The Recluse Report - March 2026 Part 2

31 March, 2026. 3,059 words.

Time marches on.

Gaming

Haven’t played much lately. I haven’t been in much of a talking mood so that cuts down a lot on the games I play. And I’m not really focused on any particular game right now, so I bounce around a lot.

Not Crimson Desert

Haven’t played it. Prominent Steam reviews and Roger’s posts list a litany of the exact kinds of overlooked quality of life details that I would find annoying enough to return the game.

Resident Evil 4 Remake

I’ve had the RE4 remake for years, but I finally started playing, since I saw that the new Resident Evil Requiem is out.

Resident Evil games can be a bit frustrating, because they’re sort of like action games, in that you have to react to game stimuli to stay alive, but your character’s movements are so limited and so slow that you’re constantly fighting with the controls to make your character respond.

A lot of times you have to die a few times before you work out what you have to do to get through the scene, because there’s often a predictive element to the “correct” responses. It’s always easier when you know what to expect beforehand. It’s a bit annoying to play by trial and error that way, and goes against my natural instincts.

Nioh 3 on PS5

I hooked the PS5 into my main recording setup so I could start recording my progress in Nioh 3. I don’t play very much though. I’m nearing completion of the Tokaido zone.

This “open world-ish” part of the game is pretty fun. However, I’m dreading reaching the next major boss because I know I’ll hate it and want to quit the game. There’s such a radical difference in the skill and dedication required in the boss fights versus the rest of the game.

I recently encountered an optional (I assume) boss out in the world named Mezuki. As usual with Nioh-series games, this boss made me want to rage quit the game. It has yet another new mechanic to learn which I call Dark Forces, which is incorrect but makes me chuckle. I tried a bunch of times and gave up, moving on toward Hamamatsu. Whatever reward it drops can’t possibly be worth it. It’s not blocking progress so screw it.

Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker

Mostly dropped off my radar. I have to be really “up” to play this one, since there’s a lot of dramatic reading of quest text.

World of Warcraft Midnight

I completed the fourth chapter of Midnight, entitled Ripple Effects. This represents a grand total of maybe an hour and half of further progress.

There really isn’t a lot of incentive to play World of Warcraft. Every battle is incredibly easy, and I literally press a single button over and over again. So, no tactical challenge.

The story is instantly forgettable. I don’t even know what’s happening from moment to moment, even though I dutifully read every quest dialog out loud. Every NPC is the most generic version of an NPC imaginable.

The loot drops are meaningless. Inventory management is a pain.

So, it’s pretty hard to summon a lot of enthusiasm for continuing to play WoW when there’s almost no reward for the time investment.

Worse yet, videos of World of Warcraft are among the most boring imaginable, because there’s nothing to talk about. “Oh look, I pressed my single attack key again and the enemy mob died again. Glad I came up with that pro strat.” Otherwise I mostly have to stop myself from making fun of the silly story.

The only fun part is trying to read the quest text and match the tone of the NPC’s voice. Lately I’ve been fascinated by one guy who sounds a little like an American Obi Wan Kenobi. But overall there isn’t a lot of quest text to read in WoW.

Ah well. I still feel a minor obligation to continue, since I already started. But I’ve had my fill of WoW for the foreseeable future.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Yeah, yeah, I went ahead and bought MSFS. I don’t know why. Worse yet, I bought a joystick thingy, which hasn’t arrived yet. What a complete waste of money. At least I haven’t bought any of the thousands of dollars worth of in-game purchases.

Media Production

I’m uploading 3 videos a night to catch up again. I didn’t think YouTube would allow that but they seem fine with it.

I got a couple of copyright claims on my Final Fantasy XIV videos, where some random unknown claimant says that FFXIV’s soundtrack music is theirs. (It seems to be the Old Sharlayan music.)

It would be one thing if Square Enix filed the claim, since as far as I know they own the soundtrack copyright. I’d let that go because technically that would be a valid claim, even if it’s bizarre to try to enforce it given worldwide precedent of the last 10 years.

But it’s really galling when it’s some random third party fly-by-night scammer. My channel isn’t monetized so it has no material effect on me either way, but the principle of it is outrageous.

It seems wildly unfair that people can just claim whatever music they feel like, and YouTube does not provide an option in their dispute process to say “this claimant is wrong and actually doesn’t own what they’re claiming.” And the claimant gets to decide if the dispute is valid or not while YouTube stays out of it, so of course a scammer is always going to say the dispute is invalid.

I get that in the early days, people streamed and uploaded copyrighted music all the time and it made sense to err on the side of the claimant, but it seems like an extreme overcorrection that doesn’t make sense anymore.

All I can say is I feel bad for anyone who actually makes a living and depends on money coming in from YouTube or Twitch or any of these platforms. What a thankless grind that life must be.

