Endgame Viable

There’s a big controversy about Discord starting to crack down on age verification worldwide, or something like that. I found out about it on Discord.

I can’t say I’m surprised. It was a great run for 5 or 10 years there but letting the huddled masses onto the Internet has definitely proven to have been a huge mistake in hindsight. I assume that’s not a controversial viewpoint.

Since Intrepid Studios just imploded in dramatic fashion, I dug out the game again and recorded three videos for the historical record.

I don’t personally think the game was a scam or a cash grab or anything like that, but I do think it was mismanaged, had an inexperienced development team, and they probably bit off way more than they could chew. From the outside, the end result of those two situations looks roughly the same. But I can’t see anyone in this day and age sinking 10 years into a game project as some kind of long con.

I don’t know anything or particularly care about the business side of it or any of the personalities involved; I can only make some educated guesses about the development process based on looking at the game and noting technical issues I see.

There are multitudinous writing issues, so I don’t think they had a particularly strong writing team. It varies widely from “this part isn’t bad” to “somebody copied this from their phone without fixing autocorrect mistakes.” Which seems like a particularly troublesome oversight for a game that primarily presents its storyline through writing.

I can only assume somebody made a decision that the story didn’t matter, and all the players were going to speed-click through the quest dialogs anyway, so they haven’t bothered to do much editing to date. If that’s the route they wanted to go, there are better ways to facilitate that playstyle than wasting your time writing quest text.

I think my overarching impression is that whoever the creative and technical leads were didn’t have a lot of experience in the MMORPG space. I got the impression they hadn’t been keeping up with trends in the genre, or were trying to make something vaguely like what they remembered from their youth, or simply didn’t play MMORPGs. It felt like I kept seeing problems that have been solved over and over in the last 20 years of the genre, like they were starting over from scratch making a game from 2005 without any of the knowledge learned since then.

Anyway the Steam page is plastered with bright red negative reviews telling everyone to force Steam to give refunds, but my take is this: It’s unlikely any of those employees are going to get paid for their last days at Intrepid, but it seems even more unlikely if they have to pay back all the customers too. So I kind of don’t mind losing a few bucks to say, “Hey Intrepid, save your non-existent money for the people out of a job maybe.” That’s why everyone bought this on Kickstarter in the first place, right? To donate money to the devs making the game? An act of charity? Because they couldn’t convince any real entrepreneurial backers to fund their game?

I saw Tipa mention Evenshor, and I hadn’t heard of it before, so on the strength of just the post title, I looked it up, and I thought it was one of the best ideas for a video game I’ve seen in a long time.

The only problem is that it’s emulating EverQuest instead of, you know, the good MMORPG from the 90s. (That being Asheron’s Call.)

I only played a short time, but I can report that it’s a dead ringer for playing any MMORPG before around 2000. Watching computer-generated general chat and guild chat is hilarious. I was even able to ask a question in guild chat about how to give things to NPCs and got an answer!

It’s not going to have much longevity, but it was a fun diversion.

I tried it out, but I think it suffers from all the same problems as Nioh 1. I was offput when it upended an encyclopedia’s worth of keys and abilities on my head at the beginning, which isn’t exactly my jam. I like games with simple controls that are hard to master, not complex controls that are hard to memorize.

I’m probably going to return it on Steam, and maybe get it on the PS5. [I did.] In any case it’s unlikely to be a video series on my channel. I’m just not that into it.

I continue to plug away at the Endwalker main scenario quest. I’ve just started the block of level 86 quests. I think I counted 40-something quests remaining before going into the post-launch quests.

I’ve fallen short of my goal of doing three quests a day though. Each quest takes me about 20-25 minutes, when reading all the text out loud.

My character reached level 90 about halfway through the MSQ, with all the XP boosts in effect.

On my journey to get ready for Midnight, I’ve leveled from 50 to 60 through about a zone and a half of Shadowlands, from 60 to 70 through a zone of Dragonflight, and from 70 to 80 in The War Within Recap. Grand total of playing time has been maybe 12 hours? It doesn’t take long to level in World of Warcraft Retail.

Unlike Final Fantasy XIV, you don’t have to actually complete the expansion story in WoW to move on to the next expansion. In fact, with the exception of the War Within Recap, it’s almost impossible to complete an expansion’s story because you out-level the content in about five minutes.

I can’t comment on the new housing system because I’m uninterested, except that at looks exactly like what you’d expect housing in WoW to look like: Awkward.

I can comment on the War Within Recap, a streamlined version of that expansion which allowed me to hit all the story highlights on my way from 70 to 80, while cutting out all the boring kill 10 rats quests along the way.

I enjoyed it, and I wish there was a similar “recap version” for every expansion. In fact, I dare say that every MMORPG should implement some kind of “recap” alternative for every expansion, made for alts or players catching up later. It’s a rare situation where I think something from modern WoW should become an MMORPG genre staple, but that’s one of them.

In a nutshell, I’m ready to play Midnight when it launches and now I’m just grinding for Twilight currency and new gear in the pre-expansion event.

I vaguely remember there’s reason to frown on playing/talking about Activision/Blizzard games now, but rest assured I hate all the things I’m supposed to hate (whatever they are). But I typically reserve my useless retail activism in gaming for Chinese-developed games and Tencent. I just find most breakout Chinese games look like they’re transparently copied-and-pasted from previously popular western games.

(I say useless because maybe only 1% of gamers are old/savvy enough to understand anything but pew-pew-pretty-colors-take-my-money when it comes to games, so a handful of people making a stand is hardly a formidable force for change.)

Whatever happened to Microsoft buying Activision/Blizzard anyway? Oh, they completed it, that’s what happened.

Yeah, I tried Project: Gorgon again since everyone’s talking about it.

I got off that stupid starter island, which is more like a prison if you ask me, with that constant cacophony of Humble Bundle sound effect library sounds clanging in your ears all the time, and that was as far as I got. It looked more-or-less exactly like I remember it from however many years ago I played it, virtually unchanged in every way.

However I’m happy to report the mouse-turning bug was nowhere to be found, so it’s actually playable again.

It’s cute but it’s nowhere near as fun as Final Fantasy XIV or even World of Warcraft. It might dazzle a 1997 audience coming off of Ultima Online and give 1998’s EverQuest and 1999’s Asheron’s Call a run for its money, but unfortunately it’s 2026 now.

I dug out Stars Reach again since I’d recorded some videos of Ashes of Creation and other miscellaneous new MMORPGs.

Stars Reach is seriously early, early, early access. It’s barely functional, in my opinion, though admittedly, I didn’t see many bugs. And most of the features that are in the game are the same features you’d find in any of a hundred survival games. It’s not exactly bursting with fun things to do at the moment.

Not to mention I just heard they’re laying off developers. Not a great sign.

You won’t have any way of knowing this, but for the record, I predicted the Seahawks would win in a romp. I imagine most thinking sports fans did. The Patriots looked a lot like the Commanders of last year: Playing way above their actual capabilities, benefiting from a softer schedule. While the Seahawks looked unstoppable.

Holy crap I just learned about Ring Search Party in a Superbowl commercial?!? Thank god I don’t buy Internet-enabled security devices. Listen to your Gen-X elders: Don’t buy Internet-enabled security devices! Also, don’t stab yourself in the eye with a fork. Because apparently we have to explain things that should be really, really obvious.

Otherwise, AI deepfakes were all the rage in Superbowl commercials. And yes, they all look fake, but I guess visual effects are supposed to look fake now? Since literally all of them do.

And it turns out I was right about the game. The Seahawks were in charge the entire game, and the Patriots never had a chance, except for a couple of minutes at the beginning and a brief spurt of life in the 4th quarter that saved them from getting shut out completely.

As for the Bad Bunny halftime show, it was okay. As a musical performance, it seemed pretty fake and overly-produced, as many Superbowl halftime shows do. I’m way too old to appreciate modern pop music that’s produced more for the Busby Berkeley visual choreography while the music itself is an afterthought. I, for example, almost never watch music videos. There were some cool beats though. But I wouldn’t recognize any of it if I heard it again.

Anyway that’s it for NFL football until the end of summer, unless you count that spring football league.

It was weeks of cold weather, where the temperature stayed at or below freezing, so snow and ice was just sitting on the ground everywhere forever. My driveway was a solid sheet of ice.

My new SUV has exactly zero difficulty in the snow, so it’s no big deal for getting around, but it’s still pretty annoying. I’m not a big fan of cold weather, what with my house being quite chilly in the cold.

The other annoying thing is how you go to the store sometimes and the bread and eggs and meat shelves are completely empty when there’s a 50% chance of less than half-inch of snow in the forecast. It’s comically stereotypical South-in-the-snow behavior.

Times like this make me feel quite lucky to have grown up in a fairly pragmatic family.

The cold finally let up on February 9, when the high temperature climbed all the way into the 50s for the first time in forever. The day I’m posting this, the temperatures are supposed to be reach 60 all week.

A strange thing happened: A stray dog hung out at my house for a few days. Well, she had a collar so I suppose I should say “unsupervised” dog.

I went out to the front to try to get the last of the snow and ice off my front sidewalk, and I noticed a little white dog curled up next to my front porch in the sun. She got up and wandered away from me into the back yard, and that’s when I noticed a rather distinctive set of teats that immediately made me wonder if this dog had just given birth.

The dog then plopped down in the sun in the back yard, watching and waiting.

In any case, I’ve never seen a stray dog hang around my yard before. The few I’ve seen are always passing through on their way somewhere else. Stray cats are far more common around my house.

The little dog disappeared late in the afternoon, then reappeared again on my front porch two days later. She’s a pint-sized beagley hound mix.

My instinct is to try to befriend her and see if she needs any help, but I don’t really want a dog in my life. (Mainly because I don’t want a pet that outlives me, which seems especially cruel.)

Then again, she’s moved away the couple of times she’s seen me, so she may not want help. It’s been a couple of especially cold days, I haven’t seen her again, and I’m worried about her. Hopefully she found her way back to whoever put that collar on her, and she didn’t freeze to death out there somewhere in the woods.

Nothing new to report (which is good). I mentioned this last time but I had another brain MRI which showed everything the same as before (which is good).

The only notable thing to say about it is that one of the earplugs wasn’t quite in and MRIs are frickin’ loud without earplugs.

I also had an MRI of my left hip area as a precaution. I mentioned to my oncologist that I had some pain in my left hip in the mornings when I get up that goes away after I move around a bit, and she wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything going on there. It happens to be the same area where I had radiation on a bone spot in my left femur neck, and that spot has been unremarked-on in any followup CT scans.

Bye!

This time I started the blog draft document early, so there’s lots of rambling.

I don’t have anything to say about it, just that everybody seems to be playing and talking about it. I personally never “got” Guild Wars, so I don’t feel much interest in replaying it, though I have hovered over the buy button a couple of times.

I made an effort with Guild Wars 1 somewhere around 2017 or 2018, made some videos about it, realized that it was way, way too hard to consistently make edited videos like a YouTuber (which is why literally every YouTuber hires an editor first thing), and that was the last time I ever thought about Guild Wars. (1 or 2, honestly.)

I’ve seen a few obligatory sentences here and there about Project Gorgon launching a 1.0 version, so I guess I’ll mention it too.

However, I’m not going to pretend I’m going to play that game again because the last time I tried to play it, there was a bug with mouse turning that was so bad I literally couldn’t play it, and it went on for months, and I have no understanding of how they couldn’t notice or fix it. It seemed like a searing indictment of their software engineering experience at the time.

