Sorry, I prioritized filing taxes yesterday over blogging. Gaming I wanted to watch the Smosh Resident Evil 8 videos, because I watched their Resident Evil 7 videos. But in order to do that, I had to play it first. (I very rarely watch people play games that I haven’t already played before.) I’ve had it forever, but never played it. Well, I played through it. Pretty good game. Resident Evil 7 was claustrophobic and scary and gory and kind of hard, Resident Evil 8 was easy and more like a horror-themed fantastical action blockbuster. 8 is to Aliens as 7 is to Alien, if you will. For good or ill, it’s a sequel to 7, so play that one first. Sadly, the Smosh Resident Evil 8 videos aren’t that good. They showed little interest in the game, and that makes for a boring game series. It’s no Smosh FNAF, that’s for sure. Otherwise, I played a bit more Kingdom Come Deliverance II. It’s a chill game, walking around in the wilderness listening to the sounds of nature, except the parts that are frustrating as hell, which is anytime you have to interact with a quest or fight anyone. Media Production When I started Resident Evil Village, I noticed there was an option under Display Settings to enable HDR, and I thought, “Hey I have an HDR monitor, I’m going to turn that on.” So I did. It looked pretty cool. And I recorded three videos. And then I realized that the mirrored HDMI output from my gaming PC did not automatically downscale to SDR, and I recorded three videos that looked absolutely borked upon playback. They looked absurdly over-saturated with extreme contrast, almost like the videos were posterized. And then I fell down a rabbit hole into the world of recording HDR game videos, which is a world I did not realize was so dern complicated. To make a long story short, it’s not easy to record HDR videos with OBS. With my recording setup that uses a second recording PC, it’s almost impossible without an HDMI splitter. Unfortunately the disadvantages of using an HDMI splitter are numerous (not the least of which is you have to find a very specific kind of HDMI splitter to avoid things like random audio dropouts). I successfully recorded HDR video when I ran OBS locally on the gaming PC, after making sure the OBS settings are exactly right, but recording games on the same PC you’re playing on sucks. The number of times I accidentally alt-tab or otherwise ruin the game screen is just absurd. Not to mention the difficulty of seeing and monitoring OBS while you’re recording. In any case, you either setup everything to record for HDR or you setup for SDR, and you never want to switch back and forth. I would have expected that HDR video support would be a lot more common these days, but I guess it isn’t. It’s a major pain in the butt. It looks really good, though. HDR, that is. Stunning difference. Media Consumption Wheel of Time season 3 (Prime). The Last of Us season 2 (Max). Haven’t seen any trailers but I’m predicting they’re going to go into The Last Of Us fan fiction territory and not the second game’s story. The first episode has been out a day and of course I’ve already seen spoilers on YouTube, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. OH SHIT I STARTED WATCHING IT AND ABBY IS THERE IT’S GAME TIME THIS IS NOT A DRILL PREPARE FOR HIGHLY ENTERTAINING EXTREME VIOLENCE AND HEARTBREAK. I dunno, I probably watched other stuff but I didn’t write it down. I continue to watch a lot of Smosh content on YouTube like a mindless puppet. Their lineup of comedians and improv in the last two years is pretty good imo. Watching people do improv well is kind of like watching a magic trick to me. Day Job For all the anti-AI folks out there, you should know that my employer sent out an email recently that basically made it mandatory for engineers to incorporate AI code generation tools as part of their daily workflow. So if you’re a programmer trying to get a job at a major software company, you’re probably going to need that skill. Cursor is the new hotness at my job right now, and yes, it’s very good at turning ideas into working code. The only viable reasons I can think of not to use AI code generation assistance in programming are purely ideological or just plain stubbornness. It’s like refusing to use a dishwasher (actually I knew someone who hated dishwashers). When you run across someone refusing to use AI in programming, it’s like running across someone with deeply-held religious beliefs proselytizing, and you just want to nod and smile and back away slowly. The Python and Javascript folks are rejoicing with Cursor, but unfortunately it’s a fork of Visual Studio Code, so it’s not quite a full IDE, and it’s less of a nice place to live for Java development. That’s the only drawback I’ve seen so far. My company developed their own internal AI chat plugin for IntelliJ, which is okay, but nowhere near as good as ChatGPT. Home Life In health news, every time I talk above a whisper, I start coughing. Well not every time, but frequently enough that it interferes with daily life. Most times I eat anything, I start coughing. It sucks. I’ve been trying to drink copious amounts of water and chamomile tea, which does seem to help slightly, but tea is disgusting in large amounts. Cough drops help a lot, but obviously there aren’t enough cough drops in the world to keep one in my mouth all day every day. Anyway I have an appointment to see an ENT next week. World Context Too many fiascos to cover. Constitutional crises, secret police abducting people off the streets, tariffs crashing the economy, blatant insider trading, ludicrous propaganda press briefings, etc. Reality show government. Everything changes week to week. Not a great time to be a lifelong government skeptic. Or maybe it’s the greatest time to be a lifelong government skeptic. Luckily I don’t have to interact with government too much. Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). Celebrity Deaths: Bye!

Dispatches from @[email protected]: Hey I remembered to run the thing and make the post. Anyway, once a month is plenty. Tuesday 03/04 20:52 # Still listening to Smosh reading reddit posts in videos. At this point I have no choice but to believe that all these AITA-and-adjacent type posts have to be the place where writers practice their craft now. Surely creative writing teachers are telling all their students to go out and write AITA posts. Surely at least 75% of these things have to be fiction. Monday 03/10 09:38 # I was liking Monster Hunter Wilds until I got to the Hirabami quest last night where you’re supposed to shoot dung pods at them to separate them but the game didn’t tell me HOW to do any of that and then once I figured out that mechanic, it didn’t give me any dung pod resources to make more of them so I spent AN HOUR trying to kill one of those stupid things and then the quest timed out before I could. What a crock of b.s. that was. 22:17 # So tonight I’ve been farming dung in Monster Hunter Wilds. How is that a thing in any game? Anyway, the good news is that MHWilds actually has a fairly convenient UI for finding things on a map and auto-riding to them to pick them up. (Map, filter icons, find the item, R3 button.) Still tedious, but at least I don’t have to go to a wiki and stumble around blindly in the game. 22:20 # Next time I tackle these stupid Hirabami I’ll be armed with a pack full of a frick-ton of dung ammo, instead of having to scramble for the ONE dung resource in the quest area normally. I’m still so mad that the game made me waste a full hour of my time trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, then didn’t give me the resources I needed to even do it, then timed out the stupid quest in the end. So annoying. 22:49 # InoReader (an RSS feed reader) now has a button to summarize blog posts in one sentence. It does it whether the post is in the RSS feed or not. Modern times. Friday 03/14 10:32 # I finally started Kingdom Come: Deliverance II last night (still have no idea what that title refers to in the game), which I’ve had installed for over a month I think. The game starts soooo slow, and scenes take forever to develop, and I really wasn’t in the mood to try to figure out the bizarre swordfighting mechanics again, so I don’t know if I’m going to get very far in this game. 10:33 # I like how they give you one tutorial on the swordfighting, which is the most complicated and unintuitive mechanical process ever put into a videogame, and they expect everyone to just remember everything. Saturday 03/15 11:32 # Arg I played another 45 minutes of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, hoping to find it still didn’t click with me, but I found myself getting invested in the story, and now I’m angry that I’ll have to play a third time. That’s kind of how the first game went, too. It sort of grows on you like a fungus, until you have no choice but to keep playing despite all the mechanical weirdness and the complete abandonment of all gaming conventions. Still no sign that there’s any changes from the first game. It’s exactly the same so far. Like why did it take so long to make it when they didn’t change anything? It’s basically DLC for the first game from what I’ve seen so far. 19:34 # Wheel of Time S3E01… I expected the quality to drop off and the pacing of the show to accelerate so they could get through all the books in a shorter time, but neither seems to be the case so far. 19:39 # However, I think they skipped pretty much all of book 3 during the course of the first episode, so maybe they’re doing a book-an-episode this season in case it gets cancelled. 