Endgame Viable

Not to sound overly dramatic, but my body has been trying to kill me, and only recently revealed its intentions. I officially have non-smoker lung cancer (adenocarcinoma of the lung, to be specific), and it’s going to be with me for the rest of my life. It’s a hard thing to write down.

I don’t really want to get too deep into my emotional state on here. But I do want to be fairly transparent about the process because you don’t hear much about it, and maybe I can help demystify it a little bit. I definitely had not been properly educated in life to prepare for this possible eventuality. If nothing else, writing things down helps me process a bit better.

A cancer diagnosis is one of those unexpected life-changing events, like the death of a loved one or marriage or divorce or a car accident. Most everyone goes through one or more life-changing events per life, but usually nobody is ready for it, and this is no different. One day you’re living Life A and the next day you’re living Life B, and there’s an impenetrable wall separating the two existences. Cancer isn’t an inevitable outcome of the human experience, like cataracts, but a lot of people will experience it at some point, and almost everyone knows someone who has/had cancer.

Like everyone else, I’ve feared cancer from afar my whole life, but did I ever really know what cancer was before now? Really internalize it? Nope, not really.

Now I know. It lives and grows secretly inside you, and there’s nothing you can do on your own to make it better. You can’t exercise harder, you can’t eat better, you can’t rest more. None of that helps. It starts as a mutated cell, it invades and grows into neighboring cells, and it’s all without your consent, like an alien presence inside of you.

You can cut it out, but only up to a point. Unfortunately, I have a fairly sizable tumor (~7cm) wrapped around the airways of my right lung, pressing against an important vein, which has partially collapsed the upper lung. That one’s not getting cut out anytime soon. If left unchecked, it will suffocate me to death.

As if that weren’t bad enough, when it was discovered last month, the cancer had already spread to my brain, which is the standard path of lung cancer. That means I’m already at Stage IV. There was one decent-sized tumor in the back of my left cerebellum causing a lot of headaches, and two smaller tumors elsewhere in my left brain.

As of this writing, I can say that the brain tumors have been dealt with. I was checked into a hospital early in June and the larger tumor was removed surgically. Last week, the two smaller tumors were treated with something called Gamma Knife–a very targeted radiation treatment.

So from the neck up, I should be cancer-free. For now. I’ll need to get brain MRIs every three months to check for any return.

That part was easy, believe it or not. Brain surgery was a breeze. (I was cut open a little after noon and I was up and walking around again that night.) The Gamma Knife treatment was easy. I just lay there mildly sedated and napping in a big tube while the machine zapped the tumors, and I felt nothing whatsoever.

Now all my headaches are gone, which is a huge relief. I honestly didn’t realize how bad the headaches were until they were gone. The only negative side effect is I have a small divot on the back of my head from the craniotomy, but I feel exactly zero change in my brain function. In fact, I feel more mentally alert than ever. Too alert, honestly. My brain is constantly spinning out of control.

The hard part is coming up though.

After many tests, I’m lucky to match a specific cancer genetic mutation (EGFR) to qualify for a pill as the first line of attack, which targets all cancer cells in the body, no matter where they are. This is a relatively new treatment option. As far as I can tell, this is pretty much the best case scenario for my situation. I’ll be taking a pill at home every day, and that will be combined with outpatient chemo infusions every three weeks, and they’ll monitor progress. Chemo starts on July 8.

There will be side effects to manage. As yet, I don’t know how I will feel mentally or physically during these treatments, but I’ve been given a fairly sizable list of possible issues I’ll have to deal with, along with strategies to cope with them. It’ll be things like rashes, nausea, lack of energy, mouth sores, something about my fingernails, and yes, some patchy hair loss.

But will it even work? I have no idea. There’s no guarantees. Cancer likes to fight back. It adapts to the treatments being used against it, like those Borg adaptive shields.

As far as how I currently feel, my main symptoms are a persistent dry cough, shortness of breath, and some wheezing. There’s still a lot of cognitive dissonance between the seriousness of my diagnosis and the way I look and feel, which is at worst like maybe I’m getting over a mild pneumonia. I was given an Albuterol inhaler in case it got bad, but so far I haven’t needed it. I often run out of energy in the last third of the each day. My sleep schedule is completely wrecked. I’ve lost a bunch of weight this year, and my appetite isn’t great, which I attribute (for now) to stress and an overly-stimulated brain. When my brain is racing full speed I forget to eat, so I have to force-feed myself a lot.

Mentally I’m all over the place. I have fairly significant social anxiety and agoraphobia that I try to hide from everyone, and you might be able to imagine how stressful it would be to upend all of my carefully-selected safe routines and race to an endless parade of strange hospitals and doctors practically every day for a month.

In terms of health insurance and expenses, I’m very lucky to have a decent plan through my employer, and they have been covering almost everything so far, so there are no financial burdens (yet?).

My oncologist, the person who is in charge of my overall treatment plan, has been optimistic but cautious not to give false hope. This is a pretty serious case. This cancer has been growing in there for a while. I went from nothing to Stage IV cancer overnight (the stage, I’ve learned, is a shortcut that tells you how much it’s spread… ideally you’d want to find cancer well before Stage IV).

If this had happened when I were 75 instead of 55, I probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance, and the doctors probably wouldn’t waste much of their time on me. This cancer will never be cured completely, the best I can hope for are periods of remission, where it stops actively growing. This is going to be the concluding chapter of my life, however long that might be. Another hard thing to write down and process.

But, maddeningly, it’s all outside of my control. The cancer-fighting drugs and a mutated alien intruder will be battling it out at a cellular level inside me while I watch helplessly from the sidelines. All I can do is try to stay positive and avoid anything that might hurt my chances (like losing my health insurance).

And get all my affairs in order, as they say.

Sorry, that was a downer. I’d like to think I can bring a little more levity to this kind of writing in the future. I’ve got 50+ pages of notes from when I was in the hospital and then careening from one doctor appointment to the next at break-neck speed over the last month. Surely I can find some amusing anecdotes to relate from there. Like maybe the time I was trying to figure out how to use a suppository in the hospital because I’d been constipated for a week.

Also, did I mention my car is falling apart and I still have a cataract and it turns out I need a couple of root canals? Yeah. That too. When it rains it pours.

UPDATE: As an addendum to the feeling of powerlessness I mentioned above, I have just learned about the scientific relationship between stress and cortisol and its effects on the body at a more cellular level, and I’ve been encouraged to hear I might be able to positively influence this treatment process after all, just by proactively managing stress.

I’ve pretty much stopped all gaming, I’m just too tired in the evenings. I want to find some quick and easy games I can put on my phone for times I get stuck in a waiting room. Maybe something like that Balatro phenomenon I keep hearing about.

And I definitely won’t be recording any game videos for a while. I’ve uploaded everything I had left in my upload queue, for what it’s worth.

As you might imagine, I’ve been in need of a lot of distracting television lately. Here’s some more stuff I’ve watched.

For All Mankind (AppleTV via. Amazon). Finished all the current seasons. Seasons 1 and 2 are excellent, season 3 is good, but I thought season 4 was comparatively weak. They just completely gave up on the whole gravity and rocket science thing, and somehow they built the whole season around dodgy makeup and the least likable people. Don’t really know where they can go from there, but there’s supposed to be a season 5 someday.

Archer (Netflix). On bad days, I pretty much have this on repeat all the time.

Plane (Netflix). Serviceable Gerard Butler thriller, who seems to be the hardest working actor in making serviceable thrillers, following the Nicolas Cage “just do everything” mantra. The first half was better than the second half, but I didn’t hate it. There were some decent characters and a pretty good one-take hand-to-hand fight scene, I thought.

Geostorm (Netflix). Another Gerard Butler vehicle. Sometimes a lot of people put a lot of effort into making a blockbuster movie but it doesn’t work out and you can’t really tell why. In this case it seemed pretty obvious to me. It started with a really terrible script, on which even an eight-year-old science student may have offered some valuable critiques, and then nobody else involved in the project seemed to care about what they were making. It had “somebody’s pet vanity project” written all over it. Stupendously forgettable, even while in the middle of watching it.

Now You See Me (Netflix). So formulaic, so forgettable, so unbelievable. Basically a movie for children, but it passed the time. Except for all the times I got up and left the screen because I didn’t care what was happening or why.

Just a short update. I’m still here. I have more information about the lung tumor I mentioned last time. It’s been a tsunami of information and activity quite frankly. Most of the news I’ve received is not especially good, so I’ll spare you the gory details, but at a minimum I will say it’s been confirmed to be cancerous.

I was in the hospital June 3 - June 9 having–I can’t believe I’m saying this–brain surgery. It went well, and I’m back home now, awaiting further test results. I have more (outpatient) procedures scheduled next week, and there will likely be a litany of outpatient treatments after that, depending on how test results come back.

I’m fully overwhelmed with all the new information and how to process it all. It feels like my old life is over and a new life has begun, without any consent from me.

I’m being purposely vague because if I write it out in full detail, it sounds scary and like I’m at death’s door, though luckily I don’t particularly feel that way. I actually feel better today than any time in the last month or so.

So, positive steps are being taken, it’s just a maddeningly slow process of hurry-up-and-wait. I have been lucky to get the process moving fairly quickly though. But I’m only on step one of about five hundred.

Needless to say, my gaming and writing and most everything has dropped off to nothing. Most of my focus is day-to-day, eating decent meals, getting enough rest, staying hydrated, basic stuff like that.

I tried Nightreign some weeks back but it didn’t really click with me for solo play.

I’ve been watching Andor seasons 1 and 2, and I think I’m almost at the end of the second season now. Everyone is correct, it’s a very good show (except they tend to throw away the first two or three episodes of each season with a meaningless prologue), but is it good Star Wars? There’s the real question.

