter-and-a-half. They looked like the Washington I remember from the last 30 years, giving up play after play and failing to get first downs. But after a fumble recovery, they turned on the gas and became a decent team for the rest of the game.

The Commanders seem to have a lot of tough games this season. Chiefs, Seahawks, Lions, Broncos, Vikings? Then a string of NFC East games. Yikes.

Week 5

NFL Week 6 started early for the NFC East, with the Philadelphia Eagles traveling to the New York Giants for Thursday Night Football. It was a glorious game. The Eagles laid a massive egg and lost in humiliating fashion, throwing gasoline on the firestorm of meltdown controversy in Philadelphia and delighting the rest of us. Oh, and I guess Giants fans are probably happy with their new rookie quarterback, but that’s secondary to the main goal of giving the Commanders a chance to tie for first place in the division. Anyway, the Eagles fall to 4-2 while the Giants claw their way up to 2-4.

The Dallas Cowboys played at the Carolina Panthers in an early game on Sunday, and delighted Commanders fans by losing, falling to 2-3-1.

The Washington Commanders didn’t play until Monday night, hosting the Chicago Bears. The last time they played, last year, Jayden Daniels threw a last-second hail mary to win a game that I had turned off. This time, I fell asleep in the third quarter. It’s just as well because the Commanders committed three crucial turnovers and lost by one point, blowing their chance to tie for first place in the division. The Commanders defense looked like a porous mess.

So in the end, week 6 was largely a wash and only the Giants improved their relative standing.

Week 6

NFL Week 7 sucked. Up one side and down the other.

The Philadelphia Eagles sucked by winning another game at the Minnesota Vikings to go to 5-2 in the division. Annoyingly, they won while still looking very beatable.

The Washington Commanders sucked by losing to the Dallas Cowboys in an embarrassing blowout, dropping below .500 for the first time, and falling to third place in the division behind the Cowboys. Not only that, Jayden Daniels got hurt again. Once again I’m reminded of RG3 who started great, then got hurt, then disappeared into irrelevance.

The only team that didn’t suck was the New York Giants, who lost at the last minute in Mile High Stadium to the Denver Broncos, dropping to 2-5.

So yeah, the NFC East is looking kind of pathetic this year, and I’m reminded of those 30 years out in the wilderness with a Washington team that is lucky to get to 8-8 and sneak into the backdoor to a wildcard game every five years or so.

This year, I think it’s time to admit that last year was a fluke and the Commanders aren’t very likely to make the playoffs. It’s over, folks. No new budding dynasty to be seen here. We’ve been duped yet again.

Barring an Eagles implosion, Philadelphia is going to be the only playoff team from the NFC East this year. There’s no way any of these other three teams are going to make a wildcard spot with the endless parade of NFC teams from other divisions doing so well.

Next week, the Commanders start a string of tough games, taking on the Kansas City Chiefs, who absolutely obliterated the Las Vegas Raiders this week. It’s looking grim. The only thing left to hope for is to root for the Eagles to lose in the playoffs.

Week 7

Well I made it to my birthday. Otherwise not much to report on the cancer front. As of the latest scans, no further progression, and some shrinkage.

I bought Ghost of Yōtei on the PS5. If you liked the first one, you’ll surely like the second one. (I never finished the first one, though I didn’t dislike it.) It’s your basic open world game with stock standard open world game mechanics that are exactly the same in every open world game, so if you’ve played literally any Ubisoft game in the last 20 years, you’ll find it very familiar. That being said, there are a lot of cool aesthetic and cinematic choices peppered throughout. It’s a bit more button mashing than I like in sword combat, though. I prefer the far less complicated stealthy kills.

I don’t remember if I mentioned it or not but I’ve also been playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla now and then on the PS5. (Speaking of stock standard open world games.) It’s where I last left off in the Assassin’s Creed series. It’s okay, though I couldn’t care less about the story (except the modern story parts, which were always the best parts of the game for me).

It’s a sad reminder of what once was. The days where the first game (the venerable Assassin’s Creed 1) absolutely blew the doors off of what anyone thought was possible in a third person video game are long gone. I still remember being absolutely gobsmacked at how many NPCs they rendered on the screen at once and how smooth and fluid the parkour mechanics were at the time. It’s depressing that all those amazing gaming innovations are so passé now.

Superman. I did finish watching the new Superman movie. Let’s just say it wasn’t for me. Never have a seen Superman portrayed as someone who must surely be the worst person in the entire world to be around. For a while, I honestly thought, that they were trying to make Lex Luthor the relatable hero of the movie, in some kind of ironic upending of the genre formula.

Critical Role Campaign 4 Episode 1. Holy wow did they start out leaning hard into a grimdark heavy plot. Usually the start of a new campaign is a celebratory time, but the first hour started out quite literally like watching a funeral. Not figuratively literally, but literally literally.

Somber music in the background, not a trace of humor, not even the vaguest hint that anyone was having the slightest bit of fun at the table. Tons of fantasy names and places that nobody understands yet, the classic too-much-lore-at-the-beginning epic fantasy problem, where you have to start skimming ahead until you can find some kind relatable character or story thread to grab onto. It’s lucky they provided a list of the player characters on their site beforehand because it’s almost impossible to pick up who anyone is just from watching the show.

It’s not unusual for a campaign to start a little awkwardly, where everyone feels the weight of the moment and everyone’s nervous and uncertain. But it seems like you could minimize that by acknowledging it as you go, instead of trying to power through it and pretend everything’s fine.

The thing that originally made Critical Role so good was that it captured the “friends at the table” vibe really well. Now it’s all show business and absolutely none of the players’ personalities are allowed at the table anymore. It just looks like such a drag to be there now, like everyone is on their best behavior auditioning constantly for their parts, and they’re terrified to drop character for even a second. You can tell how hard they’re working because when they switch to the after-show, the whole act drops instantly and everyone’s laughing and joking and having fun again. Where’s that energy during the episode??

I find it baffling that they put so much production effort into the show but they don’t cut out the very distracting and interrupting few minutes of musical chairs when people enter and leave.

And randomly, the new background is cool but I find it a bit too busy. I wish it was a little more unfocused. The players don’t stand out. Luckily I only listen to them.

Also, the new Advertisement Playhouse thing is absolutely awful. The most painfully awkward thing I’ve ever seen. Just do regular commercials.

But, you know, I’m still going to watch it (i.e. listen to it). But yeah, so far it’s not really my vibe. The Glass Cannon Network does a much better job of capturing the kind of tabletop gaming vibe I’m interested in.

Weapons (rented on Amazon). I heard this was good so I broke with tradition and rented it while it was still on the second-tier pricing ($9.99, as opposed to $19.99 or $4.99). It was good. Possibly even great. Great direction. Lots of visual storytelling.

Taskmaster (YouTube). This season cracks me up because I keep thinking, “Wait, they got Doctor Who to be on this season!” Surely I can’t be the only one thinking that Phil Ellis is the spitting image in both appearance and demeanor of the Ninth Doctor (the best one).

The Black Hole (Disney+). Yes, that old one. I heard someone reference it and I wondered if it was on Disney+ and sure enough, there it was. This is a movie that I don’t think I’d ever actually seen before, but had a vivid and complete memory of every part of it because of what ChatGPT is telling me was The Black Hole: The Illustrated Storybook, a picture book I had as a kid. It turns out the movie is absolutely awful and the picture book is the preferred way to experience the story. (I have a similar story for the animated Lord of the Rings movie, which I’ve never seen, but know every frame because of a little purple fotonovel.)

NFL 2025 Season (cable). Ongoing NFL football games in the 2025 season.

Only Murders in the Building (Hulu). Somewhere in the past couple of months I fell into watching this modern-day Murder, She Wrote. It’s not amazing but it’s fairly entertaining, in a this-reminds-me-of-my-mom-watching-CBS-primetime-in-the-80s kind of way.

Thursday Murder Club (Netflix). Speaking of retired folks solving murders, I’ve heard about Richard Osman’s book series for a million years but I finally noticed the movie on Netflix. It was pretty good. I see why it’s popular.

Bye!

Before I start rambling, the concise cancer status remains positive, in the sense that it isn’t progressing, and many of the known metastases are dying off. But it’s still a long and uncertain road.

Having cancer is a roller coaster ride. Last time, I was enthusiastic about the progress I’d been making and feeling good that I wasn’t on anywhere near the same trajectory that my mother went through when she died within a year of finding out she had lung cancer. (She was exactly the same age that I am now.)

This time, all that’s gone and I’m back to feeling helpless and defeated.

What happened? Nothing really. Just my perception changed a bit. I got a new MRI of my brain, a three-month checkup after I had gotten Gamma Knife radiation on the remaining cancer spots in my brain.

The main problem is that I misunderstood what was going to happen when you zap cancer spots with radiation. I thought, oh, that kills those cancer cells and that’s that. Well, not so much, it turns out. It kills some of the cancer cells and shrinks the spot of metastases.

So when I got the brain MRI results showing that the two little spots of cancer (measured in millimeters, not centimeters) are still there in my brain, albeit smaller than before, I thought… oh wait, the cancer battle in my brain isn’t over yet. I thought that battle was already won.

To be clear, from what I’ve read, these results are exactly what should have happened, and a success from the doctor’s perspective, but it still took me by surprise. I somehow thought the spots on the scans would magically disappear. Not so much.

That was the first reality check.

The day after I received the brain MRI results, I had a consultation with an eye surgeon about getting the cataract in my left eye removed. Standard stuff. Just like I did before with my right eye. In the end, they agreed that I had a cataract and it should be removed. I’m more-or-less blind in my left eye these days and I had to wait two hours for that conclusion. Sigh.

What I found depressing was how many other patients in the waiting room had someone with them. I was not only one of the youngest people there, but also one of the only people there without a helper. On the day of the surgery I’ll require a driver to and from the place, and potentially a driver the day after as well. It all reminded me of what an unbelievable chore it is to get some types of healthcare without family or friends who can drop everything, drive you around, and sit around in a waiting room.

Then, a few business days later, I got a CT scan of my chest to check the progress on the lung tumor. The tumor has shrunk again, but not very much compared with the last CT scan. I found it rather disappointing and depressing. (Though, again, it’s completely in line with doctor expectations and what they want.)

That would have been bad enough, but I received a phone call later in the day about the CT results, which is always an ominous sign. If the results are in line with expectations, you don’t usually hear about them for up to a week. But this time they found a blood clot in a big vein somewhere around my pelvis or abdomen. That meant I had to start on blood thinners right away, and they informed me of signs to look for in case the blood clot breaks away and I need to go to the emergency room. Fun.

Adding insult to injury, it’s turning into autumn and the days are getting shorter, which is something I hate. I absolutely loathe the predominant darkness and sharply slanting sunlight angles of the winter months.

It also rained for a bunch of days in a row.

It all added up to a fairly depressing second half of the month, and I struggled quite a lot, only clawing my way back to some semblance of normalcy in the last few days, just in time for the fifth chemotherapy infusion.

For my fifth infusion treatment on September 30th, there was a significant delay because of processing my and everyone else’s blood work. This resulted in a lot of writing on my phone which is interspersed throughout this post.

If you’re not aware of how a chemotherapy infusion treatment goes, it works like this: You arrive at the infusion center, and they draw blood to do an assortment of tests to measure your suitability for the chemotherapy. After that, typically you’ll go to a different room and talk to your oncologist or a representative thereof to discuss your progress and talk about any changes that might be required. That takes a half hour or so.

After that, you wait for the lab to process all the blood tests, which can take an hour or so. It’s often long enough to go out and grab something to eat, if you’re confident you’ll be able to find a parking spot when you get back, that is. (Hospital-type places have the worst parking imaginable, imo.)

Then you go into another room and get the chemotherapy drugs, which takes another hour or so. Then you can leave. It’s a lot of waiting, even on a normal day.

But the waiting in my 5th chemo infusion was interminable because of delayed bloodwork results, pushing everyone 2-3 hours behind schedule. In the end I had to wait from 10:30 to 2:45 to get started on my chemotherapy. You’re just stuck in the healthcare machinery and there’s very little you can do but wait and wait and wait. I mean you could reschedule but, you know, you’ve got cancer and you kind of need these cancer drugs in a timely manner.

So you enter the waiting room game. The waiting room game is this: Sit in a semi-uncomfortable chair by yourself in a waiting room for hours (2+) and try not to look nervous or upset or bored or attention-seeking. I’m better at it than some, but not as good as others. A phone helps a lot but after a certain point, I even get bored doing things on my phone. I have no social media and almost no games on my phone, so I have to entertain myself by, for example, writing notes like these, or looking up lab results in my healthcare portal app.

Sometimes you see people who appear to lack the life skills to wait 15 minutes, let alone 2 hours. Jittering legs, changing position every 5 minutes, sighing a lot, etc. Like they’re just on the verge of taking out their personal inconvenience frustrations on someone else.

I’m thankful that I don’t usually have those issues, but I feel like I could if I didn’t expend effort to constantly check myself to make sure I’m not tapping my fingers too much, or bouncing my legs, or accidentally making eye contact with someone 5 feet away who’s clearly just as bored and impatient as I am.

