The Recluse Report - April 2026 Part 2

I’m going to stop writing this post on April 28th, because I may or may not have the energy to update it on the 29th or 30th.

Then again, I started taking steroids on the 27th to prepare for a chemo infusion on the 28th, which tends to make my mind race and also makes me vomit words into a document even when it’s far too long already.

Indeed, I woke up at 3 am on the 28th and, while working with Notebook LM on video transcripts, I added even more word vomit to this document.

Gaming

Hot take: Games with complex skill progression or class feats or whatever (ahem Pathfinder: Kingmaker) that you have to study and research constantly… they should have a built-in AI chat bot in the game that you can consult. Preferably trained on actual up-to-date game data, not all the wrong or obsolete community information on the Internet. It’s 2026 folks. It’s not the dark ages anymore. Get with the times.

I suppose I should be somewhat more lenient on games that came out before 2023, but damn it’s annoying not having an AI chat bot instantly available for whatever I’m doing now, having worked with an AI window on the side of programming IDEs every day for years. A chat bot should be on the side of literally every screen on any computer program, in place of the “help” feature. Keyword-style searching is completely dead, imo. It’s natural language for me or gtfo.

Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft

I’ve stopped playing both games. Just waiting for the right mood to strike me to continue the FFXIV Endwalker MSQ, which is the one I care about more. The last quest I did was the level 88 quest As The Heavens Burn, which is the long one where you rejoin the Scions after returning from the past.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to Midnight. There’s too many games and WoW just isn’t at the top of my list anymore. I typically only have the time and energy for nothing but the best 1% of the best 1% of games. (Where “best” is defined as “games I like to play” and not “games that are commercial hits.”)

It’s kind of like books now. 99.9% of genre books are pretty meh. I only have time to read (or more likely listen to) the 0.1% that will still be remembered 30 years from now.

Anyway. Back on topic.

Vagrus: The Riven Realms

I’ve tried Vagrus before, somewhere around 2022. I made a couple of videos that I uploaded, then I returned the game. At the time, I found it was a little too complicated and had a little too much reading.

It’s a narrative-focused RPG where you play the leader of, basically, a merchant caravan roving around the desert. Most of the gameplay takes place in your imagination, because it involves reading narrative descriptions and responding with a choice: Essentially a choose-your-own-adventure game.

There is some turn-based RPG-style combat now and then, in what I call the Final Fantasy style, where you have your guys lined up on the left and the bad guys lined up on the right, and you slug it out until one team is left standing.

Recently, I remembered Vagrus and installed it again. It’s a very hard game to approach with a steep learning curve. The UI is complicated. The setting is very grimdark fantasy. Super duper grimdark, where everything is awful and you’re just trying to stay alive another day.

It’s a bit tedious to play, because every little thing is gamed out and drowning in stats. Every day of travel, every food ration, every camp night, etc. It takes a long, long time to get from one place to another place, where you can pick up some new stories or quests.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say it’s a fantastic RPG worthy of hundreds of hours, but it’s an interesting diversion, if you’re in a grimdark reading mood. And, you know, you’ve been dying to find a game where you can manage slaves as a core mechanic.

Banner Saga

It’s a kind of tactical RPG with a really interesting animation style that looks a lot like that 70s Lord of the Rings animated movie. The story is okay, the combat is okay, but the animation is really cool. Not sure how far I’ll get into it, though. There’s too many games.

The Iron Oath

It’s another tactical RPG of the kind where you lead a mercenary/merchant group on adventures around the world, which seems to be a popular genre for some reason (Vagrus, Wartales, Battle Brothers, and The Iron Oath, that I know of).

It’s got a sort of 16-bit art style, which I find annoying*, because it’s 2026, but the combat is fairly deep and meaningful. And there’s a lot of combat. It starts out with combat and dungeon crawling, somewhat like Darkest Dungeon, then you go to a big world map for overland travel. That’s as far as I got.

I liked it, but again, not sure how far I’ll get because of too many games.

* I just find it annoying that people think 8-bit and 16-bit are “art styles,” when in reality it’s “the only thing that computers could do back then and they definitely would have made better graphics if they could have done so.”

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Probably what I played most this cycle. Bhagpuss’s recent post reminded me to dig out my ongoing five-year-old game and play a bit more.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and games like it, are among my most favorite games to record, because it reminds so much of playing D&D by myself as a kid, and making up stories with action figures and all that nonsense. Previously I played Pillars of Eternity with the same level of obsessiveness.