I have much the same feeling I had when I watched Rogue One: It’s a great movie, but it would have been better without the Star Wars IP getting in the way. I rarely see things like “Yavin Base” and jump up excitedly shouting “hey that’s from the other thing!” I only think, “Oh okay, that doesn’t matter at all to the story, whatever.” Anyway, your mileage may vary.

I also started watching For All Mankind on AppleTV via. Amazon Prime subscription. It’s a really good show, however it’s less of an alternate history science fiction and more of an alternate history socioeconomic study.

Which is fine, it’s just that I don’t know who it’s for. I often wonder that. Who is honestly still out there looking at a show like this and learning for the first time, “Oh wait, you mean women can be astronauts?” No, trolls on Twitter don’t count.

Anyway it’s a really good show. Every episode is like Apollo 13 where there’s building dramatic music by the end that makes you cheer for human ingenuity and triumphing over adversity.

That’s it, bye!

Just to rip the band-aid off, On Friday, May 23rd, I received some concerning medical news about my lungs. A followup CT scan confirmed a tumor. It’s bad, but I don’t yet know exactly how bad it is. To my untrained ear, it sounds pretty frickin’ bad, but I’m trying to remain optimistic while simultaneously preparing for worst-case scenarios.

Here’s what happened.

I mentioned last time and maybe the time before that I’d been coughing a lot and saw an ENT for acid reflux. I think that was part of it, but not the whole story.

By coincidence, I had my yearly physical with my primary care doctor on Thursday the 22nd and brought up the coughing I’ve been experiencing and he recommended I get a chest x-ray, just in case, which was exactly what I wanted him to say. He agreed with the ENT that it could be acid reflux, and he listened to my lungs but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.

In olden times, getting an x-ray meant walking into the next room for a few minutes, but now, of course, with all of our modern advances in American healthcare, it means going to the hospital for a walk-in appointment, signing in on a touch-screen kiosk, and waiting hours for your name to be called while listening to everybody else yelling at the people behind the reception desk. Those staff are truly heroic figures for being on the front lines of customer service where people are at their worst.

Anyway, after paying $500 out-of-pocket (it was 20% off on sale!) and moving to a second waiting room, I finally got the x-ray. The actual x-ray process took a maximum of 10 minutes after two hours of waiting. They took one front x-ray and one side x-ray. I asked for a copy of them on a CDROM, and they all sounded shocked and amazed that I asked for “the disc.” I mean, I just paid $500 for it, why wouldn’t I want a copy of the pictures?

The next day, on the 23rd, I got a call from my doctor saying, “Um there’s a problem with your right lung. You need to get a CT scan and you need to see a pulmonologist.” I’ll spare you the exact description of what they saw on the x-ray because it sounds super scary. Way, way worse than the worst-case scenario I had imagined, which was something like pneumonia or bronchitis.

After digging up my USB CDROM drive and the right software, I was able to view the x-ray images on the disc myself, and yeah, there’s definitely something there, and I can definitely tell it’s my body because of the distinctive kink in my upper spine that has caused me so many aches and pains the last couple decades.

So, you know, interesting times. Time to break out the dry humor as a defense mechanism and downplay the existential terror I feel at starting down roughly the same (terminal) path that my mother did in 1991. I’ve always suspected that my relatively good luck with health would disappear one day all at once, and here we are.

In life, it often seems like multiple problems materialize at the same time, rather than having to face them one at a time. Funny how that is. I also have a cataract in my left eye and I can barely read anymore. I was going to try to get it removed this summer but that just got moved to the back burner. Not to mention some car troubles and some desperately overdue home repairs.

I called a phone number I was given and scheduled a CT scan, but American healthcare means that June 5, some two weeks away, was the very first available appointment. What was I supposed to do for two weeks? Hurry up and wait, that’s what. And try to remain upbeat that it won’t actually be a worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, the only real symptoms I’m experiencing are a crushing headache every day and shortness of breath when I do any kind of physical activity, along with occasional coughing and wheezing, usually at night, and often when I talk.

The coughing is actually better now than it was about a month and a half ago when it got bad enough for me to call the ENT, thinking I had bad acid reflux. Back then, I would wake up in the morning and cough so much I almost felt like I’d pass out, especially during or after eating breakfast, or if/when I tried to talk in the morning. Now, it’s just a minor dry cough, exacerbated by talking and eating, which is roughly what I’ve experienced for many years, even before COVID.

The worst part now, by far, is the nearly continuous headache that has come on in the last month. (It’s been better the last couple of days though, so there’s some good news at least.) I thought it might have been a side effect of the new meds the ENT prescribed, but I’ve stopped taking both of them and seen no improvement in the headaches. So my suspicion is that it’s a reduction in oxygen because of reduced lung function, or stress, or both.

Then I received a call from my doctor on a Sunday saying he’d seen my June 5 CT appointment and he wanted me to get the CT scan a lot sooner than two weeks and would update his order to “stat” instead of “routine” and I should try to call the number again on Memorial Day to reschedule it sooner. That sounds … kind of serious. If it didn’t sound serious before, it definitely does now. Dude, I’m trying to stay positive, here! It doesn’t help when your doctor sounds nervous and calls on a Sunday.

I called the scheduling number on Memorial Day and, surprise surprise, they weren’t open on Memorial Day. The next day, I was lucky enough to re-schedule a new appointment for the following day, Wednesday afternoon on the 28th… but I had to drive much further to get it.

So I drove 25 minutes away to an emergency room in the correct hospital network and got the CT scan. (An adventure in and of itself, because I thought my car might breakdown on the way there.) A “contrasting CT scan” to be specific. That’s the kind where they give you an IV of some kind of contrasting dye so the blood vessels show up better on the scan. The dye gives you a weird feeling of internal heat, and that’s when I learned how fast blood circulates around the human body, something I never realized before. They injected the dye in my arm and I was feeling it in my legs mere seconds later. Weird.

Anyway they did the scans and I returned home. They said it could be 4-5 days before someone reads the results. So I hurry up and wait again, hoping I don’t drop dead in the meantime, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to proceed with normal daily life with this Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

About noon on Friday, the 30th, I received a call from my doctor saying that he had called “them” three times trying to get them to read the CT scan sooner. (A primary care doctor, I’ve learned, is not much higher than a patient on the hierarchy of importance in the healthcare system.) A few hours later I saw the results of the CT scan in my online medical portal, and lets just say it’s a lot more scary-sounding words. The chest x-ray was definitely not a false positive, and it sounds like it’s a bit beyond the “we caught it early and it’s no big deal” stage.

Again, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just speculating. But I’m almost surely hospital-bound at some point in my future.

So not to sound too morbid, but if I don’t ever post again after this, you’ll know why. That sounds like an overreaction when I read that back, but I’ve never dealt with anything this potentially serious before. As you can imagine, it’s fairly overwhelming. I wasn’t prepared for this, but then, who is?

I started posting vlogs on my real-name YouTube channel. If you happen to be a family member or know who I am, just search for my name on YouTube (use “thomas” instead of “tom”) and you’ll get more timely updates. It’s a lot easier than trying to write it down.

Most of the rest of this post was written before May 23rd, and, frankly, none of it really matters to me anymore.

The new gaming PC continues to work well. Not much else to say about it. Gaming PCs either work or they don’t work, and that’s the extent of the conversation. The next time you think about it is when you run out of room for installing games. I haven’t completed installing stuff on the new PC or rearranging my living room area, so there’s just a bunch of computers and tables strewn around with wires between them.

What a roller coaster of emotions this game is. One day, I love it. The next day, I absolutely hate it with a burning passion and fully rage quit playing. I see all the positive reviews, and there’s only one universal comment that I wholeheartedly agree with: The music is amazing.

The story? I’m still in Act 2 so my views might change, but I felt like the quality plummeted in Act 2, and it went into plotlines and characters that I couldn’t care less about, not to mention changing the goalposts of the actual gameplay. Honestly I feel like they must have inserted Act 2 to artificially stretch out the game.

Everything about the combat system is completely undermined by one design decision: Almost every attack animation is designed to be a huge slap in the face to the player. A big Nelson-from-The-Simpsons HA-HA! moment. I’ve never seen such trolling from attack animations before. The number of fake-outs and feints they throw at you to get you to dodge at the wrong time is comically over-the-top. It’s impossible for me to feel any respect for it.

I simply can’t understand how modern game designers can’t tell the difference between fun, satisfying tough-but-fair gameplay and maddening, repetitive, time-wasting tough-but-unfair gameplay.

I’ve also never seen a video game where all three difficulty settings are equally infuriating. That probably stems from the fact that there really isn’t much difference in the three settings, except in the amount of damage you receive, so it’s all pretty much the same no matter which one you pick. The settings should have been labeled: “Die occasionally before you learn the dodge timing,” “maybe die before you learn the dodge timing,” and “die a frick-ton before you learn the dodge timing.”

Pick easy? You have to slog through combat for what feels like hours even though there’s little chance of dying. “Story” my butt. It’s “still mostly combat” difficulty, to be sure. Don’t let the advertisers fool you.

Pick hard? It will still take hours because you’re going to die several times when you encounter new enemies because it’s impossible to visually react to a new enemy’s attacks when you’ve never had a chance to study and practice their timing (which essentially means learning which parts of their attacks to ignore). So now, the hours of wasted time will be extended because of running back to the combat encounter and starting over again.

Pick normal? It’s not much different from Hard, to be honest, except you can survive three or four hits instead of one or two. But you’ll still die sometimes, and boss fights are exponentially harder and deadlier than trash mobs until you figure out when to dodge.

But if you start on Hard and switch down to Normal, it feels very easy and you end up feeling that endless chore of combat again. No matter which difficulty level you pick, the game feels extremely easy once you internalize when to dodge, even on Hard. Replaying any portion of the game on Hard feels like ez-mode. It’s only “hard” the first time you encounter a boss or enemy.

Regardless of which difficulty you play on, there’s no reward or achievement for any of them. You’re just picking the least bad option, which, for me, initially meant Hard. At least there’s a small sense of accomplishment or relief from slogging through an hour-long fight, not just a crushing sense of boredom from meaninglessly clicking the same buttons repeatedly for an hour.

Lately I’ve switched back to Story, where I can spec all my points into attack power to try to shorten the fights a little bit.

Overall it reminds me a lot of the pre-remastered Mass Effect 1 or The Witcher 1… the parts in-between the cut scenes was a chore to get through.

This is exactly what I was afraid of when I got this game, but I was fooled into thinking it would be okay after seeing the first 5-10 hours. So, so many games would be a thousand times better if they ended at or before 10 hours.

Anyway I’ve rage quit Clair Obscur so many times now and slunk back to it later, realizing I was overreacting and just wasn’t in the right mood. When I start getting impatient to progress through the game (to see the story play out), I start getting mad when the game throws up all these arbitrary and unfair and un-fun road blocks that can’t be surmounted without time-consuming repetition.

To make matters worse, the story took a turn starting in Act 2 that I wasn’t too fond of, so my interest has dwindled. They shifted the focus to characters I couldn’t care less about for inexplicable reasons.

The point is I’m not super anxious to continue playing it right now.

I tried Elden Ring: Nightrein for a little over an hour on the 29th and 30th, up through the obligatory mandatory death, the new Roundtable Hold, and a couple of failed expeditions. My hot take is that it’s sort of like Monster Hunter World in the Elden Ring universe. You can play it offline solo but it’s pretty clearly designed for 3-player co-op, so I don’t know if I’ll play it much.

There are significant changes in mechanics from Elden Ring that I don’t particularly like. Steam reviews are already Mixed, typical of the overly-cynical game community, but it seems fine to me, if you like fighting stuff using the basic Elden Ring combat mechanics (which is pretty good). But it’s not Dark Souls or Elden Ring. I feel very little compulsion to keep playing it, except there’s nothing else to play right now.

I don’t see how a playthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would make a good video series, so I don’t even think I’m going to upload my videos. Unless I spend a bunch of time trying to make an abridged series just to document all the ups and downs of playing the game. But then, I should make a backup of the videos to YouTube. It just sucks to upload something I know isn’t very good. I get really mad and rant at the lunacy of the game design fairly frequently, and I don’t like uploading that stuff.

People get really touchy when you criticize things that seem obvious to you, but everybody else only sees it as haters being haters. Also sometimes you have a bad day and gaming problems excessively rub you the wrong way, which has happened a bunch with Clair Obscur. Literally every time I see an enemy pull a spear back and just frickin’ stop there it makes me want to flip a table.

Anyway in light of the lung thing, I can’t really talk very much without descending into coughing, which isn’t very conducive to making videos. I’ve tried to hide it the last couple of months with judicious use of a mute button, but the coughing comes on so suddenly now that I can’t reach the mute fast enough any more. So, probably not going to be recording much more.

Question: Is Andor the new The Wire or Breaking Bad? That one show everybody is like “you’ve got to watch this!” but they gush so much about it that you don’t want to go anywhere near it? I watched like 10-15 minutes of the first episode of season 1 last year and felt no desire to continue watching it.

Anyway I don’t have Disney+ so I’m not watching it. Everything I watched on Disney+ last year immediately disappeared and I have no memory of any of it. Which, to be fair, is what happened to me with The Wire, too, a show I watched every episode of and loved but could not tell you a single thing about it now. I think there were some disgruntled cops in it.

The Last Of Us season 2 (Max). The second season is now over, but the The Last of Us Part II is only half over. I think they’re getting the “essence” of the game’s story right, in particular the whole purpose of this first part being to train us that Ellie isn’t a hero and isn’t particularly bright. I distinctly remember thinking Game-Ellie was an idiot most of the time in Part II, and I remember wishing for her to make good choices but she almost never did, until the very end of the game. Anyway 99% of the online community discussion is nonsense, but I too think Bella Ramsey is the weakest link in the show. I’m looking forward to season 3, because I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but Abby’s story is far superior to Ellie’s story in Part II. There is a lot of hate for season 2 online, just as there was for the second game. Most of it is laughable. A lot of it boils down to “it’s not a shot-for-shot remake of the game and why did they have to change it because it was perfect and we hate change.” I’d opine that it should have been left as a game but otherwise it wouldn’t have reached a wider audience.

American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden (Netflix). The most comprehensive documentary I’ve seen of that whole thing. A lot of people would be appalled by CIA military-types like Cofer Black, and I certainly wouldn’t want to have a Thanksgiving dinner with him, but I find them pretty funny and I also find it somewhat comforting to know they exist, as long as they’re on my side.

The Studio (AppleTV via. Prime). It’s not that great but it’s kind of funny. The main thing I watch it for is the clever one-take camera work. I’m always watching the background of the shot to see when they switch the stunt doubles in and out, instead of whoever’s talking in the foreground.

Nosferatu (2024) (Amazon rental). I know little of the history of the silent film except that it was caught out as an unlicensed theft of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and still somehow birthed the horror genre. The new one is pretty good quality cinema. Expect a lot of creepy gothic music, period costumes, sets, and cinematography, slow pans, pushes, and pulls that test your television’s frame-rate conversion capabilities, black and gray palettes, rubbery prosthetics that remind you of ET, and over-the-top Victorian and Transylvanian accents. And rats. Lots and lots of rats. Also, cats that you expect to be Chekhov’s Cats but aren’t. The basic OG vampire stuff. Back to the basics. It’s the kind of rare old school movie that looks like it was made more for the director than the audience.

Mickey 17 (Max). Pretty funny and imaginative. Goes to a very different place than I expected. But I have a minor problem with movies that portray their villains as comically sociopathic and stupid.

American Sniper (Netflix). Because it was leaving soon. Not bad, though I was extremely distracted while watching it.

Fountain of Youth (Prime). Formulaic treasure hunt stuff starring Natalie Portman and John Krazinski, two people you would never expect to lead a Davinci Code-style movie like this, and who, in fact, aren’t believable in the slightest. Not funny, not interesting, not good acting or writing or directing, but successfully passes the time.

Something Something Tylenol Murders (Netflix). I didn’t realize that was still an open case. Lots of speculation about a Big Pharma cover-up but that feels pretty conspiratorial to me, fueled more by confirmation bias than any real evidence.

The Guilty (2021) (Netflix). Bold move to make a whole movie about Jake Gyllenhaal sitting at a computer, talking on the phone. You know where most of the budget for the movie went. Anyway it wasn’t terrible, and I was fairly invested in it. Would like to see the original version someday.

Flight Risk (Starz trial). What a pickle! Adequate thriller. Predicable at every turn, but not the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

Probably others that I’ve already forgotten. In the latter days of May I’ve been watching a lot of stuff because it’s the only way to keep my brain from spinning out of control while I can do nothing but wait for further medical results.

I get served a lot of history-related YouTube videos now, and sometimes I click on things that look interesting. I have to say there’s something infinitely funny about some Gen-Z or Millennial nerd cosplaying in Army fatigues talking about World War 2 tanks like he’s writing a Reddit comment. It’s funny as hell to see people nerding out about guns and war in a way that previously only would have been seen with people talking about something like Star Wars or anime.

Prior to all the medical stuff, I discovered the front right tire on my car was fully flat, a big fat 0 psi. Luckily I realized this before I’d left my subdivision, when I noticed an odd noise from the right side of the car, and didn’t drive all the way to the store and back on a rim.

I had to replace it with the spare donut tire in the trunk. I also had to learn what a “tire key” or “wheel lock” was, something I don’t think I’d ever dealt with before, at least not on this car (a 2009 Honda Accord). It’s the kind of thing you learn about once every 15 years and then promptly forget again. One of the lug nuts requires a “key” in order to dissuade people from stealing your tires, a possibility I’ve never once considered, since, as far as I know, I don’t live within the borders of any criminal chop shop enterprises. I don’t remember asking for them on this car, but it’s probably one of those things they throw in along with 50 other things nobody wants in a package deal.

At least now I know, in any future new car purchases, not to get wheel locks if I can help it, because yeesh what a pain in the butt finding that key was. First I had to take a picture of the wheel and the lug nuts and upload it to ChatGPT to even find out how to remove the keyed lug nut, then I had to commence an extensive search of the interior of the car for the hidden dashboard compartment where the lug nut key had been resting untouched for some 16 years since I bought the car.

The cause of the flat was a very obvious roofing nail. ChatGPT informed me, after I took a picture of it and uploaded it, that it was in a location close enough to the “shoulder” of the tire, that it would likely prevent the tire from being repaired, and it would have to be replaced. Which, as it turned out, was correct.

The spare donut tire was also fully flat when I pulled it out of the trunk, by the way, so I’m really glad I wasn’t on the side of the road somewhere changing the tire, because the spare would have been completely useless. (Luckily, I’ve never had to change a tire out on the road somewhere.) A lesson for other car-owners, I suppose… check that your spare tire is actually inflated now and then.

I was able to inflate the tire with a Cycplus tire inflator that I bought some years ago, a handheld battery-powered device made mostly for inflating bike tires but also happens to work on car tires (and riding mower tires). I bought it because I got sick of trying to find places out and about in the world, at gas stations mostly, to inflate tires. A lot of them are coin-operated, and I don’t know about anyone else, but I almost never have coins (or any other form of cash) on me.

So an appointment with the dealership I made. Which, speaking of AI, the appointment was made by talking to an AI agent on the phone on a weekend. Or possibly the most computer-sounding human ever. I think it’s the first time I’ve interacted with the new Agentic AI that is taking the business world by storm, replacing customer service people with AI agents. This will free up huge swathes of young people to keep pursuing their dreams of becoming TikTok influencers so it should be a win-win for everyone, unless Republicans have their way and young people have to start putting screws into iPhones for minimum wage. Neither option sounds like a great career path for young people, if you ask me.

I haven’t lost my tire-changing skills. I was able to drive to the grocery store and back once on the spare donut without incident, and then to the dealership repair appointment later in the week.

Anyway I got the flat tire fixed at the dealership, which gave me a fun opportunity to sit in a waiting room for over an hour listening to a podcast. It felt weird to wear earbuds in public. I only used the left one so I could still hear the room around me. They replaced both front tires and did an alignment. Still need to get an inspection and get the alternator checked out.

Although in light of the lung issue above, that all might be a moot point.

I have to admit, receiving distressing medical news does not put one into a good mindset for going to work normally, and definitely doesn’t put one in a good mindset for concentrating on abstract programming work. Especially when one has a splitting headache every day. I’m going to need to talk to my supervisors about this and will probably need extended time off. I just don’t know when.

Bye!

Finished this one. It was meh. Not scary. Story makes no sense. No consequences for any actions. People die and then come back for no reason other than the trope demands it. No resolution for any of the mysteries. Forgotten immediately after finishing. Typical horror fare.

In my playthrough where I chose options randomly by dice roll, three of the five survived. You can always tell which ones they don’t expect the player to save because they don’t have any lines at the end of the game, and one of mine didn’t say anything at the end, just sat there.

I was unable to stop myself from buying it. It starts out exactly the same as the original. The first hour of Oblivion is incredibly boring, and I’ve played that stupid intro and interminable tutorial what feels like hundreds of times, to the point that I can’t stand Sir Patrick Stewart’s voice. “This is the hour of my doom” blah blah yada yada just die already so I can get out of these stupid sewers.

So I had to “get through” the beginning part in the remaster even though I kind of hated it. But I got to where it opens up, saved the game before stepping out of the tunnel, so I never have to do the intro again, and I’m looking forward to exploring it as a secondary game.

So far I’ve only wandered over to Cheydinhal with my wood elf archer. For all intents and purposes, it’s identical to original Oblivion. The game looks way different but it doesn’t play much different and the complexity (or lack thereof) of the NPC conversations in town definitely aren’t any different.

Incidentally, the game is a beast in terms of graphics usage. I assume it’s the new Crysis benchmark. On the High preset at 1440p it runs at like 15 fps on a GeForce 3070. But: See PC upgrade below.

Most every single-player RPG setting falls into one of these general vibes: Some Bankable IP, Military, Tolkien, or Japanese Anime. So it’s a rare treat to see a new game with a vibe that falls outside those tropes. Anything. Literally anything outside those tropes grabs my attention immediately.

And so it was that I noted the release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a while back, but I hesitated to buy it for fear that it would be all flash and no substance. A lot of games that look fantastic (i.e. every game based on a movie) turn out to be mediocre because they spent all their time and energy on motion capture and cut scenes while the gameplay is phoned in “default out-of-the-box game engine” fare.

I’m happy to say that they didn’t phone in the gameplay, and I can recommend it. It’s no Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s not bad. To be fair, the gameplay vibe is very anime even if it doesn’t look like anime, with the combat system being essentially a carbon copy of Final Fantasy XIII, with the addition of realtime quicktime events.

But the real star of Expedition 33 is the setting and the story (and the music). I can’t say enough good things about it. I find it very thought-provoking. So far, at least. I’m still in Act 1, so there’s plenty of time for it to plummet off a cliff. But I’m hopeful it won’t. The acting performances are very good.

There’s a big problem with the combat mechanics, though, and it was almost a deal-breaker for me. When facing a new enemy, it’s impossible to gauge when the attacks are going to land, and when you’re supposed to press the dodge (or parry) button, until you get killed enough times to get a feel for the speed of the attack animations and the rhythm of the combos. And you have to dodge to survive combat, especially on Hard difficulty. Many of the attack animations are deliberately designed to trick you into dodging at the wrong time (you know, enemies that slam their club down but they hit the ground instead of you, enemies that pull their spear back to stab you but then just sit there for a few seconds before moving again, stuff like that). It’s a recent growing trend in gaming that I despise. Undoubtedly game designers and animators are thinking “oh no players are getting too smart and too experienced, the bosses in the first Dark Souls game are laughably easy now, we need to do something to make things harder for them.”

Anyway, for that reason, the first six or seven hours of the game were very frustrating for me, before I got a better feel for the parameters of the gameplay and what the game expected of me and, more importantly, how I could master the negative feelings of being tricked constantly by the attack animations.

Recently I’ve been thinking there’s another big problem with the combat mechanics, but it’s more in the player’s favor. The realtime dodging is a unique twist on the turn-based system and a worthy experiment, but I think they’ve undermined the foundation of a typical turn-based RPG combat system. If you dodge successfully, there’s really no need to engage with any of the rest of the RPG systems in order to win battles. So far, at least. For example, since dodging negates all incoming damage, you’re guaranteed to win a battle if you’re mostly successful at dodging (because the enemies have no way to negate your damage). You don’t even have to risk any parries. Therefore it doesn’t matter a whit which Pictos or Luminos or Skills you have equipped, rendering all of those systems moot. They only determine how quickly or slowly you’re going to win the battles.

So I’ve realized that the main and only thing you need to build your characters for in combat are the small windows of time when you encounter a brand new enemy you’ve never seen before, when you don’t know the timing of the dodges. Those are basically the only periods of time when you’re vulnerable and it’s possible to fail in combat, barring lapses in concentration.

That’s my two cents, at least. I talk about this a lot in the videos I’m recording while playing. It’s the curse of having played video games for over 30 years. That competitive instinct to find ways to optimize gameplay for maximum success is burned into me.

Anyway, my current character builds have all points in Vitality and Defense and zero points in anything else, and the only Skills/Pictos/Luminos I care about for survival are the ones that grant Health buffs or AP or Shell buffs. I’m currently near the end of Act 1 on Hard difficulty and have had zero expedition TPKs except for that cursed Chromatic Troubador, which I gave up on. Except for that one, I’ve won every battle on the first try.

Also, the mouse-and-keyboard controls are phoned in, like the game developers had never even heard of a mouse or keyboard before, like so many other games before it. (Honestly I fear we may be approaching a time when younger folks writing games have literally never used a mouse or keyboard before and can’t even conceive of a world where they exist.) Don’t even bother trying to play without a controller. Luckily it’s not action-oriented enough to hurt my left thumb too much. Most of the time I can even use my left index finger to work the left stick for moving around without any fear of getting killed.

On a more positive note, the music in Clair Obscur is fantastic. One of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a while, probably since Nier Automata.

By the way, I still don’t know who Clair is. But I’m only in Act 1. I’m guessing it’s like Horizon Zero Dawn, where you didn’t learn what the heck those three title words together meant until toward the end of the game. It’s so random-sounding it was like playing a game called Stick Umbrella Heaven.

I saw Age of Wonders 4 on sale and bought it impulsively, knowing for sure I wouldn’t be able to get into it for more than an hour before remembering that these kinds of games have long since lost their luster for me.

As it turns out, I was right. It looks cool, it seems perfectly fine for this type of game, but these big 4X games are all the same now: It’s like playing a game where you have to take a college calculus course before you can even start clicking buttons on the screen. They have tutorials that tell you what to do, but when they tell you what to do, it goes in one ear and out the other immediately, so you have no idea what to do on the second game.

I’d love to design a UI for a 4X game. I’d hide 90% of the complexity of the game at the start, and then slowly ask the player to opt-into more and more options and information over the course of time. Instead of, you know, presenting the player with a thousand screens of incomprehensible words and numbers right at the start, thereby ensuring that the games are unapproachable to anyone who isn’t already deeply invested in the genre.

I have fond memories of Empire on the Amiga and one iteration of Civilization (was it Civ II or Civ II Call to Power? One of those) on the PC in the 2000s. I played them to death and thought they were the greatest games ever made. Every single attempt to play a 4X game since Civ II has been a dismal failure for me. That mythical “just one more turn” thing does not exist and I have no idea what any of you are talking about.

It wasn’t exactly triggered by Oblivion–I’ve known this would be the year I upgraded my PC since January–but I finally ordered and received a new gaming PC to replace my 2021 PC. (That’s how I make big purchases… I decide I’m going to buy a thing for sure, then wait six months thinking about it off and on, then I suddenly wake up one day and buy it.) I hope it lasts until 2030.

This is the first time I’ve ordered a pre-built gaming PC. It’s also the first time I’ve gotten an AMD processor, and the first time I’ve used liquid cooling instead of a fan.

I hate revealing PC specs because it’s like waving a big flag and yelling “hey look how much better my life is than yours!” but it’s an AMD Ryzen R9-9900X with a GeForce 5080. In practical terms, on the old PC (an i5 with GeForce 3070), the beastly Oblivion Remastered ran at about 15 fps on the High preset at 1440p. On the new PC, it runs at a solid 60 fps on the Ultra preset at 1440p.

It was more complicated to setup than I hoped. I’m old now so I’m fully entitled to every luxury, so I ordered a pre-built machine so I could pull it out of the box, plug it in, and go. However I didn’t account for the unpacking process, which involved taking the tempered glass side off, checking components, and removing packing material. (I didn’t want a tempered glass side but it’s impossible to find a gaming PC that doesn’t look like a 1960s Star Trek bridge console, unless you build it yourself and dig deep in the bowels of the underworld to find plain-looking parts.)

I also didn’t account for rearranging my desk setup. I have a dream that someday I might have a gaming setup where I don’t have spiderwebs of connecting wires coiling everywhere on the floor gathering dust. So I had a crazy idea to setup a second desk (a writing desk, which was my previous gaming desk), and place all of my PCs on the desk instead of the floor. I’ve never put a tower PC case anywhere but on the floor at any time since I got my first one for playing Doom somewhere in the mid-90s. To be clear, I have no interest whatsoever in looking at the case, I just want it off the floor in the hope that I can organize the wiring better, and so I don’t have to lean over so much to plug in USB cables.

And I definitely didn’t account for migrating all my games and applications to the new PC. Thankfully Steam has this feature where if it discovers another copy of Steam on the same network, it will copy the files across the local network instead of downloading them from the Internet, which saved a ton of time re-installing Oblivion and Clair Obscur. However that doesn’t help with any of the other stuff I’m likely to install on the new gaming PC, like a Python environment and Davinci Resolve and stuff like that. (The new gaming PC is also going to be the new video editing PC, obviously.)

Normally I have a gaming PC and a recording PC. Now I have a new gaming PC, an old gaming PC, and a recording PC. Eventually I want to coalesce that down to a new gaming PC and a new recording PC, and retire the old recording PC. It’s a rather daunting prospect to think about all that software and hardware migration, though, so I’m going rather slow and I’ll likely have three machines for a while.

Side comment: It’s shocking how big and heavy gaming PCs are now. Somewhere around 2014, my gaming PC was a mid-tower case and light as a feather. Today it’s like a mini-refrigerator in size and weight, bigger and heavier even than the massive steel tower cases from the 2000s. I almost need a hand cart to move it.

I have a conundrum with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. When I record a game series, I like it to be sort of a documentary showing the arc of my reactions and experiences in the game from start to finish. Ideally I’ll be struggling to play at the start and then overcome impossible odds to master the game and win a huge victory for God and country by the end.

Well, you see, Clair Obscur has been a roller coaster. I started on Hard difficulty. It was fine except I died a lot because it’s impossible to predict when to dodge until you’ve practiced the fights by trial-and-error. I switched to Normal difficulty and it got significantly better, but then I reached another point of frustration and switched it to Easy difficulty. Then I found the combat became boring and I wasn’t even paying attention. So I switched it back to Normal difficulty. (I got to the continent area following the Gestral Village.)

Then I had a sudden urge to restart again on Hard, now that I had learned a lot of things I could use to avoid dying in every fight, and thought of a strategy to put every attribute point into Vitality and Defense. And because I remembered that I played 95% of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Hard, but that little bit I didn’t play on Hard cost me the achievement for completing the game on Hard, which has annoyed me ever since.

The problem is, the video series now has hours of repeated content. Do I cut out the whole part I played on Normal and Easy? Or do I leave it in? It’s better to leave it in for the sake of documenting my experience of the game. But it’s better to cut it out for the sake of the viewer experience. Or do I cut out all the parts I replayed on Hard? Then nobody will believe that I got through all that stuff on Hard after I spent so much time complaining about it and dying again and again. Decisions, decisions. These are the kinds of difficult decisions that plague me when preparing game videos for the channel.

Undoubtedly I’ll take the easy path and just upload everything as-is, leaving the burden of skipping things or not to the viewer.

The Last of Us season 2 (Max). Complex feelings. It’s not as good as season 1. In season 2, I find myself thinking, “Just skip to Abby’s story, that’s where the real meat is.” Show-Ellie’s story is kind of hard to watch, to be honest, because she’s so unsympathetic in season 2 (intentionally, to be fair). If it weren’t for Dina, this season would be completely unwatchable. I’ve just heard they’re splitting Part II of the game over season 2 and season 3 of the show. Yuck.

The Studio (AppleTV via. Amazon). Seth Rogan has never been one of my favorite comedic actors, but this show is pretty funny. Not riotously funny, but pretty funny, in a “ah okay I get what you’re going for there” kind of way. Also they’re obsessed with moving camera “one-take shots.”

Taskmaster series 19 (YouTube). I’m over my most recent Taskmaster uber-fan phase so I’m not as psyched as I previously was, but it’s still pretty funny.

Turning Point: Vietnam (Netflix). Good documentary. Every time there’s a new Vietnam documentary, there’s more and more details and interviews from the Vietnamese perspective. The U.S. perspective is always the same: What was that for?

Various True Crime Shows (Netflix). I got into another rabbit hole of watching true crime shows on Netflix. There’s something oddly comforting about the fake scary music and detectives droning on about their investigations in that cop-lingo affectation. One was a show about JonBenet Ramsey, which was an OJ-level 24/7 atomic bomb in the tabloid world but I steadfastly refused to pay attention at the time because of how gross the whole thing seemed. (However I now know that the publicly-believed story that the parents did it seems to have no credible evidence.)

Oceanliner Designs (YouTube). I found another weird YouTube rabbit hole of Titanic-related videos, and found a fairly respectable documentary-ish channel Oceanliner Designs, which did a number of “ship X sinking in real time” animation videos of famous shipwreck disasters (Lusitania, etc.). I love finding these super niche channels doing mini-documentaries, and I always wonder how and why they do so much work day in and day out. Do people still think they’re going to be “discovered” one day if they make good content, then become the next Netflix true crime documentarian? There’s been decades of proof that “luck” and “connections” and “money” are the driving factors in standing out in democratized content, so surely not. Are they making any money at all from their Patreons? I can’t even conceive of a world where Patreon subs could pay anyone’s rent.

The Raven’s Eye (YouTube). I don’t know if it’s just my algorithm bias, but I see a lot of good content channels based out of Australia and New Zealand. In a similar vein to Oceanliner Designs, which documents famous shipwrecks (among other things), I stumbled on this channel that documents obscure and famous air disasters (among other similar disaster-type things) with a thicker Australian (I think?) accent.

Disaster content seems pretty popular on YouTube. Grim to be sure, but this channel, at least, is well-made and more informative than exploitative (imo), and to be honest, I’d never heard of almost any of these stories. Based on this channel, I’m not sure how humanity survived the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There were so many huge industrial accidents and disasters around the world from human error or mechanical failures that caused hundreds or thousands of people to die.

“In these troubled times,” I find it oddly comforting to hear about these horrible stories from the past, to put current events in perspective. Today, my biggest headache in life (besides actual headaches, see below) is getting angry after the president tweets something idiotic, but that pales in comparison to the problems of someone living next to an industrial plant improperly handling enough explosive fuel to incinerate a whole town.

I’m kind of jealous of these sorts of pseudo-documentary channels, because I wish I’d thought of it first. A good documentary-style narrative is one of the coolest pieces of media out there, imo. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had the time and energy to make, but at this point it’s all been done before, and there’s nothing left to document.

So I’ve been on an acid reducer and a mild allergy med for half a month now trying to tame a persistent cough that got really bad some weeks ago. The good news is that the acid reducer is helping, the bad news is that the allergy med doesn’t seem to be doing anything, and I still have a persistent dry cough and I have a lot of headaches and my lungs seem to be laboring more than usual in the last month. I get winded very easily just by walking around the house a little bit, and when I was moving a desk around and setting up a new computer it felt like I was moving a piano.

So, I have two more doctor appointments coming up next week and the week after. The first is my regular yearly primary care doctor checkup, which luckily just happens to be right when I needed one. So I’m going to tell him about the ENT results and ask him what’s up with my lungs–if I might have gotten covid and didn’t realize it, or if I might have picked up a mild pneumonia, because it feels like the remnants of pneumonia, or some other respiratory chest illness. I’m hoping he’ll order some chest x-rays and give me an antibiotic prescription.

I’m trying not to think about the fact that I happen to be the exact same age as my mother was when she learned she had lung cancer and died a year later (she was a smoker though, and I’ve never smoked).

The second doctor appointment the week after is the followup with the ENT, and I’m going to tell him that the allergy thing didn’t seem to do anything, but the acid reducer did, but regardless I’m still coughing and I have a lot of headaches, which I suppose could be a side effect of one of the two meds he gave me.

In any case, interacting with the American healthcare system continues to suck. It’s a tremendous act of will to make the decision to seek out care and subject oneself to this bureaucratic torture rather than just ride it out and hope for the best like our plucky forefathers in covered wagons. And I’m one of the lucky ones with decent insurance.

By the way, I mentioned my failing car battery a while back. I use a battery charger now every time I get back from the store, and I haven’t yet been stranded anywhere from an electrical system failure. Still need to get it to the dealership to check the alternator (and get an inspection).

Today, though, I discovered an additional thing to add to the repair list: The front right tire of the car is suddenly pretty flat. So I have to charge up my little battery-powered handheld air pump to fix that, too.

In the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking it’s about time to trade it in and get a small truck. The prospect of buying a new vehicle is pretty daunting though.

Bye!

I started the Shadows of Rose DLC for Resident Evil Village but I found it a bit frustrating so I gave up on it. It was a lot more of a “run from enemies” instead of a “shoot enemies” vibe, which I find annoying. And there wasn’t much story along the way to keep me interested.

I had purchased The Quarry, one of the dime-a-dozen Supermassive horror pseudo-games that are more in the vein of visual novels, some years ago, and I randomly decided to play it because I wanted a game to play where I didn’t have to talk much. You can always count on Supermassive games to fill any silence with dialog or ambient industrial noises. It was just like every other Supermassive horror game: Good graphics, questionable writing, fun to watch, not the slightest bit scary (fun-campy-horror not scary-horror… to this day I still don’t understand why people associate “horror” with “fun” and not “existential terror,” but they definitely do), all choices are random and you can’t ever steer the narrative the way you want.

However, The Quarry has one of the best credit sequences ever in a video game. Not since the song at the end of Portal has there been a better credit sequence. I’m talking about the Bizzare Yet Bonafide podcast that played over the credits, performed by Emily Axford and Brian Murphy of NADDPOD and Dimension 20 fame, an inspired casting choice for a paranormal podcast duo performance. Truly magnificent.

This is the fifth Supermassive game I’ve played, following on the heels of Until Dawn, Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes. (I haven’t yet played The Devil in Me, and I think I heard there was a new Dark Pictures Anthology game coming?) They are all pretty much exactly the same formula, same cheesy scares that are infinitely predictable and aren’t scary, they churn them out like a low budget horror movie studio. But they’re kind of fun to watch.

The Quarry reminded me that I played three of the Dark Pictures Anthology, but hadn’t played the fourth one, The Devil in Me. So I started on that one, using a dice roller to randomly choose character decisions (which I also did for House of Ashes). I haven’t quite finished it, but so far I think it’s the worst one. I would probably rank them: 1) House of Ashes, 2) Little Hope, 3) Man of Medan, 4) The Devil in Me. (Man of Medan is a close contender for worst one, though.)

In case anyone’s wondering, I did record them all but I won’t be uploading them because scary game videos don’t work unless the player is scared, and I have exactly zero scared reactions over the entire course of all of these scary games, because they aren’t the slightest bit scary to me.

There was a surprise drop of a Remastered Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on Steam. Surprise to me, at least. Where everybody else played Skyrim to death, I played Oblivion to death, which is why I found Skyrim fairly meh and, to this day, have only played the main story exactly one time with little or no side questing. Whereas in Oblivion I played every quest and went to every square inch of the map. Anyway, it’s tempting to buy it, though I already recorded most of Oblivion already. My only question is whether they updated the voice acting or does the whole game still consist of only three voice actors talking to each other without even bothering to put on different voices. [ChatGPT Search assures me they added more voice acting, so I may be unable to stop myself from buying it.]

I was going to use the Shadows of Rose DLC as a test case for recording HDR game content, but it turned out to be a disaster. I have to record the game video locally on the gaming PC, and I’m just not setup well to do that.

I worked out a method if I had to do it, but it involves combining audio commentary recorded on the recording PC with game video recorded on the gaming PC and that’s just a nightmare post-processing scenario. Nobody’s got time for that, unless they’re getting paid a full-time salary for it.

I watched a few movies while I was taking a four-day Easter weekend break:

The great ENT doctor appointment has been completed, and the verdict on my throat is in: Kind of. At least, step one is complete. The ENT doctor stuck a fiber optic scope up my nose to look at my throat and did not see anything but what he called “benign” issues, mainly redness and irritation at the top of the esophagus, which is probably caused by stomach acid. He’s going to put me on two meds, one for stomach acid, and one for mild allergies because I’ve also been experiencing some shortness of breath and wheezing lately. (I’ve wondered if I somehow picked up a cold or covid a while back and didn’t realize it.) Hopefully that will allow my throat to heal and then I’ll go back and see him in a month. After that, probably the dreaded “lifestyle changes” (mostly less acidic/spicy food, and/or elevating my torso when sleeping).

Unless the meds don’t do anything and it’s something else.

Not the instant gratification I was hoping for, but I shouldn’t be surprised because I’m constantly disappointed by how the human body is not as easy to debug and fix as a computer program. At least he ruled out infections or growths, which was what I was worried about.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little I had to “fight” to convince the doctor I was actually experiencing issues. My baseline assumption about all doctors is that they never believe their patients, as if they are a typical tech support person who refuses to listen to a customer. It probably worked in my favor that I was struggling not to cough while talking to him.

I’ve started an extensive diary in the hopes of tracking how these new meds are helping (or not). I’ve worked out some “tests” I can do to track my progress, or lack thereof, which mainly involves reading passages from The Hobbit and recording how much I cough while I’m doing it. Weirdly, despite this technological age we live in, keeping a “diary” is harder than you might think. I decided to use an Obsidian document on my MacBook.

So after about a week, sadly I haven’t noticed much change from the new meds. But I have to remember that I’m old and don’t bounce back from injuries very quickly anymore, so maybe it will take a long, long time to heal an acid-burned esophagus. Also my extensive diary stopped after a couple of days because keeping up with a new habit every day is basically impossible.

Bye!

Sorry, I prioritized filing taxes yesterday over blogging.

I wanted to watch the Smosh Resident Evil 8 videos, because I watched their Resident Evil 7 videos. But in order to do that, I had to play it first. (I very rarely watch people play games that I haven’t already played before.) I’ve had it forever, but never played it. Well, I played through it. Pretty good game. Resident Evil 7 was claustrophobic and scary and gory and kind of hard, Resident Evil 8 was easy and more like a horror-themed fantastical action blockbuster. 8 is to Aliens as 7 is to Alien, if you will. For good or ill, it’s a sequel to 7, so play that one first.

Sadly, the Smosh Resident Evil 8 videos aren’t that good. They showed little interest in the game, and that makes for a boring game series. It’s no Smosh FNAF, that’s for sure.

Otherwise, I played a bit more Kingdom Come Deliverance II. It’s a chill game, walking around in the wilderness listening to the sounds of nature, except the parts that are frustrating as hell, which is anytime you have to interact with a quest or fight anyone.

When I started Resident Evil Village, I noticed there was an option under Display Settings to enable HDR, and I thought, “Hey I have an HDR monitor, I’m going to turn that on.” So I did. It looked pretty cool. And I recorded three videos.

And then I realized that the mirrored HDMI output from my gaming PC did not automatically downscale to SDR, and I recorded three videos that looked absolutely borked upon playback. They looked absurdly over-saturated with extreme contrast, almost like the videos were posterized.

And then I fell down a rabbit hole into the world of recording HDR game videos, which is a world I did not realize was so dern complicated. To make a long story short, it’s not easy to record HDR videos with OBS. With my recording setup that uses a second recording PC, it’s almost impossible without an HDMI splitter. Unfortunately the disadvantages of using an HDMI splitter are numerous (not the least of which is you have to find a very specific kind of HDMI splitter to avoid things like random audio dropouts).

I successfully recorded HDR video when I ran OBS locally on the gaming PC, after making sure the OBS settings are exactly right, but recording games on the same PC you’re playing on sucks. The number of times I accidentally alt-tab or otherwise ruin the game screen is just absurd. Not to mention the difficulty of seeing and monitoring OBS while you’re recording.

In any case, you either setup everything to record for HDR or you setup for SDR, and you never want to switch back and forth. I would have expected that HDR video support would be a lot more common these days, but I guess it isn’t. It’s a major pain in the butt.

It looks really good, though. HDR, that is. Stunning difference.

For all the anti-AI folks out there, you should know that my employer sent out an email recently that basically made it mandatory for engineers to incorporate AI code generation tools as part of their daily workflow. So if you’re a programmer trying to get a job at a major software company, you’re probably going to need that skill.

Cursor is the new hotness at my job right now, and yes, it’s very good at turning ideas into working code. The only viable reasons I can think of not to use AI code generation assistance in programming are purely ideological or just plain stubbornness. It’s like refusing to use a dishwasher (actually I knew someone who hated dishwashers). When you run across someone refusing to use AI in programming, it’s like running across someone with deeply-held religious beliefs proselytizing, and you just want to nod and smile and back away slowly.

The Python and Javascript folks are rejoicing with Cursor, but unfortunately it’s a fork of Visual Studio Code, so it’s not quite a full IDE, and it’s less of a nice place to live for Java development. That’s the only drawback I’ve seen so far. My company developed their own internal AI chat plugin for IntelliJ, which is okay, but nowhere near as good as ChatGPT.

In health news, every time I talk above a whisper, I start coughing. Well not every time, but frequently enough that it interferes with daily life. Most times I eat anything, I start coughing. It sucks.

I’ve been trying to drink copious amounts of water and chamomile tea, which does seem to help slightly, but tea is disgusting in large amounts. Cough drops help a lot, but obviously there aren’t enough cough drops in the world to keep one in my mouth all day every day.

Anyway I have an appointment to see an ENT next week.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention this, but the battery charger has been keeping my car battery charged well enough to get to the store and back, so I haven’t starved to death. I just plug it in after I get back home, no big deal. This gives me some leeway to procrastinate taking the car back to the dealership for repairs, because who in their right mind would hurry to schedule a time to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room for hours waiting for car repairs.

Too many fiascos to cover. Constitutional crises, secret police abducting people off the streets, tariffs crashing the economy, blatant insider trading, ludicrous propaganda press briefings, etc. Reality show government. Everything changes week to week. Not a great time to be a lifelong government skeptic. Or maybe it’s the greatest time to be a lifelong government skeptic. Luckily I don’t have to interact with government too much.

Bye!

Dispatches from @[email protected]:

Hey I remembered to run the thing and make the post. Anyway, once a month is plenty.

09:38 # I was liking Monster Hunter Wilds until I got to the Hirabami quest last night where you’re supposed to shoot dung pods at them to separate them but the game didn’t tell me HOW to do any of that and then once I figured out that mechanic, it didn’t give me any dung pod resources to make more of them so I spent AN HOUR trying to kill one of those stupid things and then the quest timed out before I could. What a crock of b.s. that was.