I feel like I was lucky to have been born before cell phones and the Internet and even personal computers, so I still retain some of the skills from my youth of spending long periods of time by myself after school with no external stimuli. Back then I would read D&D books, or fantasy and science fiction books, or draw, or write (by hand), or some other inward-focused activity. Later I spent a ton of time practicing guitar. I guess I watched television too but I remember doing that more in my later teenage years. I didn’t enter the world of computers until I was around 16 or so, and I didn’t have my own phone line until I was 20 or so.

Anyway, one of my favorite tricks to occupy my brain without a phone while waiting is looking for patterns in ceiling or floor tiles. That combined with processing the general background noise of medical staff going about their day is usually enough for me to zone out for a while. Sounds usually occupy me more than sights.

During recent MRIs I’ve taken to mentally singing favorite songs I know by heart. There’s nothing to look at during an MRI. It doesn’t bother me, but there’s a reason they ask you about claustrophobia before those things. It’s almost a sensory deprivation chamber and I can easily understand how it could freak people out. For the brain ones they try to lock your head in place and cover your face with a kind shield, and they give you ear plugs to dampen the rather loud 70s sci-fi noises of the machine. It’s a pretty solitary experience and it goes on for quite a while.

But I digress.

Wait, Saudi Arabia is buying Electronic Arts? That seems like pretty big news.

I find myself largely uninterested in PC gaming lately, and more interested in PS5 gaming. Its just so much easier. Except for that pesky issue of the controller hurting my left thumb. Luckily I get bored of playing most games before it becomes a big problem.

I installed Nightreign on the PS5 and found it the same as the PC version: Mostly uninteresting. It’s definitely a game for groups. But its kind of fun to toodle around while watching football.

Some other games I’ve installed and almost immediately dropped after a short time include Darkest Dungeon, Stardew Valley, Solasta, Hollow Knight, and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

But I don’t want to go back to the PC. There’s something about sitting in an office-style chair with a mouse and keyboard in front of a monitor that’s not very comfortable. It feels more like work than play, especially when I add in the potential for recording what I’m playing.

It feels very much like a waste of time to play any game without recording it. Most every game I play “plain” I immediately forget what I played and almost never find it interesting enough to keep playing.

And yet I rarely feel like producing a game recording because, as mentioned, it feels like work. Somehow I need to find a happy medium between the two extremes.

Or I could just keep watching television. It feels like a tossup as to whether games or television rots your brain more. At least it’s not scrolling social media.

Superman (on Max). My thoughts after the first 15 minutes of the new Superman movie was: Is this a joke? Is making a movie just a big joke to these people now? Asking people to skip whatever important stuff they do in their busy lives to sit down and watch a film is just a big old funny, funny punchline to some joke now? The first 15 minutes of Superman wasn’t for me. I didn’t watch any further.

Mitchell and Webb Are Not Helping (on Channel 4 via. VPN). I stumbled onto this on YouTube and had to watch the series. Mitchell and Webb are among the top 5 sketch comedy teams I’ve seen in history. This new thing is funny, but not in a laughing-out-loud sort of way, more of in an ah-I-see-what-they’re-going-for-there kind of way. The best laugh-out-loud line was: [in an over-the-top Aussie accent] “For cryin’ out fuck!”

Rick and Morty (Hulu). I noticed there was an 8th season so I set out watching it, and I had no idea what was happening. I realized I hadn’t watched seasons 4-7 all that closely, so a lot of the machinegun rapid-fire self-referential humor escaped me.

I started rewatching from season 3, and on rewatching, I noticed a significant decline in story quality after season 3. Season 4 was okay, but then season 5 turned into episode after episode of random chaos. They seem like they largely abandoned character stories, and went with crazy adventure stories that ultimately dont matter and dont affect any character arcs.

All the main characters are static and unchanging, which happens eventually to every animated show, but it seemed like it was quick in this one. It makes most of the episodes forgettable except for little bits here and there.

The exact shark jumping moment for me was the introduction of Mister Nimbus. Anyway that’s my armchair notes which I’m sure they’ll appreciate.

Futurama (Hulu). I also noticed there might be some new episodes of Hulu Futurama I haven’t seen, so I need to investigate that. I thought the Hulu revival was over years ago but maybe not. Anyway Futurama isn’t what it used to be either but it’s comforting voice actor work.

Most of the Gen-X friendly adult animated show staples have long since fallen into safe and comforting maintenance mode, which makes me think I should be investigating newer generations of animated shows. I just never see any that grab me.

I can usually follow Millennial humor but I haven’t figured out Gen-Z humor yet. I wish I was better at finding good representation of Gen-Z pop culture online but I fear it’s all on TikTok, the place I never visit, and even worse it probably wouldn’t be entertaining to me.

I mean if the new Superman is any indication of the kind of entertainment the 18-35 demographic wants, then I’m screwed.

Bye!

Oh! The 15th came and went. Whoopsie!

Since I write these posts over the course of several weeks, there’s an assortment of tenses below and I just can’t be bothered to fix it all. I’m neither auditioning for nor wishing for any paid writing positions, so it’s fine. Think of it as creative license.

Nothing much new to report in the world of cancer, though of course I could write about it all day. Cancer and the treatments thereof are actually somewhat fascinating subjects. There have been a lot of advancements since my mother had lung cancer in 1991 (thankfully for me).

As of this posting, I’m currently in the fourth cycle of my first four chemotherapy treatments. They call them “cycles” because it’s a three-week cycle, and there are definite cycles in how you feel across that three-week period.

Last time, for example, I experienced my worst bout of nausea and diarrhea yet, on the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday after the Tuesday chemo treatment. I actually went back into the oncology center that Friday and Saturday for hydrating IVs.

Scientifically, the nausea is because the chemo drugs target all fast-dividing cells in the body, which includes the cancer cells, but also includes a lot of collateral damage like regular cells in the gastrointestinal tract. It felt somewhat like having a stomach flu for a few days (although, to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a stomach flu before).

For this fourth cycle, I’m preparing an aggressive schedule of anti-nausea meds to take starting on Wednesday night following the Tuesday treatment. I have three different ones, of varying effects. The idea is to make sure to take the meds before you start feeling nauseous, because I now know from experience they’re less effective during and after. I also have steroids, which are supposed to help with nausea.

It’s weird because I didn’t experience much of any nausea after the first cycle, and only a limited amount after the second cycle, on Saturday. After the third cycle I was feeling it pretty hard on Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday. Because it happened sooner than I expected, I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been.

The oncologist office’s explanation for the worsening nausea after each cycle is the increasing build-up of chemo drugs in my body. Three weeks isn’t quite enough time to flush all the drugs out of my system, apparently.