20:44 # Wheel of Time S3E02… I’ll just say what we’re all thinking: Why’s that Aiel man wearing spears? 21:50 # Wheel of Time S3E03… one thing I really like about this show is the music. It’s very atypical for fantasy genre music, which is appropriate because Wheel of Time is somewhat atypical high fantasy. I had feared this season would drop in quality but so far, so good. Which of course means it’ll be cancelled and we’ll never get to see the Last Battle. Sunday 03/16 15:19 # This is weird to say after enjoying Monster Hunter Wilds on the PS5, but I’m actually enjoying the struggle of playing Monster Hunter World on the PC with mouse and keyboard too. (Need to rest my thumb from too much controller use.) Previously I gave MHW a solid “meh,” but on this, the third attempt at playing it, I like it better than ever before. Thursday 03/20 20:16 # Wheel of Time S3E04… Good ep. Finally the actor playing Rand got a chance to act. I remember big secrets being revealed in Rhuidean but I don’t remember them playing a meaningful role at any point for the rest of the book series. I imagine people who liked the books also like the series, but I have trouble imagining anyone who didn’t read the books likes the series, so I keep expecting it to get cancelled after every episode. Thursday 03/27 22:01 # Wheel of Time S3E05.. meh. There’s always a middle episode in every series, both television and book. 22:03 # Been playing Monster Hunter World for a while now, getting kind of annoyed with Diablos. It feels like I’m absolutely murdering the dude but I keep getting killed by random bad luck. There’s so many circumstances where you can find yourself stunned or shaken or something and then the monster chooses that exact moment to charge you and it’s game over. Feels bad man. Sunday 03/30 15:33 # I know it’s not popular to like using AI, but I really love asking ChatGPT “deep research” questions about everyday issues like why the battery light on my car keeps coming on even after I changed the battery, or which podcast episodes contained references to other podcast episodes, and things like that. 15:35 # P.S. it’s been 100% correct in the handful of questions I’ve asked so far. The only drawback is it takes like 6-7 minutes to answer. Thursday 04/03 21:25 # Wheel of Time S3E06.. first 50 minutes was another pretty meh episode then it suddenly got good at the end. I hate that they’re making Rand relatable and even sympathetic, something I never once got from the books. The entire series I despised that dude and couldn’t wait for his chapters to end. Again I want to call out that the music is really good in this series, imo. Saturday 04/05 18:51 # Trying Cursor for all my AI-assisted code generation needs. I assume every other programmer has embraced this new AI world and now can’t live without AI- assistance, like we previously adapted and can’t live without Intellisense. Sunday 04/06 12:41 # I’m using the OpenAI API to transcribe the 90+ videos I recorded playing Dark Souls 2 for the first time back in 2015, and then I want to see if I can get it to generate a 5000 word summary of the entire experience. Sunday 04/13 22:18 # So I randomly played through Resident Evil Village because I wanted to watch a Let’s Play of Resident Evil Village, but then it turned out the Let’s Play wasn’t that good. It’s one of those Let’s Plays where the dude has played the game 20 times so he’s just speedrunning on auto-pilot the whole time, and the other people watching him play aren’t even paying attention or talking about the game because it’s obviously boring to watch somebody speedrun a game on auto-pilot. Not a winning Let’s Play formula.

So not only was I late getting this post finished, I also forgot to hit the button to publish the changes up to the site until a day later. Professionalism! Spring is definitely here now. I don’t have seasonal allergies but it’s impossible not to have sniffles and sneezes outside when there’s a snowstorm of pollen that coats the car in a new layer of yellow dust every day. Yes, I know I’ve forgotten to publish my microblog archives. If it’s any consolation, I’ve also forgotten to post any microblog stuff. Gaming So I was bitten by the Monster Hunter World bug and have been working through that game. It started as an alternate to play on the PC while resting my thumb from Monster Hunter Wilds on the PS5, but I abandoned Wilds to continue with World. This is the third time that I’ve tried to play World. The first time I had no idea what was going on and didn’t even know how to progress in the game. The second time I had a better idea how to play but didn’t find it all that interesting. This time, everything seemed to click. At least until I got through all the Low Rank stuff and then High Rank started out repeating the same monsters except they’re more tedious. The main thing I’ve learned is that there’s a numerical defense threshold that is required for every new monster, otherwise you’re just going to get randomly killed again and again. So after every monster you have to stop and farm equipment upgrades before you can move on, which is not a game loop that I particularly like. Ideally, one should be able to get from the beginning to the end of every game with zero farming or grinding. I also played some Kingdom Come Deliverance II. It’s a very relaxing game, in that the vast majority of the gameplay is walking through the woods listening to nature. Unfortunately, it has the exact same problems as the first game, so at the end of the relaxing gameplay you can expect to get killed in two seconds because you get jumped by some bandits on the road who have vastly superior armor, weapons, and numbers, and then you have to replay the last 30 minutes of walking through the woods because of the punitive saving mechanics. I said it about the first game and it’s exactly the same in the second game: The good parts are really good, the bad parts are truly awful. Not video game related, but D&D’s official virtual tabletop offering Sigil completely melted down recently. Turns out ignoring the basic needs of tabletop roleplaying isn’t a great idea. Welcome back Roll20 as the industry leader I guess. (FoundryVTT is my personal favorite, but it’s pretty niche.) Media Consumption I fell off my podcast schedule so I’ve missed all my standard podcasts for a while. Severance season 2 completed. Wheel of Time season 3 in progress. I watch a lot of Smosh Games and Smosh Pit videos now. Don’t judge me. They’re funny. Whoa, Netflix is actually relevant now and then: Day Job Another engineer left the team. That’s three pretty talented senior engineers departing since December. The positions are only getting backfilled by hires in India. Just a fun aspect of the global economy. It’s still quite a logistical challenge to work on a team that spans 13 hours of time zones. Every morning I sign in to Slack, there are some eight hours of questions and problems waiting to hit me all at once. It reminds me of my government days when I was the last engineer left standing on a slowly disintigrating team, which is something I never wanted to repeat. Home Life Door Dash Is Cool Hey, have you heard of this thing called Door Dash? Says me, a minimum of five years after everyone else learned to depend on it daily. I used it for the very first time recently. Restaurant food just appeared at my door. What a concept! I made this discovery on one of those weekends where I was out of food and it was time for the weekly grocery shopping trip, but I didn’t feel like going out. (I never feel like going out on a weekend–“going out” is a work activity, and it feels like it should only be done during the work week.) Unfortunately there aren’t a huge number of food options near my house. The vast majority of it is fast food-type stuff, but there’s a decent Mexican place nearby. I’m not sure what the mileage threshold is for a reasonable door dash request, but it seems like going out past five miles or so would be pretty rude and impractical. Return of the Dead Car battery I thought I’d put my car battery problems behind me when I installed a new battery earlier in the month–a battery way larger than I needed, incidentally, so I’d never have trouble starting this thing again even in the dead of winter. Then, on the way home from the grocery store Sunday morning, the battery indicator came on again. I’d done a terrible job of screwing down the battery terminals because I didn’t have a metric socket set when I replaced the battery, so I thought the terminals had shaken loose. I’d since purchased a new socket set, so I double-checked the terminals and made sure they’re attached well. The car wouldn’t start, as if the battery was dead again, two weeks after I bought it. I used my iClever battery jump-starter, and while the engine ran, the battery light came on again, and eventually the engine stalled out. ChatGPT deep research confirmed what I already suspected: Something’s probably wrong with the alternator, which is the thing in a car that charges the battery while the car’s running. Quite likely my car’s been running entirely off the new battery for the last few weeks. My problem now is how to get my car to the dealer to perform repairs. I can change a tire or a battery but an alternator? Maybe, but I’d rather not find out. These sorts of transportation issues are thorny problems when you live alone out in the exurbs with no family or friends nearby. I imagine I’ll have to get the car towed to the dealer (some 9 miles away) and then take an Uber out there to pick it up. But first, I’m going to try a smart battery charger to recharge the new battery enough to drive it 9 miles safely. So far, it has completely revived the dead battery enough to run the car again, but I haven’t tried driving anywhere yet. Why Am I Coughing So Much Lately? Just wondering. It’s not COVID. It’s not a cold or flu. It’s not seasonal allergies. But there’s a nearly constant tickle in my throat now that causes me to cough pretty much every time I use my vocal cords or eat or wake up. I think (hope) it’s acid reflux related, but I need to find an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor if I can ever figure out how the American healthcare system works. World Context Holy cow, it’s really hard to respect the Trump administration as evil fascist dictators when they do stuff like this on a daily basis. This cabinet is dumber with technology than a bunch of boomers, conducting government national security business like it’s a Facebook thread. Arguably this administration is more dangerous than fascists because of their incompetent bumbling with literally everything they touch. I humbly propose a new slogan for opposition party campaigns: “Better woke than a joke.” There was a devastating earthquake in Myanmar/Burma. (The name depends on your flavor of performative politics and how strongly you feel about the military coup in 2021. Ironically, it’s Republicans, the party of overturning unfavorable election results, laws, and norms, who still hold a grudge about that coup.) Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). Celebrity Deaths: Val Kilmer (actor). Bye!

You’ve just recorded a 30 minute game session, you said some really witty and insightful stuff about the game, better than you usually do. This is going to be one of your best videos yet! As you’re signing off, you look over and see that your microphone has been muted the entire time. We’ve all been there. If you haven’t yet, you probably will be. If you’re a streamer, your audience will tell you they can’t hear you, but if you’re recording local files, you might not know until the recording is done. This just happened to me in the past week, which is what made me think of writing this post. I’ve been recording game videos since 2015 and have a fairly routine process now. But despite my best efforts to automate everything, human error still happens. It’s inevitable. What do you do if you lost the live commentary for a whole video? There’s a few options. Maybe you can load a previous save file and play that section of the game again, but all the spontaneity is gone. You can pretend you’re seeing everything again for the first time, and try to remember all that great stuff you said, but unless you’re a trained actor, the commentary is probably going to turn out flat and boring. And it defeats the entire purpose of recording game videos, because you want your initial reactions to everything. At least, I do. Or maybe it’s a game that doesn’t have save files, and you can’t go back, so you have to do the dreaded “hey guys, guess what, I lost 30 minutes of the game, sorry about that, here’s everything you missed” at the start of the next video, the thing that every viewer hates more than anything and causes them to instantly unsubscribe and unlike your videos. (I assume.) You could also record an overdub of new commentary over the game video, but that takes time and effort and it might sound weird in the context of the rest of the videos. Plus it will still lack spontaneity. As a last resort, you could upload the game video with no commentary. Some people like that, but I don’t. Especially if it’s the only one in a series that’s missing a commentary track. I’ve done all of these things with various success. The thing that I hate most about those options (except the last one) is how long it takes. Anything that takes time away from playing the game is usually something I want to avoid during the recording process. So, a long time ago I set up an emergency backup microphone. Your main microphone records to one audio track, the backup microphone records to a different audio track. If something goes wrong with the main microphone track, you use the backup microphone track. Easy peasy. The key to an effective backup microphone for me is to make sure it’s not connected to the same mute keys as the main microphone, so it’s always recording no matter what. In OBS, you can setup each audio source with different mute hotkeys. If you have a lot of money, you can setup an expensive microphone as a backup. But if you’re like me starting out, you can also use a $10 USB Logitech video conference desk microphone taped to the boom arm of the main microphone, which I used until a few years ago when I splurged on a Blue Snowball. It’s really hard to see in this old photo, but here’s how I used to tape that old Logitech backup mic to the main mic arm: Another tip if you’re worried about accidentally toggling off a microphone is to use push-to-mute instead of a toggle. I have both setup. I use push-to-mute for momentary coughs or clearing my throat, so there’s no chance of accidentally leaving the mic muted, something I used to do with annoying regularity. I use a toggle for longer periods of muting like actually getting up or during long cut scenes. Note that for push-to-mute to work in OBS, you have to enable push-to-mute for that audio source. It’s stupid. I don’t know what OBS was thinking. Literally every time I setup a push-to-mute hotkey, I try it, it doesn’t work, I scratch my head for a long time, then I remember: Oh yeah, OBS has this silly thing where you have to enable push-to-mute on a totally different screen first. OBS has never been particularly good at user interface design. In olden times, I used a wireless numeric keypad for my recording hotkeys, then I splurged on a Stream Deck to be cool like everyone else. Now I use a foot switch for push-to-mute so I can cough even in the middle of a hairy boss fight. I don’t worry about using push-to-mute on the backup microphone track, because I’d have to keep my foot down on the pedal to accidentally leave the mute on, which isn’t likely to happen. It’s only the mute toggle that I disable for the backup microphone track. You will probably find that the backup microphone doesn’t sound nearly as good as the main microphone. In my case, there’s a lot more room noise, it picks up the sounds of clacking keys and mouse buttons and the thumping of moving the mouse around on the table, so I only use it for emergencies. If I have time, I can improve the sound by using some noise gates or other filters in REAPER, which is my go-to audio post-processing software. In the case of my most recent mic failure, I needed to use REAPER anyway because I needed to amend some of my commentary. I misattributed the song It’s Probably Me to Eric Clapton instead of Sting, a crucial mistake that needed to be corrected. (I don’t correct verbal mistakes very often, unless it’s a massive pop culture mistake like that, and usually I’m in the file editing for other reasons.) Here’s the corrected clip of video. The full video probably won’t get uploaded to my channel for months at my current upload rate. (For pedants out there, on further reflection, the song is technically credited to Sting, Eric Clapton, and Michael Kamen, but I’m not re-recording another correction.) (That game is Monster Hunter World on the PC, if you’re wondering, which is what I’m currently playing.) The point of all this is that thanks to a backup microphone, I was still able to use what might otherwise have been a completely ruined recording, which helps with the primary goal of not spending too much time on videos after the recording is done. P.S. If you end up in a situation where you’ve recorded a video with commentary but no game sound, you’re screwed. I’ve never found a way to solve for that problem. You have no choice but to throw out the video. Unless you want to get creative and make your own game sound effects like I did once: That’s the only time I ever lost a crucial piece of game sound (the first time encountering a Souls boss is a must-have recording situation). I still think it’s pretty funny, in a cringy sort of way. P.P.S. Those two videos back to back highlight how much my audio loudness policies have changed in the last six or seven years. A subject for a different post. (Read up on LUFS if you want a preview.)