I’m just beginning the Season of the Bloom (Chapter 3 I think), uncovering places I haven’t seen before. I typically try to explore all the places on the map, until I run out, before pursuing main story stuff.

My party started out at level 7. I have no idea what level I’m supposed to be at this point.

Here’s a quick (ha!) summary of recent events Spoilers abound below.

Excursion 1, Exploring

For my first excursion, I went with a new group: Amiri, Valerie, Jaethal, Ekundayo, and Tristian. And my main the baron, a Vivisectionist that I originally made as a kind of joke, played by a player who doesn’t actually know how to play a Vivisectionist.

This is a terrible group, except Amiri and Ekundayo, who are must-haves and ridiculously overpowered, especially after casting Haste on them. Valerie is largely useless except as a damage sponge. I have Tristian specced entirely for healing and he has no damage-dealing abilities. My Vivisectionist is only able to do real damage when he gets a Sneak Attack, and I have yet to figure out how to reliably do those, plus I’m using a crossbow and I only have one attack per turn, which is awful compared to Amiri’s two and Ekundayo’s three.

One of the problems with Pathfinder: Kingmaker is that there are about twice as many companions as you actually need for a party, so you always have to leave half of them behind. Unfortunately some of the more interesting personalities are the least useful classes.

But I digress. It’s still a great, deep, immersive game, and I still have Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader to look forward to, which should provide many more years of Owlcat-related entertainment.

Back to the latest sessions. I drove off some bandits from a Bandit Camp without having to kill them, furthering my Chaotic Neutralness. I encountered three trolls on the road who ran away from me, but I still killed two of them easily. (It was then I realized that nobody in the party could deal fire or acid damage. I had to use alchemist bombs.)

I found a Monster Den and killed a wyvern, which was much easier than I expected, thanks to Amiri doing multiple 50+ damage criticals. There was no quest for this, so I don’t know what the point was, other than more XP.

I found a Secluded Lodge in the middle of nowhere, which didn’t seem to have much of a story to it (until later). I came across a random encounter of cultists, one of which transformed into a rather frightening owlbear, which downed Dog the Wolf for the first time. (At which point I learned that Dog the Wolf apparently cannot die permanently.)

I explored the Empty Skull Rock which was infested with Trollhounds, which were a pain in the butt to dispatch because my aforementioned party did not have anyone who can easily do fire or acid damage. I had to use all my remaining fire bombs and a handful of Acid Arrow scrolls and Scorching Ray scrolls. It was largely a wasted effort because there wasn’t much loot, however, my party gained much XP.

Then I returned to the castle for some kingdom management activities. I finally figured out how to actually build a settlement in the Outskirts, something I’ve been baffled by for literally years, so I could finally advance the How to Build a Kingdom quest line. (The UI in Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a bit opaque at times.)

Speaking of the Kingdom, I forgot to deal with the Bald Hilltop invasion for The Ancient Curse Part 2, and now I’m getting ominous warnings about the next Bald Hilltop invasion with The Ancient Curse Part 3. The next invasion is set for almost a year from now.

For such a simple-looking game, there’s just tons and tons and tons of deep lore buried in it, presumably pulled from the Pathfinder TTRPG Adventure Path of the same name, which has some twenty years of history to it, or something like that.

Excursion 2, Hunting Grounds

Then I started the Season of the Bloom quests and went on a magical beast hunt for An Amusement for the Nobles. Yikes! Difficulty spike.

I retired the old party and made a new party with Amiri, Ekundayo, Harrim, Regongar, Octavia, and me, the Vivisectionist. This is a much better party, except for Octavia, who I find pretty meh, and me. I was going to try Vivisectionist melee to see if it worked better, as all the guides indicate, but I rolled a 1 or 2 on literally every attack and missed every time, so my evaluation was inconclusive.

In the Hunting Grounds, I fought a bunch of Dire Bears and Wargs (nasty things that knock you down all the time). Then an Owlbear joined the Wargs.

Then, after healing up from that fight, a few steps later I ran into four Owlbears at once, which almost TPKed my party, but I got through it with three people left standing. Octavia saved the day with a timely Web spell on the last Owlbear, and a Dogless Ekundayo finished it off with two rounds of 4 hasted arrows. Then I returned to the hunting lodge with almost everyone at Death’s Door, and got attacked by another Owlbear, when a servant exploded and turned into said Owlbear. Yikes.