Anyway, my fourth treatment on September 9th will be my final one with two chemotherapy drugs (carboplatin and pemetrexed). After that, the plan is to change to “maintenence mode” with just the pemetrexed. I imagine that will lessen the side effects, as I believe the carboplatin is the more “powerful” drug (it takes much longer to deliver into my body, at least).

And I’ll continue with the daily Tagrisso pill, of course, which I imagine will continue for the rest of my life, and/or as long as they are effective, and/or as long as I have insurance to pay for them, and/or as long as I can afford them, and/or until something new is invented.

My next CT scan to check progress will be around September 23rd, and it’ll probably take a week to get those results, so maybe I’ll have them by my next blog post.

I can now report that I still had some nausea after my fourth treatment, but it was far less than it was after the third treatment, so mission accomplished. Still, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday are fairly sucky days after a Tuesday chemotherapy treatment, if you ever have to do it. Best-case scenario it’s an overarching feeling of queasiness, tiredness, and no appetite whatsoever.

Worth it, though.

The mental trauma of having lung cancer is lessening. It’s feeling like “the new normal,” and not an impending death sentence. It’s now feeling in the ballpark of something like diabetes, or some other life-long diagnosis that requires daily attention.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to speak with one of the social workers (basically a therapist) at the oncology center a few times, and most recently we were talking about how strange it feels to be … optimistic? To relax a little? Having received nothing but bad news for months, it was somewhat jarring to receive good news from my last CT scan.

The result is a strange feeling of wanting to return to my normal routines and push the constant thinking about end-of-life out of my head. I struggled with feeling like I was being irresponsible to do so, but with scientifically-measurable progress in reducing cancer in the form of a positive CT scan last month, and even my oncologist sounding optimistic, it doesn’t feel so strange anymore.

I just saw a commercial about a new cancer immunotherapy drug during the Monday Night Football game. The actor pretending to be a patient said, “my cancer isn’t me,” and I can tell you that simple phrase hits very differently from my post-cancer perspective.

As a newly-diagnosed cancer patient, it is fairly difficult to stop thinking that your life is forever defined by cancer and all its treatments.

Incidentally it didn’t sound like that new drug applies to my type of cancer. I’m not doing any immunotherapy, currently, which is when they stimulate your immune system to kill the cancer cells. There’s a lot of different ways to treat cancer.

Also incidentally, my ears perk up a lot more at drug-related commercials that come up during football broadcasts now, especially when that mention the word “cancer.” A sure sign of getting old.

Steroids cause hiccups… who knew?

I’m struck by how accommodating the oncologist’s office is in working with me to manage side effects of chemotherapy.

I had imagined I would need to just suck it up and deal with whatever happened if I wanted to get the benefits of killing off cancer cells, but that’s not the case at all.

I mention diarrhea and they’re calling me in to get IV hydration on a Friday and a Saturday. I mention increased nausea and they’re calling in new prescriptions and adjusting dosages. I mention hiccups and they’re changing the type of steroid I take before and after chemo.

Side note: Some of the patients rolling (literally) into the infusion center are heartbreaking. I don’t know why this person is here but they’re clearly terrified. They came in on a wheelchair and they have a docile little support terrier on their lap. Understandable because waiting rooms are pretty frightening places.

While sitting in a chair during chemo infusions is a pretty good time to write, it turns out. [Chemotherapy treatments are about 95% sitting and waiting.] On my phone though, so there’s a tradeoff. The main one being that I hit the space bar or period instead of the letters on the bottom row about 10% of the time.

In gaming news, I played a little bit more Avowed, and a little bit more Age of Wonders 4. I was able to record both of those play sessions without the maddening coughing fits I experienced back in the April/May time frame, so that was pretty cool.

Otherwise I don’t have a main game right now. I tried Nightreign again but it wasn’t that fun. It doesn’t really have that “I can’t wait to play more tomorrow” element. Many games don’t, it turns out.

It almost feels like developers have stopped trying to make new games, and they’re just focusing on sequels or expansions for old live service games. It’s not ideal for those of us who are constantly chasing that high of discovering a cool new game with some kind of hook we’ve never seen before.

I picked up Assassin’s Creed Valhalla on the PS5 for $11 or so. I haven’t played very much but so far it’s roughly the same as the previous game, just in a different setting. It passes the time.

Shockingly, I decided to get the Lies of P DLC Overture. I lambasted Lies of P up one side and down the other while I was playing it a few years ago, but I made it all the way to the end. I haven’t started it yet, but I missed the general thrill of navigating through a Souls-like game experience. It occurred to me one day that Souls-like games are akin to running an obstacle course, which child-me thought was the most fun concept ever.

UPDATE 9/18: Typical of the Lies of P punishment philosophy, it turns out you have to play through like 75% of the game in order to reach the starting point of the Overture DLC. Not sure I want to sign up for that after all. There’s an adjustable difficulty setting now, so maybe it won’t be the onerous chore it sounds like.

I finally got around to setting up my previous gaming PC as a new recording PC, for my new gaming PC. That was one of the things I had planned to do right when I found out I had cancer. Anyway, check that off the list.

I’ve been trying to play more games in the evening but I find myself more interested in watching something on television.

One of the movies I forgot to mention watching last time was the new Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. It gets my standard review score, the same review as nearly everything that comes out now: It was okay. I thought it was interesting that they sort of combined games 1 and 2 into a single movie, which makes a lot of sense. I don’t remember the ending because I sort of stopped paying attention toward the end.

I read that they cancelled The Wheel of Time series, which was disappointing, but not surprising. I don’t think many people liked it, but I thought it was decent.

There’s a season 6 of Taskmaster New Zealand, which I’ve been watching via. VPN. I still think the New Zealand and especially the Australian Taskmaster is better than the original. Crickey.

That made me look for more episodes of Guy Montgomery’s GuyMont Spelling Bee, which is the best panel/game show I’ve seen in a while. I was rewarded with a season 2 of the newer Australian version.

I like to watch these Oceanic shows because it furthers my quest to be able to distinguish New Zealand accents from Australian accents. I think the key is listening for the “I"s and the “E"s.

I also have a weird fascination with New Zealand because it feels like a miniature America, but on an alternate timeline where the native population still exists. It’s mind-boggling that they throw out Māori phrases on popular shows all the time.

Over here in the U.S., I, for example, have never seen a Native American in real life, have never heard Native American phrases in real life, though there are tribes and reservations still in Virginia. It’s no wonder I’ve never seen any, because the largest tribe only has 2000 people, and the two reservations only have about 500 people each. Native America doesn’t exist much here where I live, except in the form of names on roads and maps.

But I digress.

Lo! A new season of the O.G. Taskmaster is starting as well!