Once again we find ourselves scrambling to catch up with writing a post. It’s never a good sign when I forget to prepare the document early in the writing cycle. If I don’t have a blank document available to jot down thoughts every day or so, it’s going to be a major chore to write the post at the last minute. Blogging is such a chore, why does anyone do it? In climate news, we are leaving the winter months, otherwise known as the worst time of every year for me, and it’s looking like spring is returning and there might be an end to months of misery. Daylight savings time began so there’s an abundance of daylight and the world is normal again. (In my old age, I don’t like being awake when there’s no sun outside anymore. Long gone are the days of my youth when I was awake more at night than during the day.) Gaming I picked up Monster Hunter: Wilds on the PS5. I don’t know why. Just because it was there. At first I found it somewhat meh, and wrote a fairly lukewarm impressions post. But I find myself enjoying it, against all odds, and wanting to keep playing it. The story and characters are unappealing (I don’t even know anyone’s names, I just keep referring to them as, for example, “Big Hair Belly Girl”), but the monster-fighting part is kind of fun, and it’s a vastly improved user experience from the previous Monster Hunter games I’ve played. No fluff, no stakes, just bashing monsters with a giant sword (or whatever) while a cat companion meows at you periodically. In fact, I like it so much that I surpassed the threshold beyond which my left thumb starts to ache from using a controller too much and I have to take some days off playing. Therefore, I had to find a mouse-and-keyboard game to play on mandatory thumb-rest days. I had started Avowed last time, but it turns out I very quickly found myself uninterested in playing further. Nothing really wrong with it, there’s just not much of a hook. I tried to install Monster Hunter: World on PC again, to continue the monster-hunting vibe, and found it a horrible experience to play with mouse and keyboard, and I really missed the streamlined gameplay of Wilds. So I doubt if I’ll get very far in World this time either. Most of my previous playtime was on a PS5. According to video records the last monster I killed was a big spiky Radobaan, so that’s how far I got. I decided to finally start Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, a game I’ve had downloaded and installed for over a month now, but never launched. In all this time, I haven’t heard a single person talking about it. The first game wasn’t exactly a mainstream darling. It’s the kind of game you either like or hate. Naturally the night I wanted to play KCD2, Big Patch 1.2 had just dropped, so Steam had to download a 62.3 GB patch. That’s not really a patch, by the way, that’s a complete replacement. But I eventually played for about an hour. The first game had a pretty good story hook to start out with, the second game doesn’t. Let’s face it, Henry of Skalitz ain’t no Geralt of Rivia, commanding the screen with his presence. The whole sword combat system came rushing back to me in the first tutorial, and I questioned my own sanity for wanting to try to re-learn it. Nothing appears to have changed in the second game, mechanically speaking, for good or ill. (Including the inexplicable catastrophic drop in frame rate during cut scenes.) So I thought I’d probably never play it again, but then Saturday morning rolled around and I played a second session of KCD2, and found myself getting invested in the story. Possibly because there were a lot of flashbacks to the beginning of the first game, which was the best part of that game. Also, there’s a dog companion in the second game, which I don’t remember being in the first game, and who doesn’t love talking to their dog companions in video games. To round out this section, here are some games I’ve uninstalled recently: Grand Theft Auto V (still can’t get into GTA like I used to), Tales of Arise (played about an hour, never felt like returning to it). Media Production Uploading the final videos in Dragon’s Dogma 2, don’t really know what to do next. I thought it would be Avowed but I quickly lost interest in it. Maybe Monster Hunter Wilds but I didn’t really start recording like I would publish them until some 10 hours into the game, so maybe not. There’s really only one style of game that’s perfect for game videos, and that’s blind Souls-like playthroughs, and there just aren’t any to do right now. So I’m kind of stuck. Media Consumption I fully forgot to write down most of what I’ve been watching. Mostly the same stuff as I wrote before, although I haven’t been listening to podcasts as much. Severance (AppleTV via. Amazon). I just saw there’s a third season of Wheel of Time on Amazon. Was there a second season? I don’t remember it, but I assume I must have watched it. Before watching season three, I’ll make a prediction that this will be the season where the quality of the show drops precipitously because of budget cuts, the standard path of most streamer-made shows. Home Life Two stories. First, I bought a new mattress on the Internet (it was on sale). I’ve never done that before. It was weird to think that something which came in a relatively small (but heavy) box could expand to the size of a mattress, but it did. So far it’s a great mattress and I sleep much better. It’s a Bear Elite Hybrid mattress, if you’re interested. (Previously I used a fully memory foam mattress, which I hated.) But it’s a lot taller than I expected, so I need to follow this up with an order for a low-profile foundation. Dealing with mattresses is one of those chores that’s somewhat difficult to accomplish when you live alone, incidentally. Mattresses are pretty big and heavy (this one especially), and so are foundations. Also, getting rid of old mattresses or foundations is not exactly easy, either, especially if you don’t own a big enough vehicle, or unless you’re one of those weirdos who just throws them by the side of the road in the middle of the night. Second, my car battery died. This is a regular occurrence in my life at this point. I’d noticed it getting weaker over the winter, failing to start in the morning and so on, but I figured I’d just get a new battery at my next car inspection, which is due about now. Well, the battery had other plans and went from “weak” to “fully dead” before I got to my inspection, the way modern batteries do. I had to rig up my iClever external battery to jump start and run the car just long enough for me to drive to and from an auto parts store for a new battery. Luckily it was a short trip and I didn’t get stranded anywhere. More perils of living alone in exurbia*: If your car dies for any reason, you’re pretty much screwed. * I only recently learned the word “exurbs,” which is a good descriptor for where I’ve lived about half of my life (the other half was in suburbs). Somewhat less population-dense than suburbs, but not fully out in the country where you could literally hunt for food in your back yard. Still, you really need a working vehicle to live in this kind of area. World Context I made a concerted effort to back off of checking news daily, so I don’t have many sarcastic barbs this time. Since Trump thrives on attention and all of his policies will inevitably self-destruct from incompetence and public backlash, this seems like the best opposition strategy for now. Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). I noticed that Wikipedia stopped listing Gaza in the “ongoing events” so I’m removing it from my list too. Technically there’s a cease fire, but obviously tensions have existed since before I was born and will continue undoubtedly for the rest of all of our lives. Will I remember to make a new blank document for the next post or not?