Anyway, it’s still out there I guess if you want to play it. I think I bought an Early Access edition on Steam some years back. I remember it being a very niche game, though, unlikely to have any mainstream appeal.

Me being the cynical type, I imagine the 1.0 release is probably a last-ditch effort to make some money to keep the project running a little longer before the inevitable collapse, as these 1.0 releases of early access projects so often are. (*cough* Crowfall *cough*.)

Speaking of last ditch efforts, I also haven’t touched Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach in a while.

UPDATE 2/1: I just saw Ashes of Creation is imploding before it even gets to 1.0.

I’m continuing to play Final Fantasy XIV, though not as much as before. I had a minor slowdown because I may or may not have picked up a minor cold–because it was slightly worse than the “normal” congestion I get the weekend after a chemo infusion, but then it was also unusually frigid, so who knows–which gave me a scratchy throat and made it difficult to record dialog. Especially when the story happens to be focused on super high-voiced Loporitts at the time.

In the Endwalker story, I just got back from the moon. I’m guessing it’s near the halfway point? Because of the extra XP I’m getting from the Preferred World+ status, I’m almost level 90 already, while the quests are still level 84.

I had to go through the first trial of Endwalker, The Dark Inside, which was the first time I’d had to venture back into the world of the Duty Finder in four years. I’m sure they’ve given explanations about why they can’t do the 8-man trials with the Duty Support system, but I can’t think of any technical reasons they couldn’t extend the work they did for 4-man dungeons to 8-man trials.

It took about three days to summon up the ambition to wait in the queue, and on the third day, after waiting two hours, a really fun aspect of MMORPGs that really makes the game fun and I’m so glad I got to experience the fun of sitting around waiting for two hours in a queue because that’s the real fun of MMORPGs, right? I’m so glad they preserve that essential MMORPG player experience by not letting you do 8-man trials instantly with the Duty Support system. Anyway I finally got to do the trial.

I had looked up some info on the basic mechanics, but there’s no substitute for being there. Everything happened way faster than I expected, the second phase was on us in the blink of an eye, the platform was rotating and the stars were raining AoEs, and I was a little rusty after four years of not doing any of that, you know? So I died a couple times. Luckily some others messed it up, too, and it wasn’t just me.

Anyway we wiped on the first try, but got through it on the second try after one of the healers put a mark on his head so we could follow him, which was a huge help. On the second try I only died once right at the end when I happened to be standing a step too close to the tank buster. As always with FFXIV, it’s kind of fun when you know what to do and get all the dance steps right, but I’m not waiting in a queue for two hours to do it again.

To summarize the story since last time, we arrived in the shattered remains of Garlemald* to help, only to get a mixed reaction from the locals.

In the end, all the tempered in Garlemald–basically zombies who were made into slaves by Fandaniel’s towers–were de-zombified when all the towers fell, leaving the entire Garlemald region teetering on the brink of self-destruction, as half the people are starving to death, while the other half are recovering from zombification. The Allies decided to step in to help, and I’m sure there won’t be any political ramifications for that later on.

* Garlemald is FFXIV’s version of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, for the uninitiated–up to now, the Unambiguous Evil Empire.

Meanwhile, Fandaniel and Zenos set big bad primal dude Zodiark free on the moon, then I took care of it (in the aforementioned trial), and that somehow triggered the Final Days and the beginning of the end of all life as we know it.

Fortunately the moon is actually a big spaceship so everyone back home can ride to safety in a massive moon evacuation, run by industrious rabbit-like lalafells called loporitts. No, really, that’s what’s going on.

Returning from the moon, me and the Scions vow to stop the Final Days, however, so the moon evacuation plan won’t be necessary.

Also G’raha Tia keeps throwing himself semi-romantically at my character in cut scenes, like he did in Shadowbringers. Every time I’m told to rest, somebody knocks on my door and interrupts my night off with a cut scene.

It wasn’t at all clear to me why Fandaniel needed to erect towers all over the world and temper all of Garlemald, by the way. In the end, Fandaniel and Zenos just teleported to the moon and knocked down the last ward imprisoning Zodiark with a single blow. Why didn’t they just teleport up there and knock down all the wards that way? I’m sure there’s a deeply complex fan lore explanation, but it wasn’t very obvious on the surface.

Also, why was only Garlemald tempered, when those towers are everywhere? Is it because they were … offscreen? But that doesn’t explain why all of the elephant people in Thavnair weren’t tempered.

Eh, this is why you can’t look too closely at the story.

I saw something about a Pre-Patch Something Or Other for World of Warcraft, which sounded like there was an imminent expansion that I hadn’t heard of.

It reminded me that I hadn’t played WoW since before the big level squish thing, and WoW is the other one in the Top 2 of dependable MMORPGs, and wouldn’t it be cool to play a WoW Expansion at launch time, one of the two universal shared experiences in MMORPG gaming left in the world (the other being a FFXIV expansion launch, which I’m guessing might be coming later this year sometime?).

I know, I know, there are other MMORPGs with expansions all the time, but let’s be real here… every other one is a niche experience for superfans only, and you’re not likely to ever hear about them unless you’re tuned into MMORPG news sources. (I honestly hadn’t even heard of the last two WoW expansions.)

Anyway, when I logged in, my “main” WoW solo character, a Night Elf Hunter dating back to c. 2006, whose never been in a guild, the only character that’s been through every expansion (kind of), was level 50. I don’t remember what it was before. A hundred something? 120 maybe? I’ve somehow managed to lose every single video I’ve ever recorded of WoW so I have no way to check. (The last time I mentioned playing World of Warcraft was after Battle for Azeroth.)

There was something called a “Catch-up Experience,” which I’d never heard of. I also had four level 70 boosts available.

I think the new Midnight expansion starts at level 80, because it comes with a level 80 booster. I just went ahead and pre-ordered it, which presumably will give me access to all the previous expansions I missed, too. My general plan is to level my Hunter so it’s ready for Midnight.

Battle for Azeroth was the last one I played when it launched. According to Wikipedia, there’s been Shadowlands, Dragonflight, and The War Within since Battle for Azeroth. I remember skipping Shadowlands, but this is the first time I’ve heard of Dragonflight or The War Within.

I played the Catch Up Experience for my level 50 Hunter, which puts you into an instance of The Arathi Highlands where Jaina and Thrall give you a handful of kill 10 rats quests with 50,000 other people competing for the same mobs, and you get a full set of item level 50 gear, and in my case gain a level. I don’t know when you’re supposed to get item level 50 gear, but it said my previous pre-squish gear was around item level 17 or something like that.

During the Catch-Up Experience, I learned there’s a whole new mode of flying that seems considerably worse than it used to be. Now your mount has its own action bar and it will fall out of the sky if you don’t keep hitting the spacebar now and then.

Immediately after leaving the Catch Up Experience and plopping me into Stormwind Keep, I was funnelled into some NPCs to tell me about a Trading Post and Trader’s Tender, which sounded like something made for people who think games are only vessels for trading collectibles. I can’t see myself ever interacting with that system again.

Then I stumbled around Stormwind Keep for a while trying to avoid getting forced to the Dragon Isles (which seems to be the new defacto starting point for everyone and everything), until I finally found the guy who takes you to the Shadowlands expansion content.

I’ve praised WoW for many years for their ability to keep their game technologically up-to-date, in terms of graphics and game engine stuff. But man, their media transitions are still firmly rooted in 2000s-era jankiness. The screen blinks weirdly, bits of dialog get cut off, things are out of sync, odd delays, crazy resolution shifts between pre-rendered cut scenes and in-game cut scenes. It looks and feels absolutely awful, and it’s such a horrible first impression for a new expansion. FFXIV is a vastly superior multimedia experience.

Also, and I’m sure I’ve said this many times before, but I find WoW’s story almost entirely opaque. I chatted with ChatGPT about this: I asked it to summarize the main story of WoW expansion by expansion, and almost none of it looked familiar to me, despite having played every expansion up to and including Battle for Azeroth.

I asked ChatGPT why I didn’t remember the story, and it explained that’s because the “main story” is mostly revealed in raids, and that’s it. If you just run around doing quests, you apparently never see the main story, which matches my personal experience of the game.

World of Warcraft tells its story like a TV series where the finale is paywalled, the middle seasons were optional, and the recap episode never aired. -ChatGPT, either making up something funny, or citing something funny, who can say.

Which is weird. Another reason I think FFXIV is number 1 of the Top 2 remaining mainstream MMORPGs. The main story of FFXIV, like it or not, is impossible to miss.

After playing about an hour of Shadowlands quests in The Maw, my Hunter is already level 54 in the first zone. I’m just assuming there’s supposed to be 10 levels of Shadowlands content, then 10 levels of Dragonwhatever content, then 10 levels of War Whatever content.

The point is, I seem to be leveling rather quickly, and it feels like I’ll be able to skip past Shadowlands after maybe two zones (I think there’s five zones in Shadowlands?).

The combat is stupefyingly easy, too, after getting that item level 50 gear from the Catch Up Experience. (And after finally remembering how to summon my Hunter pet, and after adding that single-button damage rotation action to my bar.)

By the way, I was forced to look at the new housing system, even though I have no interest in it. It looks exactly like what you’d expect WoW to do with housing… it doesn’t really fit, and all the good spots are already taken anyway.

I mentioned somewhere previously that I hated skill trees and I wished there was a button I could click to just pick the best skills. Well, it turns out there is such a thing in WoW, and I could not have been more delighted to find it. No more randomly picking things from a skill tree I can’t be bothered to study!

Anyway, as of this posting, I’ve reached level 58 in the first couple zones of Shadowlands. There’s lots of extra XP stuff active, not to mention all the Mysterious Satchels raining from the sky with extra catch-up gear so you can out-level whatever content you’re doing in mere hours.

On a different character, a level 45 Mage, I tried out the Pre-Patch stuff, which takes you to a place called Twilight Highlands, which I have no memory of and my character has never been before.

You get a handful of quests dealing with and infiltrating a Twilight Cult, which, again I’ve never heard of before. Or at least I don’t remember hearing before. Then you’re turned loose and expected to run around the zone doing world events, or whatever they’re called in WoW, popping up around the map. You get some kind of currency with which you can buy exclusive gear and pets and whatnot.

I haven’t seen the events yet, but it reminds me of the Pre-Legion Invasion stuff, which was honestly one of the most fun experiences I can ever remember having in World of Warcraft.

You guessed it, the Twilight Stuff also drops tons of XP so my level 45 Mage turned into a level 49 Mage in almost no time. It’s nowhere near as fun as the Pre-Legion Invasions, though. Nobody has beaten the Rift-style gaming experience from Rift, and yet for some reason nobody ever does it anymore. Too much fun, I guess. Gaming is supposed to be a chore in the modern era.

Brrrrrrr. It was an unusually cold December here, but the latter part of January is cold, what with the much-villified “polar vortex” hanging out here. It started with the first big snow of the year on the weekend. If you get your weather from commercial sources or social media, I imagine it would have been the most frightening impending natural disaster you’ve probably ever experienced.

The grocery store was certainly in full apocalypse mode, with the shelves completely barren of milk and bread and meats. But since I just go to plain old no-advertisements weather.gov, it was just like any other winter of my entire life where there’s a potential for snow and ice, and I simply prepared for a few days of inconvenience, rather than the end of days.

I got maybe 2-3 inches of fine powdery snow Saturday night, then all day of sleet on Sunday, then freezing rain on top of that Sunday night. At the end of it, there was a solid block of ice on my (brick) back steps, that persists to this day.