I binge-watched all of the Mission Impossible movies. “Watched” is a bit of a misnomer, it was more like I played them and mostly listened and/or fell asleep at some point. It still shocks me that there was a third movie after the second one. (I assume it’s a universal opinion that Mission Impossible 2 was the weakest link in the series.) I think they probably should have ended on Fallout, because I also assume there’s widespread acceptance that it was the best in the series. I’m still waiting for the price drop before I rent the newest one.

Speaking of which, it’s pretty annoying how they force you to buy the movies when they first appear on streaming now. I don’t know if there’s a term for when you’re waiting for a new movie to become rentable instead of buyable on streaming, but there should be.

And, of course, the 2025 NFL football season has begun. After the Washington Commanders showed themselves to be a competitive team last year, making it all the way to the NFC Championship game for the first time since the moon broke off from the Earth, I’m much more interested in following the games this year.

A new wrinkle has come up since the last time I watched football regularly: I’ve had to learn what all the betting terminology means, since you can’t watch 30 seconds of a game without someone mentioning Sports Book or Draft Kings or some such nonsense now.

God help me I’ve even investigated ATSC 3.0 and antennas for pulling in 4K signals over-the-air.

Hoo boy. What a world. Thank god I have cancer!

Anyway, I have a pretty high tolerance for thoughtful political commentary in any form, so keeping up with the headlines of what’s going on doesn’t stress me out very much. I rarely get angry at whatever crazy outrage is happening in the news. It’s more likely that I’ll find it funny.

The current U.S. administration is so far over-the-top into their own made-up reality show world that it’s hard to take any of it too seriously, especially when I have real problems to deal with. Concerning things happen every day, of course, but I still don’t see too much in the way of a coordinated, irreversible, long-term ideological assault from these guys. It’s just scattershot performative nonsense for the bubble of the daily news cycle and whoever’s dumb enough to listen on Twitter. (I am, however, keeping a close eye on the cynical martyrization of Charlie Kirk, a person I had barely even heard of before.)

I’ve been trying to think of a way to reference the current American administration in a way that acknowledges they did, in fact, win the office in a free and fair election, while simultaneously making the observation that they are quite clearly bullshitting their way through a job they aren’t qualified for and don’t care the slightest bit about, except as it pertains to ratings and self-enrichment, and therefore haven’t earned any respect as governing officials overseeing the public trust.

Something like, Performant President Trump or Reality Vice President Vance. I’m still workshopping it. Hopefully that won’t get me on any of the lists they’re always making.

Bye!

Congratulations Blaugustians! Holy crap, 168 participants?!? That’s nuts. Sadly I haven’t been keeping track of anything in the Discord or the posts.

I have some good health news to share for a change.

I got the results of my first post-treatment CT scan and I can report positive progress in the molecular battle against my overzealous cancer cells.

After two and a half months of various treatments, here is the score card: 1 brain tumor was physically removed in early June. The surrounding tumor bed and 2 additional brain tumors were zapped with radiation in late June (via. something called Gamma Knife). 1 bone metastases in the left femur neck (hip) was zapped with radiation as part of a trial study in early August.

And now, the new CT scan shows that the 1 large tumor in the right lung, presumably the root cause of everything, has shrunk by almost half its volume after the chemotherapy started in July. (It’s still pretty big, it’s just significantly smaller.) Several smaller spots of metastases in the lungs have also shrunk and/or disappeared from the scan.

That means the treatments are working.

Which is pretty good news, if you ask me.

I’m editorializing here with no medical training, but this feels like especially good news, because I was told this combination of pills and chemotherapy is only effective for a maximum of two years before the cancer cells adapt to it. So these results after only a month and a half still gives me another 22 months to work with.

Basically everything has improved EXCEPT… one area of metastases in the T5 vertebrae has grown a bit. I don’t feel any pain or symptoms from it, at least not that I’m aware of. It’s concerning but not that concerning, according to my oncologist. They’ll keep an eye on it. I’ll have another CT scan near the end of September.

In short, this is the best news I’ve heard since I heard that I qualified for the daily EGFR pills. This is the first time I’ve had scientific confirmation that all this work is actually doing something.

I’m by no means out of the woods, and treatments will continue for the foreseeable future, and a “curative” outcome (as they say in the hospital biz, meaning eradicating every cancer cell completely) is still unlikely, but I feel some confidence now that I could end up in the portion of lung cancer patients that have better outcomes than not, which is about as good as it can get.

As a point of comparison, at one point, I was told if I had done no treatments I might not have lived another six months.

Anyway, physically I feel okay and remain able to work and function independently, within certain limits. I’m not running any marathons, for example, but I can go to the store and handle all of the basic necessities. I’m even coughing less, so I may actually be able to make a return to game videos someday.

From the outside, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell anything’s wrong with me. The biggest visible change is I’ve lost 10-15 pounds since last year, and I have some mild rashy spots here and there from the drugs. Also, I just buzzed all my hair off so I don’t have to worry about it anymore.

Gaming notes written earlier on my phone while getting pumped full of chemotherapy drugs for the third time:

I think I mentioned I was going to try Balatro on my phone a while back. I did, and its pretty fun and engaging. However it’s not a long term kind of game for me. After a while, you start to understand the patterns and it turns into a game of trying to get bigger scores, which isn’t really my thing. But its definitely a good little game and I understand why it’s so popular.

I fell off of playing Death Stranding 2. I got through the first boss fight and remembered how annoying the boss fights were (it always feels like you’re playing with one arm tied behind your back while wading hip deep through molasses). With no compelling story hooks (yet?) I don’t feel much incentive to continue. The magic of experiencing the first game for the first time is long gone.

While I was getting Death Stranding 2, I saw the Mass Effect Legendary Edition remaster on the PS5 store for around $5, so I got that as well. I’ve only played a little bit, though. It’s quite a lot like the original, which I already played. Everybody says 2 is the best one of the series but I always thought 1 had a much stronger story, even if the gameplay was weaker.

I’ve missed a lot of the gaming zeitgeist over the last several months, but I saw some mentions of Funcom’s new Dune game. It never occurred to me to try it, because I assumed it was a re-skin of Conan Exiles, a game I enjoyed (solo) when it first came out in early access, but grew tired of as I became able to build enough gear to go wherever I wanted. So I assumed Dune: Awakening would follow the same progression. (The same progression as most survival-type games based off of the ARK model, honestly.) Maybe I’m wrong. What would it hurt to try it? Solo, of course.

What else? I haven’t played any more Nightreign, which was the last pre-cancer game I remember getting. Its just not very solo-friendly unless you like a lot of repetitive work, and the rogue-like elements aren’t that fun for me.

What should I play next? I think there were some other games I was looking forward to this year. Pathologic 3 is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Oh, and Solasta II, but I fear that might not arrive until 2026.