Level 8

That got everyone to level 8. I completely respec’ed my Vivisectionist to the way it’s apparently supposed to work (melee instead of ranged). And then I spent like a day and a half leveling up all the other companions, consulting with ChatGPT for each one to see what I’m doing wrong. It’s crazy how deeply complicated the Pathfinder 1E rules are. (It’s also annoying how there is one clearly “best” path for each class, and hundreds of “wrong” paths.)

Next I waited for the royal council to gather to discuss the epidemic of people exploding into magical beasts. I did some more Kingdom management stuff, like building buildings, and handling problems and opportunities. I’m starting to understand a little bit of how that stuff works, thanks to a lot of reading. (I only started reading up on how the game actually works some five years after I started playing.)

Excusion 3, Swamp Bouquet

I formed a new “balanced” level 8 party of me, Valerie, Regongar, Harrim, Ekundayo, and Linzi (suggested by ChatGPT, because they were convinced my party was too heavy on damage, as if that’s a bad thing), and went out to finish the Swamp Bouquet side quest, which I thought would be a quick diversion, but turned into an epic journey.

All I had to do was find some flowers and bring them back to the Swamp Witch, but in searching the entire map I had to fight Owlbears, a Werewolf ambush, Wargs, Giant Slugs, Hodags, and probably some other stuff I forgot. I met a satyr and a dryad, who wanted me to kill a Scythe Tree, which I had done years ago. In all, it took over two hours to get the flowers and finish that quest (for minimal reward, it must be said, but the journey is usually the reward in these games).

Investigating Exploding People

When I got back to the Throne Room the real Season of Bloom storyline kicked off. With Tristian and Jhod, I performed impromptu exploratory surgery on a volunteer to see why they were exploding from the inside out, and it turns out they had some kind of seed in them. And I had to kill another Owlbear almost by myself. At least the patient survived.

As yet it’s unclear who or what is planting seeds in people to explode them. But based on my previous encounters with the deceptive Guardian of the Bloom at the Verdant Chambers, a death trap I managed to escape back in 2023 at level 6 (after many reloads), my money’s on her.

Then Linzi told me Ekundayo was sad and wanted to throw a party for him, so I went back out to the Hunting Grounds for that, where he finally named Dog the Wolf as Okbo the Wolf.

Then Kesten Garess, a loyal vassal of my barony (who I, the player, don’t know), wanted help investigating a Shrine of Lamashtu to find out if Lamashtu cultists are behind the exploding seeds (the Witch Hunt quest). So I went down there and killed a bunch of cultists, chased their leader Tsanna to the aforementioned Secluded Lodge, and ended up exiling her.

As you can see, a lot of stuff happens in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It’s a rare game where I find myself completely immersed in the story and (usually) have no idea how much time is passing while playing.

Next I’ll be exploring the Kamelands, which looks like the next big area to tackle.

Media Production

Mostly recording Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos to continue my 5-year-long-and-counting video series. I end up losing track of time and recording videso that are way too long, which is almost unheard of for me. Then I have to chop those videos into two or three smaller videos, because I don’t like uploading videos longer than 40-45 minutes, the runtime of a one hour television show excluding commercials.

Notebook LM And Video Transcripts

Yet another tip to use AI to simplify your life, if you don’t happen to be rich enough to hire a full-time personal assistant.

I uploaded all the .SRT transcripts of my Pathfinder videos to Notebook LM, going back to the very first video, and now I can query it to find exactly which videos I talked to various NPCs across the series. (I was specifically looking for references to Kesten Gariss, an NPC name I recognize but who I see infrequently enough that I never remember who he is, where he came from, what his deal is, or what he sounds like.)

It’s like having natural language search access to super detailed blog posts I’d written for every Pathfinder: Kingmaker game session going back five years, except I didn’t have to write anything, and it knows far, far more than I would ever put in a blog post anyway.

The only hiccup is you have to convert the SRT files to TXT files before you can upload. A simple task for Windsurf to write a Python program to do just that. (Also a simple task if you want to do it by hand.)

I also ended up having to upgrade to the lowest tier paid plan so I could upload more than 50 sources. It’s a trivial amount of money for what it does, imo.

Said SRT transcripts were themselves previously generated by either OpenAI’s transcription services or, more recently, I switched to AssemblyAI’s transcription service, which is much better.

