The Recluse Report - May 2026 Part 2

31 May, 2026. 2,386 words.

First, a topic unrelated to anything else: I got an email that my trial period for Google One AI Plus was about to end. I wondered what the holy heck that was.

Apparently I’d signed up for a trial of this new “service.” I don’t remember doing that, but whatever. I might have. Who can keep track of this stuff anymore? It said it was going to start charging me for it, so I investigated.

I do remember signing up for Google One to get more storage space for Google Drive and GMail (100GB I think), because I don’t want to ever delete an email for the rest of my life, and because of a (now stalled) effort to use Google Drive for critical backup purposes.

But what’s this new Google AI Plus nonsense? I stopped reading the benefits at the first item: 2 TB of storage space. I upgraded my account immediately. Yes, please, I’ll take that 2 TB of cloud storage, thank you very much. Now can I have about 500 TB more? Sadly their plans only go up to 20 TB.

Why storage space is tied to “AI” branding is a mystery to me, but it also comes with a bunch of Google AI benefits, if you’re into that sort of thing. (I typically use OpenAI as my personal AI platform of choice.)

Gaming

Haven’t played much lately. I think I’m over my Battle Brothers obsession, and ready to find a new one. See below.

Media Production

This isn’t exactly “media production,” it’s more like “archival photography,” but it does involve “media” in the sense that it involves a camera and JPEGs and stuff.

I recently got a wild hair to digitize my grandfather’s World War 1 diaries and letters from 1918-1919.

When you get cancer you start to think about what value your life has had or could have to future society, and these diaries seem like the most important thing I should preserve for future generations of historians. If I drop dead, the chances of them being treated like the priceless irreplaceable treasures that they deserve to be are pretty slim. Believe it or not, not everyone views handwritten World War 1 diaries as important. (A stunning revelation to me earlier in life.)

The diaries are pocket-sized notebooks handwritten in pencil, and they’re still in decent condition considering their origin and age, but they aren’t getting any easier to read. The pencil is faded and pages are pretty brown. The spine where the pages are held is getting fragile.

I’ve gone through them all before, sometime in the late 1990s. I have a complete transcription of every word I could read, but back in the 1990s I only had flatbed scanner technology, and I was unwilling to smash them flat to scan them, because I was and still am pretty sure it would irreparably damage them. So I’ve never actually imaged the pages.

I consulted the world’s foremost expert on such things: ChatGPT. It’s obvious I still can’t scan the little pocket-sized notebooks with any kind of flatbed scanner. That left setting the notebooks in some kind of cradle, opening it to about 100 degrees or so, setting up a camera overhead, and taking pictures of one page at a time with digital camera technology that didn’t exist in the 1990s.

So using various DIY pieces around the house (Amazon boxes, refrigerator magnets, black cloth, paperclips, cards), I took the inside corner of an Amazon box, lined it with matte black cloth, and setup some magnets so I could use paperclips and such to delicately hold the pages in place so I could take a photo of each page individually.

But I wasn’t happy with my aging Canon 60D for the project, bought somewhere in the mid-2000s. I especially wasn’t happy with either of the two lenses I had. I only had a telephoto lens (useless for this), and a rarely used wide-angle lens that was pretty dinged up from being dropped once or twice.

So I used this project as an excuse to upgrade my camera. I ordered a Canon R7 mirrorless camera, because apparently DSLR cameras are obsolete now, and I ordered a macro lens. (I also ordered an adapter so I could still use my old telephoto lens to take pictures of animals in the back yard with the new camera.)

The R7 is pretty similar to the 60D, just with a lot better connectivity and optics. And the battery doesn’t last very long. Which is how I found out that, no matter how many hundreds of USB adapter and charger and connection cables you have in your house, you never have the exact type you need (a long USB-C to USB-A charger cable).

It’ll take a while to photograph all the diaries. On the first day, which was coincidentally–though not thematically correctly, given that my grandfather actually survived snipers, explosions, gas, and pneumonia in WW1–Memorial Day, I got through about 12 pages of the first diary*.

* Admittedly I was feeling like crap on Memorial Day so I had almost no energy.

I’m trying to work out a standard workflow. I connected the camera to my MacBook Pro with EOS Utility to do remote shooting, so I can quickly setup the diary with the left or right notebook page facing up, do some quick manual focusing, adjust the lights and lens settings for optimal contrast, and snap a picture (RAW + JPEG).

Next I’ll have to figure out how to photograph all the letters my grandfather wrote home, a whole different set of problems to overcome, as they are all folded pieces of paper from 1918.

And, since it’s impossible for me to be a normal human being who doesn’t think they can quickly and easily become an expertly trained document archivist overnight, I’m obviously looking into TEI XML to do another transcription of the diaries.

The original transcription is in a nicely-formatted Microsoft Word document, but I don’t use Microsoft productivity apps anymore, and I hate the idea of not having a “source” document from which to build the final formatted document. I flatly refuse to write and format at the same time. The words are and will always be separate and distinct from the formatting and presentation for me.

Realistically, I’m transcribing in Markdown this time. No need to worry about not being able to read the file format in a hundred years, and it’s relatively easy to compile into a PDF or something with pandoc and some scripts.

Anyway, I’ll just be down here at the very bottom of a deep rabbit hole for a while.

Media Consumption

Mayday: Air Disasters

I noticed this show is referenced in almost every Wikipedia article about a plane crash. It’s peak 2000s Discovery Channel-style trash television.

The best part about this show is there’s about 4,000 seasons, and the low-budget actor recreations are hilarious. To the point where the unintentional comedy somewhat undermines the seriousness of the topic, which makes it even funnier. There’s also interesting interviews and information buried in and around the hilarious parts.