Otherwise I have an assortment of partially-finished CRPGs I can return to. And I have a bit of a hankering to go back to Roll20 and find a virtual tabletop campaign to join. I’m tempted to find a paid game in the hope it would encourage everyone to take it more seriously, but I see a lot of mixed reviews about paid games, so I feel like it would do little to reduce the complete random chaos of finding a decent group.

Here ends the phone notes.

I did, in fact, try Dune: Awakening. It’s exactly what I thought it would be. I rented a private server, played the tutorial up to the point where you’re supposed to use some kind of tool to zap a rock that’s blocking the entrance to a ship, spent five minutes trying to figure out how to do that with no instructions, got frustrated and annoyed, then quit.

I played a grand total of 40 minutes. Maybe I’ll go back someday but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The sad future of what passes for MMORPGs these days still looks pretty bleak to me.

A random side rant.

I see this floating about in the ether now and then: Play D&D without a Dungeon Master! Simulate Dungeon Master decisions so you, the solo player, can play without finding someone to do all the hard work!

For example, I saw Jeremai doing a series along these lines.

But these solo RPG endeavors are always wrong. Wrong, wrong, and more wrong. They’re basically choose-your-own-adventure books.

What I want to do is play solo D&D without the players. I want to be the Dungeon Master, and simulate the player actions and decisions. I want to do the hard part. The fun part. The creative semi-improvisational storytelling part. The exact opposite of what everyone else wants to do, apparently.

It’s frustrating. Every time I see a “solo TTRPG” thing, I have a brief moment of hope, but it’s always the wrong way around. Why is everyone always wrong about everything?

I saw Scopique talking about making a The Secret World TTRPG adventure, which reminded me about my own fantasy campaign setting I’ve been dabbling with for a year or so.

I assume this is a thing that basically everyone of a certain age–us people who memorized every page of the original, antique TSR D&D books as a kid–does out of regular habit. It’s a holdover from back in the days when the most fun part of D&D was creating your own worlds and maps to play in.

Anyway I got out Obsidian recently and started plunking away at my sandbox world full of quest hooks again. Obsidian is quite well suited to creating a campaign setting, if you didn’t know. I’d like to see better export options, though. I sprung for the Sync subscription so I could work on it from my MacBook, my Android phone, or my Windows desktop, wherever I happen to be sitting at the time I think of something. It’s cool stuff.

I also sprung for an Inkarnate subscription so I could play around with making some maps. It’s not as fun as drawing on a piece of paper, though. Someday I need to figure out how to use handheld drawing implements again.

I kind of want to make it a fairly system-agnostic campaign setting, one that should work with D&D 5e, or 2024, or 3.5, or 1e, or especially one of the new-fangled OSR offerings like DCC or Shadowdark. That’s my goal, anyway. There’s no magic to it, it basically just means trying to keep the worldbuilding elements separated from the stat blocks.

The key to homebrewing a campaign setting is not overthinking things and getting too far into the weeds. There’s no point in spending days fleshing out the deep, dark backstory of the butcher’s wife and her ties to the criminal underworld if the players never talk to her. So I’m mainly just jotting down ideas and moving on.

It’s hard, though. You really want to dive into those deep, dark backstories. It’s fun.

Anyway, the point is that I’ll be ready for that day when someone says, “Hey can you run a game for us?” Har, har. I crack myself up.

Watched The Accountant 2. It was good enough to watch the whole thing but I remembered the first one more fondly. This one seemed more comedic and unnecessary.

Watched John Wick 4. The thing about John Wicks 2, 3, and 4, especially 3 and 4, is that they’re filled with really cool, unmissable, top-quality stunt work, but they’re also really, really boring to watch. Honestly the behind-the-scenes features are better than the movie itself. This is also the problem with writing fight scenes in books… they’re kind of boring to read, unless you keep them really tight and fast and skip most of the details. The fight itself is usually unimportant, the outcome is what matters to the story. That’s my philosophy anyway. I won’t ever write and haven’t ever written a fight scene where every distinct punch is described in vivid detail and they go on forever.

Watched a movie called Last Breath on, I think, Amazon Prime. I saw Woody Harrelson in the cast and figured how bad could it be. It was okay. Not terrible, not the greatest. Interesting story though.

I think I watched another movie or two but I forgot what they were.

I’ve seen the first four episodes of Alien: Earth and my general opinion is that it’s okay but nothing special. The danger of most long-running franchises is that when they start adding new stuff because they have to keep building on the original, it doesn’t really feel like the original thing anymore. I’ve never thought of immortality as a theme of interest in the Alien world.

The “on all the time in the background” media is currently the zillion seasons of The Simpsons on Disney+/Hulu, or as I call it, Guess The Guest Celebrity Voice and/or Which Character Is Tress MacNeille This Time. I’ve never been a huge Simpsons fan, so this is the first time I’ve ever re-watched any episodes since seeing them on an actual television when they came out. They’re mostly okay, usually in the realm of “nothing special but passes the time.”

During the earlier seasons of this The Simpsons rewatch, with fresh eyes, I was struck by how much I loathed Homer Simpson and his unrelenting stupidity… it fell way short of being funny. Advancing a story plot by having a character act dumber than rocks just doesn’t sit well with me. It got better, though, mostly. Anyway, if nothing else, it’s a good way to do a year-by-year review of all pop culture history since I was a teenager.

Notes on home repairs written earlier on my phone while Carboplatin courses into my superior vena cava:

In addition to all the outpatient cancer treatments I’m getting, I’m working on some long-overdue home repair projects that have been hanging over my head and stressing me out for a long time. (By “working,” I mean “paying contractors for.”) The goal being to get all stress out of my life except cancer-related stress. [I had considerable help from a friend in getting all of this setup and running. There’s a reason it’s taken me so long to get these things done and it’s because I suck at it.]

In July, a lawn care company did a fair amount of work outside to clean up all the crazy overgrown bushes and weeds around the house, and they’ve also been taking care of the mowing since then. They also cut down, hauled away, and stump-ground several trees that were problems for various reasons. I prefer to keep trees but these were either damaged or threatening the road or just dropping tons of leaves every fall, and the company wasn’t charging very much (imo) to cut them down.

At the end of August some roofers will be installing new shingles, and repairing any damage they find in the process. There are at least three spots where water has been leaking through. [This has now been completed. They replaced one fairly large section of roof in a particularly troublesome spot.]

At the same time, a mold remediation company will be going through the attic and working to deal with mold and water damage. They’ll be tearing out insulation and chunks of ceiling from several rooms. They’ll also be disinfecting the whole house, so I’ve scheduled a couple nights at a nearby hotel which, miraculously, allows me to bring my cat. [This is also done now, and it turned out I didn’t actually need to leave my house, because they worked on only one half of the house, leaving the other half free for me and the cat.]