I got through the weekend without losing power, so I thought I was out of the woods, but then I looked at the week’s forecast and every day the high temperature is below freezing and every night the low is down into single digits. Yikes. A full week of that is highly unusual for my area, and it’s way too cold for my heating systems to keep up, so I’m going to be extra grumpy this week.

When I finally ventured out to the store on the fourth day following the snow/sleet/ice storm, the ice was still so thick around my house that the SUV did not even break through the surface as I drove over the white sheet where my driveway was. The neighborhood road was a solid chunk of about an inch of rugged ice. (Outside the neighborhood, the roads were completely fine.)

And there’s supposed to be some snow again this coming weekend. Grocery store apocalypse!

In other news, I had a rare fox sighting the morning after the storm. At least one fox lives somewhere near my house, presumably in the woods, and I only know this because they go skittering through my back yard about once a year. This time they scampered across the snow-and-ice-covered yard in the morning so it was very easy to see. Naturally I didn’t have a camera handy, and you only have about 5 seconds to find one before they’re gone. They don’t hang around.

I had another brain MRI recently, and the results showed “stability.” Which means that I continue to have a hole where they surgically removed one tumor, and two 5mm spots that are “stable”, which is what’s expected. (A stable metastasis is one that isn’t growing, but they can’t really tell if it’s still cancer cells or just scar tissue.) I’ll continue to get brain MRIs periodically because lung cancer really likes to spread to the brain.

As far as I can tell, I have no cognitive issues from these invasive tumors. Though every time I misread a word or mispronounce a word while recording a video game, I wonder if it’s brain damage.

This is my third or fourth brain MRI I’ve had, and they keep noting an area of “encephalomalacia” in my right posterior cerebellum, which I think means an old scar. I wonder if that’s from the time I whacked my head on a steel beam as a kid.

So I haven’t mentioned the world in a while, and I feel like I need to resume meeting the bare minimum of what I can do as a citizen by talking about what’s going on in hopefully a reasonably sane way.

Hoo boy has it been a roller coaster. The kind of roller coaster that hurtles into a hellish abyss that burns all of its occupants alive.

I’ve never felt so much like my federal government is completely out of control and rampant with incompetency. I’ve never seen a national party so intent on destroying the reputation and credibility and value and power of America on the world stage. While ruining as many Americans’ lives as they can on the way. To be so oblivious to history and all that the United States has built around the world (arguably) since the beginning of the last century, to be so deeply buried in their own social media bubble, and to be so transparently adamant on chucking it all away for a quick buck, is both difficult to comprehend and simultaneously exactly what you’d expect a modern voting population to produce. I’ve never been so glad that there are state and local governments between me and that insanity.

Here’s just a handful of recent events. This all happened within the last month.

The U.S. kidnapped the leader of a sovereign nation for … reasons? I’ve never once felt threatened by Venezuela, but apparently we need to bring the full force of the U.S. military to handle a few boats and mean tweets. Forget all the countries out there literally chanting “Death to America,” or the ones with indicted war criminals invading their neighbors, let’s get the one with, you know, some drug boats.

And then there was Greenland. I thought it was a joke. One of those things Trump throws out to distract from his more serious mafia shakedowns. But no, he really means to take Greenland. To be fair, I’m not against the idea of the U.S. owning Greenland. (Or is it Iceland?) I do see it as a strategic resource worth having. But the current U.S. strategy is absolutely pathetic. And the president’s rambling dementia speech at Davos was equally pathetic. When are people going to start throwing shoes at him in these world events?

That’s already old news, though. Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota is the hot topic now. There have been not one but two state-sponsored executions of U.S. citizens by ICE (or DHS?) agents in Islamist terrorist masks. Normally I’m relatively pro-law enforcement, but not so much when they’re getting their uniforms and tactics from Al-Qaeda.

Normally I’d be talking about waiting for an investigation to run its course. But there’s not going to be any investigations because the feds put their laughably made-up investigation results out in public within minutes, smeared the victims, covered up and buried the evidence (except, you know, all the video), and no doubt have their autopens ready to sign blanket pardons for any agents involved. And–I’m speculating here–I can only assume they’ve given the assassins a big pay bonus. It’s hysterically, ludicrously, over-the-top corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-Constitutional.

I haven’t even mentioned the “Board of Peace,” which could not possibly sound more like a criminal Legion of Doom if they tried. I mean, they extended an invitation to the aforementioned indicted war criminal invading its neighbor.

And I don’t even want to think about what ol’ Dementia Donny might be scripting for the Iran chapter of his ongoing reality show, what with all the U.S. military assets steaming for the Arabian Sea. I’m sure that’s waiting on standby to blow up the news cycle if things get too sticky in Minnesota.

Anyway. I’d love to look at the Republican viewpoint and consider it with reasonable reflection. I honestly tried to find some independently verifiable official evidence (i.e. not a tweet or a TikTok)–anything that would sway a reasonable person–that Operation Metro Surge had done anything positive in Minnesota, but it’s really hard to find.

But in the interest of fairness, I will report that I found a DHS press release from December 4, 2025 that identified twelve “criminal illegal aliens” arrested in Operation Metro Surge after four days. One of whom was “driving under the influence.” Worst of the worst, yo. (To be fair, most cited more serious crimes.)

And here’s another press release from December 5, 2025 listing seven more arrests. And from December 12, 2025, ten more. (Renee Goode was executed on January 7, then DHS went into press release overdrive. Perhaps they thought that murdering U.S. citizens wasn’t the lasting legacy of Operation Metro Surge they wanted to leave, a crime so heinous that one might possibly consider labeling such things the “worst of the worst.”) January 8, 2026, 13 more. January 12, 2026, 10 more. January 13, 2026, 6 more. January 14, 2026, 6 more. January 15, 2026, 5 more. January 16, 2026, 12 more. January 19, 2026, 13 more. January 20, 2026, 10 more. January 22, 2026, 10 more. January 23, 2026, 8 more.

To be clear, I’m not sad to deport most of those folks. That would be my preference, all things being equal. Especially if they’re already in jail… I can’t see the logic of a state refusing to turn over the people already in jail, but I also don’t know all the facts of that because everything is so distorted right now.

But I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if any of those press releases are true and verifiable. Given the pack of lies this administration normally spews on a daily basis, it’s impossible to believe anything they report anymore. (I will leave unsaid my vague suspicions that I saw the same mug shot photo more than once in those press releases, probably due to mistakes from this mistake-prone administration.)

I’ll also leave it to the reader to decide if deporting those so-called “worst of the worst” (those damn drunk drivers!) is worth the cost of tearing up communities, trampling our Constitutional rights, and murdering activists with impunity.

There is some reporting that the administration is unhappy with the PR of their agents carrying out mafia-style executions of U.S. citizens on the streets, and they may be changing course in Minnesota, so that’s some good news I guess.

And that’s how we’re ending this blog post. Have a great day!

It’s one of those days where I wake up wide awake at 4 am, mainly due to the steroids I have to take before and after chemo infusion day. On this particular morning I notice that it’s January 15 and it’s the day I usually publish a new blog post, so I better get to writing something before the sun comes up.

And oops, I forgot to post this yesterday.

Most of my free time this year so far has gone into playing the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker expansion. I have no idea where all this MMORPG energy came from.

I can report that FFXIV is still the best traditional MMORPG. The combat systems are perfectly balanced between casual and hardcore, and you can engage with them at any level you choose. The story is super duper anime themed but it’s mostly engaging, if lengthy. Endwalker swings between “power of friendship” nonsense and scene-chewing cartoon villainy nonsense and then goes into really interesting historical geopolitical allegories and cultural commentary.

As per tradition since the start of Stormblood, I’ve been recording my journey through the Main Scenario Quest of Endwalker.

Mainly this involves reading out all the unvoiced dialog and trying to give the stoic nodding characters a tiny bit of life. (One day, I wanted to go back and record A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, too.)

I bought some in-ear monitors, which is a fancy schmancy term for good ear buds, where the wire goes back over your ears instead of just hanging down for everyone to see. You see them a lot on people recording YouTube-friendly podcasts, instead of bulky headphones.

They sound amazing. They’re kind of a pain to put on. And they aren’t noise-cancelling, but they’re noise-blocking, since they fit so snugly in the ear, which means I can’t hear my cat knocking things over during recordings anymore. Or burglars. Or tornadoes. Things like that.

Noise-blocking headphones are a bit spooky. I’ve never understood how people can wear them walking around out in the world where any bad thing can happen at any moment. I personally rely heavily on my hearing to know what’s going on with my surroundings.

I don’t remember watching anything lately. It’s either gaming or television, never both.

I still have a selection of Glass Cannon podcasts I listen to, and an assortment of YouTube channels I halfheartedly keep up with. I just found the Slow-Mo Guys, for example. And an amusing and mildly offensive channel commenting on NFL football called ThatsGoodSports. (I’m pretty sure all sports content is mildly offensive. But being from Gen-X, I have to admit I kind of miss mild offensiveness.)

Oh, yeah, and NFL football has just entered the playoffs leading up to the Superbowl, so I’m watching that. All my teams and picks are already out, though, so I’m fairly ambivalent about who wins now. I’m just happy the Eagles lost in the wildcard round. It’s important to always root against the Eagles in NFL football. If I can teach the world anything, it should be that.

I haven’t mentioned my job in a while, which is mainly for two reasons: 1) It’s fallen a bit on my life priority list what with the cancer and all, and 2) It’s actually been quite boring for a while now.

I moved to a new team about six months ago and haven’t actually been doing much software development (it was right when all the medical stuff was in full swing, so kind of a lot all at once). Mostly I’ve been debugging other teams’ cloud infrastructure builds and destroys, which involves reading and diagnosing a lot of JSON and YAML and some Python, which is not really my thing.

It’s one thing to work on your own infrastructure, which is necessary to get your application to run at peak performance, but it’s quite another to work on somebody else’s infrastructure running services you couldn’t care less about. Especially when most of your job is reporting, “Yeah it’s not finished because it’s broken and somebody other than us needs to fix that, and yes I know nobody has time to fix that, so I guess our work is done here. See you next status update.”

Anyway the point is that it’s not really software development work, and it’s very slow and boring and not very engaging and not an especially fulfilling career path. Which, on one hand, was perfect during the months of trying to figure out my new health situation, because I didn’t need to spend much mental bandwidth on work. But on the other hand, now that I have more mental bandwidth it’s a bit soul-crushing.

But!

In the last sprint I had an actual software engineering work item, and it was super cool. Now that the medical stuff has settled into a routine, I can focus more on computer stuff. So I was deep in the weeds of Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure, but in a way that benefited my team’s service.

In as generic terms as I can think of, I was working on tests that run in a test pod against our API service pod, which is used to validate every deployment to all environments. (A requirement to pass all of leadership’s “safe change” mandates.) The hard part is establishing connectivity between the test code and the service code in all the various Kubernetes environments. There’s a local environment, an “ephemeral” environment, then the more persistent dev, stage, and production environments.

Anyway it was fun, engaging, and I learned a ton. It wasn’t easy either, because this stuff isn’t documented very well in the weird company-specific environment I work in. It’s always a challenge to learn new engineering things, and especially to learn things that will apply to any job and not just your current company’s job.

That’s one reason I tend to shy away from my company-specific AI nonsense and stick to learning e.g. OpenAI APIs.

Nothing really new to report. Things are stable. Christmas kind of sucked due to a confluence of getting two teeth pulled the week before and a chemo infusion two days before, so I lost a few pounds there, but things are back on the right track.

Bye!

I continue to play Final Fantasy XIV every day as if I’ve been doing it all along, and didn’t ignore it and all MMORPGs for a solid four years. How long will this strange pro-MMORPG phase last?

I can’t be bothered to edit my blog posts into coherent prose anymore, so they’re mostly just raw information dumps at this point. Here’s another one. If you want easier-to-digest content, you can always use the AI summary feature of all the RSS feed readers out there.

I previously gave up on leveling a brand new character to 80 to play through Endwalker, and went back to my main Bard. Here’s the gist of the story so far.

The enemy for this expansion is the Telapheroi, a “tempered” army created by Fandaniel and the deposed, resurrected Zenos. (I think: All opinions about FFXIV story subject to change because it’s very inscrutable.) They’ve built a bunch of towers around the land which are going to … I don’t know, destroy the world, or something.

First we arrive in Old Sharlayan and get a tour of the city. I did that four years ago. I don’t remember much.

Next I had a choice to go to Thavnair or stay in Sharlayan. Four years ago, I picked the option that seemed most non-standard and went to Thavnair to investigate the Tower of Zot, which is the wrong choice according to all the Internet guides. I can only assume they split the MSQ to divide the player base at launch time.

Anyway, out in Thavnair, a local alchemist named Nidhana built some devices to protect everyone from the Tower, but on testing it, Fandaniel rudely kidnapped her and stuck her into a tower wall, while I watched and did nothing despite all my Chosen One Hero Powers.

(FFXIV is thick with obvious plot holes you have to ignore. The amount of times that people are saved by some deus ex machina offscreen magic or people or not saved because your character conveniently fails to act are innumerable.)

Then I returned to Old Sharlayan for some good old-fashioned library research and politics. The Forum and the twins’ dad are up to no good and working on some secret project down in Labrynthios. In the end, the Scions are banned from conducting any further research in Old Sharlayan. And we met the twins’ mom.

So the Scions returned to Thavnair and assaulted the Tower of Zot, destroying it and rescuing all the elephant people who had been kidnapped. That was the first dungeon instance of the expansion, which I of course did with the Trust (solo) system. On the final boss, it had quite a challenging set of dance mechanics for a leveling dungeon, and it took two tries.

Instead of attacking each tower individually, the Allied commanders decide to relieve Garlemald and attack the Main Big Evil Tower, so off we go to one of the most inhospitable places in the game, weather-wise. (Though there are no mechanical detriments to the cold.)

The twins, Alisaie and Alphinaud, try to force their help on the locals, with dire consequences. (I’m almost positive the exact same thing has happened before–they never learn.) Then the twins are taken prisoner by the shattered remnants of Legatus Quintos and the Garlean 1st Legion, who really hate us, and try a sneak attack without any soldiers, food, or heat, because compromise is unthinkable. But then they’re forced to surrender and Quintos can’t handle the shame of it.

Last night I left off with Strange Bedfellows, the one which unlocks the Aetherite in Broken Glass and unlocks a ton of side quests for Aether Currents. It’s numerically about 1/3 of the way through the 6.0 Endwalker quests.

I figure if I can do three MSQ quests a day, I’ll be done with Endwalker in, oh, a couple of months? Whew. The MSQ is soooo long now. Each one takes 20-25 minutes when you read everything out loud and don’t skip anything. And frankly, you don’t do much of anything, except run from place to place, read dialog, and watch cut scenes.

I continue to level my new Machinist character in my off time, mainly when I don’t feel like reading dialog out loud. Maybe I’ll switch over to him when I get to Dawntrail. (Except the thought of running through Endwalker a second time is rather appalling.)

The bottleneck from 50-53 continues.

52-52. The Keeper of the Lake (50 ilevel 90). 52 -> 52 3/5.

52-53. The Keeper of the Lake (50 ilevel 90). 52 3/5 -> 53.

Level 52 job quest.

The bottleneck eases up once you reach level 53. Levels 50-53 is a bit of a slog.

53-55. Sohm Al. First Duty Support dungeon with the familiar Scion NPCs. Felt like it took forever.

Incidentally, the recommended gear button now keeps changing my gear to lower item level gear so I can’t get into dungeons, which is pretty annoying.

Level 54 job quest.

55-56. The Aery.

Level 56 job quest. Ended up about 56 1/2.

I like the “feel” of the new character. The lion dude has pretty good animations. (My affinity for an MMORPG character depends a lot on how good the model’s run animations are. You spend like 95% of your time staring at your character’s back while they run, after all. If they have an odd gait, it’s a real turn-off.) The Machinist is kind of a fun DPS class.

With some ways to go to reach 57, I thought I’d take on some Clan Hunts in Foundation. And this is when I ran into a huge road block, because they weren’t unlocked yet. It’s something you don’t get with a Tales of Adventure MSQ purchase.

In order to unlock the Heavensward Clan Hunts, you need to have unlocked the A Realm Reborn Hunting, and in order to do that, you have to increase your Grand Company rank to Second Lieutenant.

And that’s a lot of Company Seals you have to gather. Second Lieutenant is eight promotions, which start at 2,000 seals and go up by 1,000 each from there.

So how do you get Company Seals quickly? Great question, with unsatisfying answers. You can start with your Grand Company Rank 1 hunting log, which got me a couple of promotions.

Then, a huge road block: The Rank 2 hunting log requires you to achieve a rank of Sergeant Third Class, which is two more promotions, or about 9,000 company seals.

By my calculations, the only way to gather these Company Seals is to grind FATEs. You can’t do Expert Deliveries until you reach the rank of Sergeant Second Class. Supposedly there’s a daily Random Duty that gives out a ton of Company Seals but ugh playing with other people, no thanks.

I explored a bunch of different places to find a good balance between simplicity and seals rewarded, to maximize seals/hour. For example, low-level FATEs are super easy and fast, but don’t reward many seals, so you have to do tons of them. The FATEs around Revenant’s Toll are slower, but still easy, and reward about 200 seals each. At level 56, the ones around the first zones of Heavensward are soloable (except the bosses), and reward nearly 300 seals each.

So pick your poison. No matter which you pick, it’s a boring grind. Or maybe you like that kind of thing. You just turn off your brain, listen to a podcast or something, and suddenly it’s an hour later. But you still can’t get a promotion because you need a lot of seals.

It’s horrible, but I think it’s also necessary. You really need to unlock Hunting. It’s a vital source of XP. Wish I’d thought about it earlier.

56-57. I gained a level just running around doing FATEs. Most of that XP came from two FATE-related achievements.

57-58. The Vault. Very close to 59.

The level 58 job quest(s) got me to 59.

59-60. The Great Gubal Library.

When I finally gained enough Company Seals from FATEs (I was in the Dravanian Highlands) to buy my way to a promotion to Second Sergeant, that’s when things finally opened up and I could get things rolling to unlock the Hunts. The Rank 2 Company Hunts unlocked, which quickly got me another promotion.

Then the Expert Delivery missions unlocked, and I could dump a ton of excess dungeon gear to the vendor for a bunch more Company Seals.

Then I did a couple of company quests, which involved a couple of dungeons, which I needed to do to unlock the ability to get more promotions. After it all I reached Second Lieutenant, the goal I’d been trying to reach after all the grinding.

Then the coveted Let The Hunt Begin quest, which unlocked the Let the Clan Hunt Begin quest over in Foundation. Also, a few other Hunt-related quests could be unlocked, since I was already level 61.

Finally off to Kugane to unlock Stormblood 1 Star Veteran Clan Hunts.

And now I’m ready to level through the Stormblood levels.

I’m as shocked and appalled as anyone, but I got into Final Fantasy XIV again, for the first time in four years. Playing an MMORPG again? Playing that genre that’s been dead and buried for almost ten years? Playing like, a lot? Outrageous!

This is the three-day story of how I started a brand new character in Final Fantasy XIV to play Endwalker, got really into leveling them up to 50, and then completely lost interest in leveling them after 50 when the experience curve dragged to a crawl. Then I went back to my main to resume Endwalker.

On Friday, I decided to start a brand new character in Final Fantasy XIV. I wanted to resume playing the Endwalker expansion, which I had barely started four years ago, but I just wasn’t “feeling” my old main character anymore, and wanted to do something completely different.

(A minor defect of FFXIV is that all of your “alts” are actually on the same character, so there’s a lack of character variety (and a paucity of storage for 20+ jobs worth of gear). The game doesn’t lend itself to playing multiple characters, unless you have a lot of free time or dedication.)

I ended up making a big lion dude, which I haven’t seen before.

For this new character, I wanted to get to level 80 and the start of Endwalker, so I could play through the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest with the new character.

I wish I’d started this way sooner in my two-week holiday vacation, instead of waiting until the last three days. I had no idea I’d get so into it. But quite quickly, FFXIV sunk its hooks into me. Something about having an achievable goal that you can incrementally make good progress on is very satisfying.

But first, I had to find a server to build a character on. The Aether data center is pretty much full, and I couldn’t make a new character there, where all my other characters are. (I only have one main character but about a hundred test characters, most of which are level 25 or under.)

I ended up creating a character in the Dynamis data center on one of the Preferred Worlds. There’s three North American data centers now, which I think is triple the amount when I last played four years ago. (Incidentally, there were still plenty of queues logging into the new one.)

The thought of going through the full MSQ from the beginning is quite daunting, so to get started, I bought a Tales of Adventure boost thingy for $14, which unlocked the Main Scenario Quest all the way through the end of Shadowbringers, ready to start Endwalker, which is roughly where I last left off on my old main character. It’s insane how cheap it was.

It’s important to note, though, that the Tales of Adventure boost doesn’t level your character at all. After applying it, you’re still level 1. It just unlocks all the tools and locations and dungeons that you’d get from going through the Main Scenario Quest. And flying.

It might not sound like much, but I think of it as a time savings of some five thousand million hours. (An absolute steal for $14.)

But you’ll still have to invest some days (weeks?) grinding through class and job quests and dungeons to get at least one job from level from 1 to 80, before you can actually start Endwalker.

There are purchase options to level jobs too, but it looked like they would only level a job all the way up to 90. I only wanted to go to 80.

Here are my notes from the process, for future reference.

I tried a few different classes to start with. I had trouble picking one, because there’s only two that I actually like at the start, which is Archer and Lancer. But I’ve played those to death.

I realized that what I really wanted to do was get to 50 so I could switch to one of the Heavensward jobs I’ve never really played before (e.g. Machinist) the rest of the way. The quickest way to do that is to stick with one thing and stop switching back and forth, so I settled on Lancer to ride to 50.

I wish they’d put in ways to start the newer jobs from level 1.

Getting from 1 to 8 is almost automatic with the level 1 and 5 class quests, combined with hitting the Hunting Log targets that are usually right in front of you.

Getting to 10 for the next class quest is a little annoying, what with mostly chasing down Hunting Log targets.

The worst part is getting from level 10 to 15. The Hunting Log helps but it’s not enough. I ended up doing a couple of random side quests, but it was a big bottleneck in the road.

At level 15, I was able to do the first dungeon Sastasha with the Duty Support system, and then the levels started rolling in. I think I was pretty close to 20 when I got out of the first dungeon. You get the regular dungeon experience, a first-time bonus, a 30% bonus from an earring I have, and a Preferred World bonus. It’s a lot.