I don’t know why I did it. I knew I was going to react to Monster Hunter Wilds in the exact same way that I did to Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise: A perplexed face and a burning curiosity about why these games are so popular. But I was looking for something to play on the PS5 now and then and it’s a good game for that. I don’t feel bad about not recording it or not finishing it. (Although I am hitting the “save last 30 minutes of gameplay” button after every monster fight anyway.) For context, as of this writing, according to the PS5, I’ve played 11 hours and completed 30% of the game. I also need to make it clear that, following my standard video game practice, I haven’t looked up any guides on the Internet on how to play the game. So there’s a good chance I’m doing everything wrong. (Actually I did look up how to find endemic life for those side quests where you’re supposed to capture them, because the game doesn’t give you a marker for where they are. I just wanted to confirm that the expected game loop was to wander around in the world until you stumbled on them, like a cave man playing a game from the 90s. For other side quests, the game auto-runs you right to where you’re supposed to go, but this one thing it doesn’t.) Here are the last several monsters I killed in the main story. I think they are “large monsters” in game parlance, or what the rest of the world calls “bosses.” (All the ones before this were really easy.) There was an Alpha Doshaguma, which looked kind of like a big bear. It seemed like it was inevitable that I would win the fight, even though I “fainted” twice. It was the first time I fainted in the game, but it was no big deal–I just ran back to the boss and continued where I left off. (Reminding me of later Guild Wars 2 boss fights, where it was impossible to fail no matter how many times you died.) Then I killed something called an Uth Duma, and I’m sure those two words instantly conjure up a vivid image of what it looks like (a gigantic seal with a snake head and gossamer flaps). This has been the hardest one so far for me, and the first monster that I actually failed to kill, because I fainted three times (mostly from bad luck, imo), so it took two tries to complete that kill. The second time I called in a “Support Hunter” Rosso (a bot, I assume) but it didn’t really seem to help much, other than yelling encouragement now and then in that “we can win with the power of friendship!” way that all anime stuff has. However, I did kill it with only one fainting spell the second time so maybe it was doing more than I thought. (It’s hard to tell because the bosses don’t have health bars.) This was the boss that I discovered you can jump on top of the monster’s back and hit them in the top of the head, a feat I don’t fully understand how I did, but I somehow managed to do it a couple of times. Then it was a Rompopolo, a fairly easy monster that I described as a T-Rex with a crow face, covered with ballooning airbags. I just hit it repeatedly until it died, no fainting required. I had the ranged Support Hunter Rosso for this one too (because I forgot to turn that feature off), but it also didn’t seem to help much. The last monster I killed was a Rey Dau, which at first I thought looked like a copy-paste of the Fallingstar Beasts in Elden Ring, but it has wings (with pretty strong arms attached somehow–Darwin sure would be interested in how these creatures evolved) and lightning breath. It was tougher, but not that much. I fainted once, and when I got up and rode back, I hit the beast exactly one time and killed it. (I had Rosso the ranged Support Hunter for this one, too. After this I finally remembered to turn them off… the setting is in a very obscure location so it’s easy to miss it.) The fighting seems to go faster than the previous games, which I like a lot. I remember timing out a few times on quests in Monster Hunter World. I still don’t like it much when the boss runs away to a new location, because it just feels like it’s dragging the fight out for no particular reason. It doesn’t feel like I’m solving any game problems by simply following a monster to its new location. The only question the game is asking there is: Will you remember to sharpen your blade or not? For the record I use the big sword thingy that you start with. After this last fight I’m Hunter Rank 4, and upgraded my armor to Rompopolo gear (which looks ridonkulous), and my sword to a Hope Blade III. (Previously I think it was a Bone Blade II.) The story is telling me there is something called a White Wraith coming up, which is, for some reason, highlighted with purple. All the characters were awestruck on viewing it for the first time before it flew away, so I guess I’m supposed to be terrified of it too. But so far I don’t see any reason to change my complex go-to strategy of running straight up to things and hitting the triangle button until they’re dead. As for the story, I haven’t been paying any attention and have skipped large portions of the dialog, so I don’t know why any of the characters in the game, especially me, are out wandering around killing big monsters. There’s something about a kid from a long-lost village who’s really mad at the White Wraith or something. I don’t know. The music seems pretty generic. And the voice work. Most characters do a breathy exhale at the end of every line delivery, which nobody does in real life but is fairly common in the anime style. Once I hear it, I can’t un-hear it and it completely undermines any attempt at serious dialog because it makes me chuckle. Otherwise nobody seems to have any personality and I feel nothing for any of the NPCs. It’s pretty clear the story is only there because AAA games are expected to have stories, so they have to check that box. I have two theories on why these games are popular. One is that maybe the game changes into a completely different experience if you play co-op with other people, and that’s really the thing that people like. I have a feeling that a lot of mediocre games disguise themselves as really fun when you play them with your friends, because what you’re feeling is the enjoyment of hanging out with your friends, rather than anything intrinsically fun about the game. Which is fine, but when I play that game by myself I’m left wondering what all the fuss is about. My second theory is that these Monster Hunter games are made for people who only like to do dungeons and raids in MMORPGs, because you can sort of skip right to the boss fights. There is a pretty strong MMORPG vibe to the game in general, especially if you like resource-gathering. But the boss fights… aren’t that great. To me, at least. They’re faster than previous games, which is awesome, but they’re still pretty tedious, and there isn’t much tactical thinking involved, at least in the first 30% of the game. (Which is another reminder of MMORPG boss fights where “difficulty” is achieved by giving every boss a million hit points so that the biggest challenge is paying attention while you’re dying of boredom inside, like it’s an office presentation or something.) I haven’t had to do anything special to prepare for these boss fights yet, other than eating some food now and then. I haven’t had to learn any new combat skills or anything. I just run up and hit the big thing over and over until it’s dead or I’m dead. The animations are kind of cool, though, and the scenery is nice. There’s a nice “feel” and “weight” to landing a blow with a huge sword on a monster, which I like. (I do tend to prefer heavy weighty weapons in games, rather than fast lightweight weapons that defy physics.) But it doesn’t feel like I’ve done anything particularly noteworthy when I kill monsters. It seems like literally anyone could do this. Maybe these are the kind of games that only get good when you reach some arbitrary “endgame” point, which is another thing that reminds me of MMORPGs. World of Warcraft, for example, where so many people speedrun through the leveling process to reach the endgame, where the fun actually begins for them. tl;dr In conclusion, I’ll say that I’m liking Monster Hunter Wilds more than the previous two games, so I feel like they’ve successfully tweaked the formula for the better. It seems more streamlined and less clunky than previous games. It gets more fun the longer I play. With each new monster you kill in the main story, it unlocks a few more options you can explore. I think I just unlocked Armor Spheres. I also see there’s a bunch of Weapon Skills displayed on a page somewhere but I haven’t interacted with that system at all yet. It’s kind of fun to do the optional side missions so you can gather resources to make different kinds of armor and weapons. Still, I don’t think this franchise is ever going to reach game-of-the-year material for me because I feel like I could leave the game at any time and not feel like I’m missing anything.