Here’s an example (Pathfinder: Kingmaker game spoilers ahead):

Find every mention of Keston Gariss in these transcripts, including the name of the file it’s in, the approximate time within the file, and a summary of what was said

Based on the provided transcripts, Keston Gariss (often referred to as Keston or Kestin, and sometimes phonetically as Kestrel or Garis) appears as a major supporting character serving as a guard captain, investigator, and eventual advisor.

Prologue and Investigation

• PF1-20211111000001 - Pt 2 - Prologue
  • Approx. 00:54:57: Keston introduces himself as a fighter of “House Geres” in charge of the mansion guards for Swordlord Jamandi Aldori.
  • Approx. 01:11:20: Lady Jamandi informs the Baron that while they are away, Keston will investigate the night’s events to find out who in Restov is working for Pitax.
• PF1-20211204212610 - A Bitter Rival, Old Sycamore Tree
  • Approx. 00:00:11: Keston meets the Baron and reveals his investigation proved their innocence; Tartucio was the real spy for King Irovetti.
  • Approx. 00:01:39: He identifies Tartucio’s location and tasks the Baron with bringing him in “dead or alive”.
  • Approx. 00:03:31: He shares his backstory: a former noble of House Geres disowned by his father for breaking a strategic engagement with a widow to be with a commoner girl named Tanya.

Reporting and the New Barony

• PF1-20230509191819 - A Bitter Rival, Sacred Hall, Tartuccio…
  • Approx. 00:09:48: The Baron notes that Keston must be informed of Tartucio’s death.
  • Approx. 00:23:23: The Baron reports Tartucio’s fate to Keston at Oleg’s Trading Post. Keston rewards the Baron and pledges to stay to help guard the post.
• PF1-20230513213500 - Stag Lord Fort (remixed)
  • Approx. 00:37:51: Jamandi mentions Keston gave her a full report on the encounter with Tartucio.
• PF1-20230514143017 - A Noble Welcome, Reception, Barony Business
  • Approx. 00:18:52: Keston appears at the Baron’s victory banquet in Restov, seemingly having had a bit too much to drink.
  • Approx. 00:26:47: He arrives at the Baron’s new capital, transferred by Jamandi to serve the new barony.
  • Approx. 00:30:02: He provides an official tour of the new capital square and tavern.
  • Approx. 00:34:09: He explains the purpose of the throne room and the strategic map for the Baron.

Kingdom Management and the Trolls

• PF1-20230514204003 - More Barony Business, Capital Square
  • Approx. 00:01:23: Lander Lebeda advises against trusting Keston, claiming he is now a “broken man”.
  • Approx. 00:07:04: Keston discusses his exile again with the Baron and suggests he would be well-suited for the position of Warden.
  • Approx. 00:19:05: Keston brings reports of a troll invasion in the Gnarlmarches and suggests the Baron investigate personally.
• PF1-20230523213438 - Kalikke and Kanerah, Barony Business…
  • Approx. 00:22:06: Keston reports new, troubling news of trolls in the Gnarlmarches that seem fireproof and highly organized.
  • Approx. 00:23:26: He recommends the Baron visit the mage Bartholomew to learn why the trolls have changed.

The Season of Bloom and Witch Hunt

• PF1-20260426123500 - The Seed of Sorrow
  • Approx. 00:14:38: During the monster-birthing epidemic, Keston conducts an independent investigation and finds “something nasty” requiring the Baron.
  • Approx. 00:05:48: In a letter, Keston explains he left court to lead a militia to reassure the common folk. He reports finding a shrine to Lamashtu in the Kamelands where cultists gather.
• PF1-20260427180306 - Witch Hunt 1 of 2
  • Approx. 00:16:01: Keston meets the Baron near the Shrine of Lamashtu to coordinate an ambush on “Moon Day”. He expresses deep disgust for the cultists’ rituals.
• PF1-20260427184000 - Witch Hunt 2 of 2
  • Approx. 00:05:32: During the ambush at the shrine, Keston is hit by a cultist and knocked unconscious.
  • Approx. 00:14:56: After the battle ends and the Baron revives him, Keston urges the pursuit of a runaway priestess.
  • Approx. 00:17:39: He joins the Baron in tracking the runaway through a gorge.
  • Approx. 00:23:25: At the Secluded Lodge, Keston prepares to arrest the suspects and awaits the Baron’s interrogation.
  • Approx. 00:42:06: Keston executes the Baron’s final judgment on the priestess, banishing or executing her based on the player’s choice.