From there, it’s alternating class quests and dungeons up to level 30 and the start of the specialized job quests: Copperbell Mines, then Halatali, then Haukke Manor got me to level 33. I didn’t note down the exact levels, unfortunately, but it was pretty straightforward.

I noticed that there were some simplifications to the dungeon boss mechanics: I don’t know if those are specific to the solo dungeons or if they’ve changed the regular Duty dungeons, too. I’d swear there was a brand new boss I’ve never seen before in Copperbell Mines, but my memory could be faulty.

At the end of day one I’d reached level 33 and unlocked the Dragoon job, and the Gysahl Greens chocobo companion thing (not that there’s much need to use it with all the dungeon leveling).

At this point I’ll pause and praise the Duty Support system. It’s 100% viable to run the leveling dungeons solo with an AI party, and it takes basically the exact same amount of time and effort as a random PUG. (Well, slightly slower, since the tank isn’t trying to speedrun it.) (Balanced out by the fact that there’s no waiting for DPS queues.)

The next day (Saturday), I continued my leveling project, and took more careful notes.

33-36. Braflox’s Longstop.

Then the level 35 job quest.

36-39. The Sunken Temple of Qarn.

39-41. Cutter’s Cry.

Then the level 40 job quest.

41-44. The Stone Vigil.

44-46. Dzemael Darkhold.

Then the level 45 job quest (two of them for Dragoon, and thank god the Tales of Adventure unlocked flying).

That left me at level 46 2/3, just short of the 47 required for the next dungeon. Ugh. Now what? Hunting?

Yes! Completing the Rank 2 Hunting Log got me to level 47. Way faster than finding quests. To this day, I still don’t understand why side quests in FFXIV give so little experience points that they’re an absolute waste of time unless they give out unique rewards.

Moving on. First, a break for lunch.

47-49. The Aurum Vale.

49 1/4. 3/4 of a level short of 50. Ugh.

I didn’t want to chase all over the world to complete the Rank 3 hunting log, so I tried The Thousand Maws of Toto-rak, a level 24 dungeon, hoping that the First Time Completion bonus with sync would be enough to get me to 50. It wasn’t. I left the dungeon at about 49 5/6.

I completed three hunts in the Rank 3 hunting log, which got me to 50. (I should have just done that instead of the dungeon. Each hunting target gives a lot of XP.)

Then the level 50 job quest. (Incidentally, I killed Estinien in the last Dragoon quest. Huh. Puzzling.)

After getting the gear set, my Dragoon item level was only 61. Not enough to get into level 50 dungeons Snowcloak (80) or Keeper of the Lake (90). [It turns out this was not a problem after all, because you can just buy level 50 jewelry to up your item level right away.]

I noticed there were no more positional actions with Dragoon up to level 50, at least not that I saw in the tool tips. Did they remove that? Or does it only take effect later? It meant I could just stand still during every fight, which is nothing like I remembered.

I should note here that somewhere along the way, I got a 1,000,000 gil bonus for playing on a Preferred World. And the Tales of Adventure gave me 500,000 gil worth of tokens to sell. More than enough money for teleports and buying miscellaneous gear as needed.

Upon getting any job to level 50, according to my calculations, I can unlock the following jobs:

Since I’ve never played Machinest or Red Mage, I think I’ll go for one of those. Machinist, sadly, begins at level 30, so I may skip that one. My new character is a big lumbering oaf of a Lion dude, so I like the idea of dressing him up as a caster.

I went to Foundation and unlocked Machinist, Dark Knight, and Astrologian, the Heavensward jobs. It’s two quests each, and they all start at level 30 (boo). Luckily you don’t need to actually know how to play those jobs to pass the duties.

Then to Ul’dah to unlock the Red Mage, which begins at level 50 (yay), and more importantly item level 86: Enough to enter Snowcloak (80).

Incidentally, I wondered if I could have started immediately by unlocking the Heavensward jobs and skipping to level 30 right away, but, while you can accept the initial quests at level 1, it isn’t long before they require a level 50 war job to continue. Same deal for the Red Mage.

There’s often a gap at level 50, 60, 70, 80, and presumably 90+ as well, as there’s a big jump in item level to accommodate endgame progression. That is, there’s a huge jump in item level from level 50 to level 51, etc. I worried I’d have a problem there, but it turns out I just went to Foundation and bought some jewelry which bumped my item levels up to the point I could do any level 50 dungeons. Easy peasy.

Time for watching football, and switching to the PS5 for mindless grinding.

Honestly the Red Mage mechanics haven’t ever clicked with me, and I’ve already played Samurai before, so I decided to try to get Machinist from 30 to 50.

Machinist 30-33. Haukke Manor.

Machinist 33-36. Braflox’s Longstop.

I did the level 35 job quest.

Machinist 36-39. The Sunken Temple of Qarn.

Machinist 39-41. Cutter’s Cry.

End of day two. And day three (Sunday) begins.

Level 40 job quests (there were two for Machinist). I ended up a couple of ticks away from 42, so I went outside in Coerthas Central Highlands and killed three monsters to get to level 42.

Machinist 42-44. The Stone Vigil.

Machinist 44-46. Dzamael Darkhold.

Ended up at about 46.8, just short of 47. The Level 45 job quest (there were two for Machinist) got me over into level 47.

Machinist 47-49. The Aurum Vale.

At this point I can report that the Machinist is decent. It’s very similar to the Bard in terms of mobility, just with different animations. Has a pretty big burst DPS feature, which the Bard doesn’t have, and I think it has a better AoE action than the Bard. But it lacks the party utility of the Bard (so far).

Now stuck at about 49 1/3. No hunting logs for the Machinist. What to do? I suppose I could just repeat Aurum Vale, which could theoretically get me to 51.

Machinist 49-50. The Aurum Vale (abandoned after two bosses).

Level 50 Machinist job quest (there’s actually three), collect level 50 gear set. Buy a level 50 weapon with item level 115. From here, the job quests are every two levels. (50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60.)

And now things start grinding to a halt.

Machinist 50-51. Snowcloak (50 ilevel 80). Only a single level from this dungeon, sadly. Maybe I should have picked the other one.

Unfortunately the level 51 Heavensward dungeon isn’t yet selectable with Duty Support, so the first solo Heavensward dungeon isn’t available until level 53. Until then, it’s Snowcloak or Keeper of the Lake.

Machinist 51-51. The Keeper of the Lake (50 ilevel 90). Did not gain a level! Yikes. Getting less fun. This is the only dungeon to spam until level 53, so we’re looking at two or three more times in this one.

At this point it’s pretty clear that you’ll need to settle in for the long haul getting a job from 50 to 80. Two dungeons with first-time bonus and I only gained about 1.5 levels. Kind of sad that the Main Scenario Quests aren’t available for their experience points.

Dungeons are fun but repeating them over and over again isn’t fun.

Machinist 51-52. The Keeper of the Lake (50). Finally, a second run got me to level 52. I’d estimate it will take three more runs, at least, to get to level 53, where I can start on the first Heavensward dungeon. I can’t think of any faster way to do it. (It’s about 30 minutes per dungeon run.)

At this point I’m running out of enthusiasm for the grind and thinking I’m just going to go back to my main character, who is already a level 80 Bard, and consign this experiment to the dust bin where it belongs.

CORRECTION: It only takes about 20 minutes to run through Keeper of the Lake. The next run, the next day, got me to 52 3/5, with the rested XP bonus. So maybe I gave up too soon.

In short, leveling up to 50 is fun and only takes a couple days. You could possibly even do it in a day if you’re more aggressive than I am.

Leveling above 50, however, is a real chore and takes considerably longer. For future reference, those One Hero’s Journey job boosts are well worth the money, which are currently on sale for $17.50.

Remember when everyone hated the idea of buying your way to the endgame? I can’t even imagine spending so much time slogging through an entire MMORPG of fetch quests and cut scenes again. It’d be well worth the time savings even if it was $100.

These days I think they should just build the option into the new character creation screen to let you pick which expansion you want to start at. Then just automatically create the character at the right level with the right gear to start immediately. Surely there’s nobody left playing MMORPGs that still thinks their time spent playing is a valuable commodity?

This whole thing started because I wanted to continue Endwalker from where I left off four years ago, so I returned to my trusty main Miquot’e character on the Aether data center, who is already a level 80 Bard, to continue with the Main Scenario Quest in Endwalker. (No other job is above 60, though, as I recall.)

I last left off in 2021 exactly eight quests into the story before I stopped playing. I vaguely recall it was frustrating to log into the game at the time because of all the queues at the start of Endwalker.

As of this writing, I’ve completed a whopping seven more quests in the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest, and have reached level 81 Bard. The vast majority of the first 15 quests, by the way, are just watching cut scenes and running back and forth.

Oh hey, it’s the end of the year. Not a great year for me, what with finding out I have cancer and all. Then again, it’s possible I could have been dead by now if I hadn’t found out about it, since I had a big ol’ tumor in the back of my brain. Now, it’s all managed and under control. So good news, bad news, there.

I haven’t seen anything that looks interesting in the Winter Sale. It’s the curse of having been around video games for forty years: Every game looks the same.

Even the games I put on my wishlist look pretty meh. It’s always the same: This one looks like too many cut scenes and not enough gameplay, that one looks like a copy of a game I’ve already played, and almost every single game that comes out falls into one of those two categories.

I saw a Bhagpuss post about Ashes of Creation and went looking for it on Steam. It’s there, 15% off, so I bought it. I had such great success with Stars Reach, playing it for a grand total of twelve minutes, so surely this one will also be a slam dunk.

True story: My first time launching Ashes of Creation, I created a character, zoned in, turned the camera a bit, and a breaker tripped in my house. To be fair, I had an electric heater plugged into the same circuit at the time, but I found it an amusing game review.

I didn’t log back in for many more days. I ran around a bit, clicked through and ignored all the dialogs, killed 5 sickly goblins with ease while trying to ignore all the other players, looked at a skill tree for a while after leveling up, and logged back out.

Side rant: If I never see another skill tree in my life, it will be too soon. It’s always a heavy sigh moment. “This again,” I think. “I’ve done this a hundred million times already, and it’s always the same. Why can’t they automatically pick the most optimal things for me because math doesn’t lie and nobody has ever balanced a game at launch time and if you do it’s homogenized to the point that making choices doesn’t matter anyway.”

In this day and age where AI does everything for us, there should be a check box to enable that says, “Let AI pick through this nonsense.” That’s what AI should be used for in games.

To be fair, it doesn’t actually need AI, it just needs a game designer to package all the tedious fiddly bits into presets for casual gamers who don’t want a wall of college-level study in the first 15 minutes of the game. So I can just click the one button that says “maximize DPS” or “maximize self-healing” or whatever and it’ll pick all the skills for me. Everybody always wants the same things, every single time, and there’s no actual choices to be made. Sigh.

Anyway. I went back the next day and ran to the next quest hub, where I was given a horse and had to attune to a new Aetheryte Crystal, I mean, Big Rock Thingy or whatever they’re called in Ashes of Creation. I got another quest but I couldn’t be bothered to continue and logged out. Total play time has not yet reached 30 minutes.

I genuinely can’t think of any reason I might want to play a new MMORPG when there’s a million hours of game time to play in the existing MMORPGs. Even if I just limit myself to only the Big Two of WoW and FFXIV. Especially when the new MMORPG is blatantly repeating the exact same things in the Big Two, but less polished.

But for what it is, it’s fine I guess. It worked. It’s just not very exciting. The combat seemed like a mishmash hybrid of different systems.

I kept seeing ARC Raiders on the Top Sellers list, and I saw a couple people mention it, so I thought I’d try it out. It was slightly discounted. I saw one review mention that it could be played single-player.

I didn’t have high hopes, though. Modern multiplayer games typically serve only as a platform to socialize with your friends, while the gameplay is an afterthought. In other words, the fun of playing the game is mostly the fun of hanging out with your friends, and unrelated to the game mechanics.

ARC Raiders looks really nice. I skipped all the cut scenes so I have no idea what the setting is all about. It’s an “extraction shooter” which I have zero experience with, and would be hard pressed to explain. I think you’re supposed to run in, do stuff, and then leave before a timer expires, or something like that.

It didn’t exactly leap off the screen as the most fun thing I’ve ever played. The shooting mechanics were okay, but it looks like a lot of inventory management and sorting through loot, which is a big turn-off. And I spent most of my time just kind of running alone from place to place on a map that seemed way too big, most of which was devoid of anything to interact with.

Occasionally some flying drone robot would fly by to shoot, and that was about it. My initial weapon was a light machinegun that fired like six bullets before you had to reload for twenty seconds, during which you couldn’t do anything except stand there and get shot, which isn’t exactly a fun experience. Eventually a flying drone started electroshocking me, interrupting my reload every time, so I couldn’t fight back, and I died.

Still, it was cheap, and it looked nice, so I tried another round. This time the audio was all distorted for unknown reasons. (I think because I had just upgraded my Nvidia driver but didn’t reboot.) And there was a gigantic crab robot roaming around the map. I avoided it and set out toward a loot location, armed with my new plan to verify I was supposed to go to one of the elevators. Once again there was almost nothing to do on the way to the location I picked out.

Then I got another shock when I saw a player running around the same building I was entering. So I quit out and returned the game hehe.

I really don’t know what I ever saw in those 90s MMORPG game worlds where other people can invade my space.

I got a proverbial wild hair to log into Final Fantasy XIV. Playing Ashes of Creation reminded me that there are really only two MMORPGs good enough for casual play… it’s World of Warcraft for more nostalgia-driven players and FFXIV for more mechanics-driven players, and that’s it.

First of all, finding the right web site to renew your FFXIV subscription is a massive chore. Square Enix’s bizarre interconnecting system of web sites is one of the worst out there.

Then I had to remember how to copy my settings from another PC to my current gaming PC, another annoying thing about FFXIV. This is one of the best MMORPGs, but they don’t make it easy to return to after any amount of absence.

After all that, and waiting through a massive download of some 150 Gb, I logged in, looked around, had no interest in actually doing anything, and logged out again.

For the record, my main is a Bard level 80 and I last left off the Main Scenario Quest about a half dozen quests into Endwalker. It didn’t look like Bard abilities had changed much from what I remember, but of course I don’t remember the rotations at all.

To be fair, I went back later and completed two more MSQ quests. I have no idea what’s going on in the story.

I saw that I could get The Division 2 on Steam, so I could finally play it without having to mess with the Ubisoft launcher.

The Division 2 has my favorite shooter mechanics to date. There’s something about the cover mechanics and animations that feels exactly right. Shooters that don’t let you take cover, you know, like a normal person would do in that situation, feel extremely weird to me now.

Anyway, I did another massive download, logged in, played for a few minutes until I got killed in my very first encounter, then quit. That’s my standard process of playing games now.

I’m sure an entire post could be written about how games in general just aren’t very fun anymore, mainly because by now, literally everything’s been done before in gaming, but that’s a different topic.

For the record, my The Division 2 character is level 20.

One thing I noticed about The Division 2 is that it defaulted to full screen and HDR, and once again I was reminded how vastly better HDR looks compared to SDR. It’s like night and day. I can’t wait until HDR is the default for everything in PC gaming, and I’m somewhat baffled why it isn’t already.

I remember when Amazon Prime shows aired without commercials. It was, like, a couple years ago?

Anyway, I don’t remember anything from the first season, but I think I thought it was mildly entertaining. One of the better video game adaptations. It’s no Last of Us, but it had the right tone.

The second season appears to be making the same mistakes that I remember from the first season though: Mainly, I couldn’t care less what happened in the before time flashbacks or back in the Vault 33, and they spend 2/3 of their time telling those stories instead of following the protagonists. Also, I think they’re leaning way too hard on the “play an old-timey song” bit.

The second episode continued the theme of 40 minutes of flashbacks and side stories nobody cares about, with 10 minutes of the Lucy and the Ghoul road trip we actually want to see. It’s like they wished to make an anthology show where every episode was a different setting and characters, but they spliced it all together in a way that every episode is a scattering of bits and pieces of ten different stories, so you never really feel like anything is advancing or resolving.

I hate to criticize it because they’ve really nailed the tone of Fallout, and it looks nice, it’s just that it’s… not very interesting so far. It’s mostly “on-in-the-background” material. Which, I suppose, in this modern Tik Tok age, is the standard of media excellence.

In the end, I enjoyed it. I liked the setting, because it reminded me of all the small church dysfunctional social dynamics that I’ve witnessed in my own past. Small churches can be a petri dish of passive aggressive power struggles when you get behind the scenes.

However, mysteries are sort of hit or miss for me. They’re a bit frustrating to watch, because I feel like they always withhold information from the viewer so it’s not actually possible to deduce the killer. They don’t hide the clues to the point it doesn’t make sense, but they leave out the really important bits of information from the exposition, so if you blink at the wrong time or don’t specifically know what to look for, you’ll miss out. It strikes me as disingenuous.

I usually end up reading or watching most Stephen King things. I’m sure I’ve read over 75% of all Stephen King works, and I’ve probably seen a similar percentage of screen adaptations. It’s rare that a movie is anywhere near as good as the source material in most cases, but it’s especially true with Stephen King.

I don’t remember much of anything about the book, which I believe was a novella… oh, no it was one of the Richard Bachman books. I remember liking it, but that’s about it. Stephen King has a way of making bizarre “what if” scenarios compelling.

I found the movie a bit dull, though. It was basically 100 minutes of walking and talking, in a typical Stephen King-style ensemble. Which shouldn’t be surprising, but still, I kept finding myself looking away and getting out the laptop and walking around and generally not being riveted to the screen. The end didn’t seem very surprising or memorable.

I couldn’t get into it.

I just noticed there’s been a real glut of biopics about musical acts lately. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and I just saw an ad for a Neil Diamond biopic. None of them were the slightest bit personally or professionally controversial, as far as I remember, so I have no idea what kind of conflicts might be explored in those biopics. Well, I guess Bob Dylan had the “going electric” thing, but I can’t imagine that taking up a whole movie. The only conclusion I can draw is that they’re all cynical PR stunts.

I can report that getting two teeth extracted kind of sucks.

I’ve had teeth pulled before–wisdom teeth, a back right tooth, two other bottom teeth, some upper teeth–but I apparently forgot most of the process. I only remembered that the pulling part itself wasn’t painful.

It’s weird though. And undeniably stressful, even if it doesn’t hurt.

The doc had to give me two extra pain killer injections before it stopped hurting, though. After that it was a breeze. Well, depending on what your definition of a breeze is.

Both teeth broke apart, of course, with a shocking crack sound that resonated through my whole skull. Not unexpected with these two teeth–the doc warned me about it. Still, a weird experience.

And of course the doc had to, you know, pull the teeth out, and they were stubbornly stuck in there, more than I remember any previous ones. He had to shake my head back and forth like a dog pulling on a rope toy.

So the pulling itself wasn’t that bad, but then there’s the hours and days after the extraction, where your whole jaw hurts and eating or drinking anything is a chore.

The empty sockets bled a lot for me, so I was biting on gauze all afternoon and in the evening I had to bite on a tea bag, which finally did the trick. I’m on blood thinners now, but I stopped taking them a couple days beforehand to minimize bleeding, but it apparently didn’t help much.

Also, I’m not supposed to take ibuprofen during chemotherapy, so I just had Tylenol for pain and some Tramadol which actually didn’t do much of anything. So the first night was kind of rough and I didn’t get much sleep, and, when you get to my age, that pretty much ruins the next day, too.

As for eating, I got a bunch of soups, but I ended up mostly just drinking Ensures for the rest of the day and night.

After a fitful night sleeping propped up on the bed, the second day was much better bleeding-wise and pain-wise. And the salt rinses began. Still wasn’t big on eating but managed some oatmeal and Chef-Boy-R-Dee ravioli.

After that, things improved day by day but I was sucking down Tylenol every six hours for four or five days. The following Tuesday, I had a chemotherapy infusion, and part of that process is taking a steroid the day before, the day of, and the day after. Steroids act as an anti-inflammatory, so it helped a lot with lingering jaw pain, too.

As of publishing time it’s not quite back to normal, but I don’t need to take Tylenol too often anymore. The next step will be getting some kind of “appliance,” in dental lingo, to put back there.

My latest chemotherapy infusion was two days before Christmas, so I spent most of the holiday lying in bed watching football. If you’re wondering what chemotherapy feels like, it feels a lot like being poisoned with dangerous drugs and having to rest for a few days to recover. For me, who tolerates it fairly well so far, it’s a little like having a mild cold or flu for a few days every three weeks.

In addition to that, for up to a week after the infusion, everything tastes and smells funny. It’s a chore to find foods that are the slightest bit appetizing during that time. Between the tooth extraction and the chemotherapy, I’ve dropped a few pounds again.

Anyway, the infusion center was more deserted than usual right before Christmas, as you might expect. It was great for parking, which is usually a disaster at this particular hospital because of construction.

Someone had very kindly donated a bunch of gift baskets to the infusion center, so I got a bag of gifts that are pretty useful during chemotherapy: A little blanket, some snacks, hand cream, and a couple of Sudoku books. I thought it was a very humbling gift and I felt horrible accepting it, because my chemo treatments are a breeze compared to what others go through. Some people are there getting drugs for three or four hours, but I’m usually out in a half hour or so.

This was the very first time I’ve ever looked at a Sudoku puzzle, and I guess I can see why people find them fun. I found an app and installed it on my phone.

That’s it for this mashup of topics. Happy New Year!

For the very first time in my life, I both have a garage and also cleaned out the garage enough that I can pull my car into it so it doesn’t get snow and ice on it over the weekend.

It’s not usually full-on winter here until January but it sure has been cold this December so far. It reminds me that my house has sub-standard heating and I hate every second of winter time, always huddled in six layers of clothing, hats, and coats and wanting to go to sleep when it’s dark at 5 pm every day. Not to mention a fun little lifelong condition I’ve had called plantar hyperhidrosis which means my feet are freezing cold blocks of ice because they’re sweating all the time.

I’ve started a new project to load up in-progress RPG games and continue playing them. I tend to do this a lot near Christmas and January, for some reason.

Pillars of Eternity, White March DLC Part 2. I’ve done almost everything in Pillars of Eternity, except the White March Part 2 DLC, so I started it. They also added a turn-based combat beta feature, which is pretty cool. I greatly prefer turn-based tactical combat over the “Infinity Engine” realtime combat style that the original Baldur’s Gate forced onto us for all those years.

Disco Elysium. I resumed the game toward the end of Day 2. I have no idea how else to measure my progress in that game. It’s more of an adventure game than a tactical RPG, but I like it, because I don’t have to talk as much, and the writing is deeply fascinating. I’m trying to be a Communist and take drugs.

