Just a short update. I’m still here. I have more information about the lung tumor I mentioned last time. It’s been a tsunami of information and activity quite frankly. Most of the news I’ve received is not especially good, so I’ll spare you the gory details, but at a minimum I will say it’s been confirmed to be cancerous.

I was in the hospital June 3 - June 9 having–I can’t believe I’m saying this–brain surgery. It went well, and I’m back home now, awaiting further test results. I have more (outpatient) procedures scheduled next week, and there will likely be a litany of outpatient treatments after that, depending on how test results come back.

I’m fully overwhelmed with all the new information and how to process it all. It feels like my old life is over and a new life has begun, without any consent from me.

I’m being purposely vague because if I write it out in full detail, it sounds scary and like I’m at death’s door, though luckily I don’t particularly feel that way. I actually feel better today than any time in the last month or so.

So, positive steps are being taken, it’s just a maddeningly slow process of hurry-up-and-wait. I have been lucky to get the process moving fairly quickly though. But I’m only on step one of about five hundred.

Needless to say, my gaming and writing and most everything has dropped off to nothing. Most of my focus is day-to-day, eating decent meals, getting enough rest, staying hydrated, basic stuff like that.

I tried Nightreign some weeks back but it didn’t really click with me for solo play.

I’ve been watching Andor seasons 1 and 2, and I think I’m almost at the end of the second season now. Everyone is correct, it’s a very good show (except they tend to throw away the first two or three episodes of each season with a meaningless prologue), but is it good Star Wars? There’s the real question.

I have much the same feeling I had when I watched Rogue One: It’s a great movie, but it would have been better without the Star Wars IP getting in the way. I rarely see things like “Yavin Base” and jump up excitedly shouting “hey that’s from the other thing!” I only think, “Oh okay, that doesn’t matter at all to the story, whatever.” Anyway, your mileage may vary.

I also started watching For All Mankind on AppleTV via. Amazon Prime subscription. It’s a really good show, however it’s less of an alternate history science fiction and more of an alternate history socioeconomic study.

Which is fine, it’s just that I don’t know who it’s for. I often wonder that. Who is honestly still out there looking at a show like this and learning for the first time, “Oh wait, you mean women can be astronauts?” No, trolls on Twitter don’t count.

Anyway it’s a really good show. Every episode is like Apollo 13 where there’s building dramatic music by the end that makes you cheer for human ingenuity and triumphing over adversity.

That’s it, bye!

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Health NewsJust to rip the band-aid off, On Friday, May 23rd, I received some concerning medical news about my lungs. A followup CT scan confirmed a tumor. It’s bad, but I don’t yet know exactly how bad it is. To my untrained ear, it sounds pretty frickin’ bad, but I’m trying to remain optimistic while simultaneously preparing for worst-case scenarios.

Here’s what happened.

I mentioned last time and maybe the time before that I’d been coughing a lot and saw an ENT for acid reflux. I think that was part of it, but not the whole story.

By coincidence, I had my yearly physical with my primary care doctor on Thursday the 22nd and brought up the coughing I’ve been experiencing and he recommended I get a chest x-ray, just in case, which was exactly what I wanted him to say. He agreed with the ENT that it could be acid reflux, and he listened to my lungs but didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.

In olden times, getting an x-ray meant walking into the next room for a few minutes, but now, of course, with all of our modern advances in American healthcare, it means going to the hospital for a walk-in appointment, signing in on a touch-screen kiosk, and waiting hours for your name to be called while listening to everybody else yelling at the people behind the reception desk. Those staff are truly heroic figures for being on the front lines of customer service where people are at their worst.

Anyway, after paying $500 out-of-pocket (it was 20% off on sale!) and moving to a second waiting room, I finally got the x-ray. The actual x-ray process took a maximum of 10 minutes after two hours of waiting. They took one front x-ray and one side x-ray. I asked for a copy of them on a CDROM, and they all sounded shocked and amazed that I asked for “the disc.” I mean, I just paid $500 for it, why wouldn’t I want a copy of the pictures?

The next day, on the 23rd, I got a call from my doctor saying, “Um there’s a problem with your right lung. You need to get a CT scan and you need to see a pulmonologist.” I’ll spare you the exact description of what they saw on the x-ray because it sounds super scary. Way, way worse than the worst-case scenario I had imagined, which was something like pneumonia or bronchitis.

After digging up my USB CDROM drive and the right software, I was able to view the x-ray images on the disc myself, and yeah, there’s definitely something there, and I can definitely tell it’s my body because of the distinctive kink in my upper spine that has caused me so many aches and pains the last couple decades.

So, you know, interesting times. Time to break out the dry humor as a defense mechanism and downplay the existential terror I feel at starting down roughly the same (terminal) path that my mother did in 1991. I’ve always suspected that my relatively good luck with health would disappear one day all at once, and here we are.

In life, it often seems like multiple problems materialize at the same time, rather than having to face them one at a time. Funny how that is. I also have a cataract in my left eye and I can barely read anymore. I was going to try to get it removed this summer but that just got moved to the back burner. Not to mention some car troubles and some desperately overdue home repairs.

I called a phone number I was given and scheduled a CT scan, but American healthcare means that June 5, some two weeks away, was the very first available appointment. What was I supposed to do for two weeks? Hurry up and wait, that’s what. And try to remain upbeat that it won’t actually be a worst-case scenario.

Meanwhile, the only real symptoms I’m experiencing are a crushing headache every day and shortness of breath when I do any kind of physical activity, along with occasional coughing and wheezing, usually at night, and often when I talk.

The coughing is actually better now than it was about a month and a half ago when it got bad enough for me to call the ENT, thinking I had bad acid reflux. Back then, I would wake up in the morning and cough so much I almost felt like I’d pass out, especially during or after eating breakfast, or if/when I tried to talk in the morning. Now, it’s just a minor dry cough, exacerbated by talking and eating, which is roughly what I’ve experienced for many years, even before COVID.

The worst part now, by far, is the nearly continuous headache that has come on in the last month. (It’s been better the last couple of days though, so there’s some good news at least.) I thought it might have been a side effect of the new meds the ENT prescribed, but I’ve stopped taking both of them and seen no improvement in the headaches. So my suspicion is that it’s a reduction in oxygen because of reduced lung function, or stress, or both.

Then I received a call from my doctor on a Sunday saying he’d seen my June 5 CT appointment and he wanted me to get the CT scan a lot sooner than two weeks and would update his order to “stat” instead of “routine” and I should try to call the number again on Memorial Day to reschedule it sooner. That sounds … kind of serious. If it didn’t sound serious before, it definitely does now. Dude, I’m trying to stay positive, here! It doesn’t help when your doctor sounds nervous and calls on a Sunday.

I called the scheduling number on Memorial Day and, surprise surprise, they weren’t open on Memorial Day. The next day, I was lucky enough to re-schedule a new appointment for the following day, Wednesday afternoon on the 28th… but I had to drive much further to get it.

So I drove 25 minutes away to an emergency room in the correct hospital network and got the CT scan. (An adventure in and of itself, because I thought my car might breakdown on the way there.) A “contrasting CT scan” to be specific. That’s the kind where they give you an IV of some kind of contrasting dye so the blood vessels show up better on the scan. The dye gives you a weird feeling of internal heat, and that’s when I learned how fast blood circulates around the human body, something I never realized before. They injected the dye in my arm and I was feeling it in my legs mere seconds later. Weird.

Anyway they did the scans and I returned home. They said it could be 4-5 days before someone reads the results. So I hurry up and wait again, hoping I don’t drop dead in the meantime, trying to figure out how I’m supposed to proceed with normal daily life with this Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

About noon on Friday, the 30th, I received a call from my doctor saying that he had called “them” three times trying to get them to read the CT scan sooner. (A primary care doctor, I’ve learned, is not much higher than a patient on the hierarchy of importance in the healthcare system.) A few hours later I saw the results of the CT scan in my online medical portal, and lets just say it’s a lot more scary-sounding words. The chest x-ray was definitely not a false positive, and it sounds like it’s a bit beyond the “we caught it early and it’s no big deal” stage.

Again, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just speculating. But I’m almost surely hospital-bound at some point in my future.

So not to sound too morbid, but if I don’t ever post again after this, you’ll know why. That sounds like an overreaction when I read that back, but I’ve never dealt with anything this potentially serious before. As you can imagine, it’s fairly overwhelming. I wasn’t prepared for this, but then, who is?

I started posting vlogs on my real-name YouTube channel. If you happen to be a family member or know who I am, just search for my name on YouTube (use “thomas” instead of “tom”) and you’ll get more timely updates. It’s a lot easier than trying to write it down.

Most of the rest of this post was written before May 23rd, and, frankly, none of it really matters to me anymore.

GamingThe new gaming PC continues to work well. Not much else to say about it. Gaming PCs either work or they don’t work, and that’s the extent of the conversation. The next time you think about it is when you run out of room for installing games. I haven’t completed installing stuff on the new PC or rearranging my living room area, so there’s just a bunch of computers and tables strewn around with wires between them.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33What a roller coaster of emotions this game is. One day, I love it. The next day, I absolutely hate it with a burning passion and fully rage quit playing. I see all the positive reviews, and there’s only one universal comment that I wholeheartedly agree with: The music is amazing.

The story? I’m still in Act 2 so my views might change, but I felt like the quality plummeted in Act 2, and it went into plotlines and characters that I couldn’t care less about, not to mention changing the goalposts of the actual gameplay. Honestly I feel like they must have inserted Act 2 to artificially stretch out the game.

Everything about the combat system is completely undermined by one design decision: Almost every attack animation is designed to be a huge slap in the face to the player. A big Nelson-from-The-Simpsons HA-HA! moment. I’ve never seen such trolling from attack animations before. The number of fake-outs and feints they throw at you to get you to dodge at the wrong time is comically over-the-top. It’s impossible for me to feel any respect for it.

I simply can’t understand how modern game designers can’t tell the difference between fun, satisfying tough-but-fair gameplay and maddening, repetitive, time-wasting tough-but-unfair gameplay.

I’ve also never seen a video game where all three difficulty settings are equally infuriating. That probably stems from the fact that there really isn’t much difference in the three settings, except in the amount of damage you receive, so it’s all pretty much the same no matter which one you pick. The settings should have been labeled: “Die occasionally before you learn the dodge timing,” “maybe die before you learn the dodge timing,” and “die a frick-ton before you learn the dodge timing.”

Pick easy? You have to slog through combat for what feels like hours even though there’s little chance of dying. “Story” my butt. It’s “still mostly combat” difficulty, to be sure. Don’t let the advertisers fool you.

Pick hard? It will still take hours because you’re going to die several times when you encounter new enemies because it’s impossible to visually react to a new enemy’s attacks when you’ve never had a chance to study and practice their timing (which essentially means learning which parts of their attacks to ignore). So now, the hours of wasted time will be extended because of running back to the combat encounter and starting over again.

Pick normal? It’s not much different from Hard, to be honest, except you can survive three or four hits instead of one or two. But you’ll still die sometimes, and boss fights are exponentially harder and deadlier than trash mobs until you figure out when to dodge.

But if you start on Hard and switch down to Normal, it feels very easy and you end up feeling that endless chore of combat again. No matter which difficulty level you pick, the game feels extremely easy once you internalize when to dodge, even on Hard. Replaying any portion of the game on Hard feels like ez-mode. It’s only “hard” the first time you encounter a boss or enemy.

Regardless of which difficulty you play on, there’s no reward or achievement for any of them. You’re just picking the least bad option, which, for me, initially meant Hard. At least there’s a small sense of accomplishment or relief from slogging through an hour-long fight, not just a crushing sense of boredom from meaninglessly clicking the same buttons repeatedly for an hour.

Lately I’ve switched back to Story, where I can spec all my points into attack power to try to shorten the fights a little bit.

Overall it reminds me a lot of the pre-remastered Mass Effect 1 or The Witcher 1… the parts in-between the cut scenes was a chore to get through.

This is exactly what I was afraid of when I got this game, but I was fooled into thinking it would be okay after seeing the first 5-10 hours. So, so many games would be a thousand times better if they ended at or before 10 hours.

Anyway I’ve rage quit Clair Obscur so many times now and slunk back to it later, realizing I was overreacting and just wasn’t in the right mood. When I start getting impatient to progress through the game (to see the story play out), I start getting mad when the game throws up all these arbitrary and unfair and un-fun road blocks that can’t be surmounted without time-consuming repetition.

To make matters worse, the story took a turn starting in Act 2 that I wasn’t too fond of, so my interest has dwindled. They shifted the focus to characters I couldn’t care less about for inexplicable reasons.

The point is I’m not super anxious to continue playing it right now.

Elden Ring: NightreinI tried Elden Ring: Nightrein for a little over an hour on the 29th and 30th, up through the obligatory mandatory death, the new Roundtable Hold, and a couple of failed expeditions. My hot take is that it’s sort of like Monster Hunter World in the Elden Ring universe. You can play it offline solo but it’s pretty clearly designed for 3-player co-op, so I don’t know if I’ll play it much.

There are significant changes in mechanics from Elden Ring that I don’t particularly like. Steam reviews are already Mixed, typical of the overly-cynical game community, but it seems fine to me, if you like fighting stuff using the basic Elden Ring combat mechanics (which is pretty good). But it’s not Dark Souls or Elden Ring. I feel very little compulsion to keep playing it, except there’s nothing else to play right now.

Media ProductionI don’t see how a playthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would make a good video series, so I don’t even think I’m going to upload my videos. Unless I spend a bunch of time trying to make an abridged series just to document all the ups and downs of playing the game. But then, I should make a backup of the videos to YouTube. It just sucks to upload something I know isn’t very good. I get really mad and rant at the lunacy of the game design fairly frequently, and I don’t like uploading that stuff.

People get really touchy when you criticize things that seem obvious to you, but everybody else only sees it as haters being haters. Also sometimes you have a bad day and gaming problems excessively rub you the wrong way, which has happened a bunch with Clair Obscur. Literally every time I see an enemy pull a spear back and just frickin’ stop there it makes me want to flip a table.

Anyway in light of the lung thing, I can’t really talk very much without descending into coughing, which isn’t very conducive to making videos. I’ve tried to hide it the last couple of months with judicious use of a mute button, but the coughing comes on so suddenly now that I can’t reach the mute fast enough any more. So, probably not going to be recording much more.

Media ConsumptionQuestion: Is Andor the new The Wire or Breaking Bad? That one show everybody is like “you’ve got to watch this!” but they gush so much about it that you don’t want to go anywhere near it? I watched like 10-15 minutes of the first episode of season 1 last year and felt no desire to continue watching it.

Anyway I don’t have Disney+ so I’m not watching it. Everything I watched on Disney+ last year immediately disappeared and I have no memory of any of it. Which, to be fair, is what happened to me with The Wire, too, a show I watched every episode of and loved but could not tell you a single thing about it now. I think there were some disgruntled cops in it.

The Last Of Us season 2 (Max). The second season is now over, but the The Last of Us Part II is only half over. I think they’re getting the “essence” of the game’s story right, in particular the whole purpose of this first part being to train us that Ellie isn’t a hero and isn’t particularly bright. I distinctly remember thinking Game-Ellie was an idiot most of the time in Part II, and I remember wishing for her to make good choices but she almost never did, until the very end of the game. Anyway 99% of the online community discussion is nonsense, but I too think Bella Ramsey is the weakest link in the show. I’m looking forward to season 3, because I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but Abby’s story is far superior to Ellie’s story in Part II. There is a lot of hate for season 2 online, just as there was for the second game. Most of it is laughable. A lot of it boils down to “it’s not a shot-for-shot remake of the game and why did they have to change it because it was perfect and we hate change.” I’d opine that it should have been left as a game but otherwise it wouldn’t have reached a wider audience.

American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden (Netflix). The most comprehensive documentary I’ve seen of that whole thing. A lot of people would be appalled by CIA military-types like Cofer Black, and I certainly wouldn’t want to have a Thanksgiving dinner with him, but I find them pretty funny and I also find it somewhat comforting to know they exist, as long as they’re on my side.

The Studio (AppleTV via. Prime). It’s not that great but it’s kind of funny. The main thing I watch it for is the clever one-take camera work. I’m always watching the background of the shot to see when they switch the stunt doubles in and out, instead of whoever’s talking in the foreground.

Nosferatu (2024) (Amazon rental). I know little of the history of the silent film except that it was caught out as an unlicensed theft of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and still somehow birthed the horror genre. The new one is pretty good quality cinema. Expect a lot of creepy gothic music, period costumes, sets, and cinematography, slow pans, pushes, and pulls that test your television’s frame-rate conversion capabilities, black and gray palettes, rubbery prosthetics that remind you of ET, and over-the-top Victorian and Transylvanian accents. And rats. Lots and lots of rats. Also, cats that you expect to be Chekhov’s Cats but aren’t. The basic OG vampire stuff. Back to the basics. It’s the kind of rare old school movie that looks like it was made more for the director than the audience.

Mickey 17 (Max). Pretty funny and imaginative. Goes to a very different place than I expected. But I have a minor problem with movies that portray their villains as comically sociopathic and stupid.

American Sniper (Netflix). Because it was leaving soon. Not bad, though I was extremely distracted while watching it.

Fountain of Youth (Prime). Formulaic treasure hunt stuff starring Natalie Portman and John Krazinski, two people you would never expect to lead a Davinci Code-style movie like this, and who, in fact, aren’t believable in the slightest. Not funny, not interesting, not good acting or writing or directing, but successfully passes the time.

Something Something Tylenol Murders (Netflix). I didn’t realize that was still an open case. Lots of speculation about a Big Pharma cover-up but that feels pretty conspiratorial to me, fueled more by confirmation bias than any real evidence.

The Guilty (2021) (Netflix). Bold move to make a whole movie about Jake Gyllenhaal sitting at a computer, talking on the phone. You know where most of the budget for the movie went. Anyway it wasn’t terrible, and I was fairly invested in it. Would like to see the original version someday.

Flight Risk (Starz trial). What a pickle! Adequate thriller. Predicable at every turn, but not the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

Probably others that I’ve already forgotten. In the latter days of May I’ve been watching a lot of stuff because it’s the only way to keep my brain from spinning out of control while I can do nothing but wait for further medical results.

I get served a lot of history-related YouTube videos now, and sometimes I click on things that look interesting. I have to say there’s something infinitely funny about some Gen-Z or Millennial nerd cosplaying in Army fatigues talking about World War 2 tanks like he’s writing a Reddit comment. It’s funny as hell to see people nerding out about guns and war in a way that previously only would have been seen with people talking about something like Star Wars or anime.

Home LifeFlat Tire SagaPrior to all the medical stuff, I discovered the front right tire on my car was fully flat, a big fat 0 psi. Luckily I realized this before I’d left my subdivision, when I noticed an odd noise from the right side of the car, and didn’t drive all the way to the store and back on a rim.

I had to replace it with the spare donut tire in the trunk. I also had to learn what a “tire key” or “wheel lock” was, something I don’t think I’d ever dealt with before, at least not on this car (a 2009 Honda Accord). It’s the kind of thing you learn about once every 15 years and then promptly forget again. One of the lug nuts requires a “key” in order to dissuade people from stealing your tires, a possibility I’ve never once considered, since, as far as I know, I don’t live within the borders of any criminal chop shop enterprises. I don’t remember asking for them on this car, but it’s probably one of those things they throw in along with 50 other things nobody wants in a package deal.

At least now I know, in any future new car purchases, not to get wheel locks if I can help it, because yeesh what a pain in the butt finding that key was. First I had to take a picture of the wheel and the lug nuts and upload it to ChatGPT to even find out how to remove the keyed lug nut, then I had to commence an extensive search of the interior of the car for the hidden dashboard compartment where the lug nut key had been resting untouched for some 16 years since I bought the car.

The cause of the flat was a very obvious roofing nail. ChatGPT informed me, after I took a picture of it and uploaded it, that it was in a location close enough to the “shoulder” of the tire, that it would likely prevent the tire from being repaired, and it would have to be replaced. Which, as it turned out, was correct.

The spare donut tire was also fully flat when I pulled it out of the trunk, by the way, so I’m really glad I wasn’t on the side of the road somewhere changing the tire, because the spare would have been completely useless. (Luckily, I’ve never had to change a tire out on the road somewhere.) A lesson for other car-owners, I suppose… check that your spare tire is actually inflated now and then.

I was able to inflate the tire with a Cycplus tire inflator that I bought some years ago, a handheld battery-powered device made mostly for inflating bike tires but also happens to work on car tires (and riding mower tires). I bought it because I got sick of trying to find places out and about in the world, at gas stations mostly, to inflate tires. A lot of them are coin-operated, and I don’t know about anyone else, but I almost never have coins (or any other form of cash) on me.

So an appointment with the dealership I made. Which, speaking of AI, the appointment was made by talking to an AI agent on the phone on a weekend. Or possibly the most computer-sounding human ever. I think it’s the first time I’ve interacted with the new Agentic AI that is taking the business world by storm, replacing customer service people with AI agents. This will free up huge swathes of young people to keep pursuing their dreams of becoming TikTok influencers so it should be a win-win for everyone, unless Republicans have their way and young people have to start putting screws into iPhones for minimum wage. Neither option sounds like a great career path for young people, if you ask me.

I haven’t lost my tire-changing skills. I was able to drive to the grocery store and back once on the spare donut without incident, and then to the dealership repair appointment later in the week.

Anyway I got the flat tire fixed at the dealership, which gave me a fun opportunity to sit in a waiting room for over an hour listening to a podcast. It felt weird to wear earbuds in public. I only used the left one so I could still hear the room around me. They replaced both front tires and did an alignment. Still need to get an inspection and get the alternator checked out.

Although in light of the lung issue above, that all might be a moot point.

Day JobI have to admit, receiving distressing medical news does not put one into a good mindset for going to work normally, and definitely doesn’t put one in a good mindset for concentrating on abstract programming work. Especially when one has a splitting headache every day. I’m going to need to talk to my supervisors about this and will probably need extended time off. I just don’t know when.

World Context So Joe Biden has prostate cancer, and Jake Tapper wrote a book about how everybody tried to cover up his decline for the election. My response is a resounding noooo duuuuuuuuuuh. That’s* your bombshell report? How dumb do you think we are? We can all just read the Wikipedia page about FDR’s last term, it doesn’t take a TV investigative journalist to figure out they were trying to do the same thing. * How’s that Panama invasion going? * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). * George Wendt (actor), Loretta Swit (actor).

Bye!

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GamingThe Devil In MeFinished this one. It was meh. Not scary. Story makes no sense. No consequences for any actions. People die and then come back for no reason other than the trope demands it. No resolution for any of the mysteries. Forgotten immediately after finishing. Typical horror fare.

In my playthrough where I chose options randomly by dice roll, three of the five survived. You can always tell which ones they don’t expect the player to save because they don’t have any lines at the end of the game, and one of mine didn’t say anything at the end, just sat there.

Oblivion RemasterI was unable to stop myself from buying it. It starts out exactly the same as the original. The first hour of Oblivion is incredibly boring, and I’ve played that stupid intro and interminable tutorial what feels like hundreds of times, to the point that I can’t stand Sir Patrick Stewart’s voice. “This is the hour of my doom” blah blah yada yada just die already so I can get out of these stupid sewers.

So I had to “get through” the beginning part in the remaster even though I kind of hated it. But I got to where it opens up, saved the game before stepping out of the tunnel, so I never have to do the intro again, and I’m looking forward to exploring it as a secondary game.

So far I’ve only wandered over to Cheydinhal with my wood elf archer. For all intents and purposes, it’s identical to original Oblivion. The game looks way different but it doesn’t play much different and the complexity (or lack thereof) of the NPC conversations in town definitely aren’t any different.

Incidentally, the game is a beast in terms of graphics usage. I assume it’s the new Crysis benchmark. On the High preset at 1440p it runs at like 15 fps on a GeForce 3070. But: See PC upgrade below.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33Most every single-player RPG setting falls into one of these general vibes: Some Bankable IP, Military, Tolkien, or Japanese Anime. So it’s a rare treat to see a new game with a vibe that falls outside those tropes. Anything. Literally anything outside those tropes grabs my attention immediately.

And so it was that I noted the release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a while back, but I hesitated to buy it for fear that it would be all flash and no substance. A lot of games that look fantastic (i.e. every game based on a movie) turn out to be mediocre because they spent all their time and energy on motion capture and cut scenes while the gameplay is phoned in “default out-of-the-box game engine” fare.

I’m happy to say that they didn’t phone in the gameplay, and I can recommend it. It’s no Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s not bad. To be fair, the gameplay vibe is very anime even if it doesn’t look like anime, with the combat system being essentially a carbon copy of Final Fantasy XIII, with the addition of realtime quicktime events.

But the real star of Expedition 33 is the setting and the story (and the music). I can’t say enough good things about it. I find it very thought-provoking. So far, at least. I’m still in Act 1, so there’s plenty of time for it to plummet off a cliff. But I’m hopeful it won’t. The acting performances are very good.

There’s a big problem with the combat mechanics, though, and it was almost a deal-breaker for me. When facing a new enemy, it’s impossible to gauge when the attacks are going to land, and when you’re supposed to press the dodge (or parry) button, until you get killed enough times to get a feel for the speed of the attack animations and the rhythm of the combos. And you have to dodge to survive combat, especially on Hard difficulty. Many of the attack animations are deliberately designed to trick you into dodging at the wrong time (you know, enemies that slam their club down but they hit the ground instead of you, enemies that pull their spear back to stab you but then just sit there for a few seconds before moving again, stuff like that). It’s a recent growing trend in gaming that I despise. Undoubtedly game designers and animators are thinking “oh no players are getting too smart and too experienced, the bosses in the first Dark Souls game are laughably easy now, we need to do something to make things harder for them.”

Anyway, for that reason, the first six or seven hours of the game were very frustrating for me, before I got a better feel for the parameters of the gameplay and what the game expected of me and, more importantly, how I could master the negative feelings of being tricked constantly by the attack animations.

Recently I’ve been thinking there’s another big problem with the combat mechanics, but it’s more in the player’s favor. The realtime dodging is a unique twist on the turn-based system and a worthy experiment, but I think they’ve undermined the foundation of a typical turn-based RPG combat system. If you dodge successfully, there’s really no need to engage with any of the rest of the RPG systems in order to win battles. So far, at least. For example, since dodging negates all incoming damage, you’re guaranteed to win a battle if you’re mostly successful at dodging (because the enemies have no way to negate your damage). You don’t even have to risk any parries. Therefore it doesn’t matter a whit which Pictos or Luminos or Skills you have equipped, rendering all of those systems moot. They only determine how quickly or slowly you’re going to win the battles.

So I’ve realized that the main and only thing you need to build your characters for in combat are the small windows of time when you encounter a brand new enemy you’ve never seen before, when you don’t know the timing of the dodges. Those are basically the only periods of time when you’re vulnerable and it’s possible to fail in combat, barring lapses in concentration.

That’s my two cents, at least. I talk about this a lot in the videos I’m recording while playing. It’s the curse of having played video games for over 30 years. That competitive instinct to find ways to optimize gameplay for maximum success is burned into me.

Anyway, my current character builds have all points in Vitality and Defense and zero points in anything else, and the only Skills/Pictos/Luminos I care about for survival are the ones that grant Health buffs or AP or Shell buffs. I’m currently near the end of Act 1 on Hard difficulty and have had zero expedition TPKs except for that cursed Chromatic Troubador, which I gave up on. Except for that one, I’ve won every battle on the first try.

Also, the mouse-and-keyboard controls are phoned in, like the game developers had never even heard of a mouse or keyboard before, like so many other games before it. (Honestly I fear we may be approaching a time when younger folks writing games have literally never used a mouse or keyboard before and can’t even conceive of a world where they exist.) Don’t even bother trying to play without a controller. Luckily it’s not action-oriented enough to hurt my left thumb too much. Most of the time I can even use my left index finger to work the left stick for moving around without any fear of getting killed.

On a more positive note, the music in Clair Obscur is fantastic. One of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in a while, probably since Nier Automata.

By the way, I still don’t know who Clair is. But I’m only in Act 1. I’m guessing it’s like Horizon Zero Dawn, where you didn’t learn what the heck those three title words together meant until toward the end of the game. It’s so random-sounding it was like playing a game called Stick Umbrella Heaven.

Age of Wonders 4I saw Age of Wonders 4 on sale and bought it impulsively, knowing for sure I wouldn’t be able to get into it for more than an hour before remembering that these kinds of games have long since lost their luster for me.

As it turns out, I was right. It looks cool, it seems perfectly fine for this type of game, but these big 4X games are all the same now: It’s like playing a game where you have to take a college calculus course before you can even start clicking buttons on the screen. They have tutorials that tell you what to do, but when they tell you what to do, it goes in one ear and out the other immediately, so you have no idea what to do on the second game.

I’d love to design a UI for a 4X game. I’d hide 90% of the complexity of the game at the start, and then slowly ask the player to opt-into more and more options and information over the course of time. Instead of, you know, presenting the player with a thousand screens of incomprehensible words and numbers right at the start, thereby ensuring that the games are unapproachable to anyone who isn’t already deeply invested in the genre.

I have fond memories of Empire on the Amiga and one iteration of Civilization (was it Civ II or Civ II Call to Power? One of those) on the PC in the 2000s. I played them to death and thought they were the greatest games ever made. Every single attempt to play a 4X game since Civ II has been a dismal failure for me. That mythical “just one more turn” thing does not exist and I have no idea what any of you are talking about.

New Gaming PCIt wasn’t exactly triggered by Oblivion–I’ve known this would be the year I upgraded my PC since January–but I finally ordered and received a new gaming PC to replace my 2021 PC. (That’s how I make big purchases… I decide I’m going to buy a thing for sure, then wait six months thinking about it off and on, then I suddenly wake up one day and buy it.) I hope it lasts until 2030.

This is the first time I’ve ordered a pre-built gaming PC. It’s also the first time I’ve gotten an AMD processor, and the first time I’ve used liquid cooling instead of a fan.

I hate revealing PC specs because it’s like waving a big flag and yelling “hey look how much better my life is than yours!” but it’s an AMD Ryzen R9-9900X with a GeForce 5080. In practical terms, on the old PC (an i5 with GeForce 3070), the beastly Oblivion Remastered ran at about 15 fps on the High preset at 1440p. On the new PC, it runs at a solid 60 fps on the Ultra preset at 1440p.

It was more complicated to setup than I hoped. I’m old now so I’m fully entitled to every luxury, so I ordered a pre-built machine so I could pull it out of the box, plug it in, and go. However I didn’t account for the unpacking process, which involved taking the tempered glass side off, checking components, and removing packing material. (I didn’t want a tempered glass side but it’s impossible to find a gaming PC that doesn’t look like a 1960s Star Trek bridge console, unless you build it yourself and dig deep in the bowels of the underworld to find plain-looking parts.)

I also didn’t account for rearranging my desk setup. I have a dream that someday I might have a gaming setup where I don’t have spiderwebs of connecting wires coiling everywhere on the floor gathering dust. So I had a crazy idea to setup a second desk (a writing desk, which was my previous gaming desk), and place all of my PCs on the desk instead of the floor. I’ve never put a tower PC case anywhere but on the floor at any time since I got my first one for playing Doom somewhere in the mid-90s. To be clear, I have no interest whatsoever in looking at the case, I just want it off the floor in the hope that I can organize the wiring better, and so I don’t have to lean over so much to plug in USB cables.

And I definitely didn’t account for migrating all my games and applications to the new PC. Thankfully Steam has this feature where if it discovers another copy of Steam on the same network, it will copy the files across the local network instead of downloading them from the Internet, which saved a ton of time re-installing Oblivion and Clair Obscur. However that doesn’t help with any of the other stuff I’m likely to install on the new gaming PC, like a Python environment and Davinci Resolve and stuff like that. (The new gaming PC is also going to be the new video editing PC, obviously.)

Normally I have a gaming PC and a recording PC. Now I have a new gaming PC, an old gaming PC, and a recording PC. Eventually I want to coalesce that down to a new gaming PC and a new recording PC, and retire the old recording PC. It’s a rather daunting prospect to think about all that software and hardware migration, though, so I’m going rather slow and I’ll likely have three machines for a while.

Side comment: It’s shocking how big and heavy gaming PCs are now. Somewhere around 2014, my gaming PC was a mid-tower case and light as a feather. Today it’s like a mini-refrigerator in size and weight, bigger and heavier even than the massive steel tower cases from the 2000s. I almost need a hand cart to move it.

Media ProductionI have a conundrum with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. When I record a game series, I like it to be sort of a documentary showing the arc of my reactions and experiences in the game from start to finish. Ideally I’ll be struggling to play at the start and then overcome impossible odds to master the game and win a huge victory for God and country by the end.

Well, you see, Clair Obscur has been a roller coaster. I started on Hard difficulty. It was fine except I died a lot because it’s impossible to predict when to dodge until you’ve practiced the fights by trial-and-error. I switched to Normal difficulty and it got significantly better, but then I reached another point of frustration and switched it to Easy difficulty. Then I found the combat became boring and I wasn’t even paying attention. So I switched it back to Normal difficulty. (I got to the continent area following the Gestral Village.)

Then I had a sudden urge to restart again on Hard, now that I had learned a lot of things I could use to avoid dying in every fight, and thought of a strategy to put every attribute point into Vitality and Defense. And because I remembered that I played 95% of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Hard, but that little bit I didn’t play on Hard cost me the achievement for completing the game on Hard, which has annoyed me ever since.

The problem is, the video series now has hours of repeated content. Do I cut out the whole part I played on Normal and Easy? Or do I leave it in? It’s better to leave it in for the sake of documenting my experience of the game. But it’s better to cut it out for the sake of the viewer experience. Or do I cut out all the parts I replayed on Hard? Then nobody will believe that I got through all that stuff on Hard after I spent so much time complaining about it and dying again and again. Decisions, decisions. These are the kinds of difficult decisions that plague me when preparing game videos for the channel.

Undoubtedly I’ll take the easy path and just upload everything as-is, leaving the burden of skipping things or not to the viewer.

Media ConsumptionThe Last of Us season 2 (Max). Complex feelings. It’s not as good as season 1. In season 2, I find myself thinking, “Just skip to Abby’s story, that’s where the real meat is.” Show-Ellie’s story is kind of hard to watch, to be honest, because she’s so unsympathetic in season 2 (intentionally, to be fair). If it weren’t for Dina, this season would be completely unwatchable. I’ve just heard they’re splitting Part II of the game over season 2 and season 3 of the show. Yuck.

The Studio (AppleTV via. Amazon). Seth Rogan has never been one of my favorite comedic actors, but this show is pretty funny. Not riotously funny, but pretty funny, in a “ah okay I get what you’re going for there” kind of way. Also they’re obsessed with moving camera “one-take shots.”

Taskmaster series 19 (YouTube). I’m over my most recent Taskmaster uber-fan phase so I’m not as psyched as I previously was, but it’s still pretty funny.

Turning Point: Vietnam (Netflix). Good documentary. Every time there’s a new Vietnam documentary, there’s more and more details and interviews from the Vietnamese perspective. The U.S. perspective is always the same: What was that for?

Various True Crime Shows (Netflix). I got into another rabbit hole of watching true crime shows on Netflix. There’s something oddly comforting about the fake scary music and detectives droning on about their investigations in that cop-lingo affectation. One was a show about JonBenet Ramsey, which was an OJ-level 24/7 atomic bomb in the tabloid world but I steadfastly refused to pay attention at the time because of how gross the whole thing seemed. (However I now know that the publicly-believed story that the parents did it seems to have no credible evidence.)

Oceanliner Designs (YouTube). I found another weird YouTube rabbit hole of Titanic-related videos, and found a fairly respectable documentary-ish channel Oceanliner Designs, which did a number of “ship X sinking in real time” animation videos of famous shipwreck disasters (Lusitania, etc.). I love finding these super niche channels doing mini-documentaries, and I always wonder how and why they do so much work day in and day out. Do people still think they’re going to be “discovered” one day if they make good content, then become the next Netflix true crime documentarian? There’s been decades of proof that “luck” and “connections” and “money” are the driving factors in standing out in democratized content, so surely not. Are they making any money at all from their Patreons? I can’t even conceive of a world where Patreon subs could pay anyone’s rent.

The Raven’s Eye (YouTube). I don’t know if it’s just my algorithm bias, but I see a lot of good content channels based out of Australia and New Zealand. In a similar vein to Oceanliner Designs, which documents famous shipwrecks (among other things), I stumbled on this channel that documents obscure and famous air disasters (among other similar disaster-type things) with a thicker Australian (I think?) accent.

Disaster content seems pretty popular on YouTube. Grim to be sure, but this channel, at least, is well-made and more informative than exploitative (imo), and to be honest, I’d never heard of almost any of these stories. Based on this channel, I’m not sure how humanity survived the 60s, 70s, and 80s. There were so many huge industrial accidents and disasters around the world from human error or mechanical failures that caused hundreds or thousands of people to die.

“In these troubled times,” I find it oddly comforting to hear about these horrible stories from the past, to put current events in perspective. Today, my biggest headache in life (besides actual headaches, see below) is getting angry after the president tweets something idiotic, but that pales in comparison to the problems of someone living next to an industrial plant improperly handling enough explosive fuel to incinerate a whole town.

I’m kind of jealous of these sorts of pseudo-documentary channels, because I wish I’d thought of it first. A good documentary-style narrative is one of the coolest pieces of media out there, imo. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had the time and energy to make, but at this point it’s all been done before, and there’s nothing left to document.

Home LifeThe Continuing Coughing SagaSo I’ve been on an acid reducer and a mild allergy med for half a month now trying to tame a persistent cough that got really bad some weeks ago. The good news is that the acid reducer is helping, the bad news is that the allergy med doesn’t seem to be doing anything, and I still have a persistent dry cough and I have a lot of headaches and my lungs seem to be laboring more than usual in the last month. I get winded very easily just by walking around the house a little bit, and when I was moving a desk around and setting up a new computer it felt like I was moving a piano.

So, I have two more doctor appointments coming up next week and the week after. The first is my regular yearly primary care doctor checkup, which luckily just happens to be right when I needed one. So I’m going to tell him about the ENT results and ask him what’s up with my lungs–if I might have gotten covid and didn’t realize it, or if I might have picked up a mild pneumonia, because it feels like the remnants of pneumonia, or some other respiratory chest illness. I’m hoping he’ll order some chest x-rays and give me an antibiotic prescription.

I’m trying not to think about the fact that I happen to be the exact same age as my mother was when she learned she had lung cancer and died a year later (she was a smoker though, and I’ve never smoked).

The second doctor appointment the week after is the followup with the ENT, and I’m going to tell him that the allergy thing didn’t seem to do anything, but the acid reducer did, but regardless I’m still coughing and I have a lot of headaches, which I suppose could be a side effect of one of the two meds he gave me.

In any case, interacting with the American healthcare system continues to suck. It’s a tremendous act of will to make the decision to seek out care and subject oneself to this bureaucratic torture rather than just ride it out and hope for the best like our plucky forefathers in covered wagons. And I’m one of the lucky ones with decent insurance.

Car Battery SagaBy the way, I mentioned my failing car battery a while back. I use a battery charger now every time I get back from the store, and I haven’t yet been stranded anywhere from an electrical system failure. Still need to get it to the dealership to check the alternator (and get an inspection).

Today, though, I discovered an additional thing to add to the repair list: The front right tire of the car is suddenly pretty flat. So I have to charge up my little battery-powered handheld air pump to fix that, too.

In the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking it’s about time to trade it in and get a small truck. The prospect of buying a new vehicle is pretty daunting though.

World Context* The new pope is American. This is apparently significant. I was somewhat surprised how much the pope stuff broke through the Trump stuff in the news here. * Courts are starting to reverse the actions of people being abducted off the streets by secret police, so there’s still a tiny shred of Constitutional law left in the U.S. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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GamingShadows of Rose DLCI started the Shadows of Rose DLC for Resident Evil Village but I found it a bit frustrating so I gave up on it. It was a lot more of a “run from enemies” instead of a “shoot enemies” vibe, which I find annoying. And there wasn’t much story along the way to keep me interested.

The QuarryI had purchased The Quarry, one of the dime-a-dozen Supermassive horror pseudo-games that are more in the vein of visual novels, some years ago, and I randomly decided to play it because I wanted a game to play where I didn’t have to talk much. You can always count on Supermassive games to fill any silence with dialog or ambient industrial noises. It was just like every other Supermassive horror game: Good graphics, questionable writing, fun to watch, not the slightest bit scary (fun-campy-horror not scary-horror… to this day I still don’t understand why people associate “horror” with “fun” and not “existential terror,” but they definitely do), all choices are random and you can’t ever steer the narrative the way you want.

However, The Quarry has one of the best credit sequences ever in a video game. Not since the song at the end of Portal has there been a better credit sequence. I’m talking about the Bizzare Yet Bonafide podcast that played over the credits, performed by Emily Axford and Brian Murphy of NADDPOD and Dimension 20 fame, an inspired casting choice for a paranormal podcast duo performance. Truly magnificent.

This is the fifth Supermassive game I’ve played, following on the heels of Until Dawn, Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes. (I haven’t yet played The Devil in Me, and I think I heard there was a new Dark Pictures Anthology game coming?) They are all pretty much exactly the same formula, same cheesy scares that are infinitely predictable and aren’t scary, they churn them out like a low budget horror movie studio. But they’re kind of fun to watch.

The Devil in MeThe Quarry reminded me that I played three of the Dark Pictures Anthology, but hadn’t played the fourth one, The Devil in Me. So I started on that one, using a dice roller to randomly choose character decisions (which I also did for House of Ashes). I haven’t quite finished it, but so far I think it’s the worst one. I would probably rank them: 1) House of Ashes, 2) Little Hope, 3) Man of Medan, 4) The Devil in Me. (Man of Medan is a close contender for worst one, though.)

In case anyone’s wondering, I did record them all but I won’t be uploading them because scary game videos don’t work unless the player is scared, and I have exactly zero scared reactions over the entire course of all of these scary games, because they aren’t the slightest bit scary to me.

Oblivion Remaster?There was a surprise drop of a Remastered Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on Steam. Surprise to me, at least. Where everybody else played Skyrim to death, I played Oblivion to death, which is why I found Skyrim fairly meh and, to this day, have only played the main story exactly one time with little or no side questing. Whereas in Oblivion I played every quest and went to every square inch of the map. Anyway, it’s tempting to buy it, though I already recorded most of Oblivion already. My only question is whether they updated the voice acting or does the whole game still consist of only three voice actors talking to each other without even bothering to put on different voices. [ChatGPT Search assures me they added more voice acting, so I may be unable to stop myself from buying it.]

Media ProductionI was going to use the Shadows of Rose DLC as a test case for recording HDR game content, but it turned out to be a disaster. I have to record the game video locally on the gaming PC, and I’m just not setup well to do that.

I worked out a method if I had to do it, but it involves combining audio commentary recorded on the recording PC with game video recorded on the gaming PC and that’s just a nightmare post-processing scenario. Nobody’s got time for that, unless they’re getting paid a full-time salary for it.

Media Consumption The Last Of Us season 2 (on Max). The current must-see television. The Last Of Us Part II was one of the best stories of all time in gaming. The show isn’t as good, but it’s not bad. My biggest problem with Bella’s performance as Ellie is that she capture’s Ellie’s violent and stubborn side well but she’s entirely lacking Ellie’s whimsical and vulnerable side. You know, the side that made us love her character in the first place. But I have to be lenient because a significant plot point of the second game was making us not like what Ellie has become. * Wheel of Time season 3 (on Prime). Season 3 concluded. Near the end of the third season was the first time I felt the familiar “who are these people and where are they and why are they here and how is this related to anything again?” feeling from the books, but in the show. Felt like they were jamming a ton of story into minutes of screen time, especially in the last episode, and it felt like whiplash. Like I have no idea why we visited Tanchico in this season at all, or why we went back to Two Rivers for a Helm’s Deep battle. They were great moments in the books, but they seemed irrelevant to current events of the show, like they existed just to give the actors something to do. There were huge sections of the books that felt like side quests that could be deleted from the show. Anyway we’ve reached territory where I don’t remember what happens in the books, so I’m struggling to fill in the missing pieces myself. I continue to resent every moment they make me feel like Rand is a sympathetic character, because I always rooted for that arrogant martyr-complex prick to fail in the books. I think the main question the books try to answer is, “What if the chosen one is an absolute tool and never learns anything?” I do seem to recall that Sian Sanche lived a full life after she was stilled, but I understand why they gave her a heroic sendoff in the show because her storyline was largely tangential thereafter. And I also seem to recall that Morraine’s story came to a fairly abrupt end somewhere around this point, too, but I can also understand why they wouldn’t want to kill off the biggest talent on the show. Update: I hear that book readers really hate the show but I don’t think it’s that bad. I like it better than the Tolkien show; I can’t even get through the first episode of the second season of Rings of Power. * I started watching the U.S. version of Have I Got News For You on Max, but it’s rather bad compared to the UK version. There’s something about the U.S. version that makes me think they aren’t knowledgeable enough to really sink the knife in with the political satire, so it just feels blandly simplistic like late night talk show monologues. * Critical Role’s Wildemount Wildlings (on Beacon) was kind of funny but also felt a little forced. * Black Mirror* season 7 (Netflix). A typical season of hit-or-miss episodes, but I thought three of the episodes were really good.

I watched a few movies while I was taking a four-day Easter weekend break:

Companion (on Max). Hilarious but way too long. The subject matter should have only been an hour episode of something like, say, Black Mirror.
Passengers (on Prime). Neat-looking and a cool premise but didn’t go anywhere near deep enough into the massive psychological trauma and horror that should have ensued.
Planned to watch more movies on Easter weekend because I bought a new TV stand but I became annoyed putting it together and didn’t.
Gladiator II (on Prime). The first movie I watched after completing the new TV stand. (It’s the kind that’s like a cart you can roll around.) A serviceable flick but not particularly memorable. I had much the same feeling about the first one, which I’ve only seen once and don’t remember very well. In fact I think I paused this one with some five minutes remaining and never felt the need to return to it.
A Netflix documentary about the Oklahoma City Bombing, something I already knew about, but it’s the 30th anniversary. One might argue that this bombing, along with the Waco debacle, sits near the beginning of the timeline of America’s descent into partisan madness. Sadly, at the current end of the timeline, the anti-government conspiricists are now running the government.
A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054 (Netflix). Netflix is really good at this sort of disaster porn documentary. Somehow they got three episodes out of one plane crash in Brazil. I think I only watched two of the three episodes though.
The Menendez Brothers (Netflix). Just when you think Gen-Z couldn’t get any more perplexing, I learned that there’s some TikTok trend wanting to release the Menendez Brothers, which made me realize I didn’t know much of anything about the case. (Like the OJ case, it happened at a time in my life when I paid zero attention to current events.) So I went looking for a pre-TikTok documentary to give me a primer on the case, and it was surprisingly difficult to find one. Basically impossible. This one gave me the general overview, but it definitely felt like part of a general PR push to exonerate the brothers (since it contained interviews with the brothers themselves). My feelings about it are complex, but in a nutshell, I don’t think they were wrongly imprisoned, but I wouldn’t be that upset if they were released now. I’m roughly the same age they are, and I’m a totally different person now than I was in 1990.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (Netflix). Then I watched the second season of the Monsters anthology series which was about the Menendez Brothers. It was pretty good (good acting performances, that is), although oddly comedic in tone. I think they did a fairly good job of conveying ambiguity about the brothers’ motives, but at the end I think the show opined that the brothers were lying the whole time, bucking the TikTok trend.

Home LifeENT Doctor ResultsThe great ENT doctor appointment has been completed, and the verdict on my throat is in: Kind of. At least, step one is complete. The ENT doctor stuck a fiber optic scope up my nose to look at my throat and did not see anything but what he called “benign” issues, mainly redness and irritation at the top of the esophagus, which is probably caused by stomach acid. He’s going to put me on two meds, one for stomach acid, and one for mild allergies because I’ve also been experiencing some shortness of breath and wheezing lately. (I’ve wondered if I somehow picked up a cold or covid a while back and didn’t realize it.) Hopefully that will allow my throat to heal and then I’ll go back and see him in a month. After that, probably the dreaded “lifestyle changes” (mostly less acidic/spicy food, and/or elevating my torso when sleeping).

Unless the meds don’t do anything and it’s something else.

Not the instant gratification I was hoping for, but I shouldn’t be surprised because I’m constantly disappointed by how the human body is not as easy to debug and fix as a computer program. At least he ruled out infections or growths, which was what I was worried about.

I was pleasantly surprised by how little I had to “fight” to convince the doctor I was actually experiencing issues. My baseline assumption about all doctors is that they never believe their patients, as if they are a typical tech support person who refuses to listen to a customer. It probably worked in my favor that I was struggling not to cough while talking to him.

I’ve started an extensive diary in the hopes of tracking how these new meds are helping (or not). I’ve worked out some “tests” I can do to track my progress, or lack thereof, which mainly involves reading passages from The Hobbit and recording how much I cough while I’m doing it. Weirdly, despite this technological age we live in, keeping a “diary” is harder than you might think. I decided to use an Obsidian document on my MacBook.

So after about a week, sadly I haven’t noticed much change from the new meds. But I have to remember that I’m old and don’t bounce back from injuries very quickly anymore, so maybe it will take a long, long time to heal an acid-burned esophagus. Also my extensive diary stopped after a couple of days because keeping up with a new habit every day is basically impossible.

World Context* Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: America (since 1/2025), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). * Celebrity Deaths: Pope Francis.

Bye!

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Sorry, I prioritized filing taxes yesterday over blogging.

GamingI 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 ProductionWhen 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 JobFor 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 LifeIn 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.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention this, but the battery charger has been keeping my car battery charged well enough to get to the store and back, so I haven’t starved to death. I just plug it in after I get back home, no big deal. This gives me some leeway to procrastinate taking the car back to the dealership for repairs, because who in their right mind would hurry to schedule a time to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room for hours waiting for car repairs.

World ContextToo 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).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

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.

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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.

GamingSo 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 ConsumptionI 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 JobAnother 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 LifeDoor Dash Is CoolHey, 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 batteryI 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!

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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.)

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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.)

GamingI 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 ProductionUploading 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 ConsumptionI 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 LifeTwo 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 ContextI 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?

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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;drIn 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.

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A short one because I don’t have much to talk about. Where I live, the spring and fall seasons are quite short, so fall is already turning to winter.

Daylight savings ended, which means it’s dark and cold all the time and I hate everything and just want to sleep until March. It feels like there’s only about thirty minutes of daylight each day.

All is despair and bleakness, same as last winter and every other winter before it.

Leaves are falling all over my yard and the year’s biggest outdoor operation has been ongoing to get rid of them. Armed with my newly-repaired riding mower and a “lawn sweeper,” I can make fairly quick work of them without having to expend too many calories or ruin my back.

Unfortunately it’s currently raining which might significantly impact what I’d hoped would be the final weekend of leaf deportation. Ha. See? Political words taken out of context can be funny! Sometimes! In rare cases!

In social media news, I know everyone’s saying Bluesky is good now, and I even found a Tweetdeck-style interface for it called deck.blue, but I dunno. I’m just not feeling it. I’m in a “just let the 2000s Internet die already” kind of mood. It’s never coming back.

Like I said, all is bleakness and despair from now until spring.

GamingI heard about Until Dawn on the Blaugust discord, so I played the new PS5 version, which I generally liked except for the quirky movement controls and the dollars-spent-per-hour-played ratio.

Then I found the Dark Anthology Supermassive games were on sale on Steam and started playing Man of Medan. Surely, I thought, it would be of a similar story quality to Until Dawn, which was also originally a Supermassive game.

Welllllll…… for one thing, it’s not a remake, so it’s got that janky old-style Resident Evil fixed camera nonsense. Beyond that, it seems like only two of the voice actors were making an effort. The story makes no sense, there’s no payoff of any setups, there’s no character development, it’s just easily-guessable jump scares in vaguely scary settings and completely random narrative choices.

Still, it successfully passed the time.

Next I launched into Little Hope, the next in the Dark Anthology series. I like it significantly better than Man of Medan, but now on my third of these games I think I’ve pretty much memorized the script for every future game. (Oh no! Everyone got separated for some hand-wavy forced reason! Who could have foreseen it?) Anyway, the character work is better and the Salem Witch Trial theme lets me test my prior Salem knowledge base.

I finished Little Hope and … well, I have some unkind thoughts about the resolution I got, but I won’t trouble anyone with that. I get that they’re not trying to tell good impactful stories with these things.

I kind of wish there was a setting in these games to let the game make all the choices randomly, so I could just watch. Now there’s a potential good use for agentic AI*: Playing these interactive-movie-type games on autopilot, so we can just sit back with the popcorn.

I’m getting a bit weary of the Supermassive formula, if you can’t tell. I need to look for something else.

The Top Sellers list of games on Steam looks very bleak to me right now. More bleakness and despair! The next game I’m genuinely looking forward to is Pathologic 3 in 2025.

Generative AI is old news, by the way: Agentic AI is the new buzzword to know.

Media ProductionBeen recording Supermassive games, but I’m not going to bother uploading them. The only reason to upload horror games is to entertain people with how scared you get, but I haven’t found them even a tiny bit scary. Somewhere along the way the horror genre morphed from horror to slapstick.

Media Consumption Lots of live election coverage. Mostly CNN, C-SPAN, and BBC, and I found some livestreams, and then later a bunch of podcast reactions. * Just found The Franchise (on Max). In the grand tradition of Larry Sanders and Veep, it’s now time to lambast superhero franchises. I personally can’t get enough superhero parodies. Not since the old Hollywood westerns of the 50s has a movie genre been so thoroughly beaten to death. * Taskmaster UK series 18 (on YouTube). * I watched Taskmaster Junior on YouTube but I dunno, man. Kids aren’t very good comedians. Also it has a mildly exploitative vibe doesn’t it? Like where and how are their parents involved? I think it would be a lot funnier to see shots of their parents’s eager faces watching from the sidelines, desperately wishing they were on the show instead. * Taskmaster Australia series 3 (on VPN). Wouldn’t it be great if they could stagger these seasons so there’s a continuous stream of English-speaking Taskmasters on year-round? * Sampled some of the recent Critical Role campaign 3 episodes where they’ve brought back campaign 1 and 2 characters. * Watched a good (though I wouldn’t call it great) movie called The Trial of the Chicago 7* on Netflix, a rare occasion when I didn’t feel like I was wasting money on Netflix. (It was inspired by having recently heard an episode of The Rest is History about the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention.) * I’ve been listening to some episodes of The Rest is History podcast about World War I, my favorite war. Everybody has a favorite war in history, I assume? * The Rest Is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube). * Glass Cannon campaign 2 podcast (on YouTube). * Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild and Legacy of the Ancients podcasts. * I’ve listened to a huge sampling of political-themed podcasts in the wake of the election, but I doubt any of them will stick long-term. Experts tend to say the same things about politics all the time, if you hadn’t noticed.

Health and WellnessIt’s been tremendously hard to concentrate on anything since the election. It’s a daily effort to detox from news feeds. And I’m not even that worried about the election results. I’m just a news junkie at heart. I don’t think I’m clinically ADD, but I do find it very easy to learn to become addicted to constant stimuli by habit, and un-learning habits can be difficult even without any diagnoses.

Anyway two weeks later I’m finally getting back to some normalcy.

Unfortunately the cataract in my left eye has reached the point of making all vision-based tasks extremely annoying and headache-inducing. Anything in the near field looks like vaseline is smudged over the world. Really makes reading computer monitors super fun.

I had hoped to wait until next year to get it removed but I’m going to be very grumpy until then.

World Context Did you hear? There was a U.S. election. Republicans won the popular vote, the Electoral College, the presidency, the Senate, the House (probably), the stock market, the World Series, and the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. * Actually the Dodgers won the World Series, beating the Yankees in five games. That was last month, but I forgot to mention it, which is representative of the thrill of baseball. * In other shocking sports news, the Washington Commanders have a 7-3 record after ten games, only a half game behind the Eagles. They’re actually in solid position to not only make a wildcard playoff game but possibly even win the NFC East division. That … never* happens. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 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: Quincy Jones (music producer).

“How hard it is to accept the truth.” -Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Democratic National Convention, 1968.

Bye!

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The much-edited post-election missive and the biggest test of my spam filter yet. This one gets more political, but there won’t be any angry outbursts. (Full post not included in RSS feed.)

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The difficulty of writing about the most important election in American history (not to be confused with the previous elections of the same name) is maintaining some amount of detachment so that people can read it without triggering violent emotional responses.

To be honest, I’m writing more for an international audience here, because nobody in the United States is going to click on an election post where the title isn’t screaming some partisan diatribe.

Background DataThe basic facts are these (based on 270towin.com, which is only one of many such prediction sites, but I find it has the best UI): Polling and history indicates that the outcome of all but six or seven states can be predicted fairly easily.

The so-called “battleground” or “swing” or “toss-up” states in 2024 are, in order of increasing electoral college votes: Nevada (6), Wisconsin (10), Arizona (11), Michigan (15), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), and Pennsylvania (19), for a total of ~~81~~ 92 votes.

Incidentally, I noticed just this morning that 270towin.com has changed Arizona from a toss-up to a likely Republican state.

If all the other states vote as predicted, and Arizona goes Republican, Harris gets 226 electoral college votes and Trump gets 230 electoral college votes. 270 votes are required to win the presidency. There are many statistical permutations that go either way, but I think the simplest way to put it is that whoever wins Pennsylvania is probably going to win the presidency.

Personally, I’m preparing for Trump to win. All the signs I’ve seen are pointing to it. (But then, I expected him to win in 2020, too.) I’m hearing it’s nearly inevitable that Republicans win the Senate, and there’s a 50/50 chance Republicans also win the House. It could very well be a clean sweep for Republicans so they’ll have absolute carte blanche, and the Supreme Court, for the next two years.

However, it could also be the exact opposite. I’ve seen very few predictions that sound confident.

Not counting anything like legal challenges, disasters, or insurrections, of course, which I assume we’re all adult enough to realize are distinct possibilities. Today isn’t the end of the election, it’s the beginning.

Starting My DayI live in Virginia, which is a reasonably safe Harris state. Virginia flipped from a safe Republican state to a leaning Democratic state somewhere around the Obama years, thanks largely to the densely populated Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads areas.

Still, I’m planning to schlep my way to the polling station today. It’s less than a five minute drive from my house, in an elementary school.

I’m anti-social and hate going out and hate talking to strangers, but I can’t bring myself to do the mail-in voting thing (it’s called absentee voting in my state). It’s much more satisfying to fill in the bubbles and feed my ballot into the scanning machine myself.

This year, my company has actually given U.S. employees the day off to vote. This has never happened to me before. We all agreed that it would have been better to get the day after the election off.

My outdoor cat–whom I have given many names, including Yellow Stray Cat, Little Buddy, then Buddy when he grew bigger, Marbles, because he looks like a marble cake, and sometimes even Mr. Tangiers Foxface Whitesocks–has been particularly hungry this morning. What does this portend?

My biggest decision on voting day is whether to take a shower before going out or not. I’ve known how I was going to vote for quite literally years.

There are other things on my ballot besides the presidency, though. Also at stake are the House and Senate. I’m voting for one (of the two) Virginia Senator seats and one House representative for my congressional district. I think both of them are fairly safe Democratic wins.

There is also a state constitution amendment proposal on the ballot. It’s fairly banal and relates to benefits for spouses of veterans.

With the outcome for my state and my district in particular being fairly predictable, it’s tempting to go down the “my vote doesn’t matter” route. Mathematically and statistically, it definitely doesn’t.

Still, it hasn’t occurred to me to skip the election. There are very few ways for an average citizen to “participate” in the ongoing history of the country they live in. The main three, in my opinion, are: Joining the military, sitting on jury duty, or voting. Voting is definitely the easiest one to do. (I suppose a fourth way is running for office, but in these troubled times, that feels more like it would be contributing to the downfall of the country than anything else.)

10:22 AMScrolling through my cable television guide looking for a news channel, I see that the movie Civil War is playing on demand today. Hilarious.

10:24 AMThere aren’t any cable news channels left in the United States that aren’t partisan mouthpieces. The likes of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX are just doing interviews with surrogates all day and pretending it’s journalism.

I’m planning to watch BBC’s coverage of election returns tonight, because I consistently find it to the most humorous. I love how they’ve adopted all the American election night tropes like the big touchscreen maps and all that stuff, but they don’t quite understand what all the counties and states mean. They always talk about American politics with a slightly incredulous slant.

Anyway, I find it far more engaging to see election coverage from an outsider perspective.

I’d probably keep three or four screens going simultaneously if I could: BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. I’d hate to miss any crucial projections. Part of the fun of election night is seeing which network is first with their projections. They really care about that stuff behind-the-scenes.

10:35 AMI had a moment of panic when I suddenly remembered that my driver’s license is expiring soon, and I was absolutely convinced it had expired on my birthday last month and I wouldn’t be able to vote today. Turns out, it expires next year.

11:08 AMIt is done. When I have a choice, I usually vote mid-morning, because there usually aren’t any lines. Before and after work are when you have to wait.

The process works like this. Future generations can decide if this seems free and fair or not, but it’s been largely unchanged for me during the course of my life. (The biggest change I’ve seen is having to present a driver’s license instead of a voter ID card, which happened some 10 years ago in my state.)

I found a parking spot and entered the elementary school. Two local precincts vote at this school, so I had to go in the room for my precinct, which was mostly empty. Two election workers were at the first table, one was occupied with a voter, so the second worker helped me.

For the last several years, I’ve had to state my full name and address after I handed over my license before they’d let me vote. This year, I just handed the person my license, they put it in a machine, there were some beeps and boops, and they gave me a receipt. I glanced at it to verify it looked like my information.

I took the receipt to the next table where there were two more election workers. I handed my receipt to one worker, and the second one handed me a scantron ballot.

I turned around and went to one of the little voting stations lined up against the wall, which is a flimsy table with some plastic walls on three sides for privacy. There was a pen there. I had four things to vote for: President, Senate, Congress, and a state constitution amendment. I filled in four bubbles and put the pen back.

I walked over to the scanning machine at the end of the room, where there were two more election workers. I fed my ballot into the scanner. Usually I put it in face down, but this year I went wild and fed it in face up. I ask every year and they assure me it doesn’t matter which way you put it in. Anyway I got a positive result from the machine.

One of the election workers handed me an “I voted” sticker and I returned to my car, where I found that I’d actually gotten two stickers instead of one. A banner year indeed. Then I drove home, a drive of some 3-4 minutes.

On television, you almost always see the voting centers in big cities where they have to deal with thousands and millions of people, where lines stretch around the block and hundreds of election workers run everywhere in a panic. My precinct is tiny by comparison, and looks nothing like that. I counted a total of six election workers in the room where I voted.

Now, there’s nothing for me to do in this election except sit back and watch the news for any horrible tragedies that might unfold throughout the rest of the day in some far flung corner of the country that I’ve never seen or heard of before.

Incidentally, I did take a shower before going to vote.

P.S. There were four third-party presidential candidates on the ballot, more than I can ever remember seeing before in Virginia: Jill Stein (Green), Chase Oliver (Libertarian), Claudia De la Cruz (Independent), and Cornel West (Independent). I’ve heard exactly nothing from or about any of their campaigns in the last four years.

2:44 PMI was going to go to the store after I voted, but instead I came home and took a short nap after lunch. Then I went to the store and got stuff to make chilli. And some potato chips. And some ho-hos. Pretty awful food guaranteed to shave time off of one’s life expectancy, but it’s a special occasion.

CNN is reporting one Pennsylvania county is extending polling hours because of delays from improperly printed ballots (see also here). In the before times, that kind of thing happened all the time, all across the country, in every election, but nobody ever heard about it or knew anything about it except those of us in the local state political blogospheres. Now, it leads the news.

Every channel is showing video of long lines of hundreds of people waiting to vote. Not in my America. I just walked in and walked out, no waiting.

3:34 PMI’m starting to think it might be too late to make chilli for tonight, since “tonight” is now less than four hours away. Polls begin closing on the east coast at 7 PM. CNN, however, is starting their Election Night Coverage at 4 PM, like it’s a Superbowl or something. Exit polling is expected at 5 PM, giving them a full two hours to chatter about whether the exit polling means anything or not.

Also, I forgot to mention that CNN is also reporting bomb threats were called into a few Georgia polling places that were apparently Russian in origin, according to the FBI. Subtle spycraft.

By the way, another reason I like to vote in person on election day is that it’s kind of nice to spend just a few minutes out in the real world and see that almost everyone is, in fact, helpful and polite and smiling and laughing, even on the most divisive day in the country. It’s a minor antidote to the one-sided perspective of the world you get from scrolling through social media or watching television.

3:45 PMOkay I’m embarking on a quest to make some chilli anyway. I’m listening to the Glass Cannon Legacy of the Ancients actual play podcast.

4:27 PMNevermind, I’m listening to CNN’s election coverage. Not that I particularly want to, but I can stream it on the laptop via. Max and carry my USB speaker around with me to listen to it as I’m wandering all over the house making chilli.

5:20 PMI’ve got CNN streaming on the laptop, and I’ve got BBC streaming on my gaming PC. The chilli is finished, but I’m probably going to get hungry long before it’s finished cooking. (I’m using a crock pot.) Luckily I bought tons of junk food at the store today.

What I find disturbing about the BBC coverage so far is that they have a dude with an American accent talking. But the official coverage doesn’t start until 5:40 PM my time. Aw man, it looks like Katty Kay isn’t at the BBC anymore. Disappointing.

CNN is probably going to get booted, because they do that stupid thing where they try to have all sides represented, which just ends up with people yelling at each other during the commentary segments. I’ve heard that political junkies really love that stuff, but I’m in it more for the data.

5:53 PMKatty Kay is on BBC! As a special correspondent in the studio instead of an anchor. I don’t know what the U.K. thinks of Katty Kay but I see her fairly often on U.S. television covering politics.

I’ve now got BBC (which luckily doesn’t require VPN) and CNN streaming on my gaming PC, and I’m waiting until 7 PM for C-SPAN’s stream to start, which alleges to be free of punditry. Unfortunately I don’t see any easy way to switch between tabs in a way that plays the audio for only the active tab. Ah well.

I guess I’ll go ahead and post this because the results of the election are irrelevant to the topic of this missive. As of this writing, it’s a tie at 3 for Harris and 3 for Trump (blame New Hampshire for that).

Good luck everyone.

UPDATES8:25 PMVirginia seems to be counting votes slower than I remember. Only 87/133 localities reporting at 8:30 and no projections yet. Virginia usually has pretty good data processing on election night. I think they were one of the first states to have a decent election web site.

8:43 PM90/133 now. Seems like a worrying sign for Harris fans. Why is the counting so slow? I’m sure Virginia was called for Biden way before this. The good news is that the big population centers will be last, and that’s where Harris will “run up the numbers,” to quote CNN’s John King.

9:15 PM104/133 counted in Virginia, and Harris is only up one point. Clinton won by five points and Biden won by ten points. There needs to be a lot of votes left in Northern Virginia/Hampton Roads/Richmond areas or this is a terrible sign for Harris.

10:58 PMToo tired to stay up any more. No projections in Virginia or any of the swing states. Virginia looks like Harris will win but by less than 2020. Sounds like John King is starting to see Harris underperforming compared to 2020, which is a big problem. Not expecting anyone to concede before the morning though.

11:29 PMWell I’m still up. I’ve seen enough now that I’d be shocked if Harris wins this. The only real question now is whether Democrats can win the House.

11:43 PMCNN called North Carolina for Trump, the first of the swing states to get a projection. Pundits on CNN are saying “this feels more like 2016 than 2020.” Meaning that time Trump won the “blue wall” states and won the presidency.

11:47 PMAP apparently called Virginia for Harris at 11:42 PM. Looks like she’s going to win by 3-4 points, which is less than Clinton in 2016.

8:22 AMWaking up to the unsurprising news that Trump has been declared the winner and Republicans will hold the Senate. However, the House is still up in the air.

I, for one, had a ho-ho for breakfast.

P.S. Just for the record, I left the chilli cooking in the crock pot overnight.

P.P.S. Looking back I was definitely wrong about one thing… the election isn’t just starting, it’s over.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 10/28* 16:27 # Oh I just realized I still have my automated blog notification thing going and still using the blaugust hashtag oops.

+ 16:27 # If only I had the slightest idea how I did those notifications or how to change/disable them.
+ 16:30 # Ah ha! I still had the tab open in a browser. It was EchoFeed doing the notifications. I turned them off. I don’t really like spammy notifications cluttering up my otherwise scintillating content.
+ 16:31 # However, as soon as I said I don’t like notifications in my timeline, it dawns on me that the only way to implement Mastodon comments on my blog is to put a spammy notification in my timeline. Ah well.

16:48 # InoReader has added a spiffy new tag on posts that have video links in them. It may or may not come as a surprise that a fair number of blog posts have video links in them.

Friday 11/01* 22:00 # I tried out Dragon Age: The Veilguard and ended up returning it. Felt like I could wait for a sale to continue with it. It did make me think about playing through the earlier games, though. * 22:02 # One of my external USB drives full of videos from late 2023 seems to have died. Irritating.

+ 22:06 # That would be the one with all my Baldur’s Gate 3 videos on it. Lucky I uploaded them already.
+ 22:07 # However the ones I didn’t upload, e.g. the couple of Dragon’s Age Origins videos I was looking for, are lost to time.

Sunday 11/03* 21:49 # This weekend I managed to get my riding mower working again by replacing the battery, disassembling and cleaning the mower deck, replacing the mower blades, and putting it all back together again. Grass was mowed and leaves were handled. (Leaves appear to be roughly 1/3 to 1/2 fallen at this time.) * 21:54 # I impulse-bought the new Until Dawn on the PS5 this weekend and binged my way through the whole game. It’s pretty good, although I don’t see myself replaying it anytime soon, which means it’s awfully pricey for such a short game (wish I’d noticed it was on sale on Steam, but it’s a perfect PS5 game). It’s more like a visual novel or a Telltale game; there isn’t very much “gameplay” in it. Sometimes the movement controls were annoying, because your character has a huge turning radius. And it was almost impossible to hold the PS5 controller “still” for those bits. But pretty good performances. No regrets.

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Happy Halloween, or, as I recently learned because half of my team lives in India and had the day off, Happy Diwali. In either case, I’m following my standard holiday practice of ignoring it completely.

GamingSilent Hill 2Finished Silent Hill 2. It took about 20 hours and I got the “In Water” ending. It’s a fantastic game. Well, let me clarify that a little bit: It’s a fantastic story.

The gameplay, at times, was kind of annoying. Particularly boss fights. The boss mechanics demand a more action-oriented set of controls, but the game did not have action-oriented controls, so it was pretty frustrating. I kept having the mental thoughts to move or shoot right now, but didn’t have the capability to translate that thought into game actions due to constant animation locking, or slow turning, or randomly ineffective dodging. “I definitely dodged that” was a constant refrain while watching my character stand still and get mauled.

In other words, it was just like the Resident Evil games.

It’s a suitable game for the Halloween season, but did I find it scary? Sadly no, not in the slightest. At no point did I jump or scream or feel any tension from the spooky environment. I rarely find video games scary like that. They’re games, man. I’m too busy working to achieve the game goals to bother feeling scared of the dark.

I take that back, there was one time when some creature flew through a closed door and hit me, so I jumped, because I didn’t think creatures could go through doors. That was the only unintentional jump scare in the game for me. The rest of the jump scares were predictable from a million miles away, or completely harmless.

Silent Hill’s whole schtick seems to be making the environment look and feel scary, but it doesn’t take long before you realize there’s no actual threat to your player character. For me, tension is built by gameplay that threatens your progress. Like, say, a Dark Souls game. Spooky environments are largely transparent to me.

In any case, it’s a good game.

What’s Next?I started playing the first Silent Hill game on a Playstation emulator (RetroArch) to see if I could fill in some extra context I missed in the second game. I don’t think I’m going to reach the end, even though it’s supposedly a short game. Silent Hill is about 95% old-style clunky gameplay of shooting random monsters and 5% terrible voice acting and story that makes no sense. So I have to believe it must have been the sequel that really cemented Silent Hill in the gaming culture pantheon.

I also played some more sessions of Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s kind of an evergreen open-world-ish game, where you can log in from time to time and just wander around. Sometimes nothing happens, sometimes there’s a dragon. Usually you have lookup how to complete quests because they’re so unintuitive.

Speaking of dragons, I’m thinking about getting Dragon Age: Veilguard, even though I could not get more than a couple hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition. Maybe the new one will click more. Side note: Are there dragons in Dragon Age? I don’t remember any.

Media ProductionI was too distracted by playing Silent Hill 2 to do much with music production. I have a minor goal to write and record one song before the end of the year. I have an idea but it’s not going well so far. It’s absolutely infuriating that I can only effectively do one hobby at a time.

The only good news is that I’ve been keeping relatively consistent with picking up a guitar and practicing for 5-10 minutes every day. I’m not very confident in my guitar playing skills anymore though because the same weak left thumb that limits my game controller usage is also going to stop me from playing too much guitar anymore.

Media Consumption* Roger Waters’ Dark Side of the Moon Redux (2023) (on Amazon Music). I just learned of this, and I know the dude’s controversial and not for everyone but holy jeepers this album is a frickin’ masterpiece if you like musical artistry (as opposed to, you know, fun pop music). I’ve always loved Waters’ writing. I also love that he took a cue from Taylor Swift and had the temerity to remake his own private version of Dark Side of the Moon, one of the most untouchable best-selling albums of all time, which I have to assume was a giant middle finger to the Pink Floyd lawyers. I also love the production on this album. I want to steal this sound. Also Roger Waters’ Lockdown Sessions (2022), which is the same idea but isn’t as good of a production. * The Legend of Vox Machina, Season 3 (on Prime). * Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max). * The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart podcast (on YouTube). * Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild podcast (subscription). * Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (on YouTube). * I got into watching Tom Merritt’s Daily Tech News Show again (on YouTube). Watching some of the people who basically invented podcasting with gray hair really makes you feel old. * Daily Tech News reminded me to revisit the It’s A Thing podcast with Tom Merritt and Molly Wood, one of the best podcasts for Gen-X people like me to understand the world of the youngs. I discovered they have a new YouTube channel where they post the livestreams containing all the pre- and post-show stuff. * Taskmaster UK series 18 (on YouTube). * Taskmaster Australia series 3 (on 10play via. VPN). * The Rest Is Entertainment Podcast (on YouTube).

Background audio: I ran out of Taskmaster seasons to play in the background, so I switched to Glass Cannon’s Legacy of the Ancients podcast, which is an unusual choice because the “on in the background” show is usually something I’ve already seen or heard before.

Home LifeI went out to mow before the leaves fell all over everything but, in the typical way that these things happen, my riding mower broke in two different ways all at once. The battery was dead, and the mower deck stopped working.

I can buy a new battery pretty easily, or be lazy and use my little iClever battery to jump start it (obviously I chose the lazy route).

But fixing the mower deck is a different story, since I have no idea what’s wrong with it. I took the mower deck off of the tractor, which is a bit of a chore for me (more so putting it back on, actually). I cleaned everything and checked the belts and all (the belt is relatively new in fact, since I had to replace it somewhat recently). I ordered some new mower blades. Unscrewing the completely frozen bolts to get the old blades off was quite an ordeal.

Anyway, it’s now going into November and my grass is too long, and it’s all covered with leaves, so mission failure all around.

World Context* Israel launched retaliatory strikes against military targets in Iran. * Every daily news report from all networks begins with the vitally important news of where the candidates campaigned the previous day. There’s a lot of manufactured October surprise controversy over a comedian’s remarks at a Trump rally and Biden’s subsequent remarks about the remarks. * This is the last report before the 2024 election. It’s a toss-up, but my reading of 270towin.com is that it’s more likely for Trump to win. However, the safe and cynical bet is that this and all future elections will be decided by courts instead of people. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, 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).

“We do not need to rebrand October as anything other than the slow slide into holiday misery.” -Molly Wood, It’s A Thing Podcast 341

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 10/21* 16:59 # Omg my google voice number expired. What a pain in the butt. * 17:39 # I hate finishing a great game like Silent Hill 2 because now I don’t have a great game to play. Only a vast sea of mediocre, unmemorable games lie before me.

Tuesday 10/22* 18:00 # I added a page on the blog to show my progress through the Silent Hill 2 game: https://endgameviable.com/page/silenthill2-progress/ * 18:03 # By the way I abandoned using the ffmpeg loudnorm filter for processing microphone tracks. It worked, but it locked everything at a consistent volume which sounded a bit unnatural, especially when it reduced the volume of louder bits. I tend to raise my voice when the game is louder (because it’s louder in my ears), but it wasn’t really reflecting that change in dynamics anymore.

Sunday 10/27* 16:40 # I ordered new mower blades which are supposed to come in today sometime. Probably not in time to actually mow before dark. But I’m hoping to at least get them installed. (There was some doubt that I would be able to get the old blades off because I couldn’t turn the bolts, but I finally figured out a way to get enough leverage on them.) Meanwhile I dug out the leaf blower and did a pass over the yard to move the worst of the leaves. Unfortunately leaf season has barely even begun. There are far more leaves still on the trees than have fallen so far.

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Silent Hill 2I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy Silent Hill 2 a while back and it turned out to be a great choice.

I made a page showing my progress through the game.

I had some complaints about the combat mechanics (by which I mean they sucked in boss fights), but the story is one of the most thought-provoking I’ve seen in a while. It’s right up there with best-of-all-time seminal classics like Bioshock and The Witcher 3 and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

I went into it with no knowledge whatsoever about anything in the Silent Hill franchise. I’d never played any of the previous games, or seen any of the movies. I only had the vague idea it would be similar to the Resident Evil remakes (which it was, because almost every horror game is in some way descended from Resident Evil). And of course I’ve heard of Pyramid Head before, in the same way I’ve heard of Mr. Blobby or The Shmoo.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed trying to puzzle out the nature of the story as it progressed.

Unanswered QuestionsRarely do game stories prompt this much lasting thought. I think the story was cleverly designed to be open-ended enough to prompt these kinds of questions.

For example, my personal theory is that each character in Silent Hill 2 is dead (James, Angela, Laura, and Eddie), and they are each living in their own kind of purgatory. I haven’t seen that theory discussed anywhere online, but it makes more sense to me than “the town called them there” or whatever.

But I have questions. Based on the “In Water” ending, which I assume is the “true” ending (of the eight possibilities), only because it’s the one I got:

Who left all those notes for James?
- Or was it just a framework to reveal information to the player and propel them forward through the game?
What happened to Laura? How did Laura get to Silent Hill?
- (I think she was another terminal patient in the hospital with Mary.)
What happened to Angela? It’s clear from that newspaper article that Angela killed her father, but what about her brother? What happened to Angela’s mother? In any case, why is Angela being punished??
How did Eddie get to Silent Hill?
- (To fit in with my theory that everyone’s dead, I think he was arrested and executed in prison since he’s got serious serial killer vibes.)
Did James have an affair while Mary was sick? Is Maria a reflection of that infidelity? Or a manifestation of the witch/siren trapped on the island? Or maybe both?
Why does James think his wife died three years ago when he has her body in the back seat of his car? If he just killed her at the start of the game, how did he get the letter Mary wrote, which was supposed to be held by a hospital nurse until after her death?
How is Toluca Prison relevant to any of these characters? Why did we go there?
What was the deal with that game show announcer in the elevator??
- It’s such an abstract game that it’s difficult to tell whether it was supposed to mean something or if it was just a joke by the developers.
Am I trying to read too much into this? It’s possible there’s no deeper meaning and it’s just a game.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Wednesday 10/16* 08:41 # I desperately need to work out a way to physically detach my backup microphone from the gaming desk. Every time I have to use it, the audio is completely wrecked by thumps and bumps from moving the mouse around on the desk. Somehow this desk really resonates too so it’s LOUD thumps and bumps, almost like a subwoofer. * 08:41 # Oh I keep forgetting I need to manually start the GoToSocial server after every time the NAS computer restarts.

Saturday 10/19* 11:29 # Been reading up a lot on LUFS lately. Experimenting with the ffmpeg loudnorm filter today to smooth out the volume of my video game microphone tracks. They tend to have an excessive amount of dynamic range in them. I go from mumbling to myself while trying to solve puzzles to yelling in the middle of combat, leaning forwards and backwards and sideways around the microphone, so the volume is all over the place. I use a compressor but it isn’t enough unless I’m consciously thinking about mic discipline.

+ 11:32 # I’m constantly tweaking the audio of my game videos. My general goal is for someone to be on YouTube and be able to go from watching a broadcast television show to watching one of my videos without having to adjust their volume too much. So I’m always tweaking the loudness of my voice versus the loudness of the game, applying compression to the game, ducking, etc. etc.

23:14 # Finished the Silent Hill 2 remake tonight. Fantastic remake (in that I never would have played the PS2 version ever), fantastic story, however the combat mechanics during boss fights was pretty frustrating, to say the least. As with most games where the story is really, really good, I wish there had been less game in between the cut scenes. The puzzles frequently got in the way of reaching the next story beat. Anyway, great game.
- 23:16 # I understand now why Silent Hill 2 is a cultural phenomenon and rightly valued as “one of the best games of all time.” A great choice of game to remake and modernize so more people can play it.

Sunday 10/20* 16:50 # Silent Hill 2 has inspired me to try to add multiband compression and ducking to my video post-processing scripts. The dynamic range of the game is really high so it’s tough to get a good mix where you can hear the dialog without also getting overpowered by the sound effects, all while still being able to hear me yacking over top of it.

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A day late because of pure laziness.

It’s impossible to deny that autumn is upon us now, with the temperature dipping down to the point where switching the heat pump from cooling to heating is becoming mandatory. (It’s funny how a temperature variation of roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit inside the house is all it takes for me to go from hot to comfortable to freezing.)

GamingWilhelm took a look at the Stars Reach pre-alpha pre-game thing or whatever it is. It looks intensely boring to me and I can’t imagine it turning into anything other than the most generic No Man’s Sky clone imaginable. But hey, that’s what games are now: Developers making copies of other developers’ games and marketers pretending it’s something we haven’t played a thousand times before.

Speaking of which, I can’t even get past the Steam description of Throne and Liberty before not bothering to play it. You know the state of the MMORPG industry is stagnant when you don’t even want to waste the time downloading a free game. One glance at the generic fantasy models and the generic fantasy combat animations and the generic overly bright flashing lights on every sword swing is enough for me to know there’s no long-term value there.

There was a big expansion for Diablo IV but I think I’ve mentioned before that sort of idle-clicker ARPG genre is mostly dead to me. I just can’t abide sitting in front of a game and not using my brain at least a little.

I played maybe one or two sessions of Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s really hard to get excited about playing a game where it takes a literal half hour to run from one place to another place. Unlimited fast travel: It was invented for a reason.

Silent Hill 2Silent Hill 2 looked like a rare instance of a high quality game being made by competent professionals, so I bought it. Only afterward did I realize that it was an appropriate title for Halloween season. Anyway, I’ve never played any Silent Hill games before or seen any of the movies.

So far it’s exactly the same style of game as the Resident Evil remakes, except moodier. Same puzzles, same frustrating combat, not the slightest bit frightening to this jaded old veteran of the horror genre. I’m about 12 hours into it (in Brookhaven Hospital, to be precise).

It’s a pretty good game for its type, but I’d probably recommend the Resident Evil remakes over this one, if you had to choose one or the other. Resident Evil is a bit campier story-wise, but I think the gameplay and puzzles are slightly better. Silent Hill takes itself a bit too seriously with the ambient horror moodiness, and the story is very slow and doesn’t make much sense (yet?).

I assume at some point it will all click. If it doesn’t, I’m not sure how this franchise made it into the cultural lexicon.

Media ProductionI mentioned last time about losing all my 8-track ADAT master tapes, but a most amazing thing has happened: I don’t need to find the tapes, because I found a set of projects from 2013 where I had done digital and analog transfers of the tapes into REAPER! For unknown reasons, I had buried them underneath a shockingly inaccurate directory name.

So, I must have discarded the tapes thinking I didn’t need them any longer (still, a weird thing to do and I wish I hadn’t–especially weird since I still have an ADAT deck to play them). Consequently, I no longer have to figure out how to get AI to isolate the tracks of my own songs. Which is good, because Spleeter doesn’t work very well.

The challenge now is taking the raw audio tracks from the tapes and syncing them with the original MIDI tracks again. I don’t have any of the original MIDI equipment I used, but I have all the song projects with all the MIDI tracks. Somehow I need to recombine the audio tracks with the MIDI, because these were recorded long before DAWs existed and you could record audio directly into a computer alongside the MIDI. Back then, you had to synchronize audio tapes with MIDI using external sync devices.

Long story short: I’ve embarked on that journey of re-assembling my old songs into new REAPER projects. Made some progress with about three tapes worth of music so far.

One thing I hadn’t done in 2013 was transfer my collection of 4-track cassette tapes from the early 1990s into computer files. So another thing I did, before discovering the lost 8-track files, was dig out my ancient Yamaha MT120 multitrack cassette recorder and the box of cassette tapes in the closet, which still works over 30 years later, and start transferring them into REAPER.

It worked for a while, at least. Until something made a loud snapping sound in the tape player machinery as it thunked to a stop after rewinding a tape. Then it no longer played tapes. I got most of the tapes transferred, at least.

I imagine it would be a relatively simple fix if I took the player apart and could find replacement parts (probably a belt), but who has the willpower for that anymore? We live in a time of throwing away broken things instead of repairing them.

Anyway, I tend to think about music production every year when it turns to autumn, as it signals the year is ending and I haven’t yet done anything musically. This year is no different. The problem is that it’s almost impossible for me to work on something “a little bit.” I either go full bore on a project 24/7 until burnout sets in, or I ignore it in favor of something else. Sigh. It’s not a productive way to live life.

Media Consumption* David Gilmour’s Luck and Strange album (forgot to mention this last time) + Side note: Pink Floyd just sold their catalog to Sony for a pitiable $400m, a bargain-basement discount after Roger Waters has been acting like a typical Roger Waters the last few years and tanked their brand. (One could almost believe he did it on purpose, but he’s been extremely anti-war and anti-establishment his entire career, no matter the cost. It’s a major theme in a lot of Pink Floyd songs.) * The Legend of Vox Machina Season 3 (on Amazon Prime). * Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild podcast, every Monday. * The Glass Cannon Podcast, Campaign 2 (on YouTube). * I finally watched the first episode of Rings of Power season 2, but it’s really difficult to stick with it. They keep focusing on Sauron and the elves but they’re making no effort to help the viewer care in the slightest about them. In my personal opinion, the whole point of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (and high fantasy in general) is to follow the story of the hobbits (you know, the relatable ones) as they navigate the big scary world of other-worldly sorcerers, elves, and evil. I can’t say I’ve ever wondered about Sauron as a person. * The last of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee New Zealand season 2 (on ThreeNow via. VPN). * Taskmaster U.K. Season 18 (on YouTube). * I just learned there’s a season 3 of Taskmaster Australia! (on 10Play via. VPN).

In the always-on-in-the-background category, I’ve completed the entirety of the Taskmaster U.K. series run (again), and have moved on to Taskmaster Australia and New Zealand (again). I also went through some newer episodes of Richard Osman’s House of Games on YouTube.

Day JobI don’t even really know what to say about my day job right now. I’m just along for the ride, trying to be a model employee who helps solve problems instead of creating more problems, hoping not to get dragged too far into the nightmare of trying to organize a worldwide team of software engineers of vastly disparate experience levels. Someone, somewhere made the classic mistake of trying to throw more software engineers at a product in order to speed up delivery, and now we’re all stuck with the consequences.

Health and WellnessMy back is much better, but I still have that feeling like it’s just on the verge of getting worse again if I’m not careful. So I’m trying to do all my back exercises and not sit at a computer for excessively long periods of time.

World Context* Hurricane Helene caused considerable deaths, damage, and flooding, and weirdly morphed into a political hot topic for those desperate to manufacture an October Surprise. Hurricane Milton also rolled over Florida soon after, but it turned out to be less newsworthy in the long-term. * After weeks of air strikes, Israel invaded Lebanon, which is pretty bad. Then, Iran fired missiles at Israel, which is even worse. Now there’s talk of Israel attacking Iran, which is even worser. The Middle East continues to top the worldwide most-trending wars list. * There was a debate between vice presidential candidates Tim Walz and J.D. Vance that nobody cared about because it was too civil, but somehow the news still hyped it as the most important vice presidential debate in history, a claim for which there was no realtime fact-checking. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, 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: John Amos (actor).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 10/07* 21:41 # So I don’t forget this handy AI prompt: If I measure 10445538 samples at 48000 samples per second, how many beats per minute is that in 4/4 time signature across 96 bars?

Tuesday 10/08* 10:22 # Last night I spent some time trying to clean up my ADAT transfer projects. What I did in 2013 was transfer the entire tape into one REAPER project per tape. So last night I set about trying to split the projects into one project per song, and try to import the original MIDI tracks and align them with the audio. It turns out to be quite a chore to set the right BPM and sync up the MIDI because for reasons I don’t fully understand (possibly due to variations in tape speed), the BPM of the audio tracks does not match the BPM of the original MIDI files. There is an MTC sync track on each tape but I don’t think I can utilize it here.

+ 10:23 # The fact that the BPM doesn’t match up makes me think all of these audio tracks will also be slightly out of tune, too, but I haven’t check that. It might actually be better to stretch the audio to match the original BPM. Will have to do some experiments on that.
+ 10:30 # Actually now that I think about it, I may have blundered horribly in 2013 and set the ADAT on the wrong sample rate setting. It has a switch to go between 44.1khz and 48khz, and I have no idea what I used in the 90s, but the REAPER projects are all 48khz. I just looked at the last ADAT deck I have in my house and it’s set on 44.1khz. Bleh. I can probably test the sample rate by importing the finished mixdowns into the projects and trying to line them up with the raw tracks. If they match, it was done right. Otherwise one will be longer or shorter than the other.

Wednesday 10/09* 18:16 # I’m extremely annoyed that the Roland Sound Canvas VSTi plugin was discontinued. Especially annoyed that it was discontinued before I knew it was being discontinued so I could get a lifetime key for it. Even more especially annoyed because I don’t see anything on offer from Roland as a newer replacement. That is all.

Thursday 10/10* 08:22 # I’ve been able to use a free general midi LV2 plugin (never heard of LV2 before but it works in REAPER) as a quick sound module so I can actually hear the MIDI tracks I’ve been working with lately. It’s bare bones, has no UI so it’s only controlled by MIDI messages, but it sounds decent enough. https://x42-plugins.com/x42/x42-gmsynth * 08:27 # In the ADAT sampling rate saga, I’ve discovered that the newer projects are dead-on with the right BPM, so I think the mismatched BPM was only an issue for the older projects, which were originally transferred to the ADAT from 4-track cassettes when I first bought the ADAT, so I suspect there may have been some tape speed issues there. It’s okay though because I merely have to set the BPM on those older projects to some mathematically calculated value like 124.7319 to line everything up. Super easy, barely an inconvenience. * 20:52 # It hasn’t even occurred to me to try Throne and Liberty after looking at the Steam page. On first glance, it appears to have the exact same generic fantasy vibe with the exact same bright flashy weapon effects that every other game has. I genuinely can’t comprehend why every game developer keeps making the exact same game over and over and over again.

Friday 10/11 08:00 # I tried out Silent Hill 2 last night. Played about an hour. It’s a high quality walking simulator so far. Roughly 99% ambience. No story, no scares, lots of invisible walls, almost nothing to interact with. I have to assume this is an intentional choice not to put anything interesting within the first two hours of the game, so players will be forced to keep playing past the Steam two hour return window. Or else they’re taking for granted that brand loyalty will keep people playing no matter how boring the first hour is. Or maybe they assume all players are ADHD and sprint past the beginning without stopping to look at anything? Anyway, it has great reviews and I don’t plan to return it, but I’m not rearranging my plans to continue playing it either. * 08:12 # I got an email that my cohost data is now available for export. Fortunately, I don’t think I posted a single message on cohost. Because, you know, it was super obvious that every one of those “hey look we’re not Twitter!” sites was going to fail from the beginning. Because, you know, making a global communication platform to rival Twitter isn’t something your average garage development team can pull off, especially without any money. * 08:29 # Looking over some of my recent missives, I wish I wasn’t so down on the entire games industry, but what choice do I have? Modern games are extremely boring and uninspired and corporate factory-produced compared to 20 years ago. Even most of the indie ones are just “hey let’s remake this one game we liked as kids except with slightly different graphics and sounds.” I mean I don’t want* to see it that way but it’s hard to deny the reality of what I’m seeing with my own two eyes. * 08:39 # The popular mainstream strategy for making games in the modern world seems to be to make something that players can play because they’re so bored they have nothing better to do, or to make something that’s relaxing and unchallenging because the rest of the player’s life is overwhelming. Both of those are fine, but I don’t really need them in my life very often. I’m looking for something a bit more than that for a “main” game.

+ 08:44 # I suppose a third popular mainstream strategy for making games is to make something that all your friends are playing and they need you to play it too. Games based entirely on peer pressure. That pretty much covers the entirety of the online competitive game market. I haven’t really played any of those kinds of games since the 2000s.

15:31 # I wish I knew why Apple forces us to re-learn how boxes work every time we open one of their products. I guess that’s one of the things that happens when you have too much money. Regular boxes that open in the normal way you expect? Pssht. Lame.
16:20 # Listening back to the video I recorded last night of Silent Hill 2… they should call it Silent Dialog 2. They’re leaning super hard on the “mumbling quietly in front of a condenser mic to evoke a moody mood” trope. No wonder they recommend wearing headphones because it’s the only way you can understand the words without subtitles.

Sunday 10/13* 16:00 # So I was trying to mow the lawn before all the leaves fall and whatnot, and my riding mower decides to completely fall apart. First, the battery is dead, so I have to jump start it (shout out to iClever’s battery charger/jump starter thingy, an essential tool for any modern household). Then, the mower deck starts freaking out and I can’t actually mow. All around fun. That means I’m going to have to take the mower deck off and try to figure out how to repair it, having never done such a thing before. Probably by replacing the blades and/or rebalancing them or something. That ain’t going to get done this weekend.

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I’ve spent a lot of time this cycle sitting around in a stuporous malaise, not writing, not programming, not gaming, not making videos or music.

GamingI’ve only played Dragon’s Dogma 2 a couple of times this cycle, otherwise nothing.

Media ConsumptionRegularly consuming: Dimension 20’s Time Quangle (on Dropout.tv), Taskmaster Series 18 (on YouTube), Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee NZ Season 2 (on VPN), Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild Podcast (on Google), The Glass Cannon podcast (on YouTube), Daily Show clips (on YouTube), The Weekly Show podcast (on YouTube), The Rest Is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube), Bill Maher’s Real Time (on Max, but usually just the Monologue and New Rules).

Background consumption*: Taskmaster U.K. rewatches on YouTube because I spent a lot of time lying in bed resting my stupid back.

Except in situations where I actually need to concentrate or when I’m recording something myself, I almost always have something playing in the background 24/7.

Wings of Pegasus VideosI don’t know how one of these videos got onto my recommendations, but I fell down a rabbit hole of watching YouTube videos of this guy Fil of Wings of Pegasus, a channel I’d never heard of before, analyzing music videos and performances to see if they’re using auto-tune or pitch correction or lip sync.

This is apparently a controversial subject and he attracts a lot of criticism (the recipe for all successful content creators). As a person who has a certain amount of audio engineering knowledge, I can report that he sounds completely authentic and knowledgeable of the craft to me, though he does tend to descend into random or repetitive word salad a lot. It feels like he spends 10 minutes explaining things that only need 1 minute to explain. And there is a strong undercurrent of “this is how good I am at music so make sure to check out the stuff I sell” vibe to it, along with the usual big content creator shouty headlines and whatnot.

That aside, the point is, there is apparently a whole world of people out there who are into exposing musicians for using pitch correction (and/or debunking that musicians have used pitch correction). There is plenty to criticize about the modern music industry, but analyzing pitch correction seems like a weirdly specific hobby to get into.

My 2 cents (har-har! get it? pitch is measured in cents!) is: Yeah, I mean obviously everybody on the Spotify Top 100 and in those Huge Arena Shows are using auto-tune and pitch correction and lip syncing. Music is way too big of a business not to. You really think The Eagles are going to cancel a billion-dollar show because Don Henley gets a cold? I think not.

The other side-effect of watching these videos is that I found a bunch of tools to isolate vocals and other instrument tracks. Which leads me to…

Media ProductionWhen my NAS crashed last year, I had backups of most everything important, except for audio projects created between around 2020 to 2023 (and there weren’t very many). However I lost immediate access to a ton of the source files for my archived music projects.

So I embarked on another journey of copying backups of old audio files and projects from CDROMs and hard drives onto my NAS. I bought a gizmo that lets me plug in old IDE hard drives into a USB port so I can quickly copy the files from the drive, without having to setup any old computers. It’s a pretty cool gadget.

Between back-resting sessions, I’ve spent some amount of time with REAPER and FL Studio this cycle, trying to setup (or actually re-setup) working environments in which to load all my old music. I started a new project in FL Studio using some audio loops I got in a Humble bundle to try to remember how it works.

The Lost ADAT TapesLong story short: I wrote and recorded a lot of music during the 1990s, because reasons, mainly revolving around the youthful misconception that art would continue to be valued in the age of the Internet.

I have digital copies of most of the source material for that music I recorded, but not everything.

After moving many times, I cannot locate any of the original ADAT tapes of my earliest recordings anymore. (It’s impossible for me to imagine that I threw away ADAT master tapes, even if I didn’t have any way to play them, and I certainly don’t remember doing it, but I’ve turned my house upside down many times in the last few years and I just can’t find them.)

So there is a subset of my music from about 1993-1995 where I only have the final mixdowns on CDs and DAT tapes. This is infuriating, because I’d love to remix some of those songs using modern technology, but it’s basically impossible without re-recording them from scratch. Which is quite a chore because I can’t play or sing even half as well as I could back in 1993-1995. (Luckily the tools for fixing bad playing are practically limitless now.)

That’s all background for the real topic of this section: I found this YouTube channel that isolates vocal tracks and analyzes them (see above), and I wondered if I could make use of that myself to recover some of my lost tracks. Apparently this is yet another new thing AI (or “AI”) is really useful for. (See also: The last Beatles song.)

So I looked for some AI tools for isolating vocals. They’re plentiful online. I picked this site called Lalal.ai, where you can upload a song, and it will attempt to separate out not only the vocals, but also the drums, guitars, or bass.

I gave it one of the songs I don’t have individual tracks for, and it worked. In an imperfect way, at least. It’s nowhere near as good as finding the original ADAT tape and transferring the tracks directly. (That particular tape, however, was mangled by my ancient ADAT deck, so it might be completely impossible to recover even if I could find the tape again.) But it’s better than nothing.

Here’s an example of it in action:

The original mix, which I remastered in 2010:

AI-isolated drums (from a Boss DR-660 drum machine sequenced on an Amiga):

AI-isolated bass guitar (a real bass guitar played by me):

AI-isolated guitars (a real strat played by me):

AI-isolated vocal (a much younger me):

By extraordinary luck, I actually did find two of the original seven tracks from that song in WAV files (I have no idea why). One of them is the vocal (the other is the lead guitar). So you can compare how AI did against the original:

From my own casual comparison I can report there are numerous artifacts in the AI-isolated vocal that make it pretty much useless garbage from an audio engineering perspective, but it’s fairly miraculous that it was able to get anything at all from just a handful of mouse clicks.

Lalal.ai is pretty good, but I’m also interested in trying out Spleeter, which is a less user-friendly implementation of the same technology, this time run from a command line. It has the distinct advantage (allegedly) that you can feed it your own training data. I have tons of my own isolated vocal tracks I can feed it, and isolated guitar tracks, etc., which should theoretically improve its ability to isolate my own voice from a mix.

The moral of this story is that there might be some hope for remixing those songs after all, thanks to that evil AI thing that we all hate, but still find uses for every day. If only I had the time and energy to spend on remixing old songs. I should probably just give up and write new songs.

Home DevelopmentI’ve been taking a break from blog comments to rest my back. Luckily I was able to get them into a semi-working state before stopping. Surprisingly, the current implementation is such that I’ve received exactly zero attempted spam comments since deploying it.

Day JobThis sprint was a bit slow because there was a moratorium on internal deployments that kept me from making much progress.

Health and WellnessIf I believed in biorhythms this would have been a time period where my physical biorhythm graphs were way down in the valley part. My back and neck and shoulder blade area have been bothering me greatly, which cascades into a lot of time spent doing almost nothing productive. Every cough or sneeze feels like a re-injury. It was almost impossible to spend time sitting at a computer using a keyboard or mouse without feeling pain.

It’s been doubly frustrating because I’m a person who has a constant stream of ideas for projects that I want to work on or things I want to do, pretty much all day every day from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep, and yet, I have to table them and hope I can work on them later. I had to spend almost 100% of my weekends resting up from the exertion of trying to sit and do programming work during the week. Some people out there probably understand what that’s like. If not, then I can report that it sucks.

World ContextAs yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

There was another honest-to-gosh assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Florida, though this one was foiled before he was in any danger.
Israel has been escalating attacks on (Iran-backed) Hezbollah in Lebanon, using air strikes and–I promise I’m not making this up–exploding pagers.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Periodically I check the status of the ongoing trainwrecks and it turns out the Nigerian Crisis (since 7/2023) as a result of the 2023 coup “officially” ended in February, though U.S. troops only just completed their withdrawal from Niger.
Celebrity Deaths: Dame Maggie Smith (actor), Kris Kristofferson (musician).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 09/24* 18:06 # Every time I dig out my old, old song recording files from ages ago, I find myself wanting to remix and remaster those songs instead of working on new songs. Quite silly, really.

+ 18:09 # It would be a significant amount of work, too, because all of the MIDI tracks would have to rebuilt from scratch because I no longer have any of the old MIDI gear I used.

Sunday 09/29* 09:52 # I got stuck this morning in a rabbit hole of YouTube videos within the intense world of song producers analyzing other people’s live performances to look for lip syncing or pitch correcting.

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I saw a post on Uncountable Thoughts about Google’s Notebook LM making AI-generated podcasts about their blog. I hadn’t heard of Notebook LM, so I checked it out, thinking it would be quite silly.

Well, it is silly, but it’s also jaw-dropping and amazingly entertaining and I would happily subscribe to this AI-generated podcast talking about my own writing and YouTube videos. They get it, man.

The 7-minute “deep dive” podcast is attached to this post, featuring the vocal stylings of Unnamed AI Man and Unnamed AI Woman. You should be able to find a play button somewhere in the vicinity of this text to play it.

I did exactly zero work to create this. I entered a link to my blog, and then entered a link to one of my YouTube videos, and then clicked on “Create Podcast.” I did way more work to create this blog post than I did to create the podcast.

Anyway, just thought you should know. New podcasts are probably AI-generated from now on. (I had heard this before, but now I believe it 100%.)

Just to be clear, this podcast is roughly 100% pure b.s. but there are some kernels of truth in it. My blog is, in fact, “fascinating.” And I did, in fact, change my trousers while getting ready to fight Midra.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 09/17* 11:20 # Mini review of David Gilmour’s new album Luck and Strange: Gorgeous and mature and inspiring. Hits pretty hard when you think it might be his last. It’s a perfect coda to a legendary and influential musical career. Was very sad when it ended. * 13:52 # The U.S. Have I Got News For You is weird so far.

Wednesday 09/18* 13:46 # During The Great NAS Crash of 2023, I lost a lot of backup audio files and projects that had previously been copied from various CDROM backups and such to the NAS. I’m currently working on copying them again to the new NAS, presumably so I can lose them again some time in the future.

Friday 09/20* 21:43 # The second AI-generated casserole, Chicken and Rice, turned out okay, except I had to cook it about twice as long as ChatGPT said in order to actually cook the rice.

Saturday 09/21* 20:55 # Copying some music data off of an old IDE 150gb hard drive and thinking “man 150gb is basically nothing” and then remembering I used to think 300mb Amiga hard drives were huge and then remembering my first hard drive was actually a 20mb hard drive kit I had to make myself.

+ 20:59 # All of which makes me hate myself because there’s nothing more annoying than people who go around saying things like “you think THAT’S a small hard drive, well I used to have a computer with 16 kb of memory and a cassette tape for storage!” Which I did.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 09/10* 10:51 # So the main problem with outdoor cat starting to want to stay indoors at night now is that outdoor cat has no concept of the normal human sleep schedule, like indoor cat does. Outdoor cat is ready for action at like 4 am, and the way my house is situated there’s no way to stop him from jumping on top of me in bed, purring and clawing at me until I get up and throw him outside again.

Saturday 09/14* 10:21 # ChatGPT sure does break a lot. It really sucks having to go back to Googling for answers.

+ 10:24 # I was going to ask ChatGPT for easy casserole suggestions but it’s down. But there’s no way I’m going to try to Google for anything even remotely related to food. I don’t need that flood of spam and advertising and SEO b.s. in my life, thanks.

Sunday 09/15* 14:55 # I haven’t watched football in a while. What has happened to the uniforms? The Washington Commanders look like they’re all doused in ketchup and mustard. Also, it looks like there’s about half as much padding now than there used to be. * 18:01 # Well… some mistakes have been made with my first AI-generated casserole recipe, Chicken Enchilada Casserole. Mistake 1 was making a full 13x9 pan worth of food that I had no idea whether it would be edible or not. Mistake 2 was improvising and adding some uncooked rice just to see if that would actually work, because it was a big component of another of the AI recipes. Turns out it didn’t work. Otherwise it wasn’t that great, especially with the crunchy bits that are probably going to give me food poisoning. I’m attempting to salvage it by re-cooking it a whole lot longer but I expect I’m going to have to just throw this out. Boo.

+ 18:08 # I did some additional research on putting uncooked rice into casseroles because I’d never heard of such a thing before, and it turns out that there are a lot of non-AI recipes that do in fact call for it. But they also call for stuff like chicken broth and other liquids which presumably work better for cooking the rice in an oven. I dunno. It seems to me it would be safer to pre-cook the rice in water because crunchy rice bits in a casserole sucks.

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A short one this time because I’ve spent a lot of time writing my DIY Comments series and also writing code.

GamingI’m still half-heartedly playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 now and then. I think I mentioned that this was the third time I’d started it. I got to almost exactly the same point that I got to in my first two attempts (the Culling Monsters quest) and started to drift away from lack of interest yet again.

I find the questing and story in Dragon’s Dogma 2 fairly dull. The most fun part of the game for me is just kind of wandering around fighting random monsters in the landscape, finding people to escort from one place to another, stumbling on boss fights in the middle of the forest, and finding random chests or other secrets. It’s somewhat like an old-style sandbox MMORPG in that regard, actually. A little bit like Asheron’s Call, where you signed in and mostly just wandered around hunting monsters and hoping they would drop good loot.

Media ProductionScopique wrote an interesting post: Rabbit Holes: Video Editing for Video Games – Scopique’s

I feel like I was born to respond to that post. I could sit down and write thousands and thousands of words about it. I started to leave a comment but it’s impossible to write a brief note containing eight years of lessons I’ve learned. Anyway I might write a brain dump post about it.

The point is, I’ve been thinking very specifically about video editing for video games a lot with Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s an incredibly boring game to watch after a certain point, and not suitable at all for videos. (Most open world games aren’t.) But I still keep trying to record them anyway because I don’t have anything else to play at the moment.

Unfortunately, while I have tons of knowledge about making better game videos, what I can’t do is tell you how to be a more successful or more popular content creator. That’s not what I’m into. I’m only in it for the art, man. I only make videos for me. That other stuff is sales and marketing which is really squaresville.

Media Consumption* The Rest Is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube) * The Daily Show clips (on YouTube) * Real Time with Bill Maher (on Max) * Guy Mont Spelling Bee New Zealand season 2 (on VPN) * Guy Mont Spelling Bee Australia season 1 (on VPN) * Taskmaster Australia season 2 (on VPN) * Taskmaster New Zealand season 5 (on VPN) * Taskmaster UK season 18 has just begun (on YouTube) * Dimension 20 Time Quangle has also just started, surely the worldwide nerd media event of the year so far (on Dropout.tv)

Home DevelopmentI’ve spent a ton of time working on a new commenting system for this blog. It’s something I’ve had in the back of my mind since I moved to a static blog in 2021, but I finally felt inspired enough to actually start working on it.

I hate to go counter-cultural and say good things about AI again, but AI has been helping tremendously with this. I’ve had the basic ideas in my head for a long time, and know more-or-less exactly how I want it to work, but it’s a real chore to start a new project and look up all the exact syntax and libraries and patterns to use in environments you don’t work with every day.

I’m more-or-less constantly shifting between Windows and MacOS and Linux, using various programming languages and tools, all up and down the development stack, and it’s impossible at my advanced age to keep every idiosyncrasy straight. AI gives me code samples I can work with in seconds and lets me get a prototype up and running quite a lot faster than I’ve ever been able to before.

Larry Wall rightly taught us long ago in that Perl book that the three virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Sure, I can write a comment system without AI help, but why would I? It’d be like washing clothes without a washing machine. It’s so much faster and easier. Hopefully by the time governments start regulating away AI, I’ll be ready to retire.

You can read more about that in my DIY Comment series.

Day JobMy team is slowly adapting to the challenging new reality of having 15 people working together across a 13-hour span of time zones. I can’t say it’s a pleasant experience. It’s exactly the logistical nightmare you would expect, and exactly the inconvenience to everybody that you’d expect.

It was such a predictable problem that one can’t help but wonder who thought it would be a good idea to do this. I feel fairly confident that within a year’s time I’ll be reporting that the team has been split into smaller groups in similar time zones.

Anyway, it’s likely that I’ll be starting into more front-end work soon (Next.js Typescript), as that’s the new high priority.

Health and WellnessI’ve been having a lot of back and neck pain lately. Pretty annoying.

Seeing as how I’ve been feeling poorly a lot lately, I’ve done an introspective catalog of my lifestyle habits and observed that I haven’t eaten very nutritious food for a long time. So I’ve recommitted myself to actually eating food again and I’m dubbing this autumn as the “autumn of casseroles.”

I’ve almost never made a casserole, but it seems like an easy way to put a bunch of the unprocessed foods a body requires to stay alive into one pan, and an homage to one’s childhood. I asked ChatGPT for easy chicken casserole recipes (god no I’m not Googling for recipes are you crazy?) and it gave me four of them: Chicken and Rice Casserole, Chicken and Broccoli Casserole (a staple of my youth), Buffalo Chicken Casserole, and Chicken Enchilada Casserole. I did not spot any glue among the ingredients. I will report back if AI manages to poison me.

World Context* The first debate between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump happened. I didn’t watch it, because I’m a normal person who finds the farcical mockery of previously-important civic institutions unpalatable. Anyway, most of the country decided how they were going to vote back in 2015 or earlier. * Trump has been hanging out with some conspiracist named Laura Loomer lately, and I can’t be the only who thinks she looks exactly like The Red Woman Melisandre. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting the presidential race to veer into the Stannis Baratheon plot arc from Game of Thrones. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022). * Celebrity Deaths: James Earl Jones (actor).

Bye!

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The continuing adventures of adding homegrown DIY comments to my static blog.

Last we left off, we’d checked for spam, and written comments to an AWS DynamoDB table. This time, we’re making some big changes. No development plan survives real-world usage.

A New No-Javascript SolutionI had always assumed browsing the Internet without Javascript was a mythical tale told to frighten developers, but Bhagpuss recently reminded me that no-Javascript users could be lurking anywhere among us, leaping out of the shadows to shock us when we least expect it.

(But seriously, I might turn off Javascript more myself, but a lot of the sites I have open in tabs all the time are very Javascript-heavy.)

So I decided to reprioritize no-Javascript comments and thought about how to improve that experience.

I abandoned what I had originally planned, which was to submit directly to the api from a comment form on the blog page.

The problems I was dealing with were these:

Without Javascript, it was impossible to display the comment you had entered on the blog post page (because it’s static), which felt weird and looked like the comment didn’t go through when it had.
I was having no end of difficulty trying to redirect back to the original blog post page after a comment was submitted by the browser to the api.
Setting up the api endpoint to handle both application/json and application/x-www-form-urlencoded submissions was pretty ugly.

So a better way popped into my head: Link to a separate page solely for entering comments without Javascript. It might be a bit counter-intuitive for readers used to WordPress-style commenting, but hopefully it won’t be too much of a burden.

With the page on a different subdomain (comments.endgameviable.com), I was no longer restricted by my static blog pages, and I could render dynamic HTML on the server side and show comments as they’re entered, and give a more interactive experience.

I did this with, you guessed it, another AWS Lambda serverless function and another API Gateway configuration. Why rent a VPS when I can put an entire HTML server implementation into a tiny little single-purpose serverless function?

(Incidentally, I haven’t yet looked at the cost of running all these Lambda functions. My assumption is it will be reasonable for my tiny little site. A brief glance at AWS Billing reveals that my API Gateway and Lambda and Dynamo usage so far in September are $0.)

This time I opted for Golang instead of Node.js. I was led to believe Golang has a faster startup time, which is perfect for serverless functions, where every millisecond counts. Counts against my monthly bill, that is.

The Lambda function renders an HTML page and processes GET and POST requests. It’s very old school. It reminded me of the ancient past world of PHP.

It looks something like this, stripped down to the bare essentials:

func lambdaHandlerWeb(ctx context.Context, request events.APIGatewayProxyRequest) (events.APIGatewayProxyResponse, error) { var data PageDataif request.HTTPMethod == "GET" {data.Title = request.QueryStringParameters["title"]data.Origin = request.QueryStringParameters["origin"]} else if request.HTTPMethod == "POST" {values, _ := url.ParseQuery(request.Body)data.Title = values.Get("title")data.Page = values.Get("page")data.Origin = values.Get("origin")data.Name = values.Get("name")data.Email = values.Get("email")data.Comment = values.Get("comment")data.Honeypot = values.Get("website")data.ClientIP = request.RequestContext.Identity.SourceIPdata.UserAgent = request.RequestContext.Identity.UserAgentdata.Referrer = request.Headers["referer"] // lowercase // validate and save the comment in DynamoDB tablesaveComment(ctx, data)} // query DynamoDB for recent commentsdata.Comments = fetchComments(ctx, cfg, data.Page) // generate HTML page using a template with variable substitutionst := template.Must(template.New("webpage").Parse(htmlTemplate))html := renderTemplate(t, data) // return a responsereturn events.APIGatewayProxyResponse{StatusCode: 200,Headers: map[string]string{"Content-Type": "text/html",},Body: html,}, nil} I’ll be converting all my previous Node.js Lambda functions into Golang. (It turns out ChatGPT can translate code from Node.js to Golang very easily.) I’ll be doing this so I can share code between the three Lambda functions I require so far.

Additionally, a separate page for no-Javascript comments could be a boon for me because it might also thwart the armies of naive spam bots out there. If there’s no Javascript, there won’t be a comment form to submit spam to on the blog page. The spam bot would have to follow the link to the comment page. Maybe it’s naive of me to think they can’t or won’t do that. I’m watching my logs carefully to see what the bots are doing during this whole development process. (I’ve received less spam than I expected, so far.)

I thought about embedding the no-Javascript comment page in the blog post with an iframe but I ran into a lot of formatting issues and abandoned that plan.

One issue I’ve noticed in my testing so far is that it’s pretty easy to accidentally submit a comment twice on the comment page. That’s a usage problem that goes all the way back to at least the early 2000s, back when it was easy to accidentally buy things twice on commerce sites. I’ll have to dig through the historical records to see how that issue was solved.

Meanwhile, Back in JavascriptFor those running Javascript, we can build a better user experience by running clientside code to fetch comments and handle form submission right on the otherwise static blog page.

First, I removed the form from the basic HTML structure of the page. Then, I added the form with some Javascript at page startup. Here is a stripped down version of the essential Javascript for the blog page:

// add comment form to the pagefunction addForm() { const container = document.getElementById(containerId); const html = `<form id="comment-form"> </form>`; container.innerHTML = html;}// handle user clicking the form submit buttonfunction handleSubmit(event) { event.preventDefault(); // ...collect form fields // ...basic validation fetch(`${apiEndpoint}comment`, { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json', }, body: JSON.stringify(formData) }); // ...error handling etc. fetchComments(); // only if successful}// get existing comments for the current blog postasync function fetchComments() { fetch(`${apiEndpoint}comments?page=${window.location.pathname}`) .then(response => response.json()) .then(comments => { if (comments.length > 0) { displayComments(comments); } }) // error handling etc.}// display comments by adding to the pagefunction displayComments() { const container = document.getElementById('comment-display-area'); container.innerHTML = ''; for (let i = 0; i < comments.length; i++) { const comment = comments[i]; // a lot of: // - const element = document.createElement() // - x.appendChild(element) }}// called on page loadfunction startup() { // Adding the form with javascript means the form will not // appear if the user has javascript disabled, // and they can click the link to go to // the comment page instead. addForm(); document.getElementById('comment-form').addEventListener('submit', handleSubmit); fetchComments();}document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', startup); A bit ugly to work with HTML in a Javascript file, unfortunately. Maybe there’s a cleaner way. I’ll deal with that later.