22:17 # So tonight I’ve been farming dung in Monster Hunter Wilds. How is that a thing in any game? Anyway, the good news is that MHWilds actually has a fairly convenient UI for finding things on a map and auto-riding to them to pick them up. (Map, filter icons, find the item, R3 button.) Still tedious, but at least I don’t have to go to a wiki and stumble around blindly in the game.

22:20 # Next time I tackle these stupid Hirabami I’ll be armed with a pack full of a frick-ton of dung ammo, instead of having to scramble for the ONE dung resource in the quest area normally. I’m still so mad that the game made me waste a full hour of my time trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, then didn’t give me the resources I needed to even do it, then timed out the stupid quest in the end. So annoying.

22:49 # InoReader (an RSS feed reader) now has a button to summarize blog posts in one sentence. It does it whether the post is in the RSS feed or not. Modern times.

10:32 # I finally started Kingdom Come: Deliverance II last night (still have no idea what that title refers to in the game), which I’ve had installed for over a month I think. The game starts soooo slow, and scenes take forever to develop, and I really wasn’t in the mood to try to figure out the bizarre swordfighting mechanics again, so I don’t know if I’m going to get very far in this game.

11:32 # Arg I played another 45 minutes of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, hoping to find it still didn’t click with me, but I found myself getting invested in the story, and now I’m angry that I’ll have to play a third time. That’s kind of how the first game went, too. It sort of grows on you like a fungus, until you have no choice but to keep playing despite all the mechanical weirdness and the complete abandonment of all gaming conventions. Still no sign that there’s any changes from the first game. It’s exactly the same so far. Like why did it take so long to make it when they didn’t change anything? It’s basically DLC for the first game from what I’ve seen so far.

19:34 # Wheel of Time S3E01… I expected the quality to drop off and the pacing of the show to accelerate so they could get through all the books in a shorter time, but neither seems to be the case so far.

20:44 # Wheel of Time S3E02… I’ll just say what we’re all thinking: Why’s that Aiel man wearing spears?

21:50 # Wheel of Time S3E03… one thing I really like about this show is the music. It’s very atypical for fantasy genre music, which is appropriate because Wheel of Time is somewhat atypical high fantasy. I had feared this season would drop in quality but so far, so good. Which of course means it’ll be cancelled and we’ll never get to see the Last Battle.

22:01 # Wheel of Time S3E05.. meh. There’s always a middle episode in every series, both television and book.

22:03 # Been playing Monster Hunter World for a while now, getting kind of annoyed with Diablos. It feels like I’m absolutely murdering the dude but I keep getting killed by random bad luck. There’s so many circumstances where you can find yourself stunned or shaken or something and then the monster chooses that exact moment to charge you and it’s game over. Feels bad man.

15:33 # I know it’s not popular to like using AI, but I really love asking ChatGPT “deep research” questions about everyday issues like why the battery light on my car keeps coming on even after I changed the battery, or which podcast episodes contained references to other podcast episodes, and things like that.

So not only was I late getting this post finished, I also forgot to hit the button to publish the changes up to the site until a day later. Professionalism!

Spring is definitely here now. I don’t have seasonal allergies but it’s impossible not to have sniffles and sneezes outside when there’s a snowstorm of pollen that coats the car in a new layer of yellow dust every day.

Yes, I know I’ve forgotten to publish my microblog archives. If it’s any consolation, I’ve also forgotten to post any microblog stuff.

So I was bitten by the Monster Hunter World bug and have been working through that game. It started as an alternate to play on the PC while resting my thumb from Monster Hunter Wilds on the PS5, but I abandoned Wilds to continue with World.

This is the third time that I’ve tried to play World. The first time I had no idea what was going on and didn’t even know how to progress in the game. The second time I had a better idea how to play but didn’t find it all that interesting. This time, everything seemed to click.

At least until I got through all the Low Rank stuff and then High Rank started out repeating the same monsters except they’re more tedious.

The main thing I’ve learned is that there’s a numerical defense threshold that is required for every new monster, otherwise you’re just going to get randomly killed again and again. So after every monster you have to stop and farm equipment upgrades before you can move on, which is not a game loop that I particularly like. Ideally, one should be able to get from the beginning to the end of every game with zero farming or grinding.

I also played some Kingdom Come Deliverance II. It’s a very relaxing game, in that the vast majority of the gameplay is walking through the woods listening to nature. Unfortunately, it has the exact same problems as the first game, so at the end of the relaxing gameplay you can expect to get killed in two seconds because you get jumped by some bandits on the road who have vastly superior armor, weapons, and numbers, and then you have to replay the last 30 minutes of walking through the woods because of the punitive saving mechanics. I said it about the first game and it’s exactly the same in the second game: The good parts are really good, the bad parts are truly awful.

Not video game related, but D&D’s official virtual tabletop offering Sigil completely melted down recently. Turns out ignoring the basic needs of tabletop roleplaying isn’t a great idea. Welcome back Roll20 as the industry leader I guess. (FoundryVTT is my personal favorite, but it’s pretty niche.)

I fell off my podcast schedule so I’ve missed all my standard podcasts for a while.

I watch a lot of Smosh Games and Smosh Pit videos now. Don’t judge me. They’re funny.

Whoa, Netflix is actually relevant now and then:

Another engineer left the team. That’s three pretty talented senior engineers departing since December. The positions are only getting backfilled by hires in India. Just a fun aspect of the global economy. It’s still quite a logistical challenge to work on a team that spans 13 hours of time zones. Every morning I sign in to Slack, there are some eight hours of questions and problems waiting to hit me all at once. It reminds me of my government days when I was the last engineer left standing on a slowly disintigrating team, which is something I never wanted to repeat.

Hey, have you heard of this thing called Door Dash? Says me, a minimum of five years after everyone else learned to depend on it daily. I used it for the very first time recently. Restaurant food just appeared at my door. What a concept! I made this discovery on one of those weekends where I was out of food and it was time for the weekly grocery shopping trip, but I didn’t feel like going out. (I never feel like going out on a weekend–“going out” is a work activity, and it feels like it should only be done during the work week.)

Unfortunately there aren’t a huge number of food options near my house. The vast majority of it is fast food-type stuff, but there’s a decent Mexican place nearby. I’m not sure what the mileage threshold is for a reasonable door dash request, but it seems like going out past five miles or so would be pretty rude and impractical.

I thought I’d put my car battery problems behind me when I installed a new battery earlier in the month–a battery way larger than I needed, incidentally, so I’d never have trouble starting this thing again even in the dead of winter.

Then, on the way home from the grocery store Sunday morning, the battery indicator came on again. I’d done a terrible job of screwing down the battery terminals because I didn’t have a metric socket set when I replaced the battery, so I thought the terminals had shaken loose. I’d since purchased a new socket set, so I double-checked the terminals and made sure they’re attached well. The car wouldn’t start, as if the battery was dead again, two weeks after I bought it. I used my iClever battery jump-starter, and while the engine ran, the battery light came on again, and eventually the engine stalled out.

ChatGPT deep research confirmed what I already suspected: Something’s probably wrong with the alternator, which is the thing in a car that charges the battery while the car’s running. Quite likely my car’s been running entirely off the new battery for the last few weeks. My problem now is how to get my car to the dealer to perform repairs. I can change a tire or a battery but an alternator? Maybe, but I’d rather not find out.

These sorts of transportation issues are thorny problems when you live alone out in the exurbs with no family or friends nearby. I imagine I’ll have to get the car towed to the dealer (some 9 miles away) and then take an Uber out there to pick it up.

But first, I’m going to try a smart battery charger to recharge the new battery enough to drive it 9 miles safely. So far, it has completely revived the dead battery enough to run the car again, but I haven’t tried driving anywhere yet.

Just wondering. It’s not COVID. It’s not a cold or flu. It’s not seasonal allergies. But there’s a nearly constant tickle in my throat now that causes me to cough pretty much every time I use my vocal cords or eat or wake up. I think (hope) it’s acid reflux related, but I need to find an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor if I can ever figure out how the American healthcare system works.

Bye!

You’ve just recorded a 30 minute game session, you said some really witty and insightful stuff about the game, better than you usually do. This is going to be one of your best videos yet! As you’re signing off, you look over and see that your microphone has been muted the entire time.

We’ve all been there.

If you haven’t yet, you probably will be. If you’re a streamer, your audience will tell you they can’t hear you, but if you’re recording local files, you might not know until the recording is done.

This just happened to me in the past week, which is what made me think of writing this post. I’ve been recording game videos since 2015 and have a fairly routine process now. But despite my best efforts to automate everything, human error still happens. It’s inevitable.

What do you do if you lost the live commentary for a whole video? There’s a few options.

Maybe you can load a previous save file and play that section of the game again, but all the spontaneity is gone. You can pretend you’re seeing everything again for the first time, and try to remember all that great stuff you said, but unless you’re a trained actor, the commentary is probably going to turn out flat and boring. And it defeats the entire purpose of recording game videos, because you want your initial reactions to everything. At least, I do.

Or maybe it’s a game that doesn’t have save files, and you can’t go back, so you have to do the dreaded “hey guys, guess what, I lost 30 minutes of the game, sorry about that, here’s everything you missed” at the start of the next video, the thing that every viewer hates more than anything and causes them to instantly unsubscribe and unlike your videos. (I assume.)

You could also record an overdub of new commentary over the game video, but that takes time and effort and it might sound weird in the context of the rest of the videos. Plus it will still lack spontaneity.

As a last resort, you could upload the game video with no commentary. Some people like that, but I don’t. Especially if it’s the only one in a series that’s missing a commentary track.