Incidentally, I crossed 500 subscribers on my channel (after some 10 years), which is only halfway to where I can monetize it!

Media Consumption

Firefly

I’m sure everybody’s heard about the “Firefly Season 2” project by now. I heard about it on the Once We Were Spacemen podcast, which I now have to assume was a big marketing ploy, as pretty much everything on the Internet is now.

Anyway I decided to watch the series and the movie again.

I remember seeing it (mostly by chance) when it first aired, and thinking, “What the heck is this weird thing?” It didn’t really click with me but I didn’t hate it. It was more of a non-event.

I must have re-watched it at some point on streaming or a Netflix DVD or something, but I don’t remember doing so. I say that because when I re-watch it now, the stories are pretty familiar.

The show is certainly unique in that you don’t see very many space westerns. But is it actually good?

Well, again, it’s not terrible. It’s definitely dated. The network meddling is apparent in the tone shifts from comical to serious. The handheld camera work is abominable. The music is silly.

However, the best and most memorable part by far is the ensemble cast of classic archetypes, and the acting performances.

The movie, to my eye, seemed like a better representation of the “vision” of the show than the series was. It was also a really good ending.

So is an animated show a better idea than a live action train wreck? Absolutely. Am I dying to see it? Not really? But I’ll watch it anyway. They are a pretty funny group of actors. It’s one of those situations where the behind-the-scenes actor personalities are more entertaining than their characters in the show.

But I personally would pick Space: Above and Beyond for an animated revival any day of the week.

Speaking of revivals, I heard the Buffy Revival was no longer going forward. Ah well. It probably would have been depressing anyway.

Nuremberg

Pretty good movie, but it started out a lot more lighthearted than I expected from a story about the Nuremberg Trials. It got pretty serious by the end, though.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Finally started watching it. I think I can sum it up thusly: What if Game of Thrones but slapstick comedy? I haven’t finished the first episode yet.

YouTube

I mentioned Pilot Debrief last time, this time I want to mention Mentour Pilot.

I don’t know why I find these highly technical deep dives into flight disasters so interesting, but I do. So there.

Part of it is the standard human fascination with the macabre. Part of it is that it makes me feel better about my own life to hear about disasters much, much worse than anything I’ve ever experienced.

But another part of it is that aviation is just kind of fascinating. The world of the pilot is a world of extreme discipline and training, which appeals to my computer brain. Pilot training, when they start talking about “decision models” and things like that, seems to have a lot of applications outside of flying. It seems generally useful to hear something like “PIOSEE” explained. (A similar model can be found in software development lifecycle, but I don’t think it has a cool mnemonic.)

And it has to be said, this guy is the best I’ve ever seen at transitioning into integrated ads.

Anyway, it’s a good YouTube channel with high production values. Not the usual dreck.

And the guy has a cool accent.

Dave

Another channel I found is called IndoorOutdoorKat, which has a series of videos called “The Suffering of Dave.” I don’t normally bond with Internet cats but Dave is definitely my favorite Internet cat right now.

Dave reminds me of my cat when she’s vocalizing her suffering around breakfast time. I never need an alarm clock because my cat is meowing in my ear the same time every single morning.

UFL Football

I caught a few games of UFL Spring League Football. It’s a lot like NFL football except it’s played in stadiums the size of high school games in front of mostly-empty crowds hehe.

But for some reason they still have NFL-quality broadcast standards with all the 4k cameras and such. There’s a couple of differences I noticed.

First they mic up the quarterback so you can hear his voice and sometimes the coach in the background all through the huddle while the broadcasters are talking. It sounds like a mistake, but they seem to be doing it on purpose. My first thought was: Couldn’t the defense just have someone listen to the broadcast?

Secondly they have a thing called the UFL Drone, which is exactly what it sounds like: A little camera drone zooming around the field that you can see in the background all the time.

And third they like to play a whole concert at halftime, like every game is a Superbowl.

Rules-wise I think the biggest differences are it’s a faster-paced game because of a shorter play clock, and there’s no point-after kick. It’s always a 1-, 2-, or 3-point play from scrimmage after a touchdown, or something like that. And I think I saw a 4-point field goal line marked on the field once for some reason.

Artemes II

NASA is launching a mission to the moon on April 1. This is not a joke. I don’t think.

Anyway, this is the first space mission that looks interesting to me. I’ve mostly ignored all the billionaire space stuff, because it just never felt “real” to me. It just felt like kids playing with toy rockets.

This NASA thing feels real though. I guess because my taxpayer dollars are paying for this one. And NASA innovations tend to filter down to us peons eventually, while I have to assume that Elon Musk isn’t likely to give away SpaceX technology to the huddled masses. So it feels like I have more of a stake in this Artemes II mission.