Divinity: Original Sin. Continuing with my characters at level 4 near the Desolated Farms outside Cyseal. I originally played D:OS in 2017, and defeated two bosses before I stopped, but I either didn’t record it or more likely lost the videos, so I restarted a new game in 2023. This game is hard. Punishingly hard on the Classic difficulty. Case in point, I ran into some undead and my party died.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Last time I played (in 2023 or 2024), I was stuck at the end of Chapter 2, wondering how to progress the game. But I finally managed to stumble through enough events in the Kingdom Management screen to unlock the way to Chapter 3, the Season of the Bloom.

Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader. When last I left off, I was just starting off in Chapter 1, working on the Secrets of Navis Nobilite quest, ready to take a recently-fixed elevator up to rescue Lady Cassia. If you like your tactical RPGs with calculus-level math and statistics during combat, Warhammer 40k might be for you.

Admittedly, I’ve been extremely lax in my project so far because, as mentioned above, I typically prefer to huddle under blankets and watch television rather than sit at a desk playing PC games in the evenings.

I’ve started another video uploading project. This time I found roughly 150 old RPG videos going back to 2021 of various in-progress RPGs like Pillars of Eternity DLC, Wasteland 2, Solasta DLC, Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition, Disco Elysium, Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition, Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader. And many others.

The common theme of all those videos is I have to read a lot of text out loud, so there’s a lot of “role-playing,” if you will. They’re among my favorite kinds of videos to make, but also the most creatively draining to make.

My Mackie mixer seems to have failed in a very annoying way… it still mostly works, but the headphone output somehow is stuck in mono. It’s annoying because that’s where I monitor games when I’m recording. I had to do some reconfiguring to hear stereo game sound in my ear buds again.

So now I’m left wondering if I need to buy a new mixer, or maybe try to rebuild my recording setup without a mixer. I use an old school outboard compressor on a compact mixer to improve the sound of my microphone, but I can probably do something similar directly within OBS. Similar enough, at least. It would simplify my setup to remove the mixer, but it would also be less flexible.

That’s two compact Mackie mixers I’ve had fail. Mackie used to be a reliable brand. Now it seems to be consumer-level plastic junk. I don’t think I’m going to buy any more of them. Maybe I’ll try a Yamaha mixer.

Pluribus (AppleTV via. Amazon). Seriously, though, what is this show? Comedy or horror? Is it some kind of deep psychological experiment? I haven’t figured out the metaphor yet. Is it about loneliness? Stubbornness? Scientology? Xenophobia? It’s obviously not a science fiction show about alien DNA, because the science of it is nonsense. Anyway there’s still something compelling about it and it’s still a very well-made show. Very visually interesting. Just super slow in the plot development department.

Homeland (Disney+). I think the picture’s a little better on Disney+ than Netflix? Maybe it’s 4K instead of 1080. Anyway one of the episodes on Netflix was distorted and unwatchable so I switched. Unfortunately I lost interest during season 5. It went to the same well quite a lot.

The Mighty Nein (Amazon). We get it already! You like anime! Anyway they somehow managed to make the second campaign, which I thought started out fairly good, kind of dull. The extended runtime really drags down the energy. I wonder if Nott’s voice sounds different because of the throat thing Sam Riegel went through. I kind of lost interest after 3 episodes.

Let It Be (Disney+). The original movie about the making of The Beatles’ Let It Be album, which apparently hasn’t been available for 50 years. I’d always heard Yoko was around a lot but yeesh, I didn’t realize that meant she was literally sitting next to John all day every day. The legend of “the rooftop concert,” which everyone my age and above should know as well as they know the moon landing. I’ve always thought Paul McCartney was an underrated prodigy-level musician and singer, and this film proves it. He was on a different level from the others.

Get Back (Disney+). Peter Jackson’s extended remix of the Let It Be film footage. What an absolutely priceless treasure for music historians. The music industry sure has changed a lot. I can’t even imagine a similar documentary about any current pop acts. Like what would a documentary about the making of the last Taylor Swift album look like? There would barely be any music in it. It’d all be about marketing, ticket price scandals, dance rehearsals, and a lot of DAW screens and plugins. (Ha.. there is a new documentary about Taylor Swift’s Eras tour.)

Napoleon (forgot). Ridley Scott’s epic about Napoleon, somebody I actually don’t know much about. And after watching this movie, I still don’t. Partly because the movie is incredibly long and boring. It does a great job of stultifying what could be a fascinating story. Also, the subject matter is so vast that they end up fast-forwarding through all the major events. Is he a hero or a villain? I don’t know what the movie thinks or what history thinks or what I think.

Taskmaster Australia Season 4 (YouTube and TVNZ+). I still like the Australian and New Zealand versions of the show better than the original. I started out watching this season when they came out on YouTube but I got impatient and went to the VPN and TVNZ+ for the rest of the episodes.

I think I’m supposed to be excited about the new season of Stranger Things but I genuinely can’t remember anything that happened in seasons 2, 3, or 4. In fact, I don’t think I ever finished watching season 4. The first season was great, the second season was okay, but 3 and 4 wasn’t worth retaining a single memory from, so I can’t say I’m dying to see season 5 of Random 80s Stephen King Nostalgia Show. The fact that every commercial seems to have some kind of Stranger Things tie-in makes me even less interested in watching it.

I had a minor return of skin rashes on the chest after the last round of chemotherapy, and I had a bit of a problem with two sore toenails, both of which are known side effects of treatments. Otherwise I feel fine and no news is good news with cancer.

As this post is publishing, I’m awaiting the results of a CT scan to check progress. I have a disc of the scans and looked at the pictures myself, but obviously I can’t make heads or tails of it. [Update: The results are stable, no new cancer progression.]

While watching NFL football this year, I sometimes see a commercial saying that even former smokers who quit years ago should get routine screenings to check for lung cancer. What I wish they’d say is that everyone should get routine screenings for lung cancer, because you don’t actually have to smoke to get it. But they actually recommend against lung cancer screening for people who never smoked, because supposedly the risks of a false positive outweigh the benefits. Sigh.

In a tangentially related story, I’m having two back teeth extracted. When you have some small spots of cancer in various bone parts like I do (two vertebrae and a femur neck), they want to put you on a bone strengthener drug, which is apparently great for bones with cancer. As yet I’ve felt no symptoms from the bone spots, but the goal is to keep me from ever feeling symptoms.

However, bone strengtheners are hated by dentists, because it can cause infection complications in the jaw bone, or something like that. So my oncologist wants me to finish all my dental work before they put me on this bone strengthener.

That means no more “trying to save a tooth” with complicated and time-consuming root canals and crowns and stuff, which they tell me may or may not work in my case, and might only last a few years anyway. It means yanking the two teeth out and being done with it, and not being able to chew on the left side anymore.

Which, honestly, isn’t that big of a deal, since I haven’t been able to chew on my left side for years now anyway.

They can make an “appliance” for me, but I assume I won’t be chewing any steak with it.

Bye!

This will probably be short because it occurred to me I won’t be able to see very well to write after the 25th, he says, hastily throwing some thoughts into the document on the 24th. (Spoiler: It isn’t short.)

Actually it doesn’t take long before you can see again after cataract surgery, he says on the 28th. If you make the font pretty big, at least. I didn’t write out the details of my surgery in 2018, which I regretted, so now I’ll write it all down.

It began about 9:40 on the 25th. As I entered the factory line of cataract surgery, I first sat in a chair and signed a couple of consent forms. They took my blood pressure, temperature, and checked my blood oxygen. Standard vitals stuff that I’ve now had done about a thousand times during this summer of health problems. They gave me my first eye drop there, dilating the pupil. They confirmed they were working on the left eye and drew an X near it.

Then they moved me to what I first thought was a fancy wheelchair in a very cold hallway outside the preop room. They gave me a blanket because it was freezing back there. They put an IV stint in my right arm, something else that’s been done about a thousand times to me this year. Then I waited, while I watched the birds outside the window.

I was waiting for a space to open in the preop room, as the factory line of patients moved on. They finally rolled me into the preop room, where there was space for two patients. Another patient was already there in the queue ahead of me. They rolled me into the empty bay and that’s when I realized my fancy wheelchair turned into a gurney, so I was lying flat on my back for the rest of it. (Not super comfortable for me, thanks to my neck.)

They attached wires to my chest so they could listen to my heartbeat, and put a cuff on my left arm so they could monitor my blood pressure (though I don’t recall it ever actually activating). They gave me two more rounds of numbing drops in the left eye. The doctor arrived briefly and double-checked that it was my left eye he was working on, and he drew another mark on my face.

I waited a lot, staring at the ceiling, trying not to think about how uncomfortable it was to lie on my back like that, and how cold it was, and how cold and clammy my hands and feet were.

I got the second numbing drop, then the anesthetist came in and asked a couple of questions, and listened to my heart and lungs. He said I was going to be “sedated” which confused me because I thought meant he meant I was going to get knocked completely out, but after I asked he confirmed it wasn’t that much sedative. (In fact, I barely felt whatever they gave me.)

The anesthetist wheeled my gurney into the operating room, pushed a sedative into my IV, and then …

Well, I guess there was more sedative than I realized because it’s a little hazy for the next few minutes. I don’t remember if I was wheeled into another room for the actual surgery or not. I think I was, but I don’t have a clear memory of it.

It’s also hard to remember because I wasn’t really able to see much. I think they must have put something over my face and eyes to limit my field of vision, but I don’t remember that part. I just suddenly wasn’t able to see much.

During the procedure, I couldn’t see anything of my environment. But I could see something and it’s hard to describe. It was almost like I was seeing a closeup of the bubbles of a lava lamp, colorful bubbles against a dark background. I could see the bubbles moving, and maybe dividing, or combining. I remember seeing three bubbles touching to form a triangular sort of shape at one point. I can only guess those shapes were the removal of the bad lens and the insertion of the artificial lens, and my brain trying to make sense of it.

I was conscious the entire time, more conscious than I remember from my 2018 procedure, and I remember hearing the doctor talking. “A little pressure here,” and “now some water” while it felt like they were washing my eye out a few times. It took a grand total of about 10 minutes. I felt no pain whatsoever. I found it rather fascinating.

Somehow I ended up in a postop room, and they disconnected me from all the vitals wires, removed the IV, and sat me up. They taped a clear plastic shield with holes in it over my left eye. I was able to stand up and walk out without any issues, and I could see better immediately. It was like the whole world on the left side of my face was there again.

I never felt like I’d been sedated at all. I felt fine and could see fine on the ride home; I could have easily driven myself.

During “recovery” I have to put drops in my eyes 4 times a day, one of which is a steroid and the other is I think an antibiotic. This time, the steroid isn’t chalky and unpleasant like it was in 2018. They also told me to wear the plastic shield at night just in case I poke my eye in my sleep (something I didn’t have to do in 2018).

The next day, my distance vision was amazing and like it had always been that way. I drove to my followup appointment without any issues.

The only problem is when I try to focus on something within 5 feet of my face, like, you know, a computer screen or a phone, the main things I need to see in my life. But a television across the room? Perfect. I went from not being able to read the biggest letter on the eye chart to 20/25 vision the next day.

The first day or two, closeup vision was a little swimmy and my eye tired out very quickly. After that it felt more “normal,” in the sense that it felt like plain old farsightedness, where I just can’t focus on near things.

I have an optometrist appointment early in December and then I’ll probably have to wait until January to get fitted for new computer glasses. Until then I’ll have to make do with temporary drug store reader glasses.

I was able to see well enough with readers to take a failed USB hard drive apart. (Only to find there’s no SATA port hidden in there and there’s nothing I can do to recover the data unless I want to try replacing the circuit board with another one.)