I’ve done all of these things with various success. The thing that I hate most about those options (except the last one) is how long it takes. Anything that takes time away from playing the game is usually something I want to avoid during the recording process.

So, a long time ago I set up an emergency backup microphone.

Your main microphone records to one audio track, the backup microphone records to a different audio track. If something goes wrong with the main microphone track, you use the backup microphone track. Easy peasy.

The key to an effective backup microphone for me is to make sure it’s not connected to the same mute keys as the main microphone, so it’s always recording no matter what. In OBS, you can setup each audio source with different mute hotkeys.

If you have a lot of money, you can setup an expensive microphone as a backup. But if you’re like me starting out, you can also use a $10 USB Logitech video conference desk microphone taped to the boom arm of the main microphone, which I used until a few years ago when I splurged on a Blue Snowball.

It’s really hard to see in this old photo, but here’s how I used to tape that old Logitech backup mic to the main mic arm:

Another tip if you’re worried about accidentally toggling off a microphone is to use push-to-mute instead of a toggle. I have both setup. I use push-to-mute for momentary coughs or clearing my throat, so there’s no chance of accidentally leaving the mic muted, something I used to do with annoying regularity. I use a toggle for longer periods of muting like actually getting up or during long cut scenes.

Note that for push-to-mute to work in OBS, you have to enable push-to-mute for that audio source. It’s stupid. I don’t know what OBS was thinking. Literally every time I setup a push-to-mute hotkey, I try it, it doesn’t work, I scratch my head for a long time, then I remember: Oh yeah, OBS has this silly thing where you have to enable push-to-mute on a totally different screen first. OBS has never been particularly good at user interface design.

In olden times, I used a wireless numeric keypad for my recording hotkeys, then I splurged on a Stream Deck to be cool like everyone else. Now I use a foot switch for push-to-mute so I can cough even in the middle of a hairy boss fight.

I don’t worry about using push-to-mute on the backup microphone track, because I’d have to keep my foot down on the pedal to accidentally leave the mute on, which isn’t likely to happen. It’s only the mute toggle that I disable for the backup microphone track.

You will probably find that the backup microphone doesn’t sound nearly as good as the main microphone. In my case, there’s a lot more room noise, it picks up the sounds of clacking keys and mouse buttons and the thumping of moving the mouse around on the table, so I only use it for emergencies. If I have time, I can improve the sound by using some noise gates or other filters in REAPER, which is my go-to audio post-processing software.

In the case of my most recent mic failure, I needed to use REAPER anyway because I needed to amend some of my commentary. I misattributed the song It’s Probably Me to Eric Clapton instead of Sting, a crucial mistake that needed to be corrected. (I don’t correct verbal mistakes very often, unless it’s a massive pop culture mistake like that, and usually I’m in the file editing for other reasons.) Here’s the corrected clip of video. The full video probably won’t get uploaded to my channel for months at my current upload rate.

(For pedants out there, on further reflection, the song is technically credited to Sting, Eric Clapton, and Michael Kamen, but I’m not re-recording another correction.)

(That game is Monster Hunter World on the PC, if you’re wondering, which is what I’m currently playing.)

The point of all this is that thanks to a backup microphone, I was still able to use what might otherwise have been a completely ruined recording, which helps with the primary goal of not spending too much time on videos after the recording is done.

P.S. If you end up in a situation where you’ve recorded a video with commentary but no game sound, you’re screwed. I’ve never found a way to solve for that problem. You have no choice but to throw out the video. Unless you want to get creative and make your own game sound effects like I did once:

That’s the only time I ever lost a crucial piece of game sound (the first time encountering a Souls boss is a must-have recording situation). I still think it’s pretty funny, in a cringy sort of way.

P.P.S. Those two videos back to back highlight how much my audio loudness policies have changed in the last six or seven years. A subject for a different post. (Read up on LUFS if you want a preview.)

Once again we find ourselves scrambling to catch up with writing a post. It’s never a good sign when I forget to prepare the document early in the writing cycle. If I don’t have a blank document available to jot down thoughts every day or so, it’s going to be a major chore to write the post at the last minute. Blogging is such a chore, why does anyone do it?

In climate news, we are leaving the winter months, otherwise known as the worst time of every year for me, and it’s looking like spring is returning and there might be an end to months of misery. Daylight savings time began so there’s an abundance of daylight and the world is normal again. (In my old age, I don’t like being awake when there’s no sun outside anymore. Long gone are the days of my youth when I was awake more at night than during the day.)

I picked up Monster Hunter: Wilds on the PS5. I don’t know why. Just because it was there. At first I found it somewhat meh, and wrote a fairly lukewarm impressions post.

But I find myself enjoying it, against all odds, and wanting to keep playing it. The story and characters are unappealing (I don’t even know anyone’s names, I just keep referring to them as, for example, “Big Hair Belly Girl”), but the monster-fighting part is kind of fun, and it’s a vastly improved user experience from the previous Monster Hunter games I’ve played. No fluff, no stakes, just bashing monsters with a giant sword (or whatever) while a cat companion meows at you periodically.

In fact, I like it so much that I surpassed the threshold beyond which my left thumb starts to ache from using a controller too much and I have to take some days off playing.

Therefore, I had to find a mouse-and-keyboard game to play on mandatory thumb-rest days. I had started Avowed last time, but it turns out I very quickly found myself uninterested in playing further. Nothing really wrong with it, there’s just not much of a hook.

I tried to install Monster Hunter: World on PC again, to continue the monster-hunting vibe, and found it a horrible experience to play with mouse and keyboard, and I really missed the streamlined gameplay of Wilds. So I doubt if I’ll get very far in World this time either. Most of my previous playtime was on a PS5. According to video records the last monster I killed was a big spiky Radobaan, so that’s how far I got.

I decided to finally start Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, a game I’ve had downloaded and installed for over a month now, but never launched. In all this time, I haven’t heard a single person talking about it. The first game wasn’t exactly a mainstream darling. It’s the kind of game you either like or hate.

Naturally the night I wanted to play KCD2, Big Patch 1.2 had just dropped, so Steam had to download a 62.3 GB patch. That’s not really a patch, by the way, that’s a complete replacement.

But I eventually played for about an hour. The first game had a pretty good story hook to start out with, the second game doesn’t. Let’s face it, Henry of Skalitz ain’t no Geralt of Rivia, commanding the screen with his presence. The whole sword combat system came rushing back to me in the first tutorial, and I questioned my own sanity for wanting to try to re-learn it. Nothing appears to have changed in the second game, mechanically speaking, for good or ill. (Including the inexplicable catastrophic drop in frame rate during cut scenes.)

So I thought I’d probably never play it again, but then Saturday morning rolled around and I played a second session of KCD2, and found myself getting invested in the story. Possibly because there were a lot of flashbacks to the beginning of the first game, which was the best part of that game.

Also, there’s a dog companion in the second game, which I don’t remember being in the first game, and who doesn’t love talking to their dog companions in video games.

To round out this section, here are some games I’ve uninstalled recently: Grand Theft Auto V (still can’t get into GTA like I used to), Tales of Arise (played about an hour, never felt like returning to it).

Uploading the final videos in Dragon’s Dogma 2, don’t really know what to do next. I thought it would be Avowed but I quickly lost interest in it. Maybe Monster Hunter Wilds but I didn’t really start recording like I would publish them until some 10 hours into the game, so maybe not.

There’s really only one style of game that’s perfect for game videos, and that’s blind Souls-like playthroughs, and there just aren’t any to do right now. So I’m kind of stuck.

I fully forgot to write down most of what I’ve been watching.

I just saw there’s a third season of Wheel of Time on Amazon. Was there a second season? I don’t remember it, but I assume I must have watched it. Before watching season three, I’ll make a prediction that this will be the season where the quality of the show drops precipitously because of budget cuts, the standard path of most streamer-made shows.

Two stories.

First, I bought a new mattress on the Internet (it was on sale). I’ve never done that before. It was weird to think that something which came in a relatively small (but heavy) box could expand to the size of a mattress, but it did. So far it’s a great mattress and I sleep much better. It’s a Bear Elite Hybrid mattress, if you’re interested. (Previously I used a fully memory foam mattress, which I hated.) But it’s a lot taller than I expected, so I need to follow this up with an order for a low-profile foundation. Dealing with mattresses is one of those chores that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish when you live alone, incidentally. Mattresses are pretty big and heavy (this one especially), and so are foundations. Also, getting rid of old mattresses or foundations is not exactly easy, either, especially if you don’t own a big enough vehicle, or unless you’re one of those weirdos who just throws them by the side of the road in the middle of the night.

Second, my car battery died. This is a regular occurrence in my life at this point. I’d noticed it getting weaker over the winter, failing to start in the morning and so on, but I figured I’d just get a new battery at my next car inspection, which is due about now. Well, the battery had other plans and went from “weak” to “fully dead” before I got to my inspection, the way modern batteries do. I had to rig up my iClever external battery to jump start and run the car just long enough for me to drive to and from an auto parts store for a new battery. Luckily it was a short trip and I didn’t get stranded anywhere. More perils of living alone in exurbia*: If your car dies for any reason, you’re pretty much screwed.

* I only recently learned the word “exurbs,” which is a good descriptor for where I’ve lived about half of my life (the other half was in suburbs). Somewhat less population-dense than suburbs, but not fully out in the country where you could literally hunt for food in your back yard. Still, you really need a working vehicle to live in this kind of area.

I made a concerted effort to back off of checking news daily, so I don’t have many sarcastic barbs this time. Since Trump thrives on attention and all of his policies will inevitably self-destruct from incompetence and public backlash, this seems like the best opposition strategy for now.

Will I remember to make a new blank document for the next post or not?