Like, they’re actually going to fly around the moon. This hasn’t been done since 1972, as far as I know. That’s almost the entire span of my life.

This upcoming flight is much like the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, which was a pretty transformative mission in the history of humankind. The episode “1968” in the series From The Earth To The Moon is one of the best bits of television ever, incidentally. My older brothers are exactly the right age to have followed all that Apollo Space Race stuff, but I missed all of it. Though I still somehow know most of the astronaut names and missions.

I’ve been trying to work out how to actually watch the launch and the mission, because obviously nobody in the news industry is going to give it more than a 30-second blurb. It seems like YouTube is the place.

Home Life

I successfully got the riding mower started again and mowed some of the back yard. This was a minor achievement because last year I was too wiped out from cancer stuff and had yard people handling the yard.

I also had yard people remove a bunch of annoying boxwoods from the back side of the house and they subsequently destroyed my back yard by driving their heavy equipment all over it when it was soggy, turning it into a rugged moon surface covered with grass. Inconvenient.

I’m thinking strongly about getting a treadmill soon so I can try to push myself to do more light exercise this summer. I feel a hundred times better than I did last summer but I still feel pretty weak and atrophied.

UPDATE 4/1: I forgot to mention that I tried out Factor meals for three weeks. I’m looking for ways to ensure I’m getting a steady supply of protein in a decent diet, especially in the week after chemotherapy. The meals were very easy to heat and eat, but I found them fairly mediocre in taste compared to the cost, so I don’t think I’m going to continue.

Cancer Corner

Nothing much to report. At the very least, the cancer is not getting worse.

The last PET scan in fact showed that all previous sites of cancer “uptake” had resolved. I won’t get a chance to discuss the details with my oncologist for several more weeks but I was told it was an “excellent response.”

Treatments will still continue unchanged for the foreseeable future, because the cancer is still in there waiting for a chance to grow again. I like to think of cancer as a mean little alien organism trying to incubate itself inside my body. For now, it seems to be resting.

My oncologist is going on maternity leave soon so my next office visit will probably be with a substitute oncologist. It’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

On another note, I heard the Iran war could impact the helium supply used by MRI machines. Not cool.

World Context

I never thought I’d see a day where Iranian officials sounded more trustworthy than U.S. officials. But obviously I don’t believe a single word coming from this incompetent clown administration about anything, let alone the Iran war. So no, I don’t believe for one millisecond that Iran was “two weeks” away from a nuclear bomb.

News-gathering in the U.S. is a thing of the past, though, which makes it more difficult to opine much about how things are going with this idiotic war.

As a generally skeptical thinker, I have to hold space for the possibility that everything we’re seeing and hearing is wrong and that it’s actually a great idea to blow up the Middle East for generations, and it’s only Trump’s dementia and Hegseth’s frat boy stupidity that makes it sound like a complete disaster.

World War 3?

I’ve heard a lot of talk about World War 3 since Russia invaded Ukraine, and now again with things heating up in the Middle East region. It made me wonder: What do people mean when they say “World War 3”?

For most of my life, “World War 3” meant worldwide nuclear annihilation, particularly between the U.S. and Russia. The implication being that nuclear weapons are a requirement for the label.

However, if you think about it in terms of “a war where more than two countries are involved,” then we’ve had quite a few since World War 2. The Gulf War was one of the more memorable ones in my lifetime.

Or if you think of World War 1 and 2 as thematically connected by German aggression, you’d have to imagine World War 3 would involve Germany again somehow.

The bottom line is that “World War 3” doesn’t mean anything anymore, except as clickbait. Regardless of any of that, “war” doesn’t look anything like it did in World Wars 1 and 2 anyway. Everything’s asymmetrical now.

Incidentally, I saw a press briefing on C-SPAN given by NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy. What a refreshing sight to see a competent government official at a podium.

And now, a funny talking point I thought of after watching Trump’s hilarious cabinet meeting where he ranted about how dangerous Iran was to Americans. Americans killed by Iranian-backed terrorists in the first two months of 2026: 0. Americans killed by Trump’s own government in the same time period: 2.

Looking at the latest No Kings protests, I can’t help but think about how affluent and privileged we are here in the U.S. A couple of months ago, protesters in Iran were shot to death by their government, but here, a protest is just kind of a big party. It has more of a nerd convention feel than a protest feel. It doesn’t really sit right with me to use the word “protest” to describe these gatherings, in the same way I never liked using the word “insurrection” to describe Jan 6. It radically undermines actual insurrections throughout history, and it feels disrespectful to actual protesters in truly horrific countries.

Still waiting around to see if a single Democrat in the entire country might rise beyond the “grit your teeth and cringe but at least they’re not Trump” option.

Bye!