Dispatches from @[email protected]: Monday 01/27 19:02 # Started watching American Primeval on Netflix. I love a good grimdark western but man this is the grimdarkiest grimdark one I’ve seen in a while. The west was apparently indistinguishable from Monty Python’s Holy Grail-style rainy, muddy medieval Europe, except there’s no jokes. 08:33 # Despite being only 6 episodes, somewhere around episodes 4-5 it started to feel padded and too long. It split into an A story and a B story and the B story felt kind of unnecessary and distracting. Still, I enjoyed it despite the flaws. But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have a high tolerance for senseless brutality. Thursday 01/30 21:59 # How do I find the like, I don’t know, serious books on Audible now? Browsing the front pages for a new book, especially in the sff category, is so depressing. 22:04 # The genre fiction world has fallen a long, long way when I have to start looking to Brandon Sanderson as the bar for quality. Thursday 02/06 14:29 # I started an audiobook of Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. Not really into this audiobook so far. I really liked the First Law series, but I read those. I remember almost nothing of the story, but I remember it mainly for having good, interesting characters. Not seeing that in Best Served Cold so far. 15:37 # Somehow I managed to drive to the store, buy stuff, and walk back out to the car with my belt unbuckled. Saturday 02/08 15:39 # I’m just now catching up on the Severance phenomenon. The first season was amazing. Looking at the episodes in the second season, I’m predicting it right now: It will end up being thought of in the same way as Lost. Sunday 02/09 17:41 # The grocery store this morning was way more crowded than I expected, because of, I assume, superbowl preparations. There were people expressing their support for both the Birds and the Chiefs in the form of shirts and actual chants. I found it charming. I myself don’t want either team to win, which is unfortunately not one of the possible outcomes. Tuesday 02/11 12:55 # People are losing their minds over Severance S2E4… I need to rewatch it because I was mostly like “wtf this is cool I guess but can we get back to the actual show please” Sunday 02/16 19:12 # Watched The Gorge tonight. Weirdest meet-cute movie ever. Thursday 02/20 15:58 # I keep forgetting to write stuff here. Yesterday it snowed all day. Maybe 3 or 4 inches. No big deal, today it’s already melted off all road surfaces. 16:06 # I tried out the new game Avowed last night, by the same people who did Pillars of Eternity. It’s basically Pillars of Eternity except in a 3D action RPG form instead of 2D. It has a bit of a janky AA kind of feel to it, but I like it. Looks nice, deep lore, interesting RPG systems, decent dialog trees, and combat is frickin’ hard on hard difficulty. Sort of Oblivion-esque but you can also do a third person camera. Not bad so far. Saturday 02/22 22:23 # I was tinkering with OBS video encoding settings today. OBS changes them randomly from time to time. First I noticed the NVENC H.264 encoder I was using had been deprecated, so I switched to the new one. Then I tried the NVENC HEVC encoder, which seems to work fine. I also tried the AV1 encoders but my recording PC is way too slow to handle those. Sunday 02/23 16:36 # Yeesh I had a number of subscriptions going that I had completely forgotten about, including a FFXIV sub. 19:13 # Hey I finished the story in Dragon’s Dogma 2 tonight. None of it made any sense from beginning to end, so it was consistent throughout. Tuesday 02/25 19:25 # Confession: I’ve never noticed any ray-tracing effect in a video game ever. Never once seen any video game NPCs juggling mirrored balls surrounded by checkboard textures. Saturday 03/01 08:55 # Good news, everyone! I found eggs at the store yesterday. 12:41 # I logged in FFXIV for the first time since… I dunno, 2021? 2022? Well, not really. I just got to the title screen and list of characters then quit. I wish there was a way to see which FC I’m in (if any) before I actually log in with a character. The last thing I ever want to do with a video game is give anyone a chance to notice I’m online playing. Haven’t wanted to do that since the late 90s. It’s basically the same as walking into a crowded room. Gross. Icky. 12:46 # In addition to seeing which FC I’m in, I’d also want to be able to join or leave FCs before logging in. I dunno. I guess my personality doesn’t align well with MMORPGs anymore heh. Sunday 03/02 10:42 # Is anyone else getting tired of every male video game voice actor’s breathy exhale at the end of every phrase? 12:04 # That explosive rant was brought to you by playing a bit of Monster Hunter Wilds today. I think it’s an anime voice actor thing but it seems like every video game voice actor does it now like every video game producer expects it as the standard or something, even though no human being ever talks like that unless there’s a microphone in front of them. 12:24 # I fell into a rabbit hole watching Smosh reads reddit post videos. I’ve blocked this sort of content before (“my super original content is just reading other people’s content woo”) but it’s better than usual and hilarious and horrifying how many horrible people are out there in the world. I don’t have a high opinion of humanity to start with but sheesh it’s a frickin’ miracle there isn’t a new serial killer arrested every single day.

After another bout of cold weather and snow, there are now signs of spring returning. The last week has been fairly mild weather up into the 60s. Gaming Dragon’s Dogma 2 Breaking news: I played more Dragon’s Dogma 2! PanPan rides again! Actually jogs. A lot. Anyway, I got to what I thought was the last couple of quests in the main story (after the big iron golem thingy), and then I thought I’d complete all the side quests that will supposedly get locked out if you finish the main story. Then I got bored with the side quests and decided to finish the game. Somehow I ended up fighting a big dragon twice. But I got to the credits. I finished the game at level 40 and felt extremely overleveled. There were very few times in the entire course of the game where I felt the slightest bit challenged by any of the game systems. I did exactly nothing to optimize my character. Combat was easy for the vast majority of the game. Crafting was useless from start to finish. The story made no sense at any point as plot threads were started and abandoned at regular intervals (I think it must have been mistranslated? Whatever happened to Sven or Disa?!?). Dragon’s Dogma is the weirdest, most opaque RPG franchise that has ever existed, as far as I’m concerned. It’s impossible to figure out how to do any of the quests without reading a guide. Avowed I impulsively bought Avowed when I saw it on Steam one day, Obsidian’s new first/third-person action RPG set in the Pillars of Eternity universe. Pillars of Eternity is a “must play” game in the single-player CRPG space, in my opinion, especially if you ever liked the original Baldur’s Gate. Avowed is a totally different type of game, and it has a little bit of a janky AA vibe (you know, where everything clips through everything else and your foot movement never quite matches up with the ground and the gravity is like you’re on Mars), but it’s fun so far. It’s in the vein of a Skyrim, but set in Pillars of Eternity’s Eora universe. You’ll recognize a lot of the lore if you’ve played PoE (otherwise, 75% of the words in the game will be gibberish because it’s one of those fantasy worlds where they invent a new word for literally everything). Anyway Avowed might be my next video series. Steam Next Surprise, surprise, there was another Steam Next demo festival. It’s hard enough to look at a huge list of available games and try to divine which ones might be fun, innovative, and engaging over 30+ hours, when you know for sure that only 1 in 1000 is going to be worth your time, so I have no idea what it’s like to get excited about looking over another huge list of demos. That being said, I would have tried the Solasta II demo, but I know for sure I’m going to buy it when it comes out, so why spoil anything. Media Production Like flicking a light switch, I suddenly started back into video production mode. Weird how that works. One day, I have no interest in playing games or talking about them, the next day, I’m playing games and talking about them. I got a new lightweight hypercardoid XLR headset microphone (an Audio-Technica PRO 8HEx Hypercardioid Dynamic Headworn Microphone), but it doesn’t sound very good. It’s too “thin.” It’s fantastically light and easy to wear, though. (But it does not have headphones, it’s just a microphone.) The other bad news is that it’s a little awkward to wear with glasses. Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I’ve switched my OBS video encoder settings to the new-ish NVIDIA NVENC HEVC encoder, which is supposedly higher quality/more efficient/better compression. I tried the new AV1 encoders (the cutting edge of the video future, apparently), but my recording PC CPU (from all the way back in the dark ages of 2016) is way too slow to handle them. Media Consumption Regulars Beast Games (Amazon). The last episodes got quite boring, because they slowed down and tried to make us viewers get to know the final contestants. Unfortunately, all the contestants are idiots, so I don’t care about any of them. What I care about is laughing at their terrible decisions and their constant zeal for gambling and losing, and how they’ve represented their respective generations in the worst possible light. It was much better in the beginning when the games were quicker. Severence (AppleTV via. Amazon). Must-see television. Unfortunately serial television is nowhere near as good as episodic television when you only get to see one episode a week, so the episodes go in and out of my brain almost immediately, because I know it isn’t a completed piece of entertainment. Much better to binge the whole season of serial television at the end, but then you risk getting spoiled. Last Week Tonight (Max). John Oliver is hit or miss with me. He’s funny, but I find that he, like many late night hosts, frequently goes past the satirical and sarcastic lines into hysterical territory. The Rest Is History (YouTube). They were doing episodes on King Leopold II’s exploitation of Congo. The Rest Is Entertainment (YouTube). Creative control of James Bond sold to Amazon, yikes! I clicked on some Smosh Beopordy videos and now Smosh is the only thing that’s in my recommendations. There’s a lot of nutty shouty party games on Smosh Games. Millennials be crazy. One-Offs Trying a different heading every time until one sounds right. Presumed Innocent (AppleTV via. Amazon). Pretty good series, and a very different tone from the movie of the same name based on the book of the same name. If you’re watching it to find out if the ending is different from the movie, as I did, I can tell you that the ending is different, but I still guessed it. (I don’t know if it’s different from the book, though.) I don’t know why there’s going to be a second season, unless they’re turning it into an anthology, which honestly isn’t a terrible idea. The Gorge (AppleTV via. Amazon). The weirdest Valentine’s Day meet-cute movie ever. The story was preposterous drivel that sounded like it came from the mind of an 8-year-old, but I thought the Trent Reznor music was pretty good. Most of what I’ve seen on AppleTV so far has been good, but this one was a bit of a dud. (I saw a review that reminded me I should nevertheless praise this movie for at least being an original non-franchise story, even if it didn’t work that well for me.) SNL 50th anniversary clips (YouTube). Pretty funny, mostly nostalgic. Zero Day (Netflix). Bad. Really, really bad. Laughable, in fact. Besides the technical part, the real life political drama that we live through every day is far more engaging as an entertainment product, rendering most fictional political dramas obsolete. Smacks of yet another show written by and for people who have never experienced the world outside of a Twitter feed. Home Development This is heavily inside baseball, but I’ve (finally) updated my video post-processing scripts to use one master configuration file for all project directories, which can be overridden for each individual project. As opposed to before, where I had to keep copying a gigantic configuration file to every new project directory even though 95% of the settings where the same all the time. The configuration sets things like audio mixing settings and encoding settings and directory names on a per-project basis. Each “project” is a series of videos that eventually get turned into a YouTube Playlist. Someday I want to publish my scripts (they’re in Python) but I’m too embarrassed about how messy they are right now. I’m a professional programmer, I can’t be putting out garbage code. Day Job Who even knows what’s happening anymore. I spend about 50% of my time writing Java code and the other 50% of my time trying to figure out how we can possibly make any progress on our deliverables when we have so many dependencies causing us to wait on other teams. There’s also a fear that the amount of Java work is diminishing fairly quickly, leaving nothing but Python work or Next.js Typescript work. Neither option is very appealing to me personally for various reasons (the Python work is mostly data analysis and the Next.js work is often ill-defined because there isn’t yet a product owner with a clear vision for the frontend). And incidentally we’ve been under a crushing company-wide moratorium for several months now that prevents us from any production releases until we implement a series of unhelpful hoop-jumping checks in the deployment pipeline that give us green checkmarks on leadership dashboards. And oh by the way, coming up soon, we’ll be having to shoehorn some kind of AI integration into a product that clearly doesn’t need any AI integration, because that’s literally the only thing the company cares about anymore. Home Life I was working on casseroles for a while, but I’ve been in a soup phase lately. As always, my version of cooking is based on the founding principle of “never spend too much time cooking or eating” so my version of soup is to pour many things purchased from a store into a pot and turn on the heat. In this case, it’s chicken soup, and I make it by cooking a couple of chicken breasts, cutting them up, then putting them into a pot with: lower sodium chicken stock, some water, frozen vegetables (my store has a very convenient vegetable soup mix), a can of diced tomatoes, and a small can of “heart healthy” (lower sodium) cream of chicken soup, and let it cook for an hour or so. The end result is a pot of soup that lasts me about five days, and I have to believe is marginally more healthy than store-bought cans of soup. Next I’m going to try a vegetable beef soup which will be essentially the same, except substituting beef broth and chopped-up beef for the chicken. World Context Incidentally, I’ve started an experiment with something called Ground.news which purports to give a “balanced” aggregation of news stories from sources across the political spectrum. It’s been 39 days in Trump’s Russia-First administration. I know the whole Russian interference thing in 2016 was blown out of proportion, but it’s really easy to see why a rational person might wonder if Trump is a foreign asset considering he was cuckolded by Putin and surrendered American interests to Russia within a month of his second inauguration. Siding with Belarus and North Korea along the way. What’s next, Mr. Trump, selling nuclear weapons to Iran? There’s a lot of things to criticize Trump for (and even an occasional thing or two to commend him for, believe it or not), but with my biases of being a child of the Cold War firmly on display, this has to be the most embarrassing American loss on the worldwide stage in our history. Worse than Vietnam, worse than Korea, worse than Afghanistan. Just wholesale surrender and abdicating any semblance of being a superpower, right out in front of everybody. Then again, it’s entirely possibly Mr. Trump could (and did) go from calling Zelensky a dictator criminal one day to welcoming him into the White House the next. So it’s really hard to figure out where to direct one’s righteous outrage against the government when conditions change radically every day, as if our country is being led by a drunken sailor staggering from one rail to the other, vomiting word salad everywhere. The Weave? More like The Stagger, amirite? There is no more news, because we live in a reality game show now. However, I did hear that the Pope got pneumonia. As of this writing, he’s recovering. Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), War between Israel and Hamas (since 10/2023), War between Israel and Hezbollah (since 9/2024), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). Celebrity Deaths: Gene Hackman (actor), Michelle Trachtenberg (actor). Bye!