Necesse. This is a game I’ve forgotten to mention for a while. I think of it like Terraria, except it has a superior top-down perspective. Every time I try to play Terraria, I get annoyed with the side-scrolling nonsense and quit before I get anywhere. But Necesse is more like playing Dwarf Fortress in Adventure Mode (but substantially less complicated). It’s fun for killing time, but it’s a game where it’s not very clear what you’re supposed to do.

I’ve re-installed a bunch of CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, and Wasteland 2 and 3, but I haven’t yet re-started playing them again. Most all of those games are usually left in some state of incompletion. I love all the videos I’ve recorded of CRPGs, and I always want to continue and see what happens next, but it’s a lot of reading to commit to, a particularly difficult proposition right after cataract surgery.

I got an invite to the Stars Reach thing. Am I allowed to say that? I vaguely remember somebody else mentioning playing it, probably Bhagpuss or TAGN, so I guess it’s okay. Anyway, when I tried to log in the first time, it said the server wasn’t running. The second time, I logged in and went through an uninspiring tutorial about unintuitive controls which I will obviously forget 10 seconds later, then I logged out. Remember when you logged into World of Warcraft (or pretty much any MMORPG) the first time and it plunked you right in the middle of the world and you could run around and interact immediately? Long forgotten, I guess.

Needless to say, Stars Reach doesn’t look very compelling to me. It’s hard not to be pessimistic about these things, but it looks like yet another in a long line of people trying to eke out a meager living building a game for the handful of niche people who still wish Star Wars Galaxies was a thing.

I haven’t played any PS5 games lately, so whatever I mentioned before, I haven’t played since. Abiotic Factor didn’t stick. Stray didn’t stick either, as soon as I got to the marketplace where I had to think about inventory and pick a direction to go instead of just following rails.

Pluribus (AppleTV via. Amazon). I keep watching it. It’s interesting, but nothing much is actually happening in the show. Did I mention it’s very, very slow-paced? It’s frustrating to watch shows that are clearly meant to be binge-watched, but you only get one episode a week, and nothing much happens.

Death by Lightning (Netflix). Good show about forgotten president James Garfield and his similarly forgotten assassin. I didn’t know anything about any of this stuff, other than the fact that he was a president once and that he was assassinated. I feel like there should be a Chester Arthur sequel though.

The Beast In Me (Netflix). Decent crime thriller I guess. The main draw is the acting. The story felt a bit middling. I kept waiting for some kind of twist or surprise but there weren’t any. Weirdly I don’t think I’ve ever seen Claire Danes in anything before.

One Battle After Another (Amazon). Wasn’t what I expected. A Tarentino-esque modern folk tale. Pretty good. Cool camera work near the end with the road stuff. Not really sure what it was about or what to say about it. Was it a comedy? A drama? Not sure. Worth seeing, though. Not likely to ever re-watch, though.

Once We Were Spacemen (YouTube). Nathon Fillion and Alan Tudyk are the latest to do a podcast, where they, at least initially, talk to former Firefly cast members.

Con Man (Amazon). Re-watched recently because I heard it mentioned on the Once We Were Spacemen podcast.

Homeland (Netflix). The only other show I knew Claire Danes was in, along with that guy from Band of Brothers. I’ve always heard the first season was fantastic, but the rest of it isn’t. Anyway it just appeared on Netflix so I clicked on it during my “I can’t really use a computer right now” eye healing time.

I wouldn’t say the first season is fantastic, but it’s not terrible. (However, it’s not an acceptable substitute for 24.) I thought the second season was better, but the Internet disagrees. The third season plummeted off a cliff as they wrote most of the previous main characters out of the story and tried to do something new.

Seeing an older show reminds me how much I miss normal-paced television shows. In today’s streaming landscape, they usually have one story idea that is dragged out and beaten to death until you’re bored and sick to death of it. In olden times, they used to write episodes so they would be individually entertaining. I appreciated that they didn’t drag out secrets for the entire season, but resolved secret after secret in one or two episodes.

Nothing new. Still slowly regaining weight. Will have a new scan by my next post.

Space: Above And Beyond should have the same cult fanaticism that Firefly does.

Bye!

I just heard an analogy that’s so good I had to write an individual post highlighting it.

Using AI in content creation today is culturally perceived the same way that using a synthesizer in music was in the 70s, and, if I might editorialize a bit, the ultimate outcome will probably be the same.

That is all.

h/t Tom Merritt

Although I suppose this won’t have the eye-opening impact on a reader I might hope unless they’re basically a Boomer. Ah well.

No synthesizers were used in the recording of this blog post.

Yeah, I changed the title.

I haven’t played too many PC games lately. A bit more The Outer Worlds, but since I’m trying to record it, it’s kind of a chore to sit down and play it when I don’t particularly feel like talking. Almost every time I finally do get over the hump of deciding to launch the game and play, it’s a perfectly fine and enjoyable experience, it’s just that making that decision seems monumental when there’s so many other things to do.

Otherwise I mainly just casually tinker with PS5 games now and then, which requires no effort. I got Stray on the PS5 and played a few hours of it. I remember being so psyched to play it when it came out on the PC. Back then I played maybe an hour or less, saw immediately what the rest of the game would be like, and never touched it again. It’s much better suited for the PS5. It’s cute if you like cats, but I wouldn’t say the gameplay is deeply substantive.

I also just installed Abiotic Factor on the PS5, which seems like a rehash of Half-Life? But it’s got building mechanics? I don’t know yet. Anyway, it’s got horrible controller UI: The lazy use-the-controller-to-move-a-mouse-cursor UI, which for some inexplicable reason started to become popular some years ago.

It’s actually quite hard any more to find a game that doesn’t demand you watch a bunch of cut scenes to setup a story. On the PS5, I just want something to do while I’m listening to a football game. I can’t watch cut scenes and watch football at the same time, so big tent AAA games tend to get shunned, or else I mercilessly mash the “skip” button in whatever dialogs or movies start to play, so I can get to the unthinking gameplay part.

Case in point, I tried to replay Baldur’s Gate 3 on the PS5 but there’s just so much story and down time in between the combat encounters that it’s just not worth the effort. I wish there was a way to select combat encounters from a menu and just warp right to them. Ah well.

The Witcher season 4 (Netflix). I thought the first season was brilliant (mostly because it filled in all the missing details the games never did), but the second and third seasons were terrible random nonsense that they seemed to be making up out of thin air and stretching out to the point where almost nothing happens in the entire season. I’ve since learned that the seasons are based on the books, and the first season’s superior episodic nature was simply because they were based on short stories instead of novels. Oh well.

I didn’t hate the new Witcher actor, and I didn’t hate the fourth season. Considering the season isn’t really about Geralt, the fact that it’s a different actor is hardly noticeable since he’s only grunting onscreen maybe 20% of the time.

But once again, they stretched it out to the point where almost nothing actually happens for the entire 8-episode season, in the typical Netflix style. At the end of the final episode, I was like, that was it? Geralt just walked around for a while, accomplishing nothing. Ciri ran around with the Rats, having a college freshman “finding herself” experience, and didn’t really do anything. Yen just kind of talked to sorceresses about missing portals and tried to kill Vulgarfartz (except that one time she chose not to kill Vulgarfartz when he was unconscious, presumably after seeing the thickness of his plot armor). Otherwise nothing actually happened for the entire time. Ugh.

Anyway, it was a reasonably diverting watch, it’s just that it’s pretty forgettable because, as mentioned, nothing actually happened until the very end where they did a cliffhanger for the next season. It’s all filler, no substance, just background noise, nothing to talk about around the water cooler except how angry you feel at having been cheated out of any kind of story resolution. Typical Netflix binge-watching fare.

A House of Dynamite (Netflix). I love a good nuclear post-apocalyptic story, but this one failed to convince me. I liked it up until the first time shift, then it increasingly lost plausibility for me, since I had time to think about the unfolding plot (not once, but twice, as it turned out).

The film didn’t convince me that a single nuke from an unknown source required an immediate overwhelming retaliatory strike. In the old days of the Cold War, it was understood that the retaliatory strike was a response to an overwhelming preemptive first-strike, not just one random nuke nobody could identify.

What would be the point? Nuking Chicago doesn’t in any way diminish the U.S. capability to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. The reason for the rapid retaliation before the missiles hit is that the incoming missiles are about to wipe out the U.S. capability to respond, which was definitely not the case in this movie. So the rational thing to do is wait, find out who launched the nuke, and then respond accordingly.

Anyway I kept saying “but why” at the screen a lot toward the end. Also I didn’t particularly like the time jumps or the end, because the whole reason we’re watching is to see what happens when the nuke hits, not to see the same backstory three times.

Go find HBO’s star-studded By Dawn’s Early Light if you want a better version of roughly the same cautionary nuclear tale, where a full-scale U.S. retaliatory strike makes a lot more sense.

Pluribus (AppleTV via. Amazon). I’ve only seen the first three episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new show. I’m not sure what to make of it yet. It’s very, very slow-paced. The tone ping-pongs back and forth between humor and horror. It’s not at all clear what it’s trying to say or where it’s going. Most damningly, there aren’t any compelling characters I want to root for yet. But it’s well-made.

The Last Wish. The Witcher season 4 reminded me that there’s so much that isn’t explained and doesn’t make any sense in the latter seasons of the show, that I thought maybe if I got the books, things like how competent people can get stuck in the middle of a river on a ferry boat and why an unnamed queen needs to cross a bridge might seem less inexplicably random.

The audiobooks are competently narrated, which is good because the translations are heavy on the -ly adverbs. It’s a throwback to the old sword-and-sorcery genre that isn’t seen much anymore. It’s kind of like grimdark but, you know, not so grimdark.

Having cancer is kind of mundane and routine at this point. I continue to feel better, while still knowing full well that there is cancer in my body. It’s an odd paradox.

I just completed my seventh chemotherapy treatment on the 11th, which is also fairly routine now. Except you never know exactly how long the waiting time will be. I successfully navigated another round of the “bad days” where I feel queasy and exhausted (usually Thursday and Friday).

My next CT scan is December, so until then all I know is that the cancer is “not progressing.” There are only three basic states of cancer: 1) It’s not there, 2) It’s not progressing, or 3) It’s progressing.

The treatment goal in my case is to halt/reverse progression for as long as possible. So “not progressing” is a win.

I’m trying to work in some light exercises into my routine but I’m pretty bad at remembering to keep up with exercises. I have no idea how people do that.

In other medical news, by the time I post my end-of-November post, I should have completed cataract surgery on my left eye. It’s been bothering me for a couple of years, but it’s been particularly bad this year. I should have gotten it removed last year.

I’m almost functionally blind in my left eye as I’m writing this. I can’t even read the biggest letter on an eye chart with that eye. A laptop screen is just a big smudge of lights and darks. For posterity, I made an image to try to simulate what a computer screen looks like through my left eye right now.

I can tell it’s a laptop, but that’s about it. I can usually see better in most situations by closing my left eye. I’m far-sighted in my right eye (where a cataract was removed in 2018), so I effectively can’t read or see much of anything within arm’s reach without glasses.

The point is, I’ll be taking a step closer to getting back to some normal eyesight by the end of the month and I can’t wait. I feel like I’ve been living with a gauze shroud covering half my face most of this year, and I can’t wait to lift that shroud.

Everybody on television says “welcome in” now instead of just “welcome.” What’s up with that? Why do sudden, widespread shifts in phraseology happen?

Bye!