Here’s another example. It’s not actually every instance for some reason, but it’s a start. More spoilers probably.

After updating the sources, list every instance where I had to reload a previous save, including the filename and approximate time, and what the situation was

Based on the transcripts, here are the instances where a previous save was reloaded due to a Total Party Kill (TPK), a quest failure, or a desire to avoid a specific situation:

1. Thorn Ford (Against Kressle and Bandits)

• Filename: PF1-20211130000001 - Pathfinder Kingmaker Pt 5 - Stolen Land, Thorn Ford.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:17:10
• Situation: The party charged into battle while low on health and was “chopped down” by Kressle and her bandits. Because there were no autosaves in the middle of the map, you had to reload to the beginning of the location, describing it as a “miserable last chapter”.

2. Tusk Gutter’s Lair (Against the Giant Boar)

• Filename: PF1-20211130000002 - Pathfinder Kingmaker Pt 6 - Tuskgutter, Prove Your Worth, Tecnic League Encounter.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:33:43
• Situation: The giant boar, Tusk Gutter, evaded nearly every attack and “gutted everyone” in the party one by one. You reloaded the most recent autosave to attempt the fight again.

3. Temple of the Elk (Against the Bear-like Treant)

• Filename: PF1-20211203000000 - Pathfinder Kingmaker Pt 9 - Stolen Land, Temple of the Elk 1.txt
• Approximate Time: 01:00:00
• Situation: The party was mauled by a massive Bear-like Treant while trapped in their own Grease spell. You noted that everyone was “dead, period, the end” and reloaded after several party members fell.

4. Stag Lord Fort (Multiple TPKs)

• Filenames: PF1-20230509191819 - A Bitter Rival, Sacred Hall, Tartuccio, Stag Lord Fort TPK.txt and PF1-20230510210250 - Stag Lord Fort TPKs.txt
• Approximate Time: 01:12:01 (First file); 00:18:22 and 00:31:05 (Second file)
• Situation: The party was repeatedly “obliterated” and “wrecked” by the Stag Lord and his lieutenant, Akiros Insmort. You reloaded multiple times, concluding that the fight might be “unwinnable” at level 4 without a better strategy.

5. Stag Lord Fort (Quest Timer Failure)

• Filename: PF1-20230513213022 - Attempt to change party.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:05:00
• Situation: While attempting to change your party composition, the game informed you that you had failed to complete the quest in time, ending the story. You reloaded a quicksave to try and finish the fort before the timer expired.

6. Sorrowflow (The “Death Loop”)

• Filename: PF1-20230523213438 - Kalikke and Kanerah, Barony Business, Sorrowflow Disaster.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:36:17, 00:38:07, and 00:39:24
• Situation: While accompanied only by Kalikke, you were repeatedly “insta-killed” by Ferocious Slurks. You described being “stuck in a death loop” and reloaded the same autosave three times before deciding to abandon the encounter entirely.

7. Avoiding Random Encounters

• Filename: PF1-20230705205351 - Pt 24, Sorrowflow Continued, Barony Business, Storyteller.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:17:41
• Situation: You mentioned that you “only had to reload once to avoid a random encounter” while traveling back to your capital from Sorrowflow.

8. Lone House (Against Branded Trolls)

• Filename: PF1-20230708171046 - Troll Trouble, Lone House, Troll Fighting (no commentary).txt
• Approximate Time: 00:22:02
• Situation: After the entire party went down to regenerating trolls, you realized there was no autosave from your camp. You were forced to load a save from when you first arrived at the Lone House and redo the entire sequence.

9. Troll Lair Depths (Against Hargulka and Tartuuk)

• Filename: PF1-20240115112421 - Troll Lair Depths, Kargulka Defeated.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:30:19
• Situation: The party was “brutally” defeated after the boss fight difficulty spiked “instantaneously” in real-time mode. You reloaded to re-attempt the encounter using turn-based mode.

10. Candlemere Tower (Against War Wisps)

• Filename: PF1-20260405151801 - The Curse of Candlemere Continued, Fighting Wisps.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:15:16 and 00:17:56
• Situation: The party was overwhelmed by Ancient Will-o-Wisps and War Wisps. You reloaded twice after major party members were downed by devastating lightning attacks.

11. Candlemere Tower (Avoiding Combat)

• Filename: PF1-20260405161033 - The Curse of Candlemere Continued, Rismel.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:49:54
• Situation: After hearing lightning from a nearby group of wisps, you decided you had “had enough fighting” and “cheated a little bit” by reloading a previous quicksave to avoid the battle entirely.