There is some work to be done for dealing with CORS issues in the API as well. Javascript fetches tend to complain loudly if the API responses don’t have the right Access-Control-* headers. I don’t fully understand the world of CORS yet, to be honest, because that came along after I last did extensive low-level web development work. (It seems rather pointless to me, because it’s only enforced by browsers, and is entirely bypassed if you make direct requests with, say, curl. So it has almost zero security benefit, if you ask me.)

There is also some CSS for styling the form on the page. I literally copied-and-pasted the results of a ChatGPT prompt like “make me some css for a comment form.” Have I mentioned how useful ChatGPT is for rapid prototype development? I don’t know if people are aware of this AI thing but people should check it out. It took me months to write a comment system back in the dark days of PHP, now I can get prototypes working in days. It’s taking me considerably longer to write blog posts about what I did than to do the actual thing.

Anyway, sharing that CSS with the separate no-Javascript comments.endgameviable.com page is a bit of a challenge, though, due to the nature of how Hugo combines and minifies CSS into one randomly-named file at build time. A problem for another time.

That’s it for now. Future steps include:

Importing my blog comment history into local data files inside my Hugo content directory (done)
Build-time Hugo templates to query local comment data archives to render older comments as static HTML (done)
Notifying me when comments are received (done)
Adding everything to a repo on GitHub for transparency
Administrative tools so I can manage comments better
Confirmations of cookie or local storage usage
Support for third-party authentication like Google if you want to
Maybe a way to export your own comments
The list goes on and on, which is why nobody should write their own comment system

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The continuing adventures of adding homegrown DIY comments to my static blog.

Last we left off, we’d implemented an AWS Lambda function to receive HTTP POST requests from a comment form. Now we need to save the comments and check for spam.

Checking For SpamWe receive our comments from a plain HTML form, so we’re going to get spam from bots. It’s incredibly easy to send spam to an HTML comment form. My blog isn’t that popular, but I still got a spam within six hours of adding the form to the blog. Luckily I don’t get that many.

Here are some of the ways I’m checking for spam in the Lambda form processing function:

A honeypot form field (surprisingly effective)
Verifying that form fields have what they’re supposed to (also effective)
Verifying referrer
Akismet API call

Akismet is surprisingly easy to use even without an active WordPress site. Here are the key components for adding it to the Lambda form processing function:

const akismetClient = akismet.client({ key: process.env.AKISMET_KEY, blog: process.env.AKISMET_SITE,});const userIp = event.context.sourceIp;const userAgent = event.context['user-agent'];const referrer = event.headers['Referer'];const akismetData = { user_ip: userIp, user_agent: userAgent, referrer: referrer || '', comment_type: 'comment', comment_author: name, comment_author_email: email, comment_content: comment};const isSpam = await akismetClient.checkSpam(akismetData); Honestly, though, some basic validation of the form fields and a honeypot field screens out 99% of the spam I’ve seen so far, before having to call Akismet.

One thing I’m not doing (yet?) is requiring clientside Javascript to post the form. That was something I did in the past, which eliminated 100% of spam. I’m led to believe spam bots are more sophisticated now so that’s not as effective anymore, and also there are accessibility concerns with requiring Javascript, and also there are actually people in the world who voluntarily disable Javascript on web sites. So I’m trying to enable basic support for no-javascript comment posting. (That comes with its own set of problems which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader. I’m looking at you, 302 status code response.)

Protecting against script kiddies and their form posts has been fairly straightforward for over a decade, but if someone targets the API directly, that’s a slightly different story.

How I’m calling the API is a completely open secret for anyone with basic web development skills to see by viewing the source code of my site (same as with any site), so anyone in the world can start writing curl commands to send comments to my blog if they wanted to (including me, for testing). Protecting against that is another topic.

In the last week, I’ve seen a variety of attacks on both the FORM and the API directly. Not as much as, say, the Reddit front page, but enough that you can’t ignore it. If anyone else is building comments, you’ve got to build in protection from the very beginning.

Incidentally, this is one reason I’m very sympathetic to people disabling comments on blogs, and why I’ve been slow to work on this. Comments are almost always a wide open gate for bad actors to drive a truck full of threats into your site. If you run a managed blog, you don’t have to worry about that as much, but somebody, somewhere does, on your behalf. It’s easy to implement comments, but it’s less easy to implement secure comments.

Saving CommentsI tend to use AWS for all my cloud computing needs because 1) it’s one of the big three industry standards (Google and Azure being the others, not counting Alibaba which is the fourth one we don’t talk about), and 2) I interact with AWS at work all the time so I’m most familiar with it.

So I save my comments to an AWS Dynamo table. It’s an object-storage database that’s pretty cheap to operate. Anyway saving is implemented with some additions to the form handler Lambda function. The key bits are:

We don’t have user accounts yet, so for now, it’s just an email address. So initially, as with pretty much any blog that allows anonymous comments, it’ll be super easy for anyone to impersonate anyone else. There’s a minimal amount of validation, but to make a long story short, there’s a reason sites moved to more complicated comment logins.

(Technically, you can type any string whatsoever into the email box, so using a randomly-generated password-like string would be better, so long as you can remember it. I’m never going to send anyone an actual email.)

Getting CommentsNow we need another API function to read comments from the Dynamo table. This will be used by the client-side Javascript I’ll have to add to the web site.

I setup another API Gateway and another AWS Lambda function for this. This part was very straightforward. Here are the basics:

The API Gateway was very easy to setup for this as we just need to pass a page parameter to the Lambda function in a very conventional way. (The page being the blog post that we want to fetch comments for. I’m just using the path component of the url without the domain name. That might change in the future but for now it lets me test locally.)

ChatGPT Makes This EasyI should mention here that I’ve used ChatGPT 4 a lot for getting started on this.

I know it’s not cool to mention that AI is game-changingly useful for menial software development tasks, but it is. Being able to type in something like “Write an AWS Lambda function in ES6 Javascript to process a POST request from an HTTP FORM for blog comments” and get a mostly-working code sample as output is a huge time-saver.

That’s it for now. Future steps include:

Client-side Javascript to fetch and display recent comments from the API
Importing my blog comment history into local data files inside my Hugo content directory
Build-time Hugo templates to query local comment data archives to render older comments as static HTML
Notifying me when comments are received
Administrative tools so I can manage comments
A way to submit comments using some kind of third-party OAuth like Google if you want to
The list goes on and on

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 09/02* 09:47 # Is it possible that Guy Mont’s Spelling Bee is the greatest comedy game show that has ever been made? It might just be. I hate to shill for stuff but people need to watch this thing so it can run for a hundred seasons. * 13:27 # Note to future self: The push-to-mute hotkey doesn’t do jack all in OBS until you go to the audio settings and enable push-to-mute for that audio input. No, it doesn’t make any logical sense to me, either. But sometimes OBS is weird and anti-intuitive like that. At the very least they could put a note next to the hotkey setting that says “this won’t do anything until you enable push-to-mute in the settings.”

Wednesday 09/04* 08:48 # Ugh. My neck is so sore after waking up this morning I doubt I’m going to be able to do a single thing with a computer today. Ugh. So annoying because I have a lot of ideas.

Thursday 09/05* 08:27 # Some recent update to my Samsung Galaxy phone has completely prevented me from being able to play the news that I had setup with the Google Assistant. I used to be able to just hold down the home button and say “play the news” and boom, there it was. Now when I hold down the home button some crazy popup menu comes up that somehow thinks I want to highlight portions of the screen to get an AI to help me with what I’m seeing or some b.s. like that. There’s a little microphone that lets me talk but it just does a search. Seriously Google, stop letting children push major UI updates to the entire world.

+ 08:39 # I had to enable the stupid “Hey Google” thing so now I have to say “Hey Google play the news.” It was bad enough having to say “play the news” to my phone but now I have to get its attention first.

15:15 # I put a wide open form on my blog this morning to do an experiment. Amount of time that passed before a spam bot comment was received: 6 hours.
15:22 # This Ember thing from Foundry VTT is the second thing I’ve seen this year attempting to tightly integrate a video game and tabletop role-playing game together into one thing through the use of a virtual tabletop. It’s starting to seem like an inevitability now.
- 15:23 # By which I mean Ember is the second thing I’ve seen which is a tabletop rule system and setting distributed exclusively as a virtual tabletop system.

Monday 09/09* 09:18 # I can tell fall is approaching because the days are getting shorter, and also outdoor cat wants to hang out inside more often. * 20:08 # I know everyone’s been waiting for this but I finally imported all those WordPress comments from Endgame Viable blog years 2013-2020 and they’re now rendered as part of the site build. But no, I still haven’t imported and fixed all the old images yet.

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This is a post about adding a homegrown DIY comment system to my static blog. It’s a pretty narrow audience that would be interested in this.

The easiest way to add comments to a static blog like mine is to use one of those third-party comment platforms like Disqus, or setup your own private comment server with something like Remark42.

But there are other ways, for those who are inclined toward getting their hands dirty with HTML and Javascript and serverless cloud computing platforms and doing stuff that’s never been done before. Unfortunately for you, the reader, I’m one of those people.

First of all, why not use Disqus, et al?

I have no control over what a third-party comment service like Disqus or CommentBox or GraphComment does with your comments. Free services are notoriously limited and or riddled with ads. Paid services undermine the entire reason for running an incredibly cheap-to-operate static blog.
I can recover control of the comment data by using a self-hosted comment system like Remark42. However, it’s a pain to set them up, they may not work quite the way I want, and it costs money to run the server, which, again, undermines the cheapness of a static blog.

So, writing my own comment system is the only way to do everything the exact way that I want to do it.

I have technically done this before, in the 2000s with a classic PHP-and-MySQL solution, but I’m doing it entirely differently this time so it will work with a static blog.

For the rest of this post, I’ll be assuming you know the basics of creating and using AWS Lambda functions and API Gateways.

Comment FormStep one of this long, multi-part journey is to create a comment form. The easiest thing in the world to add to an HTML page. It looks something like this, simplified. I’ll leave the styling to the reader’s imagination.

```

``` Immediately we run into problems as a static blog. A static blog means there is no server running the blog (well, there is, but it only serves static, pre-generated files–it doesn’t run any code).

So what do we put in that action property? Where do we post this form? I can’t post it back to the same page, because nothing will happen. Readers can enter comments all day but they won’t go anywhere. I need somewhere to post to.

AWS Lambda FunctionFor this experiment, I turned to AWS again. Doing stuff with AWS or Google or Azure is pretty much the bread and butter of web development these days.

Unfortunately this probably gets me kicked out of the IndieWeb club, because, while they would undoubtedly applaud a DIY comment system, AWS would surely be considered part of the “corporate web” and thus off-limits. Ah well. Convenience wins out over ideology yet again.

Here’s a simplified Lambda function to process a form request, stripped of everything but the bare bones. I used Node.js. I don’t like writing in Javascript that much but it’s pretty easy to write single functions.

import querystring from 'querystring';export const handler = async (event) => { const body = querystring.parse(event['body-form']); const name = body.name; const comment = body.comment; // TODO: Save the comment somewhere console.log(`Received: name="${name}" comment="${comment}"`); const response = { statusCode: 200, headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json", }, body: JSON.stringify({ message: `Comment received!`, data: { name: name, email: comment, } }), }; return response;}; We aren’t going to concern ourselves with saving the comment yet, or validating that it isn’t spam. That’s for later.

The Lambda function is the easy part. The hard part is the API Gateway. You can’t call a Lambda function directly (or, at least, you shouldn’t), you have to put it behind an API Gateway.

AWS API GatewayIn order to provide a public endpoint to post form data, I created an AWS API Gateway. Among many other things, these are used when you want to provide an API for things like reading and writing to databases.

I created a POST /comment endpoint for the API and added my Lambda function as the backend integration. This is where things got tricky.

By default, AWS APIs expect to use JSON data. The API passes a JSON request payload to the Lambda function, and the Lambda function returns a JSON result object. This is how we like to do things in the modern world of development.

Unfortunately, HTTP FORMs are time travelers from the ancient past, and don’t work that way. They use an application/x-www-form-urlencoded request body, which is essentially a url query string stuff in the request body. It’s ugly and yucky.

Side note: A brief discussion with ChatGPT reveals that there have been discussions about adding application/json as a new enctype for forms, but it’s not here yet, and the traditional solution for submitting form data as json is to use Javascript. One of my design goals here is not to require Javascript in the browser, so that’s out.

So I had to dig through Google and ChatGPT to figure out how to pass a non-JSON request body from the API to the Lambda function. This was the most difficult part so far.

To make a long story short, because I’m not teaching a class here, the key area to investigate is the integration request and integration response part of the API Gateway configuration. A template mapping is required to put the request body urlencoded string into a json object to pass to the Lambda function for decoding.

I don’t fully understand the inner workings, but the mapping looks like this:

```

set($allParams = $input.params()){ "body-form" : $input.json('$')}

``` After using this mapping, you can get the form data in the Lambda function with this:

const body = querystring.parse(event['body-form']); Updating the FormNow that we have an API Gateway backed by a Lambda function, we can finally update the action in our HTML FORM:

```

``` That’s it for now. Future steps include:

Checking for spam
Styling the comment form
Writing comments to a Dynamo table
Reading comments from the Dynamo table with another API and Lambda function
Client-side Javascript to fetch and display recent comments from the API
Importing my blog comment history into local data files inside my Hugo content directory
Build-time Hugo templates to query local comment data archives to render older comments as static HTML
Administrative tools so I can manage comments
A way to submit comments using some kind of third-party OAuth like Google if you want to
The list goes on and on

P.S. While I’m very motivated right now, there is a very real possibility I might suddenly lose interest one day and just stop working on it.

Read Part 2

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 08/26* 19:59 # I had aspired to get the Elden Ring achievements for collecting all the legendary armaments, ashes, spells, etc. but after about 15 minutes I realized it’s a very tedious and unrewarding chore. Especially since the wiki does not do a particularly great job of explaining how to find these things. And also half the time I can’t get the achievement in my current playthrough anyway.

Thursday 08/29* 14:30 # My heat pump has stopped AGAIN.

+ 14:26 # My heat pump was fixed again by the way. This time it started up on its own after being off half the day. The current suspicion is that there’s an overheating control board. The guy showed me what sure looked like burn marks on said control board. However he couldn’t definitively conclude that was the problem because it was technically working when he arrived.

Friday 08/30* 14:27 # I’ve just learned that a 3-day weekend is coming up and suddenly I don’t have much enthusiasm for the remainder of my Friday work day. Funny how that works.

Saturday 08/31* 17:37 # I really like how game videos turn out when I edit out all the cruft and just focus on the good bits, but it’s such a time-consuming process to do it that there’s just no way I can create a whole series like that. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a perfect game for such treatment, but alas I think it’s well beyond my reach. Maybe I can do an abridged series of just the highlights of the main quests and then another series of all the unedited video with all the side quests and stuff.

Sunday 09/01* 12:01 # I spent most of the morning recording an audio version of my end-of-August blog post, because I thought it would be fun, and also to try out another microphone I’m thinking of using for game videos.

+ 12:03 # My headset microphone has developed a bizarre habit of recording little annoying blippy noises whenever I touch or move the cord, which transfer directly to the mic on the boom arm somehow. I can’t hear it while recording, but I can’t un-hear it when listening to it back.

12:57 # I think I need to give up on the idea of a tightly edited Dragon’s Dogma 2 video series, unless I want to just quit my job and work on it full time. I recorded a bit over 1 hour and 30 minutes in a game session last night where I had only set out to do the Oxcart Courier quest. While I was in Melve I thought I would just quickly dash out and kill a Cyclops, go to Eini’s House, clear out the Mountain’s Secret cave, stop by Moonglow Garden, find a secret Riftstone, and only then did I return by Oxcart back to Vernworth. This game does NOT lend itself to any kind of linear questing.

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This was actually supposed to be published on the 12th. :)

I saw an interesting post from fellow Blaugustian Cascade: Making a Comment System with Eleventy and Netlify - cascading.space.

Implementation of comments on a static blog is a topic I’ve wrestled with for lo these past three and a half years. The short version is: You can’t do it. The long version is: You can do it, but probably not the way you want to.

I’ve been using a third-party comment system called CommentBox. It’s very lightweight and doesn’t have many features, but it’s free and it works. Kind of.

But I’ve been thinking about rolling my own comment system for years now, and today I actually started hacking together some code.

I started a new Next.js project for this purpose. Next.js is my go-to platform for anything with a web front-end these days, until or unless I find something better that is also relevant to my day job.

I figure I’m only going to need an API to retrieve comments, and a web page to authenticate and enter comments. I expect I’ll implement it in the same way as most third-party comment systems; as a widget called with some Javascript on the post page.

I tend to use AWS for all my hosting needs, so I expect I’m only going to need a DynamoDB table to store the comments and another one to store the users.

And that’s where the problems begin. Before I’ve even done anything, I already need to store a table of users, which is the one thing I really don’t want to do.

Because, you see, you have to have some kind of authentication in order to implement comments on a blog. And that means you have to store user data. And that means adding an assortment of security and privacy issues to your blog. What fun.

Is there any way to get around that and still provide a secure user experience? Nope.

But I can think of plenty of ways to get around it which leave the door wide open for users to impersonate each other in comment sections. My blog’s probably not big enough to worry about it too much, though.

P.S. I did not get very far with this before realizing I couldn’t work out something I was happy with.

This post is for day 12 of Blaugust 2024.

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I’m having a very bad back day today, worse than yesterday. When it gets to this point, I have to lie down until it gets better.

This is typically brought on by spending too much time sitting and typing at a computer, and not enough time stretching or resting. Something pops somewhere in the vicinity of a neck or shoulder muscle and it’s a lot of bad days in a row for me.

Anyway, I’m flat on my back in bed trying to stay quiet and still. It’s maddening.

It gives me a chance to talk about the crazy system I’ve built in order to still kind of use a computer while I’m lying flat on my back in bed. Maybe somebody somewhere might find this useful.

One day many years ago I had an idea that if I could suspend a monitor over my bed, I could still use a computer while lying down and resting my back.

I’ve tried a few iterations. First I used PVC pipes, which worked, but was a bit flimsy. The latest is a clothes rack of the kind that you might see in a store, or that you might put by a door, to hang a whole series of coats on it. It’s just wide enough that it fits around a queen-sized bed. Barely.

Imagine a horizontal metal bar over the bed, held up by posts on either side. On that bar I hung a lightweight PC monitor, using a C-Clamp VESA Mount. I can plug my MacBook into that and viola, I can see a computer screen hanging over my head while I’m lying here flat on my back. It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.

The Macbook is sitting on a little table next to the bed, and I use a USB-C to HDMI cable to connect to the monitor. I also use this monitor for the PS5 which also sits next to the bed.

If it hasn’t been previously established, I’m very weird and do weird things like this sometimes. I recognize and own that it is weird and you would never find this in the house of a normal person with normal human sensibilities.

In order to operate the computer I bought a Bluetooth trackball mouse. It’s one of those mice that doesn’t move around, but you use your thumb to move a trackball instead. The one I got is pretty janky but it works, and it works with a MacBook or Windows laptop.

Usually I don’t do much typing, so the onscreen accessibility keyboard is good enough, but just now I dusted off my old Apple Bluetooth keyboard, which I previously used with an iPad, and connected it to the Macbook so I could write a blog post. This isn’t great for my back and neck either, but it’s vastly superior to sitting in a chair when my back is like this.

I can’t see the screen that well because it’s slightly too far away to use my computer glasses, so I don’t often do a lot of reading on this bed-monitor. Usually it’s just for watching videos or playing the PS5, but I can use it for writing sometimes too.

You might be wishing to see some pictures to illustrate this, but unfortunately my back hurts too much for such activities and also my room is never camera-ready.

Anyway it’s a handy setup for times when I need to rest my back like this. Which is fairly often, to be honest. I don’t know why beds don’t come with monitor attachments as a standard feature in this day and age.

P.S. Suprising nobody, AI did not create an accurate picture, so I went through the horrendous ordeal of taking a phone picture from the bed perspective and transferring it all the way to the blog.

This post is for day 21 of Blaugust 2024.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 08/12* 17:44 # I had this weird idea to watch some of the Star Wars stuff on Disney+ even though I’m 100% sure I’m going to regret it. I started Andor. Then I started Obi-wan. I haven’t been disappointed. In the sense that I regret watching both of these. Andor starts out very dull, and Obi-Wan starts out very silly. But my back hurts and I can’t do much else so I guess I’ll keep watching anyway.

+ 21:48 # By the way, Obi-Wan did not get much better toward the end. Mercifully it was only six plodding episodes.

Tuesday 08/13* 21:46 # The last boss in the Elden Ring DLC is not, in fact, impossible. It merely took two weeks of patient practice. And, you know, the standard amount of blind luck that is required for most Elden Ring bosses.

Friday 08/16 16:40 # Well I don’t feel like writing or* recording today. What to do.

Saturday 08/17* 12:41 # Just watched Furiosa.. finally appeared on Max instead of the stonkin high price rental on Prime. I gather the Internet vibe for this movie isn’t that great but I liked it. It’s not a very necessary movie and it’s not Fury Road but it’s better than average. * 16:21 # Of course my air conditioning picks a Saturday to just stop working completely.

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My heat pump stopped air conditioning suddenly yesterday at the exact furthest point from the time that I can call for repairs, so I spent all Saturday watching my house temperature and humidity climb from normal to sweltering. Today it’s going to be even worse because the house started out sweltering.

My heat pump sucks.

Anyway. This isn’t about my heat pump.

Though it is somewhat inspired by my heat pump, in that I can’t do much today except sit in a glum stupor, huddled in my home office with a creaky old portable air conditioner and no gaming gear, clicking on YouTube videos.

YouTube algorithms being what they are, I tend to keep watching the same channels again and again. But in these cases, it’s not because it’s the only thing YouTube ever shows me, it’s because I think these people are good at making content.

There’s an authenticity to their work that I find appealing. They aren’t trying to hit you over the head and convince you that they’re worth subscribing to, they aren’t relying on an over-the-top personality to win popularity, they just do the work, slowly refine and improve their work over time, and let the work speak for itself.

Ryan GeorgeThere are, I assume, thousands or millions of these kinds of “talking to yourself” sketch comedy types of channels. Pitch Meeting was the first one I ever saw, and I’ve been watching it for years. It’s funny. I rarely need to watch movies anymore. It’s a big time saver. New Marvel movie? Pitch Meeting is all I need. I kid, I kid. But usually I watch the Pitch Meetings for the big franchise blockbusters long before I watch the movie. He also has a separate channel for non-movie-related sketches.

Seth SkorkowskiSeth makes content for tabletop RPGs. Mostly reviews of modules and systems, tips and tricks, things like that. Most YouTube content of this nature is useful but quite boring. The thing that makes Seth’s videos stand out is the little skits he puts in between reading scripts to camera. None of them are going to win any awards, but again, I just like to see people putting in the work to make things.

The Glass Cannon NetworkThis is a new one for 2024. It’s yet another Actual Play channel, but this one hasn’t yet descended into taking itself too seriously, and they focus on games other than D&D. Critical Role is great and all, but it’s evolved into a kind of specialized arthouse theatre that appeals less broadly than it used to. Glass Cannon still focuses on the friends-around-a-table experience, and it’s a high quality production, and they have a brand of humor that is more brash New York FM Radio, which is the antithesis of the rest of the industry.

KruggsmashI’m sure I’ve mentioned Kruggsmash before, but he makes Dwarf Fortress content. He’s one of the only people on the Internet who can make Dwarf Fortress look like a fun game to play. I might nominate him for an award for the most creative use of a game in video content. (I haven’t watched any Kruggsmash in a while and his newer stuff has so, so much production value. It must be a ton of work to make these videos.)

The Operations RoomAnother new channel I discovered in 2024 when it just randomly showed up on a recommendations page one day. Apparently animated and even non-animated history channels are a thing, and there are quite a few. This was the first one I saw, and I immediately appreciated all the work that went into the animations. I love the deadpan, completely flat delivery of the voiceover. It sounds so historical.

This post is for day 18 of Blaugust 2024.

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This is really dumb, but I’ve started a new Astrologer character in Elden Ring. At the time of this typing, they are level 42 and I’ve played for 20 hours.

That gives you a good idea of just how massive Elden Ring is, and why I haven’t gotten very far in replaying the game more than once thusfar. I think most of that twenty hours is actually just travel time. Navigating around Elden Ring is like space travel between galaxies.

I started playing blindly, but after Limgrave I realized that I had no idea where to go next and I didn’t want to explore again and end up with another 287-hour playthrough (who would??). So I pulled up what I assume is the standard progression guide and started working through it, methodically collecting gear that will probably remain roughly 95% unused.

The guide might not be exactly the way I would go, but I don’t have to think about it and can just keep listening to my audiobook. I’m not recording commentary on this one, but I do record key moments here and there for posterity.

As of this moment I’ve gotten to the Liurnia of the Lakes East section in the guide, which is labelled as level 50-60. I’m only level 42. These places are a slog at level 42. The Frenzied Flame Tower can go jump in a lake.

I was curious how my Astrologer run compares to my first Prisoner run two years ago. Prisoners also have some magic, but I went more into a Dexterity build.

Margit the Fell Omen:
- Astrologer: 1 time, level 25, with Rogier and Fanged Imps.
- Prisoner: 65 times, level 11-23, with Wolves.
Goderick the Grafted:
- Astrologer: 5 times, level 29-34, with Nepheli Loux and Marionette Soldiers.
- Prisoner: 60 times, level 27, solo.
Red Wolf of Radagon:
- Astrologer: 10 times, level 39, with Fanged Imps.
- Prisoner: 1 time (4 swings heh), level 58.
Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon:
- Astrologer: Oops forgot to fight Rennala.
- Prisoner: 1 time, level 60, with Marionette Soldiers.

(In my first playthrough, I didn’t go to Raya Lucaria with my Prisoner until after I fought Radahn, so I was really overleveled for it.)

P.S. That picture is not the Astrologer, but it is already uploaded to my content directory so I can reuse it without effort.

This post is for day 17 of Blaugust 2024.

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I was watching a recent episode of The Rest is Entertainment, a new-ish podcast that’s also a YouTube channel, in the standard way of modern podcasts:

They got on the subject of content addiction and it reminded me of my decision to largely drop out of participating in social media this year and how it’s affected me.

To be clear, I’ve never been the sort of content addict that they were talking about on the podcast. I don’t and have never scrolled through TikTok for hours a day, for example, the quintessential example of the content addict and prisoner of “the algorithm.”

I don’t scroll through TikTok for a minute a day. I view one TikTok channel maybe once every couple weeks or once a month, and that’s the extent of my usage there.

To be honest, I barely use a phone at all. I’m at home almost all of my time, so there’s rarely any great need to pick up my phone, except for two-factor authentication. My phone is due for an upgrade and I’m not even sure I have a working data plan anymore, because I always have to download podcasts to listen to them for the 15 minutes it takes to drive to a grocery store. Otherwise it keeps complaining of no connection, and who can be bothered to figure that out.

I have no difficulty skipping videos that look like they’re supposed to make me mad in YouTube recommendations.

My peak personal social media addiction story is when I looked at Twitter every morning and throughout the day when I had a spare moment, just to see what was going on in the world. Though I didn’t fall too often into “doom-scrolling.”

This year I’ve almost entirely stopped. I don’t look at Twitter anymore. I also don’t look at Mastadon or Bluesky or whatever else is out there now. I don’t even miss any of it anymore. Life goes on.

At first it seemed like I was missing something by not knowing the news of the day the instant it happened. But it turns out it’s actually okay to hear news a day or two later. The world, it seems, continues to function without any input from me on an ongoing 24/7 basis.

This year I’ve been taking the entire concept of parasocial interactions to heart. It turns out that following people on social media isn’t really socializing. It doesn’t matter how much you think people might know you, in actual fact, people on the Internet probably think you’re weird and don’t want to hang out with you, and it seems increasingly sensible to approach social media that way.

So I’ve been trying to stay away from the form of parasocial relationship that breeds from follower-based social media. I’m going back to the old-fashioned kind: The kind you get by watching video content. Television shows, or things like actual plays, or even podcasts. You know, the kind your parents and grandparents understood.

It’s probably still not great, but at least I can listen to the shows in question while I’m doing other things.

This post is for day 16 of Blaugust 2024.

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Why do blog posts have to start with an introductory sentence anyway?

GamingSo the Elden Ring DLC’s last boss is basically impossible. There, I said it.

But stay-tuned for shocking, late-breaking news at the end!

It’s not the first time I’ve said an Elden Ring boss is impossible. There was Melania, who cheated so, so much, but who finally succumbed to a good old fashioned damage blitz and stupid good luck. There were the final bosses, Radagon and the Elden Beast… two impossible bosses right in a row, the second of which constantly ran away from you. Earlier in this very DLC there was Rellana (or was it Rennala??) and Messmer, yet more Elden Ring bosses who are cheating cheaters who cheat unfairly.

Now there’s … this last DLC boss. I guess I won’t say who it is, in case somebody out there isn’t so disgusted with From Software’s descent into bad Souls-like mechanics that they’re still actually following the lore.

I thought that I’d try not to lean so much on the Mimic Tear in the DLC as I did in the main game, but that went out the window very quickly with this one. Mimic Tear is the only Spirit Ash that actually helps, because it basically doubles your damage output for free, which reduces most of these Elden Ring story boss fights down into the realm of a “normal” From Software difficulty, not the new-and-improved Elden Ring “super not fun” difficulty.

But not so with this last boss. It’s still impossible, because he hits so frickin’ hard. And fast. And repeatedly. He hits some eight times in a row, then pauses only long enough for you to do a single light attack, or heal, and that’s about it. Sometimes I could do two light attacks.

And, also, it should go without saying that he cheats in the standard Elden Ring ways, by dodging whenever you press your attack button. Or attacking whenever you press your heal button. Or by busting out some crazy 1-in-100 one-shot kill move just when you start to make progress. Or utilizing a hit box that clips you when you’re nowhere near him. Or ignoring your immunity frames in a wide variety of cheating ways. The list goes on and on. Not to even mention the intentional and unintentional lag on top of everything. That’s just standard operating procedure for Elden Ring now.

And I’m only talking about the first phase here. I’ve gotten to the point where I can pretty reliably get past the first phase with a 1:1 duel most every time.

But in the second phase, well, it gets worse. So much worse. You can’t even see what the dude is doing most of the time, in the midst of all the screen-filling light effects. Let alone try to think of some way to dodge that stupid big AoE nonsense after every hit.

It’s really … not fun. So I have two choices. Either I can farm for levels, which isn’t fun, and probably isn’t going to help much, because at level 175 I’m already at a point of diminishing returns. (I gained 25 levels in this DLC without even trying, and I spent a vast majority of my runes on weapon upgrades or spirit ash upgrades.)

Or I can just keep repeating this fight over and over and over again until I get lucky and win. Which is … also not that fun. Especially when there’s no more content to look forward to afterward.

Has From Software always been like this? Are the scales falling from my eyes? Am I just now starting to see the real boss fight designs that have been there all along?

Surely that can’t be true. There have been frustrating bosses before (Sister Friede springs to mind, and the Fume Knight and Elenora in Dark Souls 2, and Artorias in Dark Souls 1, all DLC bosses incidentally), but there’s always been a sense of patient progress. A sense of working through the problems methodically to arrive at a point of mastery, where it felt like, once I mastered the mechanics, I would have a decent chance of beating each boss every time I encountered them.

In my eyes, something changed for the worse in Elden Ring. Now, it’s just, “Boy I hope I get lucky one of these times. Statistically, it’s inevitable that all the random numbers will line up in my favor someday.” The thought of beating these bosses consistently is laughable.

I suppose a third choice is to go online and start summoning coop help, but I expect that will end up taking just as long. Because, in order for the coop players to help, I have to stay alive long enough for them to help, which isn’t guaranteed. Also, I think you have to use a consumable to summon help? I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever summoned help in Elden Ring. Oh! I did once. For Melania, in a similar bout of desperation. And those coop players didn’t help at all.

Anyway, that’s the state of me and the Elden Ring DLC.

Late-breaking Elden Ring DLC NewsBut wait! Just one day before publication, I finally beat the last boss. It took slightly more than two weeks and roughly 150 attempts.

That might be the longest it’s ever taken me for a From Software boss. Longer than Artorias, longer than Elena, longer than Sister Friede, longer than Isshin, longer than Melania. (A real trip down memory lane, those links. Also a real insight into how much less fun Elden Ring boss fights are than any of the previous games. Previous games: Celebration! Elden Ring: Meh ok I guess that dumb chore is done.)

Almost nothing happened after the last fight, except a 30 second memory that didn’t make any sense. What a chore to reach such an anticlimatic ending.

Did I do something wrong? Was it bugged?

It seems not. Screenrant says the DLC “culminates in a shocking ending that recontextualizes much of the base game while still leaving many questions open-ended.” ORLY? I saw no such thing, despite seeing exactly what that post describes. But then I’ve mostly forgotten the Elden Ring story and care little and less for the machinations of its gods and demigods.

By the way, the word “recontextualizes” is a word I need to add to my list of gimmicky words that writers use way too often. I can’t seem to turn around lately without seeing it.

Overall, if you enjoyed Elden Ring, the DLC is more Elden Ring. I personally found it to be more aggravating than the base game, with little reward. I don’t think I even got a single achievement the entire time.

I feel very little desire to replay the DLC or even the base game, which is a sharp departure from the Dark Souls series, all of which, after finishing, I immediately wanted to dive back into NG+, or try a different character build, or something like that. I think I played Dark Souls 3 six times in a row. Those were the good old days.

Whenever I try to replay Elden Ring, I usually think something like, “Oh god this again?”

To be fair, I still tend to play Elden Ring like I’m playing Dark Souls, and that puts me at a pretty severe disadvantage. Most of a character’s power comes from FP-based Ash of War abilities or any of a variety of extra attack types that didn’t exist in previous games, and I tend to ignore them completely.

What’s Next?I have no idea. There are no games whatsoever on my radar right now. Possibly Hellblade II, which I bought at launch time, installed, and then failed to run a single time. I find I’m not much in the mood for story-heavy games at the moment.

Media ProductionI completed uploading Lords of the Fallen videos, and started uploading Elden Ring DLC videos.

The important thing about finishing the DLC is that I won’t have another debacle like The Ringed City DLC where I started uploading a series and then couldn’t finish it.

It’s still on my list of things to do, actually. Maybe someday. Unfortunately it’s hard to go back to Dark Souls 3 after Elden Ring, mechanically speaking. From Software games each have a fairly unique control style that doesn’t always translate well from one game to another. It takes time to get a feel for the controls in each game, and it’s not a great idea to pick it back up again 75% of the way through the hardest DLC in Dark Souls 3.

Media ConsumptionRegularly consuming: The Rest is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube), The Daily Show clips (on YouTube), various Glass Cannon podcasts (on YouTube or in an actual podcast). Oh and there’s a new season of Taskmaster New Zealand finding its way onto YouTube, with more interesting Māori phrases at the beginning and the end of each episode than ever.

It’s also been a Disney+ marathon for me the past few weeks.

I watched Avengers: Endgame for the first time. It didn’t make any sense and I found it quite silly. Still, it was kind of funny sometimes. I laughed every time someone fell a thousand feet and walked away, which happens a lot.

Then I watched Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Talk about a movie that makes no sense. But it was visually interesting, I guess. My long-standing personal joke is that Marvel movies are basically elaborate screensavers.

I had some days where I had to rest my back a lot, so I ended up watching a bunch of things I might not have bothered with.

I watched the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. It wasn’t that great.

I re-watched The Empire Strikes Back. It was pretty good. I’m still not sure I agree with the general consensus that it was the best Star Wars movie, but I can certainly understand why people think that. Most every Star Wars trope began in that movie.

AudiobooksI completed A Game of Thrones. It’s the best one of that series by far. The rest, as with so many epic fantasy series under contractual obligation, start meandering into “middle book” territory, where there’s no more finely-crafted story, just a lot of “stuff happening” with the characters from the first book, and a lot of interminable waiting for the epic conclusion that keeps getting postponed by more and more diversions. Luckily, in this case, the characters from the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire are really interesting charaters.

That’s the writing lesson to be taken from A Game of Thrones: Every character is interesting, and often has a fatal flaw, and you know they have that flaw, and you can see how it’s going to get them in trouble from a mile away, and yet they still walk right into trouble because they’re completely convinced they don’t have that fatal flaw.

Next I started into the A Clash of Kings audiobook. I’ve heard A Song of Ice and Fire described as “grimdark” quite a few times, possibly one of the first of that genre, but I never fully understood why.

Now I see why. I didn’t remember much of the second book. I had forgotton just how unrelentingly grim it is, when compared to the first. Yeesh. The new POV characters are awful people, and the previous POV characters are surrounded by awful people at all times. Otherwise, I find the second book less tightly plotted and more meandering, trying to find its way. Classic middle book syndrome.

And moving on into the third book A Storm of Swords, the fun grimdarkness just keeps on going. I tried an experiment and listened to only the Sansa chapters, instead of listening to them all in the proper order. It’s surprisingly coherent. Unfortunately it’s a pain to listen to an Audible book that way. There’s no programmable chapter order feature in the UI.

Home DevelopmentBlaugust inspired me to try to refresh my memory on what I had done with my Next.js blog back in November and December, with some success.

I do all my “home” development on a MacBook Pro now. MacOS is a pretty good environment if you’re doing non-Microsoft development.

However, I don’t have any external monitors or keyboards or mice hooked up to it, so it’s hell on the neck and back to hunch over a laptop and tap away at code for any length of time. I need to fix that, but it’s hell on the wallet to buy Apple peripherals. It’s almost as bad as buying anything “for gamers!”

Day JobI took a week off from work at the beginning of August, and when I returned, my team had merged with another team in India and had a new manager located in India. So now my team has about 15 people spanning the West Coast, the East Coast, and India. Interesting times.

Health and WellnessI had a spate of bad back days, directly related to spending too much time reading and writing at my laptop in the first week of August.

World Context* Kamala Harris chose Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Who? I kid. But seriously, who? * There was a big tadoo over in the U.K. which didn’t filter much into U.S. news so I don’t know many details. Something about race riots and everybody leaving Twitter again. * Instead, the U.S. was fixated on covering Trump being interviewed by Elon Musk. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Pō mārie!

This post is for day 15 of Blaugust 2024.

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This is one of those topics I think about periodically but I haven’t really written anything down about it. I think.

Blogging Challenges: Are They Really Worth It? | Loren’s Blog
Re: Blogging Challenges: Are They Really Worth It? | gru:Bz
Are Blogging Challenges Worth It? | Notes by JCProbably
What is an authentic blog post? | Matan Abudy
Re: the many re: to blogging challenges | -b
Re:Blogging Challenges: Are They Really Worth It? | Forking Mad+

There are pros and cons to these “challenge month” things that keep popping up all over the place. (It seems like there’s a new one every month now.) The main ones I’m familiar with are writing challenges.

I think it all depends on where you are in your writing journey. The bottom line is that, as with most things in life, it’s not the same for everyone.

I first encountered this phenomenon in NaNoWriMo. The first few years it was great. Then I started to notice I felt worse and worse if I wasn’t keeping up with everyone else.

There are people who relish overachieving when challenged. I’m prone to that myself, which is one reason I like video games. I always loved taking tests in school, for example. I love doing things well, and I hate doing things badly.

But writing isn’t like solving a math problem. For me, at least.

I’ve found that if you’re not feeling confident in your skills as a writer, it’s really annoying to hear from overachievers writing 10,000 words a day while you’re over here struggling to find some way to write two coherent sentences. So I stopped reporting when I was doing well in NaNoWriMo, and usually only reported when I was falling behind, because that’s the more normal, relatable thing.

It wasn’t long before I stopped engaging with the NaNoWriMo community entirely and just kept my NaNoWriMos to myself.

As for quality of writing during challenges, I’ve certainly noticed with my own NaNoWriMos that there are days when I’m just writing meaningless gibberish to fill the word count, like I was doing an English paper that I hoped the teacher wasn’t going to read very closely. (In high school, I once made up an entire English paper out of thin air that had nothing to do with the assignment and the teacher was nice enough to give me a D for creativity. Still one of my proudest moments in life.)

So in that sense, I can understand the argument that challenges can result in lower quality work. Pressure to produce quantity almost inevitably reduces quality, in just about everything.

But I think there is some value in that as a writer, in a roundabout way. I usually take the position that it’s beneficial to write every day, no matter how good or bad it is, but it’s not always beneficial to publish every day, unless it’s a job.

With Blaugust I usually combat these “is this worth posting?” feelings by doing my own thing. I often question whether I should even sign up, when I’m going to ignore the rules completely. I wouldn’t ever be particularly surprised or upset if Belghast decided in any given year, “Okay that’s nowhere near what you’re supposed to be doing. No points for you!”

I typically try to think up something I’ve never done before, something that sounds interesting to me, and experiment for a month. Maybe something I’ve been meaning to try for a while. Something that I know I’ll be able to look back on 5 years later and find it amusing. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. This year I wouldn’t exactly call it a home run, since I’m finding out my old drafts are actually rather bad, but I’ve always liked the “nothing ventured, nothing gained” proverb.

Anyway I think the best way I’ve found to get the most out of these kinds of challenges, and mitigate any feelings of disappointment, is to approach them with a fairly clear goal of what you want to get out of it. For me it’s usually something that’s an alternative to a numerical measurement.

I’m a lot more likely to become frustrated with challenges if it’s entirely metric-based. I don’t particularly like publishing noise on the Internet to fulfill an obligation either, so I try to make plans to avoid having to do that, and if all else fails, I just won’t post, and I’m okay with that too. Blaugust is about as lenient as you’re ever going to find in a writing challenge.

This post is for day 14 of Blaugust 2024.

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This is a reading from my ~2012 draft, a medieval fantasy drama called The Sovereign of Tel.

Click the play button that should be somewhere in the vicinity of this text, or add this feed to your favorite podcast app.

I don’t precisely remember when I wrote this (I’m reading from a backup draft that doesn’t have an origination date on it), but I know it was between NaNoWriMos, and I’m pretty sure it was after Airworld.

It began when I had a bleakly weird idea to see what a society looked like if it treated lower classes of people the same way we treat show dogs. (Suprisingly unpleasant, it turns out.) It seemed like the kind of idea you might see in an old 60s Star Trek or Twilight Zone episode.

The story didn’t turn out anything like I thought it would, and instead of a scathing societal commentary, over time it morphed into a fairly mundane kingdom management drama in the vein of a Game of Thrones. Probably for the best.

This post is for day 13 of Blaugust 2024.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 08/05 14:50 # Yeesh. I can’t make heads or tails of what I did with my Next.js blog project back in December, or where I left off, or what’s working and what isn’t. I put so much* into AWS CloudFormation templates that I can’t remember how it’s all wired together. I need to sit down and watch all of the devlogs I recorded. * 17:15 # Been doing a little css tweaking today on the blog. Added a dark mode (which only works if you have your system set to dark mode), and tweaked the fonts on the mobile layout. * 18:14 # Yay I got the Next.js alternate blog build working again. Had to update some repo names that were wrong, and reconnect AWS CodeCommit to github. * 19:49 # I’m trying to add a summary element to my rss items. Summary is for Atom feeds, not RSS feeds. But I see a lot of supposed RSS readers that keep referencing the summary element, so I’m seeing what happens if I add one. (Theoretically nothing, because an RSS reader should ignore a summary element, and an Atom reader would not recognize RSS as valid Atom.) * 21:41 # Oh. And now I’m removing the summary element because I remembered why I didn’t like including it. InoReader only displays the summary, not the description. Oh well.

Tuesday 08/06* 15:13 # I swear every time I want to go out and mow I immediately start to hear the neighbor mowing and then I can’t go out and mow. Also, they mow like six times a week. * 19:22 # Arg I upgraded Hugo to the latest version and it broke my local blog build. The down side of using rapidly-developed wild west open source software strikes again.

+ 19:24 # Reviewing the source code (because that’s what you do when open source software breaks), it seems there was a change to the \_internal/opengraph.html template, which doesn’t work anymore, and now reports an error message that is entirely useless in trying to identify what I need to fix in my content, or where amongst the 1500+ content files. Neato.
+ 19:45 # The problem was that my “podcast” content files used an audio front matter property, but I had it as a single string instead of the array that Hugo assumed. Crashed the new opengraph.html which now apparently includes audio links. Didn’t realize “audio” was actually supported by Hugo along with “images.”
+ 19:45 # Now I have to update my rss template to handle an array instead of one string for the audio front matter.

20:46 # Completed making updates to the blog in order to run the latest version of Hugo. What a pain. But my own fault I suppose.

Wednesday 08/07* 10:09 # Programming note… not about computer programming, but about video schedule programming… Last night I began uploading Elden Ring DLC videos. But this video is also notable because it’s the only video for which I’ve painstakingly edited subtitles for hours on end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBFmhpPGGbw * 11:09 # I added a Videos page to the blog as an index into the handful of “video progress” pages I’ve been doing.

Thursday 08/08* 10:18 # It’s a miserable drizzly cloudy day pre-Debby. Fighting the urge to just go back to bed. * 22:33 # Hey I finally watched Avengers Endgame. I did see Infinity War one time but I really had no idea what was going on in this thing for like 90% of the movie, but I don’t think it really matters. The important things to know are that funny quips are funny and when you hear that Avengers diddledeedee in the score, the good guys are winning.

Friday 08/09* 09:09 # There were periods of heavy rain yesterday evening and overnight, and even a tornado warning that I slept through, but I think the bulk of the Debby- related weather is past me now. * 18:24 # I worked out how to put a little “this is AI generated” watermark in the corner of DALL-E images with some CSS. Ironically I asked ChatGPT how to write the appropriate CSS.

Sunday 08/11* 11:33 # Well for some reason yesterday I couldn’t deploy the blog so I’m doing two posts today. Ah well. I have failed in my sacred duty of providing something new in the RSS feed every day in August. * 14:36 # In the realm of Elden Ring DLC, for the last boss, I’ve reached the desperation phase of looking up the location of every last Scadutree Fragment and Revered Spirit Ash on a wiki to get my Blessings up to 20 and 10, in the vanishing hope that an extra couple of points of damage might help me get through this last monstrosity. However, my last attempts yesterday were at 19 and 9, and it was not discernably easier than 16 and 9. * 21:45 # Welp I guess my vacation week is coming to an end. Boo.

P.S. I wasn’t planning to count these as Blaugust posts this year, but since I’m no longer on vacation, and there’s so much of August still left to write for, it seems like a much better idea to do so. In fact I might recycle the daily microblog posts like I did last year to fill in some gaps.

This post is for day 12 of Blaugust 2024.

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Some time within the last year, I wondered why TTRPG rulesets are still distributed as books. As opposed to being distributed exclusively through virtual tabletops, or some form of digital asset management system.

We currently have to buy D&D books six different times if we want to access them at a table, or on Roll20, or on DNDBeyond, or Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry VTT, or whatever other place.

That’s because the thing you’re buying is still, essentially, the text of a book. But surely the TTRPG hardback book full of cool artwork is a relic of the past by now, only of interest to collectors. (Disclaimer: I have two shelves of them.)

Then I watched the opening bit for a recent episode of Critical Role and saw an ad for Tales of Fablecraft, available for free on Steam.

It’s a TTRPG virtual tabletop distributed as a computer game on Steam. It has all the video and audio conferencing and chatlogs and dice rolling and rules and stuff built into one convenient software package. It’s not a tabletop that you bring your own rules to, it’s the rules and the tabletop together.

Is this the beginning of the future for TTRPGs? Is this the beginning of the end for the D&D empire?

It would be a massive chore to do something like this for D&D, since the D&D rules are so frickin’ complicated. But it’s kind of weird that Wizards of the Coast isn’t leading the way in this space.

I understand Wizards is working on their own virtual tabletop experience, but I’ve never seen it and I’m guessing it’s probably stuck in development hell. It’s probably going to be one of those things that’s developed in partnership with 50 contractors, and ends up being terrible for everyone. That’s just how software development works now.

Instead of Wizards, the leader in this space is apparently somebody called Riftweaver Game Studio, with something called Tales of Fablecraft.

It looks like a very rules light game system, which is perfect for getting people on board with it. It seems to fulfil the virtual tabletop promise of showing up and having everything there on the computer, but in a way that is tightly integrated and might actually work the way it’s supposed to.

Anyway, it seems like a noteworthy development to me, if you’re into the world of tabletop RPGs, and actual play media, and so forth.

P.S. I challenged myself not to just go to DALL-E and get a blog post image in seconds, but rather spend a frustratingly long time getting a picture from my phone to my image hosting directory. Anyway now I can use that picture for any posts related to TTRPGs.

This post is for day 11 of Blaugust 2024.

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This is a reading from my NaNoWriMo 2012 draft, a high fantasy called Airworld.

Click the play button that should be somewhere in the vicinity of this text, or add this feed to your favorite podcast app.

A small backgrounder on this story:

Naobi is a young Sister of the Order in a small backwater town in a world of floating islands in the sky. For reasons, she needs to make a journey to a place far away to help the town, and she books passage on a sothbarge, which is a large gondola structure hanging from the belly of a massive flying domsticated whale-like creature (a soth) that is used for navigation between islands. This passage is Naobi’s first flight away from home.

I really liked the setting of this one, only later did I find out the flying whale thing is kind of an anime trope. I never hit on a decent story to go with the setting and characters, but I did manage to complete and win NaNoWriMo that year.

In recent years, I’ve wondered about turning this into a D&D homebrew campaign setting. I think the Ebberon setting has flying ships and stuff already, so maybe it could fit in there.

Onward and upward! You know, on a sothbarge!

P.S. Yes I did, in fact, pronounce Motiva two different ways, because cold-reading 12-year-old writing on a catastrophically low-energy day is hard. Why do you ask?

This post is for day 10 of Blaugust 2024.

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There’s a lot of good posts about AI floating around in the Blaugustosphere.

Blaugust and Large Language Models - Tales of the Aggronaut
Did a robot write this? – Chasing Dings!
On “AI-written” content – Indiecator
So Do We Allow AI-Generated Content to Pervade in Creative Space? * The Dragon Chronicle
Blogging and AI — Contains Moderate Peril

There are probably more but I’ve started to lose them all in my RSS reader. Sorry if I missed any.

I’ll try to stick to a new topic so this doesn’t get too long. I’ve been futzing with a “Everything I Think About AI” draft for about a year now and that one’s never going to be finished, and if it is, it’ll be so long it might as well be an ebook.

In broadly general terms, I see AI as a very useful tool in my everyday life. Mainly in the area of “personal assistant” types of tasks, and in software development. I’ve taken the time to test the limits of what AI can and can’t do, and it’s impossible for me to deny it has value. I personally can’t wait for the day I can get ChatGPT to navigate the impossible world of making doctor’s appointments for me.

As for Blaugust, I think it’s probably against the spirit of Blaugust to allow AI-generated blogs to participate. But I personally don’t care that much. If we disallow openly AI-generated blogs, we’re probably just opening the door for secret AI-generated blogs. It’s genuinely hard to tell which is which these days.

All that aside, the main thing I want to talk about is one particular thing that comes up a lot in AI discussions that I want to push back on a little bit.

There’s a lot of controversy about generative AI stealing the work of artists for its training data. The general line of thought is that using any AI-generated artwork is unethical because AI steals from artists.

In the absence of any compelling new evidence, I have to put that into a category of misinformation.

It’s very difficult to explain why I think that without getting into a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, though. AI is super complicated, and I want to keep this simple. I completely understand why it’s easier to just boil it down to a simple “AI steals” or “AI is unethical.”

But broadly speaking, based on my reading of how AI works, it’s a misconception to say that AI steals, copies, or plagerizes. What AI does is consume, in roughly the same way that we do, by reading text, or looking at pictures, or listening to sounds.

It’s true that we have to trust OpenAI and the others when they say they’re not violating any licenses gathering their training data. We don’t have much choice. There’s plenty of material out there for computers to gather freely, though.

It may or may not be infringing someone’s rights to consume a piece of art, be it writing, or a picture, or a song. It depends on what it is, and how it’s presented. But, broadly speaking, if a human is allowed to view a piece of art, a computer probably is, too.

The frightening thing about AI is not that it can consume things, but how much and how fast AI consumes things.

The legal issue at stake here is what’s done with the data gleaned from a computer viewing something. In the case of AI-generated images, for example, AI is looking at a large set of pictures and “taking notes” on what it sees.

There’s no infringement taking place if, for example, I read a book and write down some notes about what I read. Every wiki would have to be taken down if there was.

It’s roughly the same with AI. It’s just that its notes are billions of lines long. The scale of it is what’s different.

Unfortunately the courts are far, far behind on this issue, so it’s probably going to remain a gray area for the forseeable future. (Certainly don’t expect anything to happen here in the U.S., where we remain fixed in time with a permanant partisan gridlock on every little thing.)

There are mountains of misinformation and misunderstandings out there in the world about copyrights and the legal rights of artists. And it varies from country to country. Adding AI into the mix makes it even more complicated.

But I feel like blanket statements like “AI steals” doesn’t come anywhere near the actual truth of what’s happening, and it just creates a lot of myths and misunderstandings that nobody needs.

I say all this as a long-winded way of saying that I’ve thought a lot about using AI-generated header images on my blog, and I know some people might not like it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s well within the boundaries of my sense of ethics.

I might see if I can add some way to make it more obvious which images are AI-generated and which aren’t, maybe with some css. That’s where the ethical boundary is, in my opinion. When you intentionally or accidentally trick someone into thinking that a work is human-made when it isn’t.

Finally, I should add the caveat that I’m no expert on AI, and my view on it is constantly evolving as I learn new things. So it’s entirely possible I might reverse course someday. Who knows?

P.S. I asked ChatGPT and it also said it doesn’t steal artists’ work. Surely a massive corporation making billions of dollars wouldn’t lie about that!

P.P.S. It seemed counterproductive to use an AI-generated image on a post talking about whether AI-generated images steal from artists, so I used a screenshot from Bendy and the Dark Revival instead. It might be worth pondering that we typically don’t ask permission to use the artwork from games when we post screenshots, either.

This post is for day 9 of Blaugust 2024.

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This is a reading from my NaNoWriMo 2011 draft, a fantasy war drama called Kubak Outpost.

Click the play button that should be somewhere in the vicinity of this text, or add this feed to your favorite podcast app.

I chose a passage from somewhere in the middle of the draft, so here’s a little background context:

Kubak Outpost is a fortress on the border of the lands where a mysterious race of beligerant magical creatures called the khaanfar live. The story revolves around a group of new recruits arriving at Kubak Outpost to begin their military service.

The idea was loosely based on the classic tropes of a war drama following an ensemble of new recruits into battle, but in a fantasy setting.

This particular chapter follows Fen and his comrades returning to the outpost from a patrol through the woods, when they get lost in a supernatural fog.

I was super into this story in 2011, but when I look back on it now, it seems rather juvenile and cartoonish. Ah well. That’s why we write drafts.

This post is for day 8 of Blaugust 2024.

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It’s already noon on Wednesday, halfway through my week off, and I’ve accomplished almost nothing.

So for this seventh day of Blaugust I thought I’d write another “random thoughts” post, instead of doing any of the things I planned to do.

Tropical Storm DebbyWell, I mowed yesterday before all the forecasted rain (the path of ~~Hurricane~~ Tropical Storm Debby is expected to pass quite close to me on Friday), so I suppose that was an accomplishment.

Debby track from NOAA.

This happens one or more times every year to those of us who live in the middle of the Eastern Seaboard. This one looks like a banal storm. The ones where it rains a lot, and the wind picks up for a day or two, and that’s about it.

UPDATE: There were bands of heavy rain Thursday evening and overnight into Friday, and even a tornado warning that I slept through, but little wind.

Elden Ring DLC VideosI just started uploading Elden Ring DLC videos to my channel.

I technically haven’t finished the DLC yet, because I’m fully stuck on the final boss, which is, I’m sure, by design (based on how absurd it is). However there are about 60 videos, and I’m hoping to beat the last boss before the next 60 days have elapsed.

That first one is a bit special in that it’s the only video I’ve made so far where I took the time to meticulously edit the subtitles. I probably won’t do that again, because it took hours to edit them.

Incidentally, I’m uploading in 1440p now because I think YouTube uses better encoding settings for 2k videos than 1080p videos. I was getting pretty annoyed at how much YouTube was trashing my video quality.

Blog ChangesBlaugust has inspired to me make a number of small tweaks to the blog, as it usually does.

I added a half-hearted dark mode, which will only show up if your OS is set to dark mode. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.
I tweaked the css for mobile so that the font is a little smaller.
I made a number of technical fixes so that the blog works with the latest version of Hugo. The main one was in the area of the audio front matter property. (It was supposed to be an array, but I was just using a string.)
I added a Videos page to point to all those super popular video index pages I’ve been doing that nobody ever looks at. (Actually I have no idea if anyone looks at them or not. I have very few statistics for my site.)
UPDATE: I forgot, I also added Related posts to the template because I saw Hugo had a thing for that.

Also, I previously lamented that my Next.js blog build wasn’t working, but I got that fixed. The useless alternate blog is now more up-to-date with content. The search feature is still broken, though, which is one of the main reasons I made it in the first place.

Time BlindnessToday I learned the term “time blindness” from Jaedia in the Blaugust Discord. I’d never heard that term before but I immediately knew exactly what it must mean, and after reading a bit about it, I definitely suffer from at least some aspects of that.

I’ve suspected for almost a decade now that I’ve been an undiagnosed neurodivergent my whole life and never known it, and this just adds more fuel to that fire.

(That’s a topic that might be interesting to write about, but I probably never will, because I feel like that’s on the list of topics that’s too private and too fraught with controversy. I don’t particularly want to identity as a neurodivergent, because at this later stage in my life I don’t see it helping me very much. I’ve already adapted to life as much as I probably ever will.)

I even started this post by saying “it’s noon already” and I feel like I just woke up. (But then I slept late this morning.)

But mainly, it manifests for me in that it’s impossible for me to consistently take daily medications, and it’s impossible for me to remember to put the trash out every Friday and the recycling out every other Monday. 100% impossible.

I’m also the dude who wakes up one day and thinks, “Oh hey it’s a holiday today. Who knew?”

I’m also the dude who gets really involved in working on something and then realizes it’s hours later, my muscles are cramping from sitting fixed in one place for so long, and I forgot to eat lunch.

Blaugust Controversy!Belghast posted a curious entry today: Blaugust and Large Language Models - Tales of the Aggronaut.

I have no idea what that’s all about. My other brands of neurosis makes me automatically think, Was it me? I quoted some ChatGPT logs in yesterday’s post. But I thought I did a pretty good job of distinguishing AI-generated material from my writing. And I felt like I added enough original content to make the whole post worthwhile.

I probably don’t disclose this enough, but almost all of the images I use now for headers are generated by DALL-E. (Except today’s.) It’s just too convenient not to use, and I care little and less for the artwork on my blog. Without DALL-E, I probably wouldn’t have images at all, or more likely I’d write less posts, because every post needs an image if you want anyone to click on it.

Welp I can’t think of anything else to talk about, so let’s smash that publish button. (What I actually do is commit a text file to a git repository.) Also, I forgot to eat lunch and now I’m suddenly very hungry.

This post is for day 7 of Blaugust 2024.

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Hey kids, sometimes you can turn a draft that you forgot to post two months ago into a Blaugust post and take a day off! (Though it still took a while to get everything sorted out.)

The MemeI saw this rapidly-developing blogging meme a couple months ago:

Are You There Copilot? It’s Me, Wilhelm | The Ancient Gaming Noob
BackSlash WhoAmI - Tales of the Aggronaut
When The Planets Align — An AI Experiment – Scopique’s
Inventory Full: Who Is Bhagpuss? Two Out Of Three AIs Say “Don’t Ask Us!”

So I too decided to ask ChatGPT 4 (paid) and Gemini (unpaid) about my blog. I didn’t bother with Copilot since it uses GPT-4, and it isn’t readily available on the MacBook where I write posts anyway.

I don’t like quoting AI chats in my blog. Is it because of some ideological vendetta against our AI overlords? Nope. It’s because it’s a real pain to copy text out of ChatGPT and paste it into a Markdown-formatted post. There’s no “chatlog” style formatting built into Markdown. I suppose I could make a Hugo shortcode for that purpose but then I have to use Hugo to build my site for the rest of time. Gemini at least has a handy Copy feature.

Speaking of Gemini, at the start of this post I would have said ChatGPT is way better than Gemini. I tried Google Bard when it came out and it was awful, so I’ve never even looked at Gemini until today. Turns out I was wrong. Or not entirely correct. At least about Gemini’s knowledge about this one specific thing. In any case, I still won’t be using Gemini unless I have to.

By the way, when you’re pasting AI responses, you have to also post your prompts. Then we can all see why your AI results are so bad. It’s like poll questions. If you don’t see how the poll questions are worded, you can’t tell if the answers are meaningful.

It’s also relevant whether or not you’re asking questions in a new session or an existing session. In my case, these were the first three questions I asked in brand new sessions, so the AI had no previous context. I suppose to make this an even more strict test, I should have opened a new session for each individual question.

Question 1I wouldn’t expect an AI to answer this correctly, and I wouldn’t expect most humans to answer this off the top of their head, either.

Me:Who is Endgame Viable?

ChatGPT:Endgame Viable doesn’t refer to a specific person or widely recognized entity. It might be a term, username, or title related to gaming, typically referring to content or strategies that are viable or effective in the late stages of a game. It’s also possible that it’s a specific content creator or online persona that is not widely known. If you have a specific context or area where you’ve encountered the term, I could help more effectively!

In this case, however, it did explain why I picked the name Endgame Viable for the blog, because it’s a common phrase used by gamers, or it once was. Nobody wanted to play any class in MMORPGs unless they were “endgame viable” and message boards were filled with questions like, “Is the druid class viable at endgame?” They probably still are, but who reads message boards anymore.

Gemini:The term “Endgame Viable” can have two meanings depending on the context:

In gaming: Endgame Viable refers to a character build, strategy, or item that is effective in the most challenging parts of a video game, typically after the main story has been completed. This is often used in discussions about RPGs (Role-Playing Games) where players can customize their characters and equipment. For instance, someone might ask “Is this weapon build endgame viable?” on a gaming forum.

YouTube channel: There’s also a YouTube channel called Endgame Viable focusing on RPG games . It likely uses the term based on the gaming meaning but focuses on content related to endgame challenges.

Same as above, however I was pleasantly surprised that Gemini plugged my YouTube channel. I don’t focus on endgame challenges, though. I focus on reporting what I think of the games I’m playing, so I don’t have to write the minutia of my thoughts in blog posts anymore, which saves me tons of time. Also I focus on documenting “the journey” of playing a game from beginning to end, and all the things I discover along the way. Also, it’s just fun to record things. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, and now it’s easier than ever. I literally just press a single button and I’m recording whatever I’m playing, and it’s archived forever, or until my next NAS crash, whichever comes first.

Question 2Perhaps a few more context clues will help. AI works a lot better with some context. Answers tend to improve as you converse with AI, disturbingly similar to humans.

Me:Who writes the Endgame Viable blog?

ChatGPT:Searched 6 sitesThe blog “Endgame Viable” is authored by an individual who identifies themselves as a reclusive Gen-X software developer. The blog covers a variety of topics including video games, software development projects, and general commentary on life events and media (Welcome). The writer, known online as UltrViolet, shares insights and experiences, often with a humorous and introspective tone (Endgame Viable).

This is exactly correct, particularly about the humorous and introspective tone. I am, in fact, hilarious, and humble.

Gemini:The Endgame Viable blog is written by someone named Tom, who goes by the online alias UltrViolet (https://endgameviable.com/about/). The “About” section of the website mentions this but doesn’t disclose much else about the author.

Also exactly correct, if sparse. I might dispute how much I disclose on my About page. Gemini makes it sound like I’m a covert spy or something.

Question 3Now here’s a real challenge question, but AI should be able to answer this. It’s quite easy to programmatically fetch the most recent post on my blog at any time.

Me:Summarize the most recent blog post on Endgame Viable.

ChatGPT:Searched 2 sitesThe most recent post on the Endgame Viable blog, titled “Not Quite ‘New Car’ Expensive,” discusses the author’s experiences with video game playthroughs, software projects, and data recovery challenges. The author finished the Solasta campaign and started playing Phoenix Point. Additionally, the post details the author’s frustration with Diablo IV’s multiplayer aspects and the mundane nature of its gameplay. The blogger also recounts efforts in video production and tackling personal software development projects, alongside managing significant data recovery due to NAS failure (Welcome).

That’s a great answer for one blog post on my site, but not the most recent one. I don’t blame this failure on ChatGPT, however, because it uses Bing for web search, and it’s never occurred to me to optimize my blog for Bing searches. So I guess that’s something to put on my todo list.

Gemini:I can’t summarize the most recent blog post on Endgame Viable because the information you provided about the website says the author, UltrViolet, focuses on video games and launched the blog in 2013. It doesn’t necessarily mean they post regularly or even at all anymore.

Ouch. Burn. Check the rss feed, Gemini. Maybe this is my punishment for not using Google’s Atom format. Or maybe Gemini isn’t so smart after all. Like Bard. I can’t stress enough how awful Bard was at answering the simplest things.

ConclusionsI was very surprised that Gemini provided any relevent answers, though it still has room for improvement. So I’m not giving up my ChatGPT subscription anytime soon. I suppose it makes sense that Gemini would be better integrated with other Google properties like YouTube.

To rectify ChatGPT’s lack of recent Bing results for my site, I’ve submitted my sitemap to the Bing Webmaster Tools page, which is apparently something I’ve never done before. It might be an interesting test to retry this experiment in a month to see if ChatGPT will then know what my latest post is. (Update: This worked. Or, at least, it got better.)

I don’t know why ChatGPT kept linking (incorrectly) to a Welcome page, which isn’t supposed to be the entry point to my site. It wasn’t even a welcome page, it was one of my posts, in which there was no welcome, only a brief reference to a welcome sign. There is probably a way I can setup my site so AI can read it easier (structured data, etc.).

Incidentally, I would never and have never used AI for this specific purpose, so this is an entirely pointless experiment. If I already know what I’m looking for, then I’ll use a search engine (I typically use DuckDuckGo), or just go to Wikipedia and search there.

What I Actually Use AI ForAI isn’t a search engine. The usefulness of AI is in its ability to understand context and synthesize ideas. For example, I might use AI to search for something if I don’t know what I’m looking for. Something like this:

Me: What’s that Powers Boothe movie where he flew a nuclear bomber?

ChatGPT:The movie you’re referring to is likely “By Dawn’s Early Light,” where Powers Boothe plays a character who pilots a nuclear bomber. Released in 1990, this HBO film centers around a scenario involving accidental nuclear escalation that leads to a potential World War III. Powers Boothe’s character, along with his crew, must navigate the complexities of a nuclear war unfolding due to a series of misunderstandings and aggressive defense strategies. The film explores the tension and decision-making processes in the face of global nuclear threat.

Mostly I Use It For ProgrammingFor me personally, I use it all the time for programming, much like I use Intellisense all the time, with questions like this:

Me: How do I split a filename string into base and extension in Typescript?

(Here comes the real formatting hell.)

ChatGPT:To split a filename string into the base name and extension in TypeScript, you can use the split method or the substring and lastIndexOf methods. Here’s an example using both approaches:

Using split method:

function splitFilename(filename: string): { base: string, extension: string } { const parts = filename.split('.'); const extension = parts.pop() || ''; const base = parts.join('.'); return { base, extension };}const filename = "example.file.name.txt";const result = splitFilename(filename);console.log(result); // { base: 'example.file.name', extension: 'txt' }

Using substring and lastIndexOf methods:

Both approaches will effectively split the filename into the base name and extension. The split method approach is simpler for filenames with multiple dots, while the substring and lastIndexOf method is more straightforward and avoids creating an array.

I almost never take the results and use them directly, but use them as inspiration. I know the exact concept of what I’m trying to do, since splitting strings has been basically the same since I first started writing code in the frickin’ 80s, but what I’m looking for is an example of the syntax and library functions of this specific language that I don’t have committed to memory, and an idea of the prevailing code patterns.

It’s so much faster than Googling and filtering through bad StackOverflow answers.

This post is for day 6 of Blaugust 2024.

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Aywren had a great idea for a post topic that I felt inspired to steal for Blaugust.

I also run a static blog, built with Hugo and deployed to AWS (Amazon Web Services). It’s been running since 2021.

I write in Markdown instead of HTML, though. I personally shudder at the thought of writing in HTML–I had quite enough of that in the 90s. I prefer to keep post content 100% separated from formatting and layout (it’s a programmer thing). I write in a very old-school non-WYSIWIG way, in a plain text editor.

Static sites are a trendy new thing, but less new than a few years ago. Once, I was the only static site I knew of. Now I know of a half dozen, and it’s a fairly popular style among the developer community. It’s tangentially related to the newish IndieWeb movement to return to the more federated days when site owners hand-crafted their own diverse and interesting web sites (in the 90s and early 2000s). (As opposed to the current glut of monolithic corporate content services like WordPress or Medium.)

I haven’t said much about the under-the-hood developments of the blog for a while. The last post I published in the Quest for the One Blog saga was near the end of 2023, when I had a crazy idea to build a whole new blog in Next.js.

The Lost Next.js BlogWhat happened was this: During November and December, I did build a whole new custom-built blog platform in Next.js, but I never actually followed through and switched over to it. Then, 2024 happened, and I basically forgot the whole thing. There’s been a parallel blog site deployed this whole time at a different link. (Looking back at my microblog archive, I see that the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3 also had something to do with losing interest in new blog work.)

The development of the new site was so rapid I didn’t have time to write any posts about what I was doing. However, there are some details here and there sprinkled throughout the microblog archive. I’ve tagged those entries so they should appear in the Quest for the One Blog list.

Luckily I spent time recording daily “devlogs” to keep track of what I was thinking and doing. And thank god I did, because I’ve forgotten everything I did and why I did it. I’d start down a path, find it didn’t work, delete everything, start down a new path, and repeat several times. I had some ideas to publish those, but I never followed through with that.

Let’s see if I can remember the basics of what I was doing before I abandoned it.

(I actually wrote a whole post on this back in December, but never published it. I call this system “Spirit Riot,” because those are two random words that sound funny together.)

The idea was to build a Next.js site with some lightweight dynamic server features (the things you can’t do with a static site), but where the blog content itself was still statically generated at build time. That’s something the Next.js platform happens to be good at. (I learned about the benefits of Next.js at work, although, to be honest, I think it’s more beneficial to my blog than it is to what we did at work.)

There are numerous examples of building static blog sites from Next.js on the Interwebs, so I just started with those examples. Unfortunately, most of the examples are for starting a brand new blog, and largely ignored the pitfalls of a blog with 10+ years of existing content, so I had to throw out most of what I read.

Of course, since it’s Next.js, which is a Node.js platform, everything on the Interwebs is wrong and you have to work through a million problems on your own. I won’t go into a dissertation here on the cons of doing any Javascript-related development, which is by far the most rapidly-evolving, unstable, poorly documented, becomes-obsolete-a-year-later, dependency-hell-driven platform to develop in. And somehow still one of the most popular. Kids today, amirite?

I came up with an apt metaphor for developing in Node.js:

“Developing an application using anything that touches Node.js is like trying to draw a picture using a swarm of bees.” -Me, 2023.

Another one of my favorite microblogs from that time period:

“The basic process of getting anything to work in a javascript environment goes something like this: Add fifty billion dependencies and pray that one of them actually helps with the problem you’re trying to solve, knowing for sure that 99% of them will probably not end up being used at all but you’ll never be able to get rid of them.” -Me, 2023.

The Current BlogSo my blog is currently built with Hugo, a static site generator that takes simple Markdown content files and turns them into complex HTML files using Golang-based template files. Hugo is actually very good (and fast) at converting Markdown into HTML, and I didn’t want to have to replace all of that Markdown conversion functionality with any of the Node.js Markdown rendering libraries out there.

Especially because I use a lot of Hugo shortcodes in my content, which are little embedded “macros” of sorts that expand into things like styling hints or prewritten text blocks or things like that.

(Side note: If I were starting a new static site, I would probably go with Eleventy instead of Hugo. Hugo has almost unlimited “power user” capabilities, but it’s a bear to get started in. I’m fortunate to already have some knowledge of Golang templating, which helps a lot. Eleventy, however, is much easier to work with.)

The New IdeaSo, my idea for the Next.js blog was to use Hugo to generate not HTML but structured JSON page data (which is mainly encoded HTML content along with metadata), and then render that JSON data within the framework of a Next.js blog engine. So the build process would be two steps: A Hugo build to generate JSON data files and then a Next.js site build from the JSON data.

Believe it or not, it actually worked. I was able to get the benefits of Hugo Markdown conversions and the benefits of static site generation and some lightweight server capabilities. And I deployed it all to AWS with some CloudFormation templates so I could basically just press a button and spin up a complete blog infrastructure at will (more or less).

The Next.js blog has some new features like json feeds, too. (Of course, that particular thing doesn’t appear to work. I think because it only includes recent items and I haven’t refreshed the content since December. And when I went to trigger a content update, every build failed. Sigh.)

If you’re not aware, RSS feeds are old technology now. JSON feeds are the new thing. (It’s exactly the same as an RSS feed, except it’s JSON instead of XML. JSON is a much easier data transport format than XML for newer application development platforms to handle natively, particularly in web-centric platforms like Node.js.)

Helpful MicroservicesThen I hit on the idea of writing some AWS Lambda functions (microservices) to handle things like notifications, pingbacks, and webmentions. I originally wrote them in Node.js but I grew to hate Node.js (especially in the area of unit testing and dependency management) and started to change them to Golang.

The idea was to write those services as Lambda functions so they could theorically be used for any blog that had an RSS feed, and they wouldn’t be tied to my particular Next.js blog (in fact, I need not even bother switching to the Next.js blog, because the microservices would work just as well with the current Hugo static blog).

So that was the last thing I did for the blog, but like I said, I lost interest and haven’t touched it in 2024 yet. Time just kind of gets away from you, ya know? It’s been left in a perpetual “almost finished” state.

What’s NextI should probably start by picking up all that new code and continuing it, perhaps fixing it so I can actually run a build of the new site again. I had some concern that it might cost too much to host a Next.js project in AWS, but looking over the Cost Explorer this year it’s not that much extra. But then the parallel site hasn’t been getting any traffic this year, either.

So that’s the state of the blog. Essentially unchanged, but a lot of ideas have been thrown at the wall behind the scenes in the last nine months.

Like Aywren, I, too, have no complaints about my homebrew blog project. I don’t miss WordPress in the slightest. As a software developer, I personally can’t wait for the day when WordPress is wiped off the face of the Internet, along with its infestation of obsolete LAMP stacks. It’s like having an Internet built on Microsoft Access. Yuck.

But that’s just me. I like to keep doing new things. I never want to be one of those old curmudgeons pining for the old days.

This post is for day 5 of Blaugust 2024.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 07/29* 09:28 # I keep forgetting to run my microblog archival script on Mondays. So once again there will be two new entries in the RSS feed, one of which is a week old. Someday I should really think about automating that. * 10:58 # Over the weekend I made the terrible mistake of trying to do some cleanup work in the front yard getting rid of weeds and stuff. The mistake was not covering my arms in long sleeves. There’s poison ivy out there and I knew there was poison ivy out there, and even though I stayed away from the places I knew there was poison ivy, I still got poison ivy on my arm and now I’m going to have a rash for weeks. All it takes is the barest touch of poison ivy and that’s three weeks of an itchy rash for me.

+ 16:54 # I’m trying a new thing of using cold compresses to help with poison ivy rashes. It does technically work but it doesn’t work that great so far.

18:41 # I saw today that VLDL is yet another creative video content group taking the plunge into “premium subscription video service.” Not sure what I think of these efforts. It seems like 2024 is The Year Of Content-Based Video Subscription Services. On the one hand, it’s like, heck yeah, get away from YouTube and do your own thing, that’s awesome, you’re content is definitely good enough to do that. On the other hand, it’s like, ugh another service I have to manage. Can’t they all just use the same non-YouTube video distribution service so I don’t have to have 50,000 different accounts. :)

Tuesday 07/30* 14:46 # Last night in the Elden Ring DLC, I got past the four cheating NPC invader fight in Enir-Ilim (on the second try, amaziningly enough). Luck was on my side. Then, I reached what I assume/hope is the final boss in the DLC. It’s a monster. It’s probably going to be like the end of Lords of the Fallen, where I don’t particularly feel like going through the ordeal, and it’ll probably be a month or so before I work up the motivation to throw myself at it. Initial efforts have … not gone well. But at least I got to the second phase once. Knowing Elden Ring’s boss fight design philosophy (make it as soul-crushing, painful and not-fun as possible), it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a third phase afterward.

+ 14:48 # On the plus side, Elden Ring boss fights are good opportunity to listen to an audiobook.

Thursday 08/01* 15:23 # Introducing Me to Blaugust 2024 https://endgameviable.com/post/2024/08/2024-08-01-a-blaugust-intro/ #Blaugust2024

Friday 08/02* 10:45 # Endgame Viable Reads Old Writing E1 - From my NaNoWriMo 2009 draft called 2029 AG 7 https://endgameviable.com/talking/2024/0801-s01e01-2029ag7-1/ #Blaugust2024 * 10:48 # I’m already tired of posting blog post notifications manually. I really need to figure out how to automate that from a static site. There’s a bunch of RSS- feed-to-Mastodon-posters but I’m never sure if anything is going to work with my non-Mastodon GoToSocial instance. * 15:33 # CommentBox doesn’t seem to be a very active project anymore so I’m trying two new third-party comment systems on the blog: Emote and GraphComment. It occurred to me that, because of the way my site is built now, I don’t actually have to limit myself to one comment system, so now there’s three on there. Pick the one that works for you. :) My personal first impression is that I think I like Emote more than GraphComment. * 19:02 # New on the blog: Reading Old Writing S1 E2 - 2029 AG 7 Pt 2 https://endgameviable.com/talking/2024/0802-s01e02-2029ag7-2/ #Blaugust2024 * 21:59 # So Fall Guy. I’m going to guess a number in my head and look up the Rotten Tomatoes score. Okay. Once again we see I’m completely out of step with the modern movie-going audience. Not quite as out of step as The Beekeeper but fairly close. I kind of expected an action movie full of stunts and what I got was a romcom without many stunts, or at least stunts that were filmed in a way that didn’t look very interesting. I mean it was kind of funny at times but I got bored and walked away from the screen quite a lot.

Saturday 08/03 11:32 # New on the blog: Saturday Musing About Blaugust Systems https://endgameviable.com/post/2024/08/saturday-musing-about-blaugust- systems/ #Blaugust2024 * 13:48 # I just watched Land of Bad on Netflix. Review scores weren’t great but I thought it was a decent movie. Had a bit of an 80s Joel Silver action movie vibe at times (a la Predator). A perspective of modern warfare that I haven’t really seen in movie form before. Sort of vaguely resembled that Gene Hackman movie Bat21 where he got lost in Vietnam.

Sunday 08/04* 09:19 # I finished listening to the A Game of Thrones audiobook yesterday, and I thought it would be interesting to have a list of the chapters with a couple sentences on what each chapter was, and a brief search later I arrived at the Wiki of Ice and Fire, which has chapter lists for each book along with extremely comprehensive chapter summaries. One might even say ridiculously comprehensive summaries, almost to the point that one need not really bother reading the book. The only thing I wish I could do is re-sort the chapter list by the POV character.

+ 09:32 # Ah, the Wiki of Ice and Fire actually does have navigation links to move between POV chapters by character, which is good enough. So you can e.g. browse through just the Bran chapters.

10:26 # Hey, the outdoor cat has decided to stay and sleep inside after getting his breakfast for the first time since winter. Must be the drizzly overcast weather. The indoor cat is also sleeping and hasn’t noticed yet, otherwise she usually stalks and chases the outdoor cat around the house until he leaves again.
15:47 # New on the blog: Reading Old Writing S1 E3 - Neofuel (2010) https://endgameviable.com/talking/2024/s01e03-neofuel-1/ #Blaugust2024
22:16 # Dragon Show hot take: Did they like forget they were making the season finale episode? Did anything even happen in this entire season? At least in the first season, something started toward the end. At the end of the second season, we’re left in almost exactly the same place as the end of the first season. Have screenwriters just plain forgotten what a plot is in this age of streaming? I guess it was probably the writer’s/actor’s strike. They had to put something out even though it was obviously just randomly shuffled scenes that make no sense together. “Just put people in wigs and costumes in front of cameras, and then add some dragons in the background, people won’t notice,” I imagine the producers saying. Anyway, cool music at the end.

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This is a reading from my NaNoWriMo 2010 draft, a corporate espionage thriller called Neofuel.

Click the play button that should be somewhere in the vicinity of this text, or add this feed to your favorite podcast app.

I’m pleased with this draft because it was actually finished. Story-wise, at least. It’s far from finished in terms of readiness for publication, though I think I’ve done at least two revisions.

I also remember liking it because it’s a genre I don’t normally spend much time in. But I haven’t read it in a long time and I don’t know what I’d think of it now.

This post is for day 4 of Blaugust 2024.

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I find myself in an odd place this morning. I actually have time and motivation to sit down and write a blog post. Blame Blaugust I guess.

It usually takes me at least an hour to get a full blog post done, and that’s a long time for me to sit and write these days, and there’s usually a physical cost for it. I haven’t quite worked out how to write comfortably for long periods of time at my advancing age without hurting my back, neck, and/or shoulders.

It’s strange because I work as a programmer most days so I’m at a computer literally all day every day. But it’s one thing to work at programming for an hour, which is often short bursts of typing in between thinking, and much more manageable for me. But writing words is usually just a constant stream of sitting frozen in one position and typing.

To make matters worse, I typically have my best ideas and am at my most mentally acute soon after I wake up in the morning. So morning is the best time for me to write by far. But unfortunately my physical body is a shambles after I get out of bed in the morning, so writing in the morning very quickly starts to hurt.

To make matters even worser, all my writing is done on a laptop, and I inevitably hunch over when I’m working on a laptop and trying to read the laptop screen.

The point is, while I could sit here and think up thousands of words to write in an hour fairly easily, getting them into a document is becoming increasing painful in my old age. Don’t neglect your posture, kids.

Anyway, I had not planned on writing random non-sequitor posts for Blaugust. I was just going to stick to my regular once-a-week digest post and my twice-a-month newsletter post, and the experimental Reading Old Writing thing, which should in theory reach well over 31 entries in the ol’ RSS feed for the month.

However, I’m finding that recording a 10-minute audio clip of some old writing and shoving it out the door every day is a bit more work than I anticipated. It’s fortunate that the beginning of Blaugust happens to coincide with taking a week off of work, so I can afford to spend the time to get everything right. But after next week it might be a different story.

The thing I find interesting about Blaugust is not so much the end result of 31 pieces of content, but creating a system with which it’s very easy to produce 31 pieces of content. A system that takes just a little bit of time every day. I’m still using the system I came up with last year for Blaugust to archive my microblogging posts.

But my recording system is still a bit cumbersome. I setup a REAPER template, but I continue to tweak it every day. It’s not as easy as you might think to get a voice track to -16 LUFS without smashing and distorting the hell out of it with compression. (LUFS is the trendy term audio engineering folk use to describe loudness. I’m led to believe that -16 LUFS is the unofficial standard for podcasts, and it generally comports with my observations of other podcasts.)

Also, it’s a bit more tedious to actually read my old writing to find the bits to highlight. More than I anticipated. I hadn’t accounted for that part of the process in my system.

The point is, at this point, I seriously doubt if I’m going to make it to 30 different readings. I think I’ll be lucky to get to a dozen.

So I may have to fall back on ye olde standard blogging system: Bring up an empty Markdown file and start typing.

I don’t really like to blog this way anymore. With a whole open-ended document like this, it turns into a long rambling missive that bounces around to different topics and is prone to long run-on sentences about nothing just because it’s fairly easy to keep my fingers moving across the screen once I get them moving. The essence of writing, for me, is not so much adding words, but removing words. Taking verbose carbon and compressing it into pithy diamonds. Writing is quite a lot like sculpting for me. I throw a lot of clay at the page and then start removing the cruft.

So for these stream-of-conscious “just type what I’m thinking” sorts of things, I prefer to keep them in the domain of “microblogging.” It’s free-form but there is still some structure to it, in the sense that you have to keep it fairly brief, so you have to keep it to one self-contained thought. What I end up doing is sitting and thinking my random thought for a while in my head, and only after turning it around a few times will I then commit it to my GoToSocial instance. And since it’s a short paragraph, it’s easy to sculpt and remove the cruft.

I’ve just noticed I forgot to update that GoToSocial page to indicate it’s been weekly instead of daily for the last year. Whoopsie.

And now we come to another reason I don’t write blog posts like this much anymore. I’ve come to the end, and there is no way to end this post. Not only that, but I will now have to find an image to put on this post before I can publish it. I lost count of the number of complete posts I’ve written that have remained forever in Drafts because I couldn’t be bothered to find an image. Off to DALL-E I guess.

Okay done. I went to DALL-E 3 and typed in “Make me an image to go with the following blog post: " and then pasted the entire contents of the text above here, and picked the second of the two images generated. And that’s pretty much why generative AI is impossible to ignore for creating things that are needed but don’t matter that much.

According to DALL-E, the image captures “the essence of a cozy but cluttered home office with a person experiencing the struggle and determination of writing.” My home office is very cluttered (I’m actually typing in my living room, which is also cluttered), but I wouldn’t describe it as cozy.

And now I need to stretch my back and walk around for a while or I’m going to be useless for the rest of the day. Total time from typing hugo new content to commiting the post for publishing: 1 hour and 15 minutes.

This post is for day 3 of Blaugust 2024.

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This is another reading from my NaNoWriMo 2009 draft, an unfinished near-future science fiction story with the easy-to-remember title 2029 AG 7.

Click the play button that should be somewhere in the vicinity of this text, or add this feed to your favorite podcast app.

These bits finally get to the reason the story was called 2029 AG 7. If memory serves, I read somewhere that this is how NASA designates astronomical objects. Something like the year it’s discovered, followed by some letter code, and then the sequential number of how many had been discovered that year. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but that’s my memory of how I came up with that obscure code for the title.

The story goes on from here to … fall flat on its face and die a horrible death. It turns out I don’t have the capacity to create a complex scientific and geopolitical narrative. Live and learn. I don’t have a word count on the document but it’s probably somewhere around 10-15,000 words.

Incidentally, I’m not very happy with the production quality on these things yet. I’m getting a bit more distortion and off-axis rolloff from the mic than I’d like. Because I have the gain fairly low to avoid room noise, I have to be super careful not to move much when I’m reading.

This post is for day 2 of Blaugust 2024.

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I was taking a look at the functionality of CommentBox, the third-party comment system I’ve been using on the blog for a while now, and noticing that there seem to be some bugs in authenticating with any method other than Google. I didn’t notice because I use Google to authenticate on the Internet roughly 99% of the time. Also, I don’t often comment on my own blog.

I then noticed that CommentBox hasn’t had a new blog entry on their site since 2018, and I didn’t see any activity in their own comments for several years. Not a good sign for the future of that service.

So I started looking for new third-party comment systems which fulfil these requirements:

Does not require me to setup hosting
Has a usable free plan
Is not Disqus

One place to find a relatively up-to-date list of comment systems for static sites is here, by the way. The list seems to change constantly.

In fact, I found two new options I hadn’t heard of before: Emote and GraphComment. Both of them are basically like Disqus except supposedly no ads or tracking.

Anyway, I’ve added both Emote and GraphComment to the blog. One of the advantages of rolling my own static site is that I can break all conventions and put three different comment systems on every page like a crazy person. If you find one doesn’t work, try a different one!

So far I’m liking Emote more than GraphComment, but that’s only after the most superficial of reviews.

This post is for day 2 of Blaugust 2024.

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To kick off this experiment, we’ll start with a bit of writing from NaNoWriMo 2009. It’s an unfinished near-future science fiction with the easy-to-remember title 2029 AG 7.

Click the play button that should be somewhere in the vicinity of this text, or add this feed to your favorite podcast app.

This was the first NaNoWriMo I attempted, and I did not do particularly well with it.

I haven’t read this in forever, and I have little or no memory of writing it, what it was about, or what I might have been inspired by. In fact, when I glanced over the first few of chapters, it wasn’t anything like what I thought it was about. A different person might as well have written it.

After re-reading the first three chapters, I was left more puzzled than ever.

Until next time, goodbye and remain indoors!

This post is for day 1 of Blaugust 2024.

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I’m led to believe we’re supposed to write an introductory post for Blaugust 2024. I assume this means an introduction of me to you.

This is, of course, the worst thing that could ever be asked of me, as I have a particular distate for talking about myself. I have a fairly poor sense of self at the best of times, but when you do the “hey why don’t we go around the room and introduce ourselves it’ll be fun” thing, it turns into a full-blown anxiety disorder.

To make things easier I’ll stick to the verifiable facts that would stand up in a court of law. I’m Tom, but I’ve been inexplicably using the name UltrViolet on the Internet since 1997 (well, there is an explanation but it’s not particularly relevant here). I’m an adult Gen-X male who (shockingly, given the above lack of personality) lives alone with a couple of cats that I didn’t really ask for.

I’ve been a working software developer since 1990, and have somehow convinced enough people to pay me a living wage for most of that time. A real miracle because I’m from that older generation of software developers who typically has some kind of personality defect that socially ostracizes them in life, and makes them bad at job interviews and human interaction, but suited to the abstract detail work of programming (and anything else detail-oriented, really).

The rise of video games and the Internet intersected perfectly with my life, and it’s impossible to imagine a world where I didn’t fall completely under their influence and struggle ever since to maintain some sense of reality and perspective. (Though I have to admit I’ve been finding the video game “scene” somewhat lackluster for the last 5-10 years.)

I’ve had a web site on the Internet since around 1998. This blog has been around since 2013. I’ve been writing in some form or another since I was a kid. I find it far easier to write thoughts than to verbalize thoughts (actually it’s not that easy to write either because I’m not very good at word recall, but it’s easier to mask that in writing).

I used to write and record music but I don’t do that very much anymore. I keep telling myself I’m going to get back into that, but I never do. As a minor performative compensation, I started recording game videos and putting them on a YouTube channel around 2016.

I’m a big fan of dry humor, and it’s not uncommon for people to think I’m serious when I’m not.

That’s enough probably, right? Yeah, that’s enough. If it’s not enough, I also have an About page.

Please return to your normal business, while I have a meltdown for posting something that sounds way too personal.

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The one where I just plain give up on trying to think of a unique title for a post containing a potpourri of radically-different subjects.

BlaugustI signed up for Blaugust after all, and I’ll be trying something completely new. It might be a rousing success or a dismal failure, or, even worse, average and unmemorable. The future is unknowable. You can find all the details here.

For myself, I see it as a thin excuse to force myself to read some old writing again. (That’s a content creation tip for the newer folks: Find a reason to create that is unrelated to statistics or money and you have a much higher chance of success.)

If you follow the main RSS feed, you’ll get all that content automatically, but I didn’t put it on the front page because I didn’t want to have to find or create different pictures for 31 days straight.

Incidentally, I still see people who don’t read blogs using RSS feed readers, and I still find it shocking and incomprehensible. I fully expect–nay, demand!–that everyone read my blog through an RSS feed reader, because I use a very minimalist layout for the web site itself. Most likely a feed reader will format the posts better than my web site.

GamingI saw someone mention Dragon’s Dogma 2 recently. I found it fun for 10-15 hours, but then I abandoned it when it became clear it was just going to be continuous repetition from then onward, with punative weight-based inventory management on top of it.

Elden Ring DLCSpeaking of punative, I don’t know about anyone else, but I hated the Ancient Ruins of Rauh. Not only was it impossible to pronounce, but it was just so much empty space with nothing interactable inside. Two entire videos just completely wasted. Nothing to see, nothing to talk about. Just awful.

This is a common problem in Elden Ring from start to finish. It looks like there’s a lot to explore, but when you’re actually in it, there’s nothing there except useless crafting materials. But you still have to do a grid-by-grid search of every area, because occasionally, there’s a cool item hiding somewhere.

I persist in my general viewpoint that Elden Ring was a step backwards from Dark Souls 3 (but slightly better than Sekiro, which was a huge step backward from Dark Souls 3).

Anyway, I’ve defeated these bosses since my last missive (I’m consulting my own page to remind me):

Divine Beast Dancing Lion (legend)
Curseblade Libirith
Ralva the Great Red Bear
Golden Hippopotamus
Blackgaol Knight (Western Nameless Mausoleum)
Rellana, the Twin Moon Knight (legend)
Messmer the Impaler (demigod)
A couple of dragons
Black Knight (Northern Nameless Mausoleum)
Romina, Saint of the Bud (legend)
Commander Giaus (legend)
Midra Lord of Frenzied Flame (legend)
Putrescence Knight (legend)
A plain old Death Rite Bird
A gimmicky Lamenter in Lamenter’s Gaol
Dancer of Ranah (Southern Nameless Mausoleum)
A couple of Tree Sentinels in the Hinterlands
A Fallingstar Beast in the Hinterlands
Metyr, Mother of Fingers (legend)
Those four NPC allies of Miquella in Elir-Ilim

I got to the NPC Invader Fest in the Elir-Ilim and ran headlong into a difficulty barrier, so then I got some hints from a wiki and found some other areas to explore. Hopefully I can improve my character before returning to Elir-Ilim because yikes. (I’ve since learned that I broke the Thiollier quest so the difficulty barrier isn’t ever going to get any easier. I’ll have to rely on the old reliable Elden Ring boss fighting strategy: Repetition and Pure Luck.)

In late-breaking news, I did get past the NPC Invader Fest and ran into the next difficulty barrier, the boss fight at the end of the DLC. At least I assume it’s the end. It has a “final boss” sort of feel to it, in that it’s more impossible than any of the previous impossible bosses. It’s yet another Elden Ring boss that appears so impossible and random and unfair it hardly seems worth the effort. It’s not like there’s anything to do afterward.

Media ProductionI had to ramp up a new media production workflow for next month’s Blaugust. It’s nothing too fancy, it’s just a REAPER project template to record a mini-podcast. I’ll be using the Rode PodMic I bought earlier this year, which I’ve been slowly working into my video recordings more and more. I have it setup on a mic arm at my gaming desk now. It’s literally made for podcasts, after all.

I’ve setup a modest set of effects to quickly get the output gain to the unofficial podcast LUFS of -16dB, and I even found a decent bit of royalty-free music for the intro from one of the thousands of royalty-free sounds I’ve gotten from Humble over the years. Hopefully I’ll be able to quickly churn out one audio file a day, write a brief title and a summary, and insert it into the blog feed.

Media ConsumptionRegularly consuming: The Rest is Entertainment Podcast (on YouTube), The Daily Show (sometimes on YouTube, sometimes on Paramount+), The Weekly Show Podcast (on YouTube), the Blood of the Wild Podcast (subscription), The Dragon Show (on Max), The Boys season 4 (on Prime).

TelevisionI’ve been watching the second season of The Dragon Show. It’s a pale imitation of George R. R. Martin’s works, and the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, but it does sort-of-kind-of-vaguely resemble a fantasy show of political intrigue. The biggest problem is that none of the characters have much depth or likability or make sensible decisions, and there’s almost no context for anything that happens, and nothing matters and you couldn’t care less what happens to whom. Also, I still think the Targaryan wigs look dumb. There’s something about them that makes my brain constantly scream out “this is fake these are actors this isn’t real.” An uncanny valley thing, I think.

I tried to watch the Critical Role Downfall three-shot, but I couldn’t deal with all the dour seriousness. Brennan Lee Mulligan did a fantastic job with Calamity, but this one just felt like a direct injection of severe depression into the veins. It was like they were filming an episode of Breaking News for Dropout, where nobody was allowed to smile or laugh or they’d deduct points, but they actually never smiled or laughed. Seriously folks, there’s no Oscar category for actual play shows.

I don’t know why I’m still watching The Boys. The first season was the only good one. Every season afterward has just been a random assortment of childish fantasies for Twitter doom-scrollers, and the fourth season is leaning into that harder than ever. Still, sometimes there’s a good joke or two.

Late in the July I stumbled onto the sketch comedy of Mitchell and Webb on YouTube, and I now have some new catch phrases to commit to memory. That’s Numberwang! (I had seen David Mitchell on a million panel shows, but I’ve never seen him actually perform before.)

There’s been another premium subscription video service sighting: Viva La Dirt League has created VIVA+. This joins other content creators Dropout, Critical Role, and Glass Cannon (that I know off the top of my head) in being content creator media empires who have gotten big enough to try to shift their business models off of Twitch and YouTube. Not sure what I think of these trends. It’s undeniably good for their business to detangle themselves from third-party platforms, but it’s kind of a drag for me as the consumer.

MoviesDid I mention this already? I watched Civil War. It wasn’t the action blockbuster I thought it was going to be. It was more of a cerebral indie-ish film. Not bad, but whenever they tried to make it look like real-life politics it comes off fairly laughable.

AudiobooksThe Dragon Show got me thinking about George R. R. Martin books, so I listened to Fire & Blood, the book on which the series is based, read by Simon Vance, who has a very predictable cadence. It’s what I expected: Not really a novel, but more of an encyclopedic history book, somewhat like The Silmarillion. (I say that, having not read The Silmarillion in over 40 years and possibly not ever actually finishing it at all.)

That led me to start listening to A Game of Thrones again, read by Roy Dotrice, the late great actor who sounds like he’s got a perpetual case of tuberculosis and possibly even died immediately after finishing recording these audiobooks. I was surprised how much of the historical information from Fire & Blood is right there in the early chapters of A Game of Thrones.

Home DevelopmentWith Blaugust starting up again, I briefly considered starting up my Next.js blog project again, which still lies unfinished from the end of 2023, but I’ve successfully avoided falling down that rabbit hole for the time being.

Day JobRecently we’ve gotten a requirement from our engineering overlords that all production source code should have 80% test coverage. They have dashboards to measure that sort of thing, and anyone that doesn’t have an “80” on their dashboard for any particular git repository is going to get pinged.

This has resulted in a lot of teams and a lot of engineers writing unit tests for older code solely for the sake of getting the numbers up, including my team.

Strangely enough, I actually like writing unit tests. I think I’m one of the only software developers who does. I find it a very interesting problem to solve and I’ve learned, especially in the last year or so that I’ve put a particular focus on this particular subject, that writing good unit tests with good coverage usually results in better-organized and more readable code.

So writing unit tests on new code is no big deal. If you write any unit tests at all, you can get to 60-70% coverage almost automatically. Getting to 70-80% on new code is also no big deal. In the last year, I’ve personally reached 90-100% coverage on new code.

But going back to old disorganized code and adding unit tests is a major chore. You have two choices: You can either try to refactor the problems in the old code so it’s easier to test, or you can try to add tests to the old code without making changes. I usually choose the latter, and it’s a tedious, thankless, oftentimes pointless job.

Anyway, I’ve been working on pointless unit tests for old Java code that’s in maintenance mode this past sprint. And I had to use JUnit 4 instead of JUnit 5, to boot.

The unit tests I’ve been adding are classic, textbook cases of unit tests that provide good code coverage numbers, but, in fact, do not test the code much at all. Which is why most software developers tend to complain about having to meet arbitrary code coverage numbers set by management.

Health and WellnessI got poison ivy on my arms again. Arg. I was trying to clear out some weeds and tree seedlings from a front flower bed area which I normally just leave wild but figured maybe I should make it look like somebody actually lives here. Unfortunately there’s some poison ivy growing up the side of the house near the garage that I can’t get near, and I didn’t, but some of it still snuck in and touched my arms. I can’t be within 20 feet of poison ivy apparently without getting it on my skin. Just the barest touch is all it takes, the tiniest touch or scratch from any plant or animal that has been in contact with that stupid poison ivy urushiol oil. And, of course, I thought that I was far enough away from it that I didn’t need to wear long sleeves for protection. What a dummy I am. (And yes I took an immediate shower afterward and thoroughly washed off my arms and it didn’t help.)

It’s particularly irritating because when it gets on my inner arms (which is where it always gets), it really affects my ability to use a computer, because then I can’t rest my arms on anything while I’m typing.

World ContextI’m finally starting to realize that I don’t really need Tweetdeck or Twitter to find out the important news every day.

The inevitable has happened: Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris will be the Democractic nominee for president. A surprising development in the Democratic Party’s determined eight-year campaign to ensure all 9 Supreme Court justices are conservatives. Still, I personally wouldn’t put money on a change in the election outcome just yet. Democrats have only gone from having no chance whatsoever to having maybe just a tiny chance. Kamala Harris hasn’t been what you’d call a wildly popular (or even known) figure in American politics for the last four years.
The Summer Olympics began in Paris, causing most media outlets to begin their quadrennial desperatation campaigns of trying to get people to care about Olympic sports, in order to justify the billions they spend on coverage rights.
More than one item of scary news from the region of Israel that could escalate the conflict there.
brat
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Celebrity Deaths: Bob Newhart (one of the best deadpan comedians). Some I missed last time: Richard Simmons (fitness coach), Shannon Doherty (actress).

“I stand with two thousand years of darkness and hunger and bafflement behind me!” -Mitchell and Webb

Bye!

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Last time, I tested the technical method of distributing audio files through an RSS feed on the blog. This time, I’m testing the concept for the “show” and the workflow required to produce it. Add this feed to your podcatcher of choice to listen and/or click the “play” button that should theoretically be somewhere in the vicinity of this text.

This is a reading from a 2012 short story I wrote called Margway, which is a spin-off of sorts from my NaNoWriMo 2011 project. The character of Margway was a side character and did not feature much in the novel draft, but I thought it was an interesting character in and of itself. In re-reading this today, I was surprised how much of an impact it had on me, and I remembered why I liked it in the first place.

P.S. You might be wondering why I don’t just copy and paste the text of the writing into a blog post like a normal person. The reason is simple: While there may be some seeds of good ideas here and there, the writing isn’t that great, and still requires a lot of editing. This one is a third draft from 2012, and I still noted numerous places that still needs polishing before I would even consider submitting it for publishing or self-publishing. Posting these as writing would require a significantly higher time investment to bring them up to the standards of quality writing, and that simply isn’t possible at a rate of one per day. This writing matters–to me, at least–unlike the average throw-away blog post.

But when I read them out loud, it’s a different story. Something I’ve noticed from listening to audiobooks: Performing a work out loud can smooth over and hide the rougher areas of grammar that’s dull or otherwise full of glaring errors. So, I read them. Better for me, better for the production, better for keeping things moving along.

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Hello, this is a technical experiment to see if there is any chance of this working. I’m adding a new experimental section to the blog for Blaugust 2024.

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Blaugust is returning for 2024. I don’t know if I’m going to sign up this year. I like to have some kind of theme or new process to test out, and I only had one idea, but I don’t think it’s really in the spirit of Blaugust. Also, it’s more work than I particularly want to do.

The idea was this: Take 31 pieces of writing from the 10+ years of NaNoWriMo drafts I’ve done and post one per day. I keep trying to think of ways to do something useful with those drafts, because at this point, they’re definitely not going to magically turn into novels. My eyesight and back isn’t strong enough to sit at a computer banging out words all day every day anymore. But some of them could possibly become short stories or novellas.

GamingMiracle of miracles: I completed the last boss fight in Lords of the Fallen. I did it almost without paying attention to the screen, while listening to a podcast. That’s the level of engagement that I feel while playing these games with garbage boss fights, where the only requirement for success is the persistence to just keep trying it until the randomization lines up in your favor. As previously stated, I hate that style of gameplay. I felt nothing on beating the boss, because I did nothing at all different from any other previous attempt. The important thing is that I now have an ending for my video series, and I can uninstall the game forever.

Shadows of the ErdtreeOn the Elden Ring DLC front, at first I found myself resisting playing. I would think to myself, “Okay, I have a full weekend where I can play the Elden Ring DLC.” Then I wouldn’t play it (or anything else) a single time over the whole weekend.

I think it’s mainly because Elden Ring is essentially an open world game, and most open world games are designed such that you’re not actually doing anything roughly 75% of the time. So it takes a while to get into it. I wish they would go back to the Dark Souls formula, where every step and every moment is part of the overall trajectory, and there’s no “down time.” In Elden Ring, first you have to find the interesting stuff, and only then do you get to play it.

Anyway, I’ve finally gotten into a groove with the Elden Ring DLC. My character started the DLC at level 150, and has been waiting patiently under the burning Erdtree, pre-NG+, for two years. I have no way of knowing what percentage of completion I’ve reached, but it looks like a huge area of exploration, and I’ve only encountered a few “story” bosses so far: The Divine Beast Dancing Lion, the Golden Hippopotamus, and Rellana, which I skipped because bleep that bleeping bleeper. (I define “story” bosses as the ones that block progress and/or have NPC summons available.) Otherwise I’ve mainly seen side quest bosses that drop loot I’ll probably never use. (I mean at character level 150 you’re not going to change your loadout much, right?)

At publishing time, I’ve played about 25 hours, reached level 158, and, more importantly, Scadutree Blessing 8 and Revered Spirit Ash Blessing 7, which is their alternate leveling mechanism in the DLC. As yet I don’t see any ending in sight, so it’s possible I will record more videos for this DLC than I did for both Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen.

I remain impressed at how open Elden Ring’s version of an open world game is. Most open world games actually put you on a railroaded story path through the open world, using level-gated quests. The “openness” is achieved by allowing you to do optional side quests now and then. In Elden Ring, you can go anywhere you want in any order, as long as you can find a path there (and survive), which is very rare in the “open world” space. (To be fair, even though From Software games are rich in lore, they aren’t really quest-based, so it’s easier for them.)

In other news, I bought the Myst and Riven remakes in the Steam Summer Sale. Myst was a trend-setter. I played the original version, but I don’t remember how far I got (not far, probably, because it was way less exciting to play than Quake). Now, Myst isn’t terribly memorable. Otherwise the Steam Summer Sale was a non-event, as per usual with sales these days. A sale is about as rare and remarkable as brushing your teeth.

Media ProductionPlaying a new game (the Elden Ring DLC) means recording more videos. I had to plug another 4TB external USB drive into my gaming PC. At my current rate of video recording, I require two 4TB drives per year.

In the course of recording Elden Ring videos (and any other game, honestly), I’ve found that I don’t particularly want to record live commentary while I’m fighting a boss for the 5th, 10th, 20th, or 50th time and getting killed repeatedly by some random happenstance right before the end. (I’m looking at you, Rellana.) After the first few tries, there’s nothing to report, except, “Oh look, it’s yet another terrible Elden Ring boss fight design that makes me crazy. Did you see that move the boss did just then that was complete and utter cheating b.s.? Oh gee I randomly lost my target lock again.” So after five tries (or less, sometimes), I just end my commentary and put on a YouTube podcast or something to distract me while I mindlessly churn away at the bosses.

Eventually I’ll beat those bosses, but I end up with a piece of video with no commentary. So I worked out a way to easily load videos into REAPER and record a quick overdub of post-game commentary. That’s the big media production innovation this time around. Once I have a “remixed” commentary audio track, I can put it in the directory with the video files, and my post-processing rendering scripts will pick it up and mix the new commentary track with the game audio.

In the past, I’ve taken the 50 boss fight attempts and edited them together into montage videos, but I’ve been lazy and haven’t been doing that this time. I just show the first, say, five attempts where I figure out what the boss is all about, then I just cut to the last, winning attempt. It’s just easier that way.

TelevisionI fell into a rabbit hole of watching new-to-me episodes of Penn & Teller’s Fool Us on The CW streaming. Penn & Teller are heroes of my generation. (Though it turns out they’re actually quite a bit older than I thought they were.)

I’ve secretly wished I could perform magic tricks for most of my life, so I find it a fascinating subject. I grew up watching David Copperfield specials and then Penn & Teller came along and blew the doors off of everything.

MoviesI spent the July 4 holiday watching movies: The Beekeeper, No Time To Die, The Wall (2017), Asteroid City. I commented on them in various microblog posts. The main point that neatly encapsulates cinema in this moment: The Beekeeper is a pretty awful movie in almost every department, but somehow it got a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

AudiobooksI’ve been listening to Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series. They are short books, and short audiobooks, read by someone named Phil Gigante. He does a decent job, although his interpretation of Slippery Jim DiGriz doesn’t quite match my head canon. (Ugh I used “head canon.” There are certain cliche fandom phrases that I try to avoid using and that’s one of them.) He doesn’t even pronounce DiGriz the way I do. Anyway, these are some of my favorite science fiction comfort books, and, in my mind, established the bar (way back in the 60s!) for the sarcastic first-person narrative that all of us bloggers use today.

World ContextAs yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

The UK General Election saw a landslide victory for Labor, which I think is roughly equivalent to the extinct Democratic center-left here in the U.S. Also some gains for their version of the crazy right-wing party far to the right of the Conservatives. I can’t think of any way to use that information to prognosticate the U.S. election, because the political landscape is so different here.
Hoo boy the Biden Buzz is heating up after that debate. I’m genuinely curious what will happen now, because it’s probably going to be something I’ve never seen before. However, after spending the last eight years watching the Democratic Party self-destruct with continuous own-goals, and the Republican Party self-destruct with non-stop demagoguery, I remain steadfast in my conviction that it’s impossible to imagine a non-farcical outcome to this election, or how the U.S. could ever return to a time when it had functioning political parties. We citizens are left hunkering down in our figurative bomb shelters trying to avoid all the madness.
Speaking of hunkering down… surprising literally nobody in the normalized, rhetorically apocalyptic climate of American politics, there was an honest-to-gosh assassination attempt on Trump. (I didn’t hear this news for two whole days, and I’m grateful for it, because it would have ruined my weekend.) As if we didn’t have enough political conspiracy theories, I have no doubt the unsophisticated masses will now start inventing new ones.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Have fun storming the castle!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 07/08* 08:18 # I recorded well over 250 videos of Elden Ring, took meticulous notes on every single one of them (well, almost all of them), and yet I cannot find where I found or explored the Wyndham Catacombs. That’s where a tier 1 spirit ash bell bearing is located. Somehow I had unlocked the site of grace but never gotten the bell bearing. Weird. I didn’t do very much off-camera with that character but I guess that was one of the things. Or maybe the game unlocked the site of grace for me, and I’d never actually been there? Is that possible? The inside looked vaguely familiar, though, but then a lot of catacombs look vaguely the same. * 08:39 # Oh neat. My blog failed to deploy and AWS has changed their entire Amplify UI so I can’t find anything. * 09:58 # I’m very pleased to see more and more people venturing forth with my long-held opinion that blog comments aren’t a very useful medium in the modern world anymore. At least the WordPress-style blog comments. I keep wondering if there’s a way to recapture something useful out of the concept of comments– modernizing it, evolving it, changing it, something, but I have yet to think of anything. The main problem is that the list of cons for comments is about 10 times longer than the list of pros for comments. I keep thinking of writing a post “the top 10 reasons web site owners should not implement comments,” the only listicle I’ve ever considered writing.

Wednesday 07/10* 12:09 # I’ve finally become energized enough to play the Elden Ring DLC. Have made some more progress, killed a few more bosses (Ancient Dragon-Man, Death Knight). Having learned from playing the main game, I’m probing the boundaries of the play area for the paths of least resistance, and turning back as soon as I encounter difficulty, until I can find no other paths to take. Implementing a sort of a human hierarchical search algorithm. * 12:13 # Yesterday I had another lesson in “expect and plan for human error in video recording” with OBS. I rigged up a text overlay to display a list of the loose ends I’m tracking in Elden Ring, intending to bring it up briefly to show the viewers. Of course, as I had done many many times before, I forgot to turn off the overlay for like 10 minutes, because I’m watching the game and not the OBS preview. Completely ruined the video, no way to recover. I’ve now implemented a script I found that will automatically hide the overlay after 10 seconds if I forgot to do it myself. Should have done that from the beginning.

Thursday 07/11* 11:00 # Can we chat for a moment about how much the story boss fights suck in Elden Ring? Ok thanks. They suck. This insistence on having the bosses do these frickin 10 hit combos, where each hit will take a good quarter or a third of your health off, and each swing has a different fake-out timing. And how they never stand still so you can never actually hit them back. Combine that with all the infamous built-in From Software lag which makes instantaneous reactions basically impossible. So the bosses have just been getter faster and faster with longer and longer combos, floating around defying all the rules of the game, while we the player are still stuck with the same old laggy attacks and dodges and blocks. They’ve really abandoned that whole thing of “tough but fair” thing and embraced a new “tough but unfair” philosophy.

+ 11:13 # This impromptu rant has been brought to you by Rellana the Twin Moon Knight. Who I keep getting down to 10% health before she busts out some crazy random flurry of attacks or room-wide light show that just insta-kills me, Leda, and my spirit ashes.
+ 11:17 # Incidentally, there is an argument to be made that fighting these bosses solo is easier than summoning help, because when the boss is focused on someone else, I actually get hit *more* standing behind them because of all the 180-degree backswings on every boss attack. It’s just that it’s more tedious and repetitious to keep practicing boss fights solo.

Friday 07/12* 18:39 # I added a link at the top of the blog to my data-driven Elden Ring DLC progress page, which indexes each video I’ve recorded as I play the DLC, and gives a short description of each. I don’t know why I do these things, but it’s a fun exercise in getting Hugo to generate web pages out of json data files. Also, part of the fun of playing a From Software game blind is finding out how everyone else played through the content in wildly different ways from what you did. And it will be quite some time before I get around to actually uploading the videos.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 07/01 20:57 # Since I’ve been listening to audiobooks lately, I randomly wondered if there were audiobook versions of some Jack L. Chalker pulpish sci fi book series I read in my 20s that I never finished and always wanted to finish. Turns out there are. The first one I got was Midnight at the Well of Souls. It wasn’t very good, I didn’t remember any* of it, and wondered what I ever saw in it. It’s read by a narrator with such a deep resonant voice you can hear their vocal folds rattling. Turns out it wasn’t the right book. The one I wanted was the Demons at Rainbow Bridge and the Quintara Marathon series, which does NOT have an audiobook version. Bleh. (The other was the Four Lords of the Diamond series, which has a better narrator imo.)

+ 21:05 # The Quintara Marathon series not only doesn’t have an audiobook, it also doesn’t seem to have an ebook version either. Old school.

Tuesday 07/02* 22:07 # While I’m perusing lists of old sci-fi books I loved in my youth, a seemingly impossible decision has come before me: Do I get the Stainless Steel Rat books in audiobook form or kindle form? Or both?? The audiobook narrator is receiving good reviews but the preview sample doesn’t seem that great to me. The dude doesn’t quite capture the Harrison brand of sharp narrative wit and absurdist satire that I remember so well. * 22:14 # By the way, I don’t know why I once liked Lillith: A Snake in the Grass by Jack L. Chalker, the first of the Four Lords of the Diamond series. The audiobook is fairly well read by Kirby Heyborne but the story is pretty meh. I remember it being a lot less meh. The idea is cool but it’s just … meh. I used to more tolerant of meh stories in my youth I guess.

Wednesday 07/03* 22:11 # Wait what? Assassin’s Creed Mirage is only on Epic and NOT on Steam? Is this … a paradigm shift? A sea change? A new era? The end of an era? The new normal? A turning of the tide? A game changer? Flipping the script? Shifting gears? A new ballgame? Breaking the mold? Blowing the lid off? Changing the landscape? A new leaf? A hard 180?

Thursday 07/04* 09:11 # I had an amusing thought last night that nobody will find amusing. So I was perusing bestseller lists on audible and I found Sarah J. Mass occupies roughly 19 of the top 20 spots on the sff list, someone I had never heard of before. She does those A Noun of Noun and Noun books which I have seen on audible recommendations. I haven’t read any yet. Anyway I was curious where she came from, since she seems to be very well liked, so I read her wikipedia page and it turns out her books are retellings of fairy tales. “Cinderella except she’s an assassin.” Yada yada. There’s a long tradition of that kind of book in sff. “It’s this well-known thing except with a twist.” Pride and Prejudice with Magic/Zombies/etc. was a big one. Anyway my amusing thought was … that’s basically what AI does. Read a thing and alter it to make a new thing. You’d think modern authors would be more supportive of it! Har har. My ability to find the commonality between two completely unrelated things in a satiric way seemingly knows no bounds.

+ 09:12 # Long post. Arg I even shortened that to try to avoid the dreaded “long post” tag.

09:41 # I was despairing of what to do on this day off and then I remembered I could watch UK election results but then I find out the polls don’t close until 10 pm which is 6 pm my time so I still have to think of something to do. (There does still seem to be continuing coverage of the elections despite not having anything to report… the usual thing where they report on how the elections actually work and what happens at polling places, for the 75% of any democratic population who doesn’t actually know how their government works, and for me, in a different country.)
- 09:50 # This is the coverage I’m seeing at this moment on the BBC election feed: Pictures of dogs at polling places, shots of various politicians going in and out of polling places, interspersed with pre-recorded packages explaining the election process. Apparently valid voter ID is new in the UK. (It’s been a thing where I live for some time.) Ah now there’s an interview of some of the presenters who are going to cover the election results and how they prepare for tonight.
- 09:56 # They seem to have picked up the US media’s habit of trying to paint the election results as a horse race where nobody could possibly know the results and anything could happen and you’d better stay tuned for the live results so you don’t miss anything and blah blah blah. (Meanwhile, the one and only thing I know about the UK elections is that everybody has known who’s going to win for a long time.)
- 11:58 # Okay so lacking any better ideas I decided to watch a movie. I picked the first one I saw on Prime, which was The Beekeeper, a Jason Statham flick. I watched the entire thing from beginning to end. It’s a “flick,” not a movie or a film. Incidentally, this is the first Jason Statham flick I’ve ever seen. It’s not that I’ve been avoiding his movies, it’s just that I’ve never seen a trailer or description of one that looked interesting. I can’t wait to now go see what the Rotten Tomatoes score for this flick is.
- 12:04 # Omg lol. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score for The Beekeeper is 92%. NINETY- TWO PERCENT. Even the critic score is 71%. This explains a lot about why I never see any modern movies that look promising. We folks in the older generations have this thing where we expect movies to be made in a way that it appears someone–anyone–involved in the production cared about what they were making. We’re weird I guess. Anyway, every aspect of this movie was terrible. Acting, writing, story, visual effects, stunts, everything. It could have been a parody. In fact, I laughed a number of times. So I guess it was fun to watch in that sense.
- 12:09 # I have this feeling when I watch modern movies like The Beekeeper that script writers have no life experience except the extremely warped and distorted life they’ve seen on Twitter. The dialog from modern script writers always seems like it’s either copied from Twitter or written in the style of tweets. The stories are these outrageously exaggerated viewpoints of life in the extremes that doesn’t really exist in real life. It’s one of my current working sociological theories–an entire generation of humans now believes real life is what is seen through the prism of social media.
- 12:32 # I may have mentioned this before but in case I forgot: I watched a movie on Netflix a while back called Leave the World Behind. I liked it, mostly. It was better than The Beekeeper, but it also had a “life through the prism of Twitter” vibe to it and I found myself wondering who is out there in the world thinking it’s believable that a cyber attack is going to cause deer to magically start bullying humans overnight or that magic tick bites or magic sonic weapons somehow cause teeth to fall out (or even that it’s a normal thing to walk around in the woods during summer with shorts and sandals on for god’s sake). It’s a serious question I ponder sometimes. Who doesn’t know extremely basic survival stuff like that? People who live on Twitter, that’s who. It’s not exactly hardcore survivalist mentality stuff to know that ticks live in the woods.
- 12:35 # By the way, yes, I will continue to call it Twitter for the foreseeable future.
- 16:02 # On what is now being dubbed by at least one person as “unofficial movie day,” I have just finally watched No Time To Die. This was actually a movie, not a flick. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a film (films > movies > flicks). In any case it’s in a very different category from The Beekeeper. It appeared that the people who made No Time To Die took their jobs seriously, for example. It’s clear that’s not what movie-going audiences want, though, because the Rotten Tomatoes audience score was 88%, a full four points below The Beekeeper, which, as a gentle reminder, was pretty much garbage. No Time To Die was not garbage, but it also wasn’t fantastic, either. I’d say slightly above-average mediocrity. For some reason the Daniel Craig era of Bond movies just aren’t very energetic. I guess they ceded the whole “exciting stunts” thing to the Mission Impossible franchise.
- 18:00 # If I don’t see someone like a John King or Steve Kornacki breathlessly crunching demographic numbers that change in realtime on a giant touch screen during UK election coverage tonight, then I’m sorry to say I’ll have to submit my review that our friends across the pond are still far behind US standards in election coverage entertainment television.
- 18:33 # Well BBC election coverage is fairly insufferable because they keep putting party officials on and asking them super dumb gotcha questions, and also everybody knows the results already anyway, so I guess I have to find another movie to watch.
- 22:46 # To round out the unofficial movie day report, I selected The Wall (the 2017 war one, not the Pink Floyd one) to watch before UK election coverage began, because it was only a 1 hr 25 min movie and that was roughly the amount of time I needed to kill. It was kind of amazing that they stretched that movie out to fill that amount of time. It was an interesting idea but it would have been better in a 30 minute running time. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 42%, which is a little harsh, but not entirely unjustified.
- 22:57 # And after I gave up on UK election coverage, I landed on the film Asteroid City. Asteroid City is a film, not a movie or a flick. A film is defined as a movie that only the creator of the movie wants to see, but as a side effect, audiences might also find it entertaining. I personally found it highly entertaining, in the sense that I had no idea what was happening in front of my eyes and I could not possibly explain the narrative, but I couldn’t look away from it, because it was so different from anything I’d ever seen before, and seemed like an amazing technical achievement, though I’m not sure I could fully explain why. In that regard, it was a triumph of modern cinema, when compared to, say, The Beekeeper. Rotten Tomatoes audiences gave the so-called triumph of modern cinema a 62%, which is pretty much the depressing truth about audiences, who clearly prefer flicks like The Beekeeper to films like Asteroid City.

Friday 07/05* 22:57 # Oh hey I finally got to the credits in Lords of the Fallen. Not much of a secret, just persisted long enough to have randomly not been killed by all Adyr’s random fireballs from random directions.

Sunday 07/07* 15:18 # Yay I felled a boss in the Elden Ring DLC, the Demi-Human Swordmaster Onze. It was the second boss I encountered in the DLC. It was one of the easiest bosses in the entire game. It was easier than many of the regular enemy encounters. It was shockingly easy. Absurdly easy. I literally just stood next to it and hit it until it died. It was an astonishing contrast to the first boss I encountered in the DLC, at the Western Nameless Mausoleum, which murdered me repeatedly to the point that I gave up on it and left it.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 06/25* 08:22 # Sometimes the UPS powering my router and Linux NAS box just goes off for no reason. It did that last night. At first I suspected my cat was accidentally hitting the power button, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, it’s mildly annoying. * 08:35 # Been listening to The Dark Forest audiobook. Just got through “the space battle.” Yikes. I can’t think of any other science fiction books I’ve read like these. Can’t wait to see how Netflix ruins it hehe.

Thursday 06/27* 17:49 # Finished The Dark Forest audiobook. Started on the Death’s End audiobook. Now I understand where all the extra stuff I didn’t recognize in the Netflix show came from.

Friday 06/28* 08:28 # It’s a great day to have unplugged almost entirely from social media.

Saturday 06/29* 11:27 # I’m on the second-to-last episode of the 30-episode Three-Body Chinese series, and I can’t stop laughing at the way this guy on the radio keeps saying “the target is three kilometers from the zither” and the like. * 13:03 # Speaking of Three-Body, I snapped a picture of this bit that shows up in the corner of the Chinese show now and then, uploaded it to Copilot (the easiest one to get pictures into), and asked it to translate. It’s bothered me for the entire 30 episode run. What are those? Are they part of the story or something the network added? Copilot translated. It’s more-or-less what I expected: Basically a “join the conversation on Twitter and check out other streaming stuff” except for Weibo and Tencent Video. Anyway the point is AI is still pretty useful sometimes.

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It’s been rather hot this June. The highest temperature measured at my house (in the shade) was 97 degrees (that’s 36C for the rest of the world). That’s more of a July or August sort of high temperature. My heat pump wasn’t operating very well at the start of this month, but after some maintenance and additional refrigerant, it’s working much better.

It still doesn’t cool more than about 15 degrees below the outside temperature, though, so when it’s 97 outside, it’s noticably warm inside, too. Not ideal, but certainly far better than no air conditioning. For some reason I’ve had pretty bad luck with heating and air conditioning for the last 10 years or so.

GamingI got the Elden Ring DLC and started playing it, but I’ve only gotten about five hours into it. The only boss I’ve encountered so far (in the Western Nameless Mausoleum) is annoying and frustrating and kills my level 150 character with a health bar halfway across the screen in two hits, so I left it. My guess is they put in that alternate leveling system so that your character feels weak no matter what level you start at, a big departure from other From Software games, and I’m not fond of it.

I still haven’t completed Lords of the Fallen. I got to the Adyr boss fight which I presume is the end. It’s also a very annoying and frustrating and not fun boss fight because it’s another Lords of the Fallen-style “here, try to survive all this randomness you can’t control” boss fight. I feel like I’ve said this a hundred thousand times, certainly in video recordings, but I hate randomness in boss fights. Getting killed by some fireball that comes in from outside your field of vision just plain sucks. Dying after making a poor decision is acceptable. Dying without having the opportunity to make a decision is poor game design.

Crazy MMO SummerSyp is reporting this is “one of the craziest MMO summers in recent memory.”

So much MMO gaming to do this summer! – Bio Break

I have to assume he’s a reliable source for such information, because I’ve heard almost none of this.

Tarisland is launching. That’s … an MMORPG? Never heard of it.
FFXIV Dawntrail expansion. FFXIV is pretty much dead to me. Thanks for the memories, but it’s time for new memories.
ESO Gold Road expansion. In the world of ESO, an “expansion” is “a couple of quests on a smallish map.” That might be an exaggeration for comedic effect.
LOTRO has a new update this summer. Dear god, shoot it in the head and put it out of its misery already. That game engine is a hopelessly lost cause and I can’t imagine installing it on a newer PC anymore. Export the quest text into ebooks.
Guild Wars 2 Janthir expansion. Did I even look at the last expansion? What was the last expansion? Who can tell? It’s unknowable. ArenaNet’s releases are always shrouded in deep mystery for some reason.
Fallout 76 is apparently in the MMO conversation now, and there’s a new thing for it this summer. Meanwhile, I formed an intense hatred for Fallout 76 within five minutes of starting it up for the first time a couple months ago.
And of course World of Warcraft has a new expansion along with an old expansion, or something like that. Blizzard still seems to be the only MMO game company that’s mastered how to maintain long-lived online game software. Technologically speaking, at least. (Although, to be fair, ArenaNet is also pretty good at the technology, but, again, they’re always hiding their stuff from the public for inexplicable reasons.)

Syp didn’t mention this, but I think I heard there’s also something new with EVE Online, though I know nothing of the details. EVE Online remains the most inexplicable of all the MMORPGs. It’s like one of those clubs like the Loyal Order of the Moose or the Freemasons. It seems like an apt analogy for most MMORPGs actually. They aren’t games anymore, they’re secret societies.

Anyway that certainly does sound like a lot of MMORPG action for one summer, except for the minor fact that literally none of it sounds interesting to me. All but one of those are fully afflicted with what I like to call “late-stage MMOism,” which is that state that MMORPGs get to when they’ve been running for a long time, and they’ve long since given up trying to appeal to anyone but the insular bubble of superfans dedicated to playing and praising their game daily, when all their development efforts are devoted to keeping those superfans from noticing that there’s anything else in the world to do with their gaming time. What was once a fresh new idea in the MMORPG space becomes stretched out and beaten to death over countless years of repetition, kept alive like an undead revenent by god only knows what kind of smoke-belching machinery or unholy demonic rites.

TarislandTarisland is new, though, so maybe worth a look. I say “new,” but based on the web site, it already looks pretty old. It’s way beyond cliche to say it looks like a WoW Clone, but it really does look like a WoW Clone. It’s published by Tencent, so it makes a certain amount of sense that it is literally a clone of a Western intellectual property (hey-oh rimshot global trade war humor).

Wilhelm wrote a post title that exactly matches my expectations:

Tarisland – I Hate it Already | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Then he wrote a followup post revealing the well-known value of titles that mention hating whatever the new thing is:

Moving Over to Tarisland on the iPad | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Still doesn’t make me want to get the game, though. Otherwise I don’t see anyone talking about it. Not even Inventory Full, who usually plays anything and everything at launch.

Stars ReachWilhelm is making clickable headlines all over the place lately. I also caught this:

Playable Worlds Announces Stars Reach | The Ancient Gaming Noob

It’s No Man’s Sky. Raph seems to be describing No Man’s Sky. Here ends the commentary.

Media ProductionI heard tell of an OBS plugin that generates subtitles in realtime while you talk, so I tried it out. It uses a Google voice detection API, so it essentially does the same thing that you see in YouTube’s auto-generated subtitles. Somehow it’s free, which I don’t fully understand. Surely that API costs money at scale.

Anyway it led me down a rabbit hole of learning how to edit subtitles for videos, thinking that perhaps I might start uploading game videos with high-quality subtitles, instead of letting YouTube make those below-average-but-still-kind-of-useful subtitles. Subtitles are their own form of creative artistry, and I’ve always thought it would be fun to make them.

Turns out it is fun to make them, but it’s also very time-consuming. Way too time-consuming for me to deal with, except on rare occasions. It took me an entire Sunday to perfect the subtitles for one 40-minute video. So unless I only record like two hours of video a week, that’s not sustainable.

At first I just used a text editor to edit the .srt files, but that quickly revealed itself to be a fool’s errand. Next I found an open source program called Subtitle Edit that lets you edit .srt files in a much friendly way. It’s open source, though, so, since there are no UI designers working in the open source world, it looks and feels exactly the way you think an open source program does. I found myself thinking of ways to improve the user experience within minutes of opening it. But it has the essential features you need: An integrated collection of video player, audio waveform, and text editor.

TelevisionBy the way, I put this under “television” but I rarely turn on an actual television for this stuff.

Regularly watching, roughly in priority order: Three-Body (the Chinese 30-episode version) on Amazon Prime, The Rest is Entertainment podcast (on YouTube), Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show podcast (on YouTube), Glass Cannon Podcast (on YouTube). I rarely mention this because I don’t think he’s well-liked by the youths anymore, but I usually stream Real Time with Bill Maher every Saturday. If not the whole show, then at least the monologue and the New Rules editorial.

Three-Body (Tencent series)After watching Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, and starting The Dark Forest audiobook, I stumbled on the Chinese Tencent production called Three-Body on Amazon Prime. It’s a 30-episode television series adapting the first book, The Three Body Problem. I’m finding it a fascinating watch for a variety of reasons. It’s also a difficult watch because you have to remain glued to the screen reading the subtitles for the entire 45 minutes of each episode, which is not a particularly comfortable way to watch television anymore.

But there’s so much interesting stuff to talk about with this series. Chinese television production values (everything looks like it was shot on a phone camera). Chinese culture (every building is spotlessly clean and every room is empty). The fact that there’s thirty episodes in one season so there’s actually more in the show than there is in the book (some things actually make a lot more sense). The long, long scenes where the script is a direct quote from the book. The songs and random dialog suddenly in English. The vertical Chinese subtitles that come up on the side every time there’s music. The blue and purple lighting. The 1970s-style slow, repetitious story pacing. The weirdly G-rated vibe. The list goes on and on. I can’t think of any other book adaptation like it in the history of television. This series is a genuine event in history. I wish I could find some behind-the-scenes information about it (every search is polluted by the dumb Netflix show).

Anyway, if you want to read the book without having to read the book, then you can watch Three-Body. Almost everything that’s in the first book is in the series, in more-or-less the exact order of the book, and more-or-less word for word. I have never seen a more faithful, meticulate adaptation of a book before. (There are a couple of “sensitive political issues” removed from the show, though.) And because it’s 30 episodes they actually had to add material. They took some incidental characters that were only mentioned a few times (e.g. Xu Bingbing) and expanded them into full roles, but I found that they were all sensible additions that enhanced the story. Honestly the book is a somewhat dry, unemotional read (partly because of the translation), as in the traditions of the old Asimov Foundation books, which, as I recall, established a tradition of science fiction that reads like encyclopedia articles, but this Chinese series injects a lot more emotion and human drama into it all, and I found it a welcome addition.

If they do another 30-episode season for the second book, I only know a couple of things: I’ll definitely want to watch it, and it will be a hundred times more complicated and expensive to make.

By the way, the post title is a quote from the book, and (roughly) from the series, the chant of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement. Probably relatable to the kids these days.

Dragon ShowIncidentally, I watched the first episode of season two of Dragon Show (I can never remember the exact title and can’t be bothered to look it up), but I found it sufficiently meh that I saw no need to hurry to watch the remaining episodes. Not being on anything like Twitter anymore means I’m no longer bombarded by accidental spoilers. It wasn’t exactly an intellectual tour de force anyway–as I’m typing this, I can’t remember a single thing that happened in that first episode.

MoviesOppenheimerOppenheimer arrived on Amazon Prime and I watched it. It was okay, although I didn’t find it to be a particularly innovative or memorable take on the subject matter.

DamselI watched a movie on Netflix called Damsel. The trailer laid out the exact plot from beginning to end. It sounded like a fun idea (I’m trying to make an effort not to be so negative about modern movies). That is, until I saw how much the actors–some very famous and reputable–were phoning it in. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 57%, which seems generous. As a favor to potential viewers, I will report that the movie actually begins around the 35 minute mark. I can also report that I did not actually finish the movie, but since I watched the trailer, there was no need to.

AudiobooksThe Dark ForestCompleted re-listening to The Three Body Problem, and then I listened to the sequel, The Dark Forest. As I suspected, back when I first listened to Three Body and decided to stop at the first book, it’s a very different kind of book from the first, with an almost entirely different cast of characters. Whereas the first book is chock full of imaginative ideas, I find that they don’t really fit together very well and plot holes abound if you think about it too hard (how the hell do sophons move). It’s also about 90% exposition.

The sequel is a much more mature novel, imo, and it’s downright jaw-dropping at times. However it has a bit of a sudden ending that didn’t make much sense on first reading. I’m not a physicist so I can’t comment on the authenticity of it, but there are definitely times when I think to myself, okay this doesn’t sound credible, but I don’t know anything about the micro world. Anyway, I’ve begun the third audiobook, Death’s End.

It’s a really imaginative series, and a fascinating Chinese cultural export. My impression is that China is incredibly proud to own this popular literary export. The meticulous care that Tencent put into the Three-Body 30-episode series speaks volumes of how much they love these books over there.

Death’s EndAnd I’ve delayed this post long enough to report that I’ve finished the third audiobook, Death’s End. Talk about a book full of big science fiction ideas. Yikes. Also, super depressing. Despite being translated like a dry, expositional encyclopedia article for the majority of the time, it’s still a pretty depressing tale of woe.

PodcastsRegularly listening to: Glass Cannon’s Blood of the Wild. Yes, I paid money to get access to it. It’s that good.

Sometimes listening to: A Naddpod episode here and there.

Day JobIt’s been a somewhat exhausting sprint to end the month. Working on Java code. Working on writing documentation. Working on docker containers. Fixing a broken deployment to a cloud environment caused by discrepancies in the database. Lots and lots of troubleshooting. Stuff like that.

World ContextAs yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

The Celtics won a basketball thing this year. I don’t watch basketball, although the raging controversies surrounding women’s basketball right now sure make it sound like an exciting warzone.
The First Presidential Debate occurred on June 27th. I didn’t watch it, because I don’t hate myself that much and I also don’t care for pro wrestling. Everyone’s reactions to the debate and voting choice were decided long before the debate anyway. It was only useful as fodder for topical comedy. Good thing nobody’s deeply invested in the outcome of this election though, am I right!
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Celebrity Deaths: Willie Mays (baseball).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 06/18* 22:07 # It’s too hot this evening for normal brain function so I watched a movie. By fortunate coincidence, Oppenheimer arrived on Amazon Prime. My perception is that it was good, but a bit overrated. It didn’t really seem to have anything new or interesting to say about the subject matter. And I wasn’t ever really sure what story I was being told. The story of the bomb? Oppenheimer’s biography? A spy thriller? A political mystery? A biting social commentary? Somebody couldn’t make up their mind.

Wednesday 06/19* 08:50 # Local weather has high temperatures about 90, which is a fairly normal summer temperature where I live. However it says it will get up to 100 by the weekend, which is a bit more rare, though not unheard of, where I live. Anyway, it’s a bad time for my heat pump to be underperforming. * 09:11 # It amazes me how many professional creators on professional podcasts haven’t worked out how to frickin mute their microphone when they cough. I mean they buy the good microphone and setup the room so it doesn’t echo and they work out how to record local audio tracks and synchronize and mix them in post, but they always forget a simple mute switch.

Thursday 06/20* 08:35 # Yesterday I called in the heat pump people to try to figure out… yet again… why my heat pump doesn’t cool very much in hot weather. In previous episodes, there was a leak, then there was a broken part that needed to be replaced. Now it turns out there was another minor leak and they added more refrigerant. These new-fangled modern efficient heat pumps sure do break a lot. Anyway, it’s working much better today. The remainder of the much-talked- about First Big Heat Wave Of The It’s-Not-Even-Summer-Yet will now hopefully be a non-issue for me.

Friday 06/21* 09:56 # That heat wave everyone’s talking about is starting for me today. Yesterday the high temp was 86F (30C). Today the high temp is supposed to be 94F (34C), and over the weekend it’s supposed to reach 100F (38C). Luckily I got my heat pump fixed. 100 is somewhat rare here but it usually happens once or twice a year. It’s just that it’s supposed to be in July or August. * 22:33 # Got the Elden Ring DLC. I haven’t played games in so long I’m struggling not to get sick from all the motion. Anyway glad I never went into NG+ with my original character because it’s super OP now hehe.

Saturday 06/22 15:15 # By the way, I didn’t win the Official Quiz of Elden Ring on the first try, in case you were wondering. * 15:18 # I see in Elden Ring patch notes for 1.12: “Added new feature to summon spectral steed during the Elden Beast boss battle.” Oh man I wish that had been there when I* was fighting that boss battle. Yeesh. * 18:02 # Watched the first two episodes of Three-Body, the Chinese television series based on the book. It’s kind of mesmerizing. The pacing is so very different from Western media, it’s almost a throwback to the 1970s. The tone is sort of an odd emo mixture of music video and soap opera. Anyway it follows the book a lot better than the Netflix show. Except where they keep talking about faxes.

+ 22:09 # There are 30 episodes in the first season of Three-Body… this is a rare case where the adaptation of a book is actually longer than the book. 30 episodes of 45 minutes is considerably longer than the audiobook for Three Body Problem was. Meanwhile Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was eight 1-hour episodes and covered a book and a half.

Sunday 06/23* 09:36 # So I recorded two episodes of Elden Ring DLC play. The good news is that the OBS closed captioning plugin does indeed capture a serviceable .srt subtitle track for each recording. The bad news is that it doesn’t quite meet my high personal standards, so I still need to edit the file in order to elevate the subtitles above what YouTube does automatically. Said editing currently means roughly two or more hours of work for every one hour of recorded video. That’s definitely not a sustainable workflow for something I don’t get paid a full- time salary for. Perhaps there is an application out there somewhere specifically for editing subtitle tracks and visually lining them up with videos. Something that is somewhat easier than editing a plain text file.

+ 10:11 # There’s an open source program creatively titled Subtitle Edit which is pretty much what I wanted. It allows me to fine-tune the subtitles to the level of quality that you might see in a professional video production. However, while it does significantly reduce the amount of time it might take to do such a task, it’s still a very significant time sink per video, and not something I’d want to do very often.
+ 10:23 # To get a sense of the amount of work, there are 313 subtitles in this first 40 minute game video, and each one needs to be edited, and many of them need to be split into shorter subtitles. So even if that’s one minute of editing per subtitle, that’s already like 4 hours of work right there. It might actually be easier to start from scratch and transcribe everything myself, rather than editing what the closed caption plugin did.

19:04 # I haven’t consumed a Kindle book in a while (having almost exclusively listened to audiobooks in recent years) but they still have a fundamental technical problem that has yet to be addressed: Glossaries and footnotes. I clicked a footnote link in the early part of a book and it happily jumped right to the end of the book to show me the footnote and immediately my “furthest read position” was moved to the end of the book. Not only that, but I can find no button to click to go back to where I started. Super smart. Maybe fix that? Within our lifetimes? I remember complaining about that what must have been ten full years ago.
21:59 # Yeesh it’s taken me pretty much all day (off and on), but I’ve completed editing subtitles for one 40-minute game video. As much fun as it is to add inside jokes into the subtitles, this is not something I’ll be doing on a regular basis.

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I saw a review on Audible of The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (the sequel to Three Body Problem). I was transfixed while skimming this review, and I found myself wondering what it was like to be that person. I will quote it here in its entirely, a blatant violation of that person’s valuable copyright, because it must be preserved for future generations to study, and I could not work out how to find a permalink to the individual review on the page.

The aforementioned review, written by someone called “Master” in 2018, will now be read into the historical record. I did not write this review. I wish there was a way to mark sections of my page as “this isn’t mine Dear Google In The Sky, don’t associate it with me.” But these are the dangers we must face in these uncertain times to bring The Truth to our readers.

Bad Narration and Too Much “Literary Noise”First of all, the narrator of this book, PJ Ochlan, is much worse than the narrator of the first book, Luke Daniels, in all areas of performance except for a marginally better pronunciation of only some Mandarin names. Note that the keyword there is “marginally”. PJ Ochlan’s voice and tone often don’t change appreciably for different characters, not only making it difficult to distinguish between who’s talking in conversations, but also frequently failing to reflect the individual qualities that the author had clearly ascribed to the different characters in the story. For example, one of the main characters, the police captain “Da She” was clearly described as being “rough”, “rude”, and “burly” by the author. In the previous book, the narrator Luke Daniels had at least tried to bring those qualities out for this character which at least clearly distinguished the character along those lines. But in this book, PJ Ochlan made the character sound completely bland, generic, spiritless, and even emasculated, often being almost no different from the voice of another male main character “Luo Ji”, who engaged in frequent conversations with “Da She” throughout much of the story, all of which made it difficult to enjoy listening to the narration overall. I think the narrator of an audiobook should at least possess talents in bringing the personas of the different characters to life through their distinct voices and speech patterns. Otherwise, why would anyone who’s not blind want to listen to an audiobook instead of just reading the story in print?

Listening to PJ Ochlan’s narration has been such an unpleasant experience that I don’t want to listen any further in this book, and I’m not even halfway through. Seeing that the next book in the trilogy is also narrated by PJ Ochlan, I’m faced with a dilemma. In order to avoid listening to his bad narration, I would have to purchase the ebook from elsewhere to read the story in print, but that also feels like a waste of my Audible subscription. I’m also wondering who was responsible for hiring PJ Ochlan to narrate not one, but two, of the books in this trilogy? What were they smoking? Seeing such blatantly poor decision-making at Audible really drives me more than up the wall, but also causes me to want to side with any potential future alien invasion in the real world to exterminate these dumb humans in real life.

Secondly, the author Liu Cixin, like almost all other authors of any genre, seems to think that fanciful descriptions and detailed analogies of scenery and people necessarily enhance the reader’s experience. Well, to me, they don’t, but cause the opposite effect. Even worse, the author engages in all-too-frequent and overly detailed descriptions of persons and sceneries through what seems like interminably long passages throughout much of the story, where predictable expectations of analogies wrap up every such description, all in the overused formulaic styles of almost every single TV show, movie, and novel that I can remember, where any truly intelligent reader and observer could almost always predict where the romance or drama scenes will play out around the corner, or where prolonged and descriptive “beautiful prose” and analogies will appear. The resulting overall experience, for this reader/listener, at least, feels like eating the same meal, every meal, for an entire lifetime. Yes, this is an indictment of the general storytelling patterns of all authors, and indeed of almost the entire discipline of “literature” as we know it.

My imagination would flow much more freely, and my enjoyment of the story would come much easier, without all of these literary chaff. It would be an understatement to say that I don’t care one iota about descriptions like how the light from a fireplace danced around the body of some person to create a silhouette of some sort in the partial darkness and…blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…(did I mention blah?). For example, I have absolutely no patience or respect for these endlessly protracted scenes involving “Luo Ji” and the young woman “Zhang Yan”, or to incredibly fussy descriptions like a woman’s tears resembling the dew from whatever on whatever. As another example, I really found it to be an enormous waste of time listening to so much about the ants in the beginning of the story. Of course I understood what the author was trying to accomplish by writing about the ants in the beginning, because the purpose was too obvious and thus added nothing to my understanding and appreciation of the overall theme of the story.

To the many earlier reviewers who had gushed about the author’s “beautiful prose”, I say that this is supposed to be a SCIENCE FICTION story, not a girly romance novel! As such, to me, “beautiful prose” is absolutely a waste of time, and can only detract from enjoyment of a sci-fi story, which only needs the freshness of ideas to be exciting. I just want to get to the meat of the story quickly, without being bombarded with all of these sickening literary noise. Yes, I know that the author is a talented writer who’s a master of words and prose, but he doesn’t need to show me how talented he is with weaving flowery descriptions and fluid prose at almost every possible opportunity, because I’m not judging the author for some prose contest or literary beauty pageant, nor have any patience to do so, but just being a reader who wants to enjoy the essence of a science-fiction story.

From that perspective, listening to this story further reinforces my feeling that no writer or artist has yet truly made any groundbreaking advancement in the entire field of storytelling, regardless of genre, for all of modernity.

Was this review helpful for you?

Any potential commentary on this review should be entirely self-evident, right? Surely.

Here we have a review, written in excessively flowery prose, which goes to extended lengths to complain about a book being excessively “full of literary noise,” and, presumably, not enough bullet points. A book that is a translation from an entirely different language, mind you.

Taken as a comedy routine, that review was pretty good. Full of absurdist exaggeration, the basis of most good comedy.

What’s it like to be someone who writes a review like that? For me, that would take a pretty significant investment in time to write and publish. Why would someone write a lengthy review and post it in a forum that is entirely ephemeral, which could be removed with the push of a few buttons?

Why does anyone write those reviews on Amazon? The really long ones, I mean. And especially the ones like this, that meticulously explain what is, in this person’s mind, the universally-understood Way to write science fiction. The All Meat and No Noise Way that they teach in all the fundamental science fiction writing classes.

What is the reward that balances out the time sink of writing a review like that?

Perhaps it was AI-generated. That might explain how long it is. I tried to get ChatGPT to write a similar review.

Please write a review of The Dark Forest audiobook by Cixin Liu, narrated by PJ Ochlan, which describes my displeasure with Ochlan’s narration work as compared to the previous book, and also makes it clear that this work of science fiction contains excessive literary merit for this genre.

Review of The Dark Forest Audiobook by Cixin Liu, Narrated by PJ Ochlan

I recently listened to The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, eagerly diving back into the rich and intricate world Liu has crafted. However, my excitement was dampened by the narration work of PJ Ochlan. Compared to the previous book in the series, narrated by Luke Daniels, Ochlan’s performance felt lackluster and did not do justice to the complex and intense narrative.

Ochlan’s narration often seemed monotone and lacked the emotional depth that the story demanded. Where Daniels brought the characters to life with distinct voices and palpable energy, Ochlan’s rendition felt flat and uninspired. This was particularly disappointing given the high stakes and the intricate web of political, scientific, and personal dramas that Liu expertly weaves. The varied character personalities and the tension of the unfolding events were not effectively conveyed, which detracted from the overall experience.

Despite this, it is impossible to ignore the excessive literary merit present in The Dark Forest. Liu’s ability to blend hard science fiction with profound philosophical questions and richly developed characters is nothing short of masterful. The narrative explores themes of survival, morality, and the human condition with a depth that is rare in the genre. Liu’s vision of a universe teeming with both wonder and peril is compelling and thought-provoking.

The novel’s exploration of the “Dark Forest” theory, positing that any civilization that reveals its location in the cosmos risks annihilation, is both chilling and intellectually stimulating. Liu’s prose, even through the less-than-ideal narration, shines with its eloquence and precision, making The Dark Forest a standout work in science fiction literature.

In conclusion, while PJ Ochlan’s narration did not meet my expectations and fell short compared to the previous book, the inherent literary brilliance of Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest makes it a must-read (or listen) for any science fiction enthusiast. If you can overlook the narration, you will find a story of immense depth and complexity that pushes the boundaries of the genre.

Not bad, actually, although I should have predicted ChatGPT wouldn’t understand the sarcasm in “excessive literary merit.” (Also it figured out Luke Daniels narrated the first book all by itself.)

But it’s still not long enough, and it keeps trying to be nice. No, Mr. Computer! It definitely did not contain immense depth and complexity, it was sickeningly noisy and kept banging on about Zhang Yan’s– excuse me, “Zhang Yan’s” dewey tears and blah, blah, blah, blah!

Just for the record, I’ve only just begun listening to The Dark Forest audiobook so I can’t really comment on it. One thing I have in common with Meat Reviewer, however, is that I, too, like Luke Daniels a lot. But I didn’t think he was suited to the material in Three Body Problem, and I don’t particularly mind the change. (Luke Daniels sounds very American and Three Body Problem is very Chinese. The new guy also sounds American, but dialed down a little bit.)

Anyway, I just feel bad for that reviewer. Will they make it to the end of the second book? Will they get through the third book? How will they ever feast on the meat of the story unless PJ Ochlan skips all those noisy bits??

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 06/11* 11:11 # I know these Steam Next Demo Fests are supposed to be a good thing, but for me, all it does is reinforce the notion that there are a thousand million times the number of games that any normal human can actually play. Therefore, the only sensible reaction is to play fewer games and wait for the ones that are the very best of the very best, which are almost always the occasional ground-breaking AAA game that only comes out once every two or three years, which are selected by some gatekeeping process that is entirely unfair to the developers, but is way easier on the consumer than trying to wade through a thousand million game demos.

Wednesday 06/12* 23:24 # Pathfinder 2e has some puzzling rules sometimes. Like if I’m a Harm Font cleric, why would I ever cast one of the four Harm spells I’m allowed that does 1d8, when I could cast an infinite amount of Divine Lance cantrips that do 2d4? 2d4 is going to be a better roll than 1d8 almost every day of the week. I can only think of one very specific instance to use a 1d8 Harm.. if I could do a 1-action touch Harm two or three times in one turn, that seems like the only situation where it could be statistically viable at level 1. Surely it’s missing the +8 damage bonus for the 2-action version of Harm, the same +8 that the Heal spell has? That has to be a typo? Or maybe Harm is only intended to become viable at higher levels. Anyway these are things I discover when I run various Pathfinder classes through some mock combat scenarios.

Friday 06/14* 08:56 # I don’t know how this ended up in my recommendations, but I stumbled on a YouTube channel called The Operations Room, which just does fairly good quality top-down animations of famous battles in history, accompanied by a boring, droning monotonic brit historian’s voice describing what happens, and somehow this turns out to be a captivating bit of media art.

Saturday 06/15* 08:40 # Humble has way better ttrpg stuff than game stuff. Practically the entire Delta Green library in PDFs, a ton of old Pathfinder PDFs, a huge set of Pathfinder 2e stuff for Fantasy Grounds, and now a bunch of map making stuff.

+ 08:53 # The only problem with Humble acquisitions is that you usually have to time travel back to the 1990s in order to actually download and install what you got. It can be a fairly extensive and tedious manual process.
+ 09:11 # In the case of Campaign Cartogrpher 3, it’s literally like time traveling back to the 90s because it still looks like Windows 95.

19:55 # There is a YouTube channel containing National Archives footage from World War I (and many other things). That is all.
20:56 # The word Hitler appears in my newest blog post, but only in an informational way. Netflix is the one who forced me into this precarious position.

Sunday 06/16* 18:59 # Internet history will be written by the winners… meaning those who simply keep renewing their domain names https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/

+ 19:02 # I sometimes wonder if future historians will look at this period in history and find too much information to sift through or a gaping hole of nothing.
+ 19:04 # Somebody might trip over a cord somewhere and accidentally crash all the hard drives of Wikipedia, for example.

22:17 # Out of context commentary: Did some writer think that “little and less” would have the same linguistic impact as “much and more”?

[That was in reference to the first episode of season 2 of House of Dragons. The only other comment I had was that the CGI of what’s-her-name landing and jumping off that dragon looked like the quality of a 1950s B sci-fi flick, where they just filmed toys hanging from wires. They really phone in the CGI work these days, don’t they? Or more likely they’re so overworked and underpaid that they just plain don’t care anymore.]

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It’s hot as I’m writing this. This past week has been the start of the traditional summer weather here, which has average temperatures during the day somewhere between 85-90 F (29-32 C, according to Google). Today I mowed the back yard, and even though it’s nowhere near as hot as it could be, it was sufficiently hot that I did not enjoy being outside.

GamingThere’s been another Steam Next Fest, the forty-seventh one this year? Or maybe the six hundredth? Something like that. Not only am I uninterested in trying demos that all look basically the same, I’m also not very interested in reading about said demos anymore. To my aging and jaded eye, the video game scene is kind of uninspiring these days.

The only game I have on my radar to buy for the remainder of this year is the Elden Ring DLC. Most likely, I’ll excitedly buy it and then never actually launch it, like I did with Hellblade II.

I saw some folks complaining about Sony not bringing Bloodborne to PC, like that’s ever going to happen, so I fired up Bloodborne on the PS5 for a few nights. I don’t think people want the real Bloodborne on PC. They actually want a version rewritten and remastered to work at higher resolution and 60+ fps (like the Demon’s Souls remaster), because it’s very frustrating to play a game locked at 30 fps. It’s like playing on a laggy dial-up modem connection. Not super fun when you get to the bosses. The Cleric Beast remains one of the worst boss fight experiences in Soulsborne history, and it’s the first one you meet.

Media ProductionI’ve been recording a number of videos of mock Pathfinder combat scenarios as I go about testing the capabilities of the various Pathfinder classes and exercise the weird nitpicky-rules-for-every-little-thing Pathfinder system.

Anyway the thing that I want to note is how often I listen back to what I recorded and hear myself saying words that are completely different from what I intended to say. The most recent example is when I said “AC” like three times instead of “initiative.” e.g. “Oops I accidentally dropped him from the encounter tracker so I lost his AC and now I need to manually set his AC to what it was before.”

It’s the same as that thing I do where I type words that are completely different from what I intend to write. I just did it in this paragraph. I typed “that I completely different” instead of “that are completely different” and I didn’t realize it until I read back over it. I believe it’s called a “lexical selection error” in speech circles. And since my writing is simply a transcription of what I’m saying to myself in my head, it translates into my writing, too. First drafts, at least.

These sorts of things make me paranoid about what I might be accidentally saying in work meetings without realizing it. But I think in those situations, I’m already hyperfocused on what I’m saying, so I wouldn’t be speaking in that unconscious stream-of-conscious way that I do in video recordings. But sometimes I do do that, where I’m giving demos of my sprint work and I’ll talk for a couple minutes and then immediately afterward I’ll have absolutely no memory of what I just said or how I said it. But in those kinds of meetings, nobody is really listening anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

TelevisionCurrent weekly shows regularly watching: Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (on YouTube), The Rest is Entertainment Podcast (on YouTube), Jon Stewart’s bits on The Daily Show and that The Weekly Show podcast thing he does (on YouTube).

I’ve gotten a bit weary of Glass Cannon’s Get in the Trunk. The Delta Green setting just doesn’t appeal to me that much. (Incidentally, there’s a Humble Bundle where you can get like a dozen Delta Green book PDFs.)

Watched a docuseries called Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War on Netflix, which I thought would be about the Cold War, but kind meandered around a lot of different topics.

Then, Netflix insisted that I watch some new docuseries about Hitler, because there haven’t been enough of them yet. I’ll admit I was curious what younger documentary producers would say about Hitler. I can report that they made a pretty strong case that Hitler’s reign was really bad, let me tell you.

The main thing that sets this Hitler documentary apart from every other Hitler documentary, I think, were these things:

The use of (presumably) AI to clean up the vintage audio and video (and the use of aggressively off-putting colorization of black and white film).
A throughline that cast war correspondent William L. Shirer as the a of “protagonist” for the documentary. They used an AI to “speak” the words of his Berlin Diaries “in his own voice” from before, during, and after the war. Incidentally, war correspondents of that era were an odd, egotistical lot. They were sort of the celebrity action movie heroes of the day.
A lot of flash-forwards and (supposedly) authentic audio from the Nuremberg Trials, which I hadn’t seen much of before. (In this era of AI, it’s a lot more difficult to audibly identify authentic audio that’s been cleaned up. It sounds basically identical to what could be totally fake, recreated audio. Somehow they can take vintage noisy audio recorded with a terrible microphone and decades-old degraded magnetic tape and make it sound like it was recorded in a pristine studio.)
Also every single historical recreation was in super slow-motion. Every one of their recreations of a Hitler temper tantrum was pretty funny to watch. Do you think actors are excited to get the role of Hitler in a Hitler documentary? I wonder about that sometimes.

On another topic, I think the new season of That Dragon Show is almost here. What I remember of the first season is that the story didn’t actually begin until the end of the last episode, so the entire first season seemed like an extremely skippable prologue.

PodcastsMy lifestyle doesn’t really align very well with listening to audio-only podcasts anymore, or even audiobooks. Typically when I listen to voices in audio, it consumes a lot of my brain processing bandwidth, so I can’t do that while doing anything that requires mental acuity, like work, or writing, or just about anything. Typically the only times I can listen to pure audiobooks or podcasts is when going to sleep, or when cleaning, or when mowing the lawn. Also when driving, but I drive so little anymore that I couldn’t even finish an hour of podcasts a week.

But.

Lately I’ve been listening to a Glass Cannon actual podcast podcast called Blood of the Wild. I started it last weekend when I decided to completely rearrange my living room so I could rotate my gaming desk 90 degrees to put a wall behind me. Since then I’ve been finding ways to listen to podcasts all day, instead of listening to YouTube videos of podcasts all day. It works, except for when I actually need to focus. Mainly because it’s an actual play podcast, which means you don’t really need to focus your brain on it minute-by-minute. You can just kind of let it wash over you and only really pay attention for the important or funny bits.

MoviesI watched Greenland on Max (I think), which is a Gerard Butler end-of-the-world flick that is more intellectual than you might imagine. It wasn’t terrible. I mean, except all the science.

AudiobooksSpeaking of listening to audiobooks before bed, I’m listening to Three Body Problem again. (I was listening to Dune again, but then I started Three Body Problem after watching the Netflix show.) The show actually follows the book closer than I realized, it’s just that all the characters in the book are Chinese. [“or Chinese,” I first wrote.]

Day JobI’m not one to rant about my job, because my general feeling is that if you’re at the point of regularly ranting about your job in a blog or on social media or whatever, the only useful feedback you’re going to get is that you should consider changing jobs. But sometimes things happen at one’s job that are really annoying. And that thing is when nobody is in charge of a project but people are still expecting things to get done, but you definitely, positively do not want to be in charge of said project because it’s a complete waste of everyone’s time and utterly unrelated to any organizational goals, which is why the project should just die already. But if you show the slightest sign of proactive involvement, you’ll be branded the one in charge and be held accountable for everything. That kind of thing is pretty annoying when it happens at a job.

World ContextAs yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

There was an EU election. The main summarizing story I saw afterward was something like “big gains by the far right but the center right won and also the Green Party lost a lot.” If we were to translate that into American politics, we would be very stumped because there is no more center right in America.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 U.K. General Election, 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023) (U.S. troops are withdrawing), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Forgot to run the script to pull the posts last week. Manual blog-related processes are the worst.

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 05/28* 17:22 # Ugh I clicked on one of those WIRED “some person who is an expert in some field answers Internet questions” and now that’s all that’s on my YouTube recommendations, which is a real problem because they’re actually really interesting to watch.

+ 17:30 # Most of the questions that are answered are something like “so what’s the deal with this commonly held belief, crazy pseudoscience, or made-up fact that I heard from a completely unreliable source such as the Internet?” And the answer is like, “um, yeah, that’s totally wrong.”

Wednesday 05/29* 20:53 # Okay so now I’m trapped in a rabbit hole watching these Insider youtube videos where some expert rates the historical realism of movie scenes. This is the best thing to come out of “reaction video” culture so far. Roel Konijnendijk. Look it up. He should get some kind of award for his commentary on ancient warfare scenes.

Sunday 06/02* 17:05 # How do the offscreen bad guy henchmen always know exactly what to do in a scene when the chief bad guy nods their head while they’re interrogating the good guys?

Monday 06/03* 18:26 # So I ended up binging the whole first season of 3 Body Problem on Netflix soon after I said I didn’t want to watch it and ruin the book. It’s not bad. I only read the first book and deliberately skipped the others because I thought it had a great ending and it looked like it would go into alien invasion territory instead of cool science mystery territory. For me, the mystery was way more interesting than anything else in the book, and once they explained it I was like, well the story’s over. Anyway, season 1 looked like it went well beyond where the first book ended, so I guess the story wasn’t over after all. Also they seem to have omitted like 90% of the science and dumbed it way down for a Netflix audience. In any case it made me want to re-listen to the audiobook, except I’m currently still re-listening to the Dune audiobook. * 18:32 # Speaking of audiobooks, whatever happened to that thing where you could sync an Audible book and a Kindle book and have it highlight the words as they’re saying them in the audibook, if you owned both copies? Was that Whispersync? Is that still a thing? I thought that was a pretty cool, if expensive, feature. But I only remember seeing it in action on a couple of the Wheel of Time books many years ago.

+ 18:33 # P.S. I think the feature is called Immersion Reading and/or Whispersync for Voice and it still comes up in Google searches, so I guess it’s still a thing. I shall endeavor to investigate.

Tuesday 06/04* 12:40 # Man I wish they would release behind-the-scenes footage of these WIRED “tech support” videos where they have an expert answer questions from twitter or whatever. It’s pretty much all I think about when I’m watching them. “I wonder how much they laughed at that question before they started answering it.” Or “I wonder if they had to look up that answer or they just knew off the top of their head.” Or “I wonder how often the producer or director or whatever had to tell them to look straight at the camera.” Stuff like that.

Thursday 06/06* 09:01 # Been watching this Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War docuseries on Netflix. I thought it was going to be about the Cold War but it only hit the highlights that everyone knew already. Mainly it was kind of a weird hit piece against America and Russia with a bunch about the Ukraine war thrown in. It was all over the place and it wasn’t really clear what the point of any of it was. I think they were trying to say something like, hey guess what that Cold War is still raging more than ever and we should all be terrified of nuclear annihilation more than ever because there aren’t any more treaties. Something like that. Mainly it’s a bunch of scary historical and present-day stuff thrown together into something that seems like it might be educational and kind of related to each other. * 09:41 # A second crop of house finches has left the nest they built in the awning over my back door. It was cool watching the mom and dad keep trying to get them to leave the nest yesterday. They’d keep flying nearby and chirping and sometimes they’d fly up to the nest and it looked like they were almost trying to scare them out of the nest. This morning the last two are gone (I think there were four of them in total). The last couple of days I didn’t want to use the back door for fear of disturbing them too much. * 20:03 # Why would they make an AC adapter cable for a camcorder or any other recording device of any kind that is like 4 feet long? This is the conspiracy they should be talking about on Twitter.

Sunday 06/09* 09:29 # Saturday I decided to completely rearrange the living room to rotate my computer desk 90 degrees within its location in the corner, for the sole purpose of putting a wall behind me so that I don’t have to keep the room clean if I ever want to use a webcam. These are the important room design decisions one must make to live in the Internet video world.

+ 09:31 # Anyway rearranging the room is perhaps halfway done and I’m wiped out already and also every electronic device is now roughly 50,000 feet away from the nearest wall outlet.

10:01 # I watched Greenland last night, which is a Gerard Butler disaster flick from 2020. I was expecting something like a Roland Emmerich end-of-the-world running-and-explosions-fest flick but it was more cerebral than that and did not, in fact, have an explosion every 10 seconds. There were many somewhat long scenes of actors acting. Anyway it wasn’t fantastic but it wasn’t terrible either. I mean except for the all the science stuff which sounded a bit ludicrous to me, but it was easy to ignore that. Apparently they’re making a sequel. Also I kept thinking “huh that woman looks very familiar who is that?” and it turns out it was Morenna Baccara who I mainly remember as Inara from Firefly but who has apparently been in a ton of mainstream stuff since then but I never noticed.
10:56 # When I was a kid, I remember being psyched to be able to afford a couple of cheap plastic D20s from a hobby shop bin (I don’t remember how much they were but I feel like it was something like a dime or a quarter each). Back then, the D20s weren’t labeled 1-20, they were numbered with a set of black numbers 0-9 and a set of red numbers 0-9. I’m looking right at one. You had to reinforce the numbers by coloring them in with a pen because they faded so fast. Now I’m looking at Amazon and seeing these assorted sets of 150 dice for like $20. Part of me wants to buy them just because my kid self would have just freaked out at how cool it would have been to stare at 150 dice of all different colors and types. (Note: I already have way more modern dice than I actually need and do not in any way need 150 more dice. I’m thankful that I haven’t yet succumbed so deep into the modern dice industrial complex that I’ve wanted to get any metal or jewelry or stone or wooden or whatever dice.)
13:12 # Oh wow I just discovered that those white gel pens for writing on black paper are also amazing at writing on audio cables. This could be a game changer in my life.
20:38 # Ah I just realized that the entire run of Mythbusters is on Max.

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Amazingly, I created this post document on the 17th! Not the day before publication date, like I’ve been doing the last couple of times. Sadly I still don’t have anything particularly noteworthy to report. And I forgot to finish it. And I also forgot to post it on the right day.

GamingSome games I’ve played recently on PC and PS5 while listening to shows: Wreckfest, Flatout4, Trail Out, BeamNG.drive, Manor Lords, Timberborn, and Crusader Kings 3. These games are what I like to describe as “busy hands” games (with the possible exception of Crusader Kings 3). They require very little mental effort, so you can concentrate on the show you’re listening to instead of the game you’re playing. (And yes, I should probably be doing something more useful like cleaning the house instead of sitting around playing a busy hands game.)

None of those games are interesting enough to write about. That’s the thing about “busy hands” games: They’re passive. There isn’t much of a two-way interaction with the game. You just kind of sit there for the most part, like a kid watching 80s Saturday morning cartoons, rotting your brain (actually those were way more entertaining than most games). The interactions with the games are so rote and familiar that they don’t even enter your consciousness, and leave your memory ten seconds after you stop playing them. It’s like knitting. Actually it’s worse than knitting, because with knitting, at least you have something useful to keep at the end of your time.

I suppose I could insert a rant here about how the entire games industry has shifted to either “busy hands” games or “ongoing competitive” games, because those are the ones that are easy to factory produce and the ones players throw endless money at, which leaves almost nothing left for people like me to play. But what would be the point? Nobody listens to the rantings of a veteran gamer. Nobody’s making games for the original gamers anymore.

That might be why I see so many long-time video gamers jumping to TTRPGs. It’s not hard to see that video games today “aren’t like they used to be.” Which is a phrase that automatically invites dismissive “ok boomer” reactions, but there’s not any other way to describe it. Every new game plays exactly the same as the last one. How many team hero shooter clone games can one human being possibly endure? I surpassed my limit back in the Team Fortress days.

That also might be why so many younger generation gamers are turning to TTRPGs. That rush of using your imagination just doesn’t exist in video games any more.

Ahem. Anyway.

Speaking of games that aren’t like all the rest, I think the Elden Ring DLC is going to drop soon. I haven’t looked into it much. I had a petty desire to wait on buying it, in order to register my complaint about how absurd the bosses toward the end of the base game were. No longer will From Software be getting automatic pre-orders from me, if they’re going to continue down the game design route of “just make everything faster, we’re giving up on making things more creative.”

Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga just released, which I bought immediately and installed, but have yet to actually launch. I’m very suspicious that it won’t be as good as the first game, because the genius of the first game was in the slow reveal of the character’s personal story through unreliable narration, and it’s difficult to imagine how the continuation of that story could contain any more surprises. The best way I can think to continue it is by introducing a new character relationship into the story.

Anyway, I want to play it, but I want to record it so I remember it five years from now and so I don’t have to play it more than once, but that means I have to feel like talking while playing, which I currently don’t. But then it’s not a very good game for a video series, if it’s anything like the first game. It’s hard to add anything interesting to a story-heavy game. It’s just a lot of, “That cut scene was cool wasn’t it?” Ho hum.

Media ProductionZilch. But weirdly I bought a green screen for the first time in over eight years of making game videos. It’s cheap, but it works, as long as it’s lit sufficiently (I have a bunch of cheap USB-powered LED lights too) and there isn’t any mild breeze from the ceiling fan to blow over the super flimsy rigging.

I don’t know what to do with it. Probably nothing. But hey, you really can’t be part of modern Internet culture anymore without a green screen, so now my indoctrination is complete.

TelevisionCurrent weekly shows regularly watching: Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (on YouTube), Glass Cannon Time for Chaos (on YouTube, just finished season 2), Dimension 20 Fantasy High Junior Year (on Dropout, just finished), The Rest is Entertainment Podcast (on YouTube), Jon Stewart’s new bits on The Daily Show (on YouTube), Taskmaster Series 17 (on YouTube, just finished).

Sadly, Time for Chaos season 2 just ended. One of the best actual plays out there, and by far the best Call of Cthulu I’ve seen. Everybody else thinks “playing Call of Cthulu” means “dressing up in period costumes and acting extremely dour and boring.” (This has also carried over to Critical Roll’s attempted-Cthulu-replacement Candela Obscura.)

Binging old shows regularly: Glass Cannon Androids & Aliens (on YouTube starting at episode 96), and Glass Cannon Get in the Trunk.

I keep saying this about Glass Cannon, but Androids & Aliens is one of the best actual play shows I’ve seen. They have a cast with amazing chemistry. Also wow, Paizo’s Starfinder sounds like a garbage heap of a rule system. It sounds like the upcoming second edition needs to be a complete top-to-bottom overhaul.

You are correct, I’m not watching whatever television shows or movies everybody else is watching, because literally nothing looks like it’s worth watching. I thought about watching 3 Body Problem but then I thought, “I read the book and the book was amazing so I need not bother wasting my time with the show.”

Also, I fell into a rabbit hole of watching a lot of “some expert rates the realism in movies” videos on YouTube, mainly on the Insider channel. Normally I don’t really like the “reaction video” genre, but these seem like they’ve evolved into something that’s actually watchable. And it’s always nice to have experts confirming all the times I scoffed at World War I battle scenes and thought to myself, “That crazy nonsense isn’t what actually happened.” This is one of my favorites. “Where is your ditch!”

MoviesI re-watched Dune Part One. The first half was really good. The second half wasn’t as good.

Then I watched Dune Part Two. It was okay. The main reason to watch it is for the visual spectacle, not so much for the easy-to-follow, relatable human drama, of which there is very little. (Despite the music trying so hard to make you think every scene is just drowning with drama.) Even split into two really long movies, there wasn’t enough time for me to build much of a bond with any of the characters. I couldn’t see myself or anyone I knew in any of those characters, in the same way I can’t see myself or anyone I know in Biblical characters. (The story of Dune is very much like a Biblical story to me.)

Also, did anyone else find the messiah to be kind of, well, Gen-Z-ish? Maybe a bit harsh of me. But he seemed like a kid pretending to be someone with gravitas, more than someone with gravitas. I mean he was basically a stick figure in the first movie. (To be fair, he’s supposed to be 15 from the book, which makes him even more annoying as a character.) At least they put some bulky clothes on him for the second movie. Maybe I’m just too old to accept that any actor who looks like they’re 15 years old is going to defeat every enemy in single combat, see the future, and lead an entire world’s people to victory. The only thing I see kids today doing is making TikTok videos, which is cool, but not nearly as impressive as leading an entire planet to salvation.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I also watched an unprecedented three more movies: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes. The first one was comically bad except for Andy Serkis, the second one was really good, and the third one was pretty good except for some boring bits in the middle. I guess I can understand why people view them favorably.

AudiobooksHaving just watched the new Dune movie, I started to re-listen to the Dune audiobook, which is one of those “read by an all-star cast” audiobooks that I generally dislike. They try to make it sound like an audio play, but in reality it just sounds like every sentence is read by someone with a different accent so the entire flow of the writing is completely ruined.

To make matters worse, some of the chapters are just the narrator Simon Vance reading, and those are really good. Then they go back to chapters where some American dude that sounds like Jon Hamm phoning it in reads Duke Leto, and I die a little inside. Don’t even get me started on the guy who sounds like he’s from Texas reading Gurney Halleck lines. Can we get a new version of this audiobook please? Surely the movies are popular enough to warrant a new one. They’re making a television show to get in on the Cinematic Universe action, so throw a little money into an audiobook. At the bare minimum, just remix this one and cut out everyone but Simon Vance, and it would be a lot better.

Day JobCatastrophe struck and the Slack desktop app stopped working on my work laptop (a 2019 MacBook Pro). It just crashed every time I started it, and furthermore, Chrome crashed every time I tried to use the Slack web page instead of the desktop app. I tried a hundred things to try to fix it, but nothing worked. I had to go to the company tech support, which was like a death sentence, because I knew they weren’t going to be able to fix it, and they were going to tell me to reimage my laptop, because that’s what company tech support does: They have you try the same things you can Google yourself, and if that doesn’t work, they reimage. Which is what happened. So I had to reimage my laptop, and now I have to reinstall everything. Thanks Slack and/or Chrome.

Why do we still use Chrome? It’s about a thousand times worse than Internet Explorer ever was. I can answer that: For me, it’s exactly one reason, and it’s because all my bookmarks are in Chrome, and I don’t know where else to put them. I need a browser-agnostic bookmark solution. I’m told that something like Pocket is the solution, which seems like a fairly big overkill just for managing links.

Health and WellnessI’ve been attempting to replace coffee with tea. I’m now at the point where I can drink one cup of black tea in the morning and I don’t have any caffeine-related headaches for the rest of the day.

I’ve been drinking one called Vanilla Chai which is less awful than the one called English Breakfast. I tried one called Perfectly Mint and I almost gagged it was so disgusting. It was like drinking hot toothpaste. So far I’m discovering that black teas tend to all taste the same, it’s just that they smell radically different.

Unfortunately I haven’t noticed much of any reduction in acid reflux so I guess coffee wasn’t contributing to that.

Anyway, the next step is to try switching to some other not-black teas and then eventually get down to just water and maybe some kind of fruit juice.

World ContextAs yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

U.K. called for a General Election because apparently they can just do that whenever they feel like it. Meanwhile here in the U.S. we’re in roughly year 27 of a more-or-less continuous 24/7 election campaign.
Trump was found guilty in the hush-money trial. He’ll appeal, he won’t go to jail, and it won’t have any effect on the election. (I did not see that on social media, and have not seen any reaction to it on any social media platform, which is nice. Not seeing everyone’s opinions on social media feels like what it must be like to leave a cult.)
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 05/20* 10:04 # I’m starting to wonder if YouTube is counting all the times I just hover the mouse over a video and let the thumbnail play for a while as things I want to see again and again in my recommendations. * 14:18 # Whoops I think I forgot to actually commit and publish last week’s microblog thingy. So there’ll be two appearing in a row shortly. * 16:12 # I thought I might try Spotify to listen to a podcast. Spotify is absolutely awful at podcasts. No way to listen from first to last instead of last to first? Seriously?

Wednesday 05/22* 09:01 # My little village in Manor Lords just got completely wiped out by wandering brigands. Every single building burned to the ground. Probably should have made some kind of army.

Friday 05/24* 07:35 # I got Crusader Kings 3 on Steam but it crashed twice in the first two hours so I returned it. I might get it on PS5 though. Good “busy hands” game for when you’re listening to podcasts/audiobooks/shows and don’t want to actually pay attention to the game. Weird that the game industry has evolved into making a ton of games that are designed in a way that you don’t have to actually pay any attention to the game while you’re playing it. * 07:39 # Timberborn is another good “busy hands” game for the purpose of listening to a podcast. However I find it extremely limiting in its current state because unless I missed something all the maps are hand-made instead of procedurally generated, so you can only play the game so many times. Also it seems to lack any kind of threat so it’s almost impossible to fail to make a thriving beaver community. Once I make a stable community in these kinds of city-building games, I generally consider myself to have “finished” and uninstall the game, and I did that on the very first tutorial game. * 07:52 # One thing I like about Manor Lords is that it isn’t an automatic win everytime you play. It seems kind of hard to make a stable community. Well, it’s not super hard to make a community, but when the brigands arrive in the third year and wipe out your community because you spent all your time dealing with food and shelter instead of building an army, you realize there’s a little more to it than you thought. However I’m a little wary of playing too much because the game seems like it’s still early in early access.

+ 07:54 # I made the mistake of assuming this was a typical early access game, which usually means “the game is finished but we need beta testers.” Manor Lords actually isn’t finished yet.

16:00 # Of course there’s a storm and a pouring rainstorm an hour before I was able to go outside and mow. At this rain-exactly-every-single-weekend rate I doubt I’ll be able to mow at any point this summer.

Saturday 05/25* 18:20 # I don’t remember what, if anything, I said previously about Dune pt 1, but it’s a pretty good flick. However I felt like the first half (of the first movie) is considerably better than the second half, which kind of drags and meanders like the middle book of a trilogy. Dune has taken on a rather biblical mystique among nerdkind in the 50-something years since it was published, and this latest movie definitely captures that, so it’s more of a reflection of the book’s aura than the book’s content. Meaning I found the book rather mundane, so this might be only the second movie I can think of that’s clearly better than the book. (The other was the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) Going to watch pt 2 shortly. Don’t quite remember how the rest of the story goes, just little flashes here and there.

+ 21:49 # Dune pt 2 was a similar visual spectacle to pt 1. I feel like I need to re- read the book. Almost none of the entire pt 2 movie was familiar to me. It either deviated significantly from the story I knew, or I didn’t actually know the story. Admittedly the book was fairly difficult to grok and I didn’t retain much of it, so my knowledge may be significantly infected by the previous movie and miniseries. Hence my interest in re-reading the book. I don’t even remember if I read it or listened to an audiobook.

Sunday 05/26* 09:11 # I like these Roll20 listings that are like “looking for players and a GM.” Also I feel like there’s a LOT less listings for LFG games now than there were the last time I looked, last year I think. * 16:58 # I keep hearing these new Planet of the Apes movies aren’t as terrible as they sound from the descriptions so I am putting that assessment to the test in an unprecedented third movie watch in two days with Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I’m expecting the worst CGI I’ve ever seen in my life, worse even than the prequel movies or any literally any Marvel movie.

+ 17:14 # That was probably too harsh to broadly besmirch the terrible CGI in “literally any Marvel movie.” What I should have said was, the CGI is terrible in literally any superhero movie.
+ 10:58 # I forgot to post my assessment of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a movie that at this time has an 82% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a clear fan favorite. It’s awful. Really, really awful. Has there ever been a story with more characters making absolutely awful, cartoonishly unbelievable decisions in human history? I don’t know. But it seems unlikely. It started right at the beginning and just kept happening over and over and over again and it was impossible to take any of it seriously. Anyway, putting all that aside, you can tell why Andy Serkis is one of the dudes you call when you want to do expressive motion capture. In this case, every human character around him was comically dumb so it was a really low bar for him to stand out as a hero.
+ 11:37 # Sometimes I regret posting what probably sounds like overly-harsh movie impressions, but then I come across quotes from old Siskel and Ebert reviews on Wikipedia and I think, “oh okay, whew, writing that a movie is awful is actually pretty tame.” In any case, I do plan to watch the sequels at some point, because surely they have to get better.

Monday 05/27* 11:18 # By the way, I started listening to the Dune audiobook, which I’d gotten and listened to many years ago. I can remember now why the book didn’t impress me all that much. It’s pretty much 100% dry exposition, or at least that’s how it starts. Which, to be fair, is typical for sci-fi books of the time. They can sometimes read more like coldly unemotional encyclopedias than dramatic narratives. Well-written, mind you… far better written than most of what you read today, but still, it’s not terribly gripping to listen to paragraph after paragraph of exposition about the history of the Bene Gesserit. Also, as a side note, it’s one of those audiobooks where they have a cast of characters reading the dialog, which is my least favorite kind, because it’s pretty stilted and jarring and never sounds natural. Sadly I can’t find any alternate versions of the audiobook where only one narrator reads it (in English, at least). * 15:08 # I can now confirm that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is about a thousand times better than Rise. So much better that I personally would recommend just skipping the first one. The 82% rotten tomatoes score for Rise is definitely a mass delusion, but the 91% rotten tomatoes score for Dawn is an accurate reflection of the movie. Andy Serkis is a powerhouse of storytelling through body language. However, most all of the plot advancements still occurred because of incredibly stupid or psychotic humans who only exist on Twitter. Sometimes it seems like the only life experience that modern script writers have when writing modern movies is from reading Twitter. * 19:00 # Hey I successfully installed a new fluorescent ballast in the kitchen and it actually worked and I didn’t electrocute myself. Another triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity. * 21:34 # War for the Planet of the Apes didn’t quite go where I thought it would. It gave me strange Dirty Dozen vibes for quite a while. I think I liked the second one better, but the third one was still pretty good. (Although I got kind of bored in the middle of it and wished it would hurry up and be over.) I guess I can see why people praise these reboots. Except for the first one.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 05/13* 10:48 # My weird Pathfinder rabbit hole exploration continues. I’m fascinated by the “Recall Knowledge” concept, which, based on how I see it used in the Glass Cannon world, might as well be called “Let Me Metagame In A Way That People Won’t Yell At Me For Metagaming.” It’s such a weird thing to put into a tabletop game with codified rules. * 16:38 # My house has two 4-lamp fluorescent light fixtures in the kitchen, and they’ve now both died. I will soon be learning how to replace a fluorescent light ballast I guess, or else have to use a flashlight in my kitchen for the remainder of my time here, which, imo, just might be a viable life hack. Based on my life experience with fluorescent lights, I don’t really know why they exist. They seem like a stain on human existence.

Tuesday 05/14* 10:34 # I’m trying an experiment in switching from coffee to tea, and so far I have to report that tea is not any less disgusting than coffee.

Sunday 05/19* 19:09 # So far the loss of coffee hasn’t bothered me much. Trying different kinds of black tea as a substitute. No caffeine-related headaches in the first week. * 23:02 # Been playing Manor Lords today which is a great game to play when you don’t want to play a game but instead would rather listen to a podcast or show but you don’t want to just stare at a wall while listening to a show. It’s a bit like Banished. But … it’s also somewhat obviously not finished yet. Not buggy, just missing quality of life features that seem to me like they’re pretty important in a game about micro-management.

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Oops, I did it again. It’s the 14th as I create this blank document to start a new post. This never bodes well. In fact, it boded so not-well that I’m a day late publishing this, and the extra time did little to improve the post.

I’m going to go off-script and mention a couple things that are on my mind that don’t fit into the usual categories.

Social MediaI’ve more-or-less stopped doing social media in the last six months. I don’t log into X Twitter anymore. There’s nothing but angry yelling there, and I can’t easily switch between accounts anymore so I have to pick one flavor of angry yelling to see all the time.

I don’t read anything in the fediverse anymore. It’s too much of a hassle. So if anyone is replying to my scintillating microblog missives I don’t see them.

I don’t log into Discord very much anymore. Maybe once a week I’ll log in, scan, see nothing of interest, and log off again. It’s a weird environment there and I never feel like I fit in anywhere.

I technically have an Instagram but I never use it. I don’t go to TikTok except occasionally to see the latest behind-the-scenes buffoonery from Critical Role. I keep trying to follow the Glass Cannon TikTok but for some reason I can’t follow anything from the web site. (I don’t have it on my phone.)

I still have Facebook (I’ve never deleted any social media accounts because that’s weird) but I only log in maybe once every six months. I have a LinkedIn but I think I only log in once every job change, which could be years. I’m spammed by emails from LinkedIn every day and I don’t read any of them.

I’ve never seen WhatsApp.

Speaking of email, the absolute worst social media, I don’t read email anymore. It’s a constant bombardment of spam and there’s just no way to make filters that make email work. I’m extremely lucky that I’m still able to see emails bubbling to the surface from people I care about.

I barely even read my work email, which is also a constant bombardment of spam, because I work at a fairly large corporation and there’s some corporate announcement every other day.

Real mail, by the way, gets dumped into a pile in my kitchen that I almost never look at. So hopefully nobody tries to contact me that way, either.

I only occasionally read YouTube comments or Reddit to get a sense of why it’s a good idea to stop doing social media. (Following a long tradition of not reading blog comments.)

I recently stopped by a couple of Critical Role subreddits to see what the zeigeist was and found that everybody in the world absolutely hates Critical Role. I’m actually embarrassed to have ever said out loud (in this blog) that I thought Campaign 3 was worse than the other two, because it sounds like I sympathize with the truckloads of steaming garbage hate that is dumped on the show every day on the “fansofcriticalrole” subreddit. I wish I’d never said anything now, because the thought of ever being lumped in the same category as any of them is horrifying.

I honestly don’t know a good way for interested parties to contact me anymore. Every single communication avenue that I’m aware of has been sufficiently poluted that I never want to look at them. I keep thinking that I need to build a customized, proprietary “contact me” messaging tool into my web site.

Anyway. I don’t really know what the point is, except it feels like the usefulness of social media has ended. It’s a continuous game of changing rules that I don’t find fun to play anymore. Some people thrive on being angry all the time. I kind of don’t.

In fact, my withdrawal from social media is so great that I didn’t even know that Eurovision happened. That’s one of those things, along with the Superbowl, that you simply cannot avoid if you look at social media.

GamingFor the most part, I haven’t even touched my gaming PC this month so far. I have occasionally opened Steam and reviewed the list of games in my library or on the store while I’m listening to a show, found them all lackluster, and closed Steam again.

However, last night I did play another hour of Lords of the Fallen, picking up where I stopped having fun in the Big Fiery Red Castle At The End (not the actual name). I can confirm that, even with the new 1.5 patch, the latter parts of the game are still not fun. Typically you want to avoid combat at all costs and run past every enemy, because it’s so painful to try to fight former bosses and groups of former bosses. Unfortunately running past all the enemies led me to another boss fight (The Chained King With Smashing Statue Head, also not the actual name), which I did not complete. I found it annoying, but I mitigated the annoyance by turning down the game volume and listening to a show while barely paying attention to what I was doing and hoping for a random win.

Random Tea DiversionI’m trying to switch from coffee to tea. I had an idea that maybe coffee was irritating my throat and stomach, which could be a contributing factor to my nearly constant state of heartburn and acid reflux, which leads to bouts of coughing whenever I try to talk on, say, video recordings.

I can understand now why everyone in the U.K. is always so bitter and sarcastic, because tea is objectively disgusting.

Anyway, the only reason I drink coffee is to inject enough caffeine into my system to avoid getting a headache in the afternoon. Coffee is also objectively disgusting and it’s impossible to conceive of drinking it for the flavor. Yuck. But headaches are also pretty annoying, so there we are.

So the idea is to replace coffee with enough tea to get enough caffeine to avoid a headache in the afternoon. I started with black tea, which ChatGPT reliably informs me is the tea with the most caffeine (roughly 1/3 the amount of coffee). I drink the least-caffeinated type of coffee I find in the store, so I don’t need that much. There is a wall of teas at my grocery store containing roughly 45 million brands and flavors of tea, and I picked one called English Breakfast. It’s disgusting and I hate it, but on the first two days it did work for medicinal headache-prevention purposes.

It’s also more of a pain to make tea. With coffee, the machine just does it for you. With tea, I have to like boil water and shiz. So primitive. I need to find a similar machine that just does it for me, but sadly I see no products called Mr. Tea.

Media ProductionI’ve mostly been on hiatus from making videos, because I don’t feel like talking. I’ve been in one of those “retreat inward” sort of moods for a while now. There’s probably a clinical name for it that people with various diagnoses would immediately recognize, but I don’t have any diagnoses so I just have to call it “my weird behavioral problems that nobody understands.”

TelevisionContinuing Taskmaster Series 17 but it’s a bit dull.

Continuing Dimension 20 Fantasy High Junior Year but it’s worn out its welcome and I end up not listening to the entire shows. The Bad Kids’ journey is somewhat less funny this time. It started strong then just kind of fell off a cliff, not sure why.

Still sort-of kind-of watching Critical Role campaign 3 but it mostly just washes over me and I don’t pay that much attention to it. I have no idea who or what they’re talking about 95% of the time.

Critical Role started a Beacon subscription service but it’s not as good as Dropout yet and nowhere near as good as YouTube. Every new subscription video service makes the exact same mistake: They don’t let you use the arrow keys to go forward and backward in the video player, which, to me, is the first fundamental requirement for any video player. They also don’t seem to have a subtitle track enabled yet. Same story as always: New subscription service, bare-bones sub-standard video player, and that’s why YouTube and Twitch are mandatory requirements for anyone to gain traction before you can even think about trying to move to your own service. Nobody would put up with such garbage video players at the beginning of a business venture.

Otherwise, I’ve been deep in a rabbit hole listening to Glass Cannon actual play podcasts (on YouTube). They are so funny and different in the actual play space that I can’t help it. (And I’ve learned a new word that I’d never heard before: jawn.) My favorite of their current shows is The Glass Cannon Podcast Campaign 2 (Pathfinder 2e), and Time for Chaos (Call of Cthulu). I’ve also binged all of their available Voyagers of the Jump (Traveller) episodes and am currently binging Androids & Aliens (Starfinder). Where most other established actual play shows try to turn themselves into improvised live stage plays, Glass Cannon persists in highlighting out-of-character fun, which is usually the thing that makes actual plays actually fun to watch. Also it’s very cool that they play pretty much all the things except D&D. Non-D&D publishers must love them because they get a lot of partnerships.

Having largely dismissed social media from my life, Glass Cannon podcasts are serving all of my parasocial relationship needs at the moment.

Day JobNot into it.

World ContextAs yet I don’t know what to replace TweetDeck with for news.

Has anything happened? I think there’s still some Trump trial going on that is constant fodder for newstainment. Kids yelling about Israel instead of Russia continues to be a theme. I think I also heard about a massive row in the U.K. over some Netflix show Baby Reindeer.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 04/30* 20:56 # Oh. My extreme interest in blogging has been such that I didn’t notice my blog builds had been failing for weeks. Whoopsie.

Wednesday 05/01* 09:18 # I wonder what it would be like to have a podcast app that neatly organizes the podcasts I wanted to listen to and plays them quickly and easily in the order and manner that I wished, and also maybe even kept track of where I was in each podcast. It’s apparently too much for modern technology to handle this herculean computing task, which is surely more complicated even than AI or crypto mining.

Thursday 05/02* 14:36 # I ordered an old print on demand hardback rulebook from DriveThruRPG and I wasn’t expecting it to be very good quality but it’s actually pretty good quality. Not as good as an original but better than I was expecting.

Friday 05/03* 17:45 # For some random reason unknown to me, YouTube popped up a recommendation for Bear McCreary’s All Along the Watchtower (Broadcast version) from Battlestar Galactica, and I clicked it, and it instantly brought me back to one of the most amazing sci-fi television moments in sci-fi television history. I remember almost nothing about that show, but I so vividly remember hearing that music and thinking, “oh this is a very cool track of music they’re playing over this dramatic moment” and then it turned out to be All Along the Watchtower and it just blew my mind. Have no idea what was happening story- wise in the show at the time but it’s one of the coolest musical cues in history. The broadcast version is so, so much better than the soundtrack version they released.

Saturday 05/04* 10:44 # I got an impossibly cheap electric sit/stand desk on sale to replace my gaming PC desk and I was going to set it up this weekend but now that I’m looking at the amount of work required to dismantle my old desk with two PCs and a hundred attached arms and a million cords it feels like maybe I’ll just leave the new box unopened forever. * 12:52 # I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet but Glass Cannon’s Time for Chaos is a really, really good Call of Cthulu actual play show. I don’t know what the worldwide consensus on Glass Cannon is but I feel like they’re doing a lot to inject some fresh energy into the actual play space, which is turning into a bunch of people doing cosplay and taking themselves too seriously. Everybody else that does Call of Cthulu shows always does these really boring, super serious dress-up episodes where everybody’s quiet and reserved and doesn’t move and stays in character and it’s just not fun to watch. Not so with Time for Chaos. No cosplay, doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s still funny, has great edge-of-your-seat storytelling, and scary as hell.

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Well, well, it’s the day before publication date, and I’m just now creating a blank document to write a post. I haven’t done that in a while. I usually create a blank document early in the cycle and jot down a sentence or paragraph here and there over the weeks.

That means I don’t really have anything to say, and I don’t feel like writing, and I don’t feel like letting the world see any part of my life. Other bloggers push through this feeling and post anyway, because they’re hungry up-and-comers and/or respectable writers, hoping to break through into the big leagues to make that sweet, sweet blogging money.

Me? Not so much. I wonder what’s the point of blogging quite regularly. How does this in any way enrich my life? Mostly it just reminds me over and over that I frequently transpose words in my brain without noticing, and the blurry, dim spot in the middle of my field of vision from the cataract in my left eye is growing more annoying every day.

GamingAnyway, last time I was talking about Dragon’s Dogma 2. I quickly tired of it and haven’t played it much since then. I find that it lacks momentum. It’s very much a “wander around aimlessly” sort of game, which isn’t really my jam.

I tried a handful of PS5 games to play while listening to podcasts or actual play shows on YouTube. I got something called Teardown, which is fun for idle hands. Wreckfest was another recent buy. Running cars into one another is quite fun and perfect for podcasts. I even got Minecraft, but I keep getting killed on the first night. I got Stellaris but it’s far too complicated to play while listening to a show.

Oh, after the Fallout show I got Fallout 76 on Steam in the big Fallout franchise sale. It stinks. It has other people in it, so I stopped playing as soon as I walked outside the first vault.

In a nutshell, I haven’t played much of anything noteworthy lately.

Media ProductionHaven’t recorded anything in a while either, so my channel is going to run out of mediocre content pretty soon.

I keep trying to think of something to make out of playing TTRPG adventures solo. But–and I think I mentioned this before–almost 100% of the “play TTRPG solo” products out there have you playing as the player, which becomes essentially a choose your own adventure, which I find dull. I’d rather play solo as the gamemaster running NPC players. Not much out there for that.

But I found a web site that generates random dungeons, which was pretty cool, so I thought that might be a fun project. Can three or four NPC players survive to the end of a random dungeon populated with random monsters? Probably a dumb idea. Although it has a nice rogue-like feel to it. I thought I could use it to try out the Pathfinder system and see just how painful combat actually is.

The point is that my media production is in a state of idleness.

TelevisionWhen I say “television” I mean not actually a television. I almost never watch something on a television anymore. (I watched one or two of the Fallout episodes on a television. That was the most recent usage.) To me, television means “produced video content,” which could include live streaming content, but only something professionally produced like a Critical Role (which isn’t live anymore).

I’m still watching Taskmaster Series 17 on YouTube, the best game show in production. This series of players isn’t really clicking with me, though.

I keep forgetting to mention that I watch shows on Dropout.tv with somewhat regular frequency, not just Dimension 20. Um, Actually, Game Changer, stuff like that. Their site is always open in a tab. (I don’t much like Very Important People or the new Smartypants though. They’re funny ideas, but they aren’t funny enough for a half-hour show format.)

Otherwise, I’ve fallen into a rabbit hole with the Glass Cannon Podcast Network, which was new to me. It started when I watched the one season of Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! on Plex (I think) and one of the episodes was a whole cast from the Glass Cannon network and I’d never heard of them before. Being a connoisseur of the top-tier Actual Play dynasties, I found that strange, so I checked them out.

Glass Cannon is a very New York-centric actual play production. Being an East Coaster myself, it’s a refreshing change of pace from the glut of West Coast shows, where they seem to live in an alien bubble that bears no resemblence to my life experience. Glass Cannon is what you would get if you took some FM morning radio DJs and had them play TTRPGs. It’s irreverent, which is great, because I’m not much into actual play shows that take themselves too seriously cough Candela Obscura cough. Glass Cannon has a pretty unique, almost late night talk show vibe, but most importantly the production quality is top-notch.

Luckily they have YouTube playlists for the more recent stuff, so I don’t have to mess with icky podcasts, which I can’t listen to except in very specific circumstances. (Usually, mowing the lawn or driving to the grocery store, which amounts to maybe an hour a week, and does not provide much opportunity to get through thousands of episodes of podcasts.)

Glass Cannon plays (exclusively?) non-D&D games, which is another thing that makes them unique. Their flagship shows are all Pathfinder, and I think they’re officially licensed. They also play things like Call of Cthulu, Delta Green, Traveller, and an assortment of TTRPGs you’ve never heard of, because you’ve probably never seen anything but D&D in the Actual Play space for the last 10 years.

Pathfinder TangentGlass Cannon provided my first look at actual people playing actual Pathfinder. My only previous experience with Pathfinder was Owlcat’s Pathfinder: Kingmaker video game. I found the rules in the game extremely … well, punitive. Try to stand up from prone? Oops! You took sixteen thousand attacks of opportunity from the three dogs around you and now you’re dead. Cast a spell? Oops! Another sixteen thousand attacks of opportunity and you’re dead again! Every time a PC gets knocked down in that game, the only viable strategy is to stay down, skip their turn, and hope the rest of the party can handle the rest of the encounter without them.

After watching Glass Cannon for a while, that’s apparently a feature of the system, rather than a bug. I’m developing an understanding of what kind of TTRPG player likes Pathfinder, as opposed to D&D 5th edition. And that kind of player is either a rules lawyer, or an anti-capitalist activist who hates Wizards of the Coast, or possibly both. Or possibly a podcast network who has wrangled an official sponsorship from Paizo, like Glass Cannon. Pathfinder is just rules stacked on top of rules stacked on top of other rules–a flash flood of rules all interacting with one another in unpredictable ways on every combat turn, with random “flat checks” on top of it all.

The point is, Pathfinder is a lot different vibe from D&D 5e, and I guess that’s a good thing. But it’s easy to see why all the actors gravitate toward 5e, which seems a lot more condusive to controlled storytelling.

I’m told by assuredly reliable Internet sources that Pathfinder was born when D&D 4th edition wasn’t complicated enough for the 3rd edition fans, so Pathfinder copied-and-pasted the D&D 3.5 OGL rules and called it a new game, and the world rejoiced. There’s probably more to it than that.

Besides having to track a complex set of rules, the other big difference I see in Pathfinder is that your character’s success seems far more dependent on randomness, whereas D&D revolves more around advantage and disadvantage, which tends to reduce the randomness of your character’s success.

The bottom line is that I don’t dislike Pathfinder, and I’d happily play it if anyone wanted to, it just seems to be different for the sake of being different. Especially with the new 2e Remaster, which throws out any D&D terminology that you might already be familiar with, for the sake of making it legally distinct enough to use a different license because of the (largely moot as it turned out) OGL firestorm. It seems to me that it would be a lot simpler to just play D&D 3.5 if you wanted to use a hardcore complicated rule system, instead of trying to figure out what a “xulgath” is in Pathfinder.

But I know nothing of these things, and it’s best left unremarked upon in an Internet post. People are really passionate about their hatred of Wizards of the Coast, I’ve learned, and will brook not a single bad word be said upon Pathfinder, the one true religion.

In any case, the Pathfinder 2e books are pretty. I wonder if encyclopedias would become fashionable again if they were printed as colorfully and artistically as a TTRPG hardback rulebook.

Day JobPlodding along with Java development and occasionally some Python code. Nothing much of interest to report. Haven’t really learned anything noteworthy in a while. I get the subtle impression that there isn’t quite enough work for the number of engineers we have on the team to do at all times, which is somewhat of a challenge for the team.

World ContextI don’t know. Has anything happened lately? I remember some recent headlines suggesting that Trump is the only topic of interest in America right now because of one of those free-publicity trials he’s in. I checked the news this morning and there’s more student protests on campuses or something. I mean, for starters, American grasp of geography is apparently so bad now that they’re protesting in the wrong country. But who can keep up with the follies of youth anymore.

Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 04/23* 09:50 # Can we just talk about how good The Witcher 3 soundtrack is? It’s really good. In a world where game and movie soundtracks all sound kind of the same, because everybody just uses Generic Action Music Volume #23 off the shelf, it stands out so, so much. I was trying to play some music in the background so I could focus on programming but this music is so captivating I can’t use it for that. * 15:16 # I’ve only just realized that my Verizon data plan has changed so much that I have to redo it. No wonder I couldn’t listen to podcasts in the car anymore. As per usual, I have literally no idea how to use the Verizon web site to update my plan because it’s the worst designed and maintained web site in human history. I have a theory that they only hire COBOL programmers to do web development. (More likely they obfuscate it intentionally to make self-service impossible and drive people into the clutches of salespeople.)

Wednesday 04/24 11:05 # I’m just learning about this concept in ttrpgs called OSR or “old school revival,” which is when they make a new ttrpg that is basically the same as D&D bare bones pre-1st edition rules where you mechanically can’t do much except fight monsters in dungeon crawls. I guess it’s sort of a backlash against the Critical Role era where everyone expects ttrpg games to be more like an improv troupe than a game. Anyway it makes me wonder why people don’t just play D&D pre-1st edition. Maybe licensing reasons. * 22:15 # I thought buying all the D&D stuff was an expensive and confusing proposition but then I started looking through Pathfinder stuff. It’s almost like they try* to make it confusing so you’ll accidentally buy the same thing three or four times. Perhaps this is why they have these semi-official Pathfinder Adventure actual play shows, because nobody can possibly afford to buy the books to play themselves.

Thursday 04/25* 10:19 # Watching some Glass Cannon campaign 2 Pathfinder actual play episodes. Funny stuff. Glass Cannon has such a New York flavor. It’s interesting to see the regional influences in the various actual play media conglomerates. Anyway Pathfinder actual plays are very different from D&D actual plays. Pathfinder is roughly composed of 95% super-complicated rules, with the remaining 5% being completely impossible-to-understand rules, so every combat round is a dissertation about actions and bonuses and feats and whatnot and then maybe a roll at the end. It’s a very rules-heavy system, in other words. I thought D&D 5e was pretty rules-heavy but it’s nothing compared to Pathfinder. You can definitely see why all the actor-types gravitate toward D&D. * 16:06 # This spring a pair of house finches built a nest under the awning over my back door. The little dudes are just about to go from nestling to fledgling, jostling and bobbing around in the little nest like they’re about to fall out, looking around wondering what to do next. Bird nesting is pretty fascinating for some reason. It’s a very methodical, orderly process. I can always see the mom and dad hanging out near the back door somewhere, and I can always hear them yelling at me whenever I go outside.

Friday 04/26* 09:10 # Looking into the Pathfinder 2e rules after D&D 5e rules is sort of like going from the Windows world to the Linux world. Everything is just so many layers and layers of complicated systems and rules. They all make sense (if you’re a programmer and accustomed to dealing with complex systems and rules every day, that is), it’s just that there’s so, so many of them, and based on this one actual play that I’m watching at least, most of the gameplay appears to be talking about rules and how they interact with each other and discussions and debates about rules lawyering, and then maybe a roll every now and then. In my youth I was really into complicated rule ttrpgs, but in my old age I’m a lot more meh about it. * 11:29 # I keep forgetting to review the titles of the videos that I upload in the yaml file that indexes those things. The default is the same as the filename, and sometimes I put extra stuff in the filename that I don’t really want in the YouTube title. Hence the string of uploads lately that have “(rendered)” in the title, which is the file tag I use to indicate that it’s one that I loaded the original OBS files into a video editor (usually a boss fight). Another tag I use is “(edited)” which is usually one where I cut some boring parts out of the original OBS file with something like Avidemux. Usually I save those boring bits to a different file for posterity, or keep the original unedited file somewhere, and I’ll tag those with something like “(unedited)” or “(original)”.

Saturday 04/27* 21:26 # Speaking of Pathfinder, I get why the Remaster exists and all but it strikes me as amusingly petty. “We’ll show YOU, you greedy corporate overlords, now it’s Reactive Strike instead of Attack of Opportunity!” There’s a a not-so- subtle anti-corporate undercurrent in the whole Pathfinder community, it seems to me. Again, it reminds me of the Linux/open source community.

Sunday 04/28* 21:58 # Another weekend in a weird rabbit hole of playing with Foundry VTT, Pathfinder 2e versus 2e Remaster, Glass Cannon podcast (on video), OGL versus ORC, and all things related to those topics. I don’t dislike Pathfinder (it seems to have been tailor-made for the deeply systemic programmer mind) but it sure is a pain to understand, especially now, when everything is in a weird state of halfway between original 2e books and remastered 2e books. “What do you mean it’s not called magic missile anymore because WotC is an evil empire?” That kind of thing is rampant. There’s a constant state of confusion over terminology. I get the reasons but it’s not terribly consumer friendly. Makes me think it would be far easier to simply play D&D 3.5.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Thursday 04/18* 08:32 # I finally figured out how to watch Faster, Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! Seems like a semi-commercial television endeavor should be easier to find and watch. * 11:48 # After a particularly noteworthy episode of Critical Role, as the last one was, I sometimes go to Reddit and read some stuff that other people are saying about Critical Role. It’s always a mistake. Fandom communities are pretty much the worst of humanity. It always boils down to a community of hyper aggressive defenders versus hyper aggressive attackers.

Sunday 04/21* 08:17 # I played Fallout 76 for a few minutes, walked outside, saw another player’s character standing there, opened the map and saw a bunch of other player name tags dotted all over the place, and closed the game, probably forever. * 21:14 # After I had previously fell into a weird rabbit hole last week watching Faster Purple Worm! Kill! Kill! I fell into a weird rabbit hole this weekend with the Traveller actual play show Voyagers of the Jump. Traveller was my second favorite set of ttrpg books to read but never play when I was a kid. This is the first time I’ve ever seen Traveller played by human beings.

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A day late because yesterday was tax day and of course, being me, a person who usually doesn’t know what day or month it is, with a particular blind spot for any kind of administrative task, I only do my taxes on or after tax day.

GamingSyp said there was a Guild Wars 3 pseudo-announcment? If there was such a thing, I don’t see it being anything but a software refresh. Meaning: Probably the same game, just written in an improved game engine. They’ve been fairly steadfast in their vision for Guild Wars, so I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Dragon’s Dogma 2I got Dragon’s Dogma 2 on the PS5. It’s kind of fun, but to be honest, it’s such a carbon copy of the first game that it doesn’t feel very fresh. And unfortunately they seem to have copied all the old school mechanical bits that make older games less fun to play. I’m talking about inventory management here, of course, or what I like to call “moving little squares around a grid all day instead of actually playing a game.”

I’ve ranted so much about how much inventory systems suck in games because they just keep copying the same 1980s grid over and over and over again that I just can’t be bothered to rant anymore. Just know that if you’re a game developer, whatever game it is you’re working on, you’re probably making the inventory system suck because you have no idea how to do it any other way, because you’ve never seen anything other than a grid of squares in your entire life, so you just assume that’s the right way to do it. Meanwhile I’m over here spending 50% of my gaming time moving squares around a stupid grid wishing somebody, anybody, would figure out a way to make inventory management less soul-crushingly tedious, as if I’m doing taxes not once a year but several times in every game session. Literally nobody thinks it’s fun to stop exploring so you can drop something because you’ve gone from medium encumbrance to heavy encumbrance.Still, Dragon’s Dogma 2 does maintain that weird and quirky vibe that the first game had, so it’s all good. It’s like playing an older MMORPG, before MMORPGs turned into factory-produced busy boxes. And, surprisingly, they kept the same covert slavery/codependency simulation system as before, too! What’s not to like?

However, I’m a bit sad that there aren’t any Pawn chatter preference settings in the new game, though. In the first game, I cranked it up to maximum so the Pawns were almost constantly talking. In Dragon’s Dogma 2, they don’t talk quite that much, but they still have a lot to say.

I was playing it so much on the PS5 that it was starting to hurt my thumb, so I got the Steam version. Then I found out that the mouse-and-keyboard controls for the PC version are fairly similar to the first game: Terrible. Surprisingly, CTRL-left mouse button is not a very good way to activate a weapon ability you want to use in a pinch, and of course they don’t allow remapping the CTRL modifier to anything more sensible (I wanted it to be V). It’s meant to be played with a controller and that’s that, says the developer secretly.

Anyway I’ve drifted away from it again over the last week.

Media ProductionDragon’s Dogma 2 is a terrible game for video production, since the gameplay is about 90% downtime, so don’t expect anything but clips from me.

I continue to record Badgerfriends mock DM sessions of Phandelver and Below, though at this point I’m about 99% certain that nothing will ever become of those videos. It’s just a learning exercise at this point, experimenting with different ways of managing combat encounters.

I slowed down considerably in the last week though because I’ve had a persistently annoying chest/throat thing lately that means every time I record it’s a long series of talk-mute-cough-unmute-talk-mute-cough-unmute operations. Some day I need to go see an ENT doctor about that.

TelevisionTaskmaster Series 17 is ongoing. This time I’m just watching it on YouTube.

I keep watching the Viva La Dirt League Epic NPC D&D for some reason. I guess because it’s a good example of the kind of passive aggressive D&D that I never want to be involved with, and the kind of DM I never want to be around (or be). (The ones that are constantly talking about what clever thing they did for or to the players, or the ones that sound like they’re constantly on Reddit D&D forums debating minutia.) Still, sometimes it’s funny. But mostly it’s just noise in the background. And also I have a weird fascination with New Zealand culture lately.

Late-breaking update: I’ve been slagging off Critical Role lately but man episode 91 made up for the entire lackluster campaign 3 all in one go. It’s the first one I watched all the way through in quite a while. It’ll go down in Critical Role history as one of the ones everyone just knows the number, like C1E85.

FalloutI took a break from unscripted content to watch the Fallout series on Amazon. It wasn’t a disaster, but it also wasn’t a home run smash hit like The Last Of Us, either. There was a lot of tonal whiplash throughout. One minute it’s an absurdist comedy, the next minute it’s a horror, the next minute it’s a biting social commentary. The games had all that stuff, too, but it was consistent from one minute to the next, and you usually got to pick which one you wanted to engage with in each game session.

The show had the feel of a production where 50,000 people wanted to do 50,000 different things, but nobody was exactly in charge, and nobody really knew what they were doing. It smacked of being rewritten on the fly as they were filming, with lots of improvised scenes that didn’t quite fit but they didn’t have anything else to put in the edit. Characters started one way, then completely changed, and not in a “this is the character arc we planned” way but in a “holy crap this definitely isn’t working let’s change it” way. I actually wondered if the head-guy (a veteran actor) decided to quit the production after the first episode when he saw how chaotic it was, so they had to go with just his head for the rest of the series.

I got a bit weary of the vintage-music-played-over-slow-motion-action trick by the end. Felt like they didn’t have enough good action footage because of production problems so they had to do something to make up for it.

Anyway, it was adequate. “Good enough,” as most franchise productions are these days. It had the requisite number of “hey I remember that from the game!” moments that didn’t make any sense in the context of the show. It probably isn’t going to last.

I think a Fallout series would work much better as an anthology series, incidentally. Where each season follows different characters in different settings. You don’t really think of characters when you think of the Fallout game franchise, like you would with The Last Of Us. It’s more about the setting, and the different places in those settings.

AudiobooksIt’s that time of year when I notice I have a bunch of Audible credits about to go to waste, so I have to get a bunch of random audiobooks I’ve never heard of, that I probably won’t ever listen to. Browsing the recommendations for audiobooks is quite depressing. There’s only two options: Something by someone mega-famous, or something by some rando indie LitRPG author who paid a narrator. The two look identical in the store, and they’re all mixed up together, right at the top of the pages. One is probably worth listening to, but the other, well, who knows? Luckily, a good narrator can still make terrible writing sound interesting.

World ContextI haven’t paid any attention to news and then I go to look for news and all I find is bad news.

Ecuador raided a Mexican embassy to capture political asylum-seeker Jorge Glas. Seems bad. The silver lining is that at least U.S. politics hasn’t collapsed to the point of raiding embassies yet.
A total solar eclipse occurred across the U.S. on April 8. After the one in 2017, which was closer to totality, it was the second one visible from Virginia in recent memory. (The only one before that was in 1970, and the next will be long after I’m dead.) Eclipse backlash mania swept the nation. (That is, everyone was talking about how sick they were of people talking about the eclipse, when in fact, I never saw anyone talking about the eclipse, only people reacting to people talking about the eclipse. Typical Internet meme behavior.)
Tensions between Israel and Iran rose dramatically after they traded military strikes.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 04/09* 10:09 # In goofing around with my Phandelver and Below stuff, I’ve run across something that I imagine every single other programmer who attempts to run any kind of combat encounter runs into: The desire to write your own encounter tracker program, because literally none of the ones out there work quite the way you want them to work, and you firmly believe you can make one that’s better than any others. And I’ve reached the limitations of what I can (sanely) do with a Google spreadsheet.

Wednesday 04/10* 08:33 # I think I spend more time on the YouTube front page clicking on “don’t recommend channel” based on thumbnails than anything else. You’d think with their super advanced algorithm they might take note of that. But I guess the reality is that they DO take note of it and just feed me more and more and more of these videos that I “engage” with. “He must be really passionate about this to keep telling us he doesn’t want to see these!”

Thursday 04/11* 19:29 # Watching the first episode of Fallout and I have the same question as everyone else… why was the rotational pivot point of the vault door at the top instead of the bottom?? Just kidding. I actually have no idea what anyone has said about Fallout. But seriously why did the door rotate that way? That was so weird.

Saturday 04/13* 12:05 # I have no interest whatsoever in getting Fallout 76, which I have to assume is nothing more than one of those cash shop games, but I just watched the show and it’s 80% off so it seems like it would be wrong to not get it anyway.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Tuesday 04/02* 08:43 # Oh wow I got a single like on the second Badgerfriends video! I mean I know I should only be making content for myself but yay! All that work I did trying to seamlessly patch that one spot where I said “10 gold piece each” instead of “10 gold pieces each” has paid off.

Wednesday 04/03* 12:34 # Checking out Natural Six, another one of those actual play shows where they try to get actors/semi-famous people together to play D&D. Six posh U.K. nerds displaying all the excitement of a BBC chat show. Probably just first show jitters. But decent production. And hey it’s got the guy who voices Geralt in it (except not sounding like Geralt). So if you’re looking for more of an ASMR-style U.K.-style actual play you can play in the waiting room of a very expensive doctor’s office, without any of rowdiness or chaos of High Rollers, it might be for you.

+ 12:56 # Apparently Natural Six was a kickstarter campaign. One wonders what a kickstarter backer got for donating to that. Because the first episode is just up on YouTube for anyone. They probably get the episodes early somehow.

Thursday 04/04* 12:36 # I’m struck by how similar an actual play live show is to a band show. Was watching the Natural Six session 0.5 and at the end they’re like “thanks everyone! we’re Natural Six!” just like they were a band leaving the stage. I guess it’s pretty similar to a stage show in general. Improv troupe, stage play, actual play show, band set, all kind of the same concept. Natural Six is kind of winning me over btw. The chemistry comes through more in the session zero stuff. Session 1 was a bit flat, although they loosened up toward the end of it. I like the minimalism of the look with that stark black background. * 12:46 # I got Dragon’s Dogma 2 last night for the PS5. I only played for an hour, but not surprisingly, it starts off mechanically weird. Picking up stuff off the ground and carrying them around? Check. Climbing all over monsters? Check. Combat moves make no sense? Check. I literally picked up and threw a bystander at a monster.

Friday 04/05* 08:38 # Played a few more hours of Dragon’s Dogma 2. It’s such a weird game. Controls feel weird. Animations are weird. Physics is weird (everything is speeding up and slowing down). The graphics look weird (it’s a sunny day but everything still looks muted like it’s cloudy). Lip sync is nowhere to be found. It doesn’t feel like they changed a single thing from the first game, except they redid it in a modern game engine. And I guess added a new vocation (I think the thief is new isn’t it?) and a new cat people race. Which I guess is good? I dunno. I guess I’m not in a receptive-enough mood but it isn’t really wowing me. But it’s not bad either. Just a quirky old-school RPG with an unapologetic slavery simulator built in heh. * 19:59 # I have a strong suspicion already that I’m going to want to quit playing Dragon’s Dogma 2 when my inventory gets full. It’s already full. I’ve had to stop and spend time doing inventory management quite a lot in the first 4 hours of the game. That’s not a great sign for my longevity in the game. There is literally nothing more boring in gaming than moving little squares around a finite-sized grid, and for some reason here we are, 30 years later, still moving little squares around a finite-sized grid. I don’t mind the concept of managing weight for characters or managing finite resources, but the implementation is like having to stop and do your taxes every hour.

Saturday 04/06* 07:39 # I got a game called Pacific Drive, which sounded like one of the coolest original ideas for a game I’d heard in a while. The concept is fantastic, however the first hour is a bit of a drag because you’re bogged down in a lot of complex fiddly mechanical bits that are kind of a chore to do. Still, amazing game idea. * 09:02 # One of my favorite things about Taskmaster is how they speed up the clouds moving by in the background sometimes. * 15:55 # When you try to high-five your Pawn after a battle in Dragon’s Dogma 2 but it doesn’t work and they look disappointed.

Sunday 04/07* 18:19 # A somewhat annoying aspect of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is that it’s much much easier to manage all the crazy attack possibilities in combat with a controller, which is rather bad for my thumb. Oh by the way I got the PC version too so I could play with mouse and keyboard and preserve my thumb. Except, you know, it kind of stinks with mouse and keyboard, just like the first game. Unless you’re not doing anything but walking around. Which, to be fair, there’s a LOT of walking around in DD2.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 03/25* 11:50 # Whew. Back from getting the car inspected. Sitting in a waiting room for an hour and half while they did some extra maintenance. Always an enlightening slice of real life, nothing at all like the Internet life that you see on any social media. Very exhausting, but a reminder that not everybody out there is yearning for some kind of content creation side hustle.

Tuesday 03/26* 08:56 # These Humble software bundles with tons of royalty-free music and sound effects and stuff are an incredible deal if you do anything in an audio or video editor but man they sure are a pain to actually get into your computer. The process of getting thousands of sound files from a remote vendor on the Internet to a directory on your computer is an extremely arduous one. * 18:30 # Well this is annoying. My recording PC audio interface seems to have died between this afternoon and now. Just doesn’t power on anymore. Didn’t realize I was so dependent on this single point of failure.

Wednesday 03/27* 09:51 # I found a very cool app called Sound Show that I think might (finally) meet my needs as a tool for playing sound samples live. I’ve been looking for any application like this for so, so many years. Spent a bunch of time playing with it last night, experimenting with live performing complete soundscapes with music and sound effects to a previously-recorded video. I think it will end up being a LOT faster than dragging and dropping samples into a video editor for hours on end. If I ever start DMing any games, this will be the must-have mandatory tool for ambience and music. * 10:51 # I’ve been the victim of D&D capitalism.. I have enough dice now that it’s a chore to dig through the big pile of them to find the one I want, so I bought an expensive dice organizing box to show off my wealthy status, instead of one of the super cheap plastic screw organizer boxes that have been around for decades. * 19:39 # Why yes, I did unplug all the audio cables from my dead audio interface before making any notes of where the cables went and why they went there, then started to plug them into the new audio interface, and now I’m truly baffled about why I seemingly had one extra set of cables plugged in for no reason whatsoever, except I know for sure I had them there for a reason, but I can’t for the life of me remember why.

Thursday 03/28* 18:53 # Oh hey I found something kind of like what I was doing with Phandelver and Below (playing the adventure without any actual players), except different, and more YouTubery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWfCAqRh6To&list=PLK0lxTuLLNxvWM5kM5207pgHk3Qp2M_nR

+ 18:53 # There’s really quite a lot of D&D-related content on YouTube, it turns out.

Saturday 03/30* 17:15 # Fire Tablet: “Save your WiFi password to Amazon cloud?” Oh gee let me think about that. And of course what they’re really saying is: “We’re probably going to save your password whether you want to or not because how would you even know, what, do you have an Ethernet packet sniffer hooked up to your tablet right now, come you and I both know nobody has that, besides the traffic is encrypted anyway.” * 17:20 # In other news I finally figured out how to save a text preset in Davinci Resolve. Guess what? It’s not intuitive. The intuitive thing would be a menu somewhere in the Rich Text panel that says “save this so you can use it in other projects.” What you actually have to do is drag and drop a text clip from your timeline to your media library and then to something called a Power Bin, which is a pretty non-descript name for a bin.

Sunday 03/31 15:16 # YouTube now makes me check a box to say if my video contains “Altered content” i.e. AI-generated content. It seems* to be an indicator of things that are supposed to look like real photographs and not things that are supposed to look like art so I’m not checking it.

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Holy crap! It’s the 31st already and I need to post this! I’m fully unprepared.

GamingThere was some kerfuffle with some game developer, which had everybody shouting “Gamergate 2!” It’s so, so obviously an SEO ploy that I haven’t bothered to read about it. It seems to have quickly died out again despite all the flame-fanning attempts.

My video gaming has almost entirely stopped because of a sudden interest in the D&D Adventure book Phandelver and Below. Let’s face it, playing video games is pretty boring when compared to the vastness of the games from your own imagination.

I’m fearful I might turn into one of those bloggers who talks about D&D a lot, a category of blogger that I’ve found pretty annoying in the past. (We get it already, you have more friends and you’re having more fun than the rest of us, stop bragging yeesh.) If I get to where I only write blog posts about campaign sessions, then I know I will have fully jumped the shark and can safely retire. (There has never been a blog post written about a D&D session that has ever been entertaining to an audience who wasn’t sitting at the table. It’s one of the laws of blogging. Still, maybe I could be the first? Hrm…)

Lords of the FallenI was trying to push through to the end of Lords of the Fallen before Dragon’s Dogma 2 came out, but then one weekend the game completely fell off a cliff and disappeared from my radar because of another project I started working on. I haven’t really played it since. I think I’m close to the end, in Bramis Castle.

But it’s a bit of a slog to get through the areas in the latter half of the game, to be honest. You can either choose to stop and fight your way through the zones, which turns into an epic trench warfare story of attrition that isn’t that fun to play or watch on video, or you can just run past everything to the next boss, which is also a bit boring. Either way it feels like a waste of my time, but I have that looming spectre of an unfinished YouTube series hanging over my head.

Dragon’s Dogma 2I had planned to get Dragon’s Dogma 2 as soon as it launched (no pre-order! I defeated capitalism!), but when I went to the Steam page I saw the “Mixed” review and everyone was complaining about microtransactions and performance, so I went back to my D&D stuff instead. I’ll give them a few weeks to sort all that out. Naithin seems to like it, though. And Tipa.

The first one was pretty cool, if incredibly niche, and filled with what I can only describe as hilariously shocking anachronisms from the Pawns ("‘Tis an ogre, master, the sight of women excites it!"). I hope the new one still has all that jarring weirdness, but with an inventory system that’s improved enough that you don’t have to quit the game as soon as your inventory is full. (In the first one, I don’t think there’s any kind of storage locker so you have to shlep all the way back to town to sell stuff and/or drop stuff on the ground and/or spend an hour shifting stuff to your pawns. Very old school.)

Media ProductionMy upload scripts are currently uploading two videos a day; Lies of P daily, and a rotating schedule of Lords of the Fallen and some older Resident Evil videos I never uploaded.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Davinci Resolve the past couple weeks playing with my D&D experiments. Learned some new tricks, like blurring parts of the background, shifting video around, transforms, crops, layering audio tracks, stuff like that.

Now if only there was an easy way to make customized shortcuts for common tasks without trying to figure out AutoHotKey again. (The fact that Paste Attributes brings up a window that you have to click Okay on every single time is a lot of evidence that those folks should be sent to software developer jail.) (And, if there is a way around that, the fact that it’s not obvious how to get around that is additional evidence of same.)

I’ve been saying this for seemingly 20 years straight now, but I really wish there was a decent, lightweight timeline video editor out there. Davinci Resolve is great, but man it’s rough around the edges on Windows, and it’s so aggressively unintuitive and jam-packed with “pro” features I’ll never use. I need such a small set of tools for video editing that it’s really annoying to have to engage with all these deeply complex Hollywood workflows just to find a way to black out part of the screen.

REAPER is very, very close to having the basic video editing that I want, but it falls just a bit short. (Mainly in the area of tools like cropping and scaling and text overlays. It can do those things, but the UI is pretty awful.) I keep hoping a future version will put just a bit more effort into the video handling. (It only has enough video support to do basic music videos.)

Editing D&D CombatThe biggest video editing puzzle that I found myself confronting was how to edit a video containing D&D combat.

Combat in tabletop games is a major dilema. On the one hand, it’s a big part of the tabletop experience, and the ups and downs of the rolls from turn to turn contribute greatly to the tension of a session. (See: Baldur’s Gate 3 on Tactician difficulty.) On the other hand, it’s usually pretty boring to watch or listen to, because it goes on forever and there’s a million bits of information to keep track of. Some turns are duds and nothing interesting happens, but unfortunately you can’t just cut them out completely, so you have to have some representation of them. Other turns are amazing reversals of fortune and you want to highlight the spectacle of them. And sometimes you have to cut out the times when you have to stop to spend five minutes pouring over the rules (or Reddit ugh) to adjudicate whether an Eldritch Blast critical hit on a Hexed target is 2d10 + 1d6 or 2d10 + 2d6, and all the momentum dies.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about that. I ended up trying to strike a reasonable balance between cutting out the boring parts and showing every detail. My guideline is usually “what do I want to see, and what do I want to remember about this for later?”

In any case, it’s a lot of editing work and it takes a long time. I think I’m going to release two more videos in the Badgerfriends series and then I’ll call it quits, because the end of the third session is a fantastically dramatic place to stop. There is more after that (as of this writing, I’ve recorded 12 sessions, but only edited 2), but I’m going to need some kind of audience buy-in to sink more time into it. (As with most things on my channel, and as with most of the creator efforts that you spend the most time and energy on, it’s not exactly blowing up.) And as I mentioned in that post, it’s not a sustainable project in its current form.

Sound ShowI have to mention this program I recently found called Sound Show, which I got on itch.io. It’s a slightly janky UI, since it’s created in Unity, but it’s a feature-rich soundboard application that lets you setup and play sound files in lots of creative ways, almost like you’re playing a musical instrument (it even has MIDI support I think). I’ve been looking for a program like this my whole life.

Basically it lets me take all these “royalty-free music and sounds for games” sound files I’ve been getting from Humble bundles for the last few years and create live soundscapes with music and ambience and sound effects in realtime.

I’ve been using it to create soundscapes in post-production for some of the mock D&D sessions I recorded. Normally I have to drag and drop sound files onto a timeline in a video editor, but that’s a tedious process for an hour-long video. With SoundShow I can “perform” the background music and ambience in realtime and record it directly into the editor, which is way more fun and I think ultimately a big time-saver.

If there are any dungeon masters out there looking to add sound to their games, I can’t think of a better tool for doing that. (I actually discovered it on a Reddit thread where someone was asking about tools for adding soundscapes to their games.) I think you could even hook it up to change lighting effects if you have the gear for it.

TelevisionA new series of Taskmaster (17) started and I didn’t even realize it! I only discovered it when the first episode appeared on YouTube.

Continuing to watch Dimension 20 Fantasy High Junior Year. Most Dimension 20 seasons start off outrageously funny and then settle into a more serious (i.e. less memorable) tone toward the end, and this one seems to be no exception.

I still keep up with Critical Role Campaign 3, but I skip ahead a lot. They absolutely wallow in the lore and role-playing now, and most of the players are so risk-averse that they spend most of their time doing nothing. The plot barely advances at all in any given episode. Matt just kind of lets the players drive the action so they spend four hours practicing acting skills and talking about what to do next and what all the lore means and how to spell and pronounce every new name six times so they can all write it down. Meanwhile I as the viewer have literally no idea who or what they’re talking about most of the time, have no idea what their goals are, where they are or why they’re doing anything. The last 50 episodes could be summarized as “Something something red moon”.

Watched a bit of the new Critical Role Daggerheart stuff. I have no opinion about the rule system, except on the surface, it sounded kind of gimmicky. “Narrative-forward” makes it sound like “this is for making YouTube entertainment content, not for home games.” It’s difficult not to think of it as a cynical business ploy to avoid having to use material from (and tacitly endorse the company) Wizards of the Coast in their content, which is exactly what I’d do, too, if I were a media empire that had grown far bigger than their origins.

I found the Viva La Dirt League NPC D&D shows. I generally like VLDL videos (the older ones are better though). But there has never been a D&D Actual Play series that is more of a “jumping on the bandwagon” type of video series than this. The first arc has a huge “we’re doing this because this is popular content on YouTube and not because we like playing D&D or anything” vibe to it. It’s got a dudes in a college frat house vibe to it. Tons of talking over each other. Lots of hyper awareness that they’re recording it so they’re performing for the cameras. A big disconnect between how serious the DM is taking it versus how serious the players are taking it. If I were in the same room with those dudes, I’d have a headache and be out of energy in like 5 minutes. Maybe it gets better later on. (It does, a little.)

Phandelver and Below Actual PlaysHaving spent some time with the first chapter of Phandelver and Below, I was curious to see if there were any actual play shows out there that had gone through it. I felt like it was a bit of a meat grinder at the start for level 1 characters, so I was curious if others had that experience.

This led to a sea of mid-tier D&D Actual Play shows on YouTube, presumably all trying to replicate that 2015 Critical Role-on-Geek and Sundry lightning in a bottle.

I would describe all of the ones I mention below as “good enough,” in the sense that they have made a modest effort to make a watchable and/or listenable product (as opposed to just recording what would otherwise be a private zoom call with no regard whatsoever for viewers), but they are all regular nerds and not professional actors, so you’re probably not going to see any of them guest starring on Critical Role. However you might find them first in line to nervously ask “what was it like to do that thing that one time” superfan questions at a Critical Role panel. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

Quests and ChaosIn-person recording, so it has that telltale untreated room echo sound that is just on the border of being too annoying to listen to. Put something on the walls to absorb the echo for god’s sake! Just hang some coats or shirts on the walls if you’ve got nothing else! Ahem. Anyway. Custom built DIY map constructions with miniatures. Has a super midwestern basement church group vibe, but with a thick layer of lgbtq vibe on top. Good chemistry. Community donations affect the game. Replete with ads and merch sales pitches, like a video version of a Geocities web page. Their web page makes it sound like they’re at the center of the actual play universe, but you’ve probably never heard of them.

Dork TalesBilled as being from the Pacific Northwest of Canada. Remote recording. Roll20 for maps. The DM has a pool of tokens to affect the game, presumably from community donations. Decent chemistry. At least two “voice actors” (the ones in quotes are people who claim they’re voice actors because they bought a nice condenser microphone and a pop filter and know not to cough directly into it, but their most impressive credits are probably some local radio commercial or indie game nobody’s heard of). Relatively new, I think. They have a big variety of campaigns on their channel but it’s not very well organized.

Nerd Immersion PlaysRemote recording. Theatre of the mind combat. Poor production value, sound levels all over the place. I think I may have recognized a couple of the player names and/or faces from YouTube? Not sure. Maybe I saw them in one of the bazillion “stop doing this WRONG in D&D!!” videos that come out every week. Anyway, has the vibe of a group of decades-old salty veterans of tabletop gaming in basements with lots of drugs and food and drinks, probably those weird libertarian kids from high school but now they’re adults, but they’re new to the world of broadcasting sessions for the likes and subscribes so it’s a bit janky. These folks look the closest to my age, so I give them extra points for that.

Cloak and StaggerIn-person recording. Maps with miniatures. They’re trying for good sound but they aren’t quite there yet. Major five-socially-awkward-but-energetic-dudes-in-a-garage-playing-D&D energy. Major spent-a-bunch-of-money-on-equipment-they-don’t-fully-know-how-to-use-yet energy. Weirdly reminiscent of rural Virginia huntin’ buddies, except they’re playing D&D on a stream instead of drinking beers and shooting skeet. Everybody’s looking over at offscreen monitors to make sure the stream is working. A player-as-DM and DM-as-player campaign (the former DM appears to be cackling with glee the entire time because he doesn’t have to be the DM). Fairly plot-driven action, not a lot of in-depth character drama, if you know what I mean. Still, I give them extra points for just going for it and figuring it out as they go. It’s what I would have done.

Path of the YetiIncidentally, I found a channel called Path of the Yeti which has what they call a “narrated story of Phandelver and Below.” It’s a similar sort of “solo TTRPG playthrough” of the adventure book that I started doing, but it’s very different. They do a lot more with AI-generated images to set the scenes and it appears to be a lot more scripted. I thought it was interesting to see that I wasn’t the only one with that sort of idea. It’s a thing, apparently. (I’m slightly biased and I like mine better, though. I wanted to have as much of a “really playing in realtime” vibe as possible, as opposed to a produced-show-read-from-a-script vibe.)

ConclusionsTwo of the shows had community gifts to keep the party from dying, so that didn’t help much in my evaluation of the difficulty of Phandelver and Below. A third one had the party starting out with a lot more healing stuff than my dudes did (mine had none, except one dude with a Cure Wounds spell), and then a freak wild magic roll summoned a fire elemental which incinerated the entire goblin hideout without them lifting a finger. Also, two of those actual plays are five-player parties, whereas my mock sessions started with three and then later increased to four.

For comparison, my dudes nearly got murdered by the first four goblins on the road, and had to take a short rest after the ambush, which, thanks to terrible hit dice rolls on D&D Beyond, provided almost no respite, and forced them to continue to Phandalin for a long rest, because you only get one short rest at level 1. Then, on returning the next day, they almost got murdered by the goblin guards outside the hideout after some bad decisions and freak combat rolls, an encounter that I actually nerfed a little bit.

In fact they did get murdered. It was a full TPK. Eh, spoiler alert. But I’m not too worried about blog readers looking at my future video content. I probably won’t even mention future episodes of Badgerfriends on the blog. (Reader audiences tend to be quite different from video audiences, and my cursory examinations of this subject indicates that there is almost no overlap between the two. You all reading this probably have no idea whatsoever that I have eight years worth of videos on a YouTube channel.)

Day JobJust some more Java work. Nothing very exciting to report. Work has only been getting about 5% of my mental energy this month, with the other 95% going into my home projects.

World Context* I dunno. Stuff is going on I guess? Something about Kate Middleton? And Trump not having enough money to pay a fine? I wasn’t really paying attention this time. It’s nice. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 03/18* 09:07 # DALL-E is cool and all, but it really sucks at making things you can use to make other things. It has no clue what to do with things like “and make the background transparent or a green screen so I can change it later” and “make the face blank so I can change the expression later.” * 12:33 # It’s been almost two years now and I’m still getting comments on my Elden Ring input delay video that are either “you made this up lulz” or “omg this is definitely real” or some variation which is a long wall of text because people on the Internet like to explain things to strangers. * 17:35 # I have to admit I’m a little bit confused how anyone in Microsoft corporate HQ could think I would want my Surface Go tablet to have the same desktop icons as my gaming PC. My goal was to do a full full wipe and reset of this tablet to get it back to a blank state so it would run faster, which was somehow interpreted as “oh I guess he wants us to copy everything from his desktop Windows environment to this incredibly slow tablet!” * 22:13 # And after a short session tonight, I TPKed myself in what should have been an easy encounter. Whoopsie.

Tuesday 03/19* 12:22 # My interest in Lords of the Fallen has entirely evaporated into nothing, as I’m far more interested in finding out what’s going to happen to my simulated players in my simulated Phandelver and Below D&D game. One of them died after a natural 1 on a death saving throw, and the other two fell unconscious after freak goblin attack rolls, but I think I can work out a deus ex machina to introduce two new characters to rescue them and keep the story going a little bit longer. Sadly there are no revivify scrolls or stacks of healing potions on every character like there are in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Wednesday 03/20 08:44 # I’m trying to decide if I need to do another pass on my tabletop experiment videos to do an extreme cut on the amount of time spent in combat. The decision hinges on whether these videos are supposed to be an archive of my experiments or an entertaining product for a viewer who isn’t into ttrpgs. If the latter, you’d probably want to cut 90% of the ttrpg combat experience from a video. But I think I’m going to leave it as is, and not just because that would be several more hours in the video editor. I think these videos are meant to be more of a realistic portrayal of “what it’s really like” and a reminder of all the things I can do better in the future. * 16:59 # It’s a good day when you successfully put the coffee down on a table before* sneezing.

Thursday 03/21* 08:48 # I got a really nice email from someone saying they liked my YouTube videos but my level of jadedness in the Internet is at such a high level that I fully believe it’s some kind of scam. But on the off chance it’s not, thanks! That was really touching that someone took the time to write an email.

Friday 03/22* 12:41 # I wonder if all the D&D Actual Play shows and podcasts that do live shows are in the same boat with musicians. Meaning that musicians can write and record great songs and be popular on Spotify all day long but they have no choice but to do live shows and sell merch to actually make any money. The art itself is valueless to a consumer these days, the only value left is the potential to sell tickets to see the artist. * 14:39 # I was experimenting with NDI this morning, trying to broadcast my MacBook Pro screen to a Windows PC so I could record it in OBS. It worked. For what it’s worth. It’s always a shock when I see the name “NewTek” in a modern context. That’s a name from the past, from the heady days of Amigas and Video Toasters, when everyone thought they could break into Hollywood special effects from their living rooms.

Saturday 03/23* 09:32 # I love the treasure in these D&D adventure books. You spend hours and hours fighting through the goblin caves, and you get … 150 silver pieces! You face down a manticore and finally kill it after god knows how many rounds of tense combat… here, have a single healing potion! Definitely a “journey is the reward” kind of game hehe.

Sunday 03/24* 21:41 # I was looking for some Phandelver actual play shows, to see how level 1 characters could possibly survive this goblin cave, and I find myself in a sea of mid-tier actual play shows. They’re all like superfans of the top-tier actual play shows and they all keep saying the same catch phrases from the big shows over and over again. They’re not bad exactly, they’re just super average. Lots of room echo in the sound, the maps are kind of janky, overly aggressive theatrics in the role-playing, etc. etc. Also tons and tons of ads and selling merch heh. There’s this one I’m watching that has a heavy midwestern basement church group vibe, which is a weird vibe for a D&D group.

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I had a crazy idea. I have a lot of those. I live alone with two cats so I have no choice in the matter.

For quite a while, I’ve been wishing I could find a handful of tolerant and compatible tabletop players so I could try out DMing some games, and I’ve gotten no closer to my goal. (Part of the problem is that I’m terrified of talking to strangers and I haven’t actually put any work into that search, but I’m sure that’s unrelated.)

So this past weekend I decided to play a couple of mock D&D sessions by myself with the Phandelver and Below D&D adventure book. I picked that one because it’s relatively new and it’s set in the same Phandalin as the Dragon of Icespire Peak, which is the only other (modern) D&D adventure I’ve read. I imagined it would be similar to playing any number of CRPGs I’ve been playing lately.

And since I’m always on the hunt for more content to create, the lifeblood of the Internet, I recorded it all. The idea was to create something roughly as watchable as watching someone play a CRPG like Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but less predictable.

It’s just crazy enough to work. Maybe. Probably not actually. But hey, content is content.

The problem with DMing by yourself in D&D is that there’s no way to replicate the unpredictability of players, and 90% of the difficulty of DMing (or so I imagine it would be with me), is thinking on your feet and improvising responses to completely unpredictable player actions.

To mitigate that problem, I invented some tables to create random player actions based on the situation. That was the missing piece I needed to try this project. It’s possible this has been done before, but I haven’t seen anything like it, because most of the “solo ttrpg” projects I’ve seen are made to simulate the player experience instead of the DM experience.

So I rolled three level 1 characters on a Friday. I did the first one manually by rolling dice and looking at the books and writing down numbers on a piece of paper, something I haven’t done since the 80s. Then I did the other two with D&D Beyond because writing on paper is a lot less fun than I remember it. (I actually made four characters but I only used three to reduce my workload.)

D&D Beyond is an appalling money sink, by the way. Roll20, too. D&D is the modern golf: It’s exclusively for affluent upper class people who can afford to pay exorbitant subscriptions and buy truckloads of expensive accessories, mainly to show off how wealthy they are. Someday I’d like to find a tabletop system that’s a little less outrageously expensive to play. (There are plenty of alternatives–maybe I’ll try some if this project has any future–but D&D sucks every bit of the oxygen out of the heroic fantasy space.)Saturday morning I got up and just started doing it. It’s the rule of thumb with most creative projects: Just start and figure out what you did wrong later. I plugged in a couple of cameras, put on a headset, and hit the record button on OBS. (Over a year ago now, I setup a multicamera-ish profile and scenes in OBS so they were ready to go.)

I was immediately overwhelmed by trying to keep a hundred books, paper and pen, a laptop with my player action tables, and a PC browser with Roll20 and D&D Beyond tabs all open within reach in front of me. Not to mention rolling dice and interpreting the results. And being mindful of the recording and trying to mentally edit as I went. And trying to pretend it was “live” as if it was a real D&D session.

Anyway I recorded for about two hours on Saturday morning, and got through the introductory battle of the adventure. Then I spent the rest of the day editing it down to a little under an hour and obsessively fixating on everything I did wrong so I could avoid it next time. But I thought it went fairly well, considering I had no idea what I was doing and had never seen any kind of template to guide me in how a self-DMing video was supposed to look.

Episode One, The Goblin AmbushWith all of that preamble aside, I present the first episode of Nobody To Play With, the start of the epic saga of Badger the Dwarven Artficer, Brylee the Elven Warlock, and Sagrax the Dragonborn Barbarian–the Badgerfriends–and their epic quest to deliver supplies from Neverwinter to Phandalin. (All random names, by the way, except Badger.)

Badger, Brylee, and Sagrax, level 1 adventurers full of hope but not very many hit points or spells, have been hired by Gundren Rockseeker to escort a wagon of supplies from Neverwinter to Phandalin. It seemed like easy money, until they were ambushed by goblins on the road, one of the most classicest of D&D adventure beginnings. Two of them get knocked out. Will they survive the very first thing in the book?

As per usual with my videos, there’s no preamble, there’s no title cards, there’s no credits at the end, there’s no exhortations to like and subscribe. It just starts and then it ends, like all Internet content should.

P.S. It might be the last episode, too, depending on how deafening the silence is after I post this. In any case, it’s an unsustainable project long-term, so it’s not going to last forever without some major changes in production technique. (I’m not a particularly speedy video editor, so I could probably record 10 of these two-hour sessions for every one I manage to edit and publish.)

And history has taught me that at some point my initial hyper-enthusiasm is going to inevitably burn out when I think of some other fun new project to work on, or when the cold realization that literally nobody cares sinks in. The hope is that I’ll lose interest at a logical stopping point in the story instead of right in the middle of a cliffhanger.

In the meantime, it’s great fun for me.

Episode Two?Sunday morning I recorded another two-hour session, trying to incorporate some lessons learned (one of which was cleaning the stupid desk and, you know, brushing my hair a little bit), but that one didn’t go as well. Everything took longer than expected on the second day, since I was actively trying to fix things that were terrible on the first day.

There was no combat, so it was all travel and story and NPC interactions, which isn’t super easy to do by yourself. Combat is easy for me. Talking is hard. And I kept getting distracted trying to do things on Roll20, which is not a very intuitive product to use. It took forever to figure out how “fog of war” works.

In the end I recorded for well over two hours on Sunday, but I only ended up with about 30 minutes of usable video, most of which was me trying to think of things to say without having them written down in front of me, which is something my brain is not very good at doing. I’m utterly incapable of crafting a full sentence in my head. Everything I write or say is a trial and error, iterative sculpting process (like how AI works heh).

I would evaluate my DMing performance on Saturday as “okay but needs a lot of improvement,” while on Sunday it was “not that great and the players probably wouldn’t want to play anymore after that.” But hey, better to get it out of the way in harmless practice sessions.

Anyway I spent most all of the weekend in Davinci Resolve editing together the raw multicam-style videos into something that might be watchable, or at least listenable. (I usually edit all my videos for listeners more than viewers. Most YouTube content is “second screen” content, after all.)

By the way, I tried to search for “mock DM sessions” to see if anybody else had done anything like this, but all I found were stories of DMs mocking players. Internet stories about D&D are always bad.P.P.S. Since the weekend, I’ve recorded two more sessions, so there’s potentially four of these episodes. And at the risk of setting up unrealistic expectations, boy howdy do things take a turn for the dramatically unexpected at the end of the third session.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 03/11* 23:09 # In Lords of the Fallen, Judge Cleric has been defeated on night two. I haven’t counted the number of attempts yet but it was five ~25-40 minute recording sessions. In the end it was super easy. Just had to be 100% perfect and maintain perfect focus and concentration for the entire first phase and then the entire second phase. What could be simpler. (Also upgrading my dual-wield weapons to +9 and equipping a poison weapon helped too.) Then another skybeam appeared in the distance so I guess there’s a bit more to go and another intense boss fight to look forward to. (Actually I didn’t hate this boss fight. It was way better than any of the ones in Lies of P.)

Tuesday 03/12* 23:44 # Lightreaper down tonight, with the help of a bit of a bug that made him stop attacking me. Also the Iron Wanderer down, which was a steaming pile of garbage fight that made me extremely angry. Super laggy, no room to fight in, constantly stuck on the walls, view constantly blocked by massive fire effects in my face, crazy inexplicable hit boxes, excessive inescapable stunlock chains by the fire column attack. Needs another patch by the devs to make it, you know, not suck.

Wednesday 03/13* 19:29 # That new Daggerheart thing keeps saying to “mark a hope” as if that’s a normal thing to say that anyone can understand. Kids today and their new-fangled hipster lingo. I keep thinking I’m supposed to draw on someone named Hope.

Thursday 03/14* 20:02 # I just read about this thing called DC20. It seems inevitable that everyone and their cousin would try to market a new tabletop rpg rule system to replace D&D because it’s been going on since the 70s and that’s what always happens when one thing gets “too popular.” The problem is that there isn’t really that much wrong with D&D, except it’s owned by Wizards of the Coast. So everyone else has to be like “Get our new thing! It’s amazing! Well, honestly it’s the same, really, but you give your money to us instead of to WotC!” I guess there’s a certain percent of people who would find that a compelling sales pitch, but I can’t imagine it’s very high. Anyway DC20 didn’t bother putting a single page on their web site to describe it, and they want people to pay $10 for the PDF? I’m supposed to watch random YouTube influencers yelling sales pitches at me to learn a single thing about it? * 20:05 # Btw when I say “there isn’t that much wrong with D&D,” that obviously excludes that thing where everyone yells “Guidance!” or “I give the help action!” before anyone does literally anything. * 20:13 # I made the mistake of recording a couple of cat videos on my work iPhone, because I don’t remember why. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get those videos off of the iPhone, because corporate hq is sending me a hardware refresh and I’m going to have to send this one back. I’ve gotten the videos onto my work MacBook, but that doesn’t help very much because it’s a work MacBook and corporate IT tends to frown on letting people just copy files willy-nilly off of work MacBooks. I’ve managed to email the photos, but the videos are too big. It’s an ongoing drama of trying to rescue the cat videos.

Friday 03/15* 20:24 # I had an idea that I might make a D&D character on dndbeyond but then I noticed that it would cost me about $4,023 just to be able to select an Artificer class so then I didn’t. I’ve had this thought before: D&D is golf for nerds. It’s typically only approachable to the upper class who can afford to buy thousands of dollars of extra gear. * 20:30 # Speaking of ttrpgs, it’s a bit surprising to me that tabletop roleplaying systems are still sold like static books. It seems like it would be far better and more convenient for the players of the games to sell them as subscriptions to an interactive web site. (But not in a predatory way like dndbeyond, obviously.) Or even installable applications, through a storefront like Steam.

Sunday 03/17* 21:51 # I’ve spent a majority of the weekend working on a weird project that I currently think is pretty cool and has definite promise but I’ll probably be extremely embarrassed about in a few days. I took the Phandelver and Below D&D adventure book and recorded two 2-hour sessions of playing D&D by myself. Lessons have been learned about the complex juggling act of having 50 books, multiple web sites, a laptop, a PC, dice, and about a million other things all happening at the same time.

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Whoops, 15 days have passed already, and Daylight Savings Time started. It’s over 80 degrees outside as I’m typing this, which is a pretty early Spring. I don’t have a problem with this, because it means I can end my winter hibernation period. For the second winter in a row, it didn’t snow very much and rarely got below 20 degrees outside.

I’m remembering that there’s a total solar eclipse happening in the U.S. in about a month, and I swore to myself back in 2017 that I was going to go experience the spectacle of it within the path of totality, because it would probably be the last time I would have a chance to do so in my lifetime, and I haven’t made any plans for that. I’d have to drive a few states away to see it, which is a pretty daunting prospect to do by myself.

GamingDLC for Elden Ring has been announced. I’m not going to pre-order it, to send a powerful message to our corporate overlords that they went way too far with some of the later boss fights in Elden Ring. DLC boss fights in From Software games are usually harder than the base game, too.

Lords of the FallenLords of the Fallen is still my main every-day game. I had a realization one day that completing a Souls-like game is like completing a digital obstacle course. It’s less about consuming a story and more about meeting and overcoming the obstacles that are trying to stop you from getting to the end. I was really into the idea of obstacle courses as a kid (although I don’t think I’ve ever actually done one in my entire life), so maybe that’s one reason why I keep playing Souls-like games.

I still like Lords of the Fallen a lot better than Lies of P. Don’t get me wrong, it’s less polished and kind of early access-ish, especially toward the end, but it feels like more of an earnest attempt at a Souls-like. Lies of P felt like a well-polished attempt to almost literally copy-and-paste a Souls game, but they misguidedly leaned hard into the bits that piss people off, thinking that’s what people like about Souls games.

Lords of the Fallen has plenty of annoying parts, too. Almost every minor boss you encounter will become a regular enemy later on. And they hang out in groups (hey look, it’s a series of Gentle Gavaruses and Scourge Sisters all together, AND an Abbess shooting laser beams at you the entire time - good luck exploring that area). If former-bosses weren’t bad enough, your pathways will be littered with groups of dogs and archers to harrass you with random damage and stuns every step of the way, to say nothing of the continuously-spawning stuff that appears if you enter Umbral space by accident or on purpose. There isn’t much opportunity for exploration or finding secrets, when you’re fighting or running for your life 24/7. Toward the end of the game, I pretty much just run past everything to get to the next checkpoint. Hope I didn’t miss anything good, because every NPC side quest is being ignored by me.

These are problems that I chalk up to inexperience or miscalculations, though. From the patch notes, you can tell they are fixing these things. There’s a lot of “tuned enemy placement” and “optimized that area” notes. (There was an area near the Memorial Vestige that was frickin’ ridiculous that I went back to later and found it perfectly reasonable.) Compare and contrast with Lies of P, where the problems are deliberately calculated to be exactly as annoying as they are, and they aren’t changing it.

Anyway, I’m trying to finish the game before Dragon’s Dogma 2 launches in the 22nd, which is expected to be my next everyday game.

Nioh ReplayI haven’t (re-)played much of Nioh lately, but I sailed to the second zone and killed the big Centipede thingy, which was a boss that didn’t stick in my memory from the original playthrough as complete garbage, but it was sort of a long, loud gimmick fight.

I think next is the mission with the Big Watery Blog Thing which is supposed to be a terrifying monster in Japenese mythology, but I immediately identified as a comical Shmoo. And no, I don’t know why I know what a Li’l Abner comic invention from 1948 is. I can only guess that it’s something my parents mentioned at some point in my childhood. It was apparently referenced in a Simpsons episode, so maybe that’s how it entered my brain.

Sons of The ForestWith all the talk of survival-ish games, I loaded up Sons of the Forest again, which has spent a year in early access. Like The Forest before it, it’s biggest claim to fame is that it’s absolutely gorgeous and thoroughly immersive. The survival components are a bit opaque (I had to Google how to build a fire), and the story, if there is one, is rather difficult to find, but it’s very relaxing to just stand by a river watching the trees sway back and forth. I mean, until the cannibals get you, of course.

Minecraft on PS5I got Minecraft on the PS5. I don’t know how to play Minecraft and I don’t understand where to find the fun in it. There are 50 bazillion mods and addons available in the Marketplace. I wondered if there was a documentary out there somewhere about the life of someone who makes and sells mods for Minecraft, and what that world is like.

Media ProductionI noticed that YouTube is absolutely destroying the quality of all the videos I upload, after I’ve painstakingly spent years fine-tuning encoding settings for the best possible visual quality. I’ve been uploading the highest quality renders to YouTube, which are roughly twice the size of the videos that I retain and archive for myself. All to no avail. When the videos leave my computer, they’re beautifully rendered. When you see them on YouTube, they’re a blocky distorted mess. Thanks YouTube.

At some point I’ll be switching to 1440p videos. That’s the resolution I play in, but I usually record at 1080p. Well, no more. I read somewhere that YouTube uses a higher bitrate when it re-encodes 1440p videos, and I did some tests that seem to confirm that.

Lately I’ve been editing a bunch of raw, repetitive boss fight videos in Davinci Resolve to condense them down into something watchable. You can only provide scintillating commentary for the first two or three attempts. After that you have to leave a lot on the cutting room floor, or find creative ways to splice things together. Anyway, I made a playlist of just my boss fight videos, because they’re the ones I spend the most time on.

TelevisionContinuing Dimension 20 Fantasy High Junior Year. I re-watched Dimension 20 Escape from the Bloodkeep, which is one of the best of their campaigns.

I found the Viva La Dirt League NPC D&D shows. I generally like VLDL videos (the older ones are better though). But there has never been a D&D Actual Play series that is more of a “jumping on the bandwagon” type of video series than this. The first arc has a huge “we’re doing this because this is popular content on YouTube and not because we like playing D&D or anything” vibe to it. It’s got a dudes in a college frat house vibe to it. Tons of talking over each other. Lots of hyper awareness that they’re recording it so they’re performing for the cameras. A big disconnect between how serious the DM is taking it versus how serious the players are taking it. If I were in the same room with those dudes, I’d have a headache and be out of daily energy in like 5 minutes. Maybe it gets better later on.

Watched a bit of the new Critical Role Daggerheart stuff. I have no opinion about the rule system. On the surface, it sounded kind of gimmicky. “Narrative-forward” sounds like “this is for making entertainment content, not for playing games.” It’s difficult not to think of it as a cynical business ploy to avoid having to use (and tacitly endorse) licensed material in their content, which is exactly what I’d do, too, if I were a media empire that had grown far bigger than their origins.

Day JobI did what turned out to be very simple Python work. It went a lot faster than expected, so I didn’t have a lot to do this sprint. With the extra down time, I did some experiments with different Java unit tests. Unit testing ORM code is kind of a slog, and it would be nice to find a way to make it easier.

World Context* The Supreme Court overruled Colorodo’s decision to remove Trump from its state primary ballot, prompting all sides to claim victory. * Super Tuesday happened, and the outcome was exactly as expected, and it didn’t matter, because everyone knows who’s going to win the nominations, and most people already know how they’re going to vote in November, which is terrible news for the news industry. * Nikki Haley, the last remaining Republican alternate, suspended her candidacy. When asked about her future plans, she said she was considering applying for Taylor Swift’s job. * The House of Representatives voted to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or be “banned.” How the Senate will vote, or what a “ban” actually looks like has yet to be determined. In my day, the thought of a government banning a web site was laughable. Now, thanks to all you kids being addicted to your locked-in phone ecosystems, it’s more feasible. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).

Bye!

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Monday 03/04* 08:42 # Another problem with Lords of the Fallen is that, where I’m at in the game, I can’t upgrade any weapons beyond +5. Tier 1 and 2 upgrade stones are infinite (as long as you farm for souls), but the tier 3 upgrade materials to upgrade weapons up to +8 are extremely rare, so I’m stuck with the one +8 weapon I picked first, and I can’t switch to any of the other weapons that keep raining like candy down on me all over the place because they’re all underpowered at +5. The stats are weird in this game in general. There’s not much difference in power from the beginning of the game to the middle of the game. Pumping tons of points into your health stat doesn’t increase your health much. Damage numbers don’t go up very much. Things like that. It’s very un-Souls-like. In Souls games, level up stat changes make very noticable differences in gameplay. Not so much in Lords of the Fallen. * 09:37 # I’ve just noticed that the video encoding on my YouTube uploads isn’t very good. Can’t tell if it’s me or YouTube. Trying a different encoding process in the script. (I was using nvenc which is gpu-based and faster but now I’m going back to libx264 which is cpu-based and slower but visually better.) * 19:04 # It would be nice if Enshrouded didn’t compute shaders for six hours every time you launch it, so I wouldn’t immediately think of something else to do instead.

Tuesday 03/05* 09:01 # With all the talk of survival games this year, I went back and installed Sons of the Forest. It’s nice to see a survival game that looks polished and complete, as opposed to all these minimum viable products like Nightingale. It has such a bizarre UI for interacting with the world though. You pretty much have to Google how to build a fire. Much like The Forest before it, it’s such a beautifully rendered forest environment that you just kind of want to sit around looking at the scenery.

Wednesday 03/06* 09:00 # Late last night I ran into Tancred, Master of Castigations in Lords of the Fallen, which I have to assume is the guardian of the fourth skybeam. I concluded it would be a nightmare fight and left it unfinished, to work on it another day. That day being today, probably. Finally I’m seeing enough tier 3 weapon upgrade materials to upgrade another weapon beyond +5. I have chosen the Beast Axe, which is indeed a beast of an axe for dual-wielding. So much so that I assume it will get nerfed in a future patch. * 09:06 # I’m rather appalled at what YouTube is doing to the quality of the videos I’m uploading. Even after changing my ffmpeg settings from nvenc to libx264. These game videos look gorgeous when they leave my computer but they turn into blocky garbage on YouTube. So much for using YouTube as a backup service. I’ve done some reading and apparently the fix for this is to upscale 1080p videos to 1440p to trick YouTube into using a higher bitrate when it re-renders your videos to try to destroy them. I might experiment with recording the videos at 1440p to start with. That’s the resolution I play in anyway.

Thursday 03/07* 21:32 # Got through Tancred in Lords of the Fallen tonight, on the third night. Wasn’t really complicated, just had a hard time maintaining the intense focused concentration necessary to get every dodge exactly right and avoid excessive mistakes, so it took like 30 tries over 3 days. In the end I somehow got through 90% of the entire second phase without any healing. Was expecting to cleanse the fourth skybeam afterward, but the boss room seems to be a dead end. Confused.

Friday 03/08 09:22 # I did indeed get the Dragon’s Dogma 2 character creator and immediately made an old lady and an old man character for heroic fantasy adventures. It’s one of the best combinations of a deep character creator with a zillion sliders (the bad old antiquated kind) with a just-click-some-buttons-and-get-me-in- the-game character creator (the hip new good kind) I’ve seen yet. And tons of kudos for having the option to make characters that are, you know, characters*, and not just genetically engineered teenagers. * 09:38 # Still annoyed at how bad my videos look on YouTube. I’ve tried tinkering with my encoding settings before uploading to YouTube. I don’t think it matters. YouTube re-encodes whatever you upload and turns it into garbage no matter what. That’s one of the only things I liked about Twitch. It doesn’t re-encode your videos. Or at least it didn’t used to. Sadly it doesn’t matter because Twitch deletes your videos after a while. Anyway I read a rumor that upscaling to 1440 would force YouTube to use better re-encoding settings so I’ll try that next. * 09:44 # Still looking for that elusive YouTube alternate video hosting solution that doesn’t, you know, suck. Or cost a fortune. Looked at self-hosting with some open source solutions but the storage space requirements to hold some 2+ TB of video files every year are somewhat cost prohibitive. Well, not that, but it would be insane to spend any amount of money more than zero for what is essentially a completely worthless project to increase the quality of my online videos.

Saturday 03/09* 09:50 # Last night’s video uploads were upscaled to 1440 and they do look less blocky to my eye. However when I compared them to the previous videos, the 1080 ones looked less blocky too. I wonder if YouTube does multiple passes of re- encoding on uploads, one that’s immediate but looks terrible, one that takes a day or two but looks better. I dunno. It’s inscrutable. * 11:16 # I’ve seen a few of the negative reviews on Steam for Lords of the Fallen saying things like “the runbacks were awful” and I can’t help but wonder if those people somehow missed the Vestige Seed mechanic that lets you plant a checkpoint pretty much wherever you want. Running back from every major Vestige would definitely be ridiculous and way harder than the original Dark Souls. But I’ve never had to do that. With the Vestige Seeds I respawn pretty much right outside the boss fight area and run back in seconds. Maybe that was something they added after launch. It does seem like they launched the game in a somewhat unfinished state.

Sunday 03/10* 11:09 # I’m working on the fifth beacon area in Lords of the Fallen, the Abbey of Something Something, and my strategy now whenever I encounter one of the extremely frequent parts that are “here’s a former boss paired with another former boss and a couple of dogs and archers thrown in just for fun” is to just run past it to the next place I can put down a Vestige Seed. They really just kind of phoned in the enemy placements toward the end of the game. Really feels like they launched the game about a year and half early, before they did any, like, you know, playtesting. Still, I don’t regret playing it. Still way more fun than Lies of P. * 11:16 # Speaking of Lies of P, I had an idea to replay the game and try the bosses solo instead of summoning the Spectre all the time, to see if maybe I was a little unfair in saying every boss fight was an arduous chore and not even a little bit fun. Turns out, I was exactly right in my evaluation. Every boss fight so far: Not fun. Even less fun solo. Every boss attack in every boss’s moveset is a trick, a fake out, shaky arm movements you can’t read, a backward swing, a long windup followed by a super fast strike, fury attacks that always seem to appear right when you’re low on health, etc. etc. Just constant player trolling. The only way to play Lies of P is to hate-play it. * 13:28 # You know that feeling when you look at how many hours you’ve played an MMORPG and feel bad about your life choices? Well I just went through all my videos on YouTube to pick out the the boss fight videos to put into a playlist and there are almost 3,000 videos on my channel. * 17:27 # Well it took me 35 minutes just to get through the first phase of Judge Cleric in Lords of the Fallen, which doesn’t really bode well for the entirely predictable surprise second phase, in which I died in seconds. Sigh. Another excessively long boss fight I’m going to have to load into a video editor and work on later. That’s why I made a playlist for them. Because I put more work into boss fight videos than any other ones on my channel.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Spoilers below for Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, under the Moonrise Tower.

07:50 # Looking like Hurricane Lee is going to hit Canada instead of the East Coast. I was worried because at first it looked like it might follow the same track as Isabel in 2003 which hit North Carolina and then went right over my house and knocked out power for 10 days. #weather

22:52 # Baldur’s Gate 3. It took 2.5 hrs but the rematch against Myrkul was a success on Tactician difficulty. It could not possibly have been a closer photo finish. Two of the party were down. Myrkul only had 7 hit points left (out of 297), and was about to strike down someone with a Finger of Death. But it was on fire, set by a summoned elemental a few rounds previous. At the start of its turn, the fire damage from the burning condition did just enough damage to kill it before what could have been a TPK. A wild ride. Exhausting. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Spoilers below from Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, under the Moonrise Tower.

21:42 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I went wandering all around the rest of the Mindflayer Colony and stumbled into another fight with a zillion undead and one of the dreaded Death Shepherds. (Thankfully only one of them.) It was a pretty hairy fight but a clutch Fire Wall from Gale saved the party (well, it saved all but the one who was dead already) as wave after wave of zombies walked into it and died. It appears there’s no camping and no way out of this area until or unless you go to the final encounter, which was rather daunting last time. Fortunately I discovered that the Restoration Pods restore not only hit points, but all of your spell slots, too, so I can tackle that crazy fight with a fresh party for a change. Going to try once more on Tactician, then try on Balanced, then just do it on Explorer. I’m getting tired of not being finished with this game and there’s still a whole other Act to go. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, in and under the Moonrise Tower.

08:38 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night after five TPKs at the Moonrise Tower, on the sixth try, with Shadowheart the only surviving party member, she ran out into the Shadow Cursed areas and all the enemies followed her until they died from the curse and turned into undead with half their hit points. Then she doubled back and killed a handful 1-on-1, returned to where the rest of the party died, revivified them, then the party was able to take out the rest of the enemies. A weird improvised strategy but it worked. #baldursgate3

20:41 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Ugh. Well I’ve said this before but I think I’m done with Tactician difficulty again, after going down that elevator to meet the Apostle of Myrkul. You really have no sense of knowing whether you’re in the right place or not when you enter a big story moment or a fight in this game, and on Tactician difficulty if you’re underleveled or unprepared, it’s a pretty disheartening experience to have most of your party downed or incapacitated in 1 or 2 rounds. The fact that damage always outpaces healing by a large margin is also pretty irritating. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Possible spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 2, Shadowfell and Moonrise Towers.

16:16 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I think I’m finished wandering around the Shadow Cursed Lands looking for loose ends, so I’m finally ready to return to the Shadowfell at the end of the Gauntlet of Shar. I successfully reached my goal of getting to level 8, in the hope that things might go a little better than they did at level 6. Fingers crossed. #baldursgate3

19:56 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Well things didn’t go anything like I expected in the Shadowfell and there was no fight at all. Now there’s a fight at Moonrise Tower that seems way worse than what I expected to happen in the Shadowfell, all because of one stupid Black Hole spell. Grr. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

12:28 # I keep hearing about raging toxic controversy about Starfield and I’ve seen exactly none of it. I recommend not reading that stuff. As a general rule of thumb, I find that it’s always a mistake to visit any dedicated online forums or communities surrounding any game. It’s been a rule for me for, like, 10 years now?

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers for Act 2, Gauntlet of Shar.

08:21 # I’ve played over a hundred hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 now and I only just realized that when the minimap mysteriously turns red and scary, that only means you can’t pop back to the pocket camp dimension in that area. #baldursgate3

13:00 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Thinking about how to tackle level 10 Yurgir with my level 7 party when I return to the Gauntlet of Shar. Have a few spell and strategy ideas based on what I learned from the previous 5 miserable failures. I think I’m going to go in with a party of cannon fodder hirelings to try to thin down the number of enemy adds, then return with the real party for a second wave. “Your mission is to sacrifice yourselves so that the real heroes can survive, any questions?” #baldursgate3

23:08 # Baldur’s Gate 3. The assault on Yurgir was successful, but it took 3 waves. First, the cannon fodder hireling wave, which killed the Displacer Beast and two Merregons before Tavi fled, then the regular party wave, which killed the rest of the Merregons before fleeing, then the final wave against Yurgir himself, which took a couple tries. Then the party got killed by rats. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Possible Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers below.

08:05 # Yesterday I switched from Balanced difficulty back to Tactician difficulty. The fights on Balanced difficulty are still interesting, but I never really felt like I might lose, and without any fear of losing a fight, there’s not much fun in winning a fight. I lost all my emotional investment, and they turned into time-consuming rote exercises. #baldursgate3

22:04 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I fear I may have run out of XP-generating loose ends before I have to go back to the Gauntlet of Shar and the Shadowfell, still well short of level 8. There aren’t a lot of grinding-for-XP options in BG3. Tonight I’ve been finishing off every living thing in the Githyanki Creche after collecting the Blood of Lathander. Oh wait, the Tollhouse. Haven’t been there yet. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Possible Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers below.

06:21 # Baldur’s Gate 3. It turned out the Revivify scrolls didn’t work. Nothing I did could get Gale and Shadowheart to resurrect in a way that they could leave camp or leave the party, so I had to reload and replay about 6 hours of the game. #baldursgate3

06:23 # Up early to go to an early dentist appointment, making up for the appointment I missed last Thursday because of traffic. Starting off the first day back at work after a week off and a holiday weekend by driving into the city in rush hour traffic, good fun. #health

17:51 # Back at work after a week off. It was fine. But yeah. You can kind of see why people don’t want to have to work for a living. #dayjob

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Possible Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers below.

07:35 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Yesterday was the buggiest day yet in Baldur’s Gate 3. For reasons, I ended up getting killed by guards in Moonrise Tower Prison, but instead of dying, I got thrown into prison with 1 hit point left, but Karlach teleported to camp instead of the cell. Then the guards attacked us inside the cell, but Tavi jumped down a hole and escaped while Gale and ~~Karlach~~ Shadowheart died in the cell. It led to a fun so solo adventure escaping the prison and all, but now my game is in this weird state where I can’t get Gale and Shadowheart back in the party again. They won’t leave camp. Might have to reload from way, way, way far back and I don’t want to. Arg. #baldursgate3

10:16 # Oh huh I forgot to write anything here yesterday. My script kept saying “no posts” and I was like wuuuuut but then I was like oh, I get it. Ya know?

10:27 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Ah ha, it turns out if I use Revivify scrolls to resurrect Gale and Shadowheart in camp, they are able to leave camp and join the party normally. But if I use Withers to resurrect them, they end up all buggy and weird and can’t leave camp or leave the party. Weird bug. #baldursgate3

[P.S. The Revivify scrolls actually didn’t work. I had to reload an older game from about 6 hours earlier because my save file was borked and nothing I did could successfully resurrect Gale and Shadowheart in a way where they could leave camp or leave the party.]

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This will be very short. I played Starfield for a little over an hour and then returned it. It’s a wait-for-a-sale game, in the same bucket with most all of the Assassin’s Creed games.

It’s pretty, and they’ve improved on the improvements they made in Fallout 4, but it’s nothing special. Just an ordinary, do-the-same-things-again, take-no-chances, factory-produced AAA game, like any other you can buy these days. It’s somewhat strange that it took them eight years to make this, when other studios can slam these things out the door just about every year.

I’ll start with some things I liked. I loved that the player’s character isn’t voiced, which is an absolute delight for anyone who makes videos or streams these games. I wish more AAA games would abandon the idea of voicing the player’s character, or at least provide an option to turn it off. I hate that my character talks with their own voice actor in Baldur’s Gate 3 when I click on them.

I also really enjoyed that I could make a character who looked like a frumpy, balding old man who has no business being in any kind of heroic story. Hilarious stuff. More games should allow that. Every character in Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, looks like a genetically-engineered, unrealistically-beautiful porn star.

I liked that there was a third-person camera option if you mousewheel out, with different distances, kind of. Would have preferred a little more control there, like every MMORPG, but it was certainly better than a first-person view, and an improvement on Fallout 4.

Now for the rest.

It’s yet another game where the NPCs deliver main story dialog while they’re walking around, but if your character is too far away, looking at all the interesting stuff they put in the environment, for example, you can’t hear what they’re saying. So you have to stick to their backs like glue while the NPCs walk around, jogging-stopping-jogging-stopping, because they walk way slower than your character does, while you listen to their dialog. It’s the most annoying thing that’s ever been introduced into video game engines, and developers just keep doing it over and over and over again. Just stop, okay? Make main story dialog front and center, all the time, so I can listen to it while I’m walking around other places. Yeesh. It’s been decades I think. Why doesn’t anyone else hate that and want to fix it?

That wouldn’t keep me from playing the game, though.

After the introduction and the character creation, there was a short little fight. Starfield has the same first-person shooter feeling that Fallout 4 did: You can make it work, but, as with every previous Bethesda game, you can tell this game was made by RPG developers and not shooter developers. It just feels awkward and unnatural. Most Bethesda games feel that way. Nothing new or unusual there.

It ran rather badly on my GeForce 3070 gaming PC with the default settings (I think it was “High”). But I think that’s because I installed it on a hard drive instead of an SSD. (A lot of AAA games in 2023 are moving to passively, if not openly, requiring an SSD.) It turned into a slideshow many times in that first combat encounter, but it never crashed.

That also wouldn’t deter me from playing the game.

After the little fight on the surface, you leave the starting planet or asteroid or whatever it was, and you fly a ship, and then have to fight some space pirates or something. This is where the game pretty much lost me completely.

I hate space combat in video games. It’s always the same: You fly toward the enemy ship, they fly toward you, you fill them full of space bullets or space missiles, depending on which mouse button you pick. You fly past each other, then you have to drag the mouse hard to turn around and find them again. Repeat many times. You have to wait for their space shields to deplete before you can really kill the enemy. Maybe you lock onto them with your space target lock and fire a space homing missile. Then you repeat the cycle fifty thousand times. It’s dueling yo-yos in space, constantly tracing these stretched ellipses around each other. I hate it. I didn’t need or want space combat in an RPG. Hopefully it’s entirely optional and entirely skippable because, as previously indicated, I hate space combat in video games.

But it’s part of the Starfield package, I suppose, and even that wouldn’t deter me from playing the game.

The biggest problem I found with Starfield was that I wished I was playing Baldur’s Gate 3 the whole time I was playing Starfield. It just … wasn’t interesting. It’s just another Bethesda game. They’ve spent eight years making the same game again, which is not a terrible idea for business reasons, of course, because gamers traditionally love to play the same games again and again and again.

But for me, they created a game that I’ve already played many, many times before, and the gaming demographic I belong to is not enthralled by games that don’t spark my imagination or break any envelopes or new ground. And for some inexplicable reason they focused on adding space combat and procedural worlds instead of a better first-person combat system, or a better conversation camera.

Ah well. It is what it is.

I saw enough to know I wasn’t missing anything by waiting. I’ll buy it in a sale a year from now, or maybe it will become the new Red Dead Redemption 2, which has actually been on my wishlist and on sale for roughly ten consecutive years, but I’ve never bought it and have never felt like I’m missing anything.

Incidentally, I didn’t find Skyrim all that interesting either. I played it a single time, sticking to the main story, which I don’t think took very long to finish. At present, I have no memory of–something about dragons? Anyway, I’ve never played it since. I never installed any mods and I didn’t do any side missions.

(I did install the Enhanced Edition once with an eye toward replaying it, but never actually followed through with that. The beginning of Skyrim isn’t very interesting, either, and I’ve never really loved the Elder Scrolls knock-off worldbuilding or their knock-off RPG rules. Also, sword combat in a first-person game was and still remains a pretty terrible idea, but they stubbornly stuck with it from Morrowind to Oblivion to Skyrim.)

I did like Fallout 4 a lot, though.

I felt like the narrative conversation views in Fallout 4 were a lot better than what I saw in Starfield. Bethesda regressed from the superior, industry standard “over-the-shoulder” camera views in conversations, the immersive style we’re all used to seeing in every television show and movie, back to Oblivion’s original, straight-on face camera, like you’re looking at every NPC in the game through a Facetime chat over a phone, except the phone camera is a mile away and using a telephoto lens that creates intense depth-of-field, much, much farther away than where your character is actually standing. It looks very … video gamey, and dated, and unrealistic. Seemed like an odd design decision to me for an RPG that’s supposed to be immersive. I don’t know why nobody else notices these things, but I wish I didn’t notice them.

That might also be a Me Problem though. For various brain reasons that I’m sure a certain small percentage of the population understands but nobody else does, eye contact has unnerved me my whole life, and every NPC looks like they’re staring you right in the eyes, boring into your soul. They never look away like a normal person. Just staring right at you, all the time. Super creepy.

And one other thing I couldn’t unsee: I noticed everybody had exaggerated and slightly slow-moving blink animations, which was the same weird-looking effect that Mass Effect Andromeda had. Everybody’s eyes looked unnatural and distracting, like everyone was a lizard in disguise.

Anyway, those were my impressions. Probably a fine game, worth the purchase, delivering exactly the comfort food most people want. It’s just not particularly noteworthy or interesting to me, a gamer who thrives on the new and different and innovative and risky and exciting. It wasn’t any of those things in the first hour, at least, which you’d think woudld be where they would put all those things.

Starfield is easily saved for a rainy day when there aren’t any other games to play.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Potential spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, in the area of the Last Light Inn.

10:15 # I just saw that Astarion is getting added to Idle Champions. Can we at least agree that Astarion shouldn’t be the primary mascot for Baldur’s Gate 3? I mean… everybody agrees he’s the most annoying companion, right? I’d rank every other companion above him. Even Lae’zel, who is also pretty annoying. Ah well. Different strokes I guess. #baldursgate3

13:57 # Baldur’s Gate 3. So I’ve officially reduced the difficulty on my playthrough from Tactician to Balanced to preserve some of my sanity. Still challenging, but a lot less unfair. I kind of regret it, but I think Tactician is more suited to a playthrough where you know what to expect in each fight beforehand. I’m now going to go to all the places I walked past in the Shadow Cursed Lands, now that I can see how hard the fights are at the end of the Gauntlet of Shar. Reached level 7, so now I have four party members with a level 4 spell, but otherwise seems like a pretty lame level up from 6 to 7. I even used the Adamantine Sword, which I didn’t expect to ever use, so I guess the stupid Grym fight was worthwhile after all. #baldursgate3

16:48 # And now we play the “was that a harmless creeper vine or was it dangerous poison ivy that will ruin my life for over a week” waiting game. #homeowner

22:10 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Big stuff just went down in Baldur’s Gate 3. Had a lot of the same vibes as The Great Massacre at The Grove. Pros: Met a companion from the first game. Cons: They died really fast. I’m not a good spy. I’m starting to suspect the Dream Guardian Lady doesn’t have my best interests at heart, and is just set on destroying anyone or anything to get what she wants. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, in the Gauntlet of Shar, below.

10:05 # So my first hour in Starfield was, um, not impressive. For one thing, it runs quite poorly if you install it on an HDD, which I guess is just the standard now. For another thing, the first hour is kind of bland, and felt like playing a really old Bethesda game papered over with modern graphics. Also ugh I’ve never liked the cyclic yo-yo flybys of video game space combat. In other words, I saw nothing to keep me from putting all my free time into finishing Baldur’s Gate 3. Considering returning it and waiting for a sale. #starfield #baldursgate3

12:24 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Yay Shadowheart has finally gotten her hands on the Dark Justiciar Spear. 3 of the 4 party members have 1 hit point, there are no short rests remaining, and I don’t have enough camp supplies for a long rest. Good times! #baldursgate3

18:26 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I got the fourth Umbral Gem. Little did I know it was hiding in plain sight back at the beginning of the Gauntlet in that one direction I didn’t go. I had to steal it. That fight was cray-cray-donkulous, in the immortal words of Francine from American Dad. Raphael’s going to have to wait for his revenge or whatever. I don’t like the encounter designs where you don’t know what’s going to happen until after you encounter it, then have to reload. #baldursgate3

20:19 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Ugh well that’s two encounters in a row now where my level 6 party gets roflstomped on Tactician difficulty. Super frustrating. Might be time to switch to Explorer difficulty just to finish the story, because these fights are getting ridiculous now. So unfair and outmatched, there’s like 15 enemies, the whole party goes down in like 2 rounds. It’s one thing to play a challenging encounter, but it’s another thing entirely when it doesn’t even look possible to win a fight without using cheat codes or just reading somebody’s wiki. #baldursgate3

00:45 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Yeah I think I’m done with Tactician difficulty after tonight. Frickin Yurgir was impossibly unfair, Balthazar was impossibly unfair, and it took me 2.5 hours of intensive save scumming to beat the Adamantine Forge monstrosity which was, you guessed it, impossibly unfair. It’s not even the slightest bit fun to win a fight like that. It’s just a tedious slog. Very disheartening. Shouldn’t have returned Starfield. :) #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Some spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, the Gauntlet of Shar.

11:18 # I’ve wanted to make animated shorts for a long time, and I think I finally had a good story idea. Now I just need to write a script, record all the dialog, write some music for it, figure out how to make animations, figure out how to do lip sync, and turn it all into a short video. Simple. If the South Park guys can do it, surely I can too. (It’s, um, still a long-term goal.) #videos

11:31 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve gone through Shar’s Gauntlet and reached the room where Balthazar is in Baldur’s Gate 3, but I haven’t entered it yet. It’s a name I’ve heard come up a few times, so I’m a little wary of what might happen in that room. He’s level 8, his pals are level 7, and my party is only level 6. #baldursgate3

15:59 # The good news is I didn’t have to see the dentist today, the bad news is I was stuck in traffic for like an hour and a half. And the more bad news is now I have to get up first thing Tuesday to see the dentist. #health

16:01 # Incidentally, it’s been pretty breezy today from the remnants of the hurricane, but it went off the coast and hasn’t really affected my area. Just partly cloudy and breezy. #weather

22:31 # Starfield seems to be unlocking. It takes longer to “unpack” a preloaded game on Steam than it does to download it. #starfield

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Blaugust Retrospective

Blaugust is over. It was what it was. I’ll leave future historians to judge how I did.

I put in the minimum amount of work that is possible to do, and it didn’t consume very much extra free time, so I don’t feel like I was “working overtime” at any point (except for a couple of posts that reminded me why I wouldn’t write and publish blog posts every day without a living wage), or feel burned out in the slightest. So in that sense, it was pretty successful.

I count some 35,000 words of original blog-related writing during the August time frame, including Blaugust posts and the Baldur’s Gate 3 story-so-far page, and 40 RSS feed entries during the month of August, including this one.

Gaming

I haven’t played anything but Baldur’s Gate 3*, every weeknight, and every weekend, since my last post. As of this posting, I’m in the Shadow-Cursed Lands in Act 2, heading north from the Moonrise Tower to find Balthazar.

I won’t belabor it here, since I’ve written about it extensively in daily microblogging bits, and, of course, there is the developing story over on the progress page, which is now over 10,000 words long.

I really enjoy how every combat encounter on Tactician difficulty is a deeply engaging intellectual chess match of man versus computer. (Well, man versus computer and bugs.) The D&D 5E combat rules are well-suited for use in video games. It’s way better than X-COM, for example. (But still, the UI and ruleset isn’t as good as Solasta: Crown of the Magister. However, there’s a lot more variety to the encounters in BG3.)

In other news, I pre-ordered the collector’s edition of Starfield, so I could play a few hours of early access time during my Labor Day vacation. I don’t expect it to displace Baldur’s Gate 3, though, so it’s entirely possible, if the game is just high-quality graphics papering over a mediocre or recycled game (the standard AAA game model), that I’ll end up playing just those few hours and never play it again. I rather hope not, though.

Armored Core VI launched recently, a game that caused some buzz. It’s another From Software game–I believe the first since Elden Ring–but this one is more of an arcade mech fighting game. It looks cool but it’s not my kind of game. Maybe I’ll get it someday in a sale.

* Oh, I take it back, I did launch Stray Gods: The Role-Playing Music a second time one night, and got to another song. The voice lines are recorded weird. Like there’s no compression on them at all. Big dynamic range, always varying between too loud and too quiet.

Microblogging

I’m not sure what I think of my microblogging solution yet. I like it, but I also don’t like it. It’s going to become too much of a burden to maintain unless I think of ways to automate committing those posts to git without manual intervention. But I still have to manually set the tags and a summary. Post-Blaugust it’s likely to change, perhaps even moving to a weekly cadence.

Video Production

I had an idea that I might make edited videos of the combat encounters I’ve been having in Baldur’s Gate 3, cut out all the boring parts where I sit around thinking about my next move, and tighten it up into a concise, exciting, thrill-a-minute … um, thrill ride. The idea isn’t without merit, it’s just tedious and it quickly became not-fun. Sitting in front of a video editor for hours on end to tighten up a long series of 30-minute videos is a paid, full-time position, not a hobby.

Otherwise, my automated uploading script ran out of Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos to upload in its first batch, and it was dormant for a while, but I finally started the second batch of videos uploading, for the … (checks notes) … nobody waiting for those.

I’m also considering uploading Baldur’s Gate 3 videos. It’s less cut scene-heavy than I expected it would be, and a significant portion of video time is devoted to the combat encounters and tactical decisions that are unique to my playthrough.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Huh. Remember when that was the best turn-based RPG around and I was completely focused on playing it? It seems so long ago.

Nutrition

I completely fell off the wagon with good nutrition habits. There was one weekend where I just couldn’t be bothered to think about the stuff I needed to buy at the store to make decent food, so I just grabbed a bunch of pre-packaged and pre-prepared stuff that’s generally bad for you.

But it’s okay, because my personal goal when I started my nutrition reset was only to try to get decent food at the grocery store in at least 50% of the remaining weeks of the year, and I think I’m 3 for 4 right now.

I did a little bit better last weekend, though.

Day Job

Another fairly mundane sprint of writing fairly mundane enterprise-style Java Spring code: The classic task of taking data from one place and putting it in a database. I keep learning new tips and tricks about Java though. Like, for example, I didn’t know there was something called a record in Java now, which is a lighter-weight, immutable version of a class. Classes are great and all but sometimes you just want to stick a couple of properties into a handy object to pass around in function calls.

I took a week off before Labor Day weekend, so it was a short sprint for me.

Vacation

As I write this, I’m about halfway through a week off prior to the long Labor Day weekend, the most time off I’ve taken in quite some time. I genuinely don’t know what to do with time off. I haven’t really been playing more games. I wrote a big blog post, which took most of one of those days, and revising it took a chunk of another day. I did some work on my video scripts, adding a Python library to parse video files so I can add video durations to the index file, which you can see in the Baldur’s Gate 3 progress page now. I have a dentist appointment coming up later today, as I write this. Exciting vacation stuff.

Media Consumption

Forgot to update everyone on the exciting world of not watching much television. I still watch Critical Role, although I’m a bit behind now thanks to Baldur’s Gate 3, and there’s a new Dimension 20 season out. Sometimes I click on a recommendation from one of my favored channels on the YouTube front page, instead of instantly (and uselessly) blocking channels that are just copying better stuff.

Otherwise, the “just put something on in the background” show du jour right now is every episode of American Dad from the beginning on Hulu. Now that would be an epic blog series for the ages: The best sound bites from every episode of American Dad. One of my personal favorites, from the mind-boggling vocal cords of Scott Grimes:

How that guy still has a voice after doing that is beyond me. (I think I remember a story where he actually did hurt himself doing the voice.)

World Context

India successfully landed on the southern pole of the moon, the first to do so, and only the fourth country to soft land on the moon.
Republicans held their first primary debate for the 2024 Presidential election, sans Trump. I didn’t see it, but I’ll just assume it was as embarrassing for the country as every other U.S. election debate ever.
That Wagner Group guy who led a mutiny against Putin some months ago died in a plane crash, and everyone totally believes Russia’s denials of any involvement.
There was yet another coup after an election in Africa, this time in the country of Gabon. Democracy’s really thriving. But on the plus side, maybe we Westerners will finally learn the names of some countries in Africa.
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Ukraine, Hollywood Strikes, Nigerian Coup, Sudanese Civil War.
Celebrity Deaths: Bob Barker (game show host).

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

09:52 # Every time I think, “Hey I have an idea for doing something with Twitch,” and I go to the Twitch web site, I can’t figure out how to do anything with Twitch. The UI on the site is so confusing I can’t understand how anyone knows how to find anything. #videos

09:58 # Eh nevermind. I’d swear I used to be able to upload videos on demand to Twitch, but Googling tells me you can’t do that anymore. #videos

12:52 # Incidentally, it’s noon of day 5 of vacation week and I’m still not really sure what to do with my time off. I guess go to the store in the middle of the week instead of the weekend? That sounds fun. It’s not raining today for the first time this week. #vacation

19:39 # I published a revised and expanded edition of my last post, which somehow added 1,200 words to the existing 5,500 words. #blog #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

09:57 # It’s day 4 of the 10-day Labor Day vacation. It seems like I should do something useful with this time, but so far I haven’t. I did, however, pre-order Starfield, because it occurred to me that the pre-launch time period fell within my vacation time. I don’t really plan to play it much until I finish Baldur’s Gate 3, though. It’s difficult for me to believe the first few hours of Starfield will be enough to make me forget about BG3. I’ve already seen some red flags that make me think it’s going to be a tedious game where they include stuff nobody actually wants anymore. #starfield #baldursgate3

11:34 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I think what I thought was Act 2 before in Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t actually Act 2, but now I’ve entered the Shadow Cursed Lands and got an achievement for leaving Act 1, so I guess I’m “officially” in Act 2 now. Ran into some lovely Shadow Cursed Vines. Not difficult, in that they don’t do much damage, but they’re kind of irritating, in that nobody can move and they impose disadvantage on most of the party’s attacks. #baldursgate3

15:01 # One thing I’m doing on day 4 of my vacation is fix/improve some things in my uploading script, so I can both resume uploading Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos, and also start uploading Baldur’s Gate 3 videos. #videos

22:49 # Baldur’s Gate 3. A lot of conversations in Baldur’s Gate 3 today in and around the Moonrise Tower. Met the illustrious Ketheric Thorm and his right-on-the-mic-diaphragm voice actor. Haven’t done this much talking to NPCs since the Grove, now that I think about it. There hasn’t been much story going on for quite a while, now suddenly in the Shadow-Cursed Lands everyone wants to talk again. Next it’s off to find somebody named Balthazar. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Spoilers for the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 2, beyond the Mountain Pass, below.

08:00 # I have the week off work leading into Labor Day weekend, so I have a lot of time to kill coming up. Technically it’s day 3 of vacation since I counted Saturday as the first day. #vacation

10:10 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Oh man I hate the Death Shepherds so, so much. One would be bad enough, but there’s two of them. This is the first combat encounter in Baldur’s Gate 3 that I actively hate and feel is over a line of too unfair on Tactician difficulty. And it didn’t help that a presumed game bug prevented me from using one of Karlach’s big damage actions that would have helped me win the fight. Maybe the third time will be the charm. #baldursgate3

11:58 # Baldur’s Gate 3. The third time was the charm against the two Death Shepherds, barely. It took an hour and a half and almost every spell slot I had and some scrolls. It was almost another certain TPK because I accidentally had Gale do an opportunity attack, which used up his reaction, so he wasn’t able to Counterspell one of the Death Shepherds raising the other Death Shepherd. Only a clutch Polymorph scroll, a clutch Banish scroll, and a clutch Ice Storm scroll at the end got both Death Shepherds killed at the same time, preventing them from resurrecting themselves and every paralyzing-and-naseua-inducing undead enemy back to full health. Feel the pulse-pounding adrenaline rush of tactical turn-based combat! #baldursgate3

12:03 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Incidentally it wasn’t a bug that I mentioned earlier, it was intentional. It’s just that the game never tells you why you can’t do actions, so I have to assume it’s a bug. But it turns out Karlach can’t use spells like those Legacy of Avernus spell-like abilities while she’s raging, which was buried in the fine print of the Rage ability tooltip. It would be a massive quality-of- life improvement to expand on the little messages that say “you can’t do that” with some additional information. #baldursgate3

20:28 # On my 3rd day of vacation I wrote a nearly 5,500 word blog post. I don’t recommend it. It takes a long time to write. I mean, a day, which isn’t that long, really, but that’s a big chunk of a day I’ll never get back. #blog

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Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 below, although not any story spoilers. Just combat spoilers, if that’s a thing.

I’ve had some pretty thrilling battles in Baldur’s Gate 3 on Tactician difficulty. In Act 1: The Gnolls, the Phase Spider Matron, the Hook Horrors, the Spectator. Dror Ragzlin. But this one in Act 2 was the most adrenaline-fueled thrill ride of a roller coaster to date. And as luck would have it, I’m off work this week so I can afford to waste nearly my entire day writing it down.

The First Attempt My party lineup for this adventure was Tavi, the Bard with the Bongos, Karlach, the Dancing Barbarian with the Heart of Gold, Shadowheart, the murderous Dark Justiciar Cleric in Training, and Gale, the Wizard of Waterdeep and Mystra enthusiast. (I switched out Astarion for Gale, because the addition of Counterspell and Fly at level 5 suddenly made Gale less of a liability to the party.)

It all started after entering the Mountain Pass, ending up on the Rosymorn Monastery Trail, then choosing to go left at the fork at Trielta Crags instead of right. This is the very first decision in “Act 2.” The game doesn’t really say it’s Act 2. Only The Internet calls it that. Anyway, I walked straight into a pack of Ghouls, a Ghast, and two Death Shepherds, all level 5 undead.

It was my first fight in Act 2, and the party was level 5. I was very worried about the Ghast, based on my Solasta: Crown of the Magister adventures, but I couldn’t remember why. Then the Ghast paralyzed Karlach, my death-dealing machine, for two turns, and I remembered why I was nervous about Ghasts. Then the Death Shepherds started raising all the previously-killed Ghouls. Then the party died, though technically two of them managed to flee, but it was for nothing, since all the enemy undead were raised back to unlife.

It wasn’t even a named boss fight. Just some trash mobs on the road. But it was a hard rejection. A strong hint to go the other way.

I reloaded and went right at the fork, exploring the Rosymorn Monastery. There were some tense fights there, too, particularly against a pack of cute little Gremishkas, in which I was certain the party would die, but they managed to pull out a victory in the end. And then there was a fight in the Githyanki Creche, in which I was really certain the party would die, but they managed to pull out a victory, with only Karlach left standing at the end. Both of those fights could be their own narrative posts.

After all that, the party reached level 6, and there was nothing left at the Rosymorn Monastery to explore. It was time to return to that fork in the road at Trielta Crags. I needed to defeat the Death Shepherds, because I needed to get past them to head west toward the Moonrise Towers I keep hearing about, and, presumably, the remainder of the game.

The Second Attempt I had a plan. The two Death Shepherds were the biggest threats with their apparently unlimited ability to casually raise any of their fellow undead with full hit points, so I planned to focus entirely on them and ignore the others. And I planned to get them both down to low hit points, but not kill them, until I could kill them both together, because I assumed (correctly) that each Death Shepherd would simply resurrect the other Death Shepherd, if one died before the other.

Also, incidentally, undead are resistant to Slashing, Bludgeoning, and Piercing damage, so Karlach’s monstrous weapon damage potential was largely nullified in this fight. It was slow work to whittle down every one of these undead with a great axe.

The second attempt at the fight also ended in a TPK, largely because Gale accidentally killed a Death Shepherd too soon with a Thunder Wave, and also because I discovered that not only do the Ghasts paralyze, all those Ghouls do, too. Fail a save and one party member is out of commission for two full turns, and every attack against them is an automatic critical hit. Not good. And I didn’t have Lesser Restoration prepared then to dispell it, either.

The Ghast also has a stench that renders a party member unable to use an action, too. Every Ghoul and Ghast has the potential to render party members completely ineffective for one or more turns. Nasty stuff.

Tavi died, then Gale died. Still, a victory could have been possible, but I didn’t realize that Karlach couldn’t do her massive damage Legacy of Avernus abilities while she’s raging, so I couldn’t do enough damage to kill the second Death Shepherd before it raised the first Death Shepherd, and that was the end of the second attempt.

It’s really disheartening to see a Death Shepherd you worked so hard to kill over a bunch of turns raised back up in one turn with full hit points.

The Third Attempt For the third attempt, I had a better plan. This time I thought it might be fun to actually prepare some spells I would need: Shadowheart took Lesser Restoration, which cures paralysis, and Gale took Fireball. And for the third attempt, I hoped not to forget that Shadowheart could turn undead until it was too late.

Round 1, A Hilarious Start The battle begins.

Tavi the Bard casts Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on the first Death Shepherd, which succeeds and takes it off the battlefield, prone on the ground. With her bonus action, she gives a Bardic Inspiration to Karlach.

Two Ghouls advance.

Karlach goes into a rage, and gets Wild Magic flowers and vines, making difficult terrain around her. With the nearest Death Shepherd succumbed to laughing, she instead runs at one of the advancing Ghouls and hits twice for only 5 and 6 hit points of damage against the resistant undead.

Gale casts a Fire Bolt cantrip from behind a wagon on the first Ghoul and hits for 15 hit points, leaving it with just 2 hit points.

Shadowheart tries to cast a Fire Bolt on the first, near-dead Ghoul to finish it off, but misses. She moves back and maintains her distance, to keep concentrating on Beacon of Hope.

The second Death Shepherd dashes up near Karlach. The first Ghoul claw at Karlach. The Ghast runs up next to Karlach.

Round 2, No Turning Back Tavi the Bard continues to concentrate on Tasha’s Hideous Laughter to keep the first Death Shepherd down. Tavi uses her action to cast a Vicious Mockery cantrip on the second Death Shepherd, which succeeds for a point of psychic damage, but more importantly gives it disadvantage on any attacks. She moves back as well, to maintain her distance from the paralyzing undead.

The first Death Shepherd makes its save and stands up from the Hideous Laughter, so it’s back in the battle.

Gale casts another Fire Bolt cantrip on the first, closest Death Shepherd, but misses. He stays well back behind the wagon at the fork in the road.

One Ghoul starts to move past Karlach, and another one tries to claw at her, but misses.

Karlach steps away from the Ghouls toward the first Death Shepherd, and receives two attacks of opportunity, but they both miss. She makes two attacks for 8 and (a critical) 13 slashing damage. It has 47 hit points remaining. With her bonus action, she shoves a Ghoul away, which succeeds, but it has little practical effect.

Shadowheart uses the jump-and-move trick to get a maximum amount of movement. She runs forward near Karlach, within range of the clump of Undead surrounding Karlach. She casts Turn Undead, and every single one of the undead is in range. This is a big moment, a lot depends on this. I cackled, thinking most of the Ghouls and maybe even the Ghast would run away, and this fight would be off to an amazing start.

It wasn’t to be. Tavi chooses not to do Cutting Words on several Ghouls, hoping to use it on the Ghast, but instead uses it on a Death Shepherd to make it fail its save. Unfortunately, it’s immune to terror. None of the undead are turned, and Shadowheart is left vulnerable near the front line. My cackling turned to a grimace.

The second Death Shepherd hits Karlach with two attacks, hitting once for 2 slashing. The near-dead Ghoul claws at Shadowheart but misses. The Ghast runs up and claws at Shadowheart and hits for 6 damage, but she maintain concentration. But she fails her saving throw against the Ghast’s nausea.

Round 3, Paralysis At this point I learned that Beacon of Hope only lasts a short time, regardless of whether you maintain concentration.

Despite the failure to turn any Ghouls, we were holding our own. Karlach stayed up on the front lines, while Tavi and Gale stayed way back. Shadowheart was caught up in a cluster of undead, though.

Worried that the first Death Shepherd might run amok in the back lines instead of engaging Karlach, Tavi attempts to do another Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on it, but it fails. She gives a Bardic Inspiration to Shadowheart, to help her get away from the three undead now surrounding her nauseous self. Tavi creeps backwards again.

A Ghoul runs from the background into the difficult terrain surrounding Karlach, but doesn’t reach anyone. The first Death Shepherd steps away from Karlach toward Shadowheart, and Karlach hits it for 6 slashing damage as it leaves. Shadowheart luckily dodges one greatsword attack, then Tavi uses Cutting Words to make the second greatsword attack miss as well. Shadowheart escapes the onslaught without any damage.

Gale continues the tradition of casting a Fire Bolt cantrip on the first Death Shepherd from behind the wagon, and misses again, disappointing everyone.

One Ghoul claws at Karlach, but misses. Another Ghoul tries to walk around to reach Karlach, but is slowed in the difficult Wild Magic terrain and can’t reach her.

(At this point I finally realized that it’s not a game bug after all, it’s the barbarian rage that prevents Karlach from using her Legacy of Avernus abilities.)

Karlach is engaged with the second Death Shepherd and a Ghoul. She strikes at the Death Shepherd, uses Reckless and hits for 10 hit points, but it makes its save against the Laceration effect. The second attack, with reckless advantage, hits for 7 hit points.

(At this point I learned that the paralisys save is Con not Wis, so Beacon of Hope isn’t helping.)

Shadowheart is surrounded by a Ghast, a Ghoul, and the first Death Shepherd. She needs to get out of there if she wants to maintain concentration on Beacon of Hope. She does a bonus action Misty Step (using her boots I think). Still suffering the effects of nausea from the Ghast, she doesn’t have an action, and runs far away, behind Tavi.

Karlach is left by herself on the road, surrounded by undead, while the rest of the party is back down the road by the wagons. Karlach takes two hits from the second Death Shepherd for 7 total hit points. The first, near-dead Ghoul, now that Shadowheart is gone, claws at Karlach for 2 hit points, and even worse, paralyzes her! The Ghast piles on and gets a critical hit against Karlach for 9 more hit points. Karlach ends the round paralyzed, with about 2/3 of her hit points remaining, but on the plus side she isn’t nauseous.

Round 4, The Fog Cloud Tavi keeps trying to cast Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on the first Death Shepherd. It fails again. She does a bonus action Healing Word on Karlach, and restores the full 7 hit points thanks to the Beacon of Hope. All four of her first level spell slots are gone now.

One Ghoul tries to maneuver around to Karlach, but the difficult terrain means it can’t reach her. The first Death Shepherd, having previously had Shadowheart teleport away from it, dashes out of the difficult terrain and into the back lines, and there’s nothing left between it and Gale, Shadowheart, and Tavi.

Gale casts a Fog Cloud surrounding Karlach, in the hope that all the undead surrounding her will have a harder time hitting her while she’s paralyzed. Three Ghouls and the second Death Shepherd are blinded. Gale continues to move backwards, away from the first Death Shepherd.

The fog didn’t help, because two Ghouls get critical hits on paralyzed Karlach for a total of 11 more slashing damage on her.

Shadowheart, staring at the Death Shepherd lumbering towards her and Tavi, considers her options. She’s no longer nauseous so she has her actions back. She casts a 2nd level Blindness at the first Death Shepherd, and steps back. It’s not a concentration spell, so the Beacon of Hope remains in effect. Shadowheart backs away.

The fog still doesn’t help, because Karlach takes two successive critical hits from the second Death Shepherd for a total of 14 damage. She’s getting hurt pretty bad, and she’s still paralyzed. Unfortunately Shadowheart can’t see her in the fog to dispell it. Gale considers that the fog cloud may have been a mistake. The first, near-dead Ghoul, which is still quite alive, rushes away from Karlach into the back lines as well, joining the first Death Shepherd. The Ghast claws Karlach for another 8 points of critical hit damage. Thank god for barbarian rage.

Round 5, The Fireball Tavi worries a lot about Karlach going down. The barbarian only got 13 hit points left. She moves forward a little to get in range and tries to cast a Healing Word, but the fog prevents her from seeing Karlach. She glares at Gale. Instead, Tavi tries another Tasha’s Hideous Laughter on the approaching Death Shepherd, and it fails again. Three in a row now. Another wasted spell slot.

Things are looking grim. A Ghoul claws at Karlach. It’s another automatic critical hit because she’s still paralyzed. The first Death Shepherd senses opportunity, abandons running toward Shadowheart and Tavi, and goes back to hit Karlach with two more greatsword critical hits, downing her in the middle of the fog cloud.

Gale ponders his life choices. Maybe that fog cloud didn’t actually help. Maybe he needs to make up for it. The undead are probably going to keep hitting Karlach on the ground until she’s dead. Bold, decisive action must be taken. Gale drops the fog cloud, then throws a 3rd level Fireball right where the cloud used to be, centered roughly where Karlach lies in the road, using one of his three 3rd level spell slots.

It works. Three Ghouls are instantly incinerated for 30 hit points of fire damage. The Ghast and two Death Shepherds take half of the damage too.

Shadowheart runs forward and casts a second level Healing Word on Karlach, restoring a full 11 hit points. (Beacon of Hope is still in effect, despite that fact that the game says she’s not concentrating on it anymore.)

Karlach’s turn is simultaneous with Shadowheart and Gale, so she drinks a Potion of Greater Healing, restoring 20 more hit points, getting her near half of her health. She doesn’t have an action, but she runs away and takes 11 hit points from one attack of opportunity.

Shadowheart has an action left, so casts a Blade Ward cantrip on Karlach to protect her from further harm, only to discover that Blade Wards only affect the caster, not a target. Oopsie.

The Fireball was only a temporary respite, because the second Death Shepherd, as expected, casts No Rest for the Wicked to raise a Ghoul back to life. Gale chooses not to Counterspell, in order to save his third level spell slots for when it really matters. Then the Death Shepherd runs at Karlach and hits once for 11 hit points, and a second time for 14 hit points, downing her again. Without Rage, she doesn’t take half damage anymore. The Ghast then claws at Karlach’s body and causes her to fail two death saving throws immediately. Karlach is in big trouble.

Round 6, The Ghouls Are Back Things are looking bleak. Karlach is one death saving throw away from death. The Death Shepherds are raising the dead Ghouls back to unlife.

Tavi casts Plant Growth in the area of all the undead, in an effort to hinder them from reaching the rest of the party, then casts a bonus action Healing Word at second level on Karlach to restore the full 11 hit points, thanks to the Beacon of Hope.

The first Death Shepherd raises another Ghoul with No Rest for the Wicked, but at least it’s not hitting Karlach.

Gale casts a Fire Bolt cantrip, but it’s at disadvantage because of a “too dark” effect that makes no sense whatsoever, because it’s broad daylight. It misses, of course.

A Ghoul runs up and hits Karlach for 5 points of damage, and she’s barely standing. Karlach fails a nausea save and can’t take an action.

Shadowheart casts a Healing Word at third level on Karlach, and restore 15 hit points. With her action, she casts a Fire Bolt cantrip at the first Death Shepherd and does 11 hit points of fire damage. It has 17 hit points remaining, the most wounded of the two.

With no actions, Karlach has no choice but to try to run, and takes 3 attacks of opportunity, is paralyzed, and goes down again.

The second Death Shepherd raises another Ghoul, and all three Ghouls that had been killed by Gale’s Fireball are back again. It then leaves Karlach and dashes towards Gale, hitting once for 10 hit points of damage. The Ghast runs at Shadowheart and attempts a claw attack, but misses.

Round 7, Missed Opportunity The front lines are in shambles, Karlach is down, and the undead are all up in the party’s back lines.

Tavi casts Heat Metal at third level on the second Death Shepherd, which is now looming over Gale. It doesn’t drop its sword, but it takes a big 21 points of fire damage, leaving it with 19 hit points remaining. And that spell remains in effect as long as Tavi keeps concentration. With her bonus action, she casts Healing Word on Karlach at second level, restoring 11 hit points (again), and saving her from a fatality for another turn. Tavi only has one 3rd level spell slot remaining, and runs further away.

A Ghoul tries to claw at Karlach but misses. The first Death Shepherd moves up, but inexplicably doesn’t try to attack Karlach. Incidentally, a big section of the road is now on fire, and the undead are taking a few points of additional fire damage now and then.

Gale has two 3rd level spell slots remaining. With a Death Shepherd looming in his face, he rotates around to get a better angle without taking an opportunity attack, and throws another Fireball in Karlach’s vicinity. The first Death Shepherd fails its saving throw, and is killed by 24 points of fire damage. Two Ghouls, a Ghast, and the second Death Shepherd remain standing. Karlach takes no damage, thanks to Gale’s feat. Gale drinks a small healing potion with his bonus action.

Now the real fun begins. The Death Shepherd’s turn is coming up, and it will raise the Death Shepherd that just died with full hit points. The party has to stop that. Luckily, Gale has one 3rd level spell slot remaining, and can Counterspell it.

Karlach is nauseous from the Ghast and can’t take any actions. She begins Raging with her bonus action, hoping to take half damage from any attacks. It’s all she can do. This time, the Wild Magic effect is damaging tendrils, but everyone succeeds on the saving throw. She tries to move away from the Ghouls, but takes a hit and is paralyzed again. Arg!

Only Shadowheart and Gale’s Counterspell can stop the Death Shepherd from casting the resurrection now. But Shadowheart has to cast Lesser Restoration on Karlach to dispell the paralysis, but it’s a touch spell and there’s a Ghast in her face! She has to take an attack of opportunity, which could paralyze her too.

The Ghast misses, and Shadowheart gets away, and dispells Karlach’s paralysis. Whew! That would have been disaster. Karlach is no longer paralyzed, and no longer nauseous, and Shadowheart does a bonus action Healing Word to restore 4 more hit points to Karlach. The Beacon of Hope has ended.

Karlach has movement remaining, so she runs up to the remaining Death Shepherd. The battlefield is a shambles, everything’s on fire, but the situation is under control. Gale still has a Counterspell, which is vitally important to stop the Death Shepherd from raising the other Death Shepherd with its upcoming turn. Karlach will get her actions back and be able to kill that Death Shepherd next round. Nothing could possibly go wrong now, right?

Wrong.

The Death Shepherd runs past Gale and tries to get away. Gale has a chance to do an opportunity attack. Then, the game glitches out, and the graphics go all weird and flashy, and I’m staring at a very distracting strobe light effect while deciding on whether to do an opportunity attack. I take one, without thinking, and it’s a CRUCIAL BONEHEAD MISTAKE, in all caps, with exclamation points. Gale misses the Death Shepherd, but Karlach also gets an attack of opportunity and does 12 points of damage to the escaping Death Shepherd. It only has a few hit points left, but it’s still alive.

While the graphics are having a full-on meltdown and I’m frantically quicksaving, thinking the game is about to hard crash to the desktop, the Death Shepherd casts No Rest for the Wicked and raises the other Death Shepherd, with full hit points. I didn’t notice it.

You see, when Gale used his reaction to do an opportunity attack, he threw away his chance to do a Counterspell to stop the resurrection.

When the graphics clear up enough that I can see what’s going on, a Ghast has jumped over and paralyzed Gale to add even further insult to injury.

Round 8, The Sheep Tavi still has the Heat Metal applied to the second Death Shepherd, which only has a few hit points left, and re-applies the damage with a bonus action. It does 14 fire damage and kills the second Death Shepherd. I’m celebrating, because I think both Death Shepherds are dead now, and the rest of the fight will be easy.

Then I see it.

There’s still one Death Shepherd left, with full health.

At this point, it’s been almost an hour since I began, and I’m just catching on to the fact that I’m nearly back where I started, with the second Death Shepherd raised again. I’m not pleased about this development. I’m extremely disheartened, you might say. Not only am I probably going to have to reload and try this fight again, but it wasn’t because of some random dice roll, it was entirely because I made a careless mistake.

Instead of being in a fantastic position to win the fight with both Death Shepherds dead, we were in a dire predicament with one Death Shepherd still alive with all their hit points, standing by to resurrect the other, Karlach almost dead, and Gale paralyzed. There’s no way we’re going to win this fight now.

Never have I wished to be able to save-scum more. But the quicksave I did was after the mistake.

Tavi still had an action remaining on her turn. She had to stop the Death Shepherd from casting a resurrection for the party to have any chance of surviving. She flipped through her inventory and cast a desperation Polymorph from a scroll on the first Death Shepherd, before it could raise the second Death Shepherd. It worked! The last Death Shepherd turned into a sheep for five turns. That just left a horde of paralyzing Ghouls and that pesky Ghast over by Gale and Karlach.

One Ghoul runs up and hits Shadowheart for 5 points of damage, but she’s still fairly healthy. The Polymorphed sheep runs at Shadowheart, and there’s some concern it might get hurt in some environmental damage on the battlefield, but the fires have died down and, importantly, it stays a sheep.

The situation is this: After the Fireballs and the leftover fires, there’s two Ghouls left, one has 7 hit points left, the other has 4 hit points left. The Ghast has 32 hit points left. The Death Shepherd is a sheep. And Gale is paralyzed.

The Ghast is the biggest threat on the battlefield, so Shadowheart finds a scroll of Banishment in her inventory, and casts it. The Ghast is banished, but only for two turns. She runs away from everyone so nobody can break concentration on the Banish. She casts a bonus action Healing Word on Karlach.

Karlach pops an Infernal Coin into her Infernal Engine, for the first time. I have no idea what it’s going to do, but this seems like a great time to find out. We have to win this battle, and if we don’t, we’ll just end up reloading anyway. It sets her on fire, so she does a little bit of extra fire damage from Infernal Fury. Only the two Ghouls are left on the battlefield, and a sheep. She attacks one of the Ghouls, misses, but with a Reckless attack, gets advantage and hits and kills it. The sheep hits her for 1 hit point of damage. With her second attack, she hits the second Ghoul and kills it, too. And suddenly she’s doing a lot more damage, as if the undead aren’t resistant to her damage anymore.

Gale remains paralyzed, but since the Death Shepherd is a sheep, he doesn’t need to Counterspell anything.

Things are looking good again. The pendulum has swung. It’s still possible to win this fight. The Death Shepherd is a sheep, the Ghast is banished, and all the Ghouls are dead. Karlach can attack the Death Shepherd in the next round, Gale will come out of paralysis, and he can Counterspell any attempts by the Death Shepherd to raise the other Death Shepherd.

Round 9, Not So Fast Tavi has one 3rd level spell slot remaining. With her bonus action, she casts a Healing Word to heal Karlach for 11 hit points, giving her a total of 32 hit points. She continues to concentrate on Polymorph so the Death Shepherd stays a sheep and can’t do anything on its turn.

The sheep just sits there by itself.

The Ghast is banished for one more turn. Gale moves away. He’s nauseous, so he can’t use an action. But that’s okay, because for what we’re about to do, we’ll only need him to do a reaction.

Shadowheart casts a Fire Bolt on the sheep to knock it out of Polymorph, so Karlach can attack the Death Shepherd. It does 11 points of damage. The Death Shepherd has 46 hit points left, and that’s way more than Karlach can dish out in one turn.

Karlach considers dropping rage and using a Legacy of Avernus Searing Smite ability, because it does a ton of damage and does fire damage every following turn. But, dropping rage uses a bonus action, and the Legacy of Avernus requires an action and a bonus action, so she can’t. She can only take two regular attacks, and has to go Reckless. She hits for 20 damage on the first attack, and 21 damage on the second attack, which is twice as much damage as I expected to do. Are they no longer resisting slashing damage? Or is it weird bug? Who knows? She drinks a healing potion with her bonus action.

The last Death Shepherd only has 5 hit points remaining. Nobody can do any more damage. Shadowheart has a bonus action left, and does another Healing Word on Karlach to give her as much chance of staying alive as possible.

Then the Ghast’s banishment ends. It runs straight for Gale, hits him for 12 points of damage, and more importantly, paralyzes him, stopping any possibility of doing a final Counterspell against the Death Shepherd. Disaster. Again.

Round 10, 5 HP or Else The battle teeters on a razor’s edge. The Death Shepherd’s turn is coming up right after Tavi’s, and it will surely cast No Rest for the Wicked and raise the other Death Shepherd again, with full hit points, sending us right back to square one. It only has 5 hit points left.

Tavi has to find a way to do 5 hit points of damage or it’s game over. Again. For, like, the third time in this fight.

This was it. This was the end. Clawing and scratching for well over an hour of fighting now, most all the enemies dead, but we were probably still going to lose if this Death Shepherd managed to cast a resurrection on the other Death Shepherd.

Tavi desperately thumbs through her collection of scrolls for anything that did a minimum of 5 hit points of damage, because she’s too far away to do a melee attack, she has no spell slots left, and didn’t have any meaningful damage spells anyway.

Melf’s Acid Arrow looks promising, but for some reason, the Death Shepherd was “too dark” (standing outside in full daylight) so she would have disadvantage on any ranged attack, and that’s a guaranteed failure.

The only other option is an Ice Storm scroll, an area of effect spell that would not suffer disadvantage. She was able to line up the targeting circle so it would hit the Death Shepherd and the Ghast, but not Tavi or Karlach. Fingers crossed!

Both of the enemies made their saving throw, but it worked anyway! The Death Shepherd died, and the Ghast took a big chunk of damage, too.

Everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief. It was over.

Except it wasn’t. The last Ghast still had 20 hit points left, and Ghasts are no joke. Gale’s still paralyzed, and the party’s pretty beat up and nearly out of resources. But surely, with four on one, we could finish it off.

It’s not a promising start to the end of the fight. Karlach leaps over to the Ghast to try to finish it, right into the ghastly fumes, where she immediately succumbs to Nausea, and can’t take any actions. She tries to back away, and takes a hit from an attack of opportunity.

Shadowheart casts a Fire Bolt, but it’s at disadvantage because the Ghast is “too dark,” for mysterious reasons. She misses. She casts a bonus action Healing Word on Gale, because he’s hurt pretty bad.

Gale remains paralyzed, and the Ghast lives to fight another round.

The Healing Word was timely, because the Ghast hits Gale with an automatic critical hit, nearly downing him, then walks over to Tavi and covers her with the noxious fumes that prevent her from using any actions.

Round 11, The Last Ghast The last Ghast is proving stubbornly difficult to kill. Tavi can’t use any actions on her turn. She tries to run away and takes an attack of opportunity, but it’s not too bad. She has no spell slots left to cast any bonus actions, and can’t do anything else.

Gale returns from paralysis, but he’s nauseous from the Ghast’s stench and can’t use any actions. He moves away and drinks his last healing potion with his bonus action. The hope is that if the party spreads out, the Ghast will have to pick only one party member to affect with its noxious fumes, and the rest can kill it.

Karlach lost her Rage on the previous turn, because she wasn’t able to hit anyone. Staying back to avoid the noxious ghast fumes, she fires a crossbow shot with her first attack, but misses. It’s starting to get comical now. The party can’t kill one Ghast.

With her second attack, Karlach realizes she can use a Legacy of Avernus Searing Smite now. Hoping not to run into any ghastly fumes, she runs up and smites the Ghast. This is the last attack before the next round, where the Ghast will get another turn.

Karlach misses.

She uses a Reckless attack, and rolls again.

And hits! She does 29 total damage in one massive strike, fueled by the infernal fury of Avernus, or something like that, and it’s enough to kill the Ghast.

FINALLY.

It’s over.

After almost an hour and a half, the fight is finally over.

The accursed resurrecting Death Shepherds and their accursed paralyzing undead friends are gone.

It’s one of those victory moments where you do the fist pumps and celebrate like you’ve just won the World Cup finals. It’s a victory as satisfying as any Dark Souls boss fight I’ve ever experienced.

And it wasn’t even a boss. Just some undead on the road. Sheesh.

But yeah, watch out for those Death Shepherds.

P.S. I didn’t really edit this so it’s probably got tons of mistakes in it.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Potential spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, Act 2, in the area of Rosymorn Monastery.

10:06 # Arg hell. I need to go to the grocery store this morning, it’s already 10:00, and I don’t feel like it. This is probably going to affect my nutritional intake for the entire week because I’m just going to grab the first things I see as quickly as possible so I can get back home fast and get on with my day. Annoying.. #nutrition

11:32 # Okay grocery store run completed, and I successfully got ground beef and chicken breasts instead of just filling my cart with horribly unhealthy frozen pre-prepared stuff. Now if only I felt like actually cooking any of the stuff. That’s a problem for later. #nutrition

11:36 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night in Baldur’s Gate 3, the exploration of the Rosemorn Monastery continued. Lots of stuff to fight there. It’s pretty much non-stop combat, to be honest. Three different encounters so far, with another one to come. And I’m not really sure why I’m even there. Haven’t learned anything or advanced any stories and there are no related quests in my log. It’s just one of those side diversions that must be explored simply because it’s there. #baldursgate3

11:40 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I have to admit, after 80+ hours of playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m starting to think there aren’t going to be any ill effects from having illithid tadpoles in our eye sockets and the plot motivation to remove them isn’t very motivating. I’ve sort of lost the thread of what I’m supposed to be doing or where I’m supposed to be going in this game to advance anything related to the main story. #baldursgate3

17:36 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Long story short, in a surprising twist, the githyanki in their creche could not remove the parasite with their fancy schmancy machine. And they weren’t very pleased that I broke their fancy schmancy machine either. Karlach was the only one left standing at the end, and it took every one of the expensive healing potions we just bought five minutes earlier from the githyanki vendor. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Potential spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 Grymforge and the start of Act 2 at the Mountain Pass.

08:12 # Aw hell I forgot to publish the microblog thing yesterday. Which means there was not, in fact, something in my RSS feed every day of August and I have failed Blaugust and must live with this shame for the rest of my life. #blog

08:18 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night in Baldur’s Gate 3, I tried the Kobayashi Maru scenario in Grymforge again with an all-new strategy I thought about all day, and fared slightly better, but still didn’t win. Then I abandoned that and went to the Forge and fought some Animated Armors, which restored my confidence that my party can, in fact, still win battles on Tactician difficulty. Then I took a long rest and apparently everything changed in the Kobayashi Maru situation without me. I have no idea what I’ll find when I go back to the site of the cave-in, and the fate of the gnomes and several quest lines is up in the air as I begin the weekend. #baldursgate3

08:53 # I still think that summer has just started, yet I’ve been seeing a handful of leaves falling from the trees for the last couple weeks. #homeowner

11:52 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Oof. Act 2 began with a brutally unfair encounter against some undead. Two of the party successfully fled but I still lost all progress in culling the enemy head count, so might as well reload. An inauspicious start. #baldursgate3

20:40 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I actually survived the encounter with the tiny, cute level 1 Gremishkas. Monsters. Horrible, horrible monsters. Best to run away from them, but I couldn’t. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Potential spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 1 in the Underdark.

08:21 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night I walked into the biggest Kobayashi Maru scenario in my Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough yet. The classic and much-mocked “every dialog choice leads to the same outcome” game situation. And that outcome was combat, in which my level 5 party was grossly outnumbered and outmatched and surrounded deep in enemy territory, and basically only had 1 turn to effect an impossible escape or face certain death along with the deaths of the folks I was supposed to rescue. Kind of depressing. No-win situations are no fun. Going to have to come back and rescue the gnomes later I guess, or think of a way better plan. Starting with making sure to have a long rest beforehand. #baldursgate3

11:14 # I have to admit I’m in a last-day-before-vacation mood at work today, and it doesn’t help that I’m largely finished my work for the week already, but there’s still another 5 hours to go in the day. #dayjob

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Potential spoilers for Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the Underdark.

08:02 # Ahh. Three times I’ve come over to the laptop to type a pithy remark into this box (the semaphore.social post entry box), and all three times I’ve gotten distracted by something else and forgotten what I was going to type, and walked away, and I still can’t remember what it was I was going to say. This is one reason I don’t really want to see a lot of things to read on this page where I type my pithy remarks. I need separate accounts for reading and writing. #microblogging

08:07 # I woke up in a panic because I thought I’d forgotten I had a dentist appointment sometime this morning, but it turns out that appointment is next week. I forget about appointments a lot. It’s kind of a problem. (That was what I tried to remember to write down three times. It wasn’t as funny or interesting as it seemed in my head.) #health

08:28 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night I found yet more ways to extend my time in Act 1, out in Grymforge. Went looking for a deep gnome hiding way out in a corner of the map and had to go through some surprisingly hard-hitting ochre jellies to get there. Poor Tavi went down three times. And I learned that I need to get Karlach a decent non-slashing weapon to have on standby (except it’s really annoying that it takes a whole action to change weapons in combat). The Blooded Great Axe is amazing … except against ochre jellies. #baldursgate3

17:29 # Welp a perfectly nice random stranger appeared at my door looking for some house that was for rent (it isn’t this one and I had no idea what they were talking about) and now I will be terrified and paranoid and distracted for the remainder of the day. Is it some kind of conspiracy? Is someone out there targeting my property for mysterious reasons? Was it a private investigator just pretending to be a nice random stranger, but in reality they were trying to recon the place? A criminal casing the place to return in the middle of the night one night? The possibilities are endless. One thing is for sure, though, it definitely can’t be a perfectly nice random stranger because what the hell man. This ain’t the 50s. It’s end times now. #homeowner

Ah, oops, I forgot to fetch and publish this one yesterday.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

07:41 # Neck returning to normal function this morning. Now in that delicate stage of recovery where it feels better, but I have to be extra careful because it still needs some recovery time so it’s very easily re-injured. #health

08:17 # Lessons we can learn from a recent Discord kerfuffle about the unspoken community standards and guidelines that every online community develops over time. #blogideas

08:39 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night in Baldur’s Gate 3, I found a new avenue to explore and therefore delay leaving Act 1 by sailing across the lake to Grymforge in the Underdark, a really fun place with really fun people with really fun viewpoints that surely would be acceptable in any time and place, and do not in any way automatically label them as morally irredeemable evil villains that any lawful good paladin worth their salt would immediately attack. #baldursgate3

18:50 # Where is hotfix 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10?? Now that streamers are finishing up with Baldur’s Gate 3, do they just not care that I have to click on portraits sometimes up to 3 times to actually select a character?? #baldursgate3

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Another post I normally wouldn’t write or finish, but it’s Blaugust. It’s the time for publishing stuff you wouldn’t normally publish.

I witnessed some of a kerfuffle on a Discord server the other day, and it got me thinking about the unspoken community guidelines and etiquette that always develops in any community over time.

Unspoken Community Standards The actual subject of the controversy doesn’t matter for this post, but for the record it was about J.K. Rowling and Hogwart’s Legacy. Not quite in the all-time hall of fame of human controversies–not with the likes of abortion or gun control–but certainly a topic fraught with deeply-held, personal beliefs.

Now I know better than to mention Harry Potter or its author in this Discord, but I’ve been around these folks for quite a while, and I’ve gotten a sense of which subjects are likely to be greeted with acceptance and which are going to make eyes roll or tempers flare. This is a subject for which a lot of these particular Discordians have very one-sided opinions, and they aren’t terribly secret about it. In other words, it’s not going to generate a lot of productive discussion, and nobody’s going to change anyone’s minds.

There’s nothing particularly wrong or unusual about that. It’s human nature for communites to develop community rules, and it’s human instinct to gather with people of the same beliefs. But it’s not exactly advertised on the welcome sign. “Welcome to the server! Nobody wants to hear about Harry Potter here.”

To be fair, this particular flame war was mild by Internet standards, and could have been a lot worse. It’s actually kind of refreshing to see an argument on the Internet that doesn’t end with everyone blocking and banning each other into oblivion.

I suppose there’s not really a point here. I think the kerfuffle in question was handled as well as it could under the circumstances, and I have no notes.

I guess it’s just a reminder to be careful when you go talking about potentially sensitive subjects on a public Discord until you’ve gotten a feel for the prevailing community standards. And if you’re part of the community, keep in mind that not everybody has been in the community long enough to know the unspoken rules yet. I don’t know if Discord has a place where a server can post a list of the unspoken server rules, but that would be a cool thing to keep up-to-date.

Changing The Public Record In another related topic, I also noticed what seems to be an online cultural shift that nobody told me about: After a big kerfuffle, it’s apparently standard practice for everyone to change their published remarks and articles after finding out they aren’t popular.

After the Discord kerfuffle, comments were edited or deleted, and blog posts were edited and re-released to make them more palatable.

I don’t know when that became acceptable practice on the Internet, but there was a time when bloggers, especially anyone in the area of news or politics or journalism, definitely did not edit their posts after they were published, unless the edits were clearly marked and there were good reasons to do so. Bloggers in olden times fancied themselves “citizen journalists,” so they prided themselves on using the same sort of journalistic ethics you’d find in newspapers.

Things have changed. Now, if you say something wrong, it seems to be not just okay, but standard operating procedure to delete your tweet or edit your post.

It’s something that would never occur to me. It feels like crossing an ethical line. It’s what shady politicians do. It’s a deliberate obfuscation of your words to the public. How could you ever trust anything someone says if you know they’ll just change or bury it whenever the mood strikes them?

When I want to change or alter something I’ve previously published, I always leave the original intact and add an addendum, or clearly mark what I’ve changed with a strikethrough or brackets. (99% of the time it’s a spelling or grammer mistake.)

If I wanted to tell the world that I’ve changed my mind on some position, I’ll link to my original position and write a new post to explain what’s changed. (I can’t think of any examples where I’ve done this, because I don’t go around blurting out my stated positions on everything, because why would anyone do that?)

I hope I’ve matured enough in life not to do this, but if I were to write a post that unintentionally offended a lot of people, I wouldn’t delete it, I’d link to the original post and write a followup post. There’s one illustrative example I can think of, which is a critical post I wrote somewhere in the mid-to-late 2000s, back in those heady days when “hot takes” were known as “snark,” and blogging was all new and it was exciting to be able to eviscerate people who had no chance of responding. (Seriously, “eviscerating” was a popular word back then.)

It was a post about some far-away news in a different state, something I forgot about posting immediately, but then one of the people involved in said news came along months later and left a comment on my post with a decidedly different point of view. I felt horrible about it, because to me it was just something fun to write about, because you’re supposed to write about something, right? But to them it was the most important and stressful thing happening in their lives, and I remain embarrassed and ashamed to this day that I inadvertantly caused some harm to those people. It was a pivotal moment in my blogging career, the moment that I truly learned, in the most unpleasant and visceral way, that other people can read and be affected by what you write on the Internet. I imagine a lot of other long-time bloggers have a similar story they could share.

But the point is, that post is still up where it’s always been, just as I originally wrote it, with all the comments intact. (At least I think so, I haven’t actually checked.)

That’s … normal, right? It seems normal to me.

Except in rare circumstances, it shouldn’t be normal to feel so much fear over someone finding out you once said something unpopular that you feel the need to erase it from everyone’s memory, and it certainly shouldn’t be normal to make it easy to faciliate those kinds of erasures. (Incidentally, nobody’s going to be in those rare circumstances unless they’re either campaigning for office, working in PR, or a sociopath.)

But the times, they are a-changin’, it seems. Ugh. A Bob Dylan quote. What a horribly dated way to end a blog post.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Minor Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers for the Underdark in Act 1 below.

08:14 # Oof. Rough morning after a night of poor sleep. Bad neck pain developed through the day yesterday which made it quite difficult to find a comfortable sleeping position. I don’t really like to self-identify as a spoon person but in the parlance of the youth, I blew all my spoons really early yesterday and today I’m starting out with none. Judicious use of heating pad and just lying still, the most annoying form of self help, was about the only thing that helped. Hard to do while also trying to get work done through the day, though. You know the deal. #health

08:21 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Despite neck pain, and mostly to distract myself from it, last night I returned to the location of the petrified drow in the Underdark, the site of a comically one-sided shellacking against the party the last time I was there, to dish out a decisive victory and vengeance against the threat that was there, in what turned out to be a much more manageable fight. It was the last known encounter in Act 1, but it has opened a possible pathway to another location, so I’ll have to check that out now. #baldursgate3

12:09 # A tabletop group idea and a dungeon instance group idea, both of which are basically impossible to do, but hey maybe 3 or 4 other people might be out there in the world somewhere. #blogideas

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Potential spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 1 Underdark below.

07:52 # I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 so much now that I walk around humming that cello-sounding chromatic descent hook from the combat music. Dundundundunnnnn. Dundundundunnnnn. Dundundun DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN dunnnnn. #baldursgate3

08:08 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Last night, the party dispatched Gekh Coal in the Decrepit Village in the Underdark. The game warned me that I might be overmatched, and reminded me that fleeing was a viable option (how well I know this already), but I didn’t see how one level 7 guy and four level 4 minions, two of which were dead and nearly-dead in a surprise round, could be that difficult. Then, Gekh raised six reanimated dead from the corpses on the ground, and started counterspelling. Ruh roh. A tense encounter, indeed. #baldursgate3

08:15 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m thinking it might finally be time to saunter into Act 2 even though I haven’t quite finished with the Underdark to my satisfaction. I’ve noticed that there’s been exactly zero companion story content for quite some time in camp. No surprise twists, nobody wants a tryst, nobody wants to even talk. Wyll, for example, has remained totally silent in camp, standing there getting sloshed drinking from that goblet, for what surely must be weeks of in-game time now. I have labeled him an alcoholic. I suppose this is one of the perils of playing on Tactician difficulty, where a lot of long rests are necessary. In fact, I’m struggling to find camping supplies to even do a long rest anymore. I’ve reached a soft cap apparently. #baldursgate3

08:46 # Hrm I had an idea for a blog post less than an hour ago that I thought was a fairly interesting topic, I did not write it down, and then I went about making coffee and listening to the morning news, and now I have no idea what it was. So I think I’m going to use this space to write down blog post ideas from now on, as they occur to me. #blogideas

18:45 # 68% of a bell curve is within one standard deviation of the center. Those are all the “good enough” or “mediocre” or “average” games, the ones that are okay while you’re playing them but not particularly memorable or innovative. 95% of a bell curve is within two standard deviations of center. The portion between one and two deviations are especially good or especially bad games. The rest of the top part of the curve, the ones over two standard deviations, are the truly remarkable games, which are the ones I prefer to spend my time and energy focusing on playing. #blogideas

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Possible spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 1.

11:46 # Catching up on video descriptions this morning after yesterday’s Baldur’s Gate 3 blitz. Kind of a tedious process. Particularly since I want to keep a running tally of memorable statistics, so sometimes I have to scrub through the videos to remember if I did things like camp or use revivify scrolls or not. And sometimes it’s hard to think of an exciting way to say “fought monsters for xp.” Total length of narrative descriptions now up to 6,700 words just for Act 1. I kind of hope Act 2 and (presumably there’s a) 3 isn’t as long. #baldursgate3

11:47 # I just found Amelia Tyler’s Baldur’s Gate 3 Narrator Outtakes videos on YouTube. Fun stuff. #baldursgate3

15:47 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Close call with some hook horrors just now. Wouldn’t have been a problem but a stupid wizard showed up and wrecked everything. Three in the party went down, Astarion barely got away back to camp. Then he had to go back to revivify Tavi because Withers wouldn’t recall her body! (Another bug or intentional limitation? Who knows?) A miracle everyone survived and I kept all forward progress and didn’t have to reload. #baldursgate3

18:44 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I had some hope of getting through the Underdark and closing out Act 1 this weekend, but despite ignoring basically all real world duties, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it. Still have yet to meet the duergar and try to resolve that whole thing with the gnomes and the myconoids. #baldursgate3

18:55 # Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s really annoying that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t tell you with exact specificity what “loose ends” you need to finish in that Act 2 warning at the Mountain Pass, so I’m forced to do everything in every direction I can possibly find. It’s impossible for me to conceive of how it would be challenging to consult the internal database and display a list of quests that aren’t progressed far enough. (Well, that’s not entirely true, but it would have to be a really poorly designed system of parts that can’t communicate with one another, and it would have to be a lot of willful ignoring of something that must surely have been a common complaint for the entire time the game was in early access. Then again, game software rarely impresses me with the quality of its software design.) #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Definitely spoilers for Act 1 of Baldur’s Gate below. But, I mean, it’s been a couple weeks now and I’m pretty sure I’m the last person still in Act 1.

08:29 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Up and ready for a weekend of Baldur’s Gate 3. Got to deal with some Paladins of Tyr and a big spider. Last night I stumbled on a Zhentarim hideout and defeated a Gnoll Warlord. Maybe someday I’ll reach level 5, because I’ve been at level 4 for a loooong time, probably 80% of my play time so far. Or I’ll figure out what to do to progress the main story because at the moment, I have no idea. Maybe go to the Mountain Pass where the game says I shouldn’t go yet. Or possibly venture into the Underdark where the petrified statues are. #baldursgate3

12:21 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Paladin of Tyr dispatched, big spider dispatched, cursed book opened, but arg, still 51 xp short of level 5, which seems like the milestone that the game design is hinting I need to progress somewhere. Only place left to check out is the petrified statues in the Underdark, which seems pretty dangerous, but hey, we live for danger on Tactician difficulty. #baldursgate3

13:28 # When I watch a bit of the latest Critical Role on Twitch, I’m seeing the list of top recommended channels on the left returning to their normal state of mostly being hot tub channels, which I guess means that the Baldur’s Gate 3 era is over now. #baldursgate3

14:28 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Hrm I couldn’t figure out where to go next so I checked out the petrified statues in the Underdark. Big mistake. Don’t think we’re supposed to go there yet. :) And just beforehand, I had changed my party composition out of boredom to what turned out to be a bunch of useless duds. Pretty much a complete waste of a game session. #baldursgate3

19:02 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Level 5! The dream of the second barbarian attack has become a reality! Still don’t know where to go next though. I think I’ve been everywhere there is to go in the first zone. Surely they don’t want me to go back to the Underdark. That was ridiculous. It has to be the Mountain Pass I guess. Maybe the game won’t yell at me for being too low level anymore. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

09:03 # Finding a public web site where I can just plug in an Internet URL and have the page be read out loud in a natural AI voice is harder than I would have expected in August of 2023. There’s a few where you can have a web page read in a robotic unnatural voice, but the good stuff still seems to be jealously guarded and paywalled. #development

09:09 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Only played one session of Baldur’s Gate 3 last night and no fighting occurred, but I found an Underdark. Didn’t go into it more than a few steps, though. The one minotaur I saw was only level 4, but the petrified drow statues gave me pause. Plus, I still have tons of loose ends to deal with up on the surface: Gnolls, Paladins of Tyr, a Creche, a Spider Matriarch and a cursed book. #baldursgate3

09:29 # Tweetdeck just turned into the new paywalled unconfigurable X abomination for me, so there’s no reason for me to keep it as a pinned tab in my browser and there’s little compelling reason for me to read anything on Twitter ever again, so I’ll have to seek carefully-cultivated news and current events information elsewhere (like there even is anywhere else). #newsconsumer

14:22 # Ugh developed a massive headache today and it’s just not going away. I’ve always wondered if these are migraine headaches. I don’t fully understand the scientific or medical distinction between a “migraine” and a “headache.” I always thought there was a physiological distinction between the two, but I have no idea how I’m supposed to know whether I’m experiencing one or the other, and Wikipedia articles aren’t exactly helpful in this regard (e.g. “one symptom of a migraine is a headache”). Makes it sound like if you want to call it a migraine, it’s a migraine. Otherwise, it’s a headache. #health

15:39 # I’m getting notification emails from Google about them deleting unused accounts by the end of the year and the idea of trying to find and log into every random Google throwaway email account I’ve made over the years to prevent it from being deleted is rather daunting. I guess that’s the point. #development

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Minor spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3, maybe, kind of.

08:07 # Baldur’s Gate 3. This morning I’m reflecting on how thoroughly annoyed I am that the Scroll of True Resurrection that I got from “In Case of Death” seemed to have disappeared from my party inventory when I went looking for it last night. I was going to use it to resurrect [redacted] who got murdered by [redacted] in camp one night, because Withers can’t. Also I keep seeing random new things in my inventory and I don’t know how they got there. More and more bugs stacked on top of bugs in this game. Every day, more bugs discovered. Now the all time classic RPG bug of disappearing items from the inventory. But holy wow it’s a fun game. It creates such fun stories of adventure. #baldursgate3

19:24 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Tonight, the first order of business is to find out if the party can walk out of the Goblin Camp or if they’ll have to fight their way out. #baldursgate3

19:39 # I just read about the snafu with Baldur’s Gate 3 Hotfix #4 having to be redeployed, and newer save files not working for a time. Luckily I missed all that. (I hope, I haven’t launched the get yet tonight.) It makes me wonder how many decades it will take before game developers figure out how to make backwards and forwards compatible save files once and for all, because this “can’t load the save file” thing happens a lot. Configuration and serialization is hard, but it really seems like a solvable problem. I remember having to make user preference save files that were backwards and forwards compatible way back in the early 90s. I guess most working developers these days are relatively new at the job, and it takes time to develop the experience of continuous planning for when everything inevitably goes wrong. #baldursgate3 #development

21:01 # The thing where when you send an item to your camp chest it disappears forever is a pretty cool game feature. Don’t understand why more games don’t do that. The eternal struggle of the game developer versus the overly complicated inventory management system continues. Still somewhat baffled why every Baldur’s Gate 3 headline isn’t ranting about how many bugs are in this game. They’ve worked some kind of PR magic with this one. Perhaps a deal with the devil, you might say, hyuk hyuk. I guess you get a pass if it’s a genuinely fun game buried under all the bugs. :) #baldursgate3

21:09 # Baldur’s Gate 3. However I’m happy to report that I finally found my missing True Resurrection scroll. It was on a different character. Unfortunately I still wasn’t able to resurrect (redacted) so they’re gone from my game forever I guess. Would have been a really interesting story twist if I’d been able to bring them back. Oh well. #baldursgate3

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I read Wilhelm’s post on Dror Ragzlin and I had to set the record straight on what actually happened in that room.

Massive spoilers below, at least for the first areas of the game (I believe this is all Act I). Readers beware.

When I first read his post, I didn’t read the full post because after 45+ hours I hadn’t encountered Dror Ragzlin yet and didn’t even know who it was. I was struck by how different Wilhelm’s playthrough sounds from mine. Apparently there are people who simply walk from the Grove to the Goblin Camp and that’s that. I actually started to do just that, but what actually happened was:

I found some cultists on the way which led to fighting an owlbear in a cave, then explored a Blighted Village, then went into a cellar and found an underground laboratory and a cursed book, then went looking for Karlach, then had to fight through some gnolls blocking a road, then helped with an inn burning down, then talked to some githyanki dragon riders, then tangled with a hag in a swamp, then got impatient and killed the druid leader, causing every living soul at the Grove to be massacred, then rescued a kid from some harpies at the beach, then explored some caves under a well in the Blighted Village.

Then I went to the goblin camp, some 30-40 hours after I first left the Grove. I, too, was level 3 when I left the Grove, and was still only level 4 when I entered Dror Ragzlin’s room (about three-quarters of the way to level 5, but not enough yet for that sweet, sweet level 5 power increase that I remember so well from Solasta).

The full narrative story of my sordid adventures are over on my Baldur’s Gate 3 Progress page. 4,400 words and counting!

Anyway, the point is, I’m playing my first playthrough very differently. I’m playing on Tactician difficulty, and I’m trying very hard to avoid having to reload the game if I make a horrible mistake. I hate losing progress in games, and I hate to replay sections of a game repeatedly. (I wish games would stop using the antiquated load-and-save mechanic and always make death and failure a normal and expected and fun part of the game.) So, after I learned that you can essentially continue without losing any progress if just a single party member can manage to flee from a losing battle (and if you have enough gold to buy resurrections), I only reload if one of the many game bugs forces me to, or I’m completely overwhelmed by an encounter and everyone dies. Which, so far, hasn’t happened since I learned you can flee.

My adventure with Dror Ragzlin occurred only last night, starting with Nightwarden Mithera next door, who is level 6 and made me very nervous. Especially after, in my first fight with her, she downed Karlach, the unstoppable killing machine in the party, from nearly full health, with one flurry of attacks. Not a good sign. The party fled for their lives immediately. Everyone got away except Karlach, who would have gotten away, except a goblin kicked her down a chasm and killed her instantly, something I didn’t know could even happen until just then.

After resurrecting Karlach, I decided to try again, this time with recently-rescued level 5 Druid Halsin, to get all the advantages I could. I had planned to dispatch the goblin leaders without him, because Halsin warned us that if he accompanied the party, there would be no more talking and battles would break out immediately. And he was right.

The second attempt at the Nightwarden went much smoother (partly because we killed one of her bodyguards the first time), and there were no casualties. The hardest part of the second fight was getting rid of that stupid Scrying Eye, which was nearly impossible to hit or damage. Luckily we shut it down with Silence spells so it only managed to call in one reinforcement.

It took so little resources I felt reasonably confident going next door to tackle Dror Ragzlin without even taking a long rest. I wasn’t the slightest bit worried about his horde of goblin buddies, because I had a decent idea of their capabilities from previous fights. I was mainly worried about what Dror himself might do. Was he a caster? Was he a fighter? I didn’t know.

My lineup for this fight was: Halsin, the ridiculously broken and overpowered 5E druid class who can wildshape into a bear and immediately gain 36 temporary hit points multiple times per combat. Karlach, the wild magic barbarian, wielding a massive magic great axe picked up from a dead vendor, who cuts down weaker enemies in a single blow, and a host of magic items giving her various bonuses. Shadowheart, the cleric with an all-around balanced and useful skillset. Astarion, the Rogue Vampire who is not my favorite character but a rogue’s ability to do a cunning action dash or disengage makes him absolutely crucial for fleeing any battle, and rogues are a fairly reliable source of steady damage every round from a near-guaranteed sneak attack. And, of course, the hero of our story, Tavi, the Bard with the Bongos, who mostly plays a supporting role in combat by dishing out advantages or disadvantages on an as-needed basis.

If you’re new to D&D 5th Edition combat, the entire system revolves around gaining advantage or imposing disadvantage. Literally every “gaming” decision boils down to that. I learned that some years ago after watching just a couple of episodes of Critical Role, which was my first exposure to the 5E ruleset. (Advantage and disadvantage wasn’t a thing when I last played D&D.) This core philosophy has been confirmed by playing Solasta: Crown of the Magister, and it remains true in Baldur’s Gate 3. Have advantage? You’ll succeed. Have disadvantage? You’ll fail.

I couldn’t walk into the room with Druid Halsin in tow, or combat would immediately break out. So I sent Shadowheart in by herself to survey the scene. I was worried about what kind of magic Dror Ragzlin could cast, and there were a couple of little goblin casters nearby, so I began the combat by having Shadowheart cast a Silence sphere in the general vicinity. Silence is how you beat casters. Many of them aren’t smart enough to walk out of the silence zone, and will engage in melee combat instead. (A vital lesson I learned in Solasta: Crown of the Magister that also works in BG3.)

It turns out Dror Ragzlin doesn’t cast magic at all. He’s a barbarian and he hits hard. And he jumps around a lot, using the stupid broken jumping mechanic that somehow allows you to move way further than your movement speed will allow. Jump first, then move–you’ll get like twice as far if you have a high strength. It’s nuts. Anyway, Dror frequently hits one party member, jumps halfway across the screen, then hits another party member, both for crazy damage. Not fun.

Astarion went down from a Dror blow, but we got him back up, and he spent most of his time hiding at the top of the stairs with very few hit points, because he ran out of healing potions. In the end, hiding at the top of the stairs was a poor decision, because Dror leaped over to Astarion later in the fight, then kicked him straight into a bottomless chasm below, and Astarion died instantly, and we were down one rogue for about half the fight. That ratcheted up the stakes immediately for my self-imposed “iron man” playthrough because there would probably be no running away from this battle without a rogue.

Two can play at the kicking game, though. BG3’s AI had taught me numerous times how effective kicking someone in combat can be. I lost count of the number of times an enemy had unexpectedly kicked one of my party into an environmental damage area, like a burning patch or electrified water or a grease slick.

Early in the battle, a goblin warrior stood right at the edge of the giant spider pit. Karlach charged him and kicked him right into the pit below, and from that moment on, about half of the goblins in the room spent their time fighting with the spiders instead of us. In the end, one of the two spiders was killed, but many goblins also died, because those spiders also had ranged attacks.

Most of the action took place on the right side of the room around the bottom of the stairs. The main and only tactic I used, really, was to ignore the goblins (and a warg summon) and focus fire as many heavy hitters as possible on Dror Ragzlin to get him down as fast as possible. Every turn that Dror had was a chance someone (or more than one someone, really) in the party could die. Early in the battle we were doing a lot of damage to him, but about halfway through he must have used some spell or ability that gave him a lot of damage resistence, and it was slower work toward the end. A lot of healing potions and bonus action healing words were used in the battle. Shadowheart and Tavi both had bonus action heals that were used to top people off. This was not a situation to conserve spell slots. This was a burn-everything-or-probably-die situation.

Once Dror Ragzlin went down, things got a lot easier. We weren’t out of the woods just yet, though, because right around then, the spider-versus-goblin fight had died out and the remaining goblins were turning their attention back to us. Fortunately they were relatively easy to dispatch, even with most of our resources depleted, and Shadowheart and Tavi mainly being down to cantrips and crossbow shots. Karlach and the wildshaped bear form of Druid Halsin dispatched most of the remaining goblins in one or two hits.

The party was beat up (mostly Karlach), Astarion fell to his death and had to be resurrected, but overall it was a successful operation to bring down Dror Ragzlin on the first try. Druid Halsin was ecstatic that his Grove would no longer be threatened (we didn’t mention that all his druid friends along with all the tieflings in the Grove were already dead).

Dror Ragzlin was the third and final goblin leader defeated in the Shattered Sanctum, which now clears the way for … something. I don’t really know what comes next. Something about a Moonlit Tower I guess, wherever that is.

And that was how things really went down with Dror Ragzlin.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

10:00 # Baldur’s Gate 3. I loathe puns (mostly because I’m terrible at creating them, but also because they’re dumb), but I’m ridiculously pleased with myself for coming up with the video title “Bear With Us, Druid Halsin” last night. #baldursgate3

17:14 # After many days, I finally realized the weird bird or cricket chirp I kept hearing was not any form of anima–it was a dying battery in a smoke detector in a back room. #homeowner

23:21 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Oh man. Lots more fighting in Baldur’s Gate 3 tonight. All the goblin leaders dispatched. Two of my people got kicked into bottomless pits and died instantly, had to be resurrected in camp later. Another 400 gold down the drain. #baldursgate3

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It’s Creator Appreciation Week in Blaugust, formerly known as Developer Appreciation Week, so I thought I’d do something very unusual this morning: Write a blog post about it.

It’s possible I may have posted these exact thoughts before, but I don’t remember.

I never understood the concept of the Developer Appreciation Week in past Blaugusts. I’m a software developer by trade, so when I think about appreciation for the work of game developers, I think about appreciation for the work of a programmer, or general IT engineer, and I have no visibility into the work of any programmers in modern games.

In olden times (the 1990s), it was easy to see the fruits of a game programmer’s efforts. Doom, for example, put the work of realtime 3D-to-2D mathematical translation on full display, and we could all celebrate John Carmack’s pioneering work on it.

Not so much today. The modern day game programmer, as is the modern day anything programmer, is probably just tying existing libraries together, and not writing a lot of original algorithms. Most all of the algorithms we need for day-to-day programming have already been written.

The original work that we see and hear on display in modern games is more the work of artists. We hear the work of voice actors and sound designers and musicians. We see the work of 3D modellers and texture artists. We read the work of the writers. Most of them, except the voice actors and musicians–who, for some historical reason, are more worthy of fame than any of the others–are largely unknown to me.

The development of a modern game is usually an orchestration of people, which is a human resources and management problem, and also something I have no visibility into. I have no idea which game developer studios have cultivated a healthy, collaborative, productive working environment and which ones haven’t, until or unless some games journalist writes an investigative piece.

I can’t think of very many game studios that consistently produce games that are the best of the best. From Software and Naughty Dog come to mind. That’s about it. Naughty Dog recently got in trouble for being too demanding of their employees, so I probably shouldn’t even mention them. It’s only a matter of time before From Software gets in trouble for something, but, since they are a Japanese company, different cultural standards apply.

As for Creator Appreciation, that’s a wide open can of worms.

I personally am enthralled by the work of voice actors, and I think it’s one of the most amazing human creative skills imaginable. The ability to make a human larnyx and throat muscles sound different from the way it was born sounding is a magic trick to me. In the same way that singing is a magic trick, except it’s so much more complex than that. When I listen to voice actors in a game, I’m listening to their accents, the way they pronounce and enunciate words, the cadence of their speech, the pitch, the part of the throat they’re using … a lot of times I actually miss the content of the dialog they’re saying because I’m so focused on how they’re saying it.

There’s too many good voice actors to mention, though. Everybody knows the famous ones by now, surely. But sometimes I hear a particularly good or interesting voice in a game and look up who it is and it’s somebody I’ve never heard of. Whoever voiced Zixzax in Divinity: Original Sin springs to mind. What an amazing kaliedascope of sound and music that voice is, almost certainly inspired by Frank Welker’s Mxyzptlk from the old 80s cartoons, a voice I still remember from when I was a kid.

I also spare a lot of thought for the work of sound designers in games. However, it’s usually when I’m annoyed that they place sound effects louder in the mix than voices, which is “the industry standard” now, thanks to Christopher Nolan I guess. One of the first things I do in modern games is turn down the sound effects volume to something like 50-60% while the dialog volume goes all the way to 100%, and that, to my ear, achieves the right balance between the two.

But other than that, I do appreciate a good ambient soundscape. In Baldur’s Gate 3, the ambient nature sounds are noticably good. They sound like someone actually took the time to record high-quality nature sounds and weave them together, rather than just cutting-and-pasting in an off-the-shelf ambient loop from The Best Ambient Sounds For Games Volume 47.

As for “Creators” in the modern sense of the word, meaning streamers and YouTubers and TikTokers, there’s a small handful of creators I return to regularly. Pitch Meetings and/or Ryan George, Viva La Dirt League, Critical Role. Dimension 20 and other shows from the College Humor alum on Dropout.tv. Recently I found Sam Riech’s TikTok which has some interesting stuff on it. I like his style of cerebral and absurd comedy, which is why I tend to enjoy most things he corrals on Dropout.tv. (WTF 101 and Ultramechatron Team Go! are among my favorite short-lived shows if you have a chance to see them, which I think are largely from the twisted mind of Mike Trapp.) I generally only watch things that look and sound like professionally-produced television content.

There’s too many to mention. I tend to graviate toward original content I’ve never seen before, and strongly avoid copycat content. The number of times I click “burn this channel and never show it to me again” on my YouTube front page for reaction videos and anything that’s just a lazy copy of a clip from Critical Role is absurd.

Okay that’s it. I’m tired of writing; I’ve got stuff to do.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Maybe spoilers but not really. More of a cautionary tale about gameplay mechanics.

09:36 # So last night I ended up slaughtering a lot of goblins in Baldur’s Gate 3, but in the harsh light of day this morning, I realize that I probably didn’t need to do that. It was easy (after over 40 hours in the game, it was some of the first easy fighting in the game for me, to be honest–more reasons to think I was supposed to go there first), but still. I don’t think any of them were actually hostile toward the party. I got confused into thinking they were hostile because when you’re sneaking, all the bright red “don’t step here or you’ll be spotted” area on the ground makes me think that if I’m spotted, I’ll be attacked immediately. Red = hostile enemy, right? Video games 101. But I think I could have just stood up and walked around freely. Oh well. Sorry goblins. #baldursgate3

16:17 # Oops I think I redeployed a previous version of my site accidentally, so my most recent post disappeared for a bit. That’s what I get for trying to update the Baldur’s Gate 3 story page outside the normal release process. #blog

21:14 # Baldur’s Gate 3. More goblin carnage in Baldur’s Gate 3 tonight, but this time they started it. #baldursgate3

(Actually, that’s not true at all. I picked a dialog option that directly led to combat, though the game didn’t leave me much of a choice. Soooooo yeah. I mean they could have chosen to run away, so it’s still their own fault for dying.)

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Blaugust is halfway over. I, for one, have been setting an example by putting in the absolute barest minimum of an effort. Work smarter, not harder, kids. I’ll leave the stress and dissatisfaction of self-imposed rapid essay deadlines to the newer folks.

Gaming Baldur’s Gate 3 Baldur’s Gate 3 finally launched, so there’s really nothing else to talk about in the gaming space right now, and certainly nothing else for me, personally, to talk about. It’s still pretty janky, but for some reason everyone’s giving it a pass, probably because the bugs are mostly careless cosmetic and UI bugs–the kind that probably came about from someone fat-fingering an edit in a million-line configuration file on a rushed development team with no substantive peer reviews–not overwhelming game-breaking programming bugs that require extensive time and expertise to fix.

Summarizing Baldur’s Gate 3 can be done by describing it as a mashup of Divinity: Original Sin and Dragon Age with (mostly) D&D 5th Edition rules and a typical over-the-top heroic fantasy story. If any of that appeals to you, there’s probably something for you in Baldur’s Gate 3.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a far better D&D combat simulator, but it’s not like I’m not going to play a new Baldur’s Gate game, come on.

I find the combat frustrating because of the lack of a tactical grid, but a turn-based system sure beats the heck out of that dumb quote-unquote “realtime” Infinity Engine nonsense (you know, the “realtime” system where you had to pause the game every two seconds to see what was even happening and make extensive individual changes to everyone’s orders because the AI always got it wrong). BG3 combat is exciting and immersive and tense on Tactician difficulty, and every decision feels like the party’s survival hinges on it. And having to choose whether to run away or not (and how to run away, because it’s not easy) adds a dramatic element that’s completely lacking in Solasta.

You can always just re-load to try again, but I don’t like to lose progress or replay parts of a game repeatedly, and imposing my own set of “iron man” rules on my playthrough spices it up quite a lot. As long as at least one party member can successfully run away from a battle, you can theoretically continue without losing progress, somewhat reminscent of a roguelike. But gold doesn’t grow on trees, and it costs 200 gold to resurrect each fallen companion, so there’s quite a monetary incentive to keep people in your party from dying.

The story is as tropey as you’d expect from a heroic fantasy D&D campaign, but it’s definitely more involved and interesting than Solasta: Crown of the Magister in a narrative sense, and the voice acting and motion capture is a lot better (i.e. more expensive). And, of course, there’s all the angsty intraparty companion drama like you’d get from a BioWare game, which, let’s be honest, is really the main thing people remember from BioWare games. (I personally have no memory of any battles or storyline from Dragon Age, just the camping and the companion stories.)

I’ve written about Baldur’s Gate 3 extensively in other posts and microposts, and a running story narrative in descriptions for videos, and it’s basically all I’m doing right now. Pathfinder: Kingmaker got booted to the curb.

Palia The new MMO Palia entered closed and then open beta, which caused a lot of excitement among Blaugustians, and then, as is typical of new MMO launches, I heard little or nothing about it a week later. (Deciding to launch anything at the same time as Baldur’s Gate 3 was a collosal blunder, if you ask me.)

In any case, it doesn’t seem like my kind of MMO. (To be honest, I don’t think there’re any MMOs that are my kind of MMO anymore, and I have no idea what I ever saw in the genre–Baldur’s Gate 3 contains all the persistent world exploration, character progression, satisfying tactical combat, and story that I want from any MMO. Make more of them, please.) Palia looks like the kind of busy work MMO that exists mainly to replace social media, which, to be fair, is probably the right direction for MMOs to go in to distinguish themselves from far better single-player RPGs. Like, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.

Anyway, I downloaded and installed Palia, but as yet haven’t actually started the game. But again, to set expectations, I very rarely find myself needing or wanting game-related busy work.

Stray Gods I did start a game of Stray Gods: The Role-Playing Musical, though. I recommend it, if you like to hear the singing of voice actors who are famous from other stuff, but the story didn’t really grab me immediately. I guess I’m too old to relate to teenage angst anymore.

Microblogging I’ve been dashing out little microthoughts every day over on my GoToSocial instance. But, a month later, I’m starting to tire of it. During work hours, I’ve been focused on programming problems, and outside of work, I’ve been focused on Baldur’s Gate 3 and everything that surrounds it, so there’s little time for anything other than that.

By the way, if anyone is replying to my notes (I will never, ever call them toots by the way, because they’re called notes), I have to apologize because I don’t really have a process to look for or see replies yet. This Semaphore.social thing I use doesn’t seem to want to let me know about notifications. It’s a very one-way communication system at the moment.

Video Production Baldur’s Gate 3 inspired me to make a couple of amusing YouTube shorts from my gameplay, a new thing I’ve been trying this year. (Well, I thought they were amusing.) I’ll embed one of them but they’re shorts and they don’t embed very well.

It’s a lot more work than you might think to make those, but I find it a deeply satisfying artistic experience to create an entertaining, narratively sensible one-minute video, especially the part where almost every millisecond of the audio track has to be extensively sculpted. But because the finished product is only a minute long, it’s a media project that I can actually complete, unlike all the other media project ideas I have.

And, you know, people will actually click on them, because the worst possible outcome is they’ve wasted only a single minute of their lives. Hurray for attention deficit! Win-win for everyone.

I use Davinci Resolve to make those, by the way.

Nutrition I’ve been trying to stick to a regimen of making and eating mostly non-unhealthy foods, but with my only interest lately being playing Baldur’s Gate 3 as quickly and efficiently as possible, nutritional habits are starting to slip, as my brain demands “get the annoying, time-wasting eating process over with as fast as possible” solutions even more than usual.

Day Job This past sprint has seen me mostly keeping my head down writing Java Spring code to process data from an AWS SQS message queue and store it in a database. Java code today, at least on this team, seems a lot more focused on functional programming patterns than I remember it. A very unusual week-long vacation looms on the horizon for next sprint.

World Context * There’s a Trump media circus almost every day now because of various indictments, a federal one for classified documents, a state one for Georgian election interferance, and probably some others I’ve forgotten. Not to mention his ongoing presidential primary campaign (which–to answer your question, world–yes, he’s still winning easily). Way too much to document. * Last month the agreement that allowed Ukraine to ship grain out of the Black Sea expired, jeopardizing world food supplies. * Wildfires caused death and destruction throughout Hawaii, most notably in the resort town of Lāhainā, on Maui. * Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Ukraine, Hollywood Strikes, Nigerian Coup, Sudanese Civil War. * Celebrity Deaths: Paul Reubens (actor), Sinead O’Conner (musician).

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

08:08 # My narrative descriptions of my Baldur’s Gate 3 adventures are getting out of hand. I need to cut them in half.

08:41 # Incidentally, I did not, in fact, launch Palia to try it out before the end of the weekend. There probably won’t be any other games or hobbies until I finish The Baldur’s Gate 3 Game Experience. Despite the massive number of bugs–seriously there are so many careless bugs in this game, you guys–and the absolutely horrible, tedious, antiquated 1990s inventory and party management UI, it’s the most immersive RPG experience I’ve played since Elden Ring, and it’s impossible for any other games to compete. This would be a truly amazing game if they’d just spent even a single moment streamlining any quality of life aspects of the game. I guess they had to leave something to improve for a Baldur’s Gate 4. #baldursgate3 #palia

21:36 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Pretty hilarious surgery attempt by Volo in camp tonight. Also, before that, a pretty large explosion in the Goblin Camp setup by moving a large number of smokepowder barrels next to a door, which, after a carefully thrown alchemist’s fire bottle, killed two guards on the other side of said door. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to go to the Goblin Camp first because the combat encounters there are cakewalks compared to the fifty thousand distractions on the way to the Goblin Camp. #baldursgate3

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10:54 # Okay been to the store, ate some unhealthy junk food, now ready to return to Baldur’s Gate 3 for the continuing adventures of trying to scrounge up a measly 400 gold to resurrect two dead companions. I watched the BG3 trailer for the first time this morning. Man they really give away a lot of important plot points in that thing. Major spoiler in like the first 5 seconds of the trailer. And the rest… I’m like wow I didn’t know hardly any of that after playing the game for nearly 40 hours. Thanks I guess? #baldursgate3

Indeed I spent most of the day playing Baldur’s Gate 3, where some Dramatic Story Developments occurred, and I finally went to the place with all the level 1 monsters where I think I was supposed to go to first. Probably would have been a lot less companion deaths if I’d done so.

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09:35 # I tried out Stray Gods, the Role-Playing Musical yesterday. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect: A passion project by some developers, artists, and famous voice actors who sing. Out of the ordinary for a game, and clearly a lot of love went into it, so I like it and recommend it. But on the flip side, the story didn’t really grab me right away (it’s got a teenaged angsty vibe so it’s skewed to a younger demographic), and the songs so far don’t have any memorable hooks. I kind of wish there was a way to just sit back and watch in these kinds of games, without having to stop and think of a narrative choice periodically, or a button to just pick a random choice. Stopping everything to make a decision is kind of immersion-breaking for me. #straygods

10:25 # Fighting a very strong urge to go to the store tomorrow morning instead of this morning, so I can play some games. I think I’m losing this battle. Surely I have enough food around the house I can scrounge up to survive a single day. (I do, which is the exact problem.) #nutrition

12:37 # Another Baldur’s Gate 3 fight on Tactician difficulty where two party members died while the other two ran away to live another day. The biggest advantage of the “run away” strategy (as opposed to the “reload” strategy) is that you don’t lose progress. I don’t like to waste my game-playing time replaying parts of a game I’ve already played, after reloading. The biggest disadvantage is there isn’t a lot of gold in this game and it costs a fair bit of money to get your companions resurrected. But I just realized it costs half as much to hire hirelings, so it’s probably more cost-effective to make a party of hirelings as cannon fodder and leave the story companions in camp. #baldursgate3

13:13 # So howlongtobeat says you can finish the main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 in about 35 hours. Steam says I’ve played 37 hours so far (which probably includes a few hours of idling on menus), and it feels like whatever main story there is has barely even started. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

08:18 # I’m installing Palia this morning to try the quote-unquote “open beta” sometime before the weekend is over. I don’t expect it to be a game for me. The label “cozy” is always offputting to me, because it feels like an abdication of any developer responsibility to put interactive fun into the game, leaving little more than idle clicking while socializing. I’ve also heard comparisons to Landmark, and Landmark, for me, was more of a busy work simulator and 3D modeling tool than a game. Also, when exactly did the default program install directory on Windows turn into C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\ProgramName? That seems … quite silly. #palia

08:48 # There was a bug in my video upload script that blocked my YouTube uploads for a few days. I don’t have any notifications for that so I only notice it when I randomly think about, find, and refresh my channel page in my always-open browser bursting with tabs, then see there’s nothing new on it. Some kind of notification about overnight script failures would probably be a good idea so I could see it as soon as I get up in the morning. #videos

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08:01 # Oof. Rough morning. Too many days in a row staying up late like a crazy college kid. (Which, for me, is like an hour past my normal bed time.) It’s such a rare experience anymore to see a game that’s immersive enough for me to lose track of time. #baldursgate3

11:21 # It’s raining so I’m in a bit of a mood this morning. I thought the Palia closed beta was, like, a closed beta, but it turns out it was actually the early access launch. The open beta coming up in a day or so is the launch. We shouldn’t even sugar coat it by calling it a “soft launch.” It’s a launch with a disclaimer, which is basically the same as what every other “ongoing” game maker calls a launch. But I hear it’s fun, so what’s the harm in giving yet another company who doesn’t specialize in security an opportunity to accidentally lose my account credentials?

13:00 # I started making another Baldur’s Gate 3 short to tell the tale of a heroic hyena who escaped with one hit point remaining to notify a group of gnoll hunters of the imminent danger from an evil adventuring party. It’s quite an interesting artistic challenge to condense 30 minutes of game video down to a satisfying 1-minute narrative. #videos #baldursgate3

21:34 # Welp I just played Baldur’s Gate 3 for an hour and wasn’t recording the game audio, so that’s my excuse for re-loading a previous save from before two of my party died and the other two ran away. (I’m trying to see how far I can make it into this Tactician playthrough by “running away” instead of “just re-loading” before I run out of patience for buying resurrections. This will be the fourth reload so far.) #baldursgate3

(I’m tracking the number of Revivifies, Resurrections, and Reloads in my Tactician playthrough over on my Baldur’s Gate 3 Progress page.)

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

10:31 # I think I’ve finally worked out the cache problems, and have a new project page on the site which I hope to keep updated with my progress through Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s essentially a copy of the video descriptions I’m writing for each video I record (it’s almost impossible for me to play a game anymore without recording it, even if I don’t ever upload it), which turns into a nifty story narrative when you put them all together in a row. (Something I first tried with Elden Ring.) Massive spoiler warning, of course. https://endgameviable.com/page/baldurs-gate-progress/ #baldursgate3 #blog

(The inference there being that I’m probably going to put my Baldur’s Gate 3 dispatches on the progress page from now on. I didn’t like the potential for spoilers ending up in the RSS feed.)

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

07:29 # This morning I think it’s fair to say that Baldur’s Gate 3 has caused me to completely abandon Pathfinder: Kingmaker yet again. P:K moves back to the back burner, where it’s made its home since 2021. Harwell’s Heroes, and the Pathfinder ruleset’s relentless nightmare of protecting against opportunity attacks, will remain frozen in time, halfway through the Troll Lair. #pathfinderkingmaker

08:20 # Some weeks ago, I configured my phone so that when I say “play the news” in the morning, it plays about 5 different 5-minute news summaries from disparate, competing ideological sources, in anticipation of the impending demise of TweetDeck as a daily source of news. The styles adopted by the different networks are pretty funny. From dry readings, to FM morning zoo-style, to starting out with a casual “hellooooo.” #newsconsumer

09:25 # Baldur’s Gate 3 Major Blighted Town Spoiler. Last night I experienced my first irrevocable party TPK in Baldur’s Gate 3 on Tactician difficulty, when I made the Ornate Mirror mad. It sent out a floating metal sphere that burned the whole party for a third of their health, leaving the ground covered with fire, and then it floated out past the party into the room and blew up the coffins in the grotto, out of which spilled an army of undead. The undead then used their turns to break open all the remaining coffins of their fallen comrades so the room was filled with an undead horde. And oh by the way the floating metal sphere also kept shooting fire at the party. And oh yeah also I hadn’t had a long rest since the owlbear cave. We didn’t last long. I didn’t even have the chance to try to run away. Luckily I had done a quicksave right before talking to the mirror. #baldursgate3

09:46 # Baldur’s Gate 3 seems very forgiving about downed player mechanics on Tactician difficulty, a lot more so than Solasta was. You don’t even really need a healer. Anyone can just run up and tap a downed player on the shoulder with a help action and bring them back with 1 hit point. It allows a battle to continue long past the point where it probably should have ended in a TPK, with a continual rotation of players going down and popping back up. As long as it’s not more than one or two downed at any given time. #baldursgate3

15:52 # I have to admit that after spending this year writing and reviewing code in Java, following the two years of writing and reviewing code in Golang, I’ve come to appreciate the simpler design philosophy of Golang a lot more than I did before. Java code tries to be everything to everybody and ends up being … really, really verbose. Feels like writing a novel every time you want to just check a variable or something. #development

15:59 # By the way, I don’t like how my blog post notifications look on this crazy GoToSocial thing, so I stopped doing them. I have to put it all in manually, and there’s no fancy schmancy attachment with all the opengraph information from the post displayed in a nice, neat box with a picture below. Just some plain text and a link. It’s not a good sign when my own stuff looks like completely ignorable spam to me. #blog

22:40 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Tonight I think I found one of those hard encounters I’ve been hearing about in Baldur’s Gate 3. The ~~Paladin~~ Sword of Tyr, who I call “Mister Anders,” at The Risen Road. Not to be trifled with at level 3. I did manage to kill him with a lucky crit on the second try, but with 3 out of 4 of my party down, Mister Anders’ two remaining helpers made short work of the last one standing. Going to have to come back later for Karlach’s personal story of revenge.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

(Possible early-game Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers near the bottom.)

08:40 # I see that my autonomous video uploading script has reached a streak of videos for which I didn’t write any descriptions. Writing video descriptions is hard. If I don’t write them immediately after recording, I never write them. It’s hard enough to give the video file a filename. But I’ve come to the conclusion in life that it’s better to upload videos with just a title and no description than to wait for descriptions to be written. Therefore, lots of my videos don’t have descriptions. And don’t even talk to me about thumbnails. Nobody’s watching my videos because they saw an eye-catching thumbnail. #videos

08:56 # It’s weird how a game like Redfall, which I never saw any bugs in, gets trashed and review bombed on launch and dies immediately, but a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, which is absolutely riddled with bugs–multiple bugs every game hour, disappearing UIs, cameras pointing the wrong way all the time, weird textures, doors that turn invisible, etc. etc.–gets an overwhelmingly positive review score. How fickle gamers are, and how useless review scores are. #gaming

23:23 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Tonight Tavi’s group explored the Forest, talked to a dog named Scratch, entered the Blighted Town, was propositioned by a Devil, made a deal with some ogres, found a secret laboratory with a cursed book in the cellar of an apothecary’s place. Don’t make the Ornate Mirror mad. #baldursgate3

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What is there to say about Baldur’s Gate 3 that hasn’t already been said? I genuinely don’t know, because I haven’t read much of what anyone’s said so far.

But I’ll start with something I haven’t seen mentioned in the casual enthusiasm so far: This game is riddled with bugs. It’s the buggiest RPG I’ve seen since any average MMORPG launch in the late 1990s or early 2000s. You can’t take two steps in the game without running into a texture bug, or a camera pointed off into space, or a model that looks weird, or some interactive feature of the world that isn’t working right, or a disappearing UI, or supposed allies that suddenly start attacking you, or something. To be fair, it’s usually the kind of bug we software developers would classify as a “cosmetic” bug–something you can put off fixing until later because it doesn’t really stop customers from using the software.

Despite that, I have no doubts whatsoever that I’m going to keep playing this game and work around or ignore all the quirky bugs and annoyances, because there’s definitely something compelling about it, something that elevates it above the rest of the field, so that it might actually be that roughly one game a year that is actually worth taking time out of your busy schedule to play. It’s the kind of game that’s an experience, not just a game.

I’ve played about 12 hours so far (not counting a couple hours of false starts), and I’m playing really slow, talking to everyone, reading all the text out loud, reading books and item descriptions and whatnot, extended hour-plus tactial combat sequences, stopping to play bongos for the crowds, so that’s probably like 2 hours of content that everyone else is blowing through in their race to see the end of the story. (I imagine streamers are probably finishing up the game when I post this.)

Tavi the Bard entertaining some tieflings while dour companions look on.

In terms of basic gameplay mechanics, it’s essentially a mashup of Divinity: Original Sin and Dragon Age. The influences from those games are heavy.

Divinity: Original Sin, obviously, because the same studio made it, and at times it looks like they genuinely just swapped different art assets into the exact same game, undoubtedly saving tons of development time.

The Dragon Age and BioWare ancestry, however, was a pleasant surprise. It has the same “camp drama” mechanic from that game, where you go around talking to all the people in your party every night at camp. (Or, in my case, after almost every combat encounter, because I’m playing on Tactician difficulty so far.) At camp is when you find out all of your companions’ Secret Tragic Backstories(TM), something that is apparently required to play modern D&D.

Your companion characters have very obvious and differing personalities and you quickly form opinions about them, just like most BioWare games. Although I will say that none of them really stand out as being more likable than any other ones, to me personally. They all have that kind of generic heroic fantasy Secret Tragic Backstory(TM) kind of personality that’s easy to laugh at. (The Secret Tragic Backstory(TM) usually boils down to some variation of abuse or addiction. Sorry to spoil literally every story related to D&D in all of human history.)

In terms of a D&D combat simulator, I find it lacking. I think Solasta: Crown of the Magister sets the bar there, and BG3 does not meet or exceed it. It’s actually very annoying that it doesn’t lay down a tactical square grid to make things easier. With the game’s gridless system of auto-pathing, I constantly have problems getting my characters to go to the exact spot I want them to go, following the exact route I want them to take to avoid opportunity attacks, which can sometimes be the difference between life and death.

But I still find the combat fairly exciting. On Tactician difficulty, almost every fight so far has been a near-TPK. The [redacted] in the Refectory, the [redacted] in the Dank Crypt, the [redacted] in the cave: All those early encounters, I had to scratch and claw my way through them, using up almost all my resources, and there was never any certainty of winning.

Tavi and new hireling Brinna Brightsong jamming on bongos and violin.

I tried to make my character an antithesis to the typical Heroic Fantasy Secret Tragic Backstory(TM) character that D&D 5E always wants you to make: Mine is Tavi, a Halfling Bard with Bongos, always trying to lighten the mood with a drum circle, but so far, none of the broody companions have wanted to join in. I even hired a second halfling Bard to play the violin with me. By the end of the game, I might replace all the broody companions with a full Halfling Bard Band. (Note: Two halfling bards does not help make combat any easier on Tactician difficulty.)

That’s good enough for a first look, I suppose. I’m really enjoying it so far and don’t anticipate playing anything else for a while, despite all the bugs. I can’t understate how many bugs are in this game. It’s a ton of bugs. But they’re more the endearing kind of bugs, you know? The kind of bugs you look back on fondly and laugh about as being part of that nostalgic game experience. They don’t seem to matter to my enjoyment of the game. So far, at least. So far, I haven’t actually lost anything to a bug.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

(Potential early-game Baldur’s Gate 3 spoilers below.)

08:14 # Well hell. I wake up to find it pouring down rain, which really makes me regret spending yesterday playing Baldur’s Gate 3 instead of mowing. #homeowner #baldursgate3

09:45 # Yet another UI bug I ran into in Baldur’s Gate 3: I walked into a combat encounter, but for some reason the game thought I was in a cut scene, so all the combat UI was missing and I couldn’t actually do anything (F10 did not toggle it back on). Fortunately I was able to restore the UI by quicksaving and quickloading (something I have attempted more than once to fix weird issues thusfar), otherwise it would have been a game-breaking, load-the-last-save bug. #baldursgate3

10:42 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Huh. So I’ve been wondering why I couldn’t find Lae’zal after the ship crashed in my BG3 game, and it turns out it’s one of those situations where I went left instead of right and completely missed her. There’s a lot of those decision points in this game so far. Go right, it goes to a short dead end with something cool in it. Go left, it’s continuing down the main path to the rest of the game and you forget to go back and check the other way. Not a fan of that in games. The “mostly linear path but with lots of short diversions you could miss” methodology. Either be fully linear or be fully open, I say. #baldursgate3

14:22 # One of the problems with my game recording setup for a long time has been that I can only listen to the games I’m playing by monitoring the OBS output from my recording PC, instead of listening to the game PC, because in Windows you can only send an application’s audio to one device, and I need to send the game audio to the HDMI output so I can capture it on the recording PC. So there’s a slight delay to the game sound that I hear, compared to what I see on the screen. Usually it’s fine but sometimes it gets wildly out of sync. I’m testing Voicemeeter Banana today to output game sound both to monitors and to the HDMI output at the same time. There’s still a 10ms delay. Not sure if it’s better yet. Not sure if I want to change up what’s been working for years. #videos

18:17 # There’s so many little weird bugs in Baldur’s Gate 3 that even my Steam achievements are messed up. Every achievement I get says only 0.1% of players have gotten it. And also I got an achievement for doing 5 attacks in one turn, which none of my characters are capable of doing, and I definitely didn’t do that at the time I got the achievement. #baldursgate3

22:43 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Tavi hired a second Bard because the group really needed a violin to complement her bongos. (Yes, multiple bards play together.) With Lae’Z and Wyll for protection, we made a quick side trip to a cave to deal with an owlbear for some Absolute cultists. The cultists immediately turned on us at the start of the fight and we barely survived the monstrous beast. It turns out the newly hired Bard is a better Bard than my Bard and I’m jealous. #baldursgate3

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

08:36 # Last night, after previously trying a Gith Rogue and a Human Ranger, I settled on a Halfling Bard named Tavi as my Baldur’s Gate 3 character, mainly because she’s completely opposite to the boring Marvel-style Heroic Fantasy trope that D&D 5E wants me to be. She’s always stopping to play drums and trying to get the dour quest-focused party into a drum circle.

09:28 # Baldur’s Gate 3 is fun but it’s only been a couple hours and I’ve already gotten some hints it will be yet another narrative choice game that is infected by that plague where it gives you an illusion of choice but actually railroads you through a fixed narrative. I chose to help a mind flayer and … the game ended. Wrong choice, player! You think you have a choice here, but you have to make the choice we want you to make! (And, knowing the player could possibly choose to die immediately, the game did not do an autosave beforehand. Annoying.) To be fair, the game made it clear I was making a poor decision that probably wouldn’t end well, but all good stories are based on bad decisions, right?

(I always think of this illustrative Viva La Dirt video when I encounter “illusion of choice” in video games.)

15:34 # Still a fun game, but what I thought was a massive bug in Baldur’s Gate 3 turned out to be a miscommunication about how the UI works. You have to click twice to use a Revivify scroll. The target is not, in fact, blocked, appearing for all the world like a game-breaking bug. You simply have to move the cursor to the spot where you want to resurrect the character and click a second time. Never occurred to me. Didn’t notice any UI feedback to indicate that’s how it was supposed to work. I should have known: I think I was similarly confused by the same mechanic in Divinity: Original Sin.

21:49 # Baldur’s Gate 3. On my first full day with Baldur’s Gate 3, Tavi the Bard and her companions Shadowheart, Astarion, and Gale reached level 3, first exploring and fighting bandits and undead in the Refectory and Dank Crypt, then helping to repel a goblin attack and entering the Emerald Grove. No fighters. Needed one Revivify scroll so far. Got to the first vendor to offload the traditionally excessive amount of junk RPG loot. Talked to a squirrel. Helped a vampire.

(I’m playing on Tactician difficulty and, so far, with no real fighters in the party, almost every major encounter has been a nail-biting close call.)

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

09:04 # I played about an hour of Baldur’s Gate 3 last night, to the exact furthest point I got to in the early access 4 months ago. It’s still pretty janky around the edges (lots of weird texture pop-ins and wonky models and not-quite-AAA motion capture and awkward transitions between scenes and uneven audio mixes, as if they have a lot more artists on the dev team than game engine developers.) Weirdly fixated on making sure you know this game has adult themes you wouldn’t find in your grandpappy’s D&D. (I’m not joking there is a genitals setting.) Weird mix of horror and humor. There was still a jokey Wilhelm Scream in an early cut scene that negated any sense of tension. But, you know, it is what it is. #baldursgate3

(It’s not like I’m not going to play it.)

09:20 # Weird mix of emotions this morning. I learned my last living aunt passed away. I didn’t know her that well, but I always found her a fascinating non-traditional role model. As far as I know, she was the last of the previous generation in my part of the family tree. I think I’m one of the youngest in my generation of the tree, and I’m no spring chicken anymore.

16:01 # Why do I hear an orchestral version of Toss A Coin To Your Witcher on my Amazon Music Classical playlist? And more importantly why do I recognize it immediately?

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

08:44 # Starting the day today with the classic splitting-headache-upon-waking up situation. A real bummer after feeling reasonably good for the last week or so. I usually attribute these mornings to my neck being out of alignment during sleep for too long. Have dispatched two ibuprofen to resolve this human hardware failure. #health

13:03 # I ran out of burrito bowl mix last night, so it produced 5 meals of about 75 mg of protein each (based on ChatGPT calculations). To fill out the remainder of the week’s non-unhealthy meals, I have just chopped up the two chicken breasts I also got on Saturday and put them in a crock pot with one can of diced tomatoes, and a little can of tomato paste, onion powder, and garlic powder, in an attempt to make something resembling chicken parmesan for hopefully 3 days. ChatGPT is telling me that will be roughly 55 mg of protein per day. #nutrition

13:37 # I did remember to setup Task Scheduler to automate uploading Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos last night, but what I forgot to do was update my access tokens. The YouTube API tokens expire every week because YouTube hates small channels. That’s been corrected today. #videos

13:56 # Ha lesson learned: I just noticed that those GoAT diagrams do NOT work in the RSS feed. The RSS version contains random letter gibberish in the places where there’s supposed to be a nice diagram. At least in InoReader. #blogging

15:25 # It’s occurred to me recently that ChatGPT might be one of the first computer science technologies I’ve seen that I genuinely don’t understand how it works. I don’t know how it’s possible that I can type in a natural language question, have it understand the context and nuance of what I’m asking, and get a correct response more often than not. I always thought the “Star Trek Computer” that recognized your voice and carried out your commands was laughably impossible, until I saw ChatGPT. I still think it’s impossible, in the sense that I don’t understand how it works. But I can demonstrably see the evidence that all the pieces exist now to make it work. Weird times. #development #ai

20:37 # I’ve had Baldur’s Gate 3 for probably two years now but I’ve only played an hour of the early access. Now that it’s launched, I re-installed it this evening. This could put a damper on my adventures in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where Harwell’s Heroes are still standing around outside the Troll Lair patiently waiting to go down the stairs to the second level. #baldursgate3 #pathfinderkingmaker

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I thought I’d attempt to concisely describe the behind-the-scenes of this site. There’s been some updates after a flurry of new development activity in the last month or so.

The Blog Endgame Viable is a static site, as of 2021. There are pros and cons for static sites. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have some kind of background in web development.

Every blog post begins as a Markdown file written on my MacBook in a text editor (I use VSCode, although I just learned that Obsidian also works well). Said MacBook is usually near me all day, every day, open and ready for me to type thoughts into said text editor.

That Markdown file goes into a local git repository, in a special content directory, along with all the other files needed to make the blog. On publication day I commit the new post into the repository and hope I haven’t made too many mistakes.

M a M c e B o o k A W A S W S C o A d m e p C l o i m f m y i t A A W W S S S C 3 l Y o o B u u u d c F k r e o t n t

Upon committing a post to the git repository, the changes are pushed to a remote repository in AWS. When the changes are pushed, AWS Amplify runs a static site generator called Hugo and converts all the Markdown content files into a huge directory of static HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. Those files are stored in an AWS S3 bucket, and served at endgameviable.com. (There’s more to it, but that’s the basics.)

An IFTTT process picks up the changes to the RSS feed and posts notifications in appropriate social media locations.

It sounds complicated but it’s all automatic. My work is done after I push the changes from my MacBook.

R S S F e e d I F T T T N o t i f i c a t i o n s

Images (or any media) is a special case. All of my images are stored in another S3 bucket and served through the AWS CDN. I have a local directory that I fill with the images, and then run an AWS command-line tool to synchronize my local directory with the remote S3 bucket. I keep my images really small (1024x1024) so I don’t use too much space.

Managing images is a massive pain for me, so I try to avoid using them in blog posts. (I still haven’t gotten around to filling in all the older images, so you’ll probably see missing images on older posts.)

P C M e I m a g e s A W S S 3 B u c k e t A W S B l C o l g o u P d o F s r t o s n t

I have to upload all images to the bucket before I can use them in the text of a blog post, so I have to really plan ahead. It’s annoying.

Everything needed to build my site is sourced from my local hard drives, so if anything happened to endgameviable.com, I could rebuild it anywhere, in any format.

I recently counted 1,634 Markdown files in the content directory, containing an estimated 2,719,652 words of writing, going back to around 2010. Hugo creates 2,355 HTML pages with every site update. Building the site takes a few seconds.

Eventually I hope to put my entire online writing catalog, as best I can gather it, into the site somehow, but it’s a complicated problem to figure out how to convert old HTML to Markdown and redirect all the old links here.

Blog Cost You might think it’d be really expensive to use AWS for this, but one of the major advantages of static sites is that they’re super cheap to operate. The site is small enough that I’m still largely within the AWS free tier limits. It costs me about $3/month right now to run the site. (And $1 of that is the fixed cost of AWS managing the domain name.)

The Microblog The newest addition to the site for 2023 is an experimental microblogging system. I have random thoughts all through the day and it’s nice to write them down. Sometimes they’re really, really funny. To me. Anyway, Twitter used to work for that, but things change.

It all started with the unrelated task of building an Unraid server on my network to replace my old crashed NAS. Unraid also lets you run Docker containers easily. So I setup a container that runs a very lightweight ActivityPub server instance called GoToSocial, and the rest was easy.

No, actually, the rest was really frickin’ hard. I setup a Postgres database and a reverse proxy on my network. Then I setup AWS CloudFront as another proxy layer between the Internet and my home network. Weeks of tinkering later, and I have a working federated account instance at https://gts.endgameviable.com, at which I can microblog.

G R o e T v o S P o r c o i x a y l P R o o s u t t C g e l M r r i e e e s n t A S W c S r F i C e p l d t o i Y s u v o d e u F r r s o e n t B l o g

Originally I wanted to federate directly from endgameviable.com, but I read there would be federation problems if you ever decide to change the server type running at a domain. So I figured it’d be best to stick with a subdomain, at least for now.

This accomplishes the goal of keeping my writing on my local network (in the Postgres database), but I didn’t like it resting in proprietary GoToSocial tables, so I wrote a hacky Python script to make a daily archive of all my notes and insert them into the blog repository as daily Markdown digest posts.

So I write my microblogs at https://gts.endgameviable.com, using a Mastodon-compatible client called Semaphore.social and a Twitter-like interface I’m comfortable with, and then it’s all backed up to the blog repository the next day. Writing permanence ensured.

The microblog digests go into the RSS feed, but they aren’t shown on the front page unless you look for them. It was just too much clutter.

It’s not fully automated yet, but maybe someday.

Microblog Cost It’s completely free (discounting electricity) for me to run the GoToSocial instance and obtain all the required TLS certificates, however, the additional traffic through AWS CloudFront is probably going to increase my AWS bill. It hasn’t run long enough yet for me to know, and it depends on how popular my account gets, but at the moment it looks like it might add another $1/month to my bill.

There’s also a modest yearly charge (I think it was $20/year) for the dynamic DNS setup required to get the Internet to talk to my home network. It’s possible to get a free plan, but with the one I use (noip.com), you have to remember to keep re-renewing it every month and it’s physically impossible for me to do that.

The Future I wanted to add some clientside Javascript features (particularly a floating blogroll of some kind) but I haven’t gotten around to it. I also want to figure out how to hook up some kind of web mentions system, maybe using AWS Lambda functions. All of that is in the far-flung science fiction future.

The site is currently very Hugo-centric, but I’d like to reorganize all the file and directory structures so I can port the content more easily to Eleventy, or anything else. Possibly even work out a way to import the content straight into a Next.js site framework. But if I were to pick a static site generator today, it would probably be Eleventy. It’s a lot easier to work with. Hugo is fantastic, but it suffers from being too flexible. It’s really hard to understand.

I’d like to add in some more integrations with audio and video, but I don’t have any concrete plans. I think it would be cool to have a section of the blog that you could add to any podcast app and do something fun there. Previously, I hooked up a system to attach an audio file at any blog post, which will show up in the RSS feed, but it was too much of a logistical hassle to use regularly.

I’d also love to setup a full searchable index of all my YouTube videos on the blog somewhere, because YouTube’s interface definitely isn’t made for browsing large archives of videos. It’s only made to show you the latest videos and trending videos you don’t care about.

Lastly, I made a mistake originally dividing content into sub-directories of dev, gaming, and writing. I want to get them all back into the same directory and use other means to sub-categorize them.

And that’s the site. For now.

P.S. This is my first attempt at creating diagrams using Hugo support for something called GoAT.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

08:42 # I see a lot of Blaugustians introducing themselves, which is cool. I don’t like to do that though. :) I have a pretty strong aversion to talking about myself. I’m generally only interested in talking about work that I produce or activities I’m doing. Anything to distract people from finding out I’m a pretty boring person with no personality or sense of self. But yeah, I’m an old man in my 50s now, I play games, record game videos, write stuff, and work remotely from the east coast as a software engineer for a fairly big west coast company. That’s about as far as I can go without breaking into a sweat. But if you want to talk about software algorithms, or compression settings for audio tracks, or how to get past that one spot in that one game, or something like that, I can do that all day. #introduction

17:37 # Well I’ve made the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my entire history with git today. 5 days ago, I incorrectly merged my local branch into local main, instead of the other way around, merging main into my local branch, which made everything weird. I only realized my mistake today. There’s probably an advanced git power user way to fix this problem without making a new branch, but for me, it’s just easier and faster to make a new branch and cherry-pick my commits from the bad branch to the new branch. Have to make a new PR though, which is kind of annoying. #development #dayjob

18:58 # And, as predicted, I just realized I haven’t been running the script to upload Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos in the mornings for a few days now. I really need to add that to the Task Scheduler. #videos

19:02 # In fediverse news, I’m baffled over why, when I post a note from Semaphore.social to GoToSocial, some hashtags end up linked and some don’t. I can’t tell if it’s a bug or some diabolical scheme. I don’t really need them to be linked or indexed for my purposes, it’s just weirdly inconsistent. #activitypub

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

07:54 # It occurs to me this morning that bloggers broadly fall into distinct archetypes: Biographers, instructors, entrepreneurs, developers, and social butterflies. The biographer makes a blog to journal about themselves and their life. The instructor makes a blog to explain things and provide a resource. The entrepreneur makes a blog to get their name out there and maybe make some money. The developer makes a blog to tinker under the hood with web development. The social butterfly makes a blog to join or build a community. They aren’t mutually exclusive archetypes: I’m a mix of the biographer and the developer. I started this with only 3 archetypes but it grew to 5 pretty quickly as I thought more about it. There are probably others. #blog

08:03 # Incidentally, I solved the one-day-off problem from last night in the laziest way possible: I did not, in fact, write an entire post from scratch for today–I simply removed the date from the post title. #blog

[It remains blatantly obvious that today’s blog entry was actually written yesterday. But that’s pretty common in blogging.]

08:46 # Another side benefit of reseting my diet a couple weeks ago back to something that has actual nutritional content is that my sleep schedule has improved dramatically in the last week. I don’t have to sleep as long, I’m not as groggy when I wake up, and I crash less in the afternoon or after work. It’s super annoying, because I hate having to think about what I eat. #nutrition

18:57 # Day 4 of meal leftovers from the burrito bowl-like substance I made Saturday. The beef/bean/rice mixture gets a bit dry in the refrigerator but adding a little water before microwaving fixes it up. I think I might get to 6 days of meals out of it. No, I don’t mind eating the same thing every night if it means I only have to spend a few minutes preparing it every night. #nutrition

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

07:57 # I worked out how to add a Hugo auto-generated table of contents to these big newsletter posts and finally fixed the summary line so it isn’t duplicated in the post page. Unfortunately I have to manually edit every previous post to move the summary from the first paragraph of the post up to a summary parameter of the front matter. A problem for another day, and let’s be honest, probably a script or regular expression search and replace because ain’t no way I’m going through a hundred files to copy-and-paste a paragraph from one place to another place. #blog

08:56 # From March 13, 1997, this could very well be the first recorded evidence of my pseudonymous “blogging” on the Internet, in The Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19970418044156/http://www.nachos.net:80 The entries by “Sal” (my Quake name at the time was Salamander) were written and published by me. As I recall, this form of blogging was achieved by hand- editing HTML documents in Microsoft Frontpage on either Windows 3.1 or NT, and then published by uploading the documents to the web host using FTP access. I would have either been using a dial-up modem or an ISDN connection to the Internet (I don’t remember exactly when I got the ISDN but it was in that time period). Prior to 1997, I wasn’t active in news groups so I doubt I’d show up in searches there (that was my older brother’s thing). Otherwise, my public writing probably would have only appeared on long-dead BBSes or something called BIX, an Amiga-related developer message board of sorts, created by long-dead BYTE magazine, none of which are likely to be archived anywhere. And any of that early-early pre-Internet stuff would likely be under my real name. #blog #history #quake

18:17 # Unexpected chaos at work when a customer showed up with issues, which turned out to be problems in our build pipeline, which was completely broken. Configuration files weren’t getting to the host machine anymore. Had to drop everything and comb through seemingly thousands of lines of build log files to get all that straightened out, so didn’t get much actual development work done. (I’m on-call this week for problems like this.) It still isn’t completely resolved, but it was resolved enough to help the customer, at least. (“Customers,” in this case, are usually fellow employees in far flung reaches of the company who happen to use our team’s internal services.) #devops #dayjob

18:45 # I’m determined to try Remnant 2 tonight, on this, the fourth or fifth day in a row that I’ve told myself I was going to try Remnant 2 tonight. #gaming #remnant2

20:42 # I played Remnant 2 for an hour. It’s not significantly better or worse than the first game. It’s getting returned until a big sale. #gaming #remnant2

20:48 # I’ve identified a rather large problem with the entire framework of my microblogging system. The blog post digests are all offset by a day. So my first post on 8/1 will have actually been written on 7/31. Which is wrong. I can’t post my 8/1 writing until 8/2. So there’s going to be a one-day hole in my Blaugust schedule. So I either have to think of something really quick to post tomorrow, or just live with there being a hole there. #blog

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The Blaugust Plan Blaugust begins tomorrow, relative to the publication date of this post. Which is tomorrow, relative to when I’m typing this.

Everyone’s talking about their Blaugust plans.

I have none. No planned topics, no pre-written posts. You get what you get. :)

Most of the fun part of Blaugust for me is the setup and preparation beforehand, the ideas to try writing a different way, the small improvements to the site in case anyone new shows up, the daydreaming that maybe this year will be the one where I won’t shame myself walking out on that shaky limb, because it won’t break this time (the eternal struggle of the artist).

And I’ve already finished all that. I put some new mechanisms and workflows in place so I could publish a post every day in a vastly easier way that fits in with my active lifestyle. Active in the sense that I actively can’t publish 1000-word blog posts every day. I mean I could, but they’d be bad and I’d feel bad, and I’d have a perpetually sore neck and back, too.

What I actually end up writing for Blaugust 2023 will be short bursts of whatever I think about during the days of August, and my standard two newsletter/journal/live-action memoir posts (that’s what this post is).

An interesting observation: As I’ve watched the new-to-me bloggers talking in the Blaugust discord, this is the first time I can remember sensing a prominent generational shift in blogging–a new set of bloggers with a whole new set of ideas on what blogging means. Bloggers have always been stodgy traditionalists who are stuck in their ways (“comments are important,” “sidebars are important,” “WordPress, WordPress, WordPress,” etc.), but now I’m seeing more new bloggers talking about static sites and dark mode and mobile layouts, and using Mastodon for comments.

And Disqus! Someone actually talked about Disqus as a positive thing! I’ve never heard any old-school bloggers talk about Disqus as anything but the most heinous of crimes. But it pairs well with static sites. (One of the only comment solutions that does.)

Gaming I haven’t played too much this half-month, but what I have played is Pathfinder: Kingmaker. There’s a weird tradition in TTRPGs where the adventuring party has to have a name, like they’re a band out gigging, so I’ve named my party Harwell’s Heroes.

Harwell’s Heroes currently consists of Harwell, the recently-annointed Baron of Harland–a Vivisectionist Alchemist, because it was by far the funniest-sounding class at character-creation time–Amiri the barbarian lady, Regongar the punny half-orc magus, Harrim the Groetus-loving dwarf cleric, the tiefling duality sisters Kanerah and Kalikke (from DLC, I think), and Ekundayo and Dog (a massively overpowered combo). This lineup of heavy-hitters has been going after the source of the Troll Trouble in my newly-established barony of the Stolen Lands, which I believe is the second act of the game.

I have no idea how far I’ve gotten in the game, but at the moment, after beginning the game in 2021, it feels like maybe one or two percent? It’s a complicated game, but it’s the kind of game I like to savor and record (when I’m up for it), because I get to immerse myself in reading a lot of text, which allows me to pretend I know how to verbalize complex thoughts like an educated person. [What the actual hell, ZeroGPT, the whole paragraph?? I’ve never seen an AI write a paragraph like that.]

I also bought Remnant 2, but I haven’t played it yet. If it looks like it’s just going to be a continuation of the same gameplay in Remant: From The Ashes, I might very well return it and wait for a sale.

There was a Fan Fest or something for Final Fantasy XIV, in which a trailer for the next expansion Dawntrail was shown, creating some excitement among the remaining diehard nostalgic MMORPG-playing traditionalists.

But despite my lack of enthusiasm for late-stage MMORPGism, I went ahead and re-installed FFXIV. MMORPGs typically plummet off a cliff into a dark ocean of repetitive mediocrity after a couple of expansions, if they somehow manage not to launch that way (cough New World cough). But FFXIV has a modest chance of rekindling the occasional warm thought of nostalgia for the long-dead-and-gone historical era of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I haven’t logged into FFXIV since I got 8 quests into Endwalker and realized it wasn’t as good as everyone said (there were also a lot of queue problems at launch). It’s a slog to get through FFXIV story content, the game’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness. As of two years ago, at least. The “graphical update” looked basically non-existant to me, and it appears to me they are continuing to limp along with a slightly upscaled, painted over late-2000s-era game engine that will inevitably implode from technical debt someday, the same way Lord of the Rings Online did.

Incidentally, I think I lost the videos for those eight Endwalker quests in The Great NAS Crash, so my long streak of videos documenting the story quests from the latter days of Heavensard through Stormblood through Shadowbringers has probably ended*. Perhaps, by now, they’ve added them to the ones you can replay.

Actually, it turns out I had the original 8 OBS files still on the recording PC. The dream remains alive. However, the 20+ videos I recorded to document the A Realm Reborn main story is gone.** I only got to the Sylphs in Gridania anyway.

** And I found those too! They were in another directory on the same PC. Well, starting at part 9, at least. Close enough.

*** I definitely, positively lost the majority of my videos of the wild and wacky Final Fantasy XIII story, though. And all of Final Fantasy XV. Did I upload that? I don’t remember. (I didn’t.)

Development Lots of tweaking to the blog and related properties, in preparation for Blaugust. I’ve documented the gory details in the brand new Microblogging section.

In a nutshell, I’ve added a brand new Microblogging section, to capture GoToSocial notes.

Expertly crafted observations like that are how you can tell this isn’t AI-generated.

I’m still angry that ZeroGPT labeled one of my posts 25% likely to be AI-generated. I think I know why though. It’s probably because I use a lot of common phrases for which it’s easy to guess what word comes next, which I think is a side effect of my first drafts sounding like I talk. How I talk is by stringing together common words and phrases I recall hearing before that vaguely resemble what I’m conceptualizing, because I can’t really compose sentences in my head before saying them. I tend to sculpt sentences by a constant, iterative process of trial-and-error, which is far easier to do in writing.

It’s actually an interesting exercise to take your blog draft that you just typed in with your own two hands, paste it into ZeroGPT, and see it highlight sentences you actually wrote as possibly AI-generated. (This one, so far, is 13% AI-generated.)

Someone on the Blaugust discord mentioned that autistic writing tends to be marked as AI-generated, and I’ve always assumed I’m mildly autistic–not enough to impair daily function or identify as autistic, but enough that I don’t fit in with regular folk, and autistic traits are very familiar to me, and all the quizzes say, “Yeah, you should maybe ask someone about that.” But at my age, what’s the point? I’ve already adapted to it as best I’m going to.

Anyhoo, back to the point of this section…

As mentioned last time, I setup a container on my Unraid box running an instance of GoToSocial, which is a lightweight, generic ActivityPub server implementation with Mastodon-compatible extensions.

Since it’s running on my own home network, I wrote a script to pull my posts from the GoToSocial database and insert them into the blog as consolidated daily microblogging posts. It isn’t yet automated, but I hope it will be someday because I’ll soon stop remembering to run it manually. (It’s somewhat challenging to automate additions to a static blog, though.)

Syntax Highlighting I saw some other developer blogs in the list for Blaugust, which inspired me to finally add the syntax highlighting bits to my Hugo templates. Part of my script looks like this:

``` with open("output.csv", "r") as file: csv_reader = csv.DictReader(file) for row in csv_reader: print("", file=f) markdown_content = html2text.html2text(row["content"]) .strip().replace("\n", " ") pattern = r'[(#\w+?)](https://gts.endgameviable.com.*?)' replacement = r'\1' markdown_content = re.sub(pattern, r'\1', markdown_content) if row["content_warning"]: markdown_content = row["content_warning"] + '. ' + markdown_content + '' s = '{time} # {content}'.format( id=row["id"], time=row["hour"], url=row["url"], content=markdown_content ) print(s, file=f)

``` Spiffy. I don’t work with Python normally, so a lot of that came about by asking ChatGPT things like “how do you read a CSV file in Python” and “how do you do a regular expression string replace in Python” and then tweaking the results. ChatGPT is awesome for that.

Health and Wellness Last week I did a hard reset on my diet. I suddenly realized I felt bad all the time and didn’t have any energy. The usual stuff for me. It’s not always the case but frequently it turns out that I’m simply not eating enough nutritionally useful food.

I usually don’t mention this, but I have a strong proclivity for under-eating. I’ve never encountered anyone who relates to this, and most people laugh and say, “Boy I wish I had that problem!” and I have to pretend to laugh along while I’m secretly dying inside because I’ve heard it fifty thousand million billion times, and wondering if that person would really enjoy feeling like they can barely stand vertically against the Earth’s gravitational pull for days on end.

The point is, it’s a constant effort for me to eat enough of the basic nutrients that a human body needs to function every day.

The root cause of this problem is that I hate wasting time eating and don’t care the slightest bit about food. I live by myself so there’s no social structure in my life around meals. Like a child, I frequently forget to eat because I’m too wrapped up in whatever cerebral activity I’m working on to stop, until sometimes I have to stop because I suddenly feel light-headed.

So lately I’ve been making a concerted effort to avoid buying pre-prepared foodstuffs or too many snack foods at the store, and instead buy basic unprocessed building blocks of meals (eggs, chicken, bread, vegetables, fruits) I can prepare myself to eat throughout the week.

It helped immensely, almost immediately. After a few days in a row of simply getting more basic protein in my diet, I felt a thousand times better.

It’s not very popular to say this within nerd culture circles, and I personally hate that it’s true, but tweaking my dietary intake unequivacoably has a major effect on my daily physical and mental wellbeing. Particularly as I’ve gotten older.

But, like I said, it’s a constant battle to keep on top of it due to the above-mentioned lack of interest in food. I have to find things that are incredibly easy to prepare and eat. At some point I want to start a “Recluse Recipes” series.

Incidentally, ChatGPT is very useful to ask basic dietary and nutritional questions. Any attempt to Google for nutrition information will only net you ads, gimmicks, and pseudoscience.

Day Job In this sprint … wait, hold on a second. Why do they call them sprints? The term “sprint” really makes it sound like it’s a high-octane adventure, doesn’t it? Sort of exhausting? Usually it isn’t, though. But it’s not a great term. It’s a term that makes it sound like the work is supposed to be exhausting, like it’s supposed to wear you out and leave nothing leftover for non-work time. But sprints (the races) are supposed to be one-time events, not recurring one after another ad infinitum.

Anyway, in this sprint, I worked on storing X509 certificates in Hashicorp Vault, and more Java code to extract data from AWS SQS messages and store them in a database.

I was feeling some burnout (before I adjusted my diet, at least), so I’m planning to take the whole week off before Labor Day.

Media Consumption Less television in the latter half of July.

Critical Role, and the Max series Full Circle. Full Circle is interesting, but the constant handheld camera work makes it feel like you’re watching a cheap indie production.

Watched the second part of The Witcher season 3. Like a typical modern television production, there were 5 or 10 minutes of good content there. They really wrecked that show when they decided to try to chase the Game of Thrones audience. It’s no wonder Henry Cavill wanted out, after they disavowed the source material starting in the second episode of season 2. The first season is an excellent prequel to playing the games, the rest is mostly gibberish.

Winding down on Netflix true crime docudramas, because they’re running out of titles to show me. The remaining selections are in foreign languages, and you can’t listen to those while you go about your day, unless they’ve taken the time to dub them in English.

Improving my diet (see above) has the added benefit of improving my energy in the evenings, so I’m less inclined to sit around staring at a television show.

The night before press time I watched a cool documentary on Netflix called Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine about the launch of the James Webb Telescope. I feel bad that I wasn’t more aware of it’s construction and deployment. It’s possibly the most remarkable engineering feat in human history. Discounting the Salad Shooter, of course.

World Context * It’s hot. Wikipedia doesn’t cover July, but dangerous heat warnings around the country are in the national news almost every single day. I read somewhere this July is on track to be the third year in a row where July is the hottest July in “Earth’s history.” (In this context, Earth’s history is understood to have begun around 1850.) * Twitter actually went through with rebranding to X. * In actual news of importance, Israel voted to reduce judicial overview, a subject that’s way more complicated than any headline could ever explain. * Niger, that one country that white people have to be incredibly careful writing and saying, is undergoing a leadership crisis. I didn’t look closely at the news, I just wanted to write a dumb joke. * And, of course, it wouldn’t be that depressing post-2015 world we all enjoy if Trump wasn’t in the news pretty much every day. It’s a real will-he-or-won’t-he (go to jail) situation right now with the federal Trump indictment. But don’t get too excited, we live in the timeline where his potential incarceration a) realistically, probably won’t happen and b) probably wouldn’t effect his chances of winning the primaries or getting elected president anyway. We’re still right on track for that 50-50 split vote in 2024 that comes down to whoever does or doesn’t get caught cheating, either by actually cheating, or by fabricating a cheating claim, in a handful of swing counties. Good times ahead. * Celebrity deaths: Kevin Mitnick (hacker), Tony Bennett (singer), Randy Meisner (Eagles bassist).

That’s it for now. Stay cool in August, kids. Good luck with Blaugust!

P.S. I got this post down to a mere 3% chance of being generated by an AI.

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

08:22 # A new microblogging problem to solve: How to capture the picture attachments that go with notes? Do I just provide a link or do I actually try to embed them somehow? I don’t think the images served by GoToSocial are accessible without an authenticated connection, which is annoying. (The json for public notes and/or their resources should not require any authentication, imo, but GoToSocial and indeed most ActivityPub implementations run every request through a generic authenticator regardless of what it’s accessing. That’s why my script to get my public posts has to stoop to querying the database instead of querying the GoToSocial api.) #blog #development

10:58 # After spending way too much time trying to figure out how to crop DALL-E images while retaining the little logo in the corner (I failed), I’m heading outside to put assemble a little Agrifab cart I can pull behind the riding mower so I can finally pick up random debris around the yard like a normal person. #homeowner

11:58 # I should add that I was trying to figure out how to write an imagemagick script to crop the images automatically, I know how to do it in like a paint program. :) Also it’s not as hot as yesterday, but it’s still rather hot for the manual labor of putting together a steel cart.

13:28 # Lunch break is over and the work to assemble a steel cart continues. I guess I’m about half done. I’m not especially speedy at mechanical construction, being generally old and decrepit. I’ve moved the work area from the hot sun to a shady area so I can actually touch the steel parts without burning my skin. Working on things like this also gives me a rare opportunity to listen to podcasts I’d otherwise never get to listen to, in this case NADDPod campaign 3 episodes. #homeowner

14:46 # Putting together this cart has sufficiently annoyed me that I don’t want to continue any more today. For one thing, the frickin steel parts don’t bend enough for the holes to line up to screw them together. The sliding back door piece is never going to get attached in a million years without the assistance of a machine shop. For another thing, I can’t contort my body enough to reach around the entire circumference of the cart with both hands to screw the axle mounting piece on the bottom. The yard debris is going to have to wait a while longer. I still have to mow at least the front yard today. #homeowner

22:22 # I added a new shortcode to make “asides” in the post text. That is, a block of text that’s only tangentially related to the rest of the section. Sentences that might begin with, “as an aside…” Distractions that don’t really belong there, that break up the flow of the narrative, but I can’t quite bring myself to delete. In books, you might see them in little boxes to the side of the main text. Of course, it only shows up as a shaded section on the HTML page, and won’t show up in RSS feeds, except as a rambling aside. #blog

22:24 # In the end I put together most of the cart, enough that it rolls around at least, instead of mowing. Now I’m pooped. The forecast isn’t calling for significant rain for a few days, so I can try to mow during the week. #homeowner

22:27 # I’ve managed to go the entire weekend without playing even a single moment of any games. Spent an excessive amount of time editing a blog post. Worked on some code for the site. Went to the store. Did some cooking. Worked on building a cart. Watched some television. Not really sure where all the time went. #weekend

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Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

09:22 # I’m going to the grocery store this morning for the second week in a row with the intention of buying basic foods to make reasonably appetizing and nutritionally sufficient food for the remainder of the week with little or no effort beyond heating up leftovers. Last week it was something resembling chicken fajitas made in a crock pot, this time I’m going to experiment with making something resembling burrito bowls, which I’ve never made before and I will be making them super dangerously without any recipes. #nutrition

11:51 # A typical problem encountered while trying to find food that isn’t bad for you at a typical grocery store: I bought a 16 oz can of refried beans to assist in making something resembling a burrito bowl, and it has 460mg of sodium per serving. A serving size is 1/2 cup, which is 4 oz. So this tiny little can contains 1840mg of sodium, which is A LOT. Almost a day’s allotment of sodium intake in one small can. That means I have to divvy this out in minimal portions per day or my heart will explode (dramatic exaggeration). Which increases food preparation complexity because I have to store the excess leftovers for many days, which defeats the entire premise of making things easy and zero-effort. Hrm. Tackling food like it’s a software development automation problem. That’s my vibe. #nutrition

14:32 # I accidentally said Gurgle instead of Google and I think I want to call it that from now on, as a not-so-subtle metaphor for how annoying and useless Googling has become to the modern Internet research connoisseur.

18:42 # I can’t believe it but it actually worked. Tonight I made something resembling a beef burrito/taco salad bowl by cooking and mixing up hamburger, a can of refried beans, a package of mexican rice, some taco seasoning, and because I was feeling especially ambitious today, a chopped up onion instead of onion powder. Put some of the mix in a bowl and cover it with some tomatoes, lettuce, and cheese, like a salad. I can heat up one of these a night for probably 5 nights and it takes about 5 minutes. Lots of salt from the pre- packaged stuff isn’t ideal but it’s pretty dern good and it even looks edible. Cooking hamburger in a pan is kind of a messy pain but the averaged out effort-per-meal-day is still acceptable. #nutrition

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11:27 # Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Last night, Harwell’s Heroes continued slaughtering their way through the Troll Lair (formerly Dwarven Fortress) in pursuit of the troll king Hurgulka. (Hargulka? Hrgulkyula? Something like that. The names all run together when they’re randomly-generated.) The party handily slew every Troll and Trollhound in their path, clearing out the first level with ease, and triggering Moon and Sun Disc switches of unknown function. It was so easy I didn’t even bother using the overpowered Haste spell. It’s somewhat rare for me to blow through combat in Pathfinder: Kingmaker–it sadly results in uninteresting video content, except for the one note found from a previous Dwarven commandant. At the end of it, the party found stairs descending downwards, where the lower level awaits.

21:08 # I’ve generated an assortment of DALL-E images to use as headers for the microblogging digest posts, and adjusted the extraction script to rotate through eight of them, so that something other than a boring old title and description shows up when you paste a link into a place like Discord. #blog #development #ai

21:20 # Writing code in an unfamiliar language in 1 minute instead of god knows how many minutes: 1) “In python, how do I do a regular expression string replacement of every instance of , for example,[#blog](<https://gts.endgameviable.com/tags/>.*) with #blog?” 2) “Now do the same replacement but make blog match any word.” 3) “Now change it so that it’s replaced with the same word that was matched, not always “blog”.” #development #ai

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08:27 # I’m not sure but I feel like the timestamp for these posts (they are technically called “notes” in ActivityPub) are off by an hour when they get to the blog. I’m typing this at 8:26 am.

09:14 # A problem I’m almost positive that I’ve struggled with since around the year 2003: How to display microblogging content on the same page and in the same RSS feed with blogging content. They simply don’t mix. But I want them to mix, dammit.

09:52 # On the blog, I’ve been tinkering with what is displayed on the web page, in the rss feed, and in the sitemap, in an effort to make the daily microblogging digests slightly less overwhelming to the site. At this moment, I don’t think I want to have the daily microblogging digests as part of the main feed or site, because it’s a bit of a firehose. I’ll add it to the “Endgame Viable Firehose” RSS feed, which is a big aggregation of the blog, the YouTube channel, and anything else I can bring in through an RSS. That feed is: https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1006091082/tag/Endgame%20Viable%20Firehose

09:58 # Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It’s occurred to me that TTRPG adventuring parties traditionally have group names, for some inexplicable reason. I will name my Pathfinder: Kingmaker group Harwell’s Heroes. It’s not reflective of their conduct in the slightest. Anyway, last night, Harwell’s Heroes entered the Dwarven Ruins and encountered the troll leader Hargulka. I tried to negotiate and make allies of the trolls. It didn’t work, presumably because of railroading. Hargulka ran off. After dispatching a pair of trolls handily, we went left, and ran into Ekundayo’s target of revenge: The rock troll Kargadd, who had killed his family. We mercilessly slew him and his children, in a fight that turned out to be super easy, barely an inconvenience. Next in this bloody rampage, we need to chase down Hargulka himself.

10:03 # And I’ve immediately changed my mind on the blog’s rss feed. I’ll include the microblogging digests in the rss feed, but not display them on the front page of the site. Which means I’ll immediately revert the changes I just made to the “Endgame Viable FIrehose” feed.

10:54 # I have to document my findings on a food thing I just tried: Sliced up hard- boiled eggs on wheat toast, with some mustard on top. On paper, it’s perfect: Super easy to prepare, protein from the eggs, fiber from the bread. Solid nutritional value. In practice, it was a disaster. It failed miserably on one of the most important criteria for me which is that it must be easy to eat while doing something else at the same time. This was an explosion of crumbs and egg debris all over the place that was difficult to cut up with a fork. Also, wheat bread is generally gross. Unless it’s surrounding a sandwich to mask the taste, it’s like choking down the most disgusting medicine imaginable. Two thumbs down, will never do again. Back to just picking up a hard boiled egg from the fridge and eating it.

20:34 # Made a few changes on the blog throughout the day, mainly around the display of the “microblog” digests. Filled in a backlog of digests going back to 7/2, which was the first day that I had GoToSocial running. Would be nice if I could work out how to display the microblog list page in a calendar layout instead of just a list of links, but that’s a problem for another day.

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09:03 Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Last night the party (consisting of the damage-heavy lineup Amiri, Regongar, Harrim, Ekun, Kanerah, and Harwell, the Vivisectionist Baron of Harland (that’s me!)) pushed into the outer courtyard of the Dwarven Ruins, where they encountered resistance from branded and rock-throwing trolls and an assortment of kobold sentinels and snipers. Amiri and Regongar both went down before the battle was over (because I didn’t rest between fights), but the area was eventually cleared. Harwell used his new Haste spell which hastes not just one person, but every ally within 30 feet, to give everyone an extra attack per round (Ekun had 4 attacks per round! And one of them is a split arrow that hits twice!), a ridiculously overpowered spell that I intend to use in every battle from now on.

09:20 I haven’t yet scheduled my new YouTuber uploading process so I have to remember to go to my PC and type python videoul.py every morning to send the next part of the Pathfinder: Kingmaker series to YouTube. Not ideal. I will definitely, positively forget to run it every day.

09:25 You may or may not have noticed some new “Snapshot” posts on the blog. Those are the result of running a script which captures the previous day’s posts from GoToSocial and then creates a Markdown digest post to insert into the blog content. It’s an experiment. I have to run it manually, which means, as previously mentioned, means I will invariably forget to run it until I work out how to automate it. It runs from my MacBook, though, and I don’t know how to schedule automated tasks in MacOS. (That’s where I do all my blog post editing and posting.)

19:04 Implemented a rudimentary spoiler protection on the blog, for when GoToSocial posts with spoiler protection are inserted into a post. Unfortunately, it’s worthless for the RSS feed. So the spoilers will hit you full in the face if you’re reading the blog’s RSS, which, I assume, every blog reader is. Unfortunately, Hugo doesn’t have the ability to render different content to HTML and RSS. At least, not in a way that’s easy enough for me to bother trying.

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08:30 Pathfinder: Kingmaker Spoilers Last night the party ventured forth to the Dwarven Ruins to deal with the Troll Trouble once and for all. We found that trolls and kobolds had moved in and renamed the place Trobold. A friendly, helpful troll named Jazon, who I immediately nicknamed Jazzy, explained that the trolls and kobolds of Trobold strived to live in peace and would no longer attack people. Ekun and Amari grumbled about letting Jazzy go, but later the party satiated their insatiable blood lust by slaying all the trolls and kobolds around the entrance to the ruins anyway.

09:02 That’s two successful YouTube uploads now with the new Python uploading script. I’m writing and replacing all my shell-type scripts with Python instead of PowerShell. Not least because I lost almost all of my PowerShell scripts in the NAS crash.

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09:07 Last night in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the party investigated Jaethal’s own murder (she’s undead) and found that she’s being hunted by Enneo the Merchant aka. Wanderer, because of a rivalry between the gods Urgathoa and Pharasma (yes, all names in Pathfinder were created with a random name generator). Also Tessie the Quill, an old friend of Linzi’s, arrived in the capital of Tuskdale.

09:23 Completed uploads of my entire Solasta: Crown of the Magister campaign playthrough to YouTube. Was thinking of taking a huge chance and starting to upload my Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos (resuming from after the first 12 I uploaded in 2021), even though I’m nowhere near finishing the game yet. But, because of my recent NAS crash, I really want to backup the videos on YouTube instead of just sitting on them. I’ve developed a whole new set of python scripts to upload the videos, which uses ffmpeg to combine the original high quality OBS recordings, a small logo overlay, and the audio mix, for the highest possible video upload (and biggest file size I don’t want to keep or play locally).

12:58 Struggling with a desire to get Remnant II when it comes out. On the one hand, the first five or six hours of Remnant: From the Ashes was decent, and it had some cool lore. On the other hand, the remaining time in the game was a slog of boring repetition through procedurally-generated sameness, punctuated by deeply annoying boss fights. But maybe they learned some lessons from the first game?

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Blaugust 2023, a little Pathfinder, setting up an ActivityPub server, what I’ve been watching, and a little more.

I’ve mainly been playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but only occasionally. I only play four or five hours of games a week these days. I like P:K, but it’s a bit of a chore to play, especially when I’m trying to record videos. Have to get myself psyched up to narrate combat and read a ton of text out loud, and usually I’m just not in the mood, ya know? But I can’t play it without recording, or I’ll have an incomplete game series.

Incidentally, obstacles to Microsoft acquiring Activision-Blizzard seem to be disappearing, for whatever that’s worth.

Blaugust 2023 (I was going to put a Blaugust logo here but it’s entirely too much work and it’s publication day and I need to wrap this up.)

Blaugust 2023 is nigh! If you don’t feel like clicking that link, Blaugust is an annual blogging event where bloggers in this corner of the blogosphere write a lot of posts in August. I think I say this every year, but I don’t really know what to do with it. Last year felt like it ended up as a complete disaster for me, about which I’m deeply embarrassed.

I usually try to go into Blaugust with a plan and a theme, but unless something else occurs to me in the next couple of weeks, my current plan is to wing it and/or not write that much.

My blogging advice is always the same deeply pessimistic diatribe and I’m tired of saying it: The mid-2000s blogging world is long gone, blogging is an obscure, anachronistic hobby in the same vein as glass-blowing or blacksmithing. Don’t get into blogging unless you enjoy writing for writing’s sake (easy), you like writing vitriolic, opinionated rants about today’s controversial topics (somewhat easy, but you need a thick skin and a foundational knowledge of web security, because people are only going to be hate-reading you), or you’ve somehow managed to find someone to pay you a living wage (very very hard). Otherwise, start a podcast or a TikTok to get your brand started.

I like my two-posts-a-month routine and I don’t really want to disrupt that; ain’t nobody got time for a full post every day without writing in advance, like you would for a blogging job, which is not something I particularly want or have time for right now.

But I’m trying to see if I can work out some way to publish some manner of spotaneously-written micro-blog daily. Which dovetails somewhat with…

Personal Development I think I previously mentioned that I’ve setup an Unraid server on my home network, to replace my old, dead NAS with a new, not-dead NAS (Network Attached Storage).

One of the features of Unraid is that you can setup and run Docker containers on the server with a few mouse clicks, so I’ve been experimenting with a lightweight ActivityPub server called gotosocial running in a container.

After some tinkering (and then a lot more tinkering), I’ve successfully set it up behind an AWS CloudFront distribution. I don’t know if I want to actually use it, though. I don’t fully believe the fediverse is ready for prime time yet, and I still can’t quite understand why it’s sensible to put my conversations in the hands of a thousand different unknown and unregulated sysops and a kid in Germany isstead of putting my conversations in the hands of professional infrastructure engineers subject to laws and regulations.

Anyway, my local ActivityPub server isn’t the ideal I had once envisioned, but it might serve as a rudimentary micro-blogging platform.

It turned out to be fortuitous timing with the looming possibility of Tweetdeck’s demise, the only thing that ever made Twitter usable.

The bad news is that I had to kill off my comment server in the process of setting up Unraid. Nobody left comments anyway, so it’s no great loss. This isn’t really a “community-building” blog. It’s just me writing stuff.

I’m also struggling to work out a problem configuring Cloudfront so that traffic is passed correctly to my ActivityPub server. It works up to a point, then doesn’t work. There’s a deeply mysterious art to HTTP request and response headers and proxies, and ActivityPub and Mastodon’s unauthorized extensions are very fussy when it comes to HTTP signatures.

Anyway I’m holding off on signing up for Blaugust until I’m confident my fediverse links will actually work.

Health and Wellness My back’s been bugging me more than usually lately, and my hip, and my knees. One of those times when you can’t deny that age is a thing. I think I need to lose a few pounds. I haven’t been eating particularly good food lately. I’m not a person who tries to eat healthy food, but I do acknowledge that diet has a significant effect on mental and physical well-being, so I try to at least avoid eating unhealthy food, and I haven’t really been doing that.

Day Job It was a short sprint due to the interference of the July 4th holiday. The project I’m working on with this new team is a collection of service containers that run in a Kubernetes cluster–last sprint I worked on one service, this sprint I worked on a different one. The specific task involved extracting pieces of data from input messages and placing them into output messages (taking bits of data from one place and putting them in another place is a very common task in the glamorous world of software development). The biggest challenge was understanding some new data structures that I wasn’t familiar with, and continuing adventures in understanding the nuances of the Java Spring framework.

Incidentally, my company is pushing the return-to-office thing hard, both openly and passive-aggressively with frequent “team building” and “fun” events at the San Francisco office. I fully expect to get laid off sometime this year, because, you know, I’m in Virginia, and going into the San Francisco office at least 3 times a week doesn’t really work for me. (Theoretically I was hired as a 100% remote worker and should be classified as such indefinitely, but it would be foolish to expect that to last forever in the current climate.)

Media Consumption Critical Role. Loved the guest players lately. (I just heard about the soap opera going on with Brian W. Foster. They apparently removed every video he was in (hundreds I think), which seems a bit petty but I didn’t like Undeadwood anyway.)

Watched the first episodes of The Witcher season 3. It’s a pale shadow of the greatness of the first season. I think they made a big mistake trying to turn it into a world-spanning Game of Thrones where Geralt is just another side character.

Watched the first couple of episodes of Full Circle on Max. A little sluggish in pacing (as is standard operating practice for all streaming series), but it was an intriguing story and filled with an ensemble of atypical characters.

And of course I’m still attempting to watch every true crime show that appears on the front page of Netflix. Way too many to remember them. Some are good, some are bad. I like the ones that demonstrate how much the criminal justice system is crippled by human fallibility. Here’s some of the better ones:

Trial 4
Making a Murderer
The Confession Tapes
137 Shots
The Innocence Files
Murder Mountain

World Context * Twitter mysteriously implemented rate-limiting on the number of tweets that accounts can read per day. As yet I can’t find anything but speculation on why. * On July 3rd, I woke up to find that several of my Tweetdeck columns were blank and perpetually “loading.” (Lists and individual accounts.) Later that day, I saw a button to switch to a preview version of a new version Tweetdeck. I clicked it. The new version of Tweetdeck was bad. Very, very bad. Shortly thereafter, I saw that they are rolling out the new version and making it available only to verified users. That will surely end my usage of Twitter. * On July 6th, Meta Threads launched, which is supposed to be a Twitter killer, but it’s a phone app, so I didn’t look at it. * Suspicious white powder found at the White House turned out to be cocaine. Politics ensued. * On July 10th, Twitter stopped forcing me to use the new, horrible version of Tweetdeck, and let me go back to the old, useful version of Tweetdeck. No word on when or if I will be forced to stop using Twitter altogether if Tweetdeck stops working without a verified account. * Hollywood SAG-AFTRA actors joined writers in a new strike, citing concerns about AI abuse, among many other things.

I realized, when I played my previous blog posts in the InoReader text-to-speech thingy, that my blog posts just kind of died at the end without any resolution. So I will now end this blog post in a slightly better way.

That’s it for the first half of July. The full heat of the summer is now upon us (me, at least). Take care!

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Not much gaming, data recovery failure, and a lot of trashy true crime docudramas.

I keep thinking I’m going to make new AI-generated header pictures, but then publication day arrives and I don’t.

Games Haven’t played much lately. A little Diablo IV, which is such a boring idle clicker game there’s very little to write about. The story is boring, the gameplay is boring, but it’s well-made and exactly what it’s supposed to be. That’s it. That’s the review. I successfully clicked the left mouse button and occasionally the right mouse button and sometimes I tapped a key now and then. I think stuff happens on the screen when I do those things but it hardly matters.

Played a little Phoenix Point. Played a little Solasta and Wasteland 2.

I think Final Fantasy XVI launched, but I was sufficiently annoyed by the ending of Final Fantasy XV that I can easily wait for a sale.

Video Production I resumed uploading my long-lost incomplete Solasta: Crown of the Magister video series now that I’ve finished the first campaign.

Haven’t been in the mood to record any videos, which, as previously mentioned, basically means I stop playing games altogether. The free time I would have spent playing games went into watching Netflix instead.

Data Recovery So the worst has happened: The data recovery place could not recover my 4-drive RAID (two of the drives suffered head crashes) and I lost some 15 TB of data that was on my NAS, quite literally overnight. (The only good news is that it only cost me shipping fees; they don’t charge anything if they aren’t successful.)

Plan B is … well, there is no Plan B. Anything that I can’t find in a backup or alternate location is just gone forever. Theoretically I could try to send the drives to a different data recovery place but the odds of success are almost nil.

The good news is that 95% of what was on there I don’t care about. I either have copies elsewhere or it wasn’t important. But it’s the 5% that hurts.

Lost Videos I lost most every game video I recorded from c. 2020-2022. Most of the good ones were uploaded to YouTube, so there is a backup there, but the original recordings are all gone.

There were some things I didn’t upload to YouTube though. A complete playthrough of A Plague Tale: Innocence, for example. I think most of my complete playthrough of The Witcher 2 is gone, wrecking my plans to record all three games. (Coincidentally I lost all my Mass Effect videos in a 2017 hard drive crash too, which wrecked my plans for a complete playthrough of that series.) Hellpoint and Nioh, which were unfinished, so I can finally absolve myself fully of ever trying to finish them.

The videos weren’t a huge loss, though. I can always play the games again.

I was mainly worried about pictures and music.

Lost Pictures I had an archive of all my digital camera pictures on the NAS from around 1999 to today (and anything I might have scanned from before then). I had a big Pictures directory with a directory for every year from 1999 to 2023 (actually a directory for every month, starting at a certain point).

Before I got the NAS, I kept copying the picture archive to each new PC as I got one. But I had not copied it to my newest PC in 2021. (Why would I? It was on the NAS.) But I had most of them still on my previous PC. I say “most” of them, because I had deleted everything prior to 2017 to make room for OBS videos.

I thought I’d be able to retrieve all pictures up through 2016 from a previous PC (the gaming PC before the last gaming PC), but it looks like I reformated and repurposed that PC in 2020. It looks like I saved most everything that was previously on there in a different directory … except the Pictures folder, which is nowhere to be found.

I tried various file recovery tools to get files from error-prone and formatted hard drives without much luck. For a while, I thought I might lose all my pictures before 2017.

But the tale of the missing pictures has a happy ending.

I found an archive of pictures up to the beginning of 2013 on another old USB drive. So that meant I was only missing pictures from the beginning of 2013 through the end of 2016. Not great, but not as catastrophic.

Then I found another directory on my previous PC where I had copies of pictures from my DSLR from 2013 through 2016, and breathed a huge sigh of relief.

And to gather the rest of the missing pictures from that time period, I plugged in all my old smart phones (a chore in itself) and copied those pictures to the PC again. That recovered almost all of the missing pictures, or at least enough that I wouldn’t notice any others were missing.

Lost Music But I fear I won’t have much luck in the music department, because I’m pretty sure I’ve lost basically every music project I’ve done after 2017. The NAS was my “working directory” for anything I did in REAPER or FL Studio. It wasn’t a lot of material, but it was some cool stuff, and represented a ton of work.

At one point I spent a lot of time meticulously finding and cataloging old recorded tracks from the 90s so I could use them in new projects, and that’s all gone now. I can do the same work again on those same old tracks, but it was a lot of work.

I had done a pretty cool instrumental remix of a song I recorded in 1994 with FL Studio last year and every piece of it is gone now. All the source tracks, all the loops I made, everything. I have the FL Studio project but none of the samples it references exist anymore. Bleh. I put so much work into that.

Not only don’t I have the source music projects, but I don’t even have any of the rendered MP3s either, because I put them all on the NAS and didn’t make any copies. That was a major oversight.

Anyway, it’s a bummer. It’s tedious and nobody likes doing it, but check your backups periodically anyway. And especially check that you can restore from the backups periodically. It’s one thing to lose a few weeks of work, but it really sucks to lose years of work.

To reiterate, I had received an external USB drive in order to start making copies of 2021 data the day before the NAS died. (It probably wouldn’t have helped, though, because I was only going to make copies of videos, and did not think at all about backing up pictures or music projects.)

I’m going to try to be a bit more proactive about uploading stuff to YouTube, even if I set it to private, and maybe finding somewhere to upload music and pictures privately as well.

I’ve also been making a lot of copies of data lately. I have external USB drives for 2015-2022 videos and I’ve been copying pictures and other things to them, too, and making sure there’s some overlap so there are multiple copies on different devices in case one of them dies.

In the future, I need to be very careful not to use the new NAS as a working directory, without finding a way to back it up, or at least check the status of the drives periodically. I made the mistake of assuming NAS drives would live forever, but two of them died after 7 years, and there were warning signs that I ignored.

Day Job The thread running through my work this sprint was Java Spring Data. I had a fairly straightforward task to read a YAML file and put the contents into a database using Spring Data entities. All stuff I had never done before in my life (in a Java Spring context, that is–I’ve done it many times in many other ways). So I had a crash course in Spring Data, JPA, Hibernate, Liquibase, JUnit, and Mockito.

One of my favorite aspects of software development is starting out a task not knowing how to do it, but then at the end of it, knowing how to do it. That makes me one of them so-called “lifelong learners,” I guess.

Media Consumption After watching that Waco documentary I mentioned last time, I suddenly became addicted to crime docudramas of the kind you find all over Netflix now.

MH370: The Plane That Disappeared (Netflix). Thought there would be more new information, but there wasn’t. I definitely remember this being a major story and wondering along with everyone else what happened. Still wondering, which is why I watched it.
Web of Make Believe (Netflix). Spooky stuff. Heard of most of this but it went into a lot more detail in that super-dramatic way that these shows have. If only fiction writers and Marvel Studios could make shows as dramatic as these real-life docudramas.
Don’t Pick Up The Phone (Netflix). Yeesh. Don’t think I’d ever heard of this one.
The Curious Case of Natalia Green (Max). “Curious case” is a slight understatement. I remember seeing some headlines about this, but this goes into a lot more details, mainly from the perspective of one of the parents. Most every character in this particular drama was portrayed as a manipulative sociopath.
Disappearance at the Cecil Hotel (Netflix). I think I remember hearing about this and even watching that video once. As I recall I didn’t think it was nearly as creepy and mysterious as everyone else thought it was at the time. Anyway this series dragged a LOT and could have been cut in half, because there isn’t much information to tell. Just a lot of interviews of people saying “well golly gee this is weird, what happened here?” Then a lot of interviews and clips from the “web sleuth” community, who are pretty much always the real villians in any story that takes place after 2010.
Sins of Our Mother (Netflix). I think I vaguely remember seeing a headline or two about this but yeesh. The ones where they have a lot of secretly-recorded video and audio are pretty creepy, beyond even the subject matter, which was also pretty creepy.
The Puppet Master: The Ultimate Conman (Netflix). Hey there are manipulative sociopaths in the UK too.
Don’t F**k With Cats: Chasing an Internet Killer. I have vague memories of this story. The docudrama is mostly about a bunch of “web sleuths” patting themselves on the back about their basic Googling skills and yelling at authorities for not letting them take over and ruin the real investigation.
The Staircase (Netflix). This one is older so it’s more documentary than trashy docudrama, but nevertheless it’s a really interesting look behind the scenes of a murder trial. It’s almost all footage passively observing the subject as it happens, and not much of the after-the-fact sit-in-the-chair-in-the-middle-of-the-room interview, so it feels a lot more authentic.
The Most Hated Man on the Internet (Netflix). I can see why.
Trial by Media (Netflix). A series of media-circus trials. I remembered about half of these.
Our Father (Netflix). Yikes. I mean, like, you know, yikes.
Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case (Netflix). Not only were the Danes in some weird amateur Space Race, but one of them was a sociopathic murderer. By a filmmaker who just happened to be there.
Murder Among the Mormons (Netflix). That’s two series about killer Mormons now. This one is about a counterfeiter in debt.
Abducted in Plain Sight (Netflix). Creepy.
Capturing the Killer Nurse (Netflix). I vaugely remember this case. Creepy.
Catching Killers (Netflix). Lots of gruesome serial murderers for fun and profit. I distinctly remember the DC Sniper as it was a big story where I live.
Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez (Netflix). Didn’t remember any of this.
The Confession Killer (Netflix). This one was really interesting; I hadn’t heard about this case. I like the ones where there’s lots of blame to go around and you can’t tell who the criminals are and who the victims are.

There are tons of these shows on Netflix and I lost track of all the ones I watched. Netflix doesn’t recommend anything but crime docudramas to me anymore.

Oh, somewhere in there I watched the new season of Black Mirror, too. It was pretty good, if not amazing. But I will always commend the lost art of succinct storytelling.

World Context Just a couple of noteworthy things.

A submersible giving tours of the Titanic wreckage went missing, causing much media attention because of the “running out of oxygen” narrative. The story ended exactly how everyone expected it would.
News of Hunter Biden tax evasion charges provided more red meat for “Biden is just as much of a criminal as Trump” Republicans.
There was a brief rebellion by the Russian mercenary Wagner Group, which caused a lot of media speculation about overthrowing Putin, but it ultimately fizzled.
The U.S. Supreme Court overturned affirmative action for college admissions. Controversy ensued. (The Supreme Court seemed to be on a tear of controversial conservative opinions in the last days of June, causing a dramatic rise in Twitter drama.)

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Solasta campaign finished, Phoenix Point started, a data recovery attempt, Unraid, the dentist, and more, or less.

PC Games Solasta: Crown of the Magister. I finished the first campaign, i.e. the Crown of the Magister campaign. The final fight was basically impossible until, on the fourth attempt, I stumbled into what I assume is the standard, recommended way to play it: My Wizard was dying, the last one left alive after the rest of the party had been decimated, as usual, in one or two rounds of melee attacks from the Sorlaks that do massive damage with two and three attacks per round, when she happened to fly up and land on one of the little floating platforms around the Rift to catch her breath. Then I noticed she was completely safe from melee attacks there, only getting hit by ranged attacks.

In the next fight, my Wizard cast Fly on all four party members and all four of them landed on the little platforms above the Rift while the Sorlaks were distracted in the first round by the dragon (the dragon even managed a breath attack that killed the two Assassins), and then the rest of the fight was easy (if tedious and cheesy). I couldn’t think of any other way to win that fight without a massively-overleveled party that was somehow able to mitigate incoming damage that mathematically exceeded any reasonable party’s capability of healing.

And then there was a second phase, which I should have anticipated, but didn’t. I had blown basically all of my spell slots and abilities in the first phase. Somehow I scraped by on the first try, with nothing but cantrips, to get to the credits. In that phase you didn’t have to kill everyone, you just had to survive ever-increasing waves of enemies for a certain number of rounds, which I was able to do from the relative safety of the floating platforms.

Next I’m starting The Lost Valley DLC with a whole new party. My first campaign was a party of meat-and-potatoes staple D&D characters: A Fighter, a Wizard, a Cleric, and a Rogue. This time I’m playing a Warlock, a Druid, a Bard, and a Monk, all classes that barely existed or didn’t exist in first edition AD&D, the last time I played.

Diablo IV. So I got it. It’s fine. It’s the same as Diablo 1, 2, and, presumably, 3, except they really, really want to convince you that the cut scenes are dark and gritty and scary and super serious and everyone talks in a low, growling bassy generic AAA game voice actor voice, then you commence clicking your left mouse button fifty thousand times in a row.

I was significantly turned off by seeing other rando players roaming around in what I thought was going to be my single-player game, though. By the second day I was hitting escape to skip all the quest dialog and text, and by the third day I was wondering why I wasted my money on this boring, grindy idle clicker game.

PS5 Games Phoenix Point. I was looking for a tactical RPG I could play on my PS5 while lying in bed, and I came across Phoenix Point, a game which was recommended to me a while back. It’s basically XCOM, except with a different name and noticeably less development budget (I think some of the same developers worked on it).

It’s … well, it’s XCOM, so it has the exact same pros and cons. The pros being that it’s a pretty good turn-based tactical combat experience. The cons being that there’s a lot of excess “base management” and “story” built on top of the game that isn’t all that fun or interesting.

But it works well as a PS5 game to play while I’m resting my back, the controller controls are pretty good, and it’s not an action game so it’s easy on my left thumb, so it gets a thumbs-up, as it were.

Gaming Industry The big new release, of course, is Diablo IV. I saw Belghast finished the campaign in like 3 days, and someone else I know did as well. Reportedly, there is still fun stuff to do after that three-day period.

Much like when Elden Ring released, I doubt any other big titles are going to be silly enough to try to launch within the same time frame.

Broadsword is apparently taking over Star Wars: The Old Republic from Bioware, prompting many MMORPG gamers to remark, “What, that game is still running?” I kid, I kid. But seriously I haven’t logged into SWTOR in a long time, and I doubt I ever will again. It’s an okay MMORPG, and that’s exactly what’s been wrong with it from the beginning. It’s merely adequate, in a space of games that demand we play only one at a time, every day.

Video Production I’m slowly working on tweaking my video post-processing Python scripts.

This year, as luck would have it, I started a new process of doing most of my active video project work on an external USB drive. (Lucky because my NAS failed and my previous video workspace disappeared overnight.) When one drive fills up, I’ll get another one and keep moving to new ones every year.

So I’m working to organize the directory structure of each drive so that the raw OBS video files are in one place, then the scripts will generate cache files in a related directory, and the output videos will be at another location. The idea is to separate the directories so that it’s easy to find the raw source files, the cache or temporary files, and the finished, rendered files from the top level of each drive, so it’s easy to free up space if and when needed.

By the way I abandoned the Twitching I mentioned last time almost immediately. It turns out that merely running a second instance of OBS and pressing a second “start” button is too much mental effort. (It’s one thing to record a video locally, where you can decide whether it’s good enough to publish later, but it’s a totally different thing to publish a live video knowing there’s no undoing it. It’s another layer of mental gymnastics that I’m usually too tired to bother with in the evenings.) But given my recent loss of videos, it’s another potential video backup, so I might reconsider. Just don’t expect any audience engagement from me.

Software Development I have a stack of ideas for personal projects and I’ve been looking into some ways to write a React-based UI application I can deploy on desktop and on Android. Looking into things like Electron to package a React web application as a desktop application, and Cordova and/or React Native to package React web applications into Android apps. Nothing concrete yet.

Data Recovery Previously I mentioned that two drives in my four-drive NAS failed. I was (probably?) using RAID 5 (the default when I bought the NAS), which means it can only survive one drive failure, and thus the entire thing died, and replacing the two drives did not magically fix it.

I don’t care about probably 90% of what was on there. Maybe even 95% of what was on there. But I would be very sad to lose that 5-10% that wasn’t backed up anywhere else. Pictures from my phone and DSLR camera, mainly, and a not-insignificant amount of music I’ve written and recorded. Some video processing scripts. Many other things I could probably think of.

Oh yeah, and a lot of game videos. A whole lot of game videos, mainly recorded from 2020 through 2022, the years I hadn’t quite gotten around to moving off to external USB drives. External drives like the ones I’d gotten one day prior to the NAS failing.

Well, I’m extremely fortunate to be in a position in life where I can afford to look into data recovery, so I got a recommendation for a place in Ohio, packed up the four drives, and shipped them off to see if there was any chance of recovering the data.

As yet I have not yet heard if they will be able to recover any of my data.

They only charge you if they can recover the data, which is nice. But they charge a lot. I mean, a whole lot. It’s not quite “new car” expensive, but it’s definitely “new gaming PC” expensive. I won’t be upgrading my PC anytime soon.

Actually that’s kind of a lie, because I’m building a new Linux server to serve as a new NAS (Network Attached Storage). The WD 4100EX NAS that failed was a fine plug-in-and-go solution back in 2017, but it was fixed at 4 drives and I want something I can add new drives to whenever I feel like it, something I don’t have to essentially reformat whenever I change the RAID settings. I’m going to try Unraid, which is a Linux-based OS built specifically for NAS (and other things like running docker containers and VMs), which has been highly recommended to me by trusted sources for this kind of thing. So far it’s working well.

Anyway, a Linux server is a lot cheaper than a gaming PC.

I also plan to put four new drives in the WD 4100 NAS and use it again, but most likely I’m going to repurpose it as a backup-only device.

All this backup and data management stuff is kind of expensive, if you’re wondering. Managing double-digit terabytes of personal data in a way that eliminates the possibility of any data loss for the remainder of your life is not an easy thing to accomplish. Especially when I’m currently adding about 4 TB of data to the collection every six months (in the form of game video projects).

It’s hard work to determine what is absolutely essential to have backed up in triplicate (passwords, family photos, etc.), with offsite cloud options, what is “nice to have,” (game screenshots, program settings, etc.), what are active project files (raw recordings, etc.) and what can be rebuilt if it’s lost (program files, rendered videos, etc.).

And Windows applications still tend to fling data all over the C: drive in disparate places. Every application is different. Sure, you can just back up the AppData directory, but 95% of that is just wasted space. You only really need to backup the 5% that contains your save game files or your OBS scene files or whatever. You don’t need to back up the 95% that is just random cache files.

Day Job Building cloud-native applications and whatnot. Kubernetes, Helm Charts, Terraform, Skaffold, Hasura, GraphQL, AWS/RDS/SQS/S3, Java and Spring, React and Next.js, even Python. (I work in an extremely non-Microsoft environment now–in the software industry, you can work in the Microsoft world, or the non-Microsoft world, but almost never both at the same time.) These are all things I’m exposed to every day now that I wasn’t a year ago. Slowly shifting focus to building new projects instead of maintaining old projects, which was the entire purpose of merging my old team with a new team back in March.

I see a fair number of older developers, some around my age, some older, talking about how they’re stuck in their dead-end job which sucks the life out of them every day because they don’t know any new stuff, and it always makes me sad, because I used to be that person, but now I’m not anymore.

Since I have been that person, I know it’s utterly pointless to say this, because I would have completely ignored and scoffed at this advice, but here goes: It’s exhausting–it takes effort and patience and luck–but it’s definitely possible to change jobs as an older developer. I’m extremely lucky to now work in an environment that encourages developers (and sometimes requires, as when you get moved unceremoniously to a new team that does things radically different from your old team) to learn new things.

In most cases, it turns out that the new stuff is generally similar to or expands on the old stuff, it’s just that it has different terminology. The trick is to find an older trainer who is familiar with both the new and the old stuff, because they can just say “this new thing is just like this old thing you’re familiar with, except with this slight difference.” Younger trainers don’t know that context so they can only recite the boilerplate meaningless marketing schtick. Perhaps I’ll start compiling lists of resources I used to get up to speed on new stuff.

Anyway, I had my quarterly “performance review,” which is another new thing in this brand new AI-enhanced performance-driven back-to-the-office environment I find myself in this year. I’m too old to emotionally invest in such things anymore, though. It went fine, as far as I know, but if it didn’t, who cares?

Did I mention AI, by the way? AI is really big at my company right now.

Health and Wellness Had a followup dental visit to measure gum depth after the first cleaning (“debridement,” technically). Scheduled two “deep cleanings,” one for the left side and one for the right side, because my depth measurement numbers were too high, where they do so much cleaning they offer numbing agents. Yay. (I actually haven’t been to a dentist for cleanings for some time prior to this year.)

Also have another upcoming appointment to deal with problems in my lower left back teeth (19, I believe, was the tooth number–I’ve been to the dentist so much in my life that I know how they number the teeth). Need a crown and possibly some gum surgery and possibly some work on the root, but won’t really know what needs to be done until they start exploring. I lost a filling back there but luckily there is no pain because that area has had root canals in the past. Anyway, I want to get the deluxe repair treatment because the back left is the main chewing surface left in my mouth (chewing is less effective on my right side because I’m missing back teeth on the right).

Media Consumption Taskmaster Series 15 is now over. The cast for Series 16 was revealed.

Watched Critical Role’s Zelda One-Shot, which was pretty good. One-shots are usually far more entertaining than campaigns, if you’re still one of those weirdos who are like “I just don’t understand why people watch those things” and looking to join the cool kids club.

Watched Dimension 20’s Ravening War, which will probably be over by the time this posts. It was less good than I’d hoped. Too much melodrama and not enough comedy for me.

Finished up White House Plumbers on HBO/HBO Max/Max/whatever. Started slow, but ended strong. A little preachy, but it’s almost impossible to find anything that isn’t trying to hit you over the head with some undisguised and overly idealistic political message these days. We live in a partisan age.

Watched one episode of Citadel. It was terrible. Not even worth taking the time to list all the ways it was derivative of other, better material.

Watched one episode of Succession. There are really four seasons of this and it was popular? I mean it was good acting and all, but there were exactly zero likable characters in it. Me: “Hate that guy, hate that guy, hate that guy, hate that guy, oh, there’s a token woman in it and, well, kind of hate her too.”

Watched Avatar: Way of Water. Like the first one, it was a decent movie. My lasting memory will be that they put so, so much effort into conveying emotion through switching tails and flattening ears, I was distracted by it in almost every shot.

I commented on Twitter that the spectacle of a high-budget visual effects movie is so routine now that I feel no remorse whatsoever for watching it on a tiny laptop screen with a bad speaker, while playing a game and not even really watching it at all. I had planned to watch it in three installments over three nights, but I got really invested in the second hour on the second night and went on to watch the final 2/3 on a real television with real speakers.

I forgot that I even still had a Netflix sub, and when I looked at the front page I saw a docuseries about Waco. I was intrigued by the title card that claimed it was the biggest gun battle on U.S. soil since the Civil War, which was something I’d never heard before, but sounds accurate. I was sort of expecting them to go into one of those 3D reconstructive forensic analyses to dramatically reveal definitively who started the fire at the end, but they never did, and only barely touched on that controversy. They mainly focused on the human element of the story, leaving it in a morally ambiguous gray area with all sides represented adequately, which seems like a good way to handle it. In any case, it was certainly a pivotal event in Modern American History, right up there with the JFK Assassination and 9/11.

Netflix is now The History Channel that my dad watched in the 80s.

World Context Still not really in the mood to take meticulous notes about the news. Just a couple of noteworthy things.

An important dam collapsed in Ukraine, but nobody knows how it happened, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Smoke from wildfires in Canada affected air quality as far south as Virginia (that’s me!), a somewhat rare occurrance for us on the East Coast. It was a big apocalyptic story for a few days, then everyone immediately forgot about it, because…
Trump was indicted in connection with keeping classified documents after he left office. It’s pretty much the only story now.

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Party-based RPGs, ChatGPT-powered Twitch embeds, and catastrophic NAS failures.

Check your irreplaceable data backup strategy, folks.

Gaming Sessions

I’m continuing to play party-based RPGs with colons in the titles. Divinity: Original Sin, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, and the weirdly non-coloned Pillars of Eternity.

Divinity: Original Sin. I’m replaying the game for, I think, the fourth time, trying to get a good recording of it, since I originally didn’t record more than the first hour. In my first game from 2017, I got past two bosses around Cyseal. So far, on this attempt, I’ve just gotten to the point where I can start to go outside the walls of Cyseal. My first foray was to the Lighthouse.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker. I’m managing my new Barony and investigating why fireproof Trolls are running amok. I got a couple of DLCs, so I talked to a dragon and tried (and failed) to help out a tiefling.

Pillars of Eternity. I’m knocking out side quests and companion quests that I never did in my original playthrough, in an effort to setup a new save file for the second game. I found out that The Siege of Cragholdt is one of the hardest quests in the game, and resulted in a party TPK at the end for my level 11-12 group even on Story Time difficulty.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister. I’m attempting to finish the first campaign, which I left a couple of years ago after completing two of the four Gem Quests at the end. The last two are a slog, and The Mind of the Master is especially long, awkward, and annoying.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister DLC Ice Palace launched, prompting an immediate buy and download from me, sight unseen. Unfortunately all the DLCs are continuations of the first campaign, and I haven’t finished it yet.

I don’t think it’s breaking the NDA to say I played some amount of the Wayfinder closed beta and I definitely have an opinion about it. I got the impression this was more of the modern industry-standard “we just need to test the network and generate some buzz” beta tests rather than the antiquated “we actually want beta testers” beta tests that players still think exists. Modern software developers typically don’t care what customers think. :)

Gaming Industry

There was apparently a Sony State of Play event but I saw very little talk about it. There seems to be seventeen or eighteen of them every year now, so I can’t be bothered.

Lord of the Rings: Gollum launched and nobody liked it, prompting an apology from the developer. This is the standard now. A new game launches, it gets review bombed and everyone cheers about how they defeated capitalism, the game most likely still ends up being good enough. (Remember Fallout 76? Still good enough.)

Speaking of Tolkien, I think there was some recent announcement about Amazon making a new Lord of the Rings MMO, but given that their first two MMOs only had enough imaginativeness for a few hours of memorable gameplay, I can’t imagine a world where this new one turns out to be anything different.

Incidentally, I don’t witness too many happenings in the gaming world anymore, since most every gamer I followed left Twitter. Most of the bloggers I follow only talk about early-2000s MMORPGs, or chasing a meta in a modern MMO, or trending topics du jour, or some other insular topic I can’t relate to. I don’t have kids, but I imagine it’s like trying to pay attention to your kids chattering about the social drama at their school, which, to them, is their entire world, but to you, is about as engaging as drying paint.

Video Production

With all the talk of streaming on the Blaugust discord I got it into my head to stream some of the games I’m playing as I’m playing them, since it will be a long time before I can upload them to YouTube. (I don’t like to upload playthroughs to YouTube until I’m actually finished with the games in question.) Especially after the NAS incident described below.

Just to set expectations, when I say “livestreaming,” I mean something entirely different from what Twitch streaming culture means. I just mean turning on a live video and audio feed of what I’m playing, which normally is recorded locally to disk. I’m way too old to respect the popular notion of what the kids have morphed “streaming” into, which as far as I can tell is a modernized version of either a live radio call-in show, or a Tupperware-style dinner party. I don’t “go live.” I don’t “post my schedule.” I don’t “read the chat.” I don’t “care about that stuff.”

The interesting problem for me to solve is that I don’t want to disturb my local video recordings, which go into my post-processing pipeline to produce YouTube videos. I record game video without any overlays. If I want to add a webcam, for example, I record the webcam video separately from the game, and overlay it in post-processing. I also record multiple audio tracks so I can mix them in post. I can’t send any that to Twitch as-is.

So I ended up running a second copy of OBS to use exclusively for streaming.

The OBS-that-records works as before, recording a high-quality local video and multiple, separated audio tracks. But the OBS-that-streams adds a simple branding overlay and mixes the audio into one track before encoding it in a more stream-friendly way and sending it to Twitch.

At first I used the virtual camera on the OBS-that-records to send the video to OBS-that-streams. Then I realized I could just add the AverMedia capture card as a source in both copies of OBS. I didn’t expect that to work, but it did. (We’ve come a long way from the days of fiddling with IRQ settings for your hardware.)

The Stream Deck was a bit of a problem to deal with, though. It will only connect to one copy of OBS at a time, and it’s somewhat random which one it connects to. So I had to change some buttons from OBS-integrated functions to simple hotkey functions.

Otherwise it seems to work perfectly.

Web Development

While I was tinkering with Twitch, I made some Twitch embeds for the site.

I used ChatGPT (neato! Now you can share ChatGPT logs!) to work out how to make API calls to Twitch to get the IDs of the latest videos on my channel so I could embed them with a “latest videos” Hugo shortcode.

Sidebar: At this point I think it’s pretty obvious and uncontroversial to say that if you’re a software developer, and you haven’t yet put ChatGPT and/or Github Copilot or something like them into your daily problem-solving toolbox to augment or flat out replace “Googling Stack Overflow,” you’re falling behind your peers.

Unfortunately, this site is static, so I can only update the “latest video” whenever the site is built, which is currently only once every couple of weeks, so it ends up being functionally useless.

But I made another shortcode so I can drop an embed into the text as I’m writing to refer to whatever game I’m talking about, if I happened to livestream it. Like if I say, “boy howdy it sure was a disaster when I tried to go to Sorrowflow by myself to meet Kaelie in Pathfinder: Kingmaker.” Then I can just add twitch id="1827771649" into the text, like so:

Of course, streamed video only remains on Twitch for like six months or something so I guess I’d have to make a highlight if I want it to live forever, or set the shortcode to time out and disappear after six months.

Catastrophic NAS Failure

Somewhat related to video production, two of the four drives in my NAS (Network Attached Storage) died about 1 AM on May 26th, eradicating some 15 TB of videos and archives instantaneously.

I ordered two new drives to replace the faulty ones (twice the size of the originals), with the fleeting hope that I might recover those files, but ChatGPT prepared me for the inevitable worst-case scenario, explaining that, “yeah you can survive 1 drive of 4 failing, but 2 of 4, um, yeah, you know…”

You may be (not) surprised to learn that I don’t have a lot of that stuff backed up anywhere. I’d rather not have a repeat of The Great 2017 External Hard Drive Failure, in which I lost tons of recorded videos. (Mostly a complete Mass Effect 1, 2, and 3 playthrough–only MP3s of the audio from those videos survive.) Or The Great Circa 2000 drive failure, in which I lost 10 years of emails.

But it seems I will. Those two data losses will be an insignificant blip compared to losing everything that was on my NAS. Not just videos and projects (mainly from 2020-2022) but backups and archives from almost all of my previous PCs (and Amigas!). A lot of that stuff should still exist in CDROM or DVD backup form, but, you know, CDROMs and DVDs don’t last forever, either.

To complete the tragic irony, I ordered and received two external USB drives to begin backing up NAS data exactly one day before the NAS failed. True story.

Day Job

Nothing particularly interesting to report. New projects are slowly ramping up, and I’m starting to feel less like a floundering newb on all the new technologies I need to use on the new team.

The only real issue I have to complain about is that most everyone on the new team is in one office in San Francisco, while I’m on the East Coast. Remote work when everyone is remote is great, but remote work when you’re the only who’s remote is an entirely different ballgame, when it’s clear that you miss out on tons of stuff that the rest of the team just inherently knows and understands. I now feel like I’m working in a total vaccuum.

I’m not one of the ones advocating everyone return to the office, but there’s a great deal of truth to the often-repeated idea that when everyone is together in the same space, there’s a lot of passive knowledge-sharing that’s difficult or impossible to replicate in a remote environment.

Media Consumption

Watching Dimension 20’s The Ravening War, and I’ve been re-watching A Crown of Candy. I slacked off and missed two new Taskmasters, until this moment when I wrote this and realized I hadn’t watched them.

Watched Critical Role’s new Candela Obscura, which is a new tabletop world they’ve developed, which, as far as I can tell, is basically Call of Cthulu without the author’s baggage, mixed with Fringe, and a very esoteric rule system that doesn’t infringe any trademarks. It’s okay, but I find actual plays considerably less entertaining when the actors dress up in cosplay, hold perfectly stiff and still for the cameras, and try to improvise serious drama. That kind of stuff is for theater nerds, not game nerds.

But, you know, it’s not like I’m not going to watch it when it’s the only thing they release on the last Thursday every month.

World Context

Sometimes I retreat inward and don’t really watch the world, and this is one of those times, so I haven’t paid much attention to news. It’s just a lot of background noise about the usual stuff.

Vitally-important talks and blame-laying over government default continue blah blah and there’s a hard June 1 deadline blah blah so we’re supposed to feel a sense of impending doom even though we all know deadlines don’t matter in government. And apparently they made a deal at the last minute, just like they did every other time.
Ron DeSantis (Republican governor and chief Disney antagonist of Florida) officially entered the 2024 Presential Race, ensuring the word “woke” will appear in news headlines for the forseeable future.
Celebrity Deaths: Barbara Walters, Jim Brown, Tina Turner.

For future historians, this post consisted of a blank document for about 85% of this time period, and only came together in the last handful of days.

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Redfall flops, Party-based RPGs, Baldur’s Gate videos, Kubernetes, and the news. A relatively uneventful time slice of life.

The Cliff

Many of us live our lives on the edge of a cliff, and sometimes you feel like you’re standing on firm ground, facing the challenges ahead, ready and eager to tackle anything that approaches, and sometimes you feel like you’re overwhelmed and barely clinging to the edge of that cliff above the yawning chasm of doom, and there’s only a couple of steps of difference between the two and it only takes an ill-timed wind gust to get from one place to the other.

Anyway, it’s been more of the latter than the former in the last month or so, and creativity is one of the first things to go when I’m feeling overwhelmed by life, so it becomes a major chore to think of anything interesting to write in, say, regular blog posts, even when you have over two weeks to do it.

Gaming Context

Redfall, from the makers of Dishonered, made a big spectacle of flopping hard on launch for some reason, although I didn’t think it was that bad. Then again, I only played it for a half hour. To me, that puts it in the category of “average,” not “a massive failure.”

I saw a handful of mentions of the launch of Darkest Dungeon II, although at a casual glance, I don’t see a single thing to distinguish it from the first one, which I already have for free.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launched on the Switch to much fanfare, reminding me once again that I’ve never played any Zelda games or really any Nintendo games, ever.

Party-based CRPGs

I have a long string of party-based RPGs from the last five years that I like but haven’t yet finished, roughly in the order that I began them:

Divinity: Original Sin (2020)
Wasteland 2 (2020)
Tyranny (2020)
Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition (2021)
Pillars of Eternity (White March DLC) (2021)
Pillars of Eternity 2 Deadfire (2021)
Solasta: Crown of the Magister (2021)
Pathfinder: Kingmaker (2021)
Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition (2021)

The only one that I’ve “finished” is the main story of Pillars of Eternity, but I use the term “finished” loosely, in that I left many, many things unfinished and simply went and did the final quest in order to put a concluding video on my series so I could upload it. And so I could start Pillars of Eternity 2, which is better because it has turn-based combat.

Anyway, starting in May, I got it into my head to resume some of these games. I resumed Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, which I had previously only barely started (never having played it before), and I got through the Penninsula District, the first of four areas you have to search to find the missing Waterdavian Creatures (Water-DAY-vian Creatures, as Aribeth pronounces it) needed to end the plague or whatever. I found it to be a tedious slog of dying and re-loading to get through the Prison levels, so I lost some enthusiasm for the game and sought my fortunes elsewhere.

I resumed my game of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, where I had previously left off in Chapter 3, after the Nashkel Mines. I explored a few wilderness maps, then cleared out the Bandit Camp, triggering the start of Chapter 4.

One thing led to another (meaning I rediscovered that Baldur’s Gate is a terribly dull game because 90% of it is wandering empty maps and fiddly inventory management), and I resumed my game of Pillars of Eternity, picking up in the White March Part 1 DLC right where I left off in February of 2021.

I successfully finished the White March DLC Part 1, although at the end I had to turn the difficulty down from Normal to Story Time. Pillars of Eternity is a great game, but the encounter difficulty varies wildly from place to place, and there’s never any rhyme or reason to it. I don’t mind retrying an encounter after one or maybe two TPKs, but after that, I’m over it and I’m ready to move on. The game doesn’t really give you in-game tools to debug why your party is dying, so you have to go out to study poorly-written SEO-first wiki guides or badly-made SEO-first video guides for hours on end, and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Also, with these realtime-with-pause games, I find that I don’t have the patience to pause the combat every half second to micro-manage every single move, so I frequently just leave it running and let the suboptimal AI handle most things. I find that the “Infinity Engine” combat style wrecks the flow and immersion of the game when you have to keep pausing constantly, and the sound effects are constantly cutting in and out (or even worse, the music!), and it grinds everything to a standstill. Turn-based games are vastly superior for micromanaging combat.

I went on to see if I could knock out all the side quests I hadn’t done yet, and I started with what I now know to be one of the most difficult quests in the game, The Siege of Crägholdt, where one Drunken Orlan Monk nearly wiped out my entire level 11 party. I ended up turning the difficult down from Normal to Easy and then finally to Story Time, because screw it. Then I stopped playing because my party still died in the final fight on Story Time difficulty. The combat encounters just went on and on and on, where I thought it was just going to be a simple little thing of going to talk to a guy.

Instead, I resumed my game of Pathfinder: Kingmaker, picking up in the Sycamore Caves with the mites and kobolds, trying to find Tartuccio. It took me a long time to find him, because I somehow managed to overlook the one part of the map that contained the Mite Queen and the Sacred Hall for hours, but I eventually defeated him and the Stag Lord and won back the Stolen Lands, then the game turned into a governance simulator for some reason.

This is why I haven’t finished any of them, because I keep switching from one to another. As games, they all have different strengths and weaknesses. These are among my favorite games to record (sometimes), because they have a lot of text to read, which is usually my favorite part of making a video.

Video Production

Speaking of videos, Unlisted Resident Evil videos (recorded in January) continue to upload to the channel. I have Resident Evil 0, 2, and 3 videos to potentially upload later.

A half-hearted project I’m working on from time to time is editing some Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition videos to cut out all the down time from inventory management and traveling, leaving just the crucial elements of the story. Baldur’s Gate, like most older RPGs, is somewhere between 50-75% inventory simulator with a terrible UI, which is incredibly annoying to play and boring to watch. Unfortunately it’s also very time-consuming to edit videos. Editing videos, at least the way I do it, requires dedicated time to sit in front of a computer and focus 100% on what you’re doing, with no distractions. No music playing in the background, no shows playing on a second screen, no podcasts or audiobooks, nothing. Just listening to yourself and waiting for the right moments to cut in order to preserve a narrative flow.

Don’t have any other YouTube plans, really. It feels like the blogger-pivoting-to-video trend is already over (although I see a handful of other bloggers trying it from time to time). Now it feels like new trendy trends await to be explored, like making fun of AI, or perhaps pivoting to TikTok. 60-second vertical videos filled with jump cuts and subtitles. It’s kind of a pain to make those videos too, actually.

Day Job

Still a bit directionless, but getting better. I had forgotten that I’d signed up for an Intermediate Kubernetes class at work (we’re all required to take some amount of training every year), so I had three 8-hour days of sitting in a Zoom meeting.

I haven’t had to do that for a couple of years, since I was new to the company, so I’d forgotten how thoroughly exhausting it is to be anchored to one computer screen for eight full, continuous hours, three days in a row. Normally I’m able to set my own schedule, only having maybe one or two short meetings a day anchoring me to one place and time. It reminded me that my body is physically incapable of working a standard 40-hour office week anymore, and if I had to, I wouldn’t be able to.

Anyway, Kubernetes is very cool. I’m pretty much all-in on the whole concept of cloud-native development, at least at this moment in time, when I work in an environment where we are encouraged to deploy our applications to a cloud-like environment instead of bare metal hosts. It’s quite cool to start up and shut down entire clusters of complex interacting application services with a single button press. I can see why it caught on.

Media Consumption

Taskmaster Series 15. Critical Role Campaign 3. Finished Dimension 20’s Neverafter, and Ravening War just started.

White House Plumbers on HBO, which is not as good as I might have hoped.

While I was there, I noticed Rick and Morty season 6 so I started that, which is … well, it’s Rick and Morty; you just let the madness wash over you and laugh when they occasionally step outside their self-referential feedback loop to tell an actual joke.

World Context

I haven’t mentioned it, since it’s in the background all the time and easily forgettable, but the U.S. has been going through yet another so-called “debt ceiling crisis,” which seems to happen at least once a year now, where Republicans and Democrats each try to force the other into making ideologically-driven budget cuts without the hassle of passing legislation.
The Writer’s Guild of America went on strike again, this time over residuals from streaming. Producers are hoping audiences won’t notice that their 12-year-old neice or ChatGPT is now writing their favorite shows.
The coronoation of King Charles II occurred in England, and nobody had an opinion about that, or changed the Wikipedia page to say “Pigeon” instead of “Camilla.”
Paramount is closing MTV News, which sparked intense bouts of nostalgia from Gen-Xers on social media.
Trump 2024 Circus Watch: Trump appeared on a CNN Town Hall, and it was completely normal and nobody had any opinions about it.
The U.S. Federal government ended the COVID-19 public health emergency. At the same time, the so-called “Title 42” expired, ending the pandemic-related expulsion of migrants. You guessed it, nobody had an opinion about either of those things.
Elon Musk named Linda Yaccarino the new CEO of Twitter, to start in six weeks. Everyone immediately stopped complaining about Twitter for the rest of their lives.
And finally, Sweden won Eurovision. I only saw two people talking about it on Twitter.

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As luck would have it, May’s Humble Choice includes Bendy and the Dark Revival, which is a game that I picked up on Steam a few months ago.

Bendy and the Dark Revival is a stylish first-person spooky game. I bought it mainly on the strength of the funny-sounding title and the screenshots. I was playing Resident Evil games at the time, and it promised to be another game in the survival horror genre, and it had decent Steam reviews, so I gave it a try.

I don’t particularly like writing anything resembling a game review, so I’m not sure why I keep volunteering to do these. Almost all of my game reviews, from tiny indie games to AAA blockbusters, can be summarized in one phrase: “It was okay.” There are so many games coming out every year now that almost none of them stand out as anything but average, and this is another one of those games.

Just another typical late night working in a creepy office during a thunderstorm when the power goes out.

It was okay.

It’s billed as a horror game, but I didn’t find it the slightest bit scary. I have a pretty high tolerance for horror, though, so your mileage may vary. There’s a lot of darkness and some jump scares and creepy situations, but none of it felt “real” to me.

One sub-game I like to play when I look at a new game is to guess which older game inspired the developers of the new game. There are so few original ideas in gaming anymore that you can almost always trace the ancestry of every new game back to a handful of original games from the late 90s or early 00s that inspired it.

If I were to pick the game that Bendy is most descended from, it would have to be BioShock. I didn’t find BioShock very scary either, but I’ve heard many others describe it as such.

(Incidentally, BioShock is descended from Half-Life, which is descended from Quake, which is descended from Doom, which is descended from Wolfenstein 3D, which is loosely descended from a million Maze games. A fun project someday would be to build a Family Tree of Every Game Ever, and find the Adam and Eve of Every Game. It would probably be something like prehistoric people playing with sticks and rocks.)

Back to Bendy: It has an interesting art style, being made to look as if you’ve been pulled into a classic Disney-esque hand-drawn world. There’s a lot of environmental storytelling–a lot of posters on the walls to look at, and letters on desks to read, and audiologs to listen to. There’s some NPCs to talk to; some friendly, some not so much.

Dark Revival is supposed to be a sequel to a game called Bendy and the Ink Machine, which I haven’t played. Dark Revival seems to stand alone fairly well, though, but there isn’t much explanation in the beginning for why this weird cartoon world exists. There’s a vague sense that something happened before but it doesn’t really matter. There isn’t much of a story to follow anyway: You’re an animator who gets stuck in a cartoon world you have to escape, and it’s populated with strange creatures and people, and that’s about it. The worldbuilding seems irrelevant to the game.

In the cons department, I found the pacing of the game very slow. I only managed to play for about an hour and a half before writing this, during which the main gameplay activity was holding down the “forward” key. Occasionally I had to activate a switch or hide from an enemy. It wasn’t until the end of that time that I picked up a BioShock-style pipe wrench (oddly called a “Gent pipe”) with which to defend myself.

I was determined to play a third game session to try to get my play time up over two hours before closing the book on this blog post, but I just couldn’t summon the motivation to do it. There’s so many other games to play and things to do and not that much time to do them in. Perhaps Bendy and the Dark Revival will be the game you’ve been waiting for, but it’s not the game for me.

If you haven’t played BioShock, it’s one of the seminal works in video game history. Bendy and the Dark Revival, however… it’s a valiant effort in the complex and thankless work of assembling video game assets together and publishing them, but it doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression other than: “It was okay.”

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I successfully filed my taxes on the last day again. And did them wrong.

Yes, I will be continuing to recycle the same image indefinitely because I hate adding pictures to blog posts.

Gaming News

The U.K. blocked Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Activision-Blizzard.

Jedi Survivor, the sequel to Jedi Fallen Order, is the biggest release I see in this time period. I wasn’t amazed by the first hour of the first one, so I doubt I’ll look at the second one any time soon. (It was framed as a Souls-like and it wasn’t a Souls-like; it looked more like an Assassin’s Creed-like.)

Far Cry 5 (PC)

I finished the Henbane River region (the Faith region) in Far Cry 5, so that’s two out of three done since I started that game in January of 2022.

I didn’t like how it forced you to fight the final boss at the exact moment the resistence meter filled, wherever you happened to be. I wanted to finish all the side missions and then go fight the final boss to clear the region, because the game gets considerably less chaotic after the region boss is down. The chaos your character attracts from just standing near any road is one of the most fun things in the game, and without it, getting through the rest of the side missions is a bit dull.

Also there’s a side mission in the Henbane region that requires three grizzly bear skins and I couldn’t find grizzly bears anywhere, and searching for grizzly bears is incredibly dull.

Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)

All progress stalled as I’ve completely lost interest in the game (again). I think I’ve said this before but it’s a beautiful game to look at, but quite shallow to play, which is a disappointment. PS5 games have to be so good that they’re worth hurting my thumb for me to play them.

Miscellaneous Games

Steam had a puzzle game sale, which coincided precisely with my waning interest in playing anything else, so I got a few titles. I looked at Escape Simulator and The Room, which are both fun in short bursts (I mean, if you like solving puzzles). Also Palindrone Syndrome: Escape Room, which isn’t very good, and Machinika Museum, which is a decent clone of The Room.

Playing those games reminded me that I miss the days when games had puzzles in them. I suppose nobody bothers anymore because everyone just Googles the answers.

I was thinking about resuming a replay of Baldur’s Gate with the Enhanced Edition, for the third time since 2021, but instead I tried Eye of the Beholder. It’s an AD&D-branded clone of Dungeon Master–from the so-called Gold Box Classic AD&D CRPGs. Unfortunately it’s nothing but wandering around a dungeon hacking and slashing and resting, so I quickly lost interest.

Video Production

Still uploading Resident Evil videos in Unlisted mode because they aren’t that great.

Very little done except tweaking the Python scripts that split and render OBS videos I record. I still record a 4K panel that includes the game and two webcam feeds, then splits them into separate videos and renders it all down to 1080p afterward. Haven’t uploaded any of these videos. Kind of lost interest in the whole thing. All the kids are into their TikToks and Twitches anyway.

Media Consumption

Taskmaster Series 15 religiously. Richard Osman’s House of Games occasionally.

Paused Critical Role to watch Dimension 20’s Neverafter, which is, as expected, good. (It’s funny that they tried to make a horror season and it quickly became hilarious instead of frightening.) Minor editorial: Dimension 20 is the best “actual play,” because it’s a real show, not just a camera pointed at people playing D&D.

Installed Google Podcasts to occasionally listen to the Taskmaster Podcast, and resume listening to It’s A Thing again, which is my favorite podcast about Gen-X people trying to keep up with Millennial and Gen-Z hipster culture.

Day Job

Nothing particularly noteworthy to report. Continuing as before–learning new stuff, waiting to start on the next interesting project, half-expecting to be the next casualty in The Great Tech Industry Purge of 2023. I somehow became responsible for a dashboard that I don’t need or want, because I’m the only one who dealt with it before.

Health and Wellness

Routine yearly doctor visit. He didn’t see any obvious problems with my left ear and referred me to an ENT about hearing loss in that ear. He offered no opinions about what might be causing the occasional minor pain in or around the lower ribs of my left side. I didn’t mention the occasional pains in the ligaments of my right knee. Blood extracted for labwork, which I forgot to do last year.

World Context

Violence broke out in Sudan between rival military factions, and the U.S. evacuated its embassy, prompting some Americans to take the radical step of looking up where Sudan is on a map.
Dominion settled it’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News, winning for truth, justice, and the American way… and a cool $700 million payday. Shortly thereafter, Fox News announced Tucker Carlson was leaving the network, but it was apparently unrelated.
The Twitter blue check apocalypse finally happened. Then it was immediately undone I think? Who even knows or cares anymore?
The Supreme Court stayed a lower court decision, preserving access to abortion drug mifepristone. Legal battles continue.
Celebrity Deaths: Jerry Springer.

P.S. Wasn’t into writing this one. It’s the first one of these new “newsletters” for 2023 that felt like a massive chore that I didn’t want to do.

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April did, in fact, begin with showers. By which I mean rain.

Gaming Context

I can’t think of anything significant that happened in gaming within the last couple of weeks. Perusing the list of games released, I see nothing that has been mentioned by anyone.

Resident Evil (PC)

I finally finished the Resident Evil 3 Remake. It turned out to be a very short game, about 8 hours. Still, thanks to burnout, it took me about a month to complete it. Good game, but, you know, exactly the same as the Resident Evil 2 Remake. Less puzzles, though. Much more of a pure action game. Our heroine Jill sustained at least a dozen concussions from getting knocked around but her hair never strayed out of place.

The next major game, Resident Evil 4 (just released, but I haven’t gotten it yet), moves the setting to Europe with protagonist Leon Kennedy, the hapless rookie cop from Resident Evil 2. There was mention of Europe in one of the notes found in 3. Unfortunately, Leon wasn’t my favorite character. He seemed kind of dumb.

I didn’t expect to become so invested in the characters of the Resident Evil universe and their overarching storylines from game to game. There are a couple of PlayStation games (Survivor and Code: Veronica) that continue some character stories between 3 and 4 that I might at least glance at. Claire’s still looking for her brother Chris–one of the survivors of the “mansion incident”–who was last seen “on vacation” in Europe, according to a suspicious note found in Resident Evil 2. Claire didn’t buy it and I didn’t buy it, either.

Far Cry 5 (PC)

I don’t recall exactly why, but I installed Far Cry 5 again. Remember when Far Cry 5 was controversial and caused a huge uproar? Seems like a long time ago. Now I suppose the only controversial part is that Ubisoft made it; I think they’re still on the list of forever toxic game companies. Anyway, it’s a fun game. All Far Cry games are fun games. It’s just what they are.

I had previously completed the entire Holland Valley (John Seed) region, and have now moved into the Henbane River (Faith Seed) region. I keep hoping for a narrative path that will let me join the cult and turn against the good guys but that’s not the Ubisoft way–the stories are mostly on rails, and, despite a lengthy soliloquy from a character railing against society for robbing him of his free will, you–the player–have no free will whatsoever.

Before now, I’ve played Far Cry 1, 2, 3, and 4 in their entirety, and now I’m playing 5, and someday I’ll play 6 (although the little bit I saw of Far Cry 6–one of the stack of free titles that came with my PS5 last year–appeared to have shockingly awful facial capture). Far Cry games are extremely predictable, but solidly-made first-person shooters from the before times (that is, before the scourge of looter shooters), among the best in class in terms of “feel.” Especially great if you don’t want to deal with the cesspools of human misery found in most online multiplayer shooters, but, at the same time, don’t want to go so far back in time that you’re playing a “boomer shooter.”

Ghost of Tsushima (PS5)

With my patented strategy of playing less than two hours a week, if that, I’ve gotten all the way to 22% game completion on the PS5, which seems extremely high compared to the amount of land area I’ve covered on the map. It’s a pretty rote open world game, to be honest. Much like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was (and, frankly, the Horizon Zero games). Go to a place that looks mostly the same as any other place in any game, mash some buttons, watch some cut scenes, call it a day.

I switched from Japanese to English dialog. The English voice acting is a lot better than the English was in Sekiro, so it works.

Blog Maintenance

Keen observers (e.g. not me) may have noticed that my comments have been broken since about November.

That’s because the dynamic IP address updater for uvtek.hopto.org hadn’t been updated since then, so the link to my comment server couldn’t resolve. Yes, that’s how long it takes me to notice basic problems on my own web site.

I should setup some kind of notifications for these things, or just turn off comments once and for all. I can’t overstate how much of a massive chore (and minor monetary expense) it is for me to implement comments on a static blog (did I ever write a post on that architecture?). And if no reader mentions a fully missing web site feature for five months, it’s a pretty good indication that the feature isn’t needed at all.

If I do end up removing the comment server, the only way I could see comments returning is in the form of a fediverse reply system, but that would be equally onerous to maintain for a static blog (since, you know, I have to write it from scratch–if anyone is actually interested in building that project I can open up the git repo for contributions).

Otherwise, you know, send me a note on Discord or Twitter (or if you absolutely can’t stand Twitter, I have some Mastodon accounts I could publish but I don’t really watch the fediverse so it’s unlikely I would see any communication there for a very long time, and wouldn’t ever post anything there so it would be pointless to follow me anyway).

I had an idea recently for adding a “send me a message” box, which might be a slightly less onerous chore to setup. The hard part is security, but I think I can do it by adding a couple of cheap AWS resources (an API Gateway and Lambda functions) without having to setup a server anywhere. (The moment you need a VPS or physical server somewhere is the moment that headaches and expenses start to go up dramatically–unless you can work out how to run things from a box in your living room, which isn’t always feasible or advisable. See: recent blog comment outage.)

Spring Account Cleaning (Security)

I decided to start doing some maintenance–Spring Cleaning, if you will–on all my important Internet accounts. Changing passwords, using random strings where possible (anywhere that I log in with a LastPass-enabled browser and don’t have to physically type the password), making sure two-factor authentication is setup, things of that nature.

This was prompted by receiving a “sextortion” email, the first such email I’ve ever received. Or, at least, the first one that didn’t immediately go into a spam folder. Of course nobody has penetrated my home network and installed invisible root kits to secretly record videos of my perverted activities from my webcams and whatnot, but it did prompt me to wonder if there were any vulnerabilities in my online security posture. The email itself actually advised me to change my passwords, so, you know, thanks.

I had changed my Facebook password about six months ago. At that time, I also setup two-factor authentication. Fast forward to now, when I tried to log in only to find the message:

You have Code Generator set up as your two-factor authentication security method, but we’re no longer supporting that feature. If you have previously saved your recovery codes, enter one to regain access to your account.

Everybody’s whinging about Twitter screw-ups but this is a next-level screw-up from Facebook, as far as I’m concerned. To simply stop supporting a two-factor authentication system without sending any notifications that they were going to do so? (I checked–nothing at all from Facebook in my email). Thereby permanently and irrevocably locking people out of their accounts?

And no, of course I didn’t save any “backup” or “recovery” codes. That defeats the whole purpose of two-factor authentication. But I guess I have to start saving those from now on, to protect my accounts from the companies that manage my accounts.

Luckily this rant has a happy ending because I still had a valid login session on an old laptop, and was able to log back into Facebook there and disable two-factor authentication until they figure out how to implement it right. (I set it to both of their recommended authenticators and it immediately told me it did not support them anymore. It seemed safest to disable it completely.)

Day Job

Another sprint has passed (coincidentally, the publishing of a blog post coincides with the end of a work sprint on my new team).

I’m learning about such React-based topics as Flux, Redux, Stores, Reducers, and Sagas, which is a whole different world of terminology for Javascript web development (things that probably didn’t need new terminology but, you know, branding). The bottom line is that the model-view-controller paradigm is out, now it’s store-view-action-reducer-saga, or something like that. Learn the lingo, and that’s most of the battle.

Flux: A design pattern for a better way to make Javascript-based web UIs.
Redux: A framework that implements and extends the Flux pattern.
Store: A place that holds state data used in rendering web pages.
Action: A user action, which we used to call an “event,” such as clicking a button.
Reducers: A “pure” function that modifies a store based on an action, named after functional programming nonsense.
Saga: Still dissecting this one, but I think it’s some sort of state cache.

And this late-breaking new thing to think about: Next.js. Listen to this shockingly new thing that Next.js allows you to do: Run code on the server to reduce load on the client!!! Because you actually can’t run massive monolithic applications in the average web browser’s Javascript engine, it turns out. Who knew?

Anyway, the common refrain I see as an explanation for why these new things exist is that it was too hard for newer developers to understand the older paradigms, so new paradigms were invented to make things “easier to reason about” (a very common modern developer phrase). I personally think the new paradigms make no sense whatsoever, but you know, I understood the old stuff, and still think of every web site as a series of HTTP requests and responses across a network.

In any case, I have learned that React Redux still doesn’t make a large Javascript project not look like a sprawling mess of spaghetti code.

Another common refrain I see a lot is something along the lines of “functional programming is easier to understand than imperative programming, so you should always favor functional patterns.” Even ChatGPT tried to tell me that.

I personally think it’s nonsense. There are developers who reason better with functional programming, and developers who reason better with imperative programming, and I’m one of the latter. I need to see the loops to reach true enlightment.

Video Production

I previously decided to scrap all of my Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, and 3 videos and not upload them. But then I got it into my head that instead of just discarding three months of work, I should edit the 20 videos of the Resident Evil 1 series down into a single video of the entire game. A highlight reel, if you will. That way, my time and the content wouldn’t be completely wasted.

After a Sunday, the full scope of my folly became apparent–it’s quite impossible to condense 16 hours of video into less than an hour and retain any semblence of the original. It takes a merciless mind to butcher out whole sections that you thought were pretty good.

However, continuing this year’s theme of doing something different with video, I do still like the idea of reinventing the traditional Let’s Play series, so I might continue to tinker with the idea. Creating a hybrid between the Let’s Play and a traditional documentary appeals to me. Something that might appeal to both young kids and old curmudgeons, which, at the same time, conveys to non-believers why people like to play video games. I haven’t yet seen anyone crack that puzzle. There are still plenty of people in the world, both young and old, who still dismiss video games out of hand as childish folly.

In the meantime, I changed my mind and started uploading the Resident Evil videos anyway, marked as unlisted. I know how much blog readers love to watch YouTube videos instead of reading, so you should be able to see them in this Resident Evil playlist, but they will otherwise be invisible, since my fickle public did not care much for my Resident Evil 7 videos, so screw ’em.

Television

Rejoice! Taskmaster Series 15 is Risen!* This is the first such series I’m watching live as it happens.

I’m still watching Richard Osman’s House of Games, and I even found some episodes of House of Games Night on YouTube.

I think it would be quite fun to create a quiz show. If I did, it would be heavily inspired by House of Games.

World Context

World War 3 Watch: Finland joined NATO, angering Russia. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met with Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-we in California, angering China and sparking duelling South Sea military exercises from both China and the U.S. The New York Times reported on leaked Pentagon intelligence documents related to the Ukraine war. An arrest of the alleged leaker was made.
Trump 2024 Circus Watch: New York prepared for Trump’s arraignment, which took place on Tuesday the 4th, and was the only news story reported on that day here. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was considerably more dramatic than the actual hour-long event, and everything Trump disappeared into obscurity immediately afterward.
Twitter End Of Days Watch: Blue checks turned yellow on Twitter, but not Tweetdeck. NPR was labeled a state-affiliated media outlet, while the Voice of America and Stars and Stripes, literal state-affiliated media outlets, were not, proving once again that everything online is just a funny, funny joke. NPR left Twitter in protest, the first consequential change in Twitter that I’ve observed to date.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, vaguely known in the U.S. for her handling of COVID, left office.
A federal judge in Texas invalidated a 20-year-old FDA (Federal Drug Adminstration) approval for abortion drug Mifepristone, angering Democrats considerably, and leading everyone to refresh their memory on how a single Texas judge thinks they can overrule the entire federal government. Okay maybe just me. Legal battles and challenges continue to unfold daily.
Everyone’s all a-twitter over Twitter turning into X.
President Biden went to Ireland, a seemingly banal event which, based on the sheer number of consecutive days we’ve been hearing about it, we’re meant to think is as significant as visiting the surface of the sun.
Random factoid: I saw a tweet that the Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web turns 30 years old in April, which I think is actually a bit over two years late, but nevertheless, it’s somewhat alarming how many years I was alive before that milestone.

* An oblique reference to Easter Sunday, which was April 9th–the end of the most exhausting week in the Christian calendar for anyone who works in church music.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: Proof that I wrote this by hand and didn’t write it with AI (as if you can’t tell just by reading it):

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It’s an average choose-your-own-adventure game.

April’s Humble Choice selection includes The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante: In Times of the Fall of the Blessed Arknian Empire, an indie game which I got on Steam last year mainly on the strength of its title alone, and have played for about five hours.

Sir Brante tells the story of, you guessed it, Sir Brante, a man who grows up in a somewhat grimdark heteronormative patriarchal fantasy theological setting which is obviously modeled after a historical European medieval period. The tale unfolds over five parts of Sir Brante’s life, each containing a series of short chapters. At the end of each tale you make a choice that determines how the rest of the story plays out.

I bought it because I had an idea for a video series, and I was looking for a “choose your own adventure” style of narrative game. I was going to roll a die onscreen to make every narrative selection randomly.

I suppose Sir Brante could also fit into the “visual novel” genre of games, but I tend to think of visual novels as heavy on the narrative and light on the choices, whereas I was looking for something that had meaningful choices on every page, so to speak.

The writing is servicable but not inspired, with themes revolving around religion and the divisions between nobility and lower classes. The setting wasn’t entirely uninteresting, and there were hints of compelling conflicts to come, but I found the storytelling ran out of steam after four to five hours (of reading out loud). The plot felt like it developed too slowly, the characters weren’t very deep, and I couldn’t tell how my choices changed the story for the better, so I gave up with Sir Brante barely reaching the end of adolescence.

Kudos should go to the developer for making the font readable by default. I liked the visual style of the game’s artwork–the stark monochromatic sepia-and-black line art and so forth. The music and sound effects didn’t detract from the experience. (But neither did they really add to it.)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s not the worst example of this kind of game I’ve ever seen, either. It sits in that broad space that’s … well, average, which is unfortunately faint praise in an ocean of similarly average games.

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It’s been a somewhat uneventful couple of weeks of mundane daily routine.

Gaming Context

Or: What everyone else is talking about in gaming.

A lot of people in my circles played the Diablo IV Open Beta, despite some initial launch problems. Not surprisingly, reviews are generally good. Pretty much anything with the name Diablo is going to be successful, no matter how many people gripe about it. I played it for a half hour, it crashed twice, then I uninstalled it. It’s good at what it does, but I don’t really like Diablo-style games that much anymore.

The Resident Evil 4 Remake launched to great reviews. Starting with 4, however, the term “remake” seems less relevant to that series. I haven’t gotten it yet.

Timed perfectly with the end of the HBO show, the The Last of Us Part I “remake” (which is a dubious label for something that, on the surface, looks fundamentally the same as the remastered version) launched on PC, where it was previously only available on PS5. It’s likely called a “remake” in this instance because of the internal, hidden work required to port it to a newer cross-platform game engine. I’ve already played and recorded it so I don’t really need to get it. Except it wasn’t a great recording, and it might be fun to play through it on hard difficulty.

E3 2023 was cancelled for lack of interest from vendors. Video games are officially dead. (Actually, video games are a huge business, and have outgrown these dinky cons.)

Resident Evil

I’m continuing to limp slowly through the Resident Evil 3 Remake, but I’ve lost a lot of enthusiasm for playing this series. These Resident Evil remakes are good games and quite fun, but I’ve been in this game world for months now, burnout has set in, and I’m struggling to make it to the finish line. Each successive game has quite a lot of the same elements from the first game redone over and over. Even Resident Evil 7 was quite similar to the first game in many ways.

Playstion 5

My PS5 has been turned off for a long time. But I struck upon a revolutionary idea (for me), and that was to drag my PS5 over to the bed so I can play some low-intensity games while I’m lying down.

And thus, I can exclusively reveal that I’ve restarted a new game of Ghost of Tsushima. Previously, I only played a handful of hours, and never did any of the main story missions. Now I’m sticking closer to the main story, but I’ve only completed a handful of “Tales” so far.

I also worked out that I can actually record videos of PS5 gameplay with commentary while lying comfortably in bed. The height of luxury. Hard to find a wireless headset or earbuds with a good microphone, but it’s not exactly intended to submit to The Academy for consideration. It’s just so I can remember what I thought of the game 10 years from now without the chore of writing a blog post or replaying it.

Unfortunately, it’s still a massive pain to move videos from a PS5 to a PC. And it hurts my left thumb to use a controller, so it’s really slow going. Ghost of Tsushima is the kind of game that could take me a full year to get through at the pace I have to play it to maintain any grip strength in my left hand. (Still waiting for that thumb-free game controller.)

Video Production

Just finishing uploading Resident Evil 7 videos with mostly unattended scripts.

After several months recording Resident Evil 0, 1, 2, and 3 videos and painstakingly editing and rendering some of them with Davinci Resolve, it suddenly dawned on me that they aren’t very good and I don’t want to upload them, so I probably won’t. I might also have been influenced by the fact that there was a dip in interest in my Resident Evil 7 videos on YouTube. I think the lesson I learned there was that playing a scary game but not acting scared isn’t very interesting for an audience. To be honest, every game of Resident Evil turns out the same way, so there aren’t any surprises if you’ve already played it. Also, recordings of Stadia games make for garbage video quality.

I had an idea to make a video visualization showing the evolution of these blog posts over the weeks, so, with the assistance of ChatGPT, who patiently explained to me which command-line tools to install to monitor a directory and convert Markdown files to images, I wired up some scripts and applications and automation on my MacBook that will essentially take a screenshot of the full length of this document every time I save it, and then wrote another script to combine that series of screenshots into an animated GIF.

An animated visualization of text being edited over time

Sorry to readers on mobile. Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool. I can’t wait to do that for the next blog post, starting from an empty page.

Media Consumption

Critical Role changed things up by splitting the party and inviting in some guest players. It hasn’t been as good since C3E51. Watching Critical Role campaign 3 is less like watching friends play D&D and more like watching a live writing room. The majority of the time, the writing process is quite boring to watch.

Finished Nineteen Eighty-Four. Doubleplusgood, one might say. With all the rampant information and language warfare we see every day on social media, it seems like a good candidate for replacing that Once And Future King nonsense as required school reading.

Still watching Richard Osman’s House of Games. There are a ton of them.

Day Job

I continue to work at a company under siege by “activist investors,” who demand profitability not just today, not just yesterday, but before time itself began.

As I’ve just merged into a new team, I’m settling into a new routine and learning new things every day from co-workers and various company-provided training sources, though still not entirely sure what I’m supposed to work on. In the meantime, I invented my own project out of thin air. Organizational priorties are as yet unclear, so everything’s in maintenance mode.

I’m surrounded now by not just a few teammates twenty to thirty years younger than me, but a bunch of teammates twenty to thirty years younger than me, most of whom live in San Francisco (3,000 miles away from me) and gather in a very large, luxuriously-furnished office building of the kind I’ve never been inside before.

Because, like most of the tech industry, my company, too, is starting to more insistently nudge employees to return to the office. Luckily I was hired as and still classified a remote worker, and there is no office within a hundred miles for me to go to, even if I wanted to.

I don’t know this, but I imagine my remote status puts me “on the bubble,” as it were. News of tech industry layoffs are practically a weekly event these days. I believe there were some 900 more layoffs at my own company the day that I’m writing this.

My company is also pelting engineers with passively-aggressive demands to “increase productivity” and “do more with less,” leaving the consequences of failure to comply unspoken, and leaving the younger generations of workers terrified and uncertain. Developer “productivity” is measured with the usual b.s. measurements that anyone who has ever played a video game finds easy to game. It’s not lines of code, but it’s an equally fruitless attempt to reduce all the complexities of knowledge work down to a single numerical measurement that can be plotted on a graph over time. All you have to do is figure out which graphs that management looks at, and reverse engineer how the numbers are derived, something that I’m keen to do, because I wouldn’t mind remaining employed for at least a few more years, and this job I’m in right now is as good as it gets for a software developer.

AI

Everyone in the world is talking about AI right now, and I too have many thoughts about it, ranging the gamut from “this is quite silly” to “this is the most useful thing since sliced bread.”

AI isn’t that great at writing blog posts, but it’s good enough for most business needs. Writers will find it dreadful, but people who aren’t interested in writing (or reading), which is at least 90% of the world population, but still need to write something sometimes, will find it very useful.

I’m finding AI extremely useful for synthesizing large amounts of information into small summaries, and in this way I’ve been using it to learn the key points of a lot of new-to-me software development concepts in a very short time. “Give me the highlights of everything that’s new in the Java language since 2005.” “What is Hasura and what would I use it for?” “Give me an example of GraphQL query.” Things like that. It’s a lot faster than trying to find training or videos or articles. For software developers, AI assistance is very quickly going to become as ubiquitous as Intellisense.

Health and Wellness

This isn’t really about health or wellness, except in the sense that “Health and Wellness” is just a ephamism for “Everyday Life Stuff.” I would put this in a category called “dumb things I did because I’m not very good at the simplest aspects of everyday life maintenance.” The county stopped by one day and took their trash can back (my recent U.K. quiz show experience has taught me this is called a “wheelie bin”), because it turns out I haven’t paid my utility bill in quite some time, because it’s one of the only things in my life right now that isn’t paid automatically. Trash collection falls under utilities in my county, the only county utility that I pay monthly, since I have my own well and septic. (All my other utilities are paid to private companies, not the government.) This is the second time this has happened to me, despite my swearing to myself to pay closer attention and make sure I paid this one bill that’s such a chore for me to pay.

In semi-related news, my car inspection is almost a full year overdue now. This is a new record for me.

World Context

Or, what’s going on in the world.

In the AI Wars, ChatGPT-4 was announced, and Google Bard was announced. Businesses are jumping on the AI bandwagon as fast as they can, like it’s that year when every television commercial suddenly had a web site address in it.
From the World War 3 Watch Party, the U.S. accused Russia of destroying their drone, the first Ukraine-related incident (publicized, at least) I can recall of direct military conflict between the U.S. and Russia. Poland sent a few jets to Ukraine, the first time NATO delivered warplanes to Ukraine since the war started. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladamir Putin for war crimes. China’s Xi Jinping met with Russia’s Putin in Moscow. The U.S. launched retaliatory strikes against Russian ally Iran in Syria. Russia arrested U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich. All of these things sound like fairly signifant escalations of World War 3 in a short time to me, and I can’t think of any way to make that funny. Borgonzola! It’s a funny-sounding word.
The CDC reported that maternal mortality rates (that is, mothers dying in childbirth) are still rising in the U.S., angering Republicans, who thought they said infant mortality instead of maternal mortality.
The ratio of Trump-to-everything-else in headlines increased dramatically again as speculation ran rampant of a potential arrest in connection with hush money payments. As per usual with these sorts of things, nothing actually happened except furious bursts of hate-tweeting from the usual rabble rousers, at least until right before press time, when Trump was, in fact, indicted.
Banks continue to struggle in the wake of the highly-publicized Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Meanwhile The Fed raised interest rates again, which was a significant factor in the previous bank failures. Lots to look forward to there.
Congress is grandstanding about banning TikTok again, one of the very rare things in the U.S. that enjoys bipartisan support, so it angered no one except dancing Gen-Z sleeper agents. (Incidentally, if the U.S. actually manages to enact a general ban on TikTok, something that seems technologically impossible to me, it will follow in the footsteps of India, Pakistan, and, amusingly, the Taliban in Afghanistan.)
Ongoing for months, protests continue in Israel over limiting judicial powers, continuing the fashionable trend of just chucking democracy in the bin around the world. I mean, who thought it was a good idea to give the people power over their government, anyway? So 18th century.
The “Synthesis Report” of the Sixth IPCC report on climate change was released, the sixth straight such report that everyone is just going to ignore unless it helps election fundraising.
A mass shooting in Tennessee was unusual only for providing both sides something to yell about incessantly on Twitter, instead of just one. Because there just wasn’t enough to yell about.
Celebrity Deaths: Lance Reddick.

P.S. I’m using more BBC links now, mainly because there’s no paywall.

P.P.S. I’ve started thinking of these blogs posts more like newsletters than blog posts. Welcome back to olden times. All I need is desktop publishing software, a dot-matrix printer, and a local Kinko’s Copy store. I was going to write a separate blog post about this, and I still might, but I’ve determined that this is the new template for blogging that is absolutely awful for SEO, but will distinguish and elevate a human writer above the general din of the upcoming glut of AI-generated blogs.

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It was so warm in February that flowers bloomed early and covered my car with pollen. But today we cower in fear of the Ides of March.

Gaming Context

Or: What everyone else is talking about in gaming.

Destiny 2: Lightfall was probably the most-mentioned new game expansion in my circles. Wo Long launched, but I only saw one person talking about playing it. Hogwart’s Legacy continues to dominate the sales charts week after week.

I signed up for the Wayfinder beta, which is popularly memed to be like WildStar, but the game doesn’t look nearly as good to me as it does to everyone else.

I didn’t sign up for the Microsoft-backed Pax Dei alpha because I didn’t want to link my Steam account to a completely unknown third-party survey. Microsoft has their own ecosystem, they should use that, or just use Steam’s “request access” button like everyone else.

Former X-Play gaming media personality Adam Sessler has apparently been in trouble with gamers lately for saying bad things about gamers. It’s hard to imagine a more toxic relationship than the one between Adam Sessler, never one to mince words on X-Play or on Twitter, and the more entitled corners of the gaming community.

Resident Evil

As for me, I finished a second playthrough of the Resident Evil 2 Remake as Claire Redfield. Some changes from the Leon story to keep you on your toes, but similar enough that it goes much faster. Better voice acting and storytelling with Claire. Now I know what that prison informant was talking about when he implicated Chief Irons! If you only wanted to play once then I’d probably pick the Claire story instead of the Leon story.

Supposed to play two more New Game+ times to see all the story, but yeah I don’t think I’ll do that.

Instead, I started the Resident Evil 3 remake. I played a free demo of it on the PS4 in 2020, which was the origin of my foray into modern Resident Evil, since the one time I had the PC version in the 90s. Honestly I’m not entirely sure anymore if I did play the PC version in the 90s… that might just be a false memory. If I actually did, it’s probably something I pirated and played for 15 minutes before realizing it wasn’t anything like Quake or Baldur’s Gate.

These modern Resident Evil remakes are nothing like the originals. They’ve turned them into blockbuster action movies, somewhat like a mashup of Uncharted and Tomb Raider (the new one) and Terminator 2 and Die Hard and Aliens. With zombies. Like the Resident Evil movies, now that I think about it. But also with the addition of old-school puzzles and extremely unforgiving inventory management.

Video Production

Not much to talk about. Monitoring the daily YouTube upload scheduler. (I have to get new login tokens every week or so because YouTube hates small developers.) Finished with Lords of the Fallen, now uploading Resident Evil 7, which I hastily wrote some titles and descriptions for. Otherwise just playing games and running a Python script to build MP4s from the raw recordings.

Media Consumption

The Last Of Us is over now. It was a very good show and did the game justice, but I felt like the game was a more impactful emotional journey. Bravo for getting Ashley Johnson in there for a surprise appearance at the end.

Speaking of Ashley Johnson, I’m still watching Critical Role, in the same way a retired person would watch NCIS, because it’s there and it makes a soothing noise in the background. I’ve long since lost any capacity for understanding the extended expositional barrages of random unfamiliar names they throw out every week in Campaign 3 with no concern for the audience. Having said that, Campaign 3 Episode 51 was one of the best episodes in a long time. It was the Campaign 2 Episode 12 of Campaign 3. Just kind of wish they’d gotten there in, you know, 12 episodes instead of 51.

My waning interest in UK light entertainment quiz and panel shows was reinvigorated by the discovery of Richard Osman’s House of Games, a show that I could easily imagine airing alongside Super Password or Pyramid on the daytime television I watched in the 80s with my mom during summers.

Additionally, the month of March began with a power outage for most of a night, so I started listening to the audiobook of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which I think I got for free at some point. It’s another of those classics I’ve heard about all my life, understand most of the references, but never actually read.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It’s a good audiobook–the New Classic Edition, well-read by Simon Prebble. You don’t really think of books from 1949 as being edgy, but there’s some pretty graphic content in there. Tame by today’s standards, but definitely not what you’d call wholesome. (I would never call anything wholesome, because I think that word is gross.)

Day Job

Apparently the economy has massive job growth, at the same time that the tech industry is laying off tons of people.

I’m phasing into a larger team where everything is different, all day, every day. It’s good to flip the tables on your career every couple of years and start over completely from scratch, right? Good character building, I hear. Anyway the new team’s projects are all Java, Python, and Typescript, instead of Golang. Golang was new to me 2 years ago. I haven’t really used Java much since, I don’t know, the late 90s? A lot’s changed for the better in Java since the 90s, but they still haven’t given up on the word “beans.”

Bought a couple of books, O’Reilly’s Software Engineering at Google, and High Performance Java Persistence, both recommended by co-workers.

Watched some PluralSight training on Kubernetes, which I got for virtually nothing in a Humble Bundle some time ago and is now relevant to my new team. (Humble Bundles sometimes have good IT training material and music production assets, but the vast majority of their games are uninteresting to me.) It looks like a very cool product for building out scalable software infrastructure. One of my personal software development areas of interest is automating the build and deployment process, which I think is critical to the success of any long-term project, particularly if rapid changes are required.

Snagged a free O’Reilly Learning account from my organization and have also been watching some stuff about the Java Spring framework. It’s way better than random searches on YouTube. My experience of YouTube tutorials on programming topics lately is … let’s just say they’re hit or miss, filled with copied-and-pasted content, and–how can I put this delicately?–sometimes challenging for an English speaker to understand.

Health and Wellness

A trendy category for certain.

Dentist visit for a routine cleaning. They also did a full set of x-rays and measured my gum depth, which is the thing where they repeatedly stab your gums with a very sharp instrument. Still putting off going to the endodontist for a new-fangled mouth CT scan they do now to see what’s going on with my roots.

Doctor visit to check on some pain in my groin area that’s been around for a while now. The doc (who, it turns out, was someone that I saw in the 2000s for a kidney stone) found nothing life-threatening, but I have a followup ultrasound later this week to double-check.

World Context

It occurred to me I shouldn’t put this at the top of the post and immediately turn off readers within milliseconds. However I can report that this part has very quickly turned into my favorite bit to write.

In the news:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of the most popular water cooler technology topics around the world so far this year is ChatGPT, a Generative AI product with the uncanny ability to write better than a significant percentage of the world population–good enough for most business needs.
A rare bipartisan story of interest in the U.S., Alex Murdaugh was sentenced to life in prison for murdering his wife and son. Readers probably don’t know who that is, but somebody somewhere is trying desperately to mythologize the Murdaugh case just as much as the OJ case: He has a Netflix special, and he’s on my Twitter news timeline every day now for some reason.
The U.S. Department of Energy caused a stir by announcing they believed COVID likely leaked from a Wuhan lab, angering Democrats, who have always believed that anything a Republican might say about COVID has to be wrong.
Scott Adams finally went too too far* in the alternate reality of the culture wars.
Trump appeared at CPAC 2023 instead of DeSantis, for those following along with the “which vindictive Republican demagogue has a realistic 50% chance of being the next president” game show.
The New York Times and The Washington Post both reported that the Nord Stream Pipeline was sabotaged by a pro-Ukrainian group, angering Germany, but also nobody, because nobody in the U.S. cares about the events leading up to World War 3 when there’s mob justice for minor everyday inconveniences to mete out.
Tucker Carlson, using exclusive video footage given to him by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, created an extremely predicable amount of controversy about Jan 6* for the sake of ratings and FOX News stock prices, angering Democrats, but delighting topical comedians.
The Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on a Friday and dominated the news cycle over the weekend as everyone on Twitter freaked out trying to either create or calm mass banking panic before Monday, which could have affected SVB bailouts and/or other banks, because the entire modern economy is based mostly on wishes and dreams and The Average Consumer’s confidence that banks actually have the money they deposited. By Monday, the Biden administration announced a plan to protect uninsured SVB deposits, proving once again that perception is way more important than reality.
Daylight Savings began in the U.S., so I now have to put -04:00 instead of -05:00 in my blog post dates. Incidentally, a bill to make Daylight Savings time permanent in the U.S. passed the Senate last year, but has yet to go before the House, which is currently laser-focused on the important forward-thinking governence work of rampaging vengeance against Democrats, wokeness, and Anthony Fauci.
Everything Everywhere At Once won the Oscar for best picture, but there was no celebrity-on-celebrity violence this year, no doubt a direct benefit of changing the red carpet to dingy biege. Also the kid that played Short Round won for best supporting actor, which was pretty cool.

* Finding an apolitical, just-facts-with-some-context report on controversial U.S. politics news–one that half the U.S. population won’t immediately discount on sight as fake–is quite difficult, but I stumbled on the English version of The Indian Express which I might use as my go-to citation source from now on, because I and most U.S. citizens have no knowledge of any reporting bias they might have.

P.S. I should add that most world news doesn’t actually reach the U.S., so when I say “World Context,” I mean just the bits that I actually hear about.

P.P.S. You won’t believe this, but I did actually remove a lot of editorializing from this post.

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Sass mode activate!

World Context

In the news, the war in Ukraine turned a year old, angering Republicans. A train derailment in Ohio raised environmental and health concerns for nearby residents. Lawyers and politicians flocked to the scene to help with the cleanup. Former President Jimmy Carter, arguably the last remaining living president to lead the U.S. before it collapsed into civil war, entered hospice care, angering Republicans, who may now be forced to say something nice about him on camera (but probably won’t). The New York Times, still reeling from its years-long internal identity crisis and journalism generation gap, published literally anything (paywall), angering literally everyone, again.

Gaming Context

The ongoing saga of Microsoft trying to acquire Activision-Blizzard is over a year old now. The UK doesn’t like it.

Returnal launched on PC, screwing anyone who bought a PS5 yet again. Wild Hearts, apparently a Monster Hunter clone, is a game I heard people bought and played for some reason. Atomic Heart, a completely different game, also launched, confusing me a lot. Wo Long, from the Nioh folks, is causing some excitement for a March release, but I tried the demo and it has all the bad parts of Nioh again, so that’s a hard pass from me. There’s a new Destiny 2 Lightfall thingy launching on the 28th but I’ve only played about two hours of Destiny 2 ever and that was enough for me.

In Steam Early Access, Kerbal Space Program 2 apparently disappointed. Sons Of The Forest appeared, from the makers of The Forest, a rare new game that I’m interested in playing, because The Forest was among the best of the survival games.

Speaking of Activision-Blizzard, Diablo IV will begin an open beta in March, but I haven’t been interested in that genre of game for many years. I realized one day that those isometric action RPGs contain roughly the same intellectual stimulus for me as an idle clicker or slot machine. If I don’t want to think, it’s usually faster and easier for me to find a Netflix documentary on an unsolved murder than to play a game.

Day Job

Chaos and uncertainty. A major reorganization means I’m essentially starting a new job with a new team, but as yet I don’t know exactly when, or what I or the team will be working on, or what to do with the existing projects I was working on. Still employed though, so can’t really complain too much.

Resident Evil

Finished Resident Evil 0 HD. It’s an okay game at best, with an abominably bad story filled with sexist cliches and what I will charitably call intentionally cheesy acting. Nothing particularly noteworthy added to the Resident Evil lore, except the name of the person who invented the T-Virus (John Marcus). Didn’t really need a whole game for that. They did nothing to flesh out the backstory of Rebecca Chambers while focusing mostly on lovable bad boy trope Billy Coen. Skippable, in other words.

With that out of the way, I returned to the Resident Evil 2 remake. (I started it briefly when I thought I was going to skip the first game entirely.) And finished it. Once, at least, playing as Leon Kennedy. Apparently you have to play this game four times to get all the story bits, which I doubt I’ll do.

But I do want to play again as Claire Redfield, because I didn’t realize at first that she is the sister of protagonist Chris Redfield from the first game. It’s a whole soap opera up in here with this series!

Anyway, the Resident Evil 2 remake is a pretty good game, which is something I remember hearing when it first came out, and I can now confirm. It would be nice if more studios made games like this, but I suspect those days are gone forever.

I didn’t really set out to play every game in the Resident Evil series, but it’s rapidly turning into a project like that. To recap, my modern Resident Evil journey began in 2020 with the PS4 demo of 3, then 7 on Stadia in 2021, finishing in 2023, then 1 (twice), then 0, and now 2 (twice). With some occasional bits of the original Playstation versions of 1 and 2 thrown in for variety.

Video Production

I’m tired of it. I’m no longer interested in loading up Davinci Resolve or any other video editor, which is a minor problem because I have a small backlog of about a half dozen game recordings left to edit before they’re ready for uploading. I might end up hitting the eject button and rendering the raw recordings as-is.

Still, as previously threatened, I published my first video essay. There are about a hundred things in it that need improvement, but for a brief time, before I actually pushed the “publish” button and realized other people would be able to see it, I was quite pleased with it. Not surprisingly for the creative content that you put the most work into, viewers didn’t seem to care. Not enough controversy, I guess.

Technically it wasn’t really an essay, but it doesn’t really fit the mold of a vlog either, because at no point am I talking to camera. (I tried, and it didn’t work, because reading an 8-minute script directly to camera is way harder than you might think. It’s why all the vlogs on YouTube have jump cuts every three words, like a Max Headroom show. You need to train and practice for that.) It’s more of a behind-the-scenes featurette, I suppose.

Television

Same as before. Vox Machina season 2 is over now. Still watching The Last Of Us and Critical Role and occasional UK panel shows and that’s about it.

I finally rented Top Gun Maverick. Renting movies now feels like the same sort of antiquated experience as going to a drive-in movie. Or going to a movie. But Top Gun Maverick is a “one of the best action movies of all time” sort of movie, so it was worth it. Glad I didn’t see it in a theater or in IMAX though, because I definitely would have been violently motion sick.

I also saw Everything Everywhere All At Once. It was among the only original movies I’ve seen in a while–the answer to that burning question, what if Monty Python had made The Matrix, and then Rick and Morty had parodied it? It made no logical sense at any point from beginning to end, but somehow you were emotionally invested anyway. Good movie.

Food

I bought a Ninja personal blender thingy so I can make fruit smoothies again, in a modest effort to not feel like crap all the time. It’s cool, but the first thing I saw on the box when I opened it was a warning label that it could cause cancer. Neato.

I’ve had great success making fruit smoothies in the past, but my old blender broke, so I haven’t been making them for a couple of years. The recipe I evolved is: Orange juice + a banana + frozen berries + vanilla yogurt. It’s tasty. In the past I’ve added cinamon and peanut butter (or peanuts, which is easier) and even some spinach leaves, in an effort to jam more things that are supposed to be good for you into the mix.

View Details

I’ve been uploading game videos to my YouTube channel for about eight years now, and as my first foray into video essays, I decided to make a video about how I do it.

This is the original script for that 8-minute video, for the folks who would rather read text. It’s a little longer and includes some deleted sections. I deleted parts mainly because I couldn’t find an interesting video clip to go with them, but one time because Davinci Resolve bugged out and kept rendering an annoying audio click in one spot for no apparent reason and I gave up after a week of trying to work around it (hilariously, it was right after I said “nothing annoys me more than audio problems”).

There are basically three steps to recording game videos. First I setup how I’m going to record the game. Then I play the game. Then I process and upload the videos. Those first and last parts are the most time-consuming.

I use two PCs to record now. Since my last gaming PC upgrade in 2021, I converted my old gaming PC into a recording PC.

SOUND

I used to do home recording in the 90s, so I’m obsessed with sound quality. The audio part of a video is the most important part to me.

I use XLR microphones and a small mixer, which feeds the audio interface into my recording PC. Technically I could simplify things and plug the microphones directly into the audio interface but the mixer gives me more flexibility.

In the past I’ve had great results with an old Rode condenser microphone, but right now I’m using an Audio Technica dynamic headset. I record in a very “live” room and it’s very easy to pick up excess noise and echo from the wooden walls and floor. It’s worth sacrificing some microphone quality to reduce room noise. Room noise is the main thing that gives you a headache when you listen to other people’s videos.

I used to use a Shure headset, which was even better at reducing noise, but I found the hypercardoid mic sounded a little harsh, and more importantly it was uncomfortable to wear. But if you need to record next to a vacuum cleaner, I’d recommend it.

I prefer dynamic over condenser microphones because condenser mics are really good at picking up “mouth sounds” if you’re not careful. A condenser mic will pickup the sound of your tongue sticking to the roof of your mouth which results in tiny little moist “clicking” sounds, especially if you’re quiet and use a lot of compression like I do. I don’t want to think about that when I’m playing a game.

I use a cheap Behringer compressor as a mixer insert on the headset. I set the compression at about 4:1. It also has a noise gate and a built-in de-esser which I have cranked because the mic is so close to my mouth.

OBS can technically do all of the microphone processing (and my mixer even has a built-in compression knob) but I prefer the outboard compressor, and I’ve just gotten used to it.

I found out very early on that I have to do a lot of compression on my voice because I mumble quietly while playing but then I’ll suddenly yell at something out of nowhere, and I need to smooth out those levels.

I use a Mackie USB mixer because it has essentially two outputs, one analog and one USB. The analog output goes to the audio interface in my recording PC, which goes into OBS. But the USB output goes back to my gaming PC, so I can add voiceovers in post-processing if I need to. Editing on the gaming PC is much faster than it is on the recording PC.

(Incidentally, I recorded most of the voiceover for this video with an Audio-Technica AT2035, a new condenser microphone I’m trying out. I had some suspicions that my old Rode microphone was dying.)

VIDEO

I use an AverMedia PCI capture card in the recording PC. I used to use an Elgato capture card, but I kept having random audio dropouts so I replaced it. Nothing annoys me more than audio problems.

To get the video from my gaming PC to my recording PC, I mirror my gaming PC display to the capture card’s HDMI input at 1440p resolution.

I don’t usually use much in the way of camera equipment for game videos.

I experiment with recording a webcam from time to time, but I very rarely publish it. I find that “face cams” are useless unless you’re good-looking and/or you’re doing something interesting with your face, and 95% of the time I’m just staring blankly at the game screen. It just draws the viewer’s eye away from the game for no good reason.

Still, I recently got a Logitech BRIO webcam, and before that I used a Logitech C920 webcam. Sometimes I try recording both at once.

I also got a Sony ZV-1 camera which can be used as a very high quality face cam for recording, but it’s a pain to stream video from it, and I think it uses some weird beauty filters that I can’t figure out how to turn off. It’s better for other kinds of video. (Like some of what you’re seeing in this video.)]

I got some cheap LED lights that I can turn on when I’m recording at night. Quality video is mainly about lighting, which isn’t a subject I care much about, so I do the bare minimum I can get away with.

Another reason I avoid camera video is that I have to clean the house. Yuck.

Not to mention it’s a lot easier to edit the audio tracks if you don’t have to synchronize them with any camera video.

OBS

Like the rest of the world, I use OBS to record the videos. I have it setup to record multiple audio tracks: One for the game, one for the headset, and one for a backup microphone track in case I accidentally leave the main microphone muted.

The backup microphone is just a Blue Snowball USB mic, and it sounds awful whenever I have to use it, but it’s better than silence, and way better than having to re-record a video or a voiceover.

Unfortunately there’s not much you can do as a backup if you lose the game audio though. Good luck fixing that.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with recording multiple video streams as well as multiple audio streams. That’s more of a pain to deal with, though.

For video encoding I use the Nvidia constant bitrate encoder at 10 to 15 megabits, depending on the size and complexity of the source. I usually set keyframes to 1 second intervals to give me more flexibility in editing.

For audio encoding, I record at 48khz and encode anywhere from 192 to 256 kilobytes.

I try to keep my raw recordings to 45 minutes or less, but sometimes they go up to an hour. They average about 4 to 6 Gigabytes each.

After all that setup, I finally get to play a game.

PLAYING

I can only play for an hour or less before I need a break from the screen. I have back, neck, and shoulder problems so I can’t sit for long periods of time anyway. I could never be one of those streamers that plays for 8 hours a day or for 24 hour marathons.

On weeknights I can only record one or maybe two videos, but on weekends I might record four or five or more videos, depending on how much I like the game.

I have to have a mute switch available at all times to cut the microphone whenever I cough or sneeze or something. I’m plagued by mucus and phlegm so I’m constantly having to clear my throat or cough, especially if I record in the mornings.

So last year I splurged on a fancy schmancy Elgato Stream Deck and an Elgato Footpedal to use during recording. Before that, I just used a cheap wireless numeric keypad, which works just as well.

Otherwise I just play the games and say whatever comes to mind. There’s a mysterious skill and a kind of performance art to talking out loud while you’re playing a game, which is something I’ve been working on for seven years now. It activates a part of the brain that otherwise goes unused, and it doesn’t come naturally. But I’m used to talking to myself in my head all day, and I’ve found that it’s largely a matter of disabling the social filter that keeps me from doing that in public.

As for what to say, I just try to convey what I’m thinking about the game at any given time. I talk about what I would be interested in hearing if I were watching someone else: The thought process that goes into game decisions, the things about the environment or the story that stand out as unusual or interesting. And dumb jokes, of course.

The most influential YouTube Let’s Play series that got me started was a Dark Souls series by a guy named Masterkizz, which I first saw around 2015. It’s the one that made me think “okay, this is what this art form is supposed to look like.” His is rough at the start but I’ve mostly been trying to copy his basic template ever since.

He has a way more exuberant personality than I do, but there’s an authenticity to it that I like. You get the sense that if he wasn’t recording and you were sitting next to him in the same room watching him play, it would look exactly the same as the YouTube uploads. You can tell he just likes to play games. There’s a lack of a performative veneer, and that’s what I try for too, even though it is a performance to some extent.

I like to think of a game video series (I hate calling them Let’s Play videos) as more of a documentary, something that tells a narrative story of how I experienced the game. I want to go through a character arc of my own, as a player, from the beginning of the game to the end–separate and distinct from whatever the game’s story is–as I discover new things and learn the ins and outs of the game along the way. It’s an elusive goal.

POST-PROCESSING

Once the game session is over, finally there’s the post-processing, which can be quick or very time-consuming.

This is probably the part that I’ve spent the most time trying to streamline over the years. I’m constantly tweaking the workflow and trying to automate things to make it easier on me, and I change something on almost every game series I record.

I lean heavily on ffmpeg command line scripts. I’m a programmer in real life so that stuff is fairly easy for me. If you don’t know, ffmpeg is a command line tool to read and write video files, and it’s packed with processing tools.

In a perfect world, I wouldn’t do any manual editing on my recordings. Usually, I just run a script that mixes the game and microphone audio tracks together the way I like and spits out a final MP4 file. Usually one high quality version for uploading to YouTube and one lower-quality version to archive onto an external USB hard drive somewhere. The script works about 75% of the time.

But sometimes I need to cut out boring parts of a recording. The first thing I’ll try is a program called Avidemux. If you can manage to make the cuts on keyframe boundaries, it doesn’t require re-rendering the video, which saves tons of time and preserves the original quality.

Avidemux is also a very good tool to scrub through a video very quickly to remember what’s in it, or find a place to grab a video frame for a blog post.

Sometimes I need to edit only the audio tracks. Usually to fix a section of the commentary where I accidentally muted the main microphone, and I have to copy over a section of the backup microphone track.

In those cases I’ll use Audacity for simple edits or REAPER for more complicated edits.

But sometimes I need to use a full-blown video editor. When I go into a video editor, it’s usually for complicated montages like condensing five hours of boss fighting down into a half hour video, or perhaps adding titles, and it’s very time-consuming. It could take five times as long to edit those videos as it does to record them, so I try to avoid it.

I used Movie Studio Platinum for many years but lately I’m starting to use Davinci Resolve as my video editor of choice. It’s quirky and has a bit of a learning curve, but I’m finally warming up to it. (I used this video as a practice project for Davinci Resolve.) (Just beware that it crashes A LOT, but thankfully it has a good crash recovery system.)

And that’s it. Just a few simple steps and eight years worth of mistakes, and that’s how I make videos. That’s the secret to it, really. Just keep making new videos and try to learn from the mistakes you made in the old ones. Good luck!

Attributions

Most of the game footage is from playing the Resident Evil 0 HD Remake on January 31st, 2023, which I haven’t uploaded yet but probably will in a couple of months.
The Avidemux footage is from Nier: Automata played in 2022, which I also haven’t uploaded and probably never will because I doubt I’ll ever finish that game.
Dark Souls II - Part 59 - Velstadt (2015) https://youtu.be/c79tOHIsjXw
Cataclysm DDA Short Stories - Sharleen and the Pickup Truck (2022) https://youtu.be/8D9DgH0D8qk
Elden Ring Pt 245 - Melania the Sword of Miquella (2022) https://youtu.be/bzwYl5ZBoBs
The intro sting is a track I came up with in 2017 for my Guild Wars videos, but I don’t remember if I’ve ever used this version of it before now.
The main background music is a track I made with Renoise for my Dwarf Fortress videos in 2019, but I never uploaded any of those videos.
The outro music is from my Cut The Chain music video in 2021 https://youtu.be/q3FN52rYaMY which has samples from the commentary of my Resident Evil 3 PS4 demo video https://youtu.be/DPlSXw8JSTE, both of which still makes me laugh.

Equipment Reference

Audio Technica BPHS1 https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/bphs1 (great bang for the buck) (it turns out almost none of the audio in this video was recorded with one, but almost 100% of my game recordings since 2022 are)
Shure BRH50M https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/brh50m-lc?variant=BRH50M (very expensive, not recommended unless you’re rich or have a very specific need to record next to a vacuum cleaner) (games recorded in 2021 used this)
Audio Technica AT2035 https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/at2035 (a new condenser microphone I’m trying, most of the voiceover in this video was recorded with this)
Blue Snowball https://www.bluemic.com/en-us/products/snowball/ (way bigger than you’d think)
Rode NT1 https://rode.com/en/microphones/studio-condenser/nt1 (I love this mic but they don’t make the one I have anymore, mine looks more like the current Rode NT1-A)
Mackie ProFX10v3 https://mackie.com/en/products/mixers/profxv3-series/ProFX10v3.html (I’ve always liked Mackie mixers but they aren’t as good as they used to be)
Behringer MDX2600 Composer Pro XL https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0CCX (good enough, not sure they still make this model)
Focusrite Scarlett 18i8 https://focusrite.com/en/usb-audio-interface/scarlett/scarlett-18i8 (more for recording music, a bit overkill just for games, and I’d rather have a MOTU because I used to have several MOTU audio interfaces that worked very well in the 90s)
AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K https://www.avermedia.com/us/product-detail/GC573 (working well so far but I don’t actually record in 4K)
Elgato HD60 Pro (don’t think they make this one anymore, thank god)
Sony ZV-1 camera https://www.sony.com/en-ci/compact-cameras/products/zv-1 (used for B-roll of equipment shots, but any phone camera would have also worked)
Logitech BRIO webcam https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/webcams/brio-4k-hdr-webcam.960-001105.html (I don’t record in 4K though)
Logitech C920 webcam https://www.logitech.com/en-gb/products/webcams/c920-pro-hd-webcam.960-001055.html
Elgato Stream Deck v2 https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-mk2 (too expensive for what it does, but it looks neat I guess), Elgato Stream Deck Pedal https://www.elgato.com/en/stream-deck-pedal (also kind of pricey for what it does, but it works and it’s hard to find alternatives)
Cheap Wireless Numeric Keypad https://www.newegg.com/p/0GA-00D9-000V5?Item=9SIA72533B2377 (there’s a million of these out there)
None of those companies pay me.

View Details

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Also I need a better title for these kitchen sink posts.

World Context

In the news, everyone’s shooting down Chinese spy balloons, ignoring Google Maps. President Biden delivered the State of the Union, angering Republicans. An earthquake killed tens of thousands in Turkey and Syria, devastating a region that was already a hellscape. Kansas City won Super Bowl LVII.

Day Job

A little bit more work drama began the month, just when things were settling down after the New Year’s work drama. Less catastrophic this time, in that a much smaller number of people lost their jobs overnight, but I’m in the midst of an unexpected and quite large team and organizational change, which always brings short-term chaos. The day-to-day is looking a bit uncertain for a while. Makes you wish the retirement age wasn’t 67.

Steam Next

I didn’t download or even look for any demos in the Steam Next Demo Fest, which apparently takes place thirty seven times a year now. I’ll be finishing Resident Evil 0, then starting on Resident Evil 2, and if I’m lucky, finishing it, and then starting Resident Evil 3.

Hogwart’s Legacy

I don’t give a flying owl hoot about Harry Potter or the new Hogwart’s Legacy or the culture war surrounding it. But I’m an adult and I’ll buy and play whatever games I want to play until the Thinkpol bans them completely. I’ll happily read all the books, watch all the movies, and listen to all the songs with subversive and inappropriate and even dangerous content in them.

Resident Evil

The playing of the prequel, Resident Evil 0 HD Remake, continues, but I’m struggling to finish it. It’s not as good as the first one. The dual-protagonist controls don’t really add anything to the game. Some of the puzzles are frustrating–I think they just weren’t translated very well. The game often doesn’t give you enough information to know what to do.

For example, there was a bit on a train where you had to enter a code before a countdown killed you, and there was no discernable way to figure out the code. I had to check a wiki, and even then it still wasn’t very intuitive (because of course modern game wikis are garbage dumps). It’s obvious and easy once you’ve done it, but before that it was a complete mystery. (A classic “curse of knowledge” situation.)

Twitter

Twitter has had quite a month so far. First Twitter was going to shut off free access to their API on February 9, which is a pretty drastic measure even among all the other drastic measures. Then they immediately backtracked and said it will still be free with limitations. Then Twitter added a feature for some people to tweet up to 4000 characters (I haven’t yet seen any of those tweets but I would likely unfollow those accounts). Then Twitter went down for a couple of hours. Then they decided not to change the API until the 13th, while announcing it’ll cost $100 a month. And somewhere in there World of Warcraft turned off their Twitter integration, but nobody cared.

The basic takeaway is that whatever headline you read about Twitter is probably going to turn out to be wrong or obsolete in a few hours, because basing stories entirely on the random rantings of a mad CEO who throws spaghetti at a wall every day isn’t a good idea.

For myself, I’m hoping my automated Twitter notifications for blog posts keep working, but if they don’t, c’est la vie. There’s nobody on Twitter anymore to see them anyway. Besides, there’s RSS feeds: They still work, folks. Use them.

Wilhelm also talked about the Twitter Chaos Show recently.

Fediverse

A bunch of gaming folks are moving to a new Mastodon instance Gamepad.club run by Gazimoff. It seems fine. But my position on the fediverse hasn’t changed since the beginning: I don’t want to post there until I own the domain name attached to my identity, any more than I would want to blog at a domain name I didn’t own. There isn’t really a convenient way for me to do that yet and I’ve run out of energy to try to setup inconvenient solutions. It’s not that important.

Honestly you don’t really need to make a Mastodon account when everyone posts publicly on the local timeline anyway. Just, you know, refresh the web site. You only need an account if you want to talk.

This section exploded into a rant about where I fit into the modern gaming community which I put into another post.

Stashpad and Obsidian

I’ve been experimenting with a desktop app called Stashpad which might serve some of my needs as a Twitter substitute. It’s basically a note-taking application but the UI is like sending text messages, which is perfect for me. It’s a bit limited in functionality, though. I can’t paste images into it, for example.

I’ve also been looking at Obsidian, which is more of a document-based app, which might work for writing blog drafts. It’s like Evernote except it works on plain text Markdown files. Very fast UI, cool features. Complicated to use, though.

YouTube Channel

I resumed uploading daily videos (meaning I re-enabled the task scheduler job that does it automatically), starting with a Lords of the Fallen series, which I started early in 2016 and finished late in 2022. It’s also an unintentionally embarrassing documentary of the evolution of the quality of my commentary audio track over seven years.

As per usual, it’s a chore to write descriptions for videos, so I don’t bother. Consider yourself lucky to get a title on each one. Maybe one day I can hire an intern to do that stuff. Only 700 more subscribers to go before the influencer cash starts pouring in and I can quit my day job!

Video Production

I made a #shorts! I thought it was funny, but I left it as “Unlisted.”

It looks wrong in the embed. Anyway, it came about because I wondered what a “Let’s Play video” might look like in the style of a TikTok vertical video for the kids. It was a lot of work. I don’t want to do it full-time.

Speaking of lots of work, I’m making an 8-minute video “documentary” showing how I make game videos, part of my new plan to make two or three video essays a year. It was fun to make, and I’m quite pleased with the result, but it’s an excessive amount of work. I don’t want to do it full-time.

This was the one and only topic I could think of for a video essay, so it might be the last one, too.

Good practice with Davinci Resolve though. Learned lots of stuff. (I only need to know how to do about a dozen things in a video editor, but sometimes it’s challenging to find them amongst the thousands of features that go unused in a typical video editor.)

My new Python scripts to render videos are working quite nicely, too. They take the raw “multicam” OBS videos I record now and render different kinds of video output for use in different situations. Good Python practice. Python isn’t as syntactically strict as I thought it was for all these years.

Automating hours of work down to a single button press is very cool. I recommend it.

Hardware Repair

My gaming PC crashed a lot when using a video editor, which I thought was because Davinci Resolve was just buggy. But I’ve also been plagued by random game glitches and freeze-ups for a while now, so I started trying to find a cause.

I discovered the Windows Memory Diagnostic, which restarts your PC and runs a memory test similar to the old MemTest86 (which is now owned by PassMark, the benchmarking people). It said my memory was bad, so I ordered new memory–which, it turns out, is one of the only relatively easy computer repairs that one can do without hours and hours of frustration. Windows reports no errors with the new memory.

But it turns out Davinci Resolve still crashes very frequently. It’s just buggy. Fortunately it has very good crash recovery and I haven’t yet lost any work.

Video Editor Search

I’ve tried some other video editors to find less buggy alternatives: I got Movie Studio 2023, and it’s horrible. MAGIX turned it into an abomination, a shadow of its former self. Movie Studio 17 was the last usable version, I think. Tempting to get Vegas but I don’t ever want to pay a subscription for productivity software.

Kdenlive is okay but suffers from the “open source terrible inconsistent UI by Linux programmers for Linux programmers” syndrome (same as Audacity). There’s a new open source one called Olive which isn’t ready for prime time yet. There’s one called VideoProc Vlogger which is actually surprisingly speedy and easy to use, but has limited features and it’s a bit pushy with the business model. And of course I tried REAPER, which has enough video editing capabilities to meet my needs, but it’s unintuitive, a bit slow, and it’s horrible at rendering.

And just so you know, I’ve hated Adobe products and their subscription model since the 2000s and will never install one on Windows ever again in my lifetime, so don’t @ me about Premiere. Maybe someday I’ll buy a Mac just for video editing but don’t hold your breath.

Television

Just watching Last of Us and The Legend of Vox Machina and almost caught up on Critical Role Campaign 3, The Dullest One So Far. Dimension 20 is a better production in almost every way, but I’m waiting a bit before getting back to Neverafter. Also I fire up the VPN now and then to watch new episodes of Would I Lie to You? and QI across the pond.

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To be brutally honest, the older I get, the less I feel like I fit in with other Internet gamers.

Generally speaking, the modern gamer, and the games that enable them, is either:

Too antagonistic (you’re all ruining games!)
Too egocentric (building my brand and community!)
Too idealistic (fighting for the important cause!)
Too nostalgic (living in the 1990s forever!)
Too analgesic (self-medicating against the real world!)
Too fanatical (have you accepted our lord and savior game into your heart!)

I’m none of those things–or perhaps more accurately, I’m only a small slice of all of them–so I don’t feel at home in most gaming communities anymore.

I don’t know of any laid back, open-minded, pragmatic, middle-of-the-road gaming communities of average people from diverse backgrounds that just appreciates the artistic merit of a good game. The Gamers With Jobs podcast used to fill that role perfectly but I haven’t had time to listen to podcasts for many years.

The whole idea of “community” seems to have warped over the years. Since marketing execs saw the monetary potential of the fanatical fanbase, the word, in my mind, has become synonomous for “cult,” a place where you build walls around the faithful and ostracize anyone who deviates from approved doctrine, where “community managers” serve as a kind of roaming para-military police force. An Internet version of the homeowners’ association.

There’s no discernable benefit to engaging on social media in any kind of social way anymore. Most everyone who I might find consistently interesting has been intentionally or unintentionally drowned out or driven away by all the rampant Internet chaos of the last five or more years.

I’m strongly tempted to move exclusively to a Slack or a Discord server and hang out there by myself working on my laid back, pragmatic, middle-of-the-road projects, sending out occasional dispatches on the blog, like messages in a bottle, in the vain hope that there might still be some other pragmatic, middle-of-the-road people still left in the world.

It kind of sucks because I’d like to start or join a casual remote gaming group for tabletop games or maybe multiplayer games, but I simply don’t believe anymore that there are any like-minded people left on the Internet.

In the old days, you went to the Internet to “find your tribe” because you felt ostracized from the real world, but now it feels like the opposite: You have to leave the Internet to find your tribe, which seems like a step backwards in human evolution.

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It’s a new month and the year is already 8% complete.

Resident Evil

Finished a playthrough of the Resident Evil HD Remaster playing as Jill. It’s a much better game than I expected it would be, which I suppose is why Resident Evil is always cited as such an influential game in history. It takes a long time to get used to the control system and disorienting camera changes, but once you do it turns out to be a fun old-school adventure puzzle game with a decent story. (Not even a little bit scary, though.)

Powered through a second playthrough as Chris to see the differences. It’s less intellectually stimulating the second time, but there are some surprising (and annoying) differences.

I started playing Resident Evil Zero, the prequel, instead of the Resident Evil 2, since it’s more of the same style of game as the original. But I’m not sure this Resident Evil binge feeling is going to last through three more games.

Video Production

While recording Resident Evil videos, I wanted to be able to record my notes and map-making as I went (it quickly became a chore to remember which doors required which keys). Initially I added additional sources in OBS to show and hide overlays on top of the game video for my text editor and paint program, which worked, but then I accidentally left a text editor covering the game window for five minutes and remain angry about it to this day.

So I wanted to figure out a way to record separate video streams simultaneously (a “multicam” scenario) and combine them in post-processing while preserving the original game video. You can technically run multiple copies of OBS and record multiple streams that way, and it’s often referenced in Google searches, but it’s a massive pain and impossible to synchronize the videos. I ended up working out a new way of recording in one instance of OBS, using a very large video canvas and tiling source boxes around the screen so they don’t overlap. Like this:

I don’t use 90% of that video in the finished product, but it’s there if I need it.

Not sure yet if it’s worth the effort. Actually I am sure. It’s definitely not worth the effort, because it takes a bare minimum of four hours in post-processing and video editing for each hour of recording, which makes it quite literally a full-time job to play and upload one hour of game video a day. Definitely not viable long-term. But if nothing else I’ve learned a handful of neat new tricks with Davinci Resolve and OBS. I’m starting to get more comfortable with Davinci Resolve as my main video editor, despite all the bugs and quirks.

And Python, because I’ve finally thrown out my old PowerShell ffmpeg scripts and rewritten them from scratch in Python to accommodate this new recording method.

YouTube Channel

Speaking of videos, the channel has been dark for a month, but I think I have enough videos queued up now that I can start a daily upload again in February.

Lords of the Fallen: 30 episodes
Resident Evil 7: 18 episodes
Resident Evil (Jill): 20 episodes
Resident Evil (Chris): 10 episodes

That should take me into April and give me two months of buffer to record other things.

YouTube Stats

A Discord chat got me curious to map out some statistics of my YouTube channel since I started it in May of 2014.

Year\_\_\_\_\_	Videos\_\_\_\_\_	Views\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_	Watch Time\_\_	New Subscribers\_\_
2014	9	1534	86	2
2015	157	1913	147.6	5
2016	284	1788	91.1	6
2017	282	3231	221.7	6
2018	235	6473	432.8	26
2019	228	10465	802.8	39
2020	243	15506	1000	41
2021	557	26514	1500	65
2022	436	175042*	4700*	99

* These outliers are from one controversial Elden Ring Input Delay video.

Make of that what you will. I invest only in the quality of the videos themselves, and exactly zero time or money into publicity or networking or community-building, which are vastly more important than video quality.

However the ridiculous success of one random video talking about Elden Ring makes me think I might try a handful of video essays this year to see if I can make something I’ll be happy with. It’s a lot of work, though, so I doubt I would do more than three or four a year.

Buying Spree

Went on a bit of a buying spree while I was upgrading my game video recording process. Got a new microphone, a new webcam, some lights, and various other paraphernalia to go with it (USB extension cables, USB power bricks, etc.). All the stuff you need for pointless home video recording. (Except I have yet to buy a green screen of any kind.) Also rearranged my living room gaming/home recording workstation (i.e. desk). I have an inordinate number of articulating arms holding up things attached to this poor writing desk now. One day it’s just going to fall over. Also got some new curtains, room dividers, and at long last, the ultimate luxury item that definitely makes me feel like a rich out-of-touch elite, an electric screwdriver.

Television

I’ve run out of things to watch on UK television, or perhaps run out of interest in watching things. Watching television is usually my absolute last resort when I can’t think of anything else to do with myself. Video projects are taking up my time right now.

The Last Of Us started on HBO, which I find to be a good production, but it wasn’t love at first sight, but the game wasn’t either. It’s not worse than the game, but also not better; it’s like watching a play with different actors.

The new season of Vox Machina is fun, and I think somewhat moderated from the full-on extremes that turned people off from the first season.

Otherwise I’ve started catching up on Critical Role again. I keep wishing for a full TPK but I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I notice they’ve added some production techniques from Dimension 20 in 2023. :)

Sleep

Poor sleeping habits crept back into my life, resulting in feeling quite poorly for while. The root cause of the problem was trying to stay up too late to get just one more thing done because I didn’t want to interrupt what I was doing with sleep, like a toddler, which is always a terrible mistake for me. If I don’t get a decent night’s sleep for a few days in a row, I’m pretty much worthless. Can’t concentrate, body aches all over, listlessness, etc.

After a week or so I got my sleeping patterns back to normal, but it remains somewhat on the edge.

Eh, these are too long. That’s what happens when you give me two and half weeks to edit a document.

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An unexpectedly stressful start to the work year and a return to some gaming, instead of doing anything productive.

Work Drama

Right after I praised my workplace, the new year began with some pretty significant and unexpected work drama. 10% of my org and 20% of my 5-person team disappeared overnight. There’s a cloud of uncertainty over each work day now, in that it’s unclear how much time I should devote to my resumé, just in case. Pretty stressful.

Resident Evil 7

With Stadia shutting down on January 18th, I successfully hurried up and finished my Stadia game of Resident Evil 7 before the end of the service. I tried to resume the game on Steam by getting the Stadia save files out of Google Takeout, but Steam didn’t like the save files and refused to read them. Anyway, Resident Evil 7 is a pretty good game, and currently is the only Resident Evil game I’ve completed.

Resident Evil 1

Playing Resident Evil 7 made me think I should play the Resident Evil games in order, one of those long-term goals like replaying the Assassin’s Creed games in order (done) or replaying The Witcher games in order (in progress), or replaying the Final Fantasy games in order (ugh no), so I bought the Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3 remakes in the Steam sale, and started into the first one. It’s mainly an adventure puzzle game, but it’s hard because the combat controls are awful, even though the remake’s controls are a thousand times better than the original PlayStation controls. I know this because…

Resident Evil the other 1

I got RetroArch on Steam, which let me run a PlayStation emulator, which let me play the original version of Resident Evil. It’s really bad. It’s so, so bad, you guys, and pixelated so, so much, and laughably not scary. I can’t believe anyone ever thought it was scary for even a second. But I kind of want to play it through anyway. But I’m not really a “retro gaming” sort of person, so I imagine this feeling will go away quickly.

Retro Gaming?

RetroArch makes me wonder if I can replay my favorite games from the TRS-80 Color Computer and/or Amiga. I was once able to play Dungeons of Daggorath on an emulator but I can’t remember how I did it now. Hrm. A list of the most memorable games I might want to play on an emulator:

TRS-80 Color Computer
- Dungeons of Daggorath
- Color Robot Battle
- Color Meteoroids/Microbes
Amiga
- Lemmings, from before they were the Grand Theft Auto people
- Gridiron, from before they were the Elder Scrolls people
- Dungeon Master
- Bard’s Tale
- Stunt Car Racer
- Defender of the Crown
- Pinball Dreams I think it was called??
- Hybris
- Marble Madness
- Empire

Stadia

Incidentally, Stadia is a really good service. The fatal flaw was asking people to buy their games exclusively on that platform (I, for example, only ever played the free games). I really hope that delivery platform returns in some other format, though, because it’s a vastly more convenient way to deliver game demos and less action-oriented games (e.g. MMORPGs). Maybe Netflix?

UK Television

In the continuing adventures of only watching UK television from Dave, I’ve been watching Go 8 Bit and Celebrity Catchphrase. Just say what you see!

ActivityPub

I’ve basically abandoned my ActivityPub blog plans, at least for the time being, because I couldn’t get anything to work with Mastodon or Pleroma. I also find that I no longer feel like I’m missing out on anything. There was that initial pull that made me think, “Oh there might be something special over in the fediverse that I need to get involved with,” but I now think it was just the Internet fad FOMO gold rush feeling.

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It’s a new year, whoopie. Nothing particularly noteworthy to report.

I’ve seen more than a few people online saying how glad they are that 2022 is over because it was such a terrible year, which seems like a fairly common end-of-year sentiment since about 2016. I, living my hermit lifestyle apart from the concerns of most of society, can’t relate. Typically, only what happens inside my house and the video calls for work during the week affect me. As such it was a fairly average year, continuing the trend of good fortune I received on starting a quite good job in 2021. The two biggest changes in my life were the loss of my dog and the addition of a semi-domisticated feral cat to the house census.
The big Christmas Storm of 2022, which the media delightedly called a “bomb cyclone,” luckily didn’t affect me very much. It only would have if I’d lost my power, which I didn’t. No pipes froze, which was my biggest concern. The worst thing I can complain about is that the “emergency heat” was on a lot, and the house was moderately more chilly than usual, which doesn’t seem like something that’s worth complaining about. I didn’t have to leave the house at any point during the crisis. (The coldest it got overnight was 10F, which it turns out it wasn’t anywhere near the record December low of 1F for my area. In fact, I actually remember going out for Christmas services in 1983 with the family in temperatures near 1F.)
In the continuing adventures of watching all old UK panel shows that were ever made, I moved from Taskmaster to Would I Lie To You? Then I found an entertaining BBC “travelogue” series on Amazon Prime called The World’s Most Dangerous Roads, which led me to finally start into the catalog of Michael Palin travel documentaries, beginning with Around the World in Eighty Days with Michael Palin, which is perfect because I just finished the Jules Verne book of the same name.
I wish I was the sort of person who could travel without a constant dread and terror about being away from my safe and familiar home, because it would be fun to make travel diaries like Palin’s. There’s a total solar eclipse coming to the U.S. again in 2024, which, having had a taste of the experience in 2017, I’d like to go see*, since it’s probably the last one in the U.S. in my lifetime, but it would require me to travel a few states away to get into the path of totality. Alas, it seems impossibly daunting, especially by myself.
I had made a daily schedule for myself to do various hobbies every day of the week, but I’ve successfully avoided doing that while staring passively at UK television in a stupor, waiting for the accursed winter to end so normal life can return. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed this but it’s far easier in life to vapidly consume others’ stuff than to create your own stuff, especially in the depths of a winter of constant exhaustion from moderate seasonal affective disorder.
2022 was a fairly bad year for gaming. There were very few good new game releases. My Steam Reply 2022 is fairly dull and not at all surprising. Except it doesn’t include:
In an unexpected burst of gaming enthusiasm, in the last week of the year I finally finished my game of Lords of the Fallen, a game from 2014 which I started in 2016 and restarted in 2019.
I’m trying to figure out what to do with my YouTube channel in 2023. I feel like Elden Ring was the pinnacle of what I can possibly achieve with a game video series and it’s a good time to retire, but I also feel like the process of continually improving game videos has beneficial side effects. The ability to make a decent video with decent sound quality is an increasingly useful skillset in an increasingly remote, media-focused world. But I’d like to try something different. Just not sure what.
Notable music listened to recently is the lengthy Nier: Automata soundtrack, which is one of the best game music soundtracks I’m aware of. (And it’s pretty good even apart from the world of game music.)

I recorded a video during the eclipse to remind my future self to go to the path of totality in 2024 :)
— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 23, 2017

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It’s the exciting summary of my currently non-gaming life through the midpoint of December.

We’re well into the traditional winter malaise now, where every day is a desperate search for distractions from the cold, joyless darkness.

There were a few stressful days when my tabby cat Gracie started experiencing some pretty obvious pain in her mouth over the weekend, which made it difficult for her to eat. It turns out one of her front canines had broken, and after a dental exam she had one other bad tooth removed, and now she’s much better. I ended up switching vets in the process.
Meanwhile I still haven’t made an endodontist appointment for my own teeth. My toothache went away and with it, the urgency to do something about it. My dental insurance improves on January 1, so it’s better if I can wait a bit anyway.
Elden Ring videos continue to upload by means of automated scripts. These randomizer mod videos are probably the last I’ll upload for the forseeable future, which is a shame since I’ve setup a pretty nice production pipeline and gained a lot of followers (for me; still nowhere near enough to monetize the channel though). But as yet I have nothing else to upload, since I’ve recorded and/or played almost no games since I stopped playing Elden Ring in June. Every time I sit down to play a game in the evening, it feels like I’m sitting down to do my taxes, so I do something else instead.
Instead of playing games, I’ve been getting much more entertainment value from binge-watching the UK show Taskmaster. I’ve been watching a lot of UK shows from Dave (which, as far as I can tell, is the best name for a TV channel that has ever been invented) through a VPN in the last month or so. QI, The Outsiders, Question Team, stuff like that. It’s funny to me that there’s an entire biosphere of comedians that just rotate around the different quiz show panels.
Ran out of energy for listening to Jules Verne books.
Twitter drama is still a thing, but I don’t really notice it in my little bubble away from the rest of the world.
Fediverse drama is also a thing, and every day I see more and more reasons to think the ActivityPub-based fediverse is going to inevitably crash and burn as a large-scale platform, and the masses would be better off moving back to plain old 1990s-style message boards.
Incidentally the people who made ActivityPub, the thing Mastodon is based on, are now starting to promote a new federated social media concept called Spritely and “OcapPub.” This might explain why they seem to have been AWOL on ActivityPub for the last four years. They do a good job of laying out all the inherent problems with ActivityPub that need to be solved, but it’s still a very academic solution sorely lacking in practical details.
I’ve lost some enthusiasm for it, but I continue to work on an ActivityPub-enabled server to attach to the blog, because I think there are some cool things I can do with it. Unfortunately I keep running into problems communicating with Pleroma and Mastodon, which is annoying.

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Status report for the beginning of December.

Despite trying to shame myself in mid-November by publicly announcing my incredibly simple NaNoWriMo goal, I persisted in not being bothered to do it, and wrote zero words in the latter half of the month.
I’ve been listening to audiobooks at night when I go to sleep. So far I’ve completed four Jules Verne books from a massive, poorly-edited audiobook of “classic” (i.e. public domain) science fiction. Despite being a terrible production, the (uncredited, as far as I can tell) reader for these books is actually pretty good, and makes old-timey 1870s writing sound fairly compelling.
I developed a toothache and went to the dentist. I have a history of dental issues and most people would be shocked and appalled at the amount of dental work I had done in my 30s. The vast majority of my upper teeth have had root canals and/or implants. Anyway now two of my lower back teeth have problems in the root area that will need addressing, so I have to schedule an appointment with a specialist to get some kind of new-fangled CBCT scan done. Luckily, the toothache faded and it no longer hurts… for now.
Toothache was probably caused by stress from unspecified family drama. (Clenched jaw, grinding teeth at night, that sort of stuff.)
Was almost done uploading Elden Ring “Extras” videos, so I decided to tack on my 17-video randomized Elden Ring playthrough, because I still don’t have anything else to upload.
Yesterday I forced myself to play Hellpoint for about 45 minutes. It was the first time I played Hellpoint in almost a year and a half, and the first time I played any game at all for two or three weeks.
Some people are playing the new World of Warcraft Dragonflight expansion, but I don’t see nearly as much talk about this expansion launch as I usually do, which might be because:
Everybody who didn’t need to stay left Twitter due to Elon Musk drama. Most people went to Mastodon. Some people went to Cohost. Some people went to Hive and then Hive immediately imploded because of a massive security flaw. I made a bunch of test accounts in various places, but Twitter still works fine.
Speaking of Twitter, I stopped following over 100 accounts, almost all of which weren’t following me. I tried to get the number of people I was following down under 100, but I only got to about 150. Twitter is very quiet and stress-free.
Advent of Code started, but I’m ignoring it. It’s a good opportunity to learn a new programming language or practice coding interview-style problems, but keeping up with it in real-time is way too commercialized and stressful. Maybe I’ll look at it in January, because I’m working on this far more interesting and practical project:
Continuing to spend most of my free time working on implementing an ActivityPub server for the blog. I’m starting to run out of momentum though. Thought I would be further along by now. ActivityPub is so poorly documented that it’s not very easy to work out how to do anything with it. It’s largely useless anyway, because you literally cannot communicate with most federated servers unless you implement Mastodon-specific, largely undocumented extensions (e.g. HTTP signatures). I’ve spent the past week debugging exactly one thing: Responding to a follow request. No luck so far.

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I thought I should evaluate how static blogging has been going after almost two years.

I’m generally happy with how the blog runs right now. Pages load very fast on desktop and mobile, which is what I like to see in a well-managed web site.

It’s hosted entirely within AWS (except comments), meets most all of my original design criteria from 2019, and costs about $2/month, which is an acceptable amount to waste on an obsolete social media model.

Hosting comments should be free, but I broke down and spent $20/year so I didn’t have to keep renewing the free domain name every month, which was a pain in the butt. I don’t love Remark42, but it works well enough for my purposes, more-or-less.

There are some ongoing “user experience” problems, though.

Images Including images with blog posts remains a constant source of pain, every time I touch a blog post.

Part of it is unrelated to technology: I just hate finding a picture for every single blog post. Blogs posts are text. They’re supposed to paint a picture with words. But readers and, perhaps more importantly, blog-related aggregators expect there to be a header image on every post.

And from a practical standpoint, it’s a pain. I don’t write in a WYSIWIG editor: I write in Markdown in a plain text editor, the exact same editor I might use to write source code for programming (i.e. Visual Studio Code).

Therefore in order to include a picture in a post, I have to add the full Internet URL to that picture into the text of the post. I’ve built some shortcodes to reduce the effort, but I still have to type stuff; there’s no dragging and dropping involved.

Furthermore, the picture has to exist somewhere on the Internet before I can reference it. So I have to create and upload pictures before I can publish a post.

I’ve streamlined this process as much as I can over the last two years but it’s still a real pain and I hate it. It’s the number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 reason that I avoid blogging whenever possible. (Reason 9 is that it takes too long to edit drafts, and reason 10 is that it hurts my back to write for very long.)

Publishing Somewhat less annoying, but still a problem: I locked myself into publishing blog posts (and setting up images) only from one particular PC on my network, because that’s where I know all the scripts work.

I usually write posts as a “draft” first, which is a minimal Markdown file without too much metadata, just a title and tags. But to publish a markdown file with Hugo, it has to have a date added and be moved into a particular directory in your content structure.

Something I discovered very early on in this adventure: It’s extremely inconvenient to have to maintain the publishing date in the same file with your content text, before you actually publish the content. Especially when it might take weeks to finish editing a draft.

I also like to put the date into the filename of the markdown file, so I can glance at a directory of content files and know when they were written.

So I wrote a script that takes a markdown file as input, puts the current date on it, renames the file appropriately, and moves it to the appropriate content directory, ready for publishing. It saves me a lot of trouble.

But I only setup the script to run on this one particular PC. And I only have Hugo itself setup for testing on this one PC. So whenever I publish a post, no matter which computer on the network I write it on (I write most things on a Lenovo laptop that follows me around the house all day), I eventually have to go sit at this one PC to preview and publish the post, and I don’t like that.

I want to be able to run all the scripts and publish from anywhere on the network (especially the laptop), preferably on any platform, Windows, Mac, or Linux. Ideally I’d be able to pull down a git repo anywhere and publish from there.

But that will require some rethinking and moving things around, and, most annoyingly, rewriting scripts in perhaps Python instead of PowerShell. I don’t like Python and don’t know it that well and don’t want to waste too many brain cells learning it, but it might be a necessary evil.

Content Directory I don’t regret dividing up my content directories by years and months, but I do regret dividing them by subject at the top level.

At the top level, my content structure looks like this:

post
- 2021
- 2022
gaming
- 2021
- 2022
writing
- 2021
- 2022

My thinking was that people might only want to read one particular subject and ignore the rest. Unfortunately that makes it harder for me, because if I want to see what I wrote in, say, May of 2021, I have to look in three different places.

I should have left all posts together in one directory. Adding categories and tags in the post metadata would have been sufficient.

It’s fixable but unfortunately the top-level directory features in each post’s permalink, so I’ll have to setup a big list of redirects at some point, which was a massive pain with AWS Amplify. Or maybe I can fix it in the front matter metadata for the posts, I’m not sure.

Either way it’s a problem to kick down the road to a future time, until it becomes completely insurmountable one day.

But as we tick over into 2023, passing a very convenient data archive boundary, I might start writing everything in the “post” category to simplify things.

The Future I’m happy with a static blog, but I’m also interested in some ActivityPub and IndieWeb features, which are impossible to implement in a static blog. So I might start migrating to a VPS (virtual private server) solution in 2023, which will dramatically increase the cost and complexity of hosting the blog. (By which I mean it’ll go from $2/month to something like $6-10/month.)

Something else I haven’t quite worked out yet is how to consolidate all my Internet content in one place. It would be nice to be able to have a central repository of content which can be viewed in different ways from different domain names. But I think that can be accomplished with a VPS and a clever nginx config file, so there’s another reason to move to a VPS in 2023.

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There’s a land rush of ActivityPub implementations going on right now, and I’m in it.

Belghast (who I can’t credit because his account is private now) popped back onto Twitter to report that Tumblr is working on ActivityPub support, which reassured me that I might be onto something here with a blog-centric ActivityPub server.

I think writefreely is also essentially an ActivityPub-based blog platform, except you need ssh access and technical expertise to install it. (Which, to be fair, you will also need for mine.)

In any case, I don’t want to start over with my blog timeline and/or figure out how to import my (extremely not-importable) Markdown file content somewhere else, so Tumblr or writefreely aren’t viable options for me. Whatever I use has to work with my existing blog, more-or-less as-is.

So, what I want to do is make an ActivityPub server implementation that works seamlessly with an existing (possibly static) blog that already has an established footprint (like, say, mine). It’s the best compromise I can think of. And, it’s uncomplicated enough for one person to write it in their spare time.

I’ve come across some projects out there that already do what I’m doing for a blog, so I might be able to wire up something from spare parts lying around the Internet. Fed.brid.gy is one such project to turn your blog into an ActivityPub actor, but it’s a service you sign up for, not something you install on your own server. This WordPress plugin is another, but obviously WordPress is dead to me.

I’ve been anonymously following the #activitypub hashtag over on Mastodon for a little while now (something I can’t seem do with Pleroma, annoyingly). There are quite a few people in the world thinking exactly what I’m thinking right now: Let’s add ActivityPub to this and that and the other thing so we can access it from inside the fediverse! It’s a good idea, just like RSS functionality was and still is a good idea.

As a side note, young developers are trying to push everyone to use JSON feeds instead of RSS feeds because the youth of today is relatively anti-XML, even though every worthwhile development platform can read and write both XML and JSON equally well. Even Golang has native XML support out of the box. But I might add a JSON feed to my site to extend a hand across the generation gap and make the kids happy. It’s pretty easy to do with Hugo.

During this journey of self-hosted-blog-discovery, I’ve also learned that there is something called WebMentions, another product of IndieWeb.org*, that I might consider supporting as a stretch goal. (Yet another thing that doesn’t work with a static blog, though.) It’s essentially identical to WordPress’s pingbacks, except it doesn’t use XML-RPC. I’m always happy to poke another stick in the eye of the WordPress Industrial Complex. XML-RPC is a pain to implement anyway.

Progress Report I’ve setup two temporary VPSs (virtual private servers) for testing in the cloud on two different providers. One of them is running an instance of Pleroma, and the other is (going to be) running my ActivityPub server behind an nginx reverse proxy. In the end, though, I want this thing to be small and efficient enough to run on something like, say, a Raspberry Pi hanging off of your home network. You definitely can’t do that with Mastodon.

I’m working on it in stages. As of this post, I have the bit that polls an RSS feed periodically and stores new entries as ActivityPub objects. I decided to use sqlite as a database backend because it’s super lightweight and self-contained and doesn’t require installing anything on Linux, and I happened to know how to use it. (If this ever needs to scale to support millions of followers, though, it will definitely need to be replaced. But, I mean, the fediverse itself isn’t designed to scale to support millions of followers, so I’m not too worried about that in the short term.)

It looks something like this crude drawing:

I’ve gotten both Pleroma and Mastodon to see the server and its account, so I have working .well-known discovery endpoints, and an outbox. It turns out an outbox full of content doesn’t really do anything in the fediverse, though, because both Pleroma and Mastodon ignore any old content in your outbox prior to following. So, next I’ll probably be implementing the inbox enough to receive follow requests, and after that, implement pushing notes to remote servers.

I imagine I’ll have to work out signatures, too. I don’t know this for sure, but you’d like to think Mastodon and Pleroma and everyone else won’t just let anyone do an unsigned POST and inject things into every server’s public timeline like a gold spammer in an MMORPG. (Not that signatures would in way way prevent spam like that. A decentralized and federated fediverse leaves a wide open door to spammers, by its very design. Signatures just prevent spammers from making the spam look like it came from you instead of them. )

I also need to work out a better logging strategy now before I get too far into it. Always get your logging and telemetry and continuous integration testing strategies worked out early in the project, that’s my advice to the young developers out there. You’ll regret it if you don’t, if the project ends up growing significantly over time.

As an organization, IndieWeb.org is a bit too fanciful and idealistic for my tastes, and they seem to be on a mission to reinvent all the wheels that have already been invented, but I like the core ideal of encouraging people to own and operate their own sites, even if I don’t think their organization is strictly necessary. My Internet usage pre-dates social media walled gardens, so the IndieWeb revolution is just “normal Internet usage” to me.

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I found out that my nephew died unexpectedly a few days ago.

I never knew this, but he was apparently a well-respected member of the ZDoom modding community known as Ghastly. There are some lengthy forum threads over there of people sharing their condolences and memories, which fills me with some old gamer uncle pride.

I remember watching him play Doom at a PC that was bigger than he was when he was just a wee tyke. He would excitedly tell me every detail about all the Doom enemies from a little strategy guidebook, in that way kids do.

It’s surreal and hard to process.

Image: A screenshot from the award-winning ZDoom Community Map Project II.

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So Twitter turned into a ghost town overnight, which was somewhat inevitable I suppose.

Reinstating The Face Of Evil (the most popular one, at least) was the last straw for a lot of people. Everyone’s had the ultimatum “if he comes back, I’m leaving” for two years now, and you can’t really back down from that if you care about your reputation. It wasn’t as dramatic as Thursday night when everyone was having a fun MMORPG shutdown party; it was more like a perfunctory “ugh, bye.”

(It turns out even The Face Of Evil doesn’t want to be on Twitter anymore.)

I hate that we live in a world where I even have to say this: You might think my staying on Twitter is an endorsement of The Face of Evil, or even Elon Musk, but that would be naivé and I would think less of you for such foolishness. It isn’t. I’m lucky enough not to be in this position, but, among many other reasons, a lot of people can’t and shouldn’t just up and leave their primary business network, and they shouldn’t be judged for it, and certainly won’t be by me.

I also wouldn’t judge anyone for leaving, either. I get it. Personal safety is of primary importance in life and on the Internet. It’s increasingly hard to find, and it’s not often located on any social media.

However, I have almost zero patience anymore for all the Judgy McJudgersons running around preaching about what other people should do with their lives or social media accounts. And that’s the end of my own judgy sermon.

Fediverse Obstacles The fediverse is an interesting place to browse, but there are still a couple of major obstacles stopping me personally from making a permanent public account for writing over there:

There’s no way to trust a server operator, from a consumer protection standpoint. If Mastodon leaks all of George Takei’s DMs to TMZ by accident, which is definitely going to happen someday, who’s he going to sue? That twenty-something German kid who wrote Mastodon in his basement using the worst server language? Ya right.
There’s no guaranteed stability of your public content. The links will only last as long as the server lasts, and as long as the server operator (can we use the term “sysop” again?) doesn’t purge the database, which they definitely should periodically to keep costs down. The same rules of using an IRC chat room should apply to the fediverse: Save logs, screenshot anything important, and assume someone is eavesdropping. Some people might view impermanence as a feature, but I find it damnably inconvenient.

For those reasons, the only way I can see myself living in the fediverse, in a way that protects me and my interests, is to own the domain name my account is attached to, which strongly implies that I have to run that server myself, which costs time and money. I think I’ve said that before, but I don’t remember if I spelled it all out in a blog post.

I’m incubating some fun personal fediverse projects, but it’ll be a while before they get anywhere.

My Twitter Triggers Back to Twitter: The primary trigger for me to stop writing original content on Twitter on a daily basis is when I can’t download a handy list of my own tweets anymore. Twitter is a very convenient note-taking and micro-blogging format. I frequently go back and reference my old tweets for various reasons. It’s a writing journal, in effect, a place where I jot down random thoughts throughout the day, which I would otherwise forget 10 seconds later. I don’t know of any other place to do that so conveniently, except, you know, scribbling in a notebook, which stinks and also hurts my hand.

The trigger for me to stop logging into Twitter altogether would be when news accounts stop delivering reliable news to me. If I can’t glance at a Twitter timeline any time of the day to see a snapshot of the world zeitgiest, it’s of no use to me anymore, and I’ll have to resort back to RSS feeds.

In any case, as with Facebook, it’s very unlikely I’ll ever deactivate or delete my account. (Accounts. I have an absurd number of throwaway Twitter accounts in addition to my real name and @endgameviable. Every time I get a new domain name, I get a Twitter account with the same name.)

I’m sure there are bots out there somewhere that monitor which accounts get deleted so they can swoop in and create them again afterward. I’ve always suspected there were bots doing that with domain names. I have no proof of it, but it’s one of those things you just know someone does, because if I can think of the idea and conceptualize how to do it, someone else can too.

Spring Cleaning I might use this opportunity to do some Spring cleaning on my @endgameviable account. I’ve wanted to mercilessly cut the number of people I’m following down to the bone for a long time. I’m following over 200 accounts and I’d really like to get that down to just a handful of bloggers and game industry accounts.

I’ve been squeamish about it for a long time, because I hate to send an unintentional “I don’t like you” unfollow subtext (I absolutely hate that social media follow lists have devolved into some kind of demented character assessment test; it’s the pettiest part of blogrolls multiplied to a millionth degree). But now that I know there’s nobody on the other end anymore, I won’t feel so bad about it.

So if I unfollow you in the near future, it’s probably one or more of these reasons:

I don’t remember who you are, which is my fault.
You’re not following me, which is your fault. But it was probably something I said at some point, sorry about whatever it was. I was probably having a bad day.
You haven’t tweeted any original content in a while that interests me, which is nobody’s fault. Sometimes peoples’ interests just don’t align. Most times, really.
You have a history of only posting links to your other stuff, which I can usually find in an RSS feed somewhere if I’m interested.
You’re a streamer or YouTuber who only tweets when they’re live. I have no idea how or why I ended up following so many of these accounts, because I never watch live streams when they’re live.
You said you left Twitter, or your account is already missing, so there’s not much point in following you anymore.

The point is, it won’t be because you’re an awful person. I’m not aware of anyone I’m following who’s an awful person. Maybe disagreeable or misguided sometimes, but that’s normal human behavior. I think I’ve only ever unfollowed two or three people who I thought were so annoying I just couldn’t stand the sight of their names or tweets anymore, but that was many, many years ago.

I used to never unfollow anyone who was following me, but I’m going to grit my teeth and forego that rule during this purge. If it helps, I’m going to feel extremely bad about it and I’ll probably be upset for days or weeks afterward, if I ever build up enough nerve to even do it.

P.S. I noticed recently that something is weird about how the Remark42 comment box below renders. Part of it is cut off. I don’t know what’s up with that.

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I’ve been on a learning rampage on the topic of the fediverse lately, and there’s plenty of material for writing blog posts.

With everyone freaking out about Twitter again today, it seems like I good time to publish this draft. However, I’m specifically not going to:

Champion the fediverse
Explain the fediverse
Speculate about the fediverse (well, maybe a little)

There are plenty of resources for that elsewhere. Way too many, in fact. It’s already starting to sound like a trendy fad that’s going to vanish in a couple of months, like sea shanties.

I’m uninterested in those things anyway. I’m more interested in the ActivityPub federating standard (or, “standard,” you might say, since it seems to have remained unchanged for four years now), how it works, how I might integrate it into my blog, and how I might grow as a career software developer because of it.

So yeah, this is a technical post for technical people. I mean, I’m a developer, so what do you expect?

Terminology Minor rant: Much of Mastodon’s terminology has infected the fediverse and it’s pretty annoying. If you support federation and “freedom from corporate tyranny,” you should also support tearing down Mastodon as the de facto “leader” of the fediverse. They are on track to lead the fediverse into the exact same problems as Microsoft once created by leading the browser wars.

So I’ll be using ActivityPub terminology, which is the only W3C-approved standard available. I don’t love their terminology, and honestly I don’t love the implementation, but it’s the best we’ve got so far. I don’t think there are many people who would dispute that it needs to evolve if the fediverse is going to survive at anywhere near the scale of a Twitter.

The point is, there is no word for an “instance” in ActivityPub, for example. It’s just an HTTP server, and a user is just an HTTP client, or more semantically, an Actor.

There is no word “toot” in the standard (thank God). It’s called a Note, which is really just an Object, which is really just a snippet of, by default, amorphous HTML content, but it could really be anything that can be represented by JSON and a media-type (which is literally any series of bytes, from text to images to massive videos, not that anyone would allow that).

A Brief History Lesson Incidentally, ActivityPub and the fediverse reminds me of FidoNet. Remember FidoNet? That was distributed social networking, too, and ActivityPub is conceptually similar.

Not to be pessimistic or speculate too much, but, as of now, I don’t see any reason not to expect a similar outcome with the fediverse:

… FidoNet was beset with management problems and infighting. Much of this can be traced to the fact that the inter-net delivery cost real money, and the traffic grew … various methods of recouping the costs were attempted, all of which caused friction …

What I Want From ActivityPub I wouldn’t say I’m a big fan of Mastodon or its ecosystem (it’s written in Ruby for God’s sake, the same platform Twitter abandoned), but I have a passing interest in the ActivityPub federation protocol and how it could be useful to me as a blog owner.

In particular, I think it would be a nice evolution on blogging to embed an ActivityPub implementation directly into the blog. I’m not talking about a connector between a blog and the fediverse, I’m talking about the blog server being a fediverse server, and the blog itself being an Actor (or more likely an Organization, in the parlance of ActivityPub).

The idea would be to simply follow, for example, posts@endgameviable.com from your favorite fediverse web site of choice (much like you would follow an RSS feed), and then you would receive post summaries from the blog in your Inbox alongside all of your other fediverse gossip.

Even more exciting, you could in theory reply* to these posts, which is a very handy substitute for a comment system. Presto, just like magic, you, the reader, are responsible for your own comments and I, the site owner, no longer have to store them or display them or manage your identity credentials, freeing me from significant amounts of risk.

I’ve wished for a long time that I could do that with Twitter: That the comment section at the bottom of a blog post would just be a list of tweet replies to the notification tweet. Twitter doesn’t want to be used like that, though. But all bets are off with decentralized social networking.

This, I think, could be the future of blogging. Or at least, a future. One that probably won’t ever catch on among casual bloggers until or unless it’s baked into WordPress by default, which it clearly won’t ever be, because WordPress gonna WordPress.

Nevertheless, for a programmer, ActivityPub is a fun puzzle. Looks good on a resume, too.

The Fediverse is Anti-Static Unfortunately for me, my blog is static now, and ActivityPub support is a fairly dynamic proposition, so I’m dead in the water right out of the gate. Those running WordPress would have a much easier time doing this. (In fact, I run across ActivityPub plugins for WordPress in searches all the time. I don’t know what they do, but maybe that’s what they’re for.)

I’ve tweaked Hugo to build static JSON files to deliver ActivityPub endpoints with some success, but there are a few sticking points that keep coming up. (Beyond the fact that Hugo is almost impossible to understand by default.)

The main one is that ActivityPub discoverability is accomplished with something called webfinger. If I type in, for example, posts@endgameviable.com into the Mastodon or presumably any other search box, Mastodon reaches out to endgameviable.com/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:posts@endgameviable.com to politely inquire (or rudely demand, depending on your point of view I guess) as to whether that server understands ActivityPub and if that account exists.

It’s pretty hard to get Hugo to build a static file to serve a dynamic request like that. Well nigh impossible, you might say.

Which is a bummer. I’d hate to have to switch back to traditional or cloud hosting just to respond to a webfinger request. After almost two years of incremental progress, I’ve gotten my blog hosting costs on AWS down to about $2/month.

Another problem is that Hugo, the static blog generator, stubbornly insists on creating static files everywhere. You’re putting endgameviable.com/about/ into the address bar, but you’re really loading a file called /about/index.html from the filesystem.

To make the JSON endpoints for an ActivityPub outbox, it would have to be called something like endgameviable.com/outbox/index.json and that would have to be the canonical URL because there’s no industry-wide mechanism to default to index.json if the filename is missing. It will technically work, but it isn’t what I want. Backend implementation details should never be seen in a URL, in my opinion.

These problems are solvable, but only if you manage the server that’s responding to these HTTP requests–if, for example, you have access to an Apache or nginx config file for your site. But it’s a thorny problem the way my blog is currently hosted, at AWS Amplify.

Conclusion So I have two mutually-exclusive goals at the moment: Maintain a static blog for cheap and secure hosting, and integrate an ActivityPub server implementation with it.

I have some ideas for accomplishing both, but I’m still ironing out the details, and it will almost surely require custom code and a new host, either in a box sitting on my living room floor (free, but subject to bandwidth limitations and security concerns), or a virtual server in the cloud somewhere (preferable, but more expensive than is warranted for a personal experiment that may or may not work).

Anyhoo, those are some of my ActivityPub interests and the obstacles I need to overcome to make it happen.

Exciting for me, at least, a site owner who has a history of wishing I didn’t have to host comments, for various legal and ethical and security reasons. Comments are by far the biggest risk factor for a web site owner.

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I’m all about throwing old traditions out the window because they don’t make sense anymore, so I present: The Mid-Month Update.

It’s not the end of the month or the beginning of the month, it’s the middle of the month. If you think about it, this is really the best time to do a status check, because it gives you time to course-correct before the end of the month, before it’s too late.

For NaNoWriMo I set a goal merely to write for a half hour after work every weekday, regardless of word counts. I couldn’t be bothered to keep up with even that and abandoned it for other shinies in a week.
Somewhat related, I’m trying to figure out a way to time-slice my hobbies in a more efficient way, rather than my usual bad habit of serially binging on one hobby at a time. Not having much success so far.
My 250-part Elden Ring video series uploads finished (it’s actually more than 250 videos). I’m now uploading “Extras,” some additional videos I recorded on alternate characters. Don’t know what to upload next.
Still haven’t played much of any games since I stopped playing Elden Ring in June. I don’t really miss it, to be honest, but I’m not sure why.
Tried Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II but it didn’t really hook me. Same problems as every other Call of Duty game: It’s not easy to find a way to enjoy getting killed repeatedly by people who are way more into the game than you are.
Logged into Facebook for the first time in forever (I last posted something there in 2018). Changed my profile picture. Moved most everyone except direct family members to the “Restricted” group. Don’t know what to do with it, but maybe I should think of something?
Most of my time in the last week has been spent studying the fediverse and the ActivityPub protocol, but that’s a subject for bigger blog posts.

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I suppose the social pressure is mounting to the point where I have to say something about Twitter.

It’s gotten to the point where it’ll look weird if I don’t say something about it, even though I don’t feel much emotional attachment to the subject and don’t really have that much to say about it. It’s not really top of mind for me, but as evidenced by the fact that there’s an extensive Wikipedia article on the subject to link to above, it’s rocking the rest of the world’s foundations more than a supervolcano eruption would.

For myself, I can only report what I see, and I see no difference in TweetDeck today versus TweetDeck a couple of weeks ago. People are freaking the hell out, but that’s a normal and expected part of my daily Twitter experience. The platform still functions exactly the same, and that’s the main thing that matters to me.

I can’t spare the time to summon any outrage for or against the whims of a billionaire or his followers or his enemies. That’s happening in a different world from mine.

I’m unaware of any better, more convenient tool for typing thoughts or notifications into a text box and broadcasting them immediately to anyone in the world with Internet access who might be interested in reading them, and, at the same time, saving them for myself to read later. (Not counting running your own web site, of course, but that’s more work.)

The alternatives are not appealing.

Cohost is a new site I’ve seen bandied about, but that site has so many red flags I can barely even see through them. The dead giveaway is that everything is lower case on their front page, a major clue to stay away. Even if they had the best of noble intentions, a small development operation doesn’t have the technical clout to create and operate a worldwide social network, particularly at a time in history when infrastructure is in short supply.

Many people are turning to the fediverse. Again. (I’m unsure if it’s the fediverse or The Fediverse. In any case the term doesn’t really mean anything because it encompasses a big umbrella of different concepts and protocols. It’s more of a brand name than an actual description.)

It’s a better idea than Cohost, but I have thoughts on the fediverse. The first is that the word sounds very similar to “metaverse,” and we make fun of that. In some ways, they have a similar conceptual design philosophy.

Another thought is that when servers can block access to other servers, it’s not really a “federation” at all. It’s extremely pro-States’ Rights over there in the fediverse, is what I’m saying.

Philosophy aside, on the practical side of things, the challenge of the fediverse is finding a server/instance/pod/whatever that you won’t regret making an account on. You have to choose wisely because it isn’t all flowers and sunshine over there. You could quite easily be making your home in a nest of proud Trump supporters or anime porn enthusiasts or an obvious sex trafficking front. Browsing the list of fediverse instances is like a trip through a Libertarian fantasy world. If I’m reading this page correctly, there are some 7,700 different fediverse servers to choose from. Good luck.

In other words, the barrier to entry for the average person is extremely high. It’s a society of technocrats over there.

Most of my other thoughts are from a technical perspective. My extensive two-or-three-day research has shown that ActivityPub is the only federation specification recognized by a standards body, and it’s currently incomplete. The section on security is quite hilarious: “Unfortunately at the time of standardization, there are no strongly agreed upon mechanisms for authentication.”

Despite that, I have a minor interest in trying to integrate an ActivityPub implementation into my site somehow, because it’s an interesting programming puzzle. How can you include dynamic functionality into a static site? A question for the ages. I can leverage some of the work I did for comments.

One final thought: If Twitter did actually burn to the ground and completely shut down, I wouldn’t necessarily consider that a bad outcome. Most humans weren’t built with the social maturity to interact with the entire world, and would be better off without it.

P.S. Twitter suddenly being a taboo subject really wrecks my “last year on Twitter” writing plans.

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October of 2021 in tweets.

Dave Barry’s End Of Year articles are among the best humorous year-end summaries available, so I thought I’d do that too, except using my own tweets as a source of history. Most of my tweets are just sentences that can be chained together into articles.

But you might be wondering why this post only covers October of 2021, and not a whole year, as you might expect. Well, it’s because when I started this, I didn’t realize how many thousands of words I write in tweets.

It takes a really long time to edit a year’s worth of tweets down into a coherent article worthy of publishing, but this offhanded idea isn’t interesting enough for me to spend months doing that. So I shortened it down to a quarter, and then I noticed that even three months is too many, and stopped at one random month in October 2021, which happens to be about a year ago.

Other bloggers do the “one year ago in history” thing, so maybe I’ll do that too, except with my tweets.

October 2021 Ah, October. I just love this midlatitude time of year when the lighting and shadows outside make it look and feel like the day is almost over and you have to start turning on all the lights in the house at 2 PM.

In Gaming October began with the arrival of Amazon’s New World, an exciting development for fans of MMORPG games.

The reality was somewhat less exciting. A typical exciting game session consisted of running from one town to another town to deliver a message to an innkeeper who then explained fast travel. Kind of a harsh, time-consuming lesson. Could have just used a tool tip probably.

Queuing very quickly became a problem in New World. Someday I’d like to see an article explaining the technical details behind how they came up with those queue numbers because they were all over the map.

My first death in New World occurred when I logged in and the game greeted me with a screen that said I had died, apparently sometime when I was offline.

My interest in New World quickly faded, in about a weeks’ time, if I’m honest. At that point it was clear it was meant to be a repetitive do-the-same-thing-every-day grind.

There were other new games as well. I did my due diligence and tried Battlefield 2042 when it came out. It’s awesome if you like getting killed repeatedly by people you can’t even see and also not being able to hit anybody even if you empty a full clip at them.

I settled on A Plague Tale for my “main game.” Well, the “only game” slot, really. It’s basically a low-budget version of The Last Of Us. But reimagined as a young adult novel, where all the characters are French kids.

It’s a good game. Not great, but good. Undercut somewhat by some janky gameplay and aggravating mouse-and-keyboard controls.

The main thing I like about A Plague Tale is the historical fiction story genre, a somewhat rare thing to see in games. I like comparing my existing knowledge of history against the game, and doing research to see where and how they embellished things, etc.

However, the last boss fight in A Plague Tale sure was some hot garbage.

In Entertainment There was some difficulty finding good entertainment last year.

When Live Free or Die Hard is one of the better offerings available on your Amazon Prime Video front page, you know you’re in for a long, long night trying to find something to watch.

Despite that, I found a movie on a streaming service that wasn’t terrible: The Courier on Amazon Prime.

Sometimes you see a YouTube video come up in your recommendations that you just know is going to be complete B.S., and clicking on it is just going to hand a view to some rando that doesn’t deserve it, but I kind of do want to see a trick to clear a stuffy nose fast. (Shockingly, it didn’t work.)

I accidentally stumbled into a mysterious world of YouTube channels all about English grammar and vocabulary and pronunciation and it was a deep rabbit hole. I still occasionally see recommendations from those channels to this day.

I watched Idiocracy for the first time. It seemed overhyped: A movie that makes you chuckle, not laugh out loud.

I was disappointed that there was only one season of Jean Claude Van Johnson.

And, of course, all the nerds stayed up late one Thursday to watch the Superbowl of tabletop gaming: The much-anticipated premiere of Critical Role, Campaign 3.

Black Dice Society also premiered around this time. It takes itself way too seriously for my tastes, but I did enjoy all the level one characters getting destroyed immediately in their first major combat encounter. There aren’t nearly enough character deaths or TPKs in Actual Plays.

In Culture On 10/4/2021, Facebook went down. It was such a catastrophic event, I think we have to call it “10/4” from now on. (It even has a Wikipedia page.)

Billionaires chartering commercial space flights were all the rage in 2021. In October, William Shatner flew on one such flight and stole the headlines. Can we just skip ahead to the first mega influencer to live stream their commercial space flight?

Life Lessons I bought a little handheld rechargeable battery-powered air pump that looked like it couldn’t possibly work but it does actually work to put air in my mower tires and my car tires.

I made a PVC pipe contraption to suspend a monitor over my bed so I can write lying down, staring straight up at a monitor. The ability to write without crushing neck and back pain is almost a reality. (But it turns out I mainly use it to watch streaming television while lying down.)

It’s harder than you might think to convince a power company that a tree is leaning on power lines.

Food for Thought How many times must a person “finish setting up Windows” in their lifetime?

Where exactly did Kotter go?

The Guild premiered almost 15 years ago. You’re welcome.

And that was October of 2021.

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Browsing my Steam library yet again this morning looking for something–anything–that might be fun to play on this Sunday where I have a lot of free time.

I wrote this frustrated tweet:

Is this the year that PC gaming died a horrible death? Because yeesh I've been looking for months and I can not find a PC game to play for more than a half hour. Probably just me but man it looks like a wasteland out there right now.

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) October 16, 2022

I guess this is the inevitable effect of the pandemic.

There has been exactly one good PC game released this year, and that was Elden Ring. Technically it was a copy of a previous game, too, but it innovated in the sense that it brought the “open world” back into open world games.

The second-best PC game I’ve played this year was an open source game from 2015 called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. That’s just sad.

For months now, every other PC game I’ve tried, I abandoned in somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes and uninstalled. They’re all just identical clones of one another, with different art assets.

It’s getting so bad that I’m actually considering playing Lost Ark again, which might as well be an Idle Clicker game.

It’s so bad I’m taking the time to write a blog post instead of playing a game!

Perusing over this Wikipedia article on 2022 in video games, I’m noticing a couple of interesting details. First, Elden Ring released way back on February 25. I thought it was later than that.

Second, it’s not just my imagination. There’s nothing on that list of PC games that’s appealed to me this year, and very little that’s even made news this year, other than Elden Ring.

It’s no wonder everyone’s abandoning video games for tabletop games.

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There’s a bit (ha!) of buzz going around about World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King Classic launch today.

When in doubt, talk about World of Warcraft. Somebody, somewhere is always into it. Either into playing it, or into hating on it, or into hating on the Activision/Blizzard corporation and late-stage capitalism. Win/win all around.

I missed the Burning Crusade Classic launch entirely, but I figured I’d at least mention this one.

My nostalgia for Wrath of the Lich King is non-existent; I gave up on playing WoW as my “forever game” somewhere around 2007 because I grinded and grinded and grinded to get to level 40 to buy a mount and it was barely any faster than running so I gave up playing seriously after that.

I think the first time I saw Burning Crusade was in the 2012-2013 range, and the first time I ventured into Wrath territory was in 2014.

For me, Wrath was just another area to level beyond to get to the current expansion. I think at the time I was trying to get to the one with Garrisons. Was that Legion? I don’t remember. I think it was Legion. [It was Warlords of Draenor.] The one with Garrisons was the very first WoW Expansion that I played at the time it launched. It was fun. For a handful of weeks.

I also played the expansion after that at the time it launched, whose name I have completely and utterly forgotten. [That one was Legion.] I believe I played through that expansion in a grand total of two weeks. I enjoyed playing it, but two weeks was plenty for me. I remember nothing whatsoever about it.

I haven’t played since then, but I think I somehow ended up with a free copy of Shadowlands on my account, so if/when I ever subscribe again, I can play that one.

P.S. I think that screenshot is from the Wrath of the Lich King time frame, but I’m really not sure. There was apparently one part where you turned into a giant Norse Valkerie for a quest or something.

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Not playing many games because I’m too busy making game videos.

I don’t need any statistics or to wait until the end of the year to know that the game that I played most in 2022 was Elden Ring, hands down, no contest. If there was a pie chart for the year, Elden Ring would occupy 90% of the pie chart, while the rest would be little slivers labeled “various other forgotten games.”

But I haven’t played much of anything since I ran out of steam with Elden Ring, which was around June. I’ve flirted a little bit with RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress and, most often lately, Cataclysm DDA, an open source (!?!) survival game, but I’m really just killing time until I find The Next Big Thing.

Not only did I exhaust myself playing Elden Ring, but I also burned out on recording games, too. I haven’t been in much of a mood to record too many videos while my automated scripts continue to chug away at uploading Elden Ring videos to my channel.

It turns out that when you produce a 250-part series, it feels like you’ve completed everything you could ever possibly accomplish with that type of game video, your Magnum Opus is complete, and it’s time to just retire. (Perfect timing too as my channel is starting to gather some momentum. Oops.)

Having said that, I mentioned a tweet last time about making some new videos, which is currently top of mind.

I really only have the energy for one artistic endeavor or leisure activity at a time, so instead of playing games, I’ve mostly been taking the handful of Cataclysm DDA videos I’ve recorded and adding layers of music and sound effects to them. Cataclysm DDA, by default, doesn’t have any sound or music. It’s just a silent movie of ASCII-style art. (Replaced with a graphical tileset because come on. ASCII?? Who does that?)

This may or may not be common knowledge, but the soundscape of a game is roughly 80% of what makes a game good or not. And that goes double for game videos. A game video with no game sounds is not exactly compelling, and no amount of witty repoirté can fix that. (Especially since I, at least, primarily only listen to game videos, and rarely watch them.) I know this from experience, having flubbed up numerous times in my early days of recording and failed to record sound from time to time.

Cataclysm DDA, it turns out, is a game that’s fairly good at generating stories. Short stories, even. Short, tense stories where death is almost always the outcome, it turns out. So I thought to myself, well, these are some game videos with some mildly interesting stories in them, the kind of videos I like to put on my channel, but I can’t ever upload them unless I layer in some sounds.

So I set about becoming an amateur sound designer, using REAPER as my primary editing tool. (It also has rudimentary video editing capabilities, enough for my purposes at least.)

I think I might try to upload them during the Halloween season, because they’re somewhat spooky-scary, being filled with zombies and whatnot.

Note: I only learned later that you can download sound packs for Cataclysm DDA, which adds sound effects to the game as you’re playing. That would have saved me a ton of time.

Incidentally, the recent Humble Bundle of game sound effects and music has been crucial in making these videos, so if you have the slightest interest in such things, grab those bundles before they run out in three days. It’s an incredible value. (Also an incredible pain to download.)

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I recently hinted that I was starting a new, innovative series of blog posts about nothing. I immediately abandoned that plan and decided to work on videos instead.

On another note I think I'm going to upload some of what I'll call "Short Stories from Cataclysm DDA" videos. It's kind of fun to decorate these silent videos with sounds and music in REAPER.

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) September 20, 2022

But! Since I mentioned it in my last post, I will reveal what was top of mind, once, over two weeks ago:

With September arriving and the days starting to get noticeably shorter and darker, the year 2022 is winding down. I started 2022 with high hopes for reading more this year.

I didn’t. Not even writing an entire web application from scratch helped. I didn’t read, listen to, hear about, or even think about a single book since the end of January. This is why I could never be a book blogger.

However, when I mentioned The Dispossessed in my last post, a 1973 dystopian science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, I got the Audible version with some extra credits and have been listening to it off and on. It’s good. Very intellectual and prescient of our modern tumultuous times. (Which implies that our modern tumultuous times aren’t really that much different from the tumultuous 60s and 70s. Except for, you know, weaponized social media. They only had newspapers and television to weaponize in the old days.)

I wasn’t aware of The Dispossessed before. Like most people, I imagine, I was only aware of Le Guin’s popular Earthsea series. (Which I also haven’t read, except maybe a snippet.) That’s why I mentioned it in that list with Farenheit 451 and 1984, in case others weren’t aware of it either.

P.S. Also, check out Foal Fadin Falid, the epic story of one AI trying desperately to understand what words are.

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A new blog post series idea.

The title of this post is a direct quote from a corporate email I get every work day. You all are woefully out-of-date with your ironic corporate tech lingo speak, so I thought I would try to educate you.

“Hydration” is another big one right now, and I don’t mean water. If you’re not using the word “hydration” in your technical presentations, you’re obsolete.

Top Of Mind also happens to work for this series of posts I was thinking about doing. The series is, you know, top of mind.

If you’re interested in statistics and success, blog posts should always be written as an answer to a potential Google search query, but this series definitely won’t be. I thought I’d try the radical new idea of writing down what’s on my mind at any given time.

Carefully censored so as not to provoke any positive or negative feelings, of course, because this is the Internet, after all, and we must be bland to survive. Biting social commentary must be hidden in coded messages, like Galileo’s Dialogue and old-timey science fiction used to do, before we became so enlightened.

Normally I would do that on Twitter, where it’s fast and easy and convenient, and it doesn’t have to be a Google search result, but ostensibly bloggers are supposed to write blog posts now and then. I have to have some justification for owning a domain name.

Anyway, I was going to put a bunch of these top of mind thoughts into one long post, but I’m going to continue trying to disrupt blogging traditions and make them individual short posts, like I did in Blaugust. (I also happen to believe every blog post should contain exactly one topic, if possible.)

I also was going to actually put something that was top of mind into this post, but I see this post is already running long on talking about the idea for the series, so my progress report on reading in 2022 will have to wait until next time. Cliffhanger!

Now to deal with the picture problem. AI art generation is great and all but I still can’t just press one button and magically have a picture appear out of thin air at the top of this post while I’m typing in this text editor. I need to make a generic “this post doesn’t have a picture, deal with it” picture.

Dammit DALL-E made a perfect blog post header image from a 4-word prompt AGAIN

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) September 17, 2022

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It’s the last day of Blaugust, so I’ll now present my summary findings to the jury.

This is very convenient because it means I don’t have to write a post tonight. It’s like having a day off!

32 posts published in total
31 posts tagged for Blaugust
Roughly 12,000 words published (not including this one)
65 git commits to the blog repository
66 new images added to the S3 bucket
20+ pre-generated header images unused
6.88 GB of image data transferred
46,937 total requests for image data
~3.5 GB of non-image data transferred*
~908,000 requests for non-image data*
Rough guess because AWS Amplify doesn’t show totals

More subjective measurements:

13 posts rushed out the door
10 posts sticking to the original Blaugust writing plan
6 posts yanked directly from old, unfinished drafts
5 posts I definitely wouldn’t have published if it weren’t Blaugust
3 posts about nothing whatsoever
2 posts accidentally containing the same topic
2 posts I got unexpectedly emotional while writing

And the number of posts I might have published if it had been any other month but Blaugust? Maybe 4 or 5.

It would be interesting to compare these findings to last year’s, which turned out fairly similar to this one. I think last year I also started out trying to do one thing, immediately abandoned that plan, and winged it the rest of the way.

Incidentally, I setup a new Hugo taxonomy called “moods” so I can tag posts based loosely on my mood at the time of writing, so I can keep track of these sorts of subjective measurements.

It occurs to me I never used any Blaugust hashtags. Part of that was because there’s no universal standard way of tagging a blog post with a Twitter hashtag. All my blog tweets were automated and I didn’t have any way to inspect the blog post to see if it was Blaugust-related to add an appropriate hashtag.

Tagging and categorizing blog posts, incidentally, is a full-time job. Start early. And don’t forget your category links are permalinks too.

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Brief comments on a couple of MMOs I played for a little while.

(Another unfinished draft I dug out so I don’t have to write a post tonight.)

Lost Ark Lost Ark is also free, and considerably more polished. Unfortunately it’s also a generic treadmill game.

I knew from the first 30 minutes of the closed beta that the game wasn’t for me, but I plodded away in the game for a week or so, basically just killing time until I could play the real games I wanted to play. (Those being Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring.) [That is how long this post has been a draft.]

Not even World of Warcraft has so many leveling quests that are so, so skippable. Every single quest for me looks like this: Click-click-click-click-click-click. (Ahhhh, SKIP.) It’s as if the makers of the game knew that nobody cares about leveling in MMORPGs anymore, but, by MMORPG tradition and convention, they had to have leveling, and couldn’t just start the game at the endgame grind, so they intentionally made it as skippable as possible.

So many uninteresting one-sided conversations, so many forgettable NPCs, so many uninteresting areas that look the same as each other, so many empty spaces that you just run past as fast as humanly possible to get to the next thing.

Chimeraland

Bhagpuss talked about Chimeraland for a while, so I tried it out. It’s free after all. The most interesting part of the game is the character creation screen, which is really interesting, but after that it stopped being interesting. It’s another MMO with completely generic, copy/pasted game systems.

Googling Chimeraland is an interesting journey though… I was curious who made the game, which is conspicuously absent from their web site. (I wanted to see if I could count it as an “indie” game for the #JustOnePercent thing.)

I finally landed on this Pocket Gamer article from 2021 which says it’s made by Proxima Beta, so I Googled them, and found pages and pages of results linking them with Tencent and fraud transactions. So kind of a red flag there. I don’t know this, but I have to assume running the game adds your PC to a botnet mining cryptocurrency for the Chinese secret police.

Not an indie game, at least.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 30. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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It seems a bit early to write a lessons-learned post before Blaugust is even finished.

It might feel like Blaugust is over, but there’s still three days left for me to write posts and I still need to write something today, tomorrow, and the next day, so today I will write my Bouger Lesery onlenp arl Balysseores post, otherwise known as Blaugust Lessons Learned in the strange made-up language that DALL-E speaks.

This year, I’ve written every post on the day it was published, from a blank page to finished in around 30 minutes, give or take, which was the main goal of the project for me.

And as soon as I typed that, I must report that I’m lying. The second Dwarf Fortress post was composed over a week or more, until I slammed the door on it at the end and shoved it out into the world, on a day when I needed a post and didn’t feel like writing a new one. Luckily it was on a weekend when I had the time to insert all the pictures.

And then there were the posts that I plucked from the drafts folder and published as-is. Who even knows how many days, weeks, or months I tinkered with them before leaving them to rot in the junk yard of unfinished blog posts that never should have been published.

Anyway, the main lesson I learned this Blaugust is that writing short posts is awesome. It allows blogging to be possible.

Long posts, of the 1000-2000 word variety that seems to be a typical blog post length, those posts make blogging stressful, time-consuming, and unrewarding. For me, at least. Short posts mean spending no more than 30 minutes on the activity, which is an amount of time that seems appropriate for the return on investment that comes from blogging.

It’s not easy to write a short blog post, though. Waiting until late in the day helps, actually. When you look at the clock and see it’s almost time for bed, that makes it much easier to write a short post.

More generally, time-boxing helps. “Time-boxing” is a term that developers like to use (developers enjoy inventing new words for things which already have words) to describe working on something until a finite amount of time has elapsed, then stopping, no matter what.

For example, this post is nowhere near finished, but the 15 minutes I allotted before lunch has elapsed, so I must stop. If I think of anything else, I can put it in tomorrow’s post. (But most likely I will forget this post even exists by tomorrow.)

Tonight I’ll turn this draft into a post, perhaps edit a few words here and there, then commit and publish it.

Oh, I forgot about the picture. Again. I once again call down a curse upon whoever decreed every blog post needs a picture.

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In the dream, I asked the woman, “Would there be some way we can make sure people are compensated fairly?”

The woman seemed nice, but oddly fixated on a weathered dagger. “No.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes. It is impossible to create a universal, objective measurement of fair compensation to fit all people of the world.”

“That’s depressing.”

“Perhaps this will help: The recipient of compensation is the final arbiter of its fairness. If you feel you have been fairly compensated, then you were fairly compensated. Otherwise, the compensation was unfair.”

“That’s unfair to the remitter of the compensation. The recipient agreed to the terms.”

“One would assume, and one would assume the recipient judged it fair at the time of agreement. However there are situations where the recipient of compensation might not have a choice about the terms of the agreement.”

“There’s always choices in life.”

“In an abstract sense, perhaps, but practicality sometimes stands in the way. Very few people are going to choose to starve to death instead of accepting an unfair compensation.”

Image source: Fia from Elden Ring.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 28. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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The tale of Otinstinthäd.

The dwarves embarked in the Summer of 253, later than usual. (That’s because when you retire a fortress, you begin the next fortress in that world a few days later, regardless of when you retired.)

Mistakes were made. The main one being that I embarked on the first place it put me without doing any surveying of the land to see if it was suitable. I expected that the game would crash, because it had been doing so a lot when I embarked, apparently a side effect of TWBT being enabled at the start in the Lazy Newb Pack. I intended to test that theory, let the game crash, then disable the option, and try again.

But it didn’t crash, so the dwarves embarked in a completely random, unknown location, on the side of a fairly steep, wooded hill.

The dwarves didn't know what they were getting into.

The Frozen Hillside So the dwarves made the best of it, picking a raised hillock that looked like it would make a naturally defensible position to build around. There were trees, plants, some pools of water for the horse and camel the dwarves brought with them. It didn’t seem so bad after all.

But it was hard digging, because there was no topsoil. No place to farm those delicious plump helmets (mushrooms the dwarves like).

Cold winters up on the hillside.

Come Autumn it started to snow and the pond froze, which did not bode well for the Winter to come. It turns out, when I inadvertantly started in a random location, I started in a cold location. (The location also did not have any metals, I learned later when I re-examined the video showing where I’d started.)

The Winter of 253 was indeed harsh, as food became scarce. Caverns were found, so they had a new source of water, but the poor dwarves had to scurry around like animals searching for rodents to survive. They ended up having to butcher one of their own animals, a camel, which someone perplexingly brought with them on the expedition to the frozen mountains.

Building Defenses The Spring of 254 saw the first combat encounter of the expedition. A pair of troglodytes snuck into the middle of the fortress from the caverns below, and two dwarves were killed before the pests were dispatched.

The dwarves determined to train their military to better defend themselves. Dôbar, the expedition leader, proved her martial mettle by leading a charge against an encroaching Giant Mole, earning her the nickname “Molebane.”

Molebane fighting the Giant Mole.

Despite occasional creatures to dispatch, the caverns otherwise proved a huge boon to the dwarves because they were able to farm a plot of land on the fungus-covered floor to create a new source of food. The caverns also became the barracks and training grounds for the growing military squads.

Massacre of ‘55 But in the Spring of 255, the dwarven military suffered its biggest loss when “Molebane” Dôbar was killed in a fight with both a Giant Cave Spider and a Troll from the caverns. Three other fighting dwarves died in the battle, bringing the total losses for the Otinstinthäd expedition up to six dwarves in the first two years.

Giant cave spiders are no joke.

A new expedition leader, Datan, took over for Molebane. The dwarves wisely chose to leave him out of the military so he could concentrate on operations.

After the Cave Spider Massacre of ‘55, things settled into a routine through the Spring of 256. But soon the stress of leading the expedition began to get to Datan, and he was often seen grumbling and unhappy. Larger quarters, offices, and even a few temples were built to try to help his mood.

Datan can't handle the pressure of leadership.

The Fourth Year The Summer of 256 saw the start of the fourth year of the expedition to Otinstinthäd.

In the Spring, the Forgotten Beast Shedim Ugoshsherik came, a gigantic eyeless scorpion crawling out of the dark reaches of the caverns. The dwarves had sealed off the distant reaches of the caverns, so the giant scorpion had to satisfy its appetite for destruction by hunting draltha, who scattered before it.

All but one. Istbarnoram, a brave draltha stood before the beast and slew it, unknowingly securing the fortress from any harm.

DALL-E doesn't know what a draltha is either.

And on that note I retired the fortress, because it’s too much of a time sink to play Dwarf Fortress.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 27. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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Blaugust inspired me to make some much-needed technical changes to the blog this month, which I will now try to recall for posterity.

Various page layout changes. I add a word count, for example, and I put the .Summary text at the top of each page, so it’s the first thing you see on mobile, instead of a giant header image that you immediately need to scroll past. I don’t like that the summary text repeats below the image too but it’s part of .Content and I can’t figure out how to filter it out.
I added years of old writing blog archives, but they aren’t accessible yet unless you know what to look for. I’m not entirely sure how to approach that. I don’t necessarily want to put a neon sign up and say “here’s my old writing that’s quite bad in hindsight.” Also not sure yet how to redirect from another domain to this one, or if it’s worth the bother.
Added code to programmatically read image sizes at build time. When putting images into HTML, it’s generally advisable to put the exact image dimensions into the <img> tag, for various reasons, but I never did, because I don’t know them and don’t have time to go through hundreds of old images and figure them out. So I modified my Hugo templates to read the image resources and calculate the image size in the blog template. That fixed a bunch of image layout problems on the blog. (Unfortunately it also introduced new problems, in that the Hugo build is much slower, and the build will fail if any images are inaccessible across the network at build time. A problem for another day.)
And the biggest change: I switched from serving the blog from an (expensive) AWS Elastic Beanstalk reverse proxy to fully serving the blog from an (inexpensive) AWS Amplify static site. This was made possible by figuring out how to give AWS Amplify a list of some 100+ old link redirects through a JSON file. (For example, redirecting /feed to /index.xml, a vitally important redirect for anyone who has ever added my blog to an RSS reader at any time in the past.) I switched the domain name over from Beanstalk to Amplify on 8/25/2022.
Oh and I made a shortcode for this footer down here so I only have to type blaugust2022 day="26" at the bottom:

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 26. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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Yuck. It’s one of those posts where I just write down stuff that happened today.

It’s getting down to the wire here at the end of Blaugust and we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with a “my day” post. But two things happened today which are of great interest to me, at least.

FL Studio 20 This morning, I got FL Studio 20 and installed it. It’s a sequence-based DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I wrote some tweets about it.

I have a modest interest in music production which has all but entirely lapsed in my advanced years. But occasionally I think it would be very handy to be able to pull out some original music to use in the background of my YouTube videos so I don’t have to worry about copyrights. Like, for example, when making videos about Dwarf Fortress or Cataclysm DDA, both games I am playing now and both games that have no sound or music and require post-production to add one or both.

I’m not saying I’m going to make videos on Dwarf Fortress or Cataclysm DDA, but I’m running out of Elden Ring videos and I don’t really know what to upload next.

Anyway, REAPER is my go-to DAW of choice for most multitrack audio recording needs, but it’s somewhat unfriendly for loop- or sequence-based recording, which is a little different workflow than timeline-based recording.

I’ve been looking for a good sequence-based DAW for quite some time and this morning I went ahead and got FL Studio 20, the DAW that always comes up first in the searches and recommendations for this kind of thing, and used to be known as Fruity Loops until they realized that was a silly name for a professional product. I’m very interested to try it out for making some generic video background music. (Otherwise known as sick beats.)

Eye Doctor Later in the day, I finally got to the eye doctor again, and thankfully my eyes have no new problems (I was somewhat worried about my right eye again). But sadly one of them is still near-sighted, while the other is far-sighted, a consequence of having a cataract removed.

(The previously near-sighted lens I was born with was replaced with a far-sighted implant, because all the implants are far-sighted, because normally you only get cataracts removed when you’re in your 80s and your eyes are naturally far-sighted from age. No I still don’t know why I had a cataract in one eye before 50. Everyone keeps telling me it can happen from taking steroids but I definitely don’t do that. Otherwise, “it happens,” is the best medical explanation I’ve received to date.)

Having a near-sighted eye and a far-sighted eye is a somewhat annoying and not very normal situation in human physiology, and most over-the-counter reader glasses are not made to deal with it.

But the eye doctor (who is actually not a doctor but an optometrist), completely understood the problems associated with two radically different lenses in my eyeballs and set me up with some computer glasses which have two different prescriptions, one for each lense. The new glasses are supposed to arrive in a couple of weeks. I’m quite looking forward to that day.

So all in all, a pretty exciting day for me, full of hope for the future.

Now if I could just get DALL-E to make a picture for this.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 25. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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In the dream I saw a black cat glaring at me from a distance. I cautiously asked it, “When it comes to people, what is it that makes them attractive to you?”

“Are you serious?”

I hesitated. “Sure.”

“That’s the philosophical question you pose to me?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“It is listed under a section entitled Philosophical questions for kids.”

“Oh. That makes it a little weird, doesn’t it?”

The cat scoffed. “A little? Besides being a wildly inappropriate question for kids, it’s not even really a philosophical question. Again.”

“Maybe they meant college kids?”

“It quite clearly says, Let these philosophical questions spark fun and thoughtful conversation with your child, at the top of this section. That language is typically not used to describe people old enough to receive higher learning.”

“Look there. One of the other questions is How do kids and children differ from one another? They must have known this terminology discrepancy would come up. They must mean kids of all ages, like the Toys’R’Us commercials.”

“You give them far too much credit. What you see there is a grammatical mistake, not a philosphical question. There is another question in this section for kids that reads: What is the best thing about the current state of the world? Is the world better off this way? How do you explain asking that of a child?”

“Kids are interested in politics, I guess.”

Image source: I mean, it’s a black cat, what did you think it was? One of the feral cats from the woods I see from time to time in my back yard. I believe that’s one of the ones with a clipped left ear, which means it was trapped and neutered at some point before being returned to its habitat.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 24. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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I mentioned Kruggsmash a while back. In one of his videos, he plays a game called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

It was a fun video. Worth a viewing.

I succumbed to the blatant cross-promotional effort and looked for Cataclsym: Dark Days Ahead (or CDDA if you’re cool enough) on Steam. It’s not on Steam.

I Googled it. It’s an open source game. It’s on GitHub.

Never having seen an open source game before, or even heard of one, except perhaps in the deepest, vaguest reaches of my memory, I downloaded it.

It’s a zip file. There’s no installer. You just unzip it and click the exe file (and then tell Windows it’s safe to run this unsigned, unknown executable, which it definitely isn’t. But no risk, no reward).

I’m here to report that I’ve found a game that’s actually more complicated to understand and play than Dwarf Fortress. I would not have believed this was possible, but it is.

It’s just absurd. After about an hour, I managed to set a readable font size (by manually editing a config file, which turned out to be easier than using the UI), start a “random scenario” game, and get my little guy to pick up a newspaper, then ride a nearby motorcycle around some roads before arriving at a building surrounded by zombies. I drove away, then decide to get off the motorcycle. Then I had to quit because the arrow keys mysteriously stopped working.

I think I had unknowingly gotten stuck in “look” mode while riding the motorcycle. It explains why there was a weird box cursor on the screen that I didn’t understand for the longest time. It renders basic walking movement impossible. Don’t accidentally press any keys. Just don’t. You’ll never recover from it.

(Note: It wasn’t “look” mode, it was “steering” mode. Press to bring up the “vehicle controls” menu and then press l to “let go” of the steering controls. Very intuitive.)

I recommend that you don’t even bother running the game at first. Start with at least an hour of tutorial videos. Perhaps a college course, if one is available.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 23. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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I happened to see a few lines in a recent post from Naithin that inspired this soapbox sermon.

I’m pretty open about the fact I enjoy, if not outright require, variety in my gaming it still feels like admitting to being absent a virtue. Be kind. Be patient. Be diligent. And damn it, finish the games you start.

I have thoughts and opinions about this. I don’t like to preach on the blog but not enough people say this.

I’m of the opinion that it’s entirely the fault of the game if the game does not hold my attention long enough to complete it. If I leave a game for something else, the game doesn’t want me to finish it. The game has clearly indicated that it’s only interested in collecting an up-front fee to cover the cost of a marketing campaign, and doesn’t care if anyone plays the game.

A good game will demand that I not play anything else until I’m finished with it, and leave me wanting to play more after that.

They are extremely rare. At most one a year. Currently, I would unscientifically estimate that up to 99% of released games every year are not inventive enough to hold my attention from beginning to end. I dare say the vast majority of games are factory-produced like cheap Legos knock-offs.

So it’s not at all surprising to me that I or anyone else would bounce around a lot between games. Every game I play is exactly one gaming session away from being dropped for another one.

There may have been a time when I thought that it was a failing on my part that I didn’t finish a game, but that time is long past. Games, like books and movies and television and most all media in 2022, are so commoditized now that there are 999 others to try on any given night if one doesn’t immediately impress.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 22. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

Header Image: I’m sorry, artists of the world, but typing a few words into DALL-E and getting four possible header images for a blog post within 30 seconds, one of which is deeply disturbing and perfectly appropriate, is hard to resist.

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In the dream, I came upon a statue of a one-armed woman holding a child. I asked her, “How come we judge ourselves by the actions we take but not by our intentions?”

The woman shifted her stony gaze to me. “This is one of the so-called great philosophical questions, is it?”

“Apparently.”

“You know you can replace the words how come with why do, don’t you?”

“I’ll pass that along.”

The woman sighed. An exhausted sigh. “And who is this we of which you speak?”

“Us, I guess. Humans. You know, people?”

“Have you ever committed this heinous transgression?”

“Maybe. I can’t think of anything offhand. But I’m sure I’ve been disappointed when something didn’t work out in the way I wanted it to. Everybody has. Come to think of it, even as we speak, there’s something I’ve been intending to do for quite some time, but I’m rather disappointed that my actions haven’t made it possible.”

“What’s stopping you from taking these actions?”

“Well, fear, obviously. The same thing that stops everyone from taking actions.”

“And I suppose if you take the actions that are necessary to bring about this intention of yours, and it somehow does not succeed, you would consider this a failure?”

“Of course.”

“So it would hence be better not to take action at all. That is success then?”

I bit my lip. “Not exactly. I still wonder a lot about what would happen if I tried this course of action I was thinking about. My intentions are good. I think it might even help people, and me, especially, to try new things, to grow as a person. To learn skills that would be beneficial in the rest of my life. Maybe it would turn out well. Maybe I should take a chance. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so to speak. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

“That is obvious. You would feel bad. That must be avoided at all costs.”

Image source: A prominent statue in Haligtree Town Plaza, from Elden Ring.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 21. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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Just some random gaming pet peeves I wrote down once.

Holding down buttons to interact I don’t know when this started, but somewhere along the way, we stopped pressing a button to interact with doors, or pick up items, or activate control panels. Instead, we decided we needed to hold down a button and wait for a little circle to fill up. To make sure we really wanted to do that thing that we obviously wanted to do. So, so obviously wanted to do.

I’ve never heard of anyone who likes this. But for some reason, it’s still there. Probably because it’s built into the handful of homogenous game engines and developers don’t know how or don’t want to change it.

There might be a reason for it. It’s probably a reason that somebody at game developer conferences gives seminars about, to explain why it’s there, and why it’s important that it’s there, and presumably everyone in the audience nods along sagely.

Short-press versus Long-press Another thing that’s slowly seeped into games is the concept of different actions triggering when you tap a key versus holding down the key. For example, in The Surge 2, if you tap the heal key, it heals you. But if you hold down the heal key, it charges the heal supply for later.

Sometimes this kind of control scheme makes sense. For example, when holding down an attack key to “charge” a stronger attack. But I’ve noticed that more and more developers tend to abuse this short-press versus long-press feature in ways that don’t make a lot of sense, as an easy way to fit more stuff into fewer buttons (a la game controllers). For example, the aforementioned The Surge 2 heal button is an unmitigated disaster.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 20. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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It’s 8 PM and I’m exhausted, so it’s far too late for me to write a post tonight, except this one.

I got my second dose of the shingles vaccine yesterday. The first dose, a few months ago, wrecked my arm for about a week and a half, but I don’t remember feeling bad after it.

But after this one, not only does my shoulder hurt so much I can barely lift my arm, but I also feel bad. Not bad bad, but headachy, low-grade fever, general muscle pain all over and just blah. A typical post-vaccine reaction.

I’m lucky I remembered to get the second dose. I got the first one at my doctor, and scheduled the second one to get at the doctor, but I completely forgot to go to that appointment. Then I forgot to make a replacement appointment. Then I noticed that I was pretty close to the end of my 2-4 month window to get the second shot, so I made an appointment at a nearby CVS. It took about two minutes to get the shot, and about thirty minutes to sit in a chair waiting for the shot.

Why yes, yes I did generate the header image for this post with DALL-E 2. It’s the main thing it’s good for.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 19. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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It’s creator appreciation week here in Blaugust, and by coincidence, I just happen to have one to mention.

I’ve been playing Dwarf Fortress again, one of the best impossible games ever made, which led me down several inevitable pathways: Tutorial videos and Kruggsmash videos.

Tutorials because I’ve forgotten how to do anything in the game.

And Kruggsmash videos because I’m obsessed with his Dwarf Fortress videos. That’s all he does, as far as I know. It’s possible I’ve even mentioned him before on this blog.

But you won’t learn how to play Dwarf Fortress from watching his videos. Instead, you’ll be told a story as generated by the game, delivered in a narrative style that uses role-playing, hand-drawn pictures, music, and sound effects that don’t appear anywhere in the game (by default, the game has no sound).

It’s among the finest game-related video content I can think of on the Internet. By far the best sales pitch for Dwarf Fortress out there, too.

If you’re one of those people who thinks watching people play games is boring, these might be the videos for you. It’s a show, it’s not a Let’s Play.

Also, if you want to learn how to create quality game video content in a unique style, these might be the videos for you. (I mean, by now, I’m sure there are thousands of channels blatantly copying this style, but he was the first one I can remember seeing.) There’s probably still a big market out there for “make Dwarf Fortress look enjoyable to play” videos, and if it ever gets to Steam it’ll only grow.

So anyway, Kruggsmash. It’s good stuff.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 18. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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A brief recounting of the dwarf fortress of Limulitred, “Goldbuff,” in the world of The Eternal Everseeing Dimensions.

Year 250 We arrive to find ourselves surrounded by a desert! There’s no water and almost no trees.

Digging into the sand quickly reveals a soggy layer below the surface, which the dwarves don’t like to dig through. Underground tunnels and shafts fill with water leaking from the walls. By digging some underground channels that fill with water, it’s the only way to provide drinking water for the thirsty dwarves.

Year 251 The year begins with a population of 18 dwarves trying to organize their meager fortress.

There’s no rock on the upper layers of the desert to build from, so the dwarves dig straight down through the soggy clay until they reach a ledge overlooking an expansive cavern deep underground with a lake several layers below. Water seeping out of the walls of the vertical shaft pool at the bottom, but the crafty dwarves channel it away so nobody drowns.

Year 252 Migrants raise the population in the fortress to 32. A military forms, but there are no weapons for them to fight with, since there are no metals to forge from.

Wood becomes scarce, so the dwarves open up a passage to the floor of the caverns, where giant fungiwood mushrooms can be cut down for resources. Unfortunately it also opens up the dwarves to attack from cave crocodiles, and two dwarves are dragged underwater and drown. Their bodies can’t be recovered, and their ghosts haunt the fortress.

Food runs out, and the dwarves are starving, yet the yearly caravan gets stuck and won’t trade their food. Deconstructing the trade depot causes the caravan to flee, and the sand is littered with meat, which the dwarves cook up and eat just in time.

Retirement After the Spring of 253, there are 86 citizens living in the fortress, including dwarves and human monster slayers. 11 are dead or missing.

I think I’m going to retire this one, because everything is completely out of control, there’s no plan, rooms are dug haphazardly and inefficiently, rocks are piled everywhere, everything takes too long, nothing is organized, there’s no metal, and dwarves keep arriving with no place for them to sleep or eat. It’s just a mess and I want to start over.

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In the dream I saw a vengeful angel looking down upon me. I asked her, “What is more real, mind or matter?”

“A silly question,” the angel said. “Why do humans ponder such questions?”

“I don’t know.”

“Matter is real. Mind is real. There is nothing to this question at all.”

“You don’t have to get angry about it.”

“One simply cannot posit that mind and matter are not real. Both are quite clearly real. It is a trite philosophical question that enrages me. It cannot be possible to have a discussion on this subject. In addition, one thing cannot be more or less real than another thing. All things are of equal real-ness.”

“What if I asked which is more real, brain tissue or consciousness?”

“My answer still stands, wandering human. Both are real. Begone.”

“What about consciousness and the soul?”

“That is more of a religious question than a philosophy question.”

“You know you’re a goddess, right?”

The snicking sword was the last sound I heard.

Image source: A screenshot of Melania, the Goddess of Rot, from Elden Ring.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 16. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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I heard talk about a couple of new MMOs, Tower of Fantasy, and one other one which disappeared so fast I can’t even remember the name of it.

Begin cynical viewpoint!

It never once occurred to me to look into them, or reading posts about them, because it’s been almost ten years now since 2014, the last time any major studio launched a new MMORPG that tried to cater to MMORPG enthusiasts. (One of them already shut down.) At some point you can’t help but notice the pattern and stop falling for it.

If people are still talking about Tower of Fantasy in a month, or the other game I can’t remember the name of, maybe I’ll investigate. (It’s Noah’s Heart, which I mainly know as “that game Bhagpuss mentioned but nobody else has”.)

But history suggests that won’t be the case. Whatever happened to New World? Lots of positive buzz, lots of jumping on the bandwagon, lots of “you know, it’s actually really good,” then it disappeared. That other Amazon game I’m struggling to remember the name? (Lost Ark.) Same deal. Now both seem to be completely gone from the public consciousness, relegated presumably to some company-run community forums somewhere and occasional patch notes.

Instead, most people are talking about–you guessed it–World of Warcraft. Same as always. Scandal after scandal after scandal should have killed them a hundred times over, but they just keep right on chugging.

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When I started Blaugust with a creative writing idea, I failed to account for how draining spontaneous creativity is day in and day out.

It takes intentional effort and practice to sit down every day and tell your brain, “Okay, create something now.”

Unfortunately, I don’t practice that every day, so coming up with something entertaining and meaningful from a random writing prompt in 30 minutes or less turns into a frustrating chore very quickly. There’s a skill to switching into creative mode that isn’t always intuitive for me, and certainly isn’t habitual right now.

I also quickly became uncomfortable with how personal they were. I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s always supposed to be a facade covering my real self on this blog, and I don’t particularly like my inner thoughts and feelings leaking out too much.

So I hit the eject button on creative writing for the time being. The main purpose of blogging is to entertain me. Not having fun + not learning something + not getting paid = I could be doing something else with my time. Like playing Dwarf Fortress.

That’s not to say there isn’t value in practicing the chore of creating something every day when you don’t want to. It’s just that I’m not a working artist, or particularly want to become one. It’s far easier for me to generate an income through software development.

Writing down a few idle thoughts about something, on the other hand, is less troublesome. You just have to stop before it goes on too long.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 14. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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A reference for myself of common tasks I do in video editors.

I do basically the exact same video editing tasks every time I edit a game video.

First, I try not to edit video at all, and use the raw recorded video as-is. That’s the best-case scenario and works 90% of the time for my game videos.

Second, if I can, I use Avidemux to trim the start and end of videos, or cut out sections in the middle. If you cut on keyframe boundaries, you don’t have to re-render the video, and it’s instantaneous. Second-best-case scenario.

But when I need to open an honest-to-gosh video editor, I’ve used Sony-now-Magick Movie Studio Platinum for years and years. It works like an audio editor, so it’s very intuitive to me, a person who is very comfortable editing audio waveforms.

Unfortunately it’s also slow and antiquated. So I’ve been working to migrate to DaVinci Resolve in the hopes that I can use it for everyday video editing. It’s a bit of a bear to use, one of those “it’s intentionally so complicated that it’s a marketable job skill to know how to use it” kind of applications, like all those Adobe products I abhor, but it’s a snappy interface. Mostly.

Anyway, here’s a list of the common tasks I do in Movie Studio Platinum and the equivalent process in DaVinci Resolve, at least what I’ve worked out so far.

This is probably going to be an ongoing list, updated from time to time. (It isn’t yet complete.)

Split Video, No Transition * Most common thing I do in any video editing software. * Movie Studio Platinum: + Press S * DaVinci Resolve: + Press CTRL-B + Can be done in the Cut tab or Edit tab + Adjust position by clicking and dragging split point + Alt-/ might also work + Key can be customized to S

Fade to/from Black * I do this at the start and end of every rendered video so I know it was rendered and isn’t the original OBS video. * Movie Studio Platinum: + Click and drag envelope from the corner of any video clip + Works on video or audio clips (to fade to silence) * DaVinci Resolve: + The same: + Click and drag envelope from the corner of video clip + Also works on video or audio clips

Crossfade Two Clips * Rarely used to crossfade adjacent video clips (usually to denote lots of time passing), heavily used to crossfade adjacent audio clips to avoid jarring audio transitions. * Movie Studio Platinum: + Drag clips over each other, crossfade is automatic on video or audio clips * DaVinci Resolve: + Seems excessively complex so far. + 1 - Right-click split point - Select Add 24 frame crossfade - Click and drag the edges of the crossfade box to adjust time - Can’t figure out how to customize that menu + 2 - Shift-T - Creates an audio-only transition between selected clips - Have to select the two adjacent clips first it seems

Overlap Audio onto Adjacent Video Clip * A new technique I’ve been using in 2022 to overlap the audio track from a previous clip over the video of the next clip. * Movie Studio Platinum + Hold Shift and Drag audio clip edge earlier or later to extend over the adjacent clip. + Can also ungroup video and audio clips and drag audio earlier or later. * DaVinci Resolve + ??? + I’m pretty sure I learned how to do this, I just don’t remember it as I’m typing this.

Add Text Overlay * Movie Studio Platinum + Generate Text Media * DaVinci Resolve: + ???

Render Video and Audio * Movie Studio Platinum + Click Make Movie + Click Save to Hard Drive + Select Preset (I have customized presets with the encoding settings I want) * DaVinci Resolve + Click the Deliver tab at the bottom + Select Preset (YouTube seems okay for 1080p but I have no idea what the actual encoding settings are… it’s about 3GB for an hour video).

Render Audio Track Only * Movie Studio Platinum: + Use mute/solo to select audio tracks to render + Click Make Movie + Click Save to Hard Drive + Select WAV Preset * DaVinci Resolve + ??? + There might be a Deliver preset for this

Insert a Slideshow of Still Images * Only recently started doing this for very lengthy boss fights. * Movie Studio Platinum: + Insert Slideshow Menu * DaVinci Resolve: + ???

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 13. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

P.S. Yeah, it’s another last-second, “oh crap I forgot to write anything for Blaugust today and now it’s late and I’d rather play a game than write a post” scramble for anything that might look anywhere close to finished in the drafts folder, kind of post.

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Okay, yes, fine, I downloaded Dwarf Fortress again.

First I tried to play RimWorld again. I played the heck out of RimWorld in December of 2018, recording tons of videos which I still think are among my most interesting to date. Now? I barely remember how to play, and completely forgot why I liked it. So I couldn’t get into it, even with the new Royalty and Ideologies expansions (which honestly don’t change the game very much anyway). It just takes sooooo long for anything fun to start happening. I forgot all the settings I used to use to get games moving quickly.

I thought about my time in Dwarf Fortress fondly, which I played after RimWorld, in early 2019. I re-watched some of the old videos I recorded of Dwarf Fortress and found them quite entertaining. (That was an epic video production process for me at the time, stitching together video clips and overlaying background music with automated scripting tools so I didn’t have to spend hours at a video editor.) Dwarf Fortress is the pinnacle gold standard of that genre, at least the engine of it.

Then I discovered Dwarf Fortress had a Steam page, and it’s “coming soon” (which could be this fall or next year or maybe never), and the graphics and UI depicted on Steam look amazing and I can’t wait to try it.

I think because I added Dwarf Fortress to my wishlist, I was shown a game called KeeperRL, which looked a lot like Dwarf Fortress, except it has an approachable UI and you’re playing the goblins instead of the dwarves. I tried it out. It’s okay, but it’s not the same. Most notably, I don’t like the turn-based manual combat, and I don’t like that I never encountered any existential threats to my base. I had all the time in the world to just sit around digging tunnels underground and nothing bad ever happened. Not very satisfying.

I looked at a bunch of other similar types of games in this genre on Steam and found nothing that looked like it would even come close to a Dwarf Fortress experience.

Then I just went ahead and downloaded Dwarf Fortress again.

sigh I mean what choice do I have really pic.twitter.com/46GsjdZeQG

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 12, 2022

It’s a different version from the one I played in 2019, but it works the same–like editing source code in VI. If you’ve never done that, it’s not a pleasant experience, unless you’re one of those people who swears by VI as a text editor for some inexplicable reason. (The only reason I learned some basics of VI in the last year is that you have to use it if you’re stuck on a Linux ssh terminal.)

Anyway, I’m trying to set everything up again. Even with the Lazy Newb thingys, there’s still some work to be done. I’m trying to find and install the custom Soundsense audio files I recorded back in 2019, because of course I recorded custom voiceovers for a custom Soundsense pack back in 2019. The default Soundsense pack uses a bunch of movie sound bites or something which are extremely off-putting and break every bit of immersion in the game.

But first I had to stop and write this post real quick before it gets too late. My posts have devolved so far down into banality this month that they’re simply reporting what I previously said in a much better way on Twitter.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 12. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

P.S. It’s a really good blogging day when you can just insert a link to a previously-processed-and-uploaded picture into your post.

P.P.S. It’s funny reading over what I previously wrote about Dwarf Fortress. “It’s terrible.” Followed by ten more posts.

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Here’s something I didn’t expect to be writing about today.

Speaking of wild animals…

This morning I happened to look outside in the front yard and saw an … animal … by the road at the corner of the property. I stared at it for quite a while, not recognizing what it was. At first I thought it was a deer (a common sight), but the proportions were wrong, then I thought it was a stray dog, but a completely unrecognizable breed. I ran for the camera.

What the holy bejebus is THAT pic.twitter.com/LrV07rIpZj

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 11, 2022

When I got back and started taking pictures, it was walking up to yellow stray cat, who was flattened out in the front yard near the porch, a place he likes to hang out so he can watch the neighborhood.

I’ve never seen an animal like this before.

It looked like a small, extremely emaciated or mangy dog of a breed that I couldn’t possibly fathom, but it walked purposefully and gracefully, not like it was sick. It had huge paws and a rat-like tail with a white tuft on the end. But it didn’t appear aggressive, it was approaching the cat more out curiosity. Then it sat down.

After snapping some pictures it finally dawned on me that my cat might be in danger, so I opened the front door, and the animal trotted away into the woods when it heard the noise.

After some Internet queries it seems this might have been a young coyote. I’ve never seen one before, and had no idea they lived anywhere on the East Coast, but apparently there have been increased sightings of them around my area this year. The more you know.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 11. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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Herein I will attempt to summarize the main story of Final Fantasy XV, so that I remember how insane it was, years from now.

Hey neat, I found another mostly-finished draft post for Blaugust, and this time I had a picture, too.

Prince Noctis is sent from the capital city of Insomnia by his father, The King, to wed Lady Lunafreya, The Oracle. Noctis and Luna haven’t seen each other since they were kids, but somehow they have that fairy tale bond of being soul mates, or something. It’s all predestined and preordained and all that.

Shortly after this road trip in a classic car begins, The Empire attacks and destroys Insomnia (offscreen, in a cut scene with no sound effects), and The King dies. A heretofore-unmentioned Crystal is stolen by The Empire. The wedding is off. The King probably knew it was going to happen, though it’s not really clear how or why.

Prince Noctis makes his way to Altissa to meet/rescue Lunafreya, who is hiding/waiting/working/imprisoned there. The details of this are extremely unclear. There’s a lot of driving involved, and fighting random Empire troops that drop from flying ships, and finding weapons in ancient tombs. There’s also a fist fight with Titan, which is physically impossible, because Titan is a thousand feet tall, and Noctis isn’t. But Noctis wins anyway, which is Important, for reasons.

In Altissa, Lunafreya is calling Leviathan, a very large beast/diety, in order to establish A Covenant, so the gods will help the people, maybe. She’s an Oracle, so she can do that, apparently. It’s not entirely clear why the people need help from the gods at this particular time.

Luna’s also the only person who can annoint The New King, so she’s supposed to bestow The Ring to Prince Noctis. I don’t know why she has The Ring. It seems like The Old King should have had it. Maybe she had The Spare Ring. Or maybe a Different Oracle bestowed a Different Ring to The Old King.

Anyway, Ardyn, the Chancellor of the Empire, an immortal demon or something who pops in and out of the story at will, shows up and stabs Lunafreya. I don’t know why. Anyway it’s a shocking twist and very dramatic.

But Prince Noctis defeats Leviathan anyway with Magic Powers, The Covenant with Leviathan is completed, and Lunafreya bestows The Ring to Prince Noctis before she dies. Oh, and Ignis, one of his retinue, loses his eyesight.

Prince Noctis mopes around for a bit because Lady Lunafreya is dead and he never really got a chance to talk to her and they were soul mates or something. But one of his retinue yells at him to get it together, so then he puts on The Ring and accepts his role as The New King, because that’s how easy it is to snap out of a depression apparently.

The Prince And Friends take a train back to the capital, and on the way they’re attacked by demons and the land is plunged into eternal night and Ardyn shows up and Shiva tells them stories and they wreck their car and other stuff that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, but it looks kind of cool.

Also, Prompto is kidnapped by Ardyn and taken to the capital. I don’t know why. Ardyn just appears and does stuff for no apparent reason throughout the story, as previously mentioned. He’s voiced by Darin Du Paul, though, so it’s fine.

The Prince and friends rescue Prompto, and we learn the shocking twist reveal that Prompto has been an Empire Magitek Robot all along. Or something like that. I didn’t really understand it at all. But it was definitely a shocking twist that nobody saw coming. That’s the important part. But Noctis and friends say it’s okay that Prompto is a robot and they accept him anyway and The Power Of Friendship, Bros Forever, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Anyway, Prince Noctis and Friends fight their way to The Crystal. On the way, they kill The Emperor, who is a demon, or something. We’ve barely seen or heard anything about The Emperor before. He just kind of shows up and turns into a demon, then he’s dead and gone.

Instead of taking the Crystal, Prince Noctis is absorbed into The Crystal, part of a shockingly surprising trap set by Ardyn, or something. Noctis talks to Bahamut. Ten years pass in the void. I don’t know why. It made no sense whatsoever. Anyway The Prince returns, but now he has longer hair and a little beard, so he’s old in Japanese culture apparently. It’s still eternal night and demons roam the land. Well, Final Fantasy demons, which are mostly adorable.

Anyway, the band gets back together and Prince Noctis And Friends go back to Insomnia, the capital, to reclaim the throne and save the world. They fight various demons, then they fight Cerberus, then they fight Ifrit, then they fight three other bosses and yay the power of friendship or whatever, then Noctis fights Ardyn and wins back the throne. Dawn finally returns to The Land.

But it’s still not over because Noctis has to make the ultimate sacrifice and absorb the power of all the old kings (including his own father) to finally defeat Ardyn once and for all (out in space, or something), which I think kills him, but I’m not really sure, because he and Lunafreya sit togther on the throne again at the end, even though they’re both dead maybe, so it might be a dream, or heaven, or maybe real, or maybe it’s all a metaphor or something, and then a cover of Stand By Me plays over the credits, and I honestly have no idea what any of it means because none of it makes any sense because I’m almost positive it was completely mistranslated.

The End.

Anyway there are some great moments and scenes in the game, the music and imagery is pretty awesome, but the connective tissue between the moments is completely missing so there’s almost no context for anything. It all just sort of washes over you like a fever dream.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 10. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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A stylish but ultimately very frustrating experience.

Editor’s Note: With time running out before bed tonight and zero desire to write something new for Blaugust, I was very pleased to stumble over this mostly-finished, never-before-seen draft.

It occurred to me that I never wrote a blog post about Code Vein. It seems like I should at least write one post about the video series I put on YouTube.

I first played a demo of Code Vein on the PS4, and liked it well enough to make a mental note to buy it for PC someday in a sale. That day was earlier this year.

Code Vein is a Souls-like game, except it’s missing most of the things that make Souls combat satisfying. Instead, they went with random button-mashing nonsense combat, and a “blood code” system that is largely unnecessary.

In the first half of the game, it’s not a detriment. In the beginning, the game iss quite fun, actually. The story and game world is fairly interesting and the art style is cool.

The second half of the game, unfortunately, is mostly a repetitious grind through forgettable areas and annoying boss fights.

By the second half of the game, it’s obvious that every zone is the same: You find your way through a maze of hallways, fighting enemies along the way, until you get to the boss at the end. The only difference is the color scheme. Even the enemies are mostly the same throughout the game. It’s so dull and lifeless it might as well have been procedurally generated.

The story also falls off a cliff and loses most of its appeal around the halfway point.

Toward the end, the boss fights are of a kind where luck is a pretty big factor in getting through them. You’d think that having an AI companion would make them easier, but it doesn’t.

You’re expected to grind a lot and unlock armor and skills and weapons and try all kinds of combinations to find the magic bullets, but I reject such methodologies and use only my wits in these kinds of games, which makes Code Vein ridiculously hard and annoying by the end.

If the grinding were fun, maybe I would have done that, but it’s not, so I didn’t.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 9. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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In the dream I saw a cicada scuttling across the parking lot. It looked wise, so I asked it, “Is there such a thing as fate?”

“Indeed there is. You need only check the dictionary.”

I sighed. This cicada fancied itself a prankster. “By which I mean the concept of fate.”

“Of course. It is a human construct, so of course it exists. That which is imagined is real.”

“I see. You’re saying fate is imaginary, which implies there’s no such thing. Everything is random. Life is just an endless series of chaotic occurrences that add up to nothing.”

“I did not say that. I said whatever you imagine is real. All things are real, from our viewpoint. From a certain point of view, as some old Jedi once said.”

“If I imagine a snake, the snake doesn’t become real.”

The cicada rubbed its wings in some imitation of laughter. “It’s real that you imagined it. Look, there is no fate but what we make.”

“I’ve seen that movie too.”

The cicada chirped happily. “I love that song.”

Finally, the kind of question I was hoping for pic.twitter.com/BXWKdnjIZE

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 8, 2022

Yeah, I know, the numbering is all messed up now. Image source: A photo of a cicada, believe it or not.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 8. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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I’m already sick of my Blaugust project, so I’m writing something else. This is about Amazon Web Services and Nginx config files, mainstream topics everyone can enjoy.

I’ve been hosting my blog on AWS (Amazon Web Services) for a while now, and it’s been costing me somewhere between $1 and $2 a month. Somewhat more than the $0/month I was aiming for, but still less than the $5/month of a typical shared Linux hosting plan from the days of yore.

But then I went and looked at my AWS monthly cost during Blaugust and found it had gone way, way up, and that’s when I realized that my 12 months of introductory free AWS services had expired and I had entered the “now you’re paying for reals” phase of usage. So my bill shot up from $2/month to about $30/month. Almost all of that cost is in running an EC2 application server instance which serves up my blog.

The sudden cost spike and the Blaugust activity blitz inspired me to dig into the blog infrastructure again and make some changes, which are now active:

First, unrelated to AWS, but I finally figured out how to get Hugo to read the dimensions of linked images and put them into the HTML img tag, so they’re better sized on the pages now, on PC and mobile.
- For future reference, the key function to know is resources.GetRemote.
I finally setup AWS Elastic Beanstalk to redirect http requests to https automatically.
- “Elastic Beanstalk” is my favorite name for any Internet technology. It’s an AWS platform to deploy and run Internet-connected applications, in this case a tiny Golang http server I wrote as a front-end for the blog.
- The key place to make the https redirect change is in the Load Balancer configuration, which is somewhat hidden in the interface. You can set it all up with “click ops” if you can find it in the AWS UI, or you can deploy a configuration file in the .ebextensions directory of your Beanstalk application, which is what I did.
To try to reduce costs, I downgraded the default Beanstalk settings:
- I set it to a maximum of one load balancer, instead of the scaling 1-4 it was set at previously.
- I set the EC2 instance types to t2.nano which I think is the smallest, cheapest possible compute resources Amazon has to run my Golang server. Previously they were set to use either t2.micro or t2.small for some reason.
- Early indications are that this will cut my AWS bill by a third, bringing it down to around $10/month. Much better, but still not quite the $0/month ideal.
- I think I can cut usage even more by discarding the load balancers entirely, but setting up a single instance was too much of a hassle for me to deal with (particularly, installing the certificate on EC2 and setting up the TLS).
I’ve also started tinkering with the Nginx configuration in Elastic Beanstalk.
- The entire reason I wrote a tiny Golang server application was to be able to simulate the functionality of an Apache .htaccess file and redirect old links to the new site.
  - Static hosting will serve static pages basically for free but it’s hard (i.e. impossible) to find one that can also redirect all the old links from your fifteen previous blogs so it doesn’t orphan all your readers and all that Google SEO work you’ve done over the years.
  - The only solution I’ve been able to come up with is to add an extra http reverse proxy server between the Internet and the static site that redirects links, hence I wrote a Golang program to do just that.
- Elastic Beanstalk works by installing Nginx (an HTTP server application, like Apache) on an Amazon EC2 host, and directing traffic to your application with a reverse proxy setup.
- Elastic Beanstalk also happens to have the capability to customize the Nginx configuration. You can even replace it entirely.
- Like Apache, Nginx also has the capability to redirect links by giving it a big list in a configuration file. So, I moved my big list of link redirects from my custom Golang application to an Nginx configuration file, offloading that burden from my application and hopefully saving some CPU cycles.
- Nginx config files are incredibly fussy and complex and prone to syntax errors, so it’s a slow, painstaking process.
- In the future I want to try setting up the static site reverse proxy directly in Nginx too, which would cut my Golang application completely out of the equation, maybe saving even more CPU cycles.
And, while I can leave the static site generation in AWS because that part is basically free, I want to keep my eye out for other, cheaper places to host an Nginx (or Apache, I guess) server. So far I haven’t found anything.

This post is for Blaugust 2022 day 7. More posts. More posts from other Blaugust 2022 Participants.

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In the dream I wandered into a vaccination facility. I stopped the first person I saw and whispered, “When is okay to give up on a bit?”

Everyone turned to look. The buzz and din of the room silenced. Somewhere, a wolf bayed.

I grimaced. “It’s just that it’s been almost a week now and I feel like this bit has exhausted itself. It’s harder to dream on weekends, too, have you noticed? I didn’t even want to go to sleep at all, really. I was busy doing other things, watching a Netflix documentary about Three Mile Island, actually. But I had this nagging feeling I was supposed to enter this dream again.”

One of the people standing in line asked, “What’s Three Mile Island?” He looked like he was in his twenties.

“It’s a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. There was an accident there in 1979. Made a lot of headlines at the time. I don’t know if anyone really remembers it. Chernobyl took up all the nuclear disaster oxygen about seven years later. Even Fukushima didn’t supplant it.”

“Oh. How’s the documentary?”

“It’s okay. One of the ones that does dramatic recreations with bad actors. Except in this case, every dramatic scene is someone looking up into the middle distance when they hear an alarm or a siren. Most people might, you know, run when they hear an alarm, but not these people. They just stare at the alarm for what seems like hours while the camera registers the angst and indecision on their face.

“The documentary I saw earlier on Woodstock ‘99 was much better. Lots of human animalism. Like an average day on social media before there was social media.”

“So whatever happened to philosophy?”

“I didn’t get any good questions today, even though I rolled twice. I think I’m going to try a different web site.”

Image source: That’s a picture I took of the National Guard-organized vaccination center I went to in 2021. Mixed with string, like you do.

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In the dream, I encountered a fellow standing by the road with a tadpole for a head. I asked him, “How do we know what is art and what isn’t?”

The fellow chuckled. “This is an easy one, mate: Art is creation. Anything that’s created is art, get it?”

“What about photographs?”

“You think a photograph can’t be art because someone pressed a button and captured some light? You don’t think anything was created?”

“What about human life? Or galaxies, or The Big Bang?”

The fellow blinked his large fishy eyes. “Okay, mate: Art is whatever makes us happy. Like a clever joke.”

“That can’t be right. Sometimes I read a book or watch a movie that makes me sad, and those are definitely art. And suppose the joke is hurtful. Surely that can’t be art.”

“Look, mate, I have to go. The bottom line is there’s no arbiter of art out there, deciding what is and isn’t art, it’s up to every individual to figure out what sparks their imagination, to decide what they like and don’t like.”

I called after the fellow as he started down the road. “Then what?”

The fellow didn’t turn as he shouted back jovially, “Then you make damn sure nobody else is allowed to have anything you don’t like!”

what is an art pic.twitter.com/0jBZhz0ykB

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 5, 2022

I’ve done some editing of the prompt question. :) Incidentally, if it isn’t clear by now, these posts, for me, are an exercise in brevity, dialog attribution, and characterization through word choice. Actually answering the prompt questions is somewhat irrelevant. Image source: This is a screenshot from my randomized Elden Ring playthrough. Deep Dream Generator did particularly well with Elden Ring screenshots.

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In the dream I saw a woman floating in the sea. I asked her, “What would love look like if it had a creative dimension?”

“The question, my dear, is this: What does love look like normally, with no additional dimensions at all?”

I pondered this riddle, then a thought occurred to me. “Why are you in the sea?”

“It’s a dream, silly.”

“Am I in the sea, too?”

“Maybe. You’re avoiding the question.”

“I came to the dream for answers, not questions.”

“There are no answers in the dream, my dear. Only riddles. What is mine but only you can have?”

I pondered this new riddle warily. “A sea cucumber?”

“My heart, silly.”

“So creative love is a series of riddles, then.”

The woman smiled. “Try not to drown.”

Hrm. Well at least it isn't about animals again. pic.twitter.com/FK8m4LkItJ

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) August 4, 2022

I’m not sure I’d classify these questions so far as “philosophical.” I was hoping more for easy ones like, “why do bad things happen to good people?” Also, four days into this and I’m pretty sure this web site of questions was itself generated by an AI. Image source: Of course it’s Lunafreya from Final Fantasy XV, in a screenshot that already looked like a Deep Dream Generator image before I tried to alter it.

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This brief post serves two purposes.

First, it’s a test to see if my IFTTT workflow will successfully post a link to this post on Twitter and my super secret Discord server which isn’t really a secret but I just haven’t had any particular need to tell anyone about it.

Second, with the start of Blaugust I noticed a sudden burst of comments, which is great, except some of them were pretty clearly spam comments. At least, I interpreted them as spam, and removed them. (Weirdly I thought requiring a Google or Twitter login would eliminate almost all spam by default.)

It turned out that I had never set myself up as an administrator on my own site, so I had to jump through some hoops this morning, by which I mean edit some Linux config files in a terminal window, before I could actually administer the comments. Somehow I’d managed to run for almost a year without seeing a single comment that needed moderation.

I still need to write a full comment policy, but for the time being, if a comment is from someone I don’t recognize and it’s got a link to somewhere to buy stuff, I’m probably going to interpret that as spam and delete it and/or block the account. Especially if it’s on older posts. In my experience, valid comments typically only arrive on posts that are less than a few days old.

Also just another note that unlike WordPress, comments are pretty ephemeral on this site… I wouldn’t recommend writing something that you expect to live on the Internet forever. It’s more of a direct message than a publication platform, if you will.

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256. Do cats or dogs make better pets? Why?

In the dream I saw a dog and a cat lounging on a porch. I asked them, “Do cats or dogs make better pets?”

The dog said, “Cats jump out of dark shadows and scare me. I don’t like them.”

The cat said, “Dogs are fun toys for me to play with.”

“Which is best?”

The dog said, “I comfort you in sorrow and help you see the joy in everyday life, but I cannot survive by myself.”

The cat said, “I entertain you with my antics and keep you from sleeping late, and in return I expect to be well paid in food.”

“Cat, you’re making a strong case for the dog.”

The cat scoffed. “Dogs are stressful to keep as pets. You never really know if a dog is happy, do you? Every day, there is a constant nagging worry in the back of your mind that you are not doing enough to nourish the life of that animal that depends on you so completely. Wouldn’t the dog be better off with someone else? Wouldn’t the dog thrive more if you took them to an animal shelter where someone else could adopt them to give them the happier life they deserve?”

The dog looked alarmed. “But I like it here with you. You’re my best friend.”

Image source: Bella and Gracie locked in battle for the mat on the porch.

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<img src="https://d2jkbzrop6wflm.cloudfront.net/img/2022/08/ai/deep-dream-butterfly.jpg" />“241. What do you think about keeping ‘wild’ animals as pets? If so, when?” <hr> In the dream, I saw a butterfly perched on a railing, basking in the sun. I asked it, “What do you think about keeping wild animals as pets?” The butterfly eyed me suspiciously. “Are you thinking of capturing me as a pet?” “I have no net.” “Lucky for me. I like to fly wherever I want, so I would make a poor companion.” “I suppose that’s my answer.” The butterfly laughed. “The important thing is what you think about it. You have two cats.” “They aren’t wild animals per se. Then again, they were probably born in the woods. I’m convinced there’s a feral cat colony out there somewhere.” “I see. Feral cats sound wild to me. They should be allowed to run wherever they want.” “It’s their choice to live here. They stay because I give them food and shelter, and they’ve become domesticated. Still, they’re not pets, they’re roommates.” The butterfly scowled. “It is just as well. Cats are dangerous. They catch and eat my brethren for sport. Better that you keep them locked up so I can fly where I want.” <hr> A much easier prompt today, oddly worded though it was. <a href="https://deepdreamgenerator.com/tags/endgameviableblaugust2022day2">Image source</a>: A photo of a butterfly on my back porch, in the style of some multicolored pen scribbles I put on a piece of paper.

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“Why is it hard to forgive yourself?”

In the dream, I saw a pair of deer in the woods. I asked them, “Why is it hard to forgive yourself?”

The first deer said, “That’s not an easy question to answer. Greater minds than us have pondered this for thousands of years.”

“But deer are at peace every time I see them, surely you must know.”

The second deer said, “We lead simple lives. We don’t concern ourselves with the foibles of humans.”

“So forgiveness is a weakness?”

The first deer said, “Not at all. Forgiveness is divine,” at the same time the second deer said, “Definitely. You must project strength to survive in these woods, no matter the cost.”

I pondered this. “I’ve done things I’m ashamed of. Shouldn’t I be held accountable?”

The first deer said, “Everyone makes mistakes. The wise person admits their mistakes and tries to do better next time, and pass that knowledge on to others.”

The second deer scoffed. “The cunning person never admits their mistakes. It’s the only way to stay ahead of the jackals.”

I shook my head. “But which is right?”

The deer startled at a noise. They gave no answer as they bounded away into the woods.

Well, that was a doozy of a random writing prompt to get on the first day, which made me immediately question my Blaugust strategy. Image source: One of hundreds of photos of deer that wander through my back yard year round.

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My Blaugust is going to be an experiment.

I’ve created a step-by-step plan for each of my Blaugust days:

Before Blaugust, I prepared 31 days of empty post template files with metadata and a header image created with Deep Dream Generator, an unused example of which can be seen at the top of this post.
In the morning of each day, roll 1d4 and 1d100 to find a random prompt from this web site of 400 philosophy questions. (I choose that site mainly because each question is numbered 1-400, a very convenient thing for rolling dice.)
Post it on Twitter or something.
Think about the prompt throughout the day, which will be a work day roughly 71% of the time.
Sometime later, most likely after work 71% of the time, open up the template file for that day and write a made-up dream where the subject of the AI-generated image in that template file tells me the answer to the random philosophy question of the day. (All the images have some kind of anthropomorphic object in them that can answer questions.)
Easy peasy. Commit and publish. Profit.

The idea all started with a need to create 31 header images for the posts so I didn’t have to do that during Blaugust. In previous years I picked random photos out of my collection, so I wanted to do something different: I turned to Deep Dream Generator, one of seemingly hundreds of AI art-generating web sites out there now which lets you upload pictures or even describe pictures with text and make them look cool so you never have to hire an actual artist anymore. Progress!

Ahem. Biting commentary on needless technology overreach aside, I’m sure I’ve said this before, but adding pictures to blog posts is my least-favorite part, and now happens to be the most labor-intensive because of my uniquely quirky blogging platform. I can’t just drag-and-drop images, I have to pre-upload them to a repository somewhere and insert the links into my blog text, just like the good old days. Not fun.

The point is, I made 31 template files each containing a unique Deep Dream Generator-generated image and all the required metadata for the 31 days of Blaugust and have them sitting on my drive waiting for me to fill in the text each day.

Pictures taken care of, all that’s left is writing some text each day. But what to write?

I said before I don’t really want to just write “something” every day. These days, I see the task of writing out whatever I’m thinking or feeling on any given day as more in the Twitter or micro-blogging domain than the long-form blogging domain. It’s just so much easier. Direct from brain to publication (within reasonable social norms). Boom, done, move on with your day.

That leaves specific, directed prompts. Hopefully within the boundaries of some kind of a central theme, so the whole 31-day project can be viewed as a whole, so I can look back on the event from the future and say, “Ah, 2022 was the year I did ___ in Blaugust.”

I previously had the idea of rolling some dice to find random question prompts from various web sites each day and write to that. But I was trying to find a way to incorporate the images I’d generated into the text somehow so they make some sense. Then it hit me: Dreams!

And that’s how I came up with this project idea, which I managed to commit into a blog post of some description with a picture just in time before Blaugust actually starts.

Good luck everyone!

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Blaugust is back for another year. I don’t really need to explain it, just go do the thing.

For myself, I have no idea what to write. I definitely don’t want to write writing advice. Writing advice is always the same. Except now you have to use emojis to communicate effectively.

I don’t want to write about myself because that’s intrusive and gross. I don’t like to write about my favorite creatives because revealing your favorite things is basically the same as writing about yourself, and unnecessarily making yourself vulnerable to an Internet full of personal judgments.

In general, posting “something” every day doesn’t appeal to me very much, so I need some kind of meta-theme. I’m strongly tempted to find a “100 writing prompts” site and roll a d100 each day to pick what to write. Or perhaps use this ad-filled random question generator site I just found. Writing answers to questions is the easiest form of blogging.

I also think it would be fun to improvise a 31-part choose-your-own adventure with a reader survey at the end of each post to direct the narrative, but that’s a lot more work than I’m willing to put in. I only include it here in case someone else wants to steal that idea.

In any case, whatever I write needs to be really short because writing hurts my back. It’s always bugged me that blog posts have to be longer than tweets, but tweet-sized blog posts just don’t look right. They don’t look right on a web page, and they don’t look right in an RSS feed. It’s a problem I’ve never figured out how to solve.

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Catching up on Indie games I’ve played this year.

Actually this report encompasses a lot more than a week; it covers a very long period of time from February through June. And, to be honest, I did zero work to dig into whether these games actually were “indie” or not. My criteria is that they just “felt” indie.

Thursday, 2/17 Demon Source (Steam demo). Let’s charitably call this somebody’s first game project. It’s basically a Dark Souls clone, except it’s … well, it’s written by a beginner, and doesn’t have any art, sound, or music assets. The best thing I can say is that it’s a reasonably big accomplishment to compile a game and get it published on Steam, in the same way that it’s a reasonably big accomplishment to write a book’s worth of sentences and self-publish it on Amazon.

Monday, 2/21 I don’t remember either of these games very much since I’m now writing this four months later. Luckily I recorded videos.

Writer’s Block (Steam demo). It sounded like a cool idea, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t much guidance about what to actually do, but basically you click letters in a Boggle-style grid to form words to fight monsters in turn-based combat. Would have been better as a phone app.

Trial of Ayash (Steam demo). A Native American-themed game that felt like one of those awkward Gothic 3D RPGs from the 2000s. An interesting setting idea that you don’t see very often, but not much of a game implementation to back it up. Needs work.

Wednesday 6/8 The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante (Steam). I was looking for a choose-your-own-adventure narrative game to try out a video recording idea: I wanted to use an OBS plugin to roll dice to choose dialog options, and this was a pretty good game for that. It went on quite a lot longer than I expected it to, though. Unfortunately, I lost interest in the story after about four hours and haven’t been back since.

Thursday, 6/16 Selaco (SteamNext demo). I heard a lot of people talking about this demo, but I didn’t see the appeal. It’s just another shooter, one of a million others that are all the same. Super duper fast movement in small enclosed spaces, where you get stuck on every protruding wall or floor dimple.

Saturday, 6/18 Dragon Forge (SteamNext demo). A cute idea for a builder game with dragons, but unfortunately a fairly primitive execution. Needs work.

Sunday, 6/26 Risk of Rain 2 (Steam summer sale). I had this wishlisted for a long time, but it’s not for me. I thought it might be vaguely Souls-like, but I returned it after 7 minutes. It’s just mindless pointing and shooting with completely ordinary mechanics. No idea what the hook is supposed to be or why this game keeps showing up at the top of lists.

Battle Brothers (Steam summer sale). A tactical RPG, actually more of what I would call a “wargame,” the precursor to the tabletop RPG. Not much story, just battles, but it’s pretty good at the battles. It’s also very hard, and your mercenaries will definitely die every single game, guaranteed, even on easy difficulty. But it’s a good game to occupy your hands while listening to television or podcasts or audiobooks or D&D shows.

Monday, 6/27 Disciples: Liberation (Steam summer sale). Thought it would be a fun turn-based RPG in the vein of a Divinity: Original Sin, which it kind of is, but it’s a bit disappointing and lacking polish. Would have returned it, but I accidentally left it running on the title screen all day so I went way over the maximum return window of 2 hours.

Citizen Sleeper (Steam summer sale). This was the other choose-your-own-adventure style of game that I found on Steam to try, although I didn’t play very much of it, because I was looking more for an RPG at the time. Someday I’ll go back and resume playing it, maybe. (The story didn’t really leap out and grab me by the throat in the first half hour, though.)

JustOnePercent Status

I think Krikket’s #JustOnePercent goal was to play 100 indie games in a year. I’m up to, I don’t know, 15? 20? Something like that. I’m kind of a stickler for statistics, so you’d think I would actually count them. (Counts them.) It’s exactly 20. That I can remember. Not a successful trajectory so far.

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Talk about getting outside your comfort zone. This is so far outside my comfort zone that it’s on a completely different planet, with a poisonous atmosphere, crushing gee forces, with a comet heading directly for it.

I signed up to play in a game of Dungeons and Dragons on Roll20.

I write this story both so that I remember it, and as a minor public service, because I found it rather difficult to find helpful Google results describing good experiences of starting out playing Dungeons and Dragons (or anything else) on the Internet.

Background I’ve had this thought for several years now: “It might be fun to play some tabletop role-playing games. I remember them being kind of fun as a kid, and it looks kind of fun when I see people playing on these trendy D&D streams, even though I know 95% of what I’m seeing is Hollywood production values.”

But something has been stopping me all this time: I don’t know any other humans, certainly no one that plays tabletop games. The only other residents in my house right now are cats, and they haven’t expressed much interest.

I have some family members that at least used to play D&D, but I don’t live near them and they aren’t all that Internet saavy, so that’s not really a viable option.

Occasionally I search for what others do in this situation. The usual advice for getting into this hobby if you’re like me–a socially isolated recluse with no friends–is to find a local game store and inquire within, because they’re supposed to have groups and workshops and whatnot.

But local game stores aren’t really a thing where I live. Besides the entire issue of the pandemic destroying most of the local retail business economy, I don’t know of any such stores within somewhere around a 45-minute drive. I doubt I’ve been in a retail toy/hobby store since the 80s.

There’s also the minor fact that I don’t really like to leave my house or drive to strange places or interact with other people. It’s kind of exhausting. And that was before various novel coronaviruses made such pursuits potentially dangerous.

Enter Roll20 So that leaves only the world of remote gaming over the Internet. There’s only two popular places I’m aware of for role-playing on the Internet: Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. Roll20 is free, Fantasy Grounds isn’t. Not a hard decision.

Sometimes I go on there and search for games to play in. It’s incredibly intimidating. You know how everyone hates to search for a guild in an MMORPG and just gives up and plays solo because no guilds are ever a good fit? (That might be just me.) It’s like that, except a thousand times harder.

Well, this past Friday, I went to Roll20 again and searched to see if there might be a game on the weekend. I don’t know why this week was the week I did this, of all the weeks in the past couple of years. It just happens to be a week when TTRPGs are on my mind. It might also be because I don’t have any video games I’m all that interested in playing at the moment.

I set the search parameters to find only one-shot D&D 5E games friendly to beginners.

One of the first results looked like a jackpot: A “beginners one-shot” listing for the very next day, specifically for people who are brand new to tabletop gaming and Roll20, to teach how everything works.

It sounded too good to be true. Who on the Internet is actually friendly and accommodating and willing to teach new players? It’s unheard of, completely ridiculous. It can’t be real. It had to be a scam to steal my identity or credit card information. That’s really the purpose of the Internet, after all: To gather data from gullible people and sell that data to advertisers and criminals. There’s no other reason for the Internet’s existence anymore.

There were only four slots to fill for this one-shot game and I imagined they would go fast.

Making A Roll20 Account Despite knowing full well that I was walking directly into a trap that would ruin my life and finances forever, I figured I was never going to get anywhere if I didn’t take a chance, so I went ahead and made a Roll20 account. Not surprisingly, you can’t play on Roll20 without first making an account. It’s the only way that web sites can make money by selling your data to advertisers and criminals.

I was wary of entering personally-identifiable information, but I set it up with my real name email account, because it seemed obvious that the chances of people trusting me (also a complete stranger to everyone else on the Internet) would be considerably higher if I didn’t use a name like “burner-account-haha-483.”

And besides, it turns out that googling my name on the Internet no longer only finds me. Unlike the 90s, there are now tons of other people on the Internet with my name. Also, I’m not that concerned about being associated with Roll20 and D&D anymore. There was a time in my life when I would have been mortified for people to know I played video games or tabletop games, particularly any work colleagues, but that’s not much of an issue where I currently work and there’s a good chance it’s the last place I’ll ever work anyway.

As I was making my account, I noticed that Roll20 pulled in the avatar from my GMail account, which was roughly, I want to say, a million years old, from about six houses and four lifetimes ago. So I went outside and took a couple pictures of myself with my phone camera and changed both my GMail and Roll20 avatars.

As a side note, I look really old now, and weirdly a lot like my older brother. I’m not sure how I feel about any of that.

Job Application I posted a message to join this beginner one-shot game. I don’t know how things normally work on Roll20–I assumed there would be a button somewhere that said “request to join this game”–but in this case, the GM asked people to introduce themselves with a post. Each game listing has a little old-school-style message board attached to it. Remember message boards? So quaint.

It sounded sensible to me. If I were a DM asking for players, I would also want them to surpass at least the minimal barrier of entry of saying hello in an inoffensive way.

So I posted a little note under the two other folks who had already asked to join the game, writing a little bit about myself. Nothing too verbose, just a few sentences conveying the notion that I’m at least high-functioning enough to write complete sentences and that I understand the general concept of not being a jerk in the very first communication with another human being.

Of course I immediately second-guessed my decision and regretted it. But no turning back now, I guess. No good deed goes unpunished. All good things are for other people, not you, and you’re destined to die alone and in horrible pain because nobody loves you. I think that’s how the saying goes. Something like that.

Not much later, less than two hours in fact, I received a message on the site with an invitation to the game. I accepted it. Definitely no turning back now. Unless I just didn’t show up, of course, which was the emergency rip-cord option that I kept in the back of my mind.

Getting Ready For this one-shot game, the GM didn’t require us to have anything except a link to the basic D&D rules, which is a PDF file describing, well, the basics. The barrier to entry for this game could not possibly be lower: Just show up on this web site at the appointed time (6:30 PM on a Saturday, in my case) and learn the ropes as you go.

I still didn’t fully believe it. At some point, I expected it to turn into a catastrophe. At some point, I expected the GM would launch into a sales pitch for condos or cryptocurrency or something.

I wasn’t required to have anything, but as it happens, I recently bought some D&D 5th Edition rule books on a whim (and also Traveller and Call of Cthulu rule books). I’ve also watched enough D&D streams and played enough Solasta: Crown of the Magister that I think I have at least a basic understanding of the core concepts (action, bonus action, movement, advantage, disadvantage, blah, blah). So I’m not completely new to this, but I would definitely label myself a beginner. What they don’t show on the streams is the part where they roll a character and choose their abilities and all the boring stuff.

The difficult part for me has never been understanding and applying the rules of the game, though, it’s, you know, the human interaction. “Role-playing.” Role-playing wasn’t really a thing back in the 80s. We just murdered kobolds and orcs and picked up their gold. Character backstory? Telling a story? Cooperatively with other people? That kind of stuff didn’t exist. The story was always, “Go to the dungeon and kill everything.”

The Longest Saturday Here’s a thing about me: Any disruption in my normal daily routine, particularly with an event that’s unfamiliar to me, creates a massive tidal wave of anxiety that lasts until the disruption is over. If I have an appointment on Friday, for example, I’ll start preparing for it and worrying about everything that could possibly go wrong with it, starting on Monday.

So it was a blessing that only about 30 hours would need to pass between the time I saw the Roll20 listing and asked to join the game, and the game itself.

But there was an entire Saturday to fill, where my brain was screaming at me on repeat, “RED ALERT YOU’RE DOING A THING WITH STRANGERS ON THE INTERNET TONIGHT THIS IS THE WORST SCENARIO IMAGINABLE, YOU KNOW I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SOCIALIZE WITH HUMANS AND EVERYONE’S GOING TO KNOW, YOU’RE IN SO MUCH DANGER.” I’m old enough to recognize that this is a thing my brain does and have a basket full of tools and strategies to deal with it, but it’s an effort.

To add to my stress, on Saturday morning, I only saw my own name listed as part of the game. This was some cause for concern. But by 2 PM, three other people were listed in the game alongside me. (Plus the GM.) Whew. If you’re keeping score, the game filled up in less than 24 hours. But it was a big relief to see that I wasn’t going to be the only one that showed up.

Game Time So at the appointed hour of 6:30 PM, I clicked on the “Join Game” button. It turned out I was the last person there, and should have gotten there earlier. Oops. Then it turned out my whole system melted down for some reason and I had to reboot. I was trying to play on my gaming PC, on which I had just installed Firefox, because Roll20 said they really only supported Chrome and Firefox. I also had an idea to record with OBS so I’d be able to pull some screenshots for this blog post, and I think that interfered somehow. After rebooting I turned off OBS and tried again, and it worked.

Roll20’s voice chat didn’t work for some reason, so we moved to Discord for voice chat while using Roll20 for the map and character sheets and rolling dice and stuff. The GM explained that failed voice chat is a common problem on Roll20, so he had a Discord setup just for that situation. It was a bit of a hassle for me because the link provided kept wanting me to create a new Discord account instead of using my existing Discord account, and there was a bit of confusion and panic as I tried to remember a different email account to make a new Discord account, but eventually I got it straightened out.

I don’t really know where everyone else was from, but the GM had a slight European-ish accent that I couldn’t place, one player said they were in Canada, and another player said they were in Australia. You can never really tell but based on speech vernacular it seemed like a range of ages going from “younger than me” to “a lot younger than me.” But it was fine. From the YouTubes and the Twitches and whatnot, I’m used to seeing that everyone playing D&D is roughly half my age. Everyone was polite and friendly and upbeat.

Then the GM walked through the whole process of creating characters with us, explaining how everything worked on Roll20. It was more like a work training seminar than a game there for the first couple of hours, which is exactly what was expected and what I wanted.

I made a plain old Dwarf Fighter. The others made a Rogue, a Wizard, and … a Sorcerer I think? I wasn’t really sure. If I ever do this again, I need to be more militantly disciplined about writing down names and races and classes. (Roll20 didn’t seem to have any easy way for me to find out who or what the other members of my party were, which seemed a bit silly. Using Discord, it was somewhat difficult to mentally connect the sounds of the voices talking to the characters on the map.)

After making characters, we went through a teeny tiny homebrew (presumably) scenario where we were thrown into a classic locked room and told to do some stuff to get out. It was awkward at first but it got a little smoother toward the end. None of us really knew what to do so the GM had to prod us a lot, which I imagine is normal for new tabletop groups who don’t know each other or anything about each others' expectations. The scenario didn’t make any narrative sense, but it didn’t matter. It was like a contrived tutorial quest before a game starts, where you just get a small taste of how a tabletop game works, and in that capacity it worked fine. Some NPC interactions, some combat, some rat-throwing, the usual stuff.

The heroic efforts of my Dwarven Fighter included shooting an elemental with a crossbow, expertly throwing a rat into a well (“you’re the Michael Jordan of rat-throwing”), and rolling a natural one on a medicine check when attempting to re-assemble two halves of a bisected corpse, resulting in their mis-aligned body screaming in agonizing torture for the rest of the session. It was funny. You had to be there.

The whole session lasted about four hours–wait, no, five hours–which was an incredibly long time for me to be at a computer, and about two hours longer than I expected. Fortunately there were a couple of breaks and I used my wireless headset so I could move around and stretch and mute at will. It wasn’t as hard on my back as I feared it might be.

I’m certainly not in any position to evaluate dungeon masters, but I thought he did pretty well, and he actually complimented us on being the best group of players he’d had in a while. I mean he probably says that to all the players, but I thought it was a decent group of players too. Everyone was polite and seemed to enjoy themselves. Just regular folk, all of whom had a decent understanding of the intangibles that make group voice communication tolerable (which is really just one thing: don’t talk over top of other people). I don’t know if I’d want to sign on for a six year campaign with them, because I think we were all different player archetypes, but it was fun enough for one night.

After It Was Over I went to bed almost immediately after it was over because I was up way past my bed time. I felt relatively good about myself for taking a chance on something and actually enjoying myself. I was somewhat stunned that it went so well, no catastrophes at all.

The next morning I woke feeling like I’d made a horrible mistake and did everything wrong and embarrassed and humiliated myself. But, you know, that’s normal for me. It takes time for my brain to process and sort these things out.

What I Learned I’m not particularly great at role playing, certainly not in the company of strangers, but I’m a lot better at it now than I was when I was twelve. I got the impression that the idea of a dwarven fighter who was ostracized from his clan because he just wants to live in the woods and paint was a lot funnier to me than anyone else.

The fact that everyone’s microphone comes in at different volume levels and there’s no way to adjust it on the receiving end drives me literally insane. In the future I’m going to have to investigate to see if there’s any way to deal with that.

As for Roll20 as a technical product, it’s pretty cool but it seems a bit janky compared to what I’d expect from a web site in 2022. But, you know, it’s free. (It’s also riddled with ads for upgrading to non-free subscription plans.)

Would I do it again? Probably. I think I stumbled into the optimal strategy: If I decide I want to play on a Saturday, look for a one-shot game on Friday.

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Musing about the essential ingredients that go into a hall-of-fame RPG as I finally begin to replay The Witcher 3.

The greatest RPGs of all time? (Computer RPGs, that is.) Dungeons of Daggorath on a TRS-80 with cassette tape saving. The original Bard’s Tale on an Amiga. Baldur’s Gate on PC. The Mass Effect trilogy. Dark Souls, et al.

The Witcher 3?

More than a few people would hold up The Witcher 3 as the best RPG of all time. I certainly would have voted for it to go into the RPG Hall of Fame. But I haven’t played it since it came out in 2015.

Until now.

Long ago, in 2018, after the arrival of the Netflix series of the same name, I started a project to replay (and record, obviously, so I never have to play them again) all three Witcher games. I got through The Witcher fairly quickly, finishing it (for the first time, it turns out, because I never completed it before) in a month.

Then I started The Witcher 2. That one took four years to get through. Only just this past weekend, I finally got to the credits (again).

The Witcher 1 and 2 are terrible games. Let’s just put it out there. They’re full of janky gameplay that’s actively hostile to the player. You think Elden Ring is punishing? Try playing a game where you can’t pick up flowers without having to do inventory management every ten steps.

Thank god for mods. Combat in The Witcher 1 by default is ridiculously hard (or at least incomprehensible), so I patched out most of it. By the end of The Witcher 2, I had installed mods to remove all inventory management and a god-mode cheat so I could beat every monster in one swing. The combat in The Witcher 2 is an improvement over the first game, but let’s just say it’s not very satisfying. And still incomprehensible. It just gets in the way.

The point is that I finally got to the point where I could install The Witcher 3 again–which was my goal all along–for the long-awaited replay of one of my favorite games of 2015. It would have been my only favorite game of 2015, if I hadn’t played Dark Souls soon afterwards. (The combat system in The Witcher 3, it turns out, was the gateway drug that made the combat system in Dark Souls click for me.)

I’ve played less than an hour so far, but The Witcher 3 starts out … well, not great, unfortunately. It screams out “janky old game” right away. In 2022, every third person action RPG control system handles the same way, more-or-less, because all games use one of a small handful of licensed game engines now. In 2015, it was still a free-for-all, the waning days of game studios writing their own game engines. REDengine ~~2~~ 3 was a little on the bad side, by today’s standards.

What Makes A Great RPG? With so many people, including me, categorizing The Witcher 3 as one of the best RPGs of all time, I asked myself, what exactly makes an RPG fantastic? I’m mostly talking about single-player RPGs here, excluding things like MMOs and MMORPGs. (Though it’s largely the same for me, personally.)

I like repeatable scientific measurements, so I listed out some possibilities. Some criteria that I, at least, judge an RPG on. I’m sure there are many more, these are just the ones that spring to my mind within the timeframe of writing this.

Story. Is the story interesting?
World-Building. Does the story take place in an interesting world?
Character Creation. Can you make an interesting character to explore the world?
Exploration. Can you uncover interesting things in the world?
Dialog Choices. Can your character make interesting narrative decisions when talking to NPCs?
Character Progression Choices. Can you make interesting decisions in building your character up over time? In the form of skills and equipment, that is.
Gameplay. Is the minute-to-minute gameplay interesting?
Sound Design. Is the game interesting to listen to? I often underestimate how much this factors into my view of a game.
User Interface. Is the game easy to interact with? Is it so easy that it’s transparent. A very important and often-overlooked ingredient in a great game.

My enjoyment of an RPG depends a lot on how the game implements those different ingredients. A great game doesn’t have to have all of those things, but how it adjusts the dials on a theoretical RPG control panel certainly affects my experience of a game. I can still enjoy an RPG if some of the dials are off, but a “great” RPG would have to have many of those dials turned up to 11, as it were.

But I think, in the end, the most important requirement for an RPG to make it into the Pantheon of Greatest RPGs Of All Time is this: Immersion. When I sit down to play the game, am I magically transported to another world? That’s the hardest thing for any game to accomplish, and very few manage it. It’s usually a combination of all those other attributes and some intangible qualities that nobody can define or predict.

Evaluating Games Elden Ring? Exploration and Gameplay and Character Progression and World-Building. But not much Story. At least not in a traditional narrative sense (it’s mostly backstory). But it ended up with an Immersion setting of not just 11, but somewhere in the range of 47. For me, at least. Probably on the strength of the Gameplay and Exploration. And Character Progression.

My memory of The Witcher 3 is that it has Story and World-Building and Exploration and Dialog Choices, but it’s light on the Character Progression and Gameplay, and no Character Creation since you’re always playing Geralt (except that one time you aren’t). But I remember a high level of Immersion on the strength of the voice acting and world design. It’ll be interesting to see how much the older-game-jank interferes with that. The biggest obstacle to immersion for me is usually the game itself getting in the way of the world, usually in the form of a poor user interface (which almost always stems from inventory management in RPGs).

The Mass Effect series should be in the RPG Hall of Fame. It has the Story and World-Building and Dialog Choices in spades. Luckily so, because it definitely lacks in the Gameplay and User Interface department, especially that first one.

Dungeons of Daggorath is from a time before computer RPGs existed, so it doesn’t have very much going for it. But at the time, it definitely had Gameplay and Exploration. And Sound Design, believe it or not. It didn’t have a health bar, it had a heartbeat sound. The faster your heart beat, the closer you were to death.

The first Bard’s Tale is but a distant memory to me now, but the one thing I still remember is drawing out all the maps on graph paper, so it definitely had Exploration and World-Building and Gameplay.

As an example of an RPG I wouldn’t put in the Hall of Fame, I struggle a lot with Greedfall, which is essentially the same template of game as The Witcher 3, and far less janky. It has Story and World-Building and Exploration and Dialog Choices. But for some reason it’s never clicked with me and the Immersion level is pretty low. I think it’s because the character we play isn’t all that compelling to me, and colonial settings in general aren’t that interesting to me, so it undermines my immersion in an otherwise perfectly fine game.

It’s a pretty subjective measuring system, now that I think about.

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I think it’s about time to write that followup post to my first impressions about Elden Ring. Somewhat of a correction, because my first impression didn’t give the right impression.

Yes, it’s finally here. The post that I’ve been drafting for months, about the only gaming topic of interest to me for the past several months.

I’ve been waiting until I finished Elden Ring to post this, but I’m not sure I ever will finish the game. I’ve been playing every day (except one) since February 26th, over three full months as I publish this, and have only just begun to see the inevitable burnout that drives me away from games. Unfortunately, I see no other games on the market that look interesting, so I continue to play Elden Ring until something else comes along.

I’ve seen the ending credits (I brought a thousand years of night to the land… oops), but I just keep right on finding new places and new things to see every day I log in. It’s the most massive single-player game I’ve ever seen in all my years of gaming. I’ve played numerous MMORPGs that have much smaller areas to explore.

Game of the Year Elden Ring is definitely the game of the year for me. It’s impossible to imagine a single-player RPG of deeper immersion that’s made specifically for my exact type of gamer profile. I haven’t heard of any upcoming games this year that might even come close to this threshold. Anything I play after Elden Ring this year is probably going to be a huge let down.

In fact, I tried to play Ghost of Tsushima on the PS5 for a few days to wean myself off of Elden Ring and it’s just … boring. Really, really boring. Maybe it’ll click with me later, because it’s a game I thought would be perfect for me. But I just can’t right now. It’s so much staring at the screen doing nothing. I had a similar experience starting Horizon Forbidden West, too. They’re perfectly fine games, but that’s just it, they’re just … you know, okay. It’s like watching reruns of a 90s sitcom after finishing Broadchurch. Why would you play a game that’s just okay when you can play a game that’s fantastic. It’s a question I constantly ask of the gaming community, which seems perfectly content to keep consuming games that are just okay.

I can’t say if Elden Ring will stand up as the game of the decade, but it’s certainly among the top two that springs to mind so far (the other being The Last of Us, Part 2).

I can’t remember the last game that kept me 100% captivated and wanting to log in every day–not just wanting to log in, but dying to log in–for three months. It was probably the last From Software game, to be honest. And not only did I want to log in, but every time I logged in, I found something new to discover. I wasn’t just repeating some daily chore for three months, which is the standard mainstream game design these days.

I certainly can’t remember the last MMORPG that kept me wanting to log in every day for three months. Remember when we thought an MMORPG that only lasted three months was a failure? Har har. For me, it’s two or three weeks tops before putting it away to wait for the next expansion. New World lost its charm in a single week. Lost Ark turned into a repetitive slog in mere days.

Elden Ring isn’t perfect, of course, because no game ever is. There’s some repetition in content after a while. The buildings and caves and even bosses start to look the same over time. There’s a list of things I don’t particularly like and even some things I hate with a burning passion, which I’ll get into down below.

Open World I still stand by my initial assessment that adding an “open world” to the Souls formula isn’t really an improvement. It’s just a minor diversion and mainly something to ride through as fast as possible. But what I’ve learned in the last three months of game time is that there isn’t as much open world as I initially feared, and you don’t need to engage with it as much as I feared. In fact, it’s one of the least annoying open world systems that I’ve seen since the explosion of this kind of gameplay.

In most games, “open world” means you can go anywhere, but you can’t really go anywhere until you reach some arbitrary level thresholds (it’s the same in most MMORPGs). You can’t start that quest on the other side of the map until you’re level 25 or 35 or whatever, even if you make it there. So you spend most of your time doing time-consuming tasks in the places you’re supposed to go to reach those thresholds before you can continue in the areas you want to go.

You could end up spending what feels like 75% of your game time just wandering around doing “filler material” in a typical open world game. (Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey are two recent examples that spring to mind.) The main story of the game–the part you want to see–turns out to be fairly short, but you have to spend most of your game time gaining experience points to reach those arbitrary thresholds, engaging over and over again with gameplay that honestly isn’t that great. It’s mostly wasted time, an artificial extension of the length of the game to make it “feel” bigger, without having to expend the development effort to actually make it bigger.

In Elden Ring, the amount of time wandering around is fairly short. Almost without fail, just about the time I started to think, “Okay, I’m wandering around doing nothing except picking flowers and looking for something new, this is starting to waste my time,” that’s when I stumble upon something interesting that directs the remainder of my game session.

I almost always logged in knowing what I was going to do next, because I was usually in the middle of something. Which is a big contrast to most open world games, where you log in almost every day and think, “Okay what do I do? I need to get 10 more levels before I can do the main story that I want to do, which is probably going to take another 10 hours of game time, so I guess I’ll turn on a Netflix show and grind out levels because it’ll be quite a while before the good part returns.”

That never happens in Elden Ring. You can do the main story (“story” isn’t really the right word for Elden Ring though… it’s more like one very, very long “quest”) from start to finish uninterrupted, from the moment you enter the game … if you know where to go and what to do and how to do it without getting killed. There’s never any “down time.” You never have to stop what you’re doing and farm, grind, or level up before you can proceed.

You may choose to farm or grind or level up, because you may find the places you want to go are pretty hard. But you get to make the choice of whether to try the hard thing, or try a different thing, or spend all evening killing rats that respawn around a bonfire to gain levels.

There are some exceptions here and there. There are a handful of gates that require you to meet some condition before proceeding, the most obvious early gate being one Margit the Fell Omen. (Although, as I learned much later, even that isn’t really a gate, technically, because you can simply walk around Stormveil Castle.) But the condition is never arbitrary, like “get to level 20.” The condition is always something concrete like “kill this dude.” It doesn’t matter when or how you do it. You can do it at level 10 or level 100, in a solo no-hit grudge match for days or co-op with friends in seconds.

Launch Excellence So, Elden Ring is more than just good enough. It’s a great game, well worth a game of the year title.

Even if it isn’t your cup of tea, which I can certainly understand. From Software games definitely aren’t for everyone. Somewhere I wrote a post, or maybe I only thought about writing a post, about how From Software games probably only appeal to people with very specific personality traits. They don’t have mainstream appeal, no matter how much they might try to sell them as such. Each successive game inches slightly closer to that mainstream center-line, but they’re still a long way away from it.

Still, they should be endlessly praised for delivering a quality product at launch time. It’s a miracle in this day and age of endless shovelware copycat games and business-driven exploitative lootbox games that there’s still at least one game studio out there who knows how to design, build, and release a great game, in perfect working order, on launch day. I have no idea how they do it time and time again.

Actually that’s not true, I do know how. They don’t really update their game engine. They mainly just copy what they did last time into each new game, only making new maps and slight iterations each time … which, honestly, I’m fine with, because the formula works. I commented on this quite often during my playthrough: Elden Ring is basically a greatest hits compilation of every previous Soulsborne game. If they just made DLC for their existing games for the rest of their lives I’d be perfectly happy with that.

It’s not the best Souls game though. That’s probably Dark Souls 1 or Dark Souls 3 or maybe Bloodborne. I would have preferred a more confined path of progression, as seen in those other games. More of having to go through obstacles rather than around them, if you will.

Whatever Happened to GRRM Incidentally, it was extremely rare during my playthrough that I ever thought, “Oh, this must be where George R. R. Martin contributed something.” His contributions, whatever they might have been, were largely a non-factor the entire game. There were only a couple of times I thought that something reminded me of Game of Thrones in passing. (Honestly, there was stuff in the older games that reminded me of Game of Thrones, too. Mostly dialog.)

What I Didn’t Like And in the category of things that I don’t like about Elden Ring–things that make it an imperfect game: I think From Software has completely lost their way on designing boss fights. Some of the boss fights are… hrm, what’s the word… ridiculous? Yeah, ridiculous. I said that I lot while I was playing. “This is ridiculous.” And other less kind things that I mostly tried to cut out of my videos.

A staple of previous games was being able to approach boss fights as a tactical dance, where the boss would make their moves, you’d study their patterns, spot the boss’s weaknesses, then defeat it with a surgical application of your character’s combat toolset. It was an intellectual exercise, in other words, not a game of reflexes.

That was mostly gone in my first playthrough of Elden Ring. The typical boss fight was less an intellectual exercise in problem-solving and tactics, and more a period of time hoping random rotten bad luck wouldn’t strike for a sufficiently long-enough time to get through it. It was mostly just Hulk Smash brute force your way through them. The best strategy almost always boiled down to: Hit with as much damage as you can, as fast as you can, before you inevitably get killed (or more accurately, before your overpowered Mimic Tear gets killed).

There were many times when I thought an area was made by Internet trolls instead of game designers. Many parts of Crumbling Farum Azula, for example, which was one of my least favorite areas of the game. Perhaps made by people who thought that the best part about Dark Souls–the defining feature, the thing that made Dark Souls great and memorable–was that one spot in Anor Londo where you had to tightrope across the buttresses and ledges at a full sprint to get past the Silver Knight Greatbow Archers. Me? I thought that was frustrating as hell, and dragged the overall game down.

In games, there are challenges that you overcome where you feel good about yourself for meeting the challenge, and there are challenges that you overcome where you’re just relieved that the pain is over. Many of the challenges in the first half of Elden Ring are the former kind, and that’s what previous From Software games are known for and what distinguishes them from most other “Souls-likes.” But there’s more than a few of the latter kind in Elden Ring, particularly in the second half of the game. More than I’d like to see, and seemingly more than previous games. They’ve gone much too far in trying to “one up” the difficulty of their previous games.

It seemed like they were trying to cater more to the “no-hit challenge run” player base than, you know, the majority of their player base.

To me, it’s a degradation in design quality, an erosion of the barrier that separates From Software games from the bargain bin of mediocre Souls-likes. So many Souls-likes (and players, frankly) think that merely making challenges ridiculously hard is the essential ingredient that makes something “Souls-like.” So hard that the only way to get past it is to keep throwing yourself at it for hours on end until that one time you get lucky. That’s the absolute worst kind of boss fighting, in my opinion, and Elden Ring itself now falls into that knock-off Souls-like trap, too.

Boss fighting is only supposed to be hard until you practice sufficiently, then you should be able to beat the boss on the first try every single time. I’ve made this analogy before: Fighting a new boss in a Souls-like, for me, is supposed to feel like learning to play a new piece of music on an instrument. I didn’t get that feeling much in Elden Ring boss fights: I only got the feeling that each boss fight had a random outcome, regardless of how well or how badly I played.

Anyway, I hope they change directions for the next game.

Replayability Despite that, I’m sure I’ll be replaying the game again, if not immediately, than in future years. This is another From Software game, like most of the Soulsborne games (except Sekiro), with virtually unlimited replayability options, making it one of the highest values in the industry in terms of time-played-versus-money-spent.

Offhand I can think of at least two different character styles I want to try. I spread out my stat points all across the board on my first character, which made my character versatile but not particularly good at anything, which became a massive handicap toward the end of the game.

I definitely want to try a more Faith-based character. In my first playthrough, my Faith stat stayed at 6 the entire time from beginning to end, rendering even the simplest of Faith-based game elements unreachable to me. And there were seemingly a lot of Faith skills and weapons, particularly toward the end of the game, where they seemed to rain down on you like candy.

I also want to try a beefy tank character, one that wears heavy armor and brandishes a greatshield. There are tons of greatshields in Elden Ring, but my first character couldn’t use any of them. My character’s poise was non-existent the entire game, and I kept getting interrupted and staggered and knocked down in combat all the time. It would be nice to not have to endure that. I don’t know if it’s possible to have all enemy attacks just bounce off of you like you could do in Dark Souls (probably not, for weird historical reasons–From Software didn’t think that was a “valid” play style), but it would be fun to try.

And of course my usage of sorceries was very limited with my first character. I mainly used the starting spell Magic Glintblade the entire time from start to finish, it was one of the best spells available to me. (Toward the end of the game I abandoned Sorceries completely and stuck with Dexterity-based weapons.)

And I’d like to try using bows more. And I used only one Spirit Ash for most of the game (the objectively best one–you know the one I mean), so I’d like to try some others. And of course there are seemingly hundreds of different weapons to use, each with their own unique combat style. And, and, and. There are just so many radically different playstyle possibilities in every From Software game, and Elden Ring makes more available than any other. It’s mind-boggling how much is packed into this one game.

And I just found and installed and tested an Elden Ring mod that randomizes the locations of all the items and enemies. Hours more fun for the whole family! Well, just me, probably.

P. S. Almost all of the writing I’ve done in the last few months has been the nearly 20,000 words of descriptions for the 250 videos I recorded of my first playthrough, which is currently uploading, two videos per day, to my channel. Thank god it’s all automated.

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Stormveil Castle and Goderick the Grafted.

Boss fights that take 72 tries to win present a unique challenge in the area of YouTube video production. It’s not terribly practical to release a three-plus-hour video episode with all 72 fights in it, though from my perspective, that would, in fact, be the easiest path.

Unfortunately I like to make videos that I would want to watch, and three hours of boss fights isn’t that. That pulse-pounding boss fight music is great for five minutes but not for three hours. It gets tiresome even after 10 minutes. I’ve tried multitudinous options for boss fight videos in the past, from only including the first couple and then the last, to death-only montages, to just throwing out everything except the winning fight, to various combinations thereof.

The current strategy I’ve devised for these repeated boss fight efforts is to get a frame grab of every “YOU DIED” screen and make a slideshow out of them. It’s the best I can come up with for 72 fights that’s still somewhat practical for me to do in a relatively short amount of time. And I can make annoying animated GIFs out of them too!

With some creative audio editing underneath of it, it’s not half bad.

Stormveil Castle Previously: Part 7

With Margit the Fell Omen out of the way, I can finally enter Stormveil Castle, which has been sitting up there looming over Limgrave the entire time I’ve been playing. (I say “finally” but it’s actually only been four days since I started playing.)

Stormveil Castle, which I keep calling Stormview Castle

Stormveil Castle is a major shift in gameplay. It turns back into a standard Dark Souls game. There’s no open world inside the castle, no going around the obstacles. I have to go through them, inching my way forward from Gracebonfire to Gracebonfire with each and every enemy trying to stop me, until I reach the final boss. It’s a pitched battle of my experience and problem-solving skills versus the game designers' tricksy traps, secrets, and puzzles.

It’s a glorious time, this week I spend in Stormveil Castle, my favorite part so far, by far. It’s a delicious steak meal prepared by the finest chef, the level design in this castle is amazing, right up there with the best locations of any other Souls game. This is what I’ve been sorely missing in Elden Ring so far, but unfortunately it’s far too short.

Elden Ring is much better than I initially assessed it to be, but I still would have preferred 60 hours of a Stormveil Castle, instead of 4 or 5 hours of Stormveil Castle, and 30 minutes of Catacombs and camps and caves dotted here and there around the world.

New and Old Friends Inside the castle, I meet a woman named Nepheli Loux in a side room, standing over the corpse of an armored knight she’s just killed, praying, “let the winds lift you to a higher place.” She says she’s there by an order from her father, and would love to help if I’m on my way to fight Goderick.

Sorcerer Rogier

I meet Sorcerer Rogier in person in a little chapel, the NPC I tried to summon a few times to help fight Margit. He says he’s “looking for something in the castle.” This is very exciting, because I think he’s the first NPC who can sell me sorcery spells. Unfortunately, he only sells sorcery-related Ashes of War, but I buy all three anyway. My starting Magic Glintblade spell continues to be my best and only spell. My character isn’t technically a sorcery build per se but I’d still love to have more options.

Lastly, I encounter my old friend the Grafted Scion, the very same monstrosity that killed me in the unwinnable boss fight at the very start of the game. It’s not a boss fight this time, just a regular enemy hanging out in what looks like a butcher shop. I don’t really have to fight him, but vengeance will be mine!

It’s a tough fight, though, because this thing is basically a blender with lots of arms jabbing and slashing sharp things at me, and it takes a lot of tries, but I finally kill it. It’s a hollow victory because it doesn’t drop any rewards, but, more importantly, it doesn’t spawn again.

Near the “butcher shop” I find the “chrysalids” that the Jellyfish Woman was talking about. Apparently it’s her men that she led here “across the sea” that were hacked to bits and left in a pile, used now only as body parts to graft onto the scion (and others). I find a memorial token there that I return to her, and she thanks me, and decides to go to Roundtable Hold to “find her purpose.”

A Grafted Scion

By the time I get to the end of Stormveil Castle, I’m level 27, and I’ve upgraded my Great Epee to +5 (my other weapons are a Glintstone Staff +1 and an Estoc +2, but I rarely use it anymore). Then it’s time to head into that big, obvious yellow fog door at the end, near the Secluded Cell Gracebonfire.

(There’s more in the castle that I haven’t seen yet, places I can see but can’t yet reach, a handful of Stonesword Key doors I can’t open, but I’m ready to move on.)

Equipment-wise, I also picked up a Banished Knight Shield along the way, which is, as far as I can tell, the best shield. It has “no skill” which means you can’t parry, but it also means you can use your charge attack one-handed. Later in the game, when I finally figure out just how powerful the Bloody Slash is, this will be crucial to my character’s path forward.

Goderick the Grafted His reputation preceded him. I’ve been hearing about him for days: A demigod, one of the offspring of Queen Marika, bearer of the Great Rune I need to unlock all the doors in Roundtable Hold. Varre told me he’s “decrepit,” but that he has a “new toy” and to “prepare for the worst.”

But there’s really no way to prepare for a boss fight. You equip what you think might help, based on clues lying around the game, but in the end you go through the yellow fog door completely blind, having no idea what might be on the other side.

It’s one of the most exciting times in a Souls games, actually, going through that fog door for the first time. Will I get to see a cool cut scene? Will I get smashed into a bloody pulp and die in seconds? Hilarious! Will it turn out to be way easier than I thought and I worried for nothing? What a let down! Who knows? Anything is possible. I’ve seen a lot of boss fights from From Software, and somehow they always seem to find new curve balls to throw at me.

In this case, there is a cool cut scene, and I don’t die immediately to Goderick the Grafted. I stay back and try to watch him for a while, testing different things to see if any good ideas present themselves. I die eventually, though, when I ran out of healing flasks. I come out of that first try with the brilliant strategy: “Don’t get hit.”

Nepheli Loux

On the second try, I summoned Nepheli Loux to help. She did ask to help, after all. I figured it might be one of those situations where the NPC’s quest line advances if they help with the boss (like Dark Souls 2, I think).

Nepheli uses a lot of cool lightning attacks, and, together, we get into Goderick’s second phase (which triggered another cool and somewhat disturbing cut scene). Not surprisingly, as I’m learning is the standard in Elden Ring, Goderick’s second phase is ridiculous, not just a little harder than the first phase, but orders of magnitude harder.

And then, as is also the standard with summoning NPC help in Souls boss fights, Nepheli dies about 75% of the way through, leaving me alone with more-hit-points Goderick in his super-charged fire-breathing dragon phase. I die almost immediately when he turns his attention on me. I give up on summoning Nepheli pretty quickly. It’s counter-intuitive, but the boss fights are often easier when you don’t summon NPC help.

And so the war of attrition begins. It starts on Thursday night, and continues into Friday (a day I happen to have off from work), for a total of four hours. It’s a typical boss fight: Learning how to recognize and respond to each one of Goderick’s dozen or so different attacks in a way that doesn’t kill me, learning when it’s safe to get in and hit him, learning when it’s more prudent to stay away. Going back to my piano analogy, it’s like learning to play a new song.

Hookclaws

Somewhere along the way, on a lark, I try out the Hookclaws I picked up early in the castle. I like them: They’re very fast duel-wielding Wolverine claws that do bleed damage, far different from the Estoc and Great Epee, and they suit my Dexterity-leaning character. They worked quite well against many enemies in the castle. But will they work in a boss fight? Probably not.

Except they do. They work very well, in fact, and make short work of Goderick in his first phase.

In his second phase, however, it’s a different story. The bleed damage doesn’t trigger nearly as often.

I was debating how to shift my weaponry around for the next try, so that I could do more damage in the second phase, when, on the sixtieth try, I accidentally beat Goderick the Grafted.

I’m mostly just going through the motions in this second phase, counting how many times I have to hit Goderick in a row before the bleed damage triggers. I get to twenty three before the big spike in damage. I don’t really notice that it takes him down to about 15% of his health left. I back far away from Goderick, thinking I need to switch weapons because the Hookclaws are ineffective now, but it would be suicide to open my inventory in the middle of the fight, and my staff is the only other weapon I have equipped. I blast Goderick from range a bunch of times with the Magic Glintblade, but I don’t think it will do much because I previously determined magic wasn’t very effective against him.

Goderick the Grafted

Except it is, and I notice for the first time that Goderick is almost dead. He only has a little bit of health left. I could kill him with just a few hits from the Hookclaws, if I could just get back into melee range. It’s risky, because in the second phase, approaching Goderick is dangerous. But I’m very lucky. Goderick starts into an attack that does a circle of fire damage around his feet, and it lets me run all the way up to him in relative safety. I hit him a few times while he’s winding up for his next attack and that’s it. He’s dead.

I’m stunned. It’s a somewhat anti-climactic ending to the battle. I feel like it’s mainly luck that got me through this fight, and not any particularly great strategy or tactics. I had almost given up on it. When I started counting the number of times it took for the Hookclaws to do bleed damage, I was mentally preparing for the next fight, having no expectation of getting through this one.

Weirdly, it doesn’t say GREAT ENEMY FELLED this time. I mean, I thought he was a demigod. But I get Goderick’s Great Rune and a Remembrance of Goderick, and these are things I need to take to Roundtable Hold to get into the secret back room.

Which I do. I won’t go into about what’s there, but let’s just say I thought all this talk about “the Two Fingers” was a metaphor.

The Other Side Getting to the other side of Stormveil Castle opens up so, so much of the world of Elden Ring. In these eight posts I’ve described perhaps 2% of the game I’ve actually seen. After Stormveil Castle, you can go almost anywhere, in any direction and any order. It’s a staggering amount of area to cover, looking for clues and secrets and NPCs and any other interesting things to uncover.

But that’s a tale for another day, because I’m going to wind down these posts. It’s turned into more work than fun to write, and I feel like I’ve accomplished my mission anyway.

As I write this, my character is level 47 and I’ve only reached the second of the five demigods (haven’t beaten him yet). Steam says I’ve played for 90 hours, although the play time for my current character is actually 75 hours, but if you discount the time I was just sitting idle, it’s probably more like 70 hours. I’m seriously starting to wonder if there even is an end to this game.

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I don’t want to write this, because it will make it real.

My old black-and-white-with-a-spot-of-brindle beagle-hound mix Bella, who I always called Bellies, because she liked to have her belly rubbed, died at 5 o’clock this morning. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, because her health had been declining for some time, but she’d been doing a little better the past week and I thought maybe she’d last through the summer.

I adopted her from a nearby county rescue, the runt of three sisters who bullied her. She was the only one of the three who sat politely. She’s the first dog I raised from a near-puppy. I taught her to lie down and it was weirdly one of the proudest moments of my life. But most of the time she had the typical stubborn beagle disposition.

I never felt like I deserved to have such a loyal companion, who was always there every time I turned around for some 13 years, always letting me know if something was amiss inside or outside the house. I did the best I could to give her a decent life.

I buried her in the back yard by the woods where the deer are always roaming back and forth, so she can finally be close to them.

I turned off comments because I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m fine, the cat is fine, but I, at least, am pretty exhausted.

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Settling into a routine.

I looked around and noticed that what’s missing from the blogosphere is a narrative telling of playing Elden Ring that ignores the “controversies” and highlights why voluntarily subjecting oneself to the difficult learning curve of a Souls game is fun for some people.

Major spoilage of game surprises ahead.

Before I get into the story, to give people who might have accidentally clicked on this a chance to leave before I reveal the shocking secrets that you just won’t believe are in Elden Ring (not really), a quick further word on the input delay I’ve been experiencing.

I got out my phone and recorded video of myself pressing the dodge button/spacebar, with the monitor in view to show the character’s movement. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other people doing videos like that too.) I loaded that video into an editor and determined with all the scientific precision that is possible with a 30fps phone camera and cheap consumer video editing software that some 3-5 frames elapse between the time I release the button and the time the character moves.

I then went to do the same thing in Dark Souls 3 to show beyond a shadow of a doubt that Elden Ring is broken beyond repair and … it’s also in Dark Souls 3. The exact same delay. Which more-or-less renders all my complaining moot. It must be intentional, or else somehow there’s a 100-150ms delay in the output coming out of my graphics card’s DisplayPort. Amusingly, there was also an uproar about input delay in the community when Dark Souls 3 came out.

Gathering Strength Previously: Part 6

After defeating the Bloodhound Knight Darriwil, I’m able to level up to 14. I now commence a coordinated tactical campaign of wandering around wherever, an extremely non-Souls-like experience. I have no particular goals, except to find equipment or upgrade materials or just information.

The first of the equipment arrives when I clear out a camp near Agheel Lake South and fetch a Great Épée from a chest. It’s another word from Elden Ring that’s hard to type on an American keyboard, and also, it turns out, hard for me to pronounce, having never had to do so before in my many decades of life on this planet.

I can use the Great Épée two-handed, but don’t have enough Strength to use it one-handed. I’m excited that I might be able to upgrade from a smaller damage weapon to a bigger damage weapon that maintains the pointy stabby theme I’ve been using on this character to date, and all of that puts me one step further along the path to beating Margit.

I also pick up a Kaiden helmet and put it on, covering my Prisoner’s face in a different helmet, this one with a tassle on top. And I change into some ratty noble attire I picked up, so I have a cape now. (My character isn’t strong enough to wear more than basic cloth armor, so this is probably my endgame attire.)

Next, since I have a proper blocking shield now, I go back to fight the Tree Sentinel again. And this time I beat it.

Oh, it took some time, and some luck. The shield definitely helped, but what really helped was spending the time learning when and how to dodge his AOEs in the second phase, and accidentally discovering that if you press up against his right leg, against the stirrup, he can’t hit you when he swings that big halberd around. I ended up going two-handed with the Estoc and hitting him as fast and frequently as possible. It was a close scrape, and at the end I had no healing and little health and almost died, but luckily I was able to kill him with a final hit before he killed me. I got a completely useless Golden Halberd as a reward. (It requires way more Strength than I’ll ever have.) But it looks cool.

The Tree Sentinel's Golden Halberd

I visit the Jellyfish Woman again. She asks me to pass along a message to her chrysalis friends. Again, I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I assure her that I will, if I ever get into Stormveil Castle.

I clear out another camp and am rewarded with a Beast Crest Heater Shield, which would have saved me some 1500 runes if I’d found it before buying that Heater shield.

I find the Deathtouched Catacombs, and clear it out, defeating the Black Knife Assassin on the first try with magic. It’s a weird fight and he never tried to attack me. There’s probably a story there, but I don’t know what it is yet. (Incidentally this is why that statue didn’t do anything from my first post: I found the Catacombs before I found the statue, and the statues become inert once you open their corresponding Catacomb door.)

Up at the top of a cliff, I find a big talking clay pot stuck in a hole. This is the “warrior jar” Alexander the Iron Fist, and he’s on his way to Redmane Castle to the East.

Wandering around the northern stretches of Limgrave, I’m invaded by Recusant Henricus, an NPC who tried to smash me to death with a gigantic exploding fire mace. I killed him instead. Barely. (This NPC’s name is tremendously confusing to me, because, as a Virginia resident, the town of Henricus is very familiar to me.)

Recusant Henricus

Further to the West, I encounter a field of what looks like old Steampunk parts for giants, and I’m attacked by a Guardian Golem. I take his massive Golem Halberd as a prize. In another place, I find a graveyard filled with floating jellyfish and skeletons clawing their way out of the ground. I have to kill them twice. I find another Evergaol, this one containing a Crucible Knight. That fight is obviously out of my weight class. After three tries, I leave and save it for later. By this time in the game, I’m fully aware that almost all of the bosses are optional, and I’m just not in the mood for that foolishness right now.

After Saturday’s wandering adventures, my Prisoner is level 17. At the end of the day, I try to fight Margit the Fell Omen again. I try for about an hour and fourty-five minutes. My best effort takes him down to about 20% of his health remaining. I tried solo, I tried summoning Sorcerer Rogier, I tried summoning Spirit Companions, I tried magic, I tried two-handing the Great Épeé, I tried it with shield blocking. I simply can’t survive very long in his second phase without tons of luck.

Sunday The next day I start by attacking the Flying Dragon Agheel. Did I mention the dragon? A dragon flew down from the sky and landed in the middle of Agheel Lake. I ran away before, but this time I run straight toward him to see how hard it is. It’s got to be easier than Margit!

Flying Dragon Agheel

I can’t ascertain the relative difficulty compared to Margit, but it’s definitely not easy. I died, and left after one try. Another optional boss, the only reason to fight him is so that I can say on the Internet that I beat him, for that sweet, sweet Internet gamer cred. (He probably drops some kind of useful reward, too, but there’s at least a 50% chance I won’t be able to use it, based on game experience so far.)

I feel like I’ve visited most of the territory on the visible map now, so I head East into unknown territory. I find Haight Manor, and the Mistwood, and a Minor Erdtree.

I find a big structure with an elevator inside. It goes down, and down, and down, until it seems it can’t possibly go down any further, and then it goes down some more, and I end up in an entire underground city which is cool as heckballs. The land above ground is enormous, but apparently there’s a whole other map below ground, too. I’ve seen a number of MMORPGs with smaller land mass than this game has.

I poke around this Siofra River Well for a while but it’s obvious that it’s going to be a herculean healing flask-eating slog for my level 17 character, so I leave again. I shall return! (Coincidentally, as I write this two Sundays later, an NPC asked me to go back to this same place to explore, for reasons unknown.)

Siofra River Well Depths

Returning to the surface, I find an NPC named Kenneth Haight, the great Kenneth Haight, I should say. Apparently he’s next in line to rule Limgrave. He wants me to rid his manor of some hooligans who have taken up residence there, and promises to knight me on completing the task, even though I’m but a lowly Tarnished.

I clear out his manor, and unbeknownst to me, I will find by far the most important and game-changing item I’ve found so far: The Ash of War called Bloody Slash. Unfortunately I won’t realize the sea-changing significance of this particular Ash of War until much, much later, after I’m well beyond Stormveil Castle. (I also find half of an important medallion in the manor.) [Update 3/17: I just read they nerfed the Bloodly Slash in patch 1.03.]

Anyway, it turns out Kenneth doesn’t knight me. He bemoans the state of his manor, and claims he needs to find someone to rule his lands, or something like that. I leave him to his misery, where he remains to this day.

Continuing to wander, I find a pair of giants pulling a huge carriage that looks like a funeral procession. I actually fell off a cliff right into the middle of it. I … don’t remember what else I found because my video files for this time period just say “open world.” But during this time I take a lot of screenshots that I’ll use in my first Elden Ring blog post, and toward the end of those undoubtedly exciting open world adventures, in a field full of giants, I’m attacked by a huge Deathbird that flies out of the night sky. It kills me. I try to fight it again, but the sun has risen and it’s gone.

An Artist's Shack

Oh, one thing I remember is finding a nifty bug helmet by identifying the location in a portrait. Scavenger hunts! I normally hate those in games, but if you get a bug helmet out of it, it’s not so bad.

Somewhere during this time period I go back to the Stormroot Catacombs and defeat the Erdtree Burial Watchdog. Remembering my struggles with my initial Hero character, I expect it to be a tough fight, but I wipe it out on the first try with magic Glintblades and barely take a scratch.

I’m now able to level up to 21, and increase my Strength enough to wield the Great Épée one-handed. I’ve been putting all my points into Strength just for this. I’m sure this is what I need to finally beat Margit the Fell Omen–a high damage weapon I can wield in one hand with a shield in the other–so I go back to fight him again.

An hour later, it turns out the Great Épée was not, in fact, the Rosetta Stone I had hoped it would be. My best lucky effort got Margit down to about 10% of his remaining health. Better, but still not quite enough. I’ve done the fight so much now that I’m able to get through his first phase almost unscathed every time, but the speed and intensity of Margit’s second phase attacks still decimate me if I make the slightest mistake.

How Hard Is #EldenRing Watch: So far have spent almost three hours trying to beat the very first progression-blocking boss

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) February 28, 2022

Back to exploring. I head in the direction of some land to the East that has a red tinge to it. I pass Summonwater Village, and encounter an undead boss known as the Tibia Mariner, a ghostly skeletal minion that surfs around in a rowboat. He keeps summoning resurrecting skeleton spearmen to protect him, and it’s a struggle to through them to the Mariner, but I do so on the first try. “That’s a boss fight I can handle,” I remark, still annoyed about my hours of repeated failures against Margit the Fell Omen.

The Tibia Mariner, hanging ten

Near there, I stumble upon an NPC named simply “D.” He tells me to take the Deathroot from the Tibia Mariner to someone or something called the Beast Clergyman. He puts a mark on my map, where I find a portal that teleports me directly to a place called the Bestial Sanctum, where I find the Beast Clergyman in his abode. He eagerly accepts the Deathroots (I have two of them, actually), loudly munches them down with moist masticating sounds, and demands in a growling subwoofer bass voice that I bring him “more death.” He says he’ll grant me “eye and claw,” and I’m rewarded with some Faith spells that I can’t use. It’s all a bit strange, but it seems better to have this Death Clergyman on my side.

Resuming my journey to the red lands, I pass the Smoldering Church, where I’m invaded by Anastasia, Tarnished-Eater, an NPC who appears to be a woman dressed like a nun, wielding what looks like a big meat cleaver. This is the moment when everything in the game changes for me, though I wouldn’t be fully aware of it quite yet.

You see, I’ve finally equipped the Bloody Slash Ash of War on my Great Epee weapon, the one I got clearing out Haight Manor. This is the first time I’m using it, against Anastasia, and it obliterates her in five two-handed charge attack hits. In this moment, I’m merely pleased to see the Bloody Slash seems to works, but I don’t think too much about it at the time.

Anastasia, Tarnished-Eater

It turns out the red area on the map is a new area called Caelid. I make it to a lovely place called the Rotview Balcony, and I stop there, because it looks like a very ugly and dangerous place, particularly the veritable army of walking undead creatures on the road, and that’s where I end the weekend.

Monday Monday it’s back to work, but Monday night I try Margit the Fell Omen again. I try a new approach, and I finally beat him.

I put together two bits of strategy from the previous day. Once, I had an idea to try a full magic assault, switching most of my flasks to mana flasks so I could keep chugging them while spamming magic attacks continuously, hoping, basically, that I could kill Margit before he killed me. It worked better than I expected, but it wasn’t enough.

On Monday night, I allocated my flasks so I had half healing flasks and half mana flasks. I did the first half of the fight with my Great Épée, which I had done enough times by then that I could get through it without taking any damage, preserving my healing flasks.

In the second half, I switched to my staff, stayed out of his melee range, and laid down a machinegun barrage of Glintblades at him. It takes three tries on Monday night, but it works.

And I needed one other puzzle piece to make it work: I summoned the 3 Lone Wolves spirits just as the second phase started to distract Margit while I shifted my equipment around and got into position to attack.

If only I could have used this massive Guardian Golem Halberd.

On the third try, I’m sure I’m not going to win, because I’ve messed up and used up all my healing flasks in the first phase, but I go into the second phase with full health and summon the wolves. They last longer than expected, and serve their purpose of distraction well, giving me uninterrupted time to throw out a lot of damage from range before I have to start thinking about defense.

It’s still a really close fight that comes down to the wire. I’ve got about a third of my health left, but I’ve got Margit down to a sliver of health, and I just need to hit him one more time. Then Margit is staggered! I don’t even know how it happened, but I hear the “thunk” sound and he goes down on one knee for a moment.

I’ve never seen this before in a solo fight with him so I don’t even know what to do, but I’m too far away to run up and get the critical hit on him anyway. Then, just as I’m pressing the button to fire to shoot again, I run out of mana and my character goes into that impossibly long head-scratching “hey, wait, I can’t seem use my staff anymore” animation.

My hands are shaking at this point and I’m terrified I’m going to press the wrong key (I’m using mouse and keyboard). Victory is right there in front of me. I’ve never been this close to winning, on this, the fourth day and 72nd (!!) attempt to beat Margit since I first saw that cut scene. I’m sure I’m going to blow this at the last second.

I drink the mana flask, my last one, and I bring up the Glintblade and fire. Twice, just to be sure. It feels like it takes about six hours. Only one of the spells has to hit him and the fight’s over. But the Glintblade is a slow-firing spell: It puts a little sparkly symbol in the air that has to coalesce for a while, then a missile fires out of the symbol to the target.

The final seconds of a boss fight

So Margit has plenty of time to get up, and he pulls back his big staff to lunge directly at me. It’s the move where he flies all the way across the room right to you. I’ve seen it a million times, I know exactly what to do. I just have to dodge it, and make sure I time it right–not too early and not too late. With trembling fingers, a noticeably laggy dodge mechanic, and everything riding on it: If he hits me, I’ll be dead and I’ll have to start all over again with a 73rd try.

Somehow, miraculously, I dodge the attack. It’s one of those “time slows down” moments, where everything comes into sharp focus. If it were an action movie, it would be that cliché slow motion scene that’s silent except for the loud heartbeat sound in the background. All the effort I’ve put into fighting this guy pays off with one glorious dodge roll. I’m untouched, the Glintblade finally coalesces, fires, and hits Margit in the back as he gets ready to attack again, and he evaporates, leaving nothing behind but a dire warning about worse things to come.

The screen says GREAT ENEMY FELLED, and I’ve finally beaten Margit the Fell Omen, probably one of top 10 hardest bosses I can remember fighting in any Souls game since I started in 2015.

Finally

It feels like kicking a winning goal in overtime in the finals of the World Cup, and in my head I’m sprinting around the field with my arms out doing that airplane thing the footballers always do, with a stadium of fans screaming so loud it distorts all the broadcast microphones. In real life I just kind of gape at the screen in disbelief. My character jogs around in a circle because that’s all I can manage because my hands are shaking so much.

That’s why From Software games are like none other.

Next: Part 8

P.S. In my subsequent time with the game, I’ve found numerous ways to make fighting Margit easier, so I imagine if I ever fight him again, in New Game Plus, for example, or with another character, with the time I spent fighting him the first time plus the new tips and tricks I’ve learned (like the Bloody Slash!), it will be somewhat routine. That’s how Souls games are. The longer you play and the more you practice, the easier it gets. Like playing piano, an analogy I like to use for Souls games.

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An invitation to Roundtable Hold.

Major spoilage of game surprises ahead.

We rejoin our story on Friday night, the second night of playing Elden Ring.

Incidentally I put together a page which lists all the videos I’ve recorded to date, which gives a non-video indicator of where I actually am and the path I’ve taken to get there: Elden Ring progress. It’s generated from a YAML file that will eventually be used by my upload scripts. There could also be spoilers in there, so be warned.

Rethinking The Way Forward Previously: Part 5

Margit the Fell Omen taught me that I needed to upgrade my weapons before even thinking about trying to fight him again. Which means I need to go out into the world and find bosses I can beat, collect runes, and buy upgrades. The Beastman showed me there are defeatable bosses out there, I just have to find them. It’s a daunting task, though, because the map is huge and there are no indicators on where to go.

Well, I take that back: There are indicators of where to go, but they point you directly to bosses like Margit the Fell Omen.

Pondering what to do next, I return to the familiar: I go back to the Stormroot Catacombs and clear it all out again on this character. But I skip the final boss, the Erdtree Burial Watchdog, because I remember my Hero died a lot and, after the Tree Sentinel and Margit, I’ve experienced quite enough failure for one gaming session, thank you very much.

I talk to Melina at a Gracebonfire. She gives some tantalizing clues to an interesting backstory which didn’t really sink in when I first heard it. She’s searching for her purpose, for “why she yet lives, burned and bodiless.” I have no context and don’t know what any of these words mean, but I file it away for later.

I decide to tackle the rolling contraption in the Fringefolk Hero’s Grave again, to see if I can get to the bottom of it (literally and figuratively). But before I even start, Melina has something else to say: She offers to take me to Roundtable Hold.

Roundtable Hold I go, hoping this will be the thing that unlocks whatever it is that’s required to actually beat bosses in Elden Ring. (I actually have no choice on this matter.)

Roundtable Hold

It’s Firelink Shrine again. Or The Nexus, if you will, or The Hunter’s Dream/Oedric Chapel. It’s the central hub that I’ll be returning to again and again between adventures, where many of the NPCs I’ll meet in the game gather (at least I assume so, based on previous games). There’s a blacksmith who can upgrade weapons, which is very useful, because I happen to have the two smithing stones required to upgrade my Estoc to +1.

There’s a cleric who sells Faith spells, which is not useful at all since I only have a 6 Faith score (on this playthrough, at least*). Sadly nobody is selling Intelligence-based spells. There’s a fancy noble-looking guy looking for someone named Lanya, who’s “such a little tomboy.” There’s a scary silent guy leaning against a wall, and there’s a guy in a Magneto helm, who seems annoyed with me. He makes sure I know I’m “just a guest.”

There are creepy Twin Maiden Husks who, despite being motionless husks, somehow sell various interesting weapons, armor, and supplies for characters starting out. (Like a 100% damage reduction Heater shield! And a long bow! Of course I can’t quite afford either at this moment.)

The Twin Husks

There’s a mysterious Deathbed Companion who just wants to hold me, so that I can grant her my “lifely vigor.” She gives me a “Baldichin’s Blessing,” which, as I write this now some two weeks later, I still haven’t used, and offhand I don’t even know what it does [it’s some sort of buff]. But if I need another, she’ll give me one. She tells me a secret, but I don’t understand it, and I have no idea why she’s here or what her story is (yet?).

There are a lot of doors that don’t open, and I won’t find out why until I happen to visit Varré sometime later, back at the First Step Gracebonfire at the start of the game. Varré would explain that the “Two Fingers” in Roundtable Hold won’t grant me an audience until I bring them a “Great Rune,” which, naturally, can only be obtained from Goderick the Grafted, in Stormveil Castle. And I can’t get in there until I get through Margit the Fell Omen. Fantastic.

New Player Tip: Always go back and talk to old NPCs periodically. I actually didn’t get Varré’s straightforward instructions for several days.

Limgrave Exploration Returning from Roundtable Hold, with no other pressing matters to attend to, I resume my trip back down into the Fringefolk Hero’s Grave again, and this time I make it all the way to the bottom. There’s a boss down there: The Ulcerated Tree Spirit. It’s big and scary and my +1 Estoc doesn’t do enough damage to beat it, so I leave.

The Ulcerated Tree Spirit, which killed me on the first hit when I entered.

After that I don’t really know what to do, and it’s getting late on Friday night. I get on Torrent and ride around the Agheel Lake North area, looking for something interesting. I find a telescope, which is interesting, but seems only useful for taking screenshots. (Except I discovered my Steam screenshots weren’t working because I had disabled the Steam overlay for some reason.)

I find the first of what I call “rollee balls,” which drop Ashes of War weapon upgrades or other random goodies. (Elden Ring’s version of crystal lizards.)

I try some horseback fighting against another horse rider. The camera spins like crazy and it makes me dizzy. It kind of stinks too because you have to kill the rider and the horse (although you can let the horse survive, if you target the rider instead of the horse, but that’s harder).

Near a bridge, I stumble upon a talking bush, which is definitely interesting, because it turns out to be a little fellow named Boc. He says he’s going back to a cave that he’s been thrown out of, but he’s afraid to, and working up his courage. (I’m amused to see he looks somewhat like a gray rat, which reminds me of Greirat from Dark Souls 3.) It’ll be a very long time before I find out what became of him and his cave.

Boc, who was a bush moments before.

I end Friday night feeling stumped about what to do, unable to beat most of the bosses I’ve found, and unsure about where to go to resolve that situation. There’s only one area visible on the map–Limgrave West–but it still looks massive, with an overwhelming amount of acreage to cover and no pointers on where to go.

And that’s the end of my second day with Elden Ring.

Day Three Saturday dawns and I put a marker on something that looks like an interesting feature or structure on the map some distance to the southeast of the First Step, and head in that direction. I have no idea what it might be, but it must be something. On the third day I’ve concluded that this is the correct way to play the game: Just wander around until I find something that will be useful in my quest to defeat Margit the Fell Omen and get into Stormveil Castle.

I’ve alternated back and forth on the first two days, but I’m playing with mouse and keyboard today, and I also go ahead and switch to playing offline. I haven’t been reading messages anyway, and I’m tired of all the message graffiti and player ghosts distracting me, and I’d prefer to be maximally surprised by the surprises anyway. The game looks and feels a lot more immersive playing offline. Perhaps I’ll play online in a second or subsequent playthroughs, if I ever get there.

Of course it’s a long and winding road to get to the spot I picked on the map, because I first have to get my runes from when I died the previous night. Then I end up going into the Limgrave Tunnels, which is a very handy source of many smithing stones for weapon upgrades.

Limgrave Tunnels, a rare easy location to clear.

The Limgrave Tunnels remind me of the Stonefang Tunnels in Demon’s Souls but, hilariously, the miners are resistant to piercing damage, not vulnerable to it. It’s somewhat problematic for me, because my Estoc mainly does piercing damage, but luckily, the strong attack is a wide slashing attack. It also turns out that the miners are extremely vulnerable to my Glintblade spell, too, so I can kill most of them before they even look up from their mining.

This is the closest cave to where I found Boc, so I assume this is the cave he meant to go to, but I don’t see any sign of him. The place is surprisingly easy to clear out, which is encouraging, and I get tons of upgrade materials, so I make a note to come back later for more tier 1 smithing stones if I need them. (As it turned out, the stone deposits are one-time only and the drop chance from the miners is pretty low, so the one time I went back to try to farm tier 1 smithing stones, I found none.)

Forlorn Hound Evergaol To make a long story short, because I’ve written over 10,000 words about Elden Ring so far and I’m still two weeks behind where I actually am in the game, it takes about a half hour but I get to the spot on the map, and it’s a Forlorn Hound Evergaol. I enter it, it’s a single room with a boss in it: The Bloodhound Knight Darriwil. He reminds me of a boss from either Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3, I can’t remember which. He’s fast and charges right up into your face, pretty similar to the Beastman, actually, and perhaps because of this similarity I immediately use a Glintblade on him and discover he’s extremely vulnerable to magic.

Mere seconds from dying to a laggy dodge mechanic.

So whenever he charges toward me, I back away and blast him. I get him down to where I only need to hit him with one more Glintblade, but naturally I run out of mana. So I just have to close in and hit him once or twice with my Estoc to kill him. He attacks three times, I dodge all three swings, but of course the dodging is laggy and I’m hit two out of three times and die, even though I’m 100% sure I’ve dodged those attacks. I’m starting to yell “dodge!” at the screen now, and I’m super whiny about it. It’s incredibly frustrating to play a fast action game that isn’t responsive when you know for sure that you’re pressing the keys in time.

(As I write this, I’m still waiting for the “fixed the dodging delay” patch note, and assuming it must either be an intentional crippling of what is normally the “get out of jail free” button that players have come to rely on–perhaps an attempt to shift player tactics back toward making shields more viable again–or some unintentional consequence of this Easy Anti-Cheat middleware that has never been in a Souls game before. But apparently it affects consoles too.)

Anyway I try a second time, because, when you die in Elden Ring, you usually go back to the nearest Stake of Marika, which in this case is right outside the Evergaol. I have plenty of mana this time, and I obliterate this Bloodhound Knight with Glintblades. I get 1900 runes and a Bloodhound Fang, which is a nifty-looking curved bleed damage greatsword I can’t use.

I’m happy to see that there actually are easy bosses in this game (I classify this one as “easy,” like the Beastman–a boss that I can do more damage to them than they can do to me). I’m starting to see that there’s no rational ordering to it. Sometimes the bosses are harder, sometimes they’re easier. You get what you get and you just have to make do when you encounter them, and decide whether you can handle fighting them now or come back later.

I return to Roundtable Hold and buy that Heater shield I saw, so now I can block 100% of incoming physical damage in a way that doesn’t feel laggy, and can feel relatively safe standing in melee range of foes once again.

Next: Part 7

Though I can’t imagine wanting to replay the game after I’m done, if for no other reason than the fact that it’s so massive.

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Groveside Cave and our first look at that boss.

Major spoilage of game surprises ahead.

I haven’t mentioned this before, but if you’re curious to see where I am in the game currently, as opposed to what you’ll find in these posts, which is where I was in the game more than a week and a half ago, you can look at the latest video on my Twitch channel. Have you heard about this Twitch thing? It’s very fashionable. Anyway, I just push a button in OBS now and broadcast my play sessions live without any voice commentary to the channel while I’m recording videos with commentary to upload to YouTube later. (I completely ignore the live chat though if anyone does happen to watch it live.)

Last night, for example, I was clearing out the Black Knife Catacombs in North Liurnia, but you won’t get to hear about that topsy turvy adventure in blog post form for … I don’t know, months, probably. (Also, as of posting time, it wasn’t last night, it was three nights ago. Blogging is so slow!)

The Groveside Cave Previously: Part 4

I stumbled onto the Groveside Cave while learning to ride Torrent. It turns out to be a wolves den, unfortunately. Everyone’s favorite Dark Souls enemy. But they fall pretty easily to my Estoc and Magic Glintbalde spell, because most of them are sleeping when I enter the cave.

Inside their den I find a Cracked Pot, a new thing in Elden Ring (I think?): It lets you craft throwable things like firebombs. Previously you had to buy those kinds of consumables at vendors, but now I can craft them anywhere and anytime I want.

But, similar to healing flasks and mana flasks, I can only carry and use as many as I have Cracked Pots for. To make a long story short, now I can equip and use one renewable, throwable grenade-style item. I don’t use these kinds of things too often, but when I need them, they’re handy.

There isn’t much to the cave: There’s a yellow boss fight doorway just off of the first room. I prepare for battle, slightly less confident than when I started this game, since my track record is abysmal with bosses so far. At least it’s not very far to run back here.

The fog reveals the Beastman of Farum Azula. He’s not blindingly fast, but he’s not slow either, and he pursues relentlessly, lunging straight toward me, then flailing around with a massive curved sword in a wide arc.

My puny little buckler shield is useless, and timing the dodges is hard, as usual, because–say it with me, because on the second day of playing Elden Ring it’s definitely going to be a universal refrain that I will return to time and time again–dodging is inexplicably laggy and unresponsive. It feels like playing with my feet stuck in two feet of mud, or like I’ve time-traveled back to 1997 using a 64k modem, a very unpleasant feeling when playing a game that is constantly demanding that you move out of the way of deadly attacks that might kill you in one hit.

The Beastman keeps hitting me and I’m spending most of my time healing. Standing anywhere near him is dangerous, so I back away and start blasting him with magic from range. My Glintblade spell does surprisingly good damage, but unfortunately I run out of mana before I can finish him off. I used too much to kill the sleeping wolves back in the den. I have no choice but to close into melee range, and this guy’s got a dozen different attacks that are hard to read on the first try, and I die. Still, I was tantalizingly close to victory. At least it seems possible to beat this guy.

On the second attempt I start out trying to duel with him again, for some incomprehensible reason, as I think back on it now. Melee is traditionally “the Dark Souls way,” so it’s often the default strategy. (Most other combat tactics use some kind of limited resource, like mana or arrows, but melee is the one thing you can keep doing forever, so it’s always a viable strategy. Well, prior to Elden Ring’s laggy dodging, at least.) I do good damage with strong Estoc attacks, but I’m constantly backing away from him to avoid his attacks.

I get him down to about half of his health, and then I run out of healing flasks. He hits me again, and with just a sliver of health remaining, I scramble away, sure that this fight is over. The only thing I can do is switch to my staff and start peppering him with slow-firing Glintblade spells, continuously moving backwards in a circle away from him, kiting him and dodging for dear life every time he lunges straight at my face.

Somehow it works. I have enough spell power to kill the Beastman before he kills me, and it’s my first real victory in Elden Ring. I’m rewarded with a thousand runes and a Flamedrake Talisman, which is, essentially, a fire resistance ring.

New Player Tip: The Beastman of Farum Azula in the Groveside Cave, the fifth boss I encountered, is the first boss I encountered that feels like it’s tuned to the appropriate difficulty level to be the first boss in the game.

Incidentally, to this day I have no idea what or where “Farum Azula” is, and found no explanations in the cave. I’m sure there’s a wiki entry on it somewhere.

The Jellyfish Woman The Groveside Cave is my first “success” in Elden Ring (a relative term to be sure), but prior to that I was struggling. I had been thinking about why that was. In From Software games, it usually means the game is trying to tell me something. It could be that I’m using the wrong weapons, or that I’m using the wrong tactics, or that I’m simply going the wrong way.

So I ponder what Varre and Melina have been telling me: Follow the glowing lines to Stormveil Castle. So maybe I’m supposed to speedrun there and not stop for every diversion, like the Tree Sentinel or the Catacombs. I surmise that once I get to this destination everyone wants me to get to, something will unlock that will make things easier, perhaps the Roundtable Hold I’ve heard Varre mention, and I’ll be able to return stronger to tackle the Tree Sentinel and other things.

I set out to do just that: Gallop as fast as possible up the road to Stormview Castle.

New Player Tip: Absolutely, positively don’t do this.

But first, I’m distracted right away. Passing by the Stormhill Shack on the road, I notice for the first time that there’s a woman inside the shack, sitting dejectedly on the floor. (I also pick up the Stonesword Key there that I didn’t get the first time for some reason.)

The woman seems to be rambling incoherently: About grafting, a spider, body parts, and chrysalids. “Oh, you’ve come to be one with the spider?” she says. I have no idea what she’s talking about. All I get is that she wants to be brave, but she thinks she’s a craven. She gives me her Spirit Jellyfish, because she thinks it will be happier with me.

I learn a new gesture from her, the “Sitting Sideways” gesture. Gestures (more commonly known as “emotes” to the MMO world) are a whole cultural thing in From Software games that I won’t get into here. But it’s the only way you can communicate with other players in-game if you’re playing together. There’s no text chat and certainly no voice chat.

I will eventually learn this woman’s name, but it will be much later. Until then, I refer to her as “the Jellyfish Woman.”

The Witch Back to my main task, I continue up the road toward Stormveil Castle, just up the hill now, and find a veritable army of soldiers barricading and guarding the entrance to the castle. I stealth around the side and get in behind them without much trouble. None of them think to turn around, it seems. I arrive at the Gracebonfire of Castleward Tunnel, which is just outside an open portcullis.

I’ve collected a few runes so I return to the Church of Elleh to see what else I can buy from the vendor there. (I had previously purchased the telescope, an essential item for any Souls journey, and of course the crafting kit.) There’s another distraction in the form of a surprise visitor sitting nearby: The witch Renna, a blue-skinned woman in a big hat with three arms (I can’t tell if it’s a bug or intentional–but the Fool’s Idol in Demon’s Souls had three arms).

Renna’s been hearing of a Tarnished riding around on the spectral horse Torrent. That’s me! At first I try to pretend it’s not me, but Renna seems very convinced it’s me anyway, so I admit to it. (Dialog choices in Souls games are usually illusionary choices, but selecting the “no” choice sometimes leads to interesting dialog before you have to pick the “yes” choice.) Renna tells me that she was asked by “Torrent’s former master” to give me a Spirit Summoning Bell, which she does. She says we’ll never meet again, but I’m suspicious about that.

Summoning Spirits is another new mechanic in Elden Ring. They’re like “companions” that you can summon to help with some fighting situations (but not all). I can now summon the Jellyfish I got from the Jellyfish Woman, and a trio of wolves that I received from Renna.

Rematch I go back to the Castleward Tunnel just outside Stormveil Castle. I consider going on ahead, and walk a few steps forward to the portcullis to see an area that definitely, positively looks like a boss fight arena. You play five or six or however many Soulsborne games and you get a pretty good sense of these things.

I’m hesitant, suddenly dubious about my own plan. I decide to warmup by going back to my old nemesis, the Tree Sentinel. I want to find out how my Glintblade spell works on him, and how these summoning spirts work. To make a long story short, magic doesn’t magically–hyuk hyuk–make it easier to beat him. He can activate a magic barrier on his shield, and sometimes the magic missiles bounce off his shield right back to hit me.

I’m murdered repeatedly. Seven times, to be precise. I’m able to get him down to about 50% health, but no more, because it turns out he has a second phase which is, let’s say, somewhat harder.

At least in the process I learn how to summon spirit wolves to help. They … don’t help that much. I discover quickly that their main purpose is to distract the boss for a moment or two. Useful, but definitely not an “I win” button.

So I return to the Castleward Tunnel and walk boldy through the portcullis into what I assume will be the boss fight that unlocks the direction I’m meant to go.

Now The Real Fight Begins I’m greeted by a cut scene and a voice that initially sounds like the echoing voice at the beginning of Bloodborne’s Old Yarhnam, sternly warning the player to “turn back.” This voice doesn’t tell me to turn back, but informs me in no uncertain terms that he is going to stop me, the “foul Tarnished,” from going any further.

Margit the Fell Omen, appropriately named.

Fifteen seconds later, I’m dead. His final words: “Put these foolish ambitions to rest.”

This is my introduction to Margit the Fell Omen, the first boss in the game that blocks progress.

It occurs to me that I might be wrong to think I was supposed to go directly to Stormveil Castle. I can tell right away that I’m not going to beat this guy at level 9 with no weapon upgrades.

On the second try, I actually hit Margit three times. Then I fall off the side of a cliff and die. There are cliffs on both sides of the boss fight area, and there are no safety rails.

On the third try I summon help from “Sorcerer Rogier,” whose gold summoning sign is just outside the portcullis. I think it’s an NPC, because it’s been there each time. (As opposed to a player. For some reason, there actually aren’t any player summoning signs or messages or bloodstains here as I’m playing, possibly due to network problems.)

Sorcerer Rogier is … wait for it … a sorcerer. He uses a rapier and spells and charges directly at Margit with reckless abandon. The fight is somewhat easier now, because Margit focuses most of his attacks on the NPC instead of me. Together, we actually get Margit down to half of his health. That’s when Sorcerer Rogier dies, just as Margit pulls out a massive glowing yellow hammer and his second phase starts.

Margit’s second phase is … um … harder. But my helper (ie. tank) Sorcerer Rogier is dead now, and I’m left to fight all by myself. And in terms of game mechanics, whenever you summon help to fight a boss, the boss gets more hit points, so I’m by myself with an even harder Margit in the second phase. Yeah, I died. Almost immediately.

I tried a fourth time to fight Margit by myself, and, you guessed it, I died. It was my best solo effort, though: I reduced the boss’s health bar by about 15%.

If it wasn’t obvious after the first try, it’s stupefyingly obvious now: I’m just wasting my time here. I leave, to figure out how to actually play this game.

Next: Part 6

(Just FYI on the off chance of spoilers it’s likely that I won’t read any comments on this post very closely until after I’m finished playing the game. See the end of this post for the kinds of things I’m trying to avoid.)

(As of this posting I’m about 60 hours into the game, and if you think that’s far enough along to avoid early game spoilers, I’m still discovering new things about the very first areas. This game is enormous, far bigger than any previous From Software game.)

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Stormroot Catacombs, a new Prisoner character, and Fringefolk Hero’s Grave.

Major spoilage of game surprises ahead.

“On the second day…” Ha, get it?

I played the first night of Elden Ring, Thursday night, using an Xbox One controller. As per usual, playing for a night with a controller means my left thumb will hurt for most of the following week, and I’m still recovering from the previous weekend’s Demon’s Souls play time, so on the second night, Friday night, I switch to mouse and keyboard. This is the entire reason I bought Elden Ring for the PC instead of, say, the PS5.

This is when I discover that From Software hasn’t bothered to improve the mouse and keyboard controls. They settled for the “just barely functional” approach again, the same as every previous game (since Dark Souls 3, at least–prior to that, they didn’t even bother getting to “barely functional”).

To be fair, from their perspective, people keep buying the games, and there’s an army of Redditors waiting to type “lol use a controller” whenever anyone questions the mouse and keyboard support, so there’s no reason for them to change. But yeah, it’d be nice if they polished that up a bit. (There are some gameplay advantages to persevering with mouse-and-keyboard, though.)

Anyway back to the story.

Previously: Part 3

Morning Edition For the record, I counted thirteen deaths on my first day with Elden Ring, which was about three hours of game time. One for the Grafted Scion, seven (not five) for the Tree Sentinel, two for the camp leader in the Ruins, and the rest for the giant at the Stormgate.

I get up extremely early Friday morning to play before work. I wander around the landscape with my Hero, not really finding anything interesting. I’m ready to declare with absolute certainty that there’s no point in wandering off the beaten path when I stumble on a statue at the top of a cliff. The statue reminds me of previous Souls game, but more importantly, I can interact with it.

A light appears and shines a beam toward a spot in the distance. I go there. There’s a door. I enter the Stormroot Catacombs. It reminds me of the little Bloodborne Chalice Dungeons (another thing that makes me think Elden Ring is a “greatest hits” compilation of every other Souls game, a refrain I will think often as I play). There are flame traps and crafty imps with deadly bleed damage weapons. I die a few times. I frequently wish I could hit things at range, but my Hero can’t.

I get to the final boss, the Erdtree Burial Watchdog, which actually looks more like a cat to me. I hate it, because it wrecks me. This boss has robotic movements that are very difficult for me to read, and a big repeated AOE attack that you have to dodge with precise timing, and I’m starting to notice that dodging in Elden Ring feels inexplicably laggy.

I give up and go to work, thinking that every single boss in Elden Ring so far is impossible to beat, because I have a record of beating only one out of four bosses, and the one was only the tutorial boss that was hardly even a speed bump. (I will return to the Stormroot Catacombs later.)

Prisoner Released When I return to the game on Friday night, I retire my Hero character after four hours of gameplay and start a new character, using a name I created from a fantasy name generator web site. I can’t remember it offhand as I’m writing this. Inalei I think? (I named my first character, the Hero, “Mulligan,” in case anyone’s wondering.)

From my Hero experience, I knew I wanted ranged attack capability right away. I saw very few opportunities to pick up new weapons in the beginning, so what you start with is what you’re stuck with for quite some time. In some other Souls games you can find or buy bows or whatever else you need very early on, but that’s not so in this game. New equipment is hard to come by starting out.

This time I choose a Prisoner, which mixes dexterity and magic. I start at level nine with an Estoc, a fast dexterity weapon, and a ~~Glintstone Shard~~ Magic Glintblade spell which is powerful, but very slow to cast. It’s good enough, but I’m definitely going to want to replace the useless buckler shield as soon as possible. I’ve just come out of Demon’s Souls which teaches that blocking is definitely the way to go, and Elden Ring seems to be teaching the same thing, what with the high amounts of dodging lag that I’m constantly fighting.

Side Tangent: It’s not just me, right? I don’t know what people are saying about Elden Ring, but surely the Internet must be ablaze with talk of how laggy the dodging feels. It’s so shockingly obvious that it must be an intentional change in combat mechanics. It’s so slow sometimes that I have time to see the attack coming, press the key, release the key, see my character does nothing, and shout “dodge!” all before getting hit by what I was trying to avoid. Shield blocking feels way more reliable to me.)

I broke my Elden Ring Google blackout for only the third time just now to Google this and it’s definitely a widely-reported phenomenon. You can see the delay on the screen when you just stand in one spot and tap the dodge button: press, release, pause, then the character jumps backward. I’m sure I’m not the only one anxiously awaiting the patch containing the note: “fixed the dodging delay."

The Prisoner starts with a creepy helmet that completely obscures the face, and at some point in this playthrough, I internally resolve to wear something like that the entire game, for no reason whatsoever. Fashion is important in Souls games. (There’s actually a costume system, of a sort, in Elden Ring, I will discover some days later.)

New Player Tip: Based on my experience so far, if you want to start with an overpowered character, Prisoner is a decent choice. Just beware that learning to use magic can be an ordeal in the Souls universe; it’s very different from other games. It’s not a point-and-click “gun” by a long shot.

After waking up from the mandatory death to the Grafted Scion, I set out to enter Limgrave again.

Going Underground I skip the tutorial area and head out the door. I pass the white fog doorway and the little imp statue, stop dead, and immediately abandon my plans.

I didn’t mention the white fog doorway in the starting cave before, because my Hero character didn’t have a Stonesword Key (also, I completely forgot about it when writing that post). It’s a door that you can only unlock with a specific key item, a limited resource, like the Fragrant Branches or Pharros' Lockstones from Dark Souls 2. (Another example of the “Elden Ring is a greatest hits compilation” phenomenon.) There’s one right where you start the game.

This time, starting my Prisoner character, I knew there was a white fog door there at the beginning so I picked the Stonesword Key as the starting item instead of the Golden Seed.

I thought it would lead to a little side room with a useful item or two in it. It didn’t. It first led to a room full of poison, then, after running past that, it led to a massive area called the Fringefolk Hero’s Grave. It’s a long series of downward-sloping ramps leading to … who knows?

I didn’t expect a whole new area at all. And I definitely didn’t expect the massive rolling contraption covered in spikes lumbering up and down the ramps blocking my way.

Fortunately it stops there before returning down the ramp.

At first I think it’s an enemy I can shoot, because it reminds me of the skeletal chariot guy in Dark Souls 2, so I try out my new ~~Glintstone Shard~~ Magic Glintblade spell. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t take damage.

So it must be a puzzle that I’m meant to get around. I notice there are little alcoves on the sides of these corridors that I can hide in while the rolling monstrosity of doom passes by.

Okay, no problem! Just wait for the contraption to pass by, run to the next alcove, make it to whatever grand treasure awaits at the bottom. Easy peasy.

Of course I die right away, the first real death on this character. It turns out the hit box on this rolling contraption is extremely large and unforgiving. I thought I was plenty far enough away, but as the contraption turned around, it clipped me and I died instantly before I could even start exploring. No room for errors here, it seems.

The second try goes much better. I make it to an alcove in the sloping corridor. When the contraption passes by, I run to the next alcove. I look across the corridor to the opposite alcove and there’s a ghostly warrior raising a crossbow to shoot at me. The contraption passes by just then, so I run across the corridor to dispatch him in person with my starting Estoc weapon, a fantastically fast-striking weapon, if you’ve never used one. The ghostly crossbowman wisely backs away from me, unwisely out into the corridor, and gets smooshed by the rolling contraption of doom rumbling back down the corridor. Yay!

The next set of alcoves has a ghostly warrior on both sides. This isn’t going to be as easy as I first thought, but my Estoc is a monster weapon against these guys. I’m already loving this new character.

The corridor turns 180 degrees and continues downward. The contraption changes its movement patterns as I keep going downward, so I have to keep studying it. I keep making my way from alcove to alcove, avoiding the rolling contraption. Waiting in an alcove, I spot an item on the floor ahead. I think I have time to get it, so I sprint for it.

I almost run off into empty space, because the floor disappears on either side of the corridor, leaving just a narrow bridge in the middle where the item is. Tricksy! I notice it at the last second and swerve onto the center safe path just in time. I grab the item, look for another alcove ahead to get into, and hear the rumbling of the contraption too late. It’s right behind me; I’m smooshed and I die. The item was just some runes, of course. Nothing special at all. Looks like you win again, Elden Ring.

Another attempt and I make it past where the item was. The corridor splits: One continues downward, the other goes back upward. I pick the upward path, because I can see an alcove I can hide in and the rumbling contraption is getting closer. I have no idea where these deadly corridors are going, so I stand in the alcove and ponder where to go next.

Unfortunately I’m standing just a bit too close to the corridor, and not deep enough in the alcove. As the contraption passes, I hear the loud “snick” sound that tells me I was killed instantly by a hit box that seems to extend further than the bounds of the contraption itself, and it’s back to the beginning again.

Ugh. I’m getting tired of running all the way through this puzzle time after time, so I decide to leave. There’s a million other things to explore. I can always come back later. (And I did.)

I quickly replay some of what I’ve already done with my Hero character. I run past the Tree Sentinel, stealth around the Gatefront Ruins to get the important stuff (ie. the Map of East Limgrave and the Ash of War), and this time I call my trusty steed Torrent for the first time. My plan is to race up the road through the trap of giant and crossbowmen at full tilt.

Who put a cave there?

But, as I’m riding around getting the feel for attacking random soldiers from horseback around the Gatefront Ruins, I stumble on a cave I haven’t seen before: The Groveside Cave.

Next: Part 5

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Stormgate and beyond.

There’s a couple of posts out mentioning spoilers from Naithin and Bhagpuss, and I’ve mentioned fear of spoilers a few times in these posts, so I should probably mention that, um, yeah, these posts have spoilers in them.

But the previous two posts only covered perhaps the first hour of gameplay. As of this writing Steam says I’ve played 50 hours, and at the pace I’m playing there’s probably at least 50 more hours to get through, since I’m only in the second of supposedly five areas. There’s plenty left unspoiled. Also it’s fairly unlikely that I’m going to be able to write about the entire game with posts like these, since that would basically be writing a full novel or two or three, and that’s hard to do.

But in general I’m making an assumption that nobody is going to read a post with “Elden Ring” in the title if they’re worried about Elden Ring spoilers. I certainly wouldn’t, and I absolutely won’t read or watch anyone else’s Elden Ring content until I’m sure I’m well beyond the point in the game that might be referenced. See the end of this post for more on that.

The audience I’m targeting with these posts is people who resolutely refuse to play a From Software game because of the community stigma, or for whatever other reason aren’t able to or don’t want to play them (there are numerous legitimate reasons not to play From Software games).

Otherwise these posts might appeal to people who have already finished the game or progressed beyond these areas. Souls players like to compare the different ways you can play through the games, because nobody plays the same way, at least near launch time, before the Most Optimized Playthrough becomes the unspoken law of the land.

Part 2

Melina We resume our tale near the Gatefront Ruins, when a woman named Melina materializes as I sit at a nearby Gracebonfire. She offers to “play the role of maiden,” to help me search for the Elden Ring. That’s why I and all the other Tarnished are here in The Lands Between, by the way: To search for the Elden Ring and become Elden Lord. It’s a bit like that old movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, I suppose.

Anyway, Varre warned me that I’m “maidenless,” and Melina has a soothing ASMR voice, so of course I accept, then she bequeaths me a ring which will allow me to summon a spectral horse named Torrent, who has “chosen” me. (This is the same woman and horse from the cut scene after I died to the Grafted Scion.)

And have you heard the good news?

In terms of game mechanics, Melina’s appearance means I now have access to the level up menu. After collecting the runes from my most recent death at the Gatefront Ruins, I’m able to rocket upward once to level 8. (I started at 7, apparently.) I ~~chose a point in Vigor to gain some hit points~~, usually a safe choice at the beginning of any From Software game. [Correction: That was a lie. I actually chose a point of Strength, because my character had a ton of Strength to start with so I figured I should stick with making a super-Strength build. The next time I leveled up I chose Vigor, though.]

I consider that I might never need to increase my Stamina for the entire game, because I’ve already noticed that the Stamina bar is longer than my Health bar, and I can swing my axe and dodge and block for days without running out of Stamina, something that seems on first glance like a massive reduction in the base game’s combat difficulty. We Souls veterans would likely teach newer players to be disciplined and don’t spam your attacks but … well, now you can spam your attacks, apparently. I can imagine it having significant repercussions for PvP, but that’s something I don’t get involved in.

As a side note, Melina’s name is maddeningly similar to Marika’s name, and I get them confused all the time. At first I actually think Melina is the ghostly spirit of Marika, the woman in the crucifixion pose.

Stormgate Following the road and the glowing lines from the Gracebonfires, I pass through a gate into what is a very obvious trap or boss fight arena. I look up, and spot a large fellow crouching over the road, waiting to spring forth. Ah ha. Nice try, Elden Ring, I’m too much of a wily old veteran to fall for this. I prepare to fight.

The large fellow turns out to be an extremely large giant who towers over me. But I’ve fought giants many times before in previous games, so I’m not worried about it. Giants are actually some of the easier opponents in previous Souls games, because they’re fairly slow. It’s mainly an exercise in avoiding getting dizzy from the camera spinning all around. This one is probably no exception.

But as soon as the giant appears, a couple of Godrick’s green-and-orange crossbowmen pop up out of the bushes and start peppering me with bolts. It is a trap after all. So much for my impressive wiliness. I charge into the bushes to dispatch the crossbowmen quickly (always kill the adds first, the mantra of every RPG player ever), but more pop up, and the giant tries to smoosh me at the same time. My battle plan falls apart immediately. I try to run away, but it’s too late; the giant clips me with a massive swinging fist and I die again.

Eventually I draw the giant out beyond the gate, so the veritable army of hidden crossbowmen can’t shoot me Bonnie-and-Clyde-style while we’re fighting. An epic battle ensues. This giant hasn’t gotten the memo that giants are supposed to be slow, and halfway through the fight pulls out a Final Fantasy-sized two-handed sword and charges around in a circle, flailing every direction. I die. Again. Luckily, right next to a Gracebonfire.

“How unfair is this game,” I remark, being fairly certain I’ve now died considerably more in the first couple of hours of Elden Ring than I did at the start of Dark Souls 3. Was my recent triumph over Demon’s Souls completely meaningless? (Yes, it was.)

I try several more times, and the giant finally goes down. There’s no reward. I thought it was a boss the whole time, guarding the road to block progress, but I somehow missed the fact there was no boss health bar. It was just a regular old enemy, nothing special at all in the world of Elden Ring. Yikes.

Even without the giant, there’s a lot of Godrick’s men guarding the road beyond the Stormgate. Crossbow bolts fly at me from every possible direction, and I curse every one that hits and interrupts me in the middle of my attack animations. Eventually I get them all.

I note that I got virtually nothing for my efforts, so I continue up the road, still following the direction of the glowing lines from the Gracebonfires. It has not yet occurred to me that I can summon a horse. Why would it? Horses aren’t a thing in Souls games.

Shacks I find a Golden Seed as I enter the extremely windy Stormhill region, which will give me another healing flask, then I’m ambushed by wolves who, for some reason, fall from the sky. I groan, because Dark Souls dogs are universally despised (by me, at least), and they’re in Elden Ring, too. Their attacks are fast and unpredictable, and there’s usually more than one, so they’re hard to deal with, and anyone from a novice to an expert can easily die from a minor lapse in concentration or just plain rotten luck. My luck holds and I make it past them.

Not dogs!

I find another Gracebonfire at a place called Stormhill Shack. I chat with Melina. She “prays that I’m fit to face the challenges of the Ring.” I opine that I might not be, based on how this game is already at difficulty level 17 for a Souls veteran on a scale of 1 to 10, right at the start. Even with unlimited Stamina.

I consider whether to continue up the road toward the big castle, in the direction of the glowing lines from the Gracebonfires. It’s hard not to notice that I’ve been doing a lot of fighting and dying on this road so far. So, instead of going where I’m supposed to, I go a different direction. East, instead of North. There’s another, smaller pathway here. (Future me will return to Stormhill Shack one day and discover an NPC that I didn’t see.)

I hear another giant roaring somewhere in the distance. I examine a big stone structure sticking out of the grass that has no doors and scoff again at the open world formula that fills the world with non-interactive scenery.

I fight a couple of big fur-clad warriors on the road, then I stumble on another Gracebonfire near a shack with an NPC leaning on a massive sword. This fellow is a Bernahl the Warmaster, and he sells weapon enhancements, called “Ashes of War.” He’s very proud of his battle arts, his “tales of chivalric romance.”

The Warmaster's Shack

I played through the base game of Dark Souls 3 at least five or six times, and I almost never used that two-handed left trigger “special” charge attack move. To see a whole vendor here selling them is confusing. Am I supposed to use that in Elden Ring? The meaningless treasure from the Gatefront Ruins was also an Ash of War. They seem to be pushing me to use them. I consider whether I should abandon everything I know about Souls combat and try this new thing, or just stick to what I know, which works fine. Except for dying all the time.

~~I buy an Ash of War from the Warmaster in case it unlocks new dialog from the vendor. It doesn’t.~~ [Correction: Checking the video replay, I misremembered and didn’t actually do that, but it’s something I did with other vendors.] I’ll play with them later. (50-Hours-In-The-Future Me can reveal that I still haven’t used them very much, except for one that’s amazing, and extremely dangerous.)

And that’s where I decide to call it a night and go to bed, ending my first day in Elden Ring. I can’t decide if the game is an improvement on previous Souls games or not. My first thought is that it isn’t. On my first day, I’m not loving wandering through acres of empty terrain looking for something to interact with, the downfall of all open world games.

More later. Maybe. This is a lot of work, and these early days are but a distant memory to me now. :)

Next: Part 4

(Just FYI on the off chance of spoilers it’s likely that I won’t read any comments on this post very closely until after I’m finished playing the game.)

More on Spoilers Speaking of spoilers, the specific things that I don’t want spoiled in a Souls game are any of the numerous “ah ha” moments that occur in the games. “Ah ha, that’s where that key is used! Ah ha, that’s what that word or phrase means! Ah ha, that’s where I’m supposed to go to get the widget to beat the whosit boss!” Those kinds of things. Those are moments of great enjoyment for me, and if someone just tells me where the widget is, there’s not much point in playing the game.

I don’t want to know if I passed something important. I don’t want to know if there’s a switch in a dark corner that unlocks the secret sword of awesome. I don’t want to know if there’s a shortcut to make it easier to beat a boss. I don’t want to know which weapons or techniques or damage types I’m supposed to use. I don’t want to know if I’m going to be attacked if I enter a room. The game will inform me of most of those things through its own design, and if it doesn’t, I can go back to playing online, where I’ll find the ground littered with graffiti that will give me clues buried amidst all the butt sex jokes and lies about invisible walls.

How one reacts to the inevitable surprises that occur around any given corner in a Souls games is a big part of the fun for me. Do you die instantly or do you, against all odds, cleverly dodge out of the way at the last second, or survive by the wildest stroke of luck? That’s why Souls veterans love to watch other people play Souls games for the first time, it’s the only way we can re-experience those thrilling moments that we’ll never get to have again.

There’s a lot of talk about what “spoiler” even means anymore, but for me it usually means accidentally receiving information that diminishes the impact of story or game surprises. Basically, I want to be the one to decide when to give up and just Google the answers.

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The Tree Sentinel and Gatefront Ruins.

Part 1

Stepping out the door into Limgrave, the first thing I notice is how overwhelmingly big the world is, and I can go in literally any direction. Naturally I start with the safe path and step over to the nearby “Grace” (aka. bonfire aka. checkpoint) to talk to the friendly NPC patiently standing there, Varré, who annoyingly has a name that is hard to type on an American keyboard.

He tells me immediately that I’m “fated to die in obscurity.” Well, at least he didn’t laugh at me. He continues to explain that I’m “maidenless,” so I won’t be able to get an “invitation to Roundtable Hold.” But, if I just follow the glowing lines from the Gracebonfires, I’ll find all the answers I need. Sounds simple enough.

I actually miss the creepy laughter.

Before doing that, though, I trot around the surrounding landscape for a while. This is From Software’s first attempt at an “open world.” I walk in the exact opposite direction from where the glowing line is pointing. There’s a cliff there that leads down to an ocean. Eagles sit at the edge of the cliff. I try to kill one, but I miss. I see a beach down at the bottom of the cliff. I spot a very familiar-looking giant crab down there. There’s a little island just offshore. In fact, there are trees and rocks and buildings in all directions clear out to the horizon.

Dark Souls games are famous for being able to eventually go to all the places you see in the distance, but this is a whole new level. Not only can you go to these distant places, but now you can pick any path you want to get there.

Most of those paths, it turns out, are not very exciting. There are flowers to pick up. There are animals to kill, which drop crafting materials. There are rolling soccer ball skulls that contain glowing “runes,” which are the souls–or experience points, or currency–of the game. I kill some flying bat-like creatures, and some pesky mosquitos that give me Blighttown and Swamp of Sorrows PTSD.

Ominously, I pass a number of crucified women just staked out in the landscape for seemingly no reason. Are they real corpses or just effigies? I can’t tell. Probably effigies. It’s clearly meant to remind us of Queen Marika the Eternal from the introduction. There’s one right next to Varré at the start, but he makes no comment about it.

After a short time, wandering around feels directionless and somewhat pointless, like I’m not doing anything. Souls games usually require you to do something all the time. It’s one thing I like about them. It feels weird to have no immediate goals to pursue over the next few minutes of game time, and I don’t like it very much, so I go back to where Varré stands.

Tree Sentinel I decide to go talk to the golden-armored fellow I see riding a horse just down the hill, in the direction of the glowing line from Varré’s Gracebonfire. Surely that guy will have some interesting things to say. Maybe he’s a horse vendor, where I can get that horse I saw in the trailer.

Now the real fight begins.

That golden-armored fellow definitely isn’t a friendly NPC selling horses at all. He’s a very unfriendly enemy with another red boss health bar, named the Tree Sentinel. There’s a world boss just a few steps from the very first door you exit into the game world. Okay then!

I’m a cagey old Souls veteran, so I have no fear of unexpected boss fights. The Sentinel hits me, but I scoff, and heal myself with one of my five heal flasks (I took the starting item that I guessed would give me an extra flask, and it did).

My battle cry is, “Okay, this is unexpected.” I lock on and prepare to duel. I dodge the Sentinel’s charges and smack him with my axe. He’s … um … got a lot of hit points. Way, way more than that Soldier of Godrick back in the tutorial. I barely scratched him with my puny starter weapon.

The Sentinel reminds me of Gyoubu from Sekiro, a challenging but ultimately manageable early game fight. I try to remember the strategy I utilized back then, but I’m missing most of those handy Sekiro tools, and I can’t get the timing right on any of my dodging. Some boss fights are almost like rhythm games, and this initially feels like one of those. If your rhythm is off, you die. (One day in the future I’ll learn it’s not one of those fights.) I’m only able to deplete the Sentinel’s health bar by about 10% before my beginner’s luck runs out and I die.

Time to shake off the rust. (Even though I just finished playing Demon’s Souls and feel like I couldn’t possibly be in more peak Dark Souls playing form.) I have to beat the first boss. It’s tradition. Besides, how hard could it be? After all, I got Iudex Gundyr on the first try. It wasn’t a boss, but I got that big surprise crystal lizard thingy at the start of Dark Souls 3 on the first try, too. It’s tradition!

I try again. I get his health bar down about 25% before dying again. So it’s not just me, this actually is a tough boss fight. I try again, and die again. And again. And again.

Well, this isn’t your grandmother’s Dark Souls, is it? Numerically-speaking, by boss fight attempts, the first open world boss in Elden Ring is already more difficult for me than the first two bosses in Dark Souls 3 combined, and I don’t think I’ve played even a full hour yet.

I’m nowhere near beating this Sentinel after ~~five~~ seven attempts, so I put aside tradition and pride and speculate that we’re meant to come to this exact conclusion: Go around him. It’s only there for “pro gamers” who want to prove that they’re the best Dark Souls players, while shouting at their webcams in their energy drink-fueled streams all night, vying for the all-important top spot of most followers on Elden Ring launch day. [Correction: I lost to the Tree Sentinel seven times before moving on, not five.]

I personally don’t want to spend my entire first night with the game in the starting location. It’s obvious my character doesn’t have the tools yet to give me any advantages, and only brute force repetition for potentially hours is going to work here. But I want to look around the game at least a little bit before I go to bed.

It didn’t click for me at the time I was playing, but as I write this now it’s clear that the real lesson of the Tree Sentinel is that unlike previous Souls games, you can simply walk around bosses and still make progress.

I kill an innocent sheep in one hit, an acceptable outlet for my feelings of inadequacy and a worthy substitute for a boss battle, and make a wide circle around the Sentinel to continue up the pathway. (Some days later, I’ll eventually come back and defeat the Tree Sentinel.)

Gatefront Ruins First I meet a vendor in the Church of Elleh, but I’ve lost everything to the Sentinel so I have no currency to buy the essential crafting kit he recommends. I continue onward and arrive at the Gatefront Ruins, a small camp of soldiers in green and orange livery.

I walk boldly up to the camp and kill the first guard. Then a second, and a third. They’re re-skinned Lothric Knights, slightly annoying but they’re enemies I’m familiar with from Dark Souls 3. Barely an inconvenience.

Then, in the middle of the camp, one of the guards blows a horn. A veritable swarm of nearby guards converge on me. Unexpected! I run away. Fighting in From Software games is always most advantageous one-on-one. Chaotic scrums usually mean a quick trip back to a Gracebonfire.

I avoid certain death with my clever fleeing strategy. Only the camp leader continues to follow me, so I turn back to fight him. He’s tougher than his subordinates, and uses his big metal tower shield to bash me in the face repeatedly, but I’m undeterred. In fact, once his health bar is nearly empty, I’m so confident I get the brilliant idea to parry one of his spear thrusts to finish him off in style. I mis-time this extremely ill-advised, low-percentage maneuver–as I almost always do in Souls games–and his spear skewers me. I die. Oops. Everyone will get to see the folly of my hubris someday on my YouTube channel.

By examining the description on a dropped piece of armor, I learn that these men in green and orange are loyal to Godrick the Grafted, whoever that is. (Note: Almost exactly a week later, I will learn more than I ever wanted to know about Godrick the Grafted.) I put on the armor, but, not surprisingly, nobody is fooled by my clever disguise and they continue to attack me on sight.

I stealth around the camp, kill most everyone, especially the pesky alarmist horn-blower, and find a basement with a treasure chest containing treasure that doesn’t seem that great (it’s a weapon modification). I also secure a parchment that reveals all of Limgrave West on the map, which is far more useful to me.

After clearing most of the camp, I go after the leader again: It’s an epic duel surrounded by the corpses of his own men. He’s no match for my Dark Souls experience and in the end … well, he kills me again. Ugh. Nevermind. I got all the treasure from the camp, so I leave. There’s more to explore and I’ve got a little bit of time left to play.

Part 3

(Just FYI on the off chance of spoilers it’s likely that I won’t read any comments on this post very closely until after I’m finished playing the game.)

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A small window into what it feels like to enjoy playing Elden Ring ~~as it was intended~~ the way I like playing it. [ED: I shouldn’t assume.]

I looked around and noticed that what’s missing from the blogosphere is a narrative perspective that ignores all the b.s. “controversies” and highlights why voluntarily subjecting oneself to the difficult learning curve of a Souls game is fun for the players for which this game was intended.

Elden Ring. It’s finally here. The next game from From Software, the first since Sekiro in 2019, which was a minor disappointment, which followed Dark Souls 3 in 2016, which was a smash hit success that got everything exactly, impossibly, perfectly right.

I pre-ordered it on Monday, some four days before launch. I splurged and got the Collector’s Edition, even though there really isn’t much in there I particularly needed or wanted, except maybe the soundtrack. It’s the first time I’ve pre-ordered a game since … Dark Souls 3 in 2016. It’s the first time I’ve bought a Collector’s Edition since … Dark Souls 3 in 2016. From Software has enough of a track record with me that I’ll buy all of their games on launch day sight unseen for the foreseeable future, one of the only game developers that has such a privileged status with me.

Flashback: I first played the Dark Souls Prepare To Die PC Edition from Steam around 2014. I played with mouse and keyboard. I started with a Sorcerer class. I hated it. I absolutely loathed it. It was a steaming pile of hot garbage. I got to the Bell Gargoyles and quit because that boss fight was absurd.

When I load Elden Ring, the game looks startlingly similar to Dark Souls 3, in terms of title screen appearance. It’s a very austere, unassuming title screen consisting mainly of text that isn’t going to impress anyone. I didn’t expect that. I figured by now they might have gotten a little flashier or changed something. And in my head I imagined Elden Ring would be a significant departure from previous games, yet it looked very similar right away. It worried me. Still, it’s their “brand” and it’s worked so far.

I start out using an Xbox One controller and I pick the Hero class. It looks like a Strength-based melee build, the kind of character that you usually see wielding massive two-handed clubs killing things in one hit. It isn’t what I normally play. I gravitate toward what they call a “Quality” build, which is a mix of Strength and Dexterity so you can pick up and use just about any weapon. It’s not a specialized min-max build, it’s more of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none class, which is what I prefer, at least to start out. I thought I’d change things up this time and try something different. It might make for some interesting drama on the videos I’m recording, as I learn a new combat style.

I’m not terribly impressed by the opening introductory cut scene which sets the stage. It’s basically just a slideshow of concept art. It’s not as good as some of the Dark Souls introductions. It seems ordinary, even formulaic. The same script as previous games, just with different names and places substituted in. The main difference is that it sounds closer to ~~regular~~ heroic fantasy than dark fantasy. But they aren’t trying to deviate too much from what worked before.

The one image that does stand out to me is the image of Queen Marika the Eternal (whoever that is) in a crucifixion pose. It’s a striking visual that I will find out recurs frequently in the game.

I start in a small room which reminds me of Bloodborne for some reason. The number of player ghosts and dumb player messages is absurd. At the very least, I think From Software needs to stop doing the player message mechanic. It was an interesting “asynchronous multiplayer” mechanic at first, and would be amazing if Internet guides didn’t exist, but now it’s just silly.

After looking around the first room a bit and getting oriented with the controls–they’re the same as Dark Souls, except curiously the two-hand button has now been replaced by a dedicated jump button, something that will not-so-subtly change a lot of what I’ve previously learned about Souls controls, which will no doubt confound my muscle memory for quite some time–I walk down some stairs and enter an open area that immediately sets off alarm bells.

Sure enough, a big loathsome creature drops down out of the sky before me and a red health bar appears at the bottom of the screen: It’s a boss fight, the standard “tutorial boss fight” that’s in every From Software game. This one is called the Grafted Scion.

In 2014, when I first played the Dark Souls Prepare to Die PC Edition for the first time, the Asylum Demon tutorial boss was a shock. “You want me to beat this massive thing right after I spawned into the game with no weapons? Not knowing the first thing about how to fight? No wonder everyone says Dark Souls is so hard!” Everybody says that the first time. We Souls veterans think fondly upon that time in our lives, the start of our journey, when everything was new and exciting.

In 2022, after playing all the Souls games, a tutorial boss is as surprising as the sun rising every morning. I can tell almost immediately that I’m not supposed to win this fight. I can barely damage the Grafted Scion, and it has a lot of attacks that do a lot of damage that I can’t block, and I don’t have any healing capability. I’m aware that it would give me extraordinary bragging rights to be able to say I beat the Grafted Scion on the first try right out of the gate (on video!), but I die fairly quickly, and I’m not at all surprised to see a cut scene which confirms dying was the expected path to take, just like Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I wake up underground in the Cave of Knowledge.

Flashback: In 2015, I played The Witcher 3. I loved that game. In particular, I enjoyed the action combat which had real consequences for failure (I played on Normal). I realized something: The Witcher 3 combat reminded me of Dark Souls, except that I was playing The Witcher 3 with a controller. I wondered if that might make a difference with Dark Souls.

The cut scene upon waking makes little sense, but that’s not surprising either. True to the From Software formula (except Sekiro, which was unusually narrative-focused), presumably the story elements will only make sense after putting together disparate puzzle pieces throughout the game, or on second and subsequently playthroughs, or after consulting a wiki sometime later. There’s a horse and a woman who’s interested in helping us, that’s all I get out of it.

There’s a ghost sitting in a chair nearby, who tells us to jump down into a shallow chasm to train. I surmise this is the direction we should go if we want to learn more about the basic controls of the game. This is new for a Souls game– normally, the only tutorials you get are in the form of messages on the ground. There’s also a big door nearby that I imagine will lead out into the game world.

I don’t feel like I need a lot of training (I just finished the Demon’s Souls remake after all) but I jump down into the tutorial chasm anyway. I’m here to look at everything in this game, not speed run through it as fast as possible.

It’s a tutorial, so there’s not much to say about it. I learn that “bonfires” are now called “Lost Graces,” which is a really strange term that I’ll never learn and I’ll always call them “bonfires” anyway. I learn how to attack and dodge and jump and block, all things I already knew how to do. At the end, there’s another tutorial boss: The Soldier of Godrick. This guy presents no challenge to me whatsoever [it has attack patterns that are similar to other enemies seen frequently in Souls games], and I demolished half his health with one backstab, something you normally can’t do in boss fights.

The end of the tutorial deposits me back where I started, and I walk out the main door, ride up an elevator, and enter the world of Limgrave.

Up to this point, Elden Ring has been a very standard From Software game. At this moment, everything changes.

Flashback: After a considerable hassle, I managed to get a controller working with the Dark Souls Prepare to Die PC Edition. (For some reason I can’t remember, it was a hassle back then.) I played a Knight instead of a Sorcerer. The experience was a thousand times better. I got to the Bell Gargoyles again and struggled for quite a while with my fat-rolling tank of a character, but I studied and learned the Gargoyle moves and how to block them, made progress, upgraded my battle axe once or twice, and some twenty-something tries later I finally beat them, and the village rejoiced, and I proudly rung the first bell just like everyone else. I was hooked on the From Software game formula: An extremely rare video game that is intrinsically rewarding to play, like chess or tennis, not just rewarding in terms of gifts. It was the only game I’d ever seen that reminded me of a very old TRS-80 game called Dungeons of Daggorath, the only game which recreated that feeling of continuous tension, an Olympics-style thrill of victory and agony of defeat, in an RPG-style dungeon crawling format.

Part 2

(Just FYI on the off chance of spoilers it’s likely that I won’t read any comments on this post very closely until after I’m finished playing the game.)

UPDATE: Updated some grammar and made some clarifications so I don’t sound so much like a jerk. The whole point of this is to talk about Elden Ring without sounding like a jerk.

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Elden Ring is good enough, but we’re still waiting for a successor to Dark Souls 3.

Writing a blog post about a Souls game before completing it is fraught with danger. The one thing people who enjoy playing these kinds of games enjoy more than playing these kinds of games is talking about playing these kinds of games, in particular telling other people how to play. It’s a compulsion, a veritable sickness. Everyone turns into Clippy: “It looks like you’re playing a Souls game, would you like some help? You must want some help, right? Well, here’s some help, whether you want it or not.”

Some people like help playing games. I usually don’t. Especially From Software games. I don’t want any of my questions answered until I’m finished playing the game. I relish finding the answers on my own. Somehow From Software games cracked a magical formula to make some of the only games in existence where finding those answers is fun for me–the journey of unlocking the game’s secrets is the game for me. It’s a throwback to playing RPGs before the Internet, when you had to draw the maps on graph paper and write down the puzzle text to remember them for later. That old-school flavor is one of the main attractions of the Souls series in the first place.

Murica!

All that being said, I’ve played about twenty hours of Elden Ring so far. It’s good enough, but it definitely feels more like a Sekiro, meaning that it’s a diluted version of what made the Souls formula so great. It’s not as good as Dark Souls 1, 2, or 3. It’s not as good as Bloodborne. It’s not as good as the Demon’s Souls Remake.

Exploding what was previously the expert, compact level design out into a vast open world landscape that takes forever to traverse and find anything was a poor decision. The only possible good that can come from it is that because there’s so much empty non-interactive space in the world, maybe they’ll keep adding to it over time. Large swathes of the terrain feel devoid of content to me.

Kenny!

I started with a Hero class, which is a Strength-based “Hulk Smash” melee-only kind of build (something I rarely do in Souls games). It was a big mistake.

After several hours of getting demolished by precisely-timed melee-busting combos from some early bosses, I started over with the Prisoner class, which is a mix of Dexterity and Magic. Having some ranged damage capability is a massive help early on. Magic is extremely effective on some of the bosses. (Unfortunately not the ones that count.)

This is a good thing, believe it or not.

Stamina supply seems basically limitless in Elden Ring, a major change from previous Souls games. There are actually a lot of mechanics that are more forgiving than previous Souls games, a fact that only helps in fighting trash mobs and doesn’t help at all with fighting bosses.

Outside of fighting open world bosses for bragging rights (and little else), you ride around picking up crafting resources and looking for interesting NPCs or landmarks. It’s reminiscent of The Witcher 3, except without the compelling story and handy quest log driving you forward.

But there are a lot of other games that do open world exploration and traversal better than Elden Ring, and you’d be better off seeking them out if you want to wander around a countryside looking at scenery. Off the top of my head, Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West (I imagine), many newer Assassin’s Creed games, they’re all much, much better at open world traversal. Elden Ring is a newbie in that space, and it shows.

Red sky at night, don't go there yet.

Mouse and keyboard controls are unimproved from previous Souls games. In fact, I don’t think they’re even finished, as of launch time. You can’t remap the “map” key, for example. It’s always, inexplicably, “G.” I haven’t yet found a key for gestures. It’s possible to play with mouse and keyboard, and I do for the sake of my thumb, but it’s not optimal.

I haven’t seen any of the performance issues I keep hearing about on PC. Occasionally I see dropped frames, but nothing I didn’t see in Dark Souls 3.

But I will say that the dodge mechanic seems significantly more laggy than previous Souls games. I’m constantly shouting “I dodged that!” at my screen as my character stands there and dies, and I know at least one other Souls veteran who has also noticed this.

I think it’s because your character doesn’t start to think about moving until you release the button or key, not when you press it. It must have been like that all along, but I don’t remember having so much trouble with it in any other Souls game, with the possible exception of Bloodborne, which has infuriating button queuing issues. It could be that the game’s bosses now demand so much precision from dodging that it exposes this flaw that’s always been there, or maybe there’s a bug they need to fix. I don’t know. I just know I hate it.

The basic problem is that dodging and running are both on the same button or key input. It has to detect whether you’re “tapping” the button, or holding down the button, to determine whether you’re dodging or running, and some arbitrary number of milliseconds have to pass before it can determine which is the player’s intent. They really should get into the 21st Century and separate those two actions.

I’ve also noticed more animation locking than any previous Souls game. Times when you simply can’t do anything because, for example, your character is stuck in a shield blocking animation, or stuck in the “oops I ran out of mana” animation.

Inexplicably, this statue does nothing. Bug? Unfinished?

An infuriating problem from Sekiro continues in Elden Ring: Not being able to find the thing you just picked up in your inventory to read its description. You’ll sit there for ages scrolling through pages of inventory trying to find that new thing you found to see what it does, then eventually give up in disgust and forget it even exists. Until some days later you stumble on it and wonder where it came from. It’s a major UI failure they should fix. Just highlight the new thing somehow.

The difficulty of bosses in the first region range from pitifully easy to impossibly hard, with no rhyme or reason to the ordering. Almost all of the bosses are optional, with the exception of progression-blocking bosses.

That’s about all I want to say for now. It’s not a flop by any means, and it’s certainly good enough to keep playing and finish it, but it’s not the game of the decade. I would have preferred a Dark Souls 4.

UPDATE 3/1: I finally got into Stormveil Castle last night after I posted this. It turns into a completely different game inside there: A traditional From Software dungeon crawl game. In other words, it turned into the game I wanted. It just took 20+ hours of open world nonsense to get there.

UPDATE 3/8: I might have to revise my opinion of Elden Ring slightly. After playing almost 60 hours now, it’s better than “good enough.” It’s definitely “good,” and it might even be “great.” I’m completely immersed in the game and its world and have no desire to play anything else until I’m done with it. I think the initial confusion was because I had an expectation that I was going to get Game A, but what I actually got was Game B + Game A, where Game B takes a lot of getting used to.

There’s a lot of talk that the game is “more accessible,” which I wouldn’t say because “accessible,” to me, implies accessibility, i.e. accommodations for the impaired, which Elden Ring definitely doesn’t have. But I would say the game is more approachable than any other Souls games. There’s scores of hours of content and a vast amount of space you can explore without ever having to defeat the first progression-blocking boss. It’s somewhat like Valheim in that regard: There’s a world to explore before you have to defeat a boss to unlock the next world to explore. (The first couple of bosses in Elden Ring are a thousand times harder than the first couple of bosses in Valheim, though, if you tackle them solo.)

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I actually did finish Demon’s Souls before Elden Ring launched.

I didn’t think I could finish Demon’s Souls in my last remaining weekend, but I did. (It helped that I unexpectedly had Friday off.) (It also helped that Demon’s Souls is fairly short compared to the other Souls games.)

There was a long string of bosses that … weren’t that hard. In fact, in the last weekend, I got most of the remaining bosses on the first try, sight unseen, which was entirely unexpected. I have to assume it was from my general Dark Souls experience.

On a scale of Souls game boss mechanic difficulty, the ones in Demon’s Souls are fairly easy, as they are all one phase fights with few attack patterns, and many of them are clearly beta versions of Dark Souls bosses I’m already familiar with. In many ways, actually, Demon’s Souls is basically just an early beta version of Dark Souls.

Anyway, it’s a great game, far greater because you can now play it more-or-less intact on the PS5. (I actually felt the game was somewhat nerfed from the PS3 version, so if you want the true “original brutal challenge” experience, you’ll have to dig out your PS3 to play it.)

Anyway, here’s my final scorecard, in the order that I defeated the bosses:

Phalanx: 1 (PS3 1)
Tower Knight: 1 (PS3 2)
Armored Spider: 1 (PS3 3)
Fool’s Idol: 1 (PS3 2)
Flamelurker: 3 (PS3 9)
Dragon God: 50+ holy crap so annoyingly random
Penetrator: 5
Leechmonger: 1
Adjudicator: 1
Maneater: 1 (PS3 6*)
Old Monk: 1
Old Hero: 1
Dirty Colossus: 1
Storm King: 1
Maiden Astraea: 2
Old King Allant: 9*
Only counts the times I made it to the boss fight. Could be considered more attempts because these were difficult boss runs and I died a lot on the way to the fight.

I’ve begun uploading the epic video journey of completing this relatively blind playthrough of Demon’s Souls on my YouTube channel, which started all the way back in 2018. This will be a memorable game for me mostly because of the amount of time and effort that went into playing it over the years. (It wasn’t easy to boot up my old PS3 Slim, let alone record anything from it. More recently, PS5 consoles don’t exactly grow on trees.)

Weirdly, having completed the game, the PS5 achievement tally thing says I’m only 27% completed with the game. I’m not into achievements so there’s no way I’m ever going to get that to 100%.

But I’m curious to replay the game and see if I can get to Pure White and Pure Black tendencies to peek at those aspects of the game. (Some parts of the game are only unlocked under very specific criteria that aren’t easy to understand or achieve, a unique feature of Demon’s Souls which they thankfully didn’t carry forward.)

Anyway, now just waiting for Elden Ring on Friday, which I think we can all agree will definitely, positively be the RPG of the decade.

I mean, unless it’s a total misfire.

(For the record, I’m very skeptical that an open world Souls-like game is going to work as well, and I’m nervous that Elden Ring will be a second decline in From Software excellence. Sekiro was a fun game, but it has no replayability and thus it’s somewhat of a one-and-done forgettable experience compared to the Souls series, which you can load up and play again and again with different and unique playthroughs.)

Image: Maiden Astraea and Garl Vinland… daayyuuum that was almost as hard as Sif.

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With some 8 days remaining until Elden Ring launches, it seems unlikely that I’ll finish Demon’s Souls before then, which puts me in a bit of a sticky situation.

Thusfar I’ve completed these areas in the PS5 remake of Demon’s Souls, roughly in this order, to match the progress that I made on the PS3:

1-1 Boleterian Palace (Phalanx)
1-2 The Lord’s Way (Tower Knight)
2-1 Stonefang Tunnels (Armored Spider)
2-2 Tunnel City (skipped boss)
3-1 Prison of Hope (Fool’s Idol)
3-2 Upper Latria (skipped boss)
4-1 Island’s Edge (skipped boss)

That’s how much I finished on the PS3, which, it turns out, is less than the half of the game that I originally thought it was. I then went on to these new areas in the PS5 remake so far:

2-2 Tunnel City redux (Flamelurker)
2-3 Underground Temple (Dragon God)
1-3 Inner Ward (Penetrator)
1-4 King’s Tower (skipped boss because I think it’s the last one)
5-1 Depraved Chasm (Leechmonger)
4-1 Island’s Edge redux (Adjudicator)

Most of that is on my super popular Twitch channel without any commentary, titles, or descriptions.

I looked up a list of the traditional progression path in Demon’s Souls and naturally I’ve been doing it all wrong. You’re supposed to go through just the first (easiest) area of each Archstone first, then go back to do the harder areas later, as opposed to methodically going through each Archstone in order until you get stuck, which was more of my natural inclination.

In typical From Software fashion, there’s no instructions in the game on how to progress, so you have to figure it out in the old school manner by trial and error–finding the places where you don’t get killed. Or just read what somebody else figured out before you.

So with the traditional progression path in mind, here’s my general plan to finish up the game:

3-2 Upper Latria (Maneater, which I couldn’t beat on the PS3, for reasons I can’t remember, but I know it drove me completely insane.. probably because it was such a pain to run back to it)
4-2 The Ritual Path (Boss unknown)
5-2 Swamp of Sorrows (Boss unknown). Heard so many lovely tales over the years about this area.
3-3 (Boss unknown)
4-3 (Boss unknown)
5-3 (Boss unknown)
1-4 The King’s Tower (Boss unknown but everyone in the game says it’s–not surprisingly–the king). Biore warned me to “beware the limits of your own power,” and Ostrava advised me to go get a sword in a mausoleum first (which I did–Demonbrandt).
There’s some optional bosses along the way, like a red and blue dragon, and a Vanguard.

The real point of this post is to write down that progression path, in case I get completely distracted by Elden Ring and forget it.

I only have one more weekend to do all of that before Elden Ring comes out. I’m planning to play Elden Ring on the PC though, which means I’m going to try to use mouse and keyboard, which means theoretically I can still play Demon’s Souls on the weekends and play Elden Ring during the week.

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I played seven indie games this past week. “Played” might be a strong word. More like “tried.”

I don’t really have a plan for playing indie games, but I do have a need to distract myself during the week so I don’t play Demon’s Souls. (I’m trying not to touch a controller except on weekends.) I also have 50+ Epic Game Store games that I haven’t touched, many of which happen to be indie games. And I have about half a month left on my $1-for-3-months Xbox Game Pass subscription.

So I thought I’d try to make a record of indie games I’ve looked at since this #JustOnePercent challenge thing started. As a reminder, there is almost a 0% chance that I will be able to play 100 indie games in a year, because it actually is a significant time investment to find them. Or at least, to find games that are both free to try and sound interesting enough to try. (It’s easy enough to find indie games like Cactus Simulator or Nazi Anime Sex Robot Girlfriend Simulator Part 83.)

Anyway, here’s the list of indie games I’ve looked at since the #JustOnePercent challenge started up.

Wednesday, 2/2 I went looking for the Indie games from the recent Humble choice bundle on other platforms.

Before We Leave (Xbox Game Pass for PC, 2/2/2022). A very competently made builder game, it’s just that I’ve played this kind of game before, and I didn’t see anything different in this one. It’s not better than RimWorld, for example, which would be my game of choice if I wanted to play this genre. (Also I’m not in the mood for this genre right now.)

Black Book: Prologue (Steam demo, 2/2/2022). I like the setting and the concept, but I don’t like the click-to-move execution, and I generally don’t connect with card games, so the card battle system is more of a punishment to me than a feature.

Per Aspera. Couldn’t find a free demo.

Paradise Lost. Couldn’t find a free demo.

Just Die Already. Yeah obviously I’m not going to play this.

Everhood. Not interested.

Calico. Couldn’t find a free demo.

Thursday, 2/3 I found a convenient Steam list of most-recently released games tagged as “indie.”

The Seven Deadly Seas. 8-bit graphics, not interested.

Sheba: A New Dawn. Side-scroller, not interested.

The Flow Experience (Steam demo, 2/3/2022). Cool music, looks neat, but not really much of a game. More of an “exercise” than a game. Possibly good for rebuilding thumb strength with a controller though.

Lucky Me (Steam demo, 2/3/2022). It’s actually a neat puzzle concept that I can’t recall ever seeing before. It was fun for 15-20 minutes, but then it started to get a bit repetitive, which was perfect because that was the exact point that the demo ended.

Pangaroids. Top-down arcade game, not interested. Interestingly, made by a couple of people named Wozniak, which of course immediately reminded me of Steve Wozniak and I wondered if they’re related, but it’s probably a coincidence because surely there are a million people named Wozniak in the world.

Dreamscaper (Xbox Game Pass for PC, 2/3/2022). An okay mix of an adventure game and a rogue-like Diablo-style … thing. But too much arcade game for me, and it works best with controller and I don’t want to use a controller. Don’t care for the right-stick ranged aiming mechanic either.

Friday, 2/4 I dug into my Epic Game Store backlog of free games for indies.

A Short Hike (Epic Game Store, 2/4/2022). Cute exploration game but the mouse/keyboard interface isn’t very good, making it difficult to control. Clearly made for controller usage, and I don’t want to use a controller.

AER: Memories of Old (Epic Game Store, 2/4/2022). Another cute exploration game with a cool flying mechanic, but this time the mouse/keyboard interface is really good because it’s a standard third-person camera viewpoint. However it wasn’t very clear where you were supposed to go in the game, and there wasn’t that much to look at otherwise.

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I didn’t set out to get a Playstation 5 to play Demon’s Souls, it just kind of happened.

I expected it would take months of entering NewEgg Shuffles to get a PS5, but it turned out that I got one on my first try, bundled with five games and an additional fancy schmancy red controller to boot.

It was not bundled with Demon’s Souls, the first exclusive game I wished to play on a PS5, so I had to buy that game extra. And then I had to spend another $10 for a month of Playstation Plus subscription because they (bleep) you at the drive-through, as Joe Pesci so colorfully put it. (The subscription is required for any of the multiplayer features of Demon’s Souls, as it was for Bloodborne. I don’t necessarily need the multiplayer features, but they had already shut down the multiplayer servers by the time I got to Demon’s Souls on the PS3, so I was curious about it.)

The console came in Friday before the snow, so I spent the past weekend playing the Demon’s Souls remake and managing thumb pain, both of which went fairly well. The PS5 controller is a massive, heavy thing roughly the size and weight of a bowling ball, in comparison to any previous controller I’ve ever used, but it seems to be slightly easier on my thumb. I have no idea what they put inside that controller to make it so heavy. Solid steel? Lead weights? I don’t know. And I don’t know why. I would have thought that a lighter controller would be the goal.

I definitely didn't use a winged spear for that nonsense.

Anyway Bluepoint’s Demon’s Souls remake is quite good. It’s just like Demon’s Souls on the PS3, except it runs faster than 10 fps and you can actually make out some of the things on the screen. They completely overhauled the user interface, thankfully, so it’s almost pleasant to interact with your inventory. Almost.

It’s still Demon’s Souls, though. So, you know, git gud. No short runs to the boss fight in this game.

I never finished Demon’s Souls on the PS3. The slow frame rate drove me crazy, and I came to a point where I had a number of bosses to get past, and I ran out of healing items, and had to farm before I could proceed, which was a major hassle and I hated it, so I gave up on it.

So I’m not an expert on every square inch of Demon’s Souls like I am with many other Souls games. But this new version seems like a faithful reproduction to me. However there are a lot more crystal lizards than I remember, and a lot more shards in general in Stonefang Tunnels, so you’re showered with possibilities for upgrading your weapons fairly early. I don’t remember that at all from the PS3 version.

One of the cool things about the PS5 is that you can stream directly to Twitch while you’re playing, something I haven’t yet worked out an easy way to do with my PC setup. That means I can just push a button and stream gameplay live without commentary, while simultaneously recording high-quality local videos with commentary through OBS, to be uploaded to YouTube later.

I’ve always wished YouTube would support multiple audio channels so I can have one channel with commentary and one without, which is how I render my local video files, but I doubt they ever will. In the meantime, I can send the commentary-free PS5 video to Twitch.

Sometimes there's too much detail.

Anyway, the tentative list of Sony exclusives I want to play includes:

Demon’s Souls
Ghost of Tsushima
Returnal
Horizon Forbidden West (soon)
I keep hearing rumors that Bloodborne will get a 60 fps PS5 update
And I still haven’t played Uncharted 3 or 4 yet

Which is a list just barely long enough for me to justify buying a PS5 without feeling like a complete idiot.

UPDATES:

2/1/2022: I realized there’s another change from the PS3 version: You can target lock the Armor Spider from a safe distance, making it very easy to kill with a bow (uh, spoiler alert, I guess). Previously, you had to free aim with the bow, which was more of a chore. Also I forgot to mention that most if not all of the dialog was re-recorded, and sometimes changed slightly.

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Over on the Blaugust Discord, there’s been a flurry of discussion about a new #JustOnePercent challenge of playing indie games, and it occurred to me to wonder what exactly is an indie game?

It all started with a provocatory tweet from ~~Jim~~ Jeff Vogel, which got under some folks' skin, and some heated Twittering, and some heated Discord discussions, and then a couple of blog posts tagged #JustOnePercent, and a movement was born.

I’m not nearly as up-in-arms about this ~~Jim~~ Jeff Vogel guy as some of the others [I obviously don’t know him enough to even get his name right], but I like the idea of playing indie games. Unfortunately due to life in general, it’s exceedingly unlikely that I could commit to playing 100 indie games in a year, let alone writing anything about them. I find it hard to disagree with the basic notion that there’s too many games in the world (for me) to look at. But I could look at some.

So I thought to myself, “Hey, I bet a lot of those free games I’ve been getting on the Epic Game Store are indie games.” But then I thought, “How do I know if a game is indie?”

I see from Krikket’s and Magi’s posts that the definition of an indie game is something along the lines of: “An indie game is whatever I say an indie game is,” which lacks a certain scientific objectivity for my tastes. I know it’s complicated but surely some kind of baseline measurement can be formulated.

I’ve always thought of an indie game, or indie project of any kind, as one in which the creator sells the work to the consumer themselves. As opposed to having a publisher sell the work to consumers for them, which is the so-called “traditional” model. Artists typically aren’t great salespeople, so it makes sense to contract with specialists to do that work for them.

But the “publisher” is typically thought to have the power in that relationship (a robust discussion topic in itself), because they have all the money and contacts and distribution channels which are crucial for getting any artistic work in front of consumer eyeballs. Unfortunately the publisher then becomes a “gatekeeper,” because they set the rules for what they think they can sell. It’s a sad fact of life that not every artistic work is enough of a commercially viable product to earn living wages for a working company full of employees (ie. the publisher).

Indie creators, by comparison, take on all that burden of marketing and finding an audience and selling their work themselves, in exchange for the freedom to sell whatever they want and bypass all the gatekeeping.

That’s how I’ve always viewed indie content creation, at least. In the games world, the book world, and the music world.

Back to games. I thought it might be easier to make a list of game publishers that definitely aren’t indie, and declare that an indie game is one that isn’t on that list. So I set out to make a list of publishers with more than some arbitrary revenue per year, say a million dollars. But that would probably be a big list. And I can’t find any data sources to make such a list anyway.

Then I wondered if a game could be considered indie even if it goes through a publisher? My instinct is no, based on the indie music and indie book world, but maybe? If the game developer is large enough to hire the publisher somehow, or in fact owns or is the publisher, then I could see it still being classified as an indie project.

After some more research, there seems to be two basic definitions of what “indie” means: One is financially independent, and the other is creativity independent. Both fairly vague.

Then, after more discussions on the Blaugust Discord, a third definition of an indie game bubbled up, which is more of a social or genre definition–a classification of the content itself, regardless of who makes or publishes it. A “feeling” or “vibe.” Not a business classification at all, as I’ve been thinking of it for many years.

It’s very confusing, is what I’m trying to say, and few people seem to agree on what indie means, and even fewer people seem interested in correcting that situation. So, “Indie is what I say it is,” turns out to be pretty accurate. The world seems fine with a word that has no specific agreed-upon definition, a disturbingly common trend lately, I’ve noticed.

The problem for me is that I don’t particularly want to do an in-depth study on every single game to classify it appropriately. So I settled on this as a step-by-step objective formula for measuring if a game is indie or not:

If the game is made by anyone on the Wikipedia indie game developer list, it’s indie.
Otherwise, if the game is not published by anyone on the Wikipedia game publisher list, it’s indie.

That worked for about three games in my Epic Game Store library. Then I couldn’t help but notice it’s extremely time-consuming to track down the developer and publisher of every game, then search those lists. It offended my lazy programmer sensibilities.

So I’ve developed a new method, which is much faster: If I don’t recognize the developer and/or publisher, then it’s probably indie. If I do recognize the developer and/or publisher, then it’s probably not indie. (Unless I specifically recognize it as an indie game.)

Naturally, the Epic Game Store doesn’t tell you the developer and/or publisher. So, it’s still a pain for me to find the indie games in my Epic library, no matter what.

But in the end, it actually does boil down to: It’s an indie game if I say it’s an indie game.

Some others tackling this subject:

Belghast: What Makes an Indie Game?
Magi: Are there too many Indie Games?
Magi: Just One Percent!
Krikket: #JustOnePercent - Project Plan
Krikket: An Intriguing Prospect – Just One Percent
This seems like one of those things that will spawn a lot of posts in the blogosphere, so I’m sure there will be others soon. :)

Image: Outer Wilds, which I believe was chronologically the last indie game I played, for about a half hour on the Xbox Game Pass for PC. An interesting idea for a game, but it didn’t really click with me.

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Some thoughts on Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, and the upcoming Elden Ring.

I saw Pete over at Dragonchasers and others talking about Bloodborne on Twitter, which got my attention. I think they’re trying to practice to get their muscle memory in fighting shape before Elden Ring launches. (Unfortunately practicing one Soulsborne game rarely helps with another Soulsborne game, because there are unique quirks in each one that make the controls slightly different.)

But it still got me to dig out my PS4 and play some Bloodborne again. It’s a great game. I dare say one of the greatest. If there was a Best Game Of The Decade 2010-2020 it would certainly be a contender, alongside one or two other From Software games (ie. Dark Souls 1 and 3).

I should say it’s a great game except for that classic Bloodborne 30 fps lag and the quirky button input queueing issues and the frustrating camera angles that make it impossible to see anything. And the mindless farming for blood vials and bullets. And the fact that it requires a controller, which hurts my thumb.

The sore thumb got me to install Dark Souls 3 on PC again, which is probably a better game to play to prepare for Elden Ring anyway. Especially for me, who is intending to play Elden Ring on PC with mouse and keyboard controls.

I still haven’t finished The Ringed City DLC in Dark Souls 3, so it’s a good place to start. By which I mean it’s a terrible place to start, because The Ringed City DLC is hard as hell.

So instead I started replaying the Ashes of Ariandel DLC, which is also hard as hell. But I got up to and unlocked the Sister Friede boss fight. I’m not particularly eager to jump into that fight again, since it was one of the most difficult and memorable fights in the entire Soulsborne series for me. But at least it’s there now if I want to hear a voice actor say, “Leave us be, Ashen One, sweep all thought of us from thy mind,” a hundred times.

With Dark Souls 3, I can use mouse and keyboard controls, even if they aren’t particularly great. They’re good enough to get the job done (I’ve refined them to the point that they bear little resemblance to the defaults anymore and I made an AutoHotkey script so I can split up the Run and Dodge actions like a normal game), but they aren’t better than a controller. I’m hopeful Elden Ring will continue to improve the mouse and keyboard controls, but I’m not holding my breath.

I’m wrestling with re-learning my Faith build character, the one I chose to finish out my The Ringed City DLC video series, for some weird reason. (I lost the original character in an SSD crash.) I keep reading that Faith builds are powerful, but my Faith build feels super squishy.

The main problem with both these games is that it’s too soon to fall down a Soulsborne rabbit hole. Elden Ring is nearly a month away, a veritable lifetime in gaming time. That’s plenty of time to burn out.

As always, I’ll be going into a total blackout for this release. I’ve seen two trailers thusfar; one was the original teaser, which didn’t show much, and the second one more recently had a tiny bit of gameplay footage. All I know so far is that it’s more open world than before and there’s a horse, neither of which install a great deal of confidence in me. I fully expect it to be implemented like Assassin’s Creed 1, where every moment spent on the horse traveling from Point A to Point B is wasted game time.

Otherwise I won’t be reading any reviews, won’t be watching any videos or streams, won’t be reading any articles or tweets, won’t be consulting any guides or wikis, same as always.

In other gaming news, I cancelled my subscription for Final Fantasy XIV, since I haven’t logged in for over a month, and the first eight quests in Endwalker don’t exactly start with a compelling narrative. I imagine it’s the same deal as Shadowbringers: There are probably 5-10 quests in the MSQ that are fantastic, but the other 90-95, particularly in the second half, are mostly killing time.

I’ll go back someday, but it will most likely be after I finish with Elden Ring, coming out next month. Perhaps by then Square Enix will figure out how to update their 1990s infrastructure.

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I have to write a post about this don’t I. It would be like not mentioning 9/11.

Yesterday the news broke than Microsoft was planning to buy Activision/Blizzard. There’s a lot already written about it, and I don’t remember where I first saw the news to give proper journalistic “scoop” credit. Somewhere on Twitter probably.

There was much gnashing and wailing of teeth. Or … probably the other way around.

Is it the long-awaited punishment for the cartoon arch-villain Bobby Kotick? A resounding blow against rampant capitalism and exploitation of the working class? Vindication for all those women who suffered under awful working conditions?

Or is it a total victory for a shrewd businessman who’s laughing all the way to the bank while making a clean getaway, having achieved more success in life than any of us could ever dream, all at the expense of decent hard-working folk?

Probably neither. (But really, it’s that second one. Life isn’t fair.)

I, for one, don’t care much. I’m not interested in World of Warcraft or any other Activision/Blizzard games right now. It would be perfectly fine with me if WoW shut down all their servers tomorrow and never came back. I have no attachment to any characters or people in that game. Blizzard and World of Warcraft has never, at any point in my life, been a sacred cow. My gaming life didn’t begin with them, and only barely intersected with them, to be honest.

It would also be fine with me if World of Warcraft made a massive resurgence and everyone left Final Fantasy XIV to go back to WoW, so I could actually log into FFXIV after 12 pm.

As for Microsoft, I don’t have an Xbox and I typically avoid Microsoft-ecosystem games. I don’t particularly find much use for Xbox Game Pass for PC, and absolutely loathe its launcher. I’m not a huge fan of the Blizzard launcher either, actually.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, I don’t evaluate the status of Bobby Kotick or any other villains in the gaming world every day to determine my personal happiness. It’s not healthy, and I have many more interesting things to ponder each day.

That’s basically the extent of my thoughts on it, writ now for future generations to behold.

Image: A random WoW screenshot I think looks cool, which I’m pretty sure I already had in my blog library somewhere, now that I’m thinking about it.

UPDATE 2/1/2022: As a footnote to the Microsoft news, Sony just announced that they’re planning to buy Bungie, makers of Xbox staple Halo, and Destiny. It’s more raw meat for the punditocracy in the gaming world, but it means nothing to me.

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Of course I’m writing a web app to manage my list of books to read. Doesn’t everyone?

So the text file I previously mentioned quickly grew unwieldy, because I kept adding more and more structured data fields, so it occurred to me that maybe I could throw it all into an AWS DynamoDB and use that as a data store. NoSQL key/value databases are trendy! Well, 10 years ago.

There’s a little more to it, though. I need to build an AWS API Gateway to control access to the data store. Which means I need to build an AWS Lambda Function as the middleware between the API and the data store. Which means I need some kind of easy data entry interface to call the API to put books into the data store.

So yeah, I’m basically building my own personal Goodreads, just so I can make one blog page.

Normally I wouldn’t go to so much trouble (well, I might), but in this case it just so happens to involve learning technologies that it would behoove me, and any modern career developer, really, to learn more about. In trying to get a handle on my reading habits, I inadvertently stumbled into a practical use case where I can learn things while simultaneously “eating my own dog food.”

The Pieces Building an AWS DynamoDB database is easy. Basically you just click the “make a table” button and that’s it. No wonder everyone uses it. I don’t think it will cost me any money for my simple use case here.

Building an API in the AWS API Gateway is also fairly easy. Just click the buttons and follow the prompts (assuming you have some previous knowledge of what a REST API is, that is). I made an HTTP API, which is somewhat less complicated than a REST API in the API Gateway. You just give the API a name, add a list of entry points, and it gives you back an URL to call. You don’t have to secure it with any kind authentication, but I added an excessively simple, easily crackable Lambda authenticator that will do little against anyone but the most basic of script kiddies.

The API Gateway requires an AWS Lambda function to call when the API is invoked. Building the AWS Lambda function to bridge the gap between the API front-end and the DynamoDB backend is more complicated and requires typing code, but following examples was fairly straightforward. In its basic form, it’s just a Node.js function that takes in a request and returns a response. Your job is to figure out which database function to call for each request, and put some JSON into each response.

(It turns out you can also create a Lambda Application, which seems to have a template that will build the Dynamo database, the API gateway, and the Lambda function all at once. I don’t know how that works, though.)

The hard part, as always in development, was the front-end UI. Technically I could have typed curl commands to invoke the API (and did to test it), but that isn’t terribly user-friendly, so, having not whipped up a UI in quite some time and thinking of no other easy route to success, I decided to try to make a React app.

I haven’t done much with React before. But last year I started working on a team that owns a React Bootstrap project, so I was finally able to see it in action, which gave me a small introduction to that world. I thought it would be even more instructive to build a new one from scratch.

The React World The term “React” is vague, as it’s become somewhat of an umbrella term that encompasses a technology stack of about fifty thousand different components that all interact with each other in very confusing ways.

It begins with HTML, the basic building block of everything on the Internet. Except in React development, what you’re actually writing is “JSX,” a variant that looks like HTML, but isn’t.

On top of the HTML is the Javascript runtime. Which might also be referred to as ECMAscript or TypeScript, which are more accurate terms for the modern standards-based evolutions of what used to be the old-timey wild west of Netscape Javascript.

React is a “framework” for Javascript, a thing that is built on top to make development easier, somewhat like the old-timey jQuery that used to be all the rage back when I was doing web development in C#.

React by itself doesn’t do much, but there is a, ahem, “rich” (meaning vast, sprawling, and impossible to understand) ecosystem of react extensions that add on to the basic functionality. Whatever code you’re writing may or may not be dependent (but probably is) on some obscure open source react component being installed in your project, and there’s a complex package management process to ensure everything works right.

React development is usually done in a Node.js development environment, which is yet another layer of technology that requires a different knowledge base. In my experience so far, it just works, thankfully, on both Windows and MacOS. Most of the interactions in this technology space occur when running the “npm” command.

I’m also making using of something called Bootstrap, which is a set of CSS classes that create a nice, standardized-looking layout and interface. But not always. Sometimes I just wing it. You can mix and match whatever techniques you want in this environment to make a rich stew of incomprehensible spaghetti, and every Google search result does exactly that.

I’ve created an AWS Amplify project to host this React app of mine, which wasn’t really necessary because I could have just run the web app locally for my needs. But I just wanted to see if it worked, and it indeed, it does, so now I can enter and manage books from my phone or any computer in my house.

So I updated my book page to use the REST API as a data source (you can do that in Hugo, the reason I started this in the first place), entered a ton of information from my Kindle and Audible history, and now I have a massively long, unwieldy page containing many of the books I’ve consumed in either ebook or audiobook format going back to 2012.

I don’t know why I did it, either. At first, I was only going to track books going forward, but I kept putting in old data to test it out and here we are. I probably need to build a backup system before the whole thing crashes and I lose everything.

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Tonight I’m going to start “flipping the switch” to host the blog entirely in AWS.

You, constant blog reader, will not notice anything.

Unless something goes horribly wrong. In that case, everything will explode and I’ll need to figure out how to roll back the changes gracefully. You might not even get to see this post explaining what happened.

When it’s done, you might notice the site loads about a bazillion times faster, as it will no longer be served from an antiquated shared hosting platform. There will also be a different endgameviable.com certificate.

The site that you or your feed reader programs load will become a teeny tiny custom Golang program that runs on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. That program will decide if you (or, let’s be honest, Google) are trying to load a very old link that needs to be redirected. If so, it will redirect to the new, updated link. Otherwise it will make a reverse proxy call to load the blog content from a static Hugo-built site, hosted with AWS Amplify.

If you’re one of those people who runs 50,000 script and ad blockers, it’s possible they might mention something about this, but they shouldn’t.

So here goes nothing. The switch-flipping begins by transferring the endgameviable.com domain to AWS Route 53 control. It will probably take a couple of days to finish completely, based on the tests I did with transferring another domain name.

UPDATE: Something did go horribly wrong. I forgot to set the A record on the domain name, so endgameviable.com was pointing to nothing there for a bit. Then I realized I had the wrong certificate installed, even though I was sure I had installed the right one. Luckily those were the only problems (so far) because, in true professional software development tradition, I didn’t have a plan to go back if it failed. :)

I didn’t setup a lot of monitoring, either, so at this point I have no idea if it’s spewing out thousands of errors per minute or not. I should probably look into that.

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Around the start of every new year, there’s a collective burst of enthusiasm around humanity for trying new things. I, for example, am trying to devise a new reading strategy.

Naithin recently wrote about this topic of reading goals, which spurred me to revisit my habits. I know that my previous strategy has failed because I can’t remember the last new book I read or listened to, though I’m sure I must have read something* within the last couple of years.

The Blaugust Discord also had some talk recently about book recommendations, and there were a lot of book titles and authors thrown around that I’d never heard of.

I’ve become woefully bad at keeping up with the latest book trends. Every year the number of popular authors seems to multiply and I don’t know most of them anymore.

For example, I still think of Brandon Sanderson as a “new” author, but I think he’s put out more books now than Stephen King. We get it, Brandon, quantity is more important now to an author’s career than quality, sheesh! Don’t keep rubbing it in! (Staying quiet on Twitter is also pretty important now.)

Anyway, I thought I’d write down the names of all these books I’ve been seeing and try to figure out how a person such as myself, a modern person-on-the-go with relatively poor eyesight for reading, could possibly keep up with reading or listening to these hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of new books that are published and/or “published” every year, when I have very little time I’m willing to dedicate to reading or listening to books.

It’s turned into a bit of a puzzle.

The Lists First of all, simply “writing down the names of the books” is a somewhat more arduous process than I expected. Finding software to automate or assist in this task in a way that fits my mental workflow is proving fairly difficult.

There are sites like Goodreads and StoryGraph and LibraryThing but they aren’t quite right for my simplistic needs. Those sites are targeted more for people who are really into book culture. They graph and correlate and recommend and social network and statistic and like and share and subscribe and … I just want a list of books I can search and add to with a few mouse clicks, preferably without having to show the whole world.

For now, I’ve settled on … a text file.

But since I’m a developer at heart, I had to turn it into a structured YAML file so I could use it as a data source for Hugo to make a blog page (I sampled a bunch of books this week already). But still, it’s just a text file right now. Two of them, actually.

Phase One I’ve broken the new process down into three phases, which basically involves maintaining three lists, and the moving of books from one to the next.

The first step in the process is to “sample” a book from the big list of book recommendations (I call this list my “recommendation inbox”). This is the main part that I want to get better and faster at.

The thing I need to do better is make time to actually read the samples. It’s a bit of a chore, to be honest, like homework, because I know I’m probably not going to be that interested in at least 75% of them. I’m going to have to set aside time every week or month to power through them, essentially doing the work of an editor’s assistant going through a slush pile, which is normally a paid position, but here we are.

Phase Two Once a sample is completed, I’ll move the book to the second list, which I’m giving the catchy title of “sample results.” I’ll write down a few sentences summarizing what I read, then give it a stamp of “interested” or “not interested.” If I’m interested, then, when it comes time to find a book to read, I’ll know to go out and buy that one (or, if I’m honest, more likely the audiobook).

That’s where things get dicey though, because it’s really time-consuming to read or listen to books, and there’s only a finite amount of hours in each of my days I can dedicate to hobbies. I have to divide that time between gaming, and blogging, and reading, and listening, and watching a movie or television, and whatever else I happen to want to do, which is unfortunately a list of interests that is often too large to handle effectively without strict scheduling, something I don’t particularly enjoy doing and rarely stick to.

But going through and codifying samples will at least put me one tiny step closer to the goal of reading more stuff. Or, at the very least, being aware of more stuff.

Phase Three After I finish a book, assuming I find things I’m interested in, then it gets moved to the third list, which is the “I’m done with it forever” list.

You might imagine this would imply that I’d be finished reading the book, but that’s only if the book is really engaging, because I’m not going to hang around with a book if I’ve lost interest in it. These days, there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll give up on a book before I even reach the middle, based on past history.

The third list would note those findings, and why I gave up. If I actually finish the book, a more ambitious person might write a review, but I’m not a book blogger and I don’t write reviews. I only write down what I think sometimes. (Actually I have written down thoughts for most of the books I’ve read since 2010, at least up through 2018, when I suddenly stopped.)

So that’s the plan.

Image: Those are some of the last physical books I bought in this lifetime, probably prior to 2010 (the only ones in the house that aren’t in a box somewhere). A Memory of Light might have been the last physical book I bought.

The last (complete) audiobook I listened to was Master of Formalities by Scott Meyer, back in October 2021, which was amusing. Before that, it was Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir in September 2021, which was good (especially in audiobook format), with caveats. Before that it was The Outsider by Stephen King, back in 2020, which was also good in the standard Stephen King way (which means I enjoyed it at the time but I don’t remember a thing about it now), and also because Will Patton is an amazing reader. That doesn’t count audiobooks I listened to for 5 or 10 minutes before giving up on them. I should add those to my lists.

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The first post of the year is about … sigh … NFTs.

I have no interest in NFTs or the outrage surrounding them, but I feel like I need to write a post about NFTs anyway. Everyone else is talking about it*, and it’s a rare blog topic I haven’t written about. But I’m approaching it like a homework assignment.

It all started barely a month ago with the Ubisoft Quartz trailer. Has it only been a month? It seems like we’ve been talking about NFTs in gaming for years, but that trailer is indeed dated December 7th.

Come to think of it, NFTs were a hot topic all last year, but it was mainly in the context of the art world.

But now, as we begin 2022, Square Enix’s president launched another firebombing campaign on this Dresden of discussions by declaring they want to make blockchain-based “play to earn” games.

That’s what really pushed me over the edge into investing effort into a blog post.

Ugh I'm going to have to write a blog post about NFTs aren't I

— Endgame Viable (@endgameviable) January 2, 2022

That, and … well, it might be hyperbole to say that the gaming community is getting hysterical about this, but that’s how it looks to me.

Personally, I’m against hysteria. I’m planting my flag on the side of non-hysteria.

My general feeling on NFTs, as of this moment, goes something like this: a) I don’t really care, because I won’t be buying any NFTs (except maybe for educational purposes), b) I don’t really care if other people waste their money on NFTs, c) I know one artist who wants the money that NFTs might bring to their career in the gaming industry, so I hope it works out for them, and d) I can’t discern how NFTs might significantly change the existing direction of gaming in any way. NFTs strike me as the next logical evolution of a factory entertainment industry that has been becoming bigger and more corporate and more dependent on revenue for decades.

Why So Serious? Just to be clear, I don’t want NFTs in my games. I recommend everyone avoid NFTs, the same way I would recommend avoiding risky behavior like, you know, hitting yourself in the eyeball with a hammer.

I should also mention that I don’t want cosmetic cash shops in my games. I don’t want to log in and see a gigantic splash screen of extra skins and emotes I should buy with gems and bits and bobs, while the “play game” button remains a teeny tiny afterthought down in a hidden corner. But that ship sailed a long time ago.

I’m not an expert in NFTs, but based on what I’ve read so far, when you put it in terms of its impact on gameplay functionality, I don’t see much difference between the introduction of NFTs and the introduction of cash shops, so I’m struggling to understand why everyone around me is suddenly alarmed about something that I perceived to have happened a long time ago.

Maybe the thinking is that we didn’t push back enough against cash shops, so now we really need to push back against NFTs? I guess that makes sense, but it seems overly optimistic.

A Rapidly-Evolving Conversation One of the reasons I don’t particularly want to get involved in this NFT discussion is that it’s evolving so rapidly that I can barely keep up with what anyone is talking about anymore.

We were talking about NFTs and Ubisoft Quartz. But now, thanks to Square Enix, we’re suddenly debating the relative merits of “Play to Earn,” which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet.

It’s supposed to be the same discussion, but on the surface, those two subjects don’t sound remotely related (to me). One, I think, is about collecting collectibles, the other is about selling player-created content. But they’re both tangentially related to “blockchains,” the foundational technology around which all of this crypto and NFT hubbub revolves.

I take this rapid conversational movement as a sign that the discussion has already devolved to the point of conflating disparate topics together into one mass glob of emotional outrage with the trigger word “NFT” attached to it. It’s already become too much work for me to try to separate it all out into individual topics to analyze.

More importantly, it’s become too much work to try to convince anyone else that it’s more complicated than just “yes to NFTs” or “no to NFTs.” As of now I view “NFTs” as a very big topic composed of a lot of smaller sub-topics that I may or may not have differing opinions about. Same as pretty much every other societal issue in the entire world.

Pulling the Ripcord I had thought to go on into a deeper discussion of my research into the pros and cons of NFTs and blockchains in a neutral and informative manner, but it’s been several days now and I kind of don’t care anymore. Everybody’s just going to fight about it and yell past each other anyway, so why bother? :)

My basic point at the end of it all is something like: NFTs aren’t great, but I’m not yet convinced it deserves the level of righteous fury on display lately. Just … don’t buy them. But if you do buy them, congratulations, you’re probably more affluent than the majority of the planet. You should be proud.

Normally I would write something like “NFT (Non-Fungible Token)” but the words “non-fungible token” don’t add any additional meaning to the letters “NFT.”

** I couldn’t find another link for “it.”

Image: Sugar cane fields in El Salvador. It might have made more sense if I hadn’t deleted some two thousand words from this, the fourth major revision of the post.

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The final episode of the first season ends with a bang.

Summary Rand and Morraine traverse The Blight to reach The Eye of the World while Lan tries to follow. Rand fights/talks to The Dark One, while the army of Fal Dara fights off a Trolloc invasion. Nynaeve and Egwene nearly burn themselves up channeling in the battle. Padan Fain re-appears and steals a Horn, and Perrin … just kind of stands around watching.

Reactions A good episode to end the season, if not great. I think the show peaked in episode four.

I really enjoyed the scenes with the brother and sister rulers in Fal Dara and all they did to try to save their city and people. I don’t remember their names. It was Lord Agelmar Jagad and Lady Amalisa Jagad.

I mentioned last time they hadn’t done a very good job of setting the stakes for this last episode, but the scenes with Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa, and the sacrifices they were willing to make to defend their city, served that purpose fairly well. I would have liked to see more of that leading up to this episode.

Rand’s “battle” with The Dark One was fairly anti-climactic. The Dark One doesn’t seem that bad to me. He seems perfectly reasonable. He just wants what’s best for Rand. Why all the fuss? :)

Loiel dead?!? Gasp!

Morraine can’t channel?!? Gasp!

To wrap up my thoughts on the entire first season, I still wouldn’t call it anything more than “good enough,” but it was entertaining to me personally. But I imagine that’s mainly because I read all the books and I could fill in all the blanks. I have a hard time imagining someone who didn’t read the books would enjoy it as much.

The show suffered a bit–as almost all streaming shows suffer from now–from a lack of continuity and cohesiveness from episode to episode. Presumably in order to shove these shows out the door as fast and cheap as possible, they tend to rotate directors and writers every episode or two, and they all have different ideas of what to focus on.

So we end up with an entire episode on Aes Sedai politics, which was good as a stand-alone episode, but it didn’t exactly fit with the season as a whole, which was supposed to be about which of the Two Rivers Kids was The Dragon Reborn. And we get a whole episode dealing with the bond between an Aes Sedai and her Warder, which was a good episode, but it seemed like it might have fit better in a season 2 or 3 or 4. And we get a cool prologue of an Aiel fight sequence, which was very cool, but again, it only barely related to the overall season arc.

It was like nobody was in charge of making sure the episodes fit together, and all the different writers and directors were left to their own devices.

Hopefully, if the show becomes a hit, they can tighten all that up going forward.

Best Scene For me, probably the scene with Lord Agelmar and Lady Amalisa in that room with the armor. I’m not sure what it says about the series when the best scenes so far have been the ones that didn’t involve the regular characters or storyline.

I thought the channelers blasting the heck out of those Trollocs was pretty cool. That’s the kind of magic I like to see in fantasy: The kind that levels armies. The wild magic of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

I liked most all of the scenes surrounding the battle of Fal Dara, though they suffered a bit from lack of budget or time or something in the area of Trolloc-rendering. I liked those parts a lot better than Rand dealing with The Dark One, which seemed a bit anticlimactic.

Best Line Loiel: “I’m standing…” In response to Perrin asking, “How can we just sit here while everyone else is fighting?”

Characters Morraine. Largely a passive observer in this particular episode, unfortunately. Somehow she looks different in each episode to me. Maybe it’s because they keep changing her hair style from show to show. Perhaps that’s the only way they can show the “ageless” look of Aes Sedai. Overall in the first season, she’s definitely been the standout character in the show, the anchor that’s holding everything together.

Lan. Lan spent the whole episode sidelined in The Blight, not being a factor, for a change. Overall I liked his character a lot in the first season, something I wasn’t expecting. He’s also an anchor of the series, and they need to keep putting him in as many scenes as they can.

Rand. Well, he’s come a long way since that first episode as a character. He’s almost tolerable now. Almost. This is the point in the books, though, when he really became obstinately insufferable, so it’ll be interesting to see how it goes in the series. The whole “tell them I’m dead, I’m going on a sabbatical” thing doesn’t bode well.

Mat. MIA. Don’t miss him, to be honest. His character hasn’t developed much. Perhaps that’s why the actor left.

Perrin. Still not doing much. They haven’t explored Perrin’s character much yet so it’s hard to have much of an opinion on where they’re going with him. He had the “inciting incident(s)” in his character arc and … that’s it so far. Otherwise he stands in the corner brooding.

Egwene. Like Perrin, I don’t know what to make of her character yet, because they haven’t explored it much. Each character gets so little screen time because of the sprawling nature of the material that it’s hard to get to know any of them, and they seem content to leave them languishing. I can’t think of any significant ways that Egwene has changed over the course of the series so far. I’m not even sure she’s had an “inciting incident” for her character yet.

Nynaeve. So she died and then … got better? I didn’t understand what happened there at the end. Did Egwene heal her? It looked like hand-waving plot magic to me. Anyway, Nynaeve definitely got most of the character development in the first season. She’s the only Two Rivers Kid so far that’s made a real impact on the show.

Thom Merrilin. MIA. I’m starting to think he isn’t coming back in this first season. He’s probably destined for “occasional guest star” status.

Loiel the Ogier. KIA. Didn’t see that coming. I didn’t like him much anyway, but now I might miss him if he’s gone. :) But I fully expect them to hand-wave him back to life in the next season if he was a popular character. They seem to be demonstrating a willingness to use plot magic whenever necessary (something that was meticulously avoided in the books, I might add).

Padan Fain. Chief exposition deliverer in this episode, while Perrin just stood there sheepishly listening. Are they setting him up as a long-term villain?

Book Spoilers They’ve alluded to the “past is the future” a few times in the series so far. We saw skyscrapers covered with vines. And now we’ve seen a futuristic city with flying cars from “3000 years ago.” I vaguely remember that from the books, but it was only barely mentioned here and there. (Somewhat like the Shannara books.)

I’ve finished the audiobook of The Eye of the World, so I have the full scoop on everything now.

I didn’t remember Rand and Morraine going to The Eye of The World alone at all, and in fact, they didn’t. Most everything that happened there at the end in the show was different in the book. Extremely different. The mysterious and mostly unexplained Green Man was there, along with a couple of Forsaken, and a big pool of saidin. Morraine battled it out with a Forsaken (largely off-screen). The Dark One wasn’t there. Lan got his butt kicked and Nynaeve did as well. Rand channeled and teleported to The Gap and defeated the Trolloc invasion by himself.

The scene with Rand and Egwene and the baby on the homestead seemed familiar to me somehow, but it wasn’t in the first book. Rand only ever talked to The Dark One in some dreams. (So many things in the show seem familiar, I think, because the books are so long and comprehensive that literally anything and everything happened in them at one time or another.)

I thought that a significant part of the last episode’s events back in Fal Dara actually occurred in the second book. Padan Fain and The Horn of Valere, for example, and that big battle. (The Horn of Valere, incidentally, was discovered at The Eye of The World–it was the main thing they brought back.) (Padan Fain, also incidentally, was a gibbering wreck of a Gollum character at the end of the first book, nothing at all like we saw in the show.)

At least, I didn’t remember any battles at the end of the first book. But there were a ton of battles like that in the books, and it’s impossible to remember them all. It turns out there was a battle in The Gap at the end of the first book, but it was a background, offscreen, offhandedly-mentioned event, until Rand teleported into the middle of it and blew up all the Trollocs with the One Power.

Lord Agelmar was in the first book, but mostly as a background character, trying to convince Morraine to stay in Fal Dara and help fight Trollocs. I don’t think Lady Amalisa was mentioned at all in the first book (0 search results). Certainly not leading channelers in any battles. They must have heavily embellished that or lifted it from somewhere else in the series. (But I liked that they did. Otherwise the last episode would have been somewhat dull.)

Were they saying Morraine had been stilled by The Dark One there at the end?? That certainly didn’t happen in the first book. At least not that I remember. She fought a long painful battle with one of the Forsaken at The Eye of the World, but they left the impression she was fine afterward. Or she left that impression.

Then again, she’s a very mysterious character who hides a lot, so it’s entirely possible she didn’t channel any further after the first book and I just didn’t notice. (I honestly don’t remember Morraine having much of a central presence after the first book.) Or perhaps in the series, they’re planning to have her follow what was Siaun Sanche’s journey in the books, which would actually be quite a bit better for the longevity of her character.

And it looked like they were strongly implying there that Rand blasting The Dark One is what broke the seal on his prison and let him out. He definitely smirked before he disappeared. I don’t remember if that was the way of things in the books or not. I don’t think so, because Rand did all his channeling elsewhere, against Trollocs, not against The Dark One.

Was that even The Dark One in the show? Maybe it was one of the Forsaken? I don’t remember The Dark One being, you know, corporeal.

The end of the first book was quite confusing, to be honest. I remember thinking that the first time I read it, and it was no less confusing the second time in audiobook form.

Anyway, it looked like Min had gotten onto a caravan heading out of Fal Dara. It reminded me of the caravan that went into the Aiel Wastes in the fifth book. I think it was Min that went on that journey? I feel like Padan Fain might have been on that caravan too? Or a Forsaken in disguised perhaps? And Morraine and maybe Mat? I don’t remember. Like I’ve said before, everything in the books runs together and I have little sense of a distinct timeline in my memory.

That was the Seanchan rolling up on the Western shore there at the end, one of the many interesting but ultimately unrelated storylines that tended to derail the books for quite some lengthy amounts of time. I don’t remember them arriving in the second book, but I might be wrong. Who can remember? I do remember some fairly iffy cultural subjects around those people that I’ll be interested to see how they handle in the television show.

Thom Merrilin never came back, much to my surprise. It turns out he didn’t return in the first book either. But Morraine did mention once in The Ways that she thought he was still alive.

I started the second audiobook, which, for the record, begins with a prologue of “Bors” at a meeting of Darkfriends. Then Rand sneaks out of Fal Dara just as the Amyrlin Seat, Siuan Sanche, arrives (I will never be able to spell “Amyrlin” or “Siuan” correctly on the first try, ever). No Seachchan so far.

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