After that, I’ll have to find someone to repair the ceilings in affected rooms.

Ding! Carboplatin done, time to go home.

Bye!

Sorry everyone. I’m still here, just very late.

First let’s see what I wrote somewhere around the 24th of July, back when I thought I would still be on time:

I’m actually feeling decent for a change.

I still have a runny nose lingering from the cold I had at the beginning of the month, and my lower back is still pretty sore from when I hurt it coughing from the cold at the beginning of the month, but otherwise I feel okay.

I was told about a recent article in the New York Times: Many Lung Cancers Are Now in Nonsmokers. Scientists Want to Know Why. (Sorry, paywall.) I would love to know why myself.

If you have the ability to read that article, it’s describing my exact situation. I was somewhat reassured to note that one of the subjects of the article was diagnosed with stage IV non-smoker lung cancer out of the blue in 2019, just like I was last month, and is still around to talk about it.

The thinking used to be that smoking was “almost the only cause of lung cancer,” said Dr. Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. But worldwide, roughly 10 to 25 percent of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50 percent or more.

My advice is if you notice unusual shortness of breath after any kind of physcial activity, get a chest x-ray, even if you have to pay for it yourself. Don’t just say “oh, I’m getting older and out of shape,” like I did. You might be, but it’s also pretty much the only sign of lung cancer. Certainly the only one I noticed.

I often think “what did I do wrong” to have missed the fact that I developed lung cancer, and the answer is, nothing. My mother died from lung cancer, but she was a smoker. Like the article says, I had no reason to think I was at a higher risk for lung cancer because the general vibe was that only smokers got lung cancer and I’ve never smoked once.

I can report that I’ve been accepted into a nation-wide study for cancers like mine. In brief, it means I’ll be getting preventative radiation treatment on one specific area of metastatis (the femur neck) instead of the current medical standard, which is to wait for symptoms to develop, then get radiation treatment. They are looking to study which has better results long-term. I haven’t been officially notified by anyone, but since they are preparing me for radiation, I have to assume I was picked to be in the half of the study group to receive preventative radiation.

Did I mention before that I have three areas of bone metastasis? Probably not. Yeah it’s a mess inside my body. Lung cancer doesn’t stay in one place. Two vertabrae, and the left femur neck. Relatively small spots, and assymptamatic as far as I can tell, but it’s enough to show up on a PET scan and enough to want to get rid of it. The daily pill I’m taking should also affect those spots, assuming the cancer has the same genetic origin.

I was getting some blood work done last Thursday to check how my white blood cell count is doing at the end of a three-week chemotherapy cycle, because I was getting a root canal on Friday. (Part of my effort to hurry up and get everything else off my plate so I can focus just on the cancer thing.) Lower white blood cell count means increased risk of infection, and mine is, as it turns out, still a bit low. So my oncologist called in an antibiotic prescription which I’ll be taking as a precaution before and after the root canal, and they’ll also do some kind of booster at my next infusion, which is next week.

The point of that is, while I was at the place where everyone with cancer comes to get their bloodwork and chemotherapy, I was able to look around at everyone else in the waiting room again. Many of them, much like me, look like completely ordinary people that you would never guess are getting treatments for cancer. The number of elderly folks in wheelchairs with some kind of oxygen, the stereotypical cancer patient, were a vanishingly small minority.

I do see a few here and there, though, and I found myself feeling thankful to be in my situation instead of theirs.

It’s an odd situation to be thankful for having cancer, but I don’t really want to be a person who wallows in self-pity. I feel like it’s fairly important to find things to be grateful for, now more than ever. I’m reminded of my mother’s lung cancer experience. I don’t remember very many details, but I remember her remaining fairly upbeat through most of it, and I don’t ever remember her projecting any kind of need for sympathy, at least around me. I have in the past and still do find it inspiring.

Something else I’m struggling with at the moment is feeling like cancer defines the entirety of my existence. Like I should greet every new person by saying, “Hi, I have cancer.” Like it’s the only thing anyone needs to know about me.

It’s hard to remember that I have hobbies and I had a life, pre-diagnosis. In all the chaos of the first month, every bit of that disappeared. I need to proactively try to claw that stuff back into my life. In fact, I’m going to start as I’m typing this by plugging in my PS5 again and getting Death Stranding 2.

And now I can report that I’ve played a handful of hours on the PS5.

It’s a beautiful game, just like the first one, only better. It’s largely a continuation of the same mechanics as the first game. What it’s lacking is the powerfully mysterious and engaging opening story hooks that the first game had. This one just kind of assumes you’re already hooked and gets right into the delivery mechanics after a brief “where are they now” scene.

Maybe something amazing will happen later on. I’ve only done three or four deliveries and reached the first boss fight. But right now it’s firmly in the “more of the same” category and I don’t feel the same sense of wonder I did in the first game.

I hope what I wrote above is good, because I’m not re-reading it to check for errors, otherwise I’ll never post this.

Now let’s fast forward to today, August the 6th, when I remembered I was supposed to post something at the start of the month.

It turns out I was in no mood for writing.

The second chemotherapy infusion hit me a lot harder than the first one did. The first week after is the worst, but it wasn’t that bad after the first one. Not this time. I spent a goodly number of the first days of August in a brain foggy stupor, and nausea hit me much more than the first round, and I had my first incident of throwing up from chemotherapy. Fun, fun.

Of course, naturally, with my tremendous luck, I wrenched my lower back again throwing up. So back to square one there. And by the way, I can’t take ibuprofen or NSAIDs during chemotherapy, so no anti-inflammatories. Just stretches and Tylenol, which only masks the pain for a brief while.

The thing about chemotherapy is that it really messes up your GI tract. Mine, at least.

First of all, everything tastes different. Water–the thing I’m supposed to be chugging all day every day to stay hydrated–tastes absolutely awful. It has a horrible chemical, metallic taste, which is not conducive to hydration. I have to mix in a variety of drink powders (they break down into Gaterade-type stuff, or lemonade-type stuff, or tea-type stuff… things like that) to make it tolerable. The drink powders also don’t taste that great.

And everything I ate for a while made me feel queasy, which is not conducive for eating properly. I have an assortment of anti-nausea pills I can take. I’ve been taking one of them almost exactly every six hours just in case, whether I feel nauseous or not. This past weekend, my main food was bread dipped in broth and crackers. Which, incidentally, also don’t taste great.

Anyway it’s been a challenging start to August.

As of yesterday afternoon and evening I started to feel better, and was able to get more food in me. I boldly challenged fate and ordered some pasta from DoorDash and when I woke up this morning I felt better than I have in a while.

Of course I immediately hurt my back when I was trying to move some stuff around.