12. Verdant Chambers (The Ambush Trap)

• Filename: PF1-20230722111942 - Ghoul in the Swamp, Trap at the Verdant Chambers.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:14:54 and 00:43:08
• Situation: Following quest instructions to go alone, you were ambushed and “permanently knocked down” by bandits and summoned monsters. After dying multiple times to the trap and the inability to escape the map, you reloaded a save from before you left the capital and decided to abandon the quest.

13. Swamp Witch’s Hut (Amiri’s Death)

• Filename: PF1-20230709202437 - Swamp Witchs Hut, The Old Beldame, Camping, Scythe Tree, Slugs.txt
• Approximate Time: 00:53:06
• Situation: During a fight with giant slugs, Amiri died permanently from Constitution damage. You reloaded to a point after your last camp to “save scum” and keep her from dying.

I haven’t really said this, but AI is my personal assistant for many everyday tasks now.

I keep seeing stories about people getting duped and suckered and misled by AI chatbots (e.g. in a recent John Oliver story), but I personally haven’t seen any of that.

I only converse with AI on technical subjects, and have never asked it for, say, mental health advice, and very rarely on writing advice. (Though I do ask it for medical advice now and then, mostly in the area of translating doctor-speak into layman’s terms… a handy resource when you have cancer.)

ChatGPT has never flirted with me, though it does tend to be more “supportive” than I’d like. I tend to ask it open-ended questions, and avoid hinting at the answer I want or expect. I pretty much talk to it exactly like I’d IM with a more junior-level coworker, and assume that I’m always smarter.

It’s fairly easy for me to spot a human spouting nonsense (see: anyone in sales, or any Internet forum), so it’s also fairly easy for me to spot AI doing the same thing, so I can’t really relate to a person who believes AI hallucinations.

Media Consumption

Nobody 2

I fell asleep for a time somewhere in the first half of the movie, but I didn’t feel like I missed anything. It is what is is: Nostalgic actors probably having a lot of fun making a generic action movie. It’s almost like The A-Team, to be honest.

For All Mankind Season 5

Previously on For All Mankind: Season 1 was fantastic, seasons 2 and 3 were good, season 4 was meh.

Season 5 appears to be continuing the trends of season 4, meaning that it’s basically a show about distracting old-age prosthetics, with some space stuff happening in the background.

And once again, they’re hoping viewers are too scientifically illiterate to realize that Mars has 1/3 of Earth’s gravity.

Other than that glaring scientific error in every scene on Mars, it’s fine. Not as good as before, but fine. Great acting, even if they keep ignoring the interesting plots (Titan anyone?) for the boring plots.

The Boys Season 5

Speaking of shows that had a fantastic first season, then were surprised by their own success and didn’t have a plan to continue:

The new season of The Boys is pretty much the same as seasons 2 through 4: Just kind of doing stuff that seems like the kind of stuff people liked in the first season, except lacking any coherent narrative. This time, however, there seems to be an attempt to wrap things up and pretend that’s how they planned it all along.

Anyway it’s the only kind of superhero genre show I can stand: The ones where the superheroes are all deeply flawed and terrible human beings.

Day Job

I don’t know about anyone else’s software development job, but mine is pretty much run by AI development tools now.

Our leaders told us to take a whole week, ignore our regular work, and use AI tools to do our work instead. Apparently there are still people out there who don’t automatically turn to something like Cursor or Claude Code or Windsurf for everyday engineering work, so they’re really pushing to ingrain that in all engineers. (My company is particularly enamored with Claude Code and its reusable “skills.”)

And, presumably, they’re trying to weed out engineers who refuse to learn new skills, a somewhat crucial innate skillset for engineering in a big company in the modern world, where everything table flips every year or so.

As I get older, I personally find it more and more difficult and mentally taxing to leap headfirst into brand new technology, but I still retain my lifelong interest in learning new things, so it’s not that hard for me to at least try.

All that is to say I’ve been experimenting with making a Claude Code Skill to query our application logs in Splunk and analyze the results and organize them into a simple, readable output. (Crawling through Splunk logs to find a trail of evidence in a production cloud application you can’t readily access is pretty tedious.)

It works great (mostly), it took less than a day to make (with Claude), but in terms of compute resources required and cost-to-serve, a regular old Python script would be far superior in the long run. But we get pretty much unlimited Claude tokens at work right now, so full speed ahead on spending other people’s money!