Of course they try to dramatize and play up the disaster part of everything to get people hooked, but it’s a tolerable level because they don’t go too far into sensationalism and exploitation in the recreations.

I started on Prime Video but then I had to switch to Plex to find seasons 13 and beyond.

Game Changer Season 8

A new season of Game Changer is starting on Dropout. Game shows combined with comedy is a good recipe.

I’m also fond of Dropout because they’re one of those scrappy independent “hey we’re doing our own subscription channel instead of YouTube” places but they’re actually good at it.

Home Life

I think I mentioned a while back that I hadn’t seen Marbles the Yellow Cat since last summer, and presumed him dead somewhere in the woods. Then, Saturday, May 23, I looked out a back window and saw a yellow cat poking around the back of the house. I opened the window and said hello, and I recognized Marbles immediately, and he meowed at me and started for the back door. He’s back!

I’ve no idea where he’s been or how he got back here, but I felt a surge of happiness at seeing this train wreck of a half-feral cat again. He disappeared right around the time I was getting diagnosed with cancer and starting treatments. I guess it scared him as much as it did me.

I have no explanations for his disappearance and return. My best guess is that someone else found him and tried to adopt him as an indoor cat. He’s definitely been eating well, because he’s pretty chunky now. But based on my experience with trying to adapt Marbles for inside, he doesn’t like to be trapped for very long except in the dead of winter, so he may have escaped his imprisonment and returned to what he thought was his actual outdoor home.

I thought about ignoring Marbles and seeing if he’d return to his other substitute home, but he seemed pretty happy to see me and has basically stayed glued to the back porch ever since he got here (it has also been raining almost non-stop since he returned), so I started going back to the old routine of feeding him every day. I used to feed him inside the kitchen and then let him back out, but now I’m feeding him outside, because he’s a bit of a mess. He seems healthy but I should get him to the vet before letting him interact too much with Gracie inside.

By the way I haven’t seen Black Cat in a while, which is for the best. Black Cat and Gracie got in a pretty big fight one day, with neither one seeming to back down. I finally got Gracie back inside. But Black Cat hasn’t been seen since that day, so I think Gracie delivered a stern message to go away.

Gracie is one of the main reasons I started taking care of Marbles in the first place, because she never fought with him outside. They seemed to develop a mutual tolerance for each other right away, which was fairly unusual because Gracie tends to dislike other cats around the house, as seen with Black Cat.

Anyway, I’m not sure how to proceed with Marbles. In some ways, I was glad that he disappeared, because last year, with my own future uncertain due to cancer, it was a relief not to have another dependant. Now, after almost a year of treatment, I’m feeling a little better about my life expectancy, but it’s still entirely possible–possibly even likely–I won’t outlive a young cat, and dying before one’s pets seems like the cruelest thing imaginable. My only comfort is that cats are probably more adaptable than dogs, at least.

Cancer Corner

Yuck. I get chemo every three weeks. Mostly it’s fine, except when it’s not. Then it sucks.

In my case, after a Tuesday infusion, the worst part usually hits me the following weekend, so my Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday aren’t the greatest. My stomach tells me very clearly, “do not put any food or water into me or else.” My nose tells me that any kind of food smells awful. I’m constipated, and just drinking water makes my stomach complain. I throw up if I’m not careful, and sometimes even when I am. So I get dehydrated, I get malnourished, I lose weight, and I feel like crap. It’s what I think a stomach flu feels like, except there’s no fever or aches.

Once I get into this weakened state, it’s hard to crawl back out of it. It’s a slow process of drinking and eating small amounts until I start to feel better so I can drink and eat bigger amounts and eventually start feeling normal again. When it’s over it’s like nothing happened. This last time it lasted from Saturday to Wednesday, which is longer than it ever has before.

I’m usually able to request a visit to the infusion center for some IV fluids, but for whatever reason this time I wasn’t able to get an appointment until Thursday morning. (It was just past a 3-day holiday weekend, and I know they’re also in some organizational turmoil because the regular oncologist is out on maternity leave.)

It sucks. It’s the worst part of having cancer, other than the cancer part. (Which weirdly doesn’t present any symptoms to me anymore, knock on wood.)

So now I have to shove food into my face hole for the next week and half to make up for the 10 full pounds I lost over the Memorial Day weekend. Most people like losing 10 pounds, but for me it’s kind of a big deal, because I don’t have that many pounds to spare. Going from 160 to 150 as an adult male is not desirable.

One Year Cancer-versary

It’s been about a year since I first learned I had a tumor in my lung, which started my “cancer journey.” I had intended to write a stirring one-year anniversary post, but it’s not really on my radar any more. Maybe in July, the one-year anniversary of starting treatment.

Anyway, the overall 5-year survival rate for people diagnosed with lung cancer at Stage IV is about 9%. On average, patients live about four months. You can see why last summer was kind of frantic.

Now it’s been a year and I’m still kicking, feeling basically the same as I did at the beginning. Perhaps not worth a celebration, but it’s something.

World Context

This is probably a peak Gen-X opinion, but, I mean, whatever. It’s all a big farce. This America 250 cage match thing has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, while simultaneously being the perfect metaphor for America after 250 years.

Trump has to be the most famous and dangerous example of a person who failed upwards ever. The most famous “social media expert” in history. I don’t see any way out of this except to wait for this perfect storm of idiocracy to blow itself out. Hopefully the inevitable collapse of America into another “former Soviet Union” waits until after I’m dead.

Bye!