You see, other stuff is going on in my life.

I have a mold remediation and roof work scheduled for later this month, part of the big overarching project to get every dangling chore off my plate except cancer.

Preparing for that involves a lot of decluttering. I had rented a dumpster, which was in my driveway for a little over a week, which I completely filled with excess clutter from my house.

I bought a new car, too. Did I mention that already? I can’t remember what I’ve written and what I haven’t. Anyway I needed a reliable car that wasn’t going to break down on the way to every chemotherapy appointment. It’s a Honda CR-V Hybrid. It’s the most luxurious car I’ve ever owned. It’s basically like driving a big computer.

And now let’s fast-forward again to today, August 8th, when I remembered that I had started to try to get this posted two days ago.

I’m feeling better, incidentally. (Except for my back, which persistently hobbles me.) I think I’m over most of the first-week-after-infusion blues. I have an insatiable urge to stuff my face with food almost all day, which is a pleasant change.

Blaugust is what I wanted to mention. I was aware that a Blaugust was taking place, but it’s far outside the scope of my reality at the moment. I haven’t even opened Discord in months, and I haven’t had much of a chance to catch up on what people are writing, but I did happen to notice Naithin’s post Blaugust in a Post-Comment-Box World, which made me chuckle, because it sounded like something I’ve written and struggled with before.

It’s very clear to me that static or static-ish sites are the future of blogging. In fact, they’re more like the present of blogging. Or at least, web sites. But yeah, comments by default are antithetical to static web sites, and it’s a rather large barrier when moving from a WordPress-style blog to a static-style blog. Technologically speaking, I think blog comments are a relic of the past, like rotary telephones, and there comes a point where you just can’t realistically support them any more. But a lot of people don’t think that. Thus the eternal debate continues.

Anyway I’m going to stop writing now, and not scroll up, and just publish this as-is, so at least people will know I’m not dead. Just lazy.

It feels like I’ve had the absolute worst luck this month. The following is a rant about all the things that have kicked me in the nads so far this month. Perhaps this will make someone feel better about their own problems.

I have quite enough health issues to worry about, and then I caught a cold. Just a plain old, ordinary rhinovirus cold. Some people just power through colds. I’ve never understood that. My body screams at me and I can’t imagine a world where I could power through feeling so bad.

This cold hit particularly hard, perhaps because I haven’t had one in a long time, and/or because of all the other stuff my body is busy with. It feels like the worst cold I’ve ever had. Worse than that time I had COVID, by a mile.

It’s now over two weeks after I first woke up with a sore throat in the middle of the night and I still feel miserable from it. According to the standard timeline of a cold, the virus itself is long gone, it’s just all the lingering sinus drainage, which forces me to blow my nose every five minutes and cough with these great whooping, croupy coughs.

As I’m writing this, I’ve finally experienced two days in a row where my tortured nose and sinuses feel slightly better than the day before, instead of worse, so there’s some daylight at the end of the tunnel at least.

But the first weekend in July was a nightmare. I coughed so much from the cold that I hurt my lower back. So in addition to snot pouring from my nose all day every day, I’ve been hobbling and limping around the house, barely able to change my pants or take a shower.

I think the cold virus invaded my body exactly one day before I had an IR Port installed in my chest. A port is a little thing they embed under the skin of the chest that connects directly to a big vein, which makes it easier to deliver chemotherapy drugs. So I was recovering from mini-surgery and a cold at a the same time.

It’s not been a fun July for me so far.

The cold and back thing are getting slightly better each day, but it’s very slow going, and that’s because my body is also dealing with this minor thing called cancer, not to mention the two different cancer treatments I’ve started.

I’ve started taking a pill called Tagrisso every day. This pill is supposed to seek out and destroy cancer cells matching the EGFR lung cancer mutation. It also dries up the skin and causes rashes. My face and my upper chest have broken out into fields of little red dots that make me look like I belong in a leprosy colony.

Then I had my first chemotherapy infusion within a week of getting the IR Port and a few days after I started on the pill. They cleared me to go ahead with it despite recovering from a cold.

First, they draw some blood to make sure you’re healthy enough for the infusion (I think they’re looking at white blood count, among other things). Then, they sit you in a chair and start pumping you full of drugs (through the new IR Port in my chest): A steroid, an anti-nausea drug, a shot of B12, and something else I forgot.

That part took about 30 minutes. Then, the actual chemotherapy drugs. I get two. One is pemetrexed, which takes about 10 minutes, and the other is carboplatin, which takes about 30 minutes. I’ll get both every three weeks for four cycles, then I’ll switch to just pemetrexed.

Chemotherapy drugs are so serious that the nurse has to wear special blue protection when they handle the drugs, and they have to ask a second nurse to double-check the settings. They attach the plastic bags of drugs (along with a bag of saline) to a little machine with an LED display that delivers it all at a suitable rate straight into your bloodstream through the port.

I felt nothing during any of this process, except a heightened sense of energy from the steroid and B12 shot (I take steroids the day before and the day after, which also partially nausea). It felt like I’d drunk a hundred cups of coffee. (As I’m writing this, somewhere near the “nadir” of a cycle, the point where the body is weakest after a chemo infusion before recovering for the next cycle, that feeling is long gone.)

The Tagrisso pill kills cancer cells only, but chemotherapy works by killing all fast-dividing cells in the body, which includes cancer cells, but unfortunately also includes non-cancer cells like skin and hair and stomach cells, hence the standard chemotherapy side effects like hair loss and nausea. So far I haven’t experienced much in the way of nausea, but I have an assortment of prescriptions on hand in case I do.

My main issues are rashes and loss of appetite and constipation. I’ve lost a lot of weight. I have to force-feed myself every day, small meals because, while I don’t have nausea, eating too much makes my stomach feel a bit upset. I’ve started drinking Ensure supplements every day, and I’m trying to find ways of adding extra protein. It’s a major chore.

Anyway, that’s the gist of my July so far. A time I hope to soon forget. Mostly because of a stupid cold. Seriously, the cold and the related back injury has been way worse than any cancer-induced symptoms so far. It sounds like I’m joking but I’m definitely not.

P.S. As if recovering from a cold and chemotherapy wasn’t bad enough, my 2009 car has a new, unknown engine issue, after I just had the alternator replaced. I need to buy a new car. I can’t deal with the stress and anxiety of a car that may or may not break down on the way to a chemotherapy infusion. I also can’t deal with the stress and anxiety of buying a new car, but I have little choice.

P.P.S. And I’m pretty sure the outdoor cat I’ve been taking care of for years is either lost, dead, or found another home. He’s been very skittish since I had to go to the hospital and now I haven’t seen him for over a week, which has never happened before.

This month can go jump right in a lake.