I don’t think of myself as an AI apologist, by the way. I just tend to use things that are super obviously convenient and useful. For every 1 incident of AI leading me astray, there’s 100 where it didn’t. That’s way better than Googling search results or asking real people.

And yes, I know the AI bubble will definitely burst someday and the economy will tank. I just hope we can still use AI after that, because having to go back to doing tedious work by hand would suck. Hopefully it’ll wait until I can retire. Or until I’m dead from lung cancer (financially I’m not quite sure yet if it would be better if that happens before or after I retire).

Home Life

A traumatic thing happened to me: I accidentally bought Bread & Butter pickles instead of Kosher Dill pickles.

Hot Chocolate

Another traumatic thing happened to me: I spilled almost a full cup of hot chocolate on my mouse and 1/4 of my computer desk. This kind of thing almost never happens to me, but I was fully into leveling my Pathfinder: Kingmaker companions, utterly lost all situational awareness, and whacked that cup right over and it got hot chocolate everywhere. I froze in total disbelief.

Luckily it didn’t spill into the keyboard or any of the computer equipment on the floor. The buttons on my Razer DeathAdder mouse survived less than 24 hours after getting drenched with hot chocolate, so I ordered a new mouse. This time, since Razer mice recently seem… I don’t know… what’s the word… Bad? Cheap? Flimsy? I got a Logitech mouse to try out instead.

The new Logitech G502 mouse also seems pretty cheap and flimsy, but it works. Has anyone else noticed that a $75 gaming mouse today feels like a Fisher Price plastic baby toy compared to the ones from twenty years ago?

Black Cat

It’s spring time, and that can only mean one thing: A new cat appears out of the woods around my house. (I’ve thought for a long time that there’s a feral colony of cats somewhere out in the woods behind my house.)

Yellow Cat, who I eventually named Marbles, and then Mr. Tangiers Foxface Whitesocks, came and went. Sadly he disappeared last year, never to be seen again. The sad fate of half-feral cats… they just kind of vanish sometimes. Probably dead in the woods somewhere, but maybe scooped up by someone else.

This time it’s Black Cat. The Internet seems to like to call these things Void Cats. I’ve seen this little guy or girl slinking around the front and back porch, a cat probably about a year old

My cat Gracie has also noticed. I’m not really in the market for a new cat, what with having lung cancer and all. But I take my queues from Gracie, who is the final arbiter of whether cats should be chased off or not. So far Gracie doesn’t seem to like Black Cat hanging around her back porch, and has gone into banshee scream mode a couple of times, which she never did with Marbles. Black Cat doesn’t seem too intimidated, and continues to hang around the back porch.

Cancer Corner

I’ll be honest, I’m dreading my 15th chemo infusion on the 28th, after the 14th one gave me such an unexpected sucker punch earlier in the month.

I’m going to try to prepare better for the worst, though it’s not especially easy to prepare to meet one’s nutritional needs when everything tastes and smells gross and curdles your stomach. Most of my traditional foods are off the menu.

It is now the 30th as I write this. So far, I have not had a repeat of the infamous 14th chemo reaction. But that reaction and the subsequent ER visit didn’t begin until Thursday night, which is tonight, as I’m writing this.

However I did not get the bone strengthener this time, because it turns out I only get that every other infusion. I’ve been drowning myself in water and eating well today, and taking anti-nausea meds preemptively. I don’t feel as congested as last time.

I’m pretty tired as evening rolls around though, as I’ve been working from home all day. But no signs of fever, so I’m hopeful this will be a regular, boring infusion cycle.

World Context

After getting my new “REAL ID” triple-checked and verified state driver’s license last year, I was also going to get a passport just to make things easier in this new ID-centric world we live in here in America, but I guess I won’t now.

In other news, I saw a news story that cited a poll where almost half of Gen Z wishes they could live in a world before social media.

Maybe Gen Z isn’t so bad after all. Maybe the world has a future.

I haven’t been on any kind of social media in many years (unless you count YouTube). It’s better. Way, way better. Normalize making regular social media users the fringe outcasts of society, I say.

Bye!

Related

• The Recluse Report - March 2026 Part 2
• The Recluse Report - March 2026 Part 1
• The Recluse Report - February 2025 Part 2
• MMORPGs and a Polar Vortex - January 2026 Part 2
• The Recluse Report - February 2026 Part 1