Gaming My apathy for games continues. Most evenings and weekends I’d rather watch or listen to a show of some kind than play a game. I did purchase Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, though I haven’t launched it yet. I also bought Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II last year, installed it, and haven’t yet launched it. Those two games are my entire backlog right now. Other people are talking about Civilization VII and the upcoming Monster Hunter: Wilds, but I don’t have any plans to get either. Media Production Not uploading anything to my channel at the moment, because I’m not playing anything. I played one more episode of Dragon’s Dogma II but I figured I should store up a handful before I start uploading again. Just today I got a new XLR headset microphone I want to try out. So far I don’t like it. Media Consumption Regulars Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild and Legacy of the Ancients (subscriber podcasts). Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (on YouTube). Critical Role Campaign 3, the final episode (Beacon.tv). I found it a bit dull and haven’t yet finished it. At no point in Campaign 3 did I understand what anyone was doing or why they were doing it, so naturally the touching finale didn’t land for me either. Various political podcasts (on YouTube). The Daily Show clips (on YouTube). Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max). (Mostly just the monologue and the New Rules, less so the guests and panel.) Severance (Apple TV via. Amazon). Just catching up to this phenomenon. Binged the first season, which was excellent. Now watching the second season, which is also good. Big time Lost vibes. Hopefully it won’t collapse under its own weight like Lost did. Mythic Quest (Apple TV via. Amazon). Since I got an Apple TV subscription through Amazon for Severance, I started watching Mythic Quest which I had also heard was good. It’s a pretty funny and charming workplace comedy, though the video game elements are far in the background. Others NADDPOD Dungeon Court (podcast). Catching up on recent episodes. The Staircase (HBO Max). The miniseries based on–one might even say, in some parts, copied wholesale from–the documentary. The documentary was better. Nothing particularly new about the case, except the Owl Theory which I don’t remember hearing before. It seemed slightly more biased in favor of the prosecution than the defense. American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson (Netflix). Despite living through that time, I didn’t obsessively watch the O.J. Trial every day on Court TV like everyone else in America, so I found it an interesting summary. It wasn’t as good as that American Crime Story series though. Superbowl LIX (FOX). I didn’t particularly want either team to win, so it was pretty hard to get excited about the game. The Eagles absolutely manhandled the Chiefs in the first half, in a way that looked like they were beating up on children every play. Nobody knows what happened in the second half because everyone stopped watching when it was obvious nothing was going to change. Surviving Black Hawk Down (Netflix). A new three-part documentary about the Battle of Mogadishu, one of the most-documented U.S. battles since World War II. Nothing new, really. Just another telling of it. Unrelated but one of my favorite tellings of the battle is The Operation Room’s animated version. Malbatt: Misi Bakara (Netflix). The above documentary reminded me that there was a Malaysian movie I wanted to see about the Malaysian soldiers who were part of the U.N. convoy sent in to rescue the Americans, and this was it. It’s basically Black Hawk Down, except on a significantly cheaper budget and from the perspective of the Malaysians. So, you know, the American soldiers are portrayed as over-the-top arrogant dicks and their accents are hilarious, like most foreign depictions of American soldiers. But it was an interesting new take on a little-known part of the battle. Greyhound (AppleTV via. Amazon). You can usually expect a movie with Tom Hanks in it to meet a certain threshold of quality, and this one does, albeit barely. It’s 100% plot-driven with almost no character development, and the vast majority of the words in the dialog are long streams of naval commands and jargon, but I found it entertaining nevertheless. Mainly it was one big homage to the technical skill of Navy crews during World War II. I don’t know how it was filmed but it looked like the entire thing was filmed cheaply in front of a green screen, kind of like the Star Wars prequels. Masters of the Air (AppleTV via. Amazon). Speaking of Tom Hanks homages to the greatest generation, this one was in the same category as Band of Brothers and The Pacific. The show is pretty good, although I don’t think it’s quite as good as those other two. Audiobooks Destructive Reasoning: The Authorities, Book 2 by Scott Meyer (read by Luke Daniels). I don’t remember a single thing about the story, it was just Luke Daniels talking in different voices for 8 hours. I had roughly the same reaction to Book 1, but I’d forgotten that. The Tar-Aiym Krang: A Pip & Flinx Adventure by Alan Dean Foster (read by Stefan Rudnicki). A book from my youth. Alan Dean Foster was sort of the Brandon Sanderson of his day, a journeyman writing a lot SF/F books that were okay, but not award-worthy. (I just learned he’s still alive.) I remember liking the Pip & Flinx books and the Spellsinger books. Hearing it now, it’s nowhere near as enthralling as I remember, and Stefan Rudnicki doesn’t sound right for the material. He sounds like one of those audiobook narrators who is just barely a step above an AI narrator–the kind that have the right kind of tonal quality to their voice, but don’t have a lot of acting skill, so it sounds only slightly better than a reading of the dictionary. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie (read by Steven Pacey). I liked the First Law series, but I’m not really vibing on this one very much. I remember nothing of the First Law story, but I remember thinking it had rich, interesting characters. But I’m not seeing that in this one so far. Uninteresting characters just kind of doing stuff without much explanation of why it matters doesn’t make a very compelling book for me. Day Job Most days I sign into work and spend my morning reviewing Slack threads on what’s happened overnight with the half of the team on the other side of the world, and what major changes in team direction have happened since the previous day. Frequently I try to do code reviews in the morning to help expedite work by the India half of the team, and I sometimes get into chat sessions trying to answer questions from the less experienced India developers with their work items. That takes up anywhere from a third to half of my day. Most team-wide meetings are scheduled right around noon my time, which is night for India, but morning for San Francisco. For me, it’s lunch time, and I frequently don’t get a chance to eat lunch until 1-2 pm. I eat a bigger breakfast now. Most of the time I only get started on writing code in the afternoon, but it depends on meeting schedules. Meetings interrupt my programming time at about a 1:2 ratio, meaning that for every half hour meeting it subtracts an hour from my programming time, if not more. World Context I feel like it would be weird not to talk about the new administration in blog posts that are semi-auto-biographical. It’d be like not mentioning the pandemic in 2020. Trump is the only thing anyone’s talking about in this country, or trying desperately hard not to talk about. It’s been about a month now living in the new lawless U.S. illiberal democracy. So far, it’s comical and incompetent and corrupt and unconstitutional, but there’s been no immediate impact on my daily life. There’s no sign of any opposition from Democrats, who remain hopelessly anachronistic. There’s been some pushback from the judiciary against the first four weeks of executive tyranny, but lawsuits take years to resolve, which is far too late to stop a persistent agenda to sow chaos. No time for me to dwell on the federal government, though, because, while you all are lamenting that there’s no viable candidates yet for the 2026 Congressional mid-term elections, let alone the next presidential election in 2028, I’m already in the middle of the 2025 campaign season for the Virginia gubernatorial election just around the corner in November, which will be the next bellweather for the country’s future. Hopefully my state will still be a good place to live after Trump and Elon finish decimating all of the federal government’s credibility, effectiveness, and world power. It’s impossible to summarize the Trump chaos on a daily basis. Here’s just one of an endless parade of examples: The America First, anti-war administration announced a plan to pave over Gaza and build a beach resort town. It’s just crazy enough to … get a lot of Americans killed. Seriously, there’s nothing else in the news anymore. Maybe other things are happening in the world or even in the U.S., but we’d never hear about it. Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), War between Israel and Hamas (since 10/2023), War between Israel and Hezbollah (since 9/2024), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). Bye!