Just a very brief post to say the cataract surgery went well, and the procedure did in fact take about 10 minutes. I felt nothing, saw nothing, heard almost nothing except some classic rock tunes on a radio somewhere. Most of the time was spent signing consent forms, waiting for dilation drops to take effect (they dosed me three different times with dilation drops which lasted all day), and putting an IV in my arm for a sedative.

Day two of life after cataract surgery was perfectly fine. I went to my followup appointment this morning, where the doctor barely even looked at me before letting me go again. They apparently don’t worry too much about people my age recovering from cataract surgery. But in any case the technician checked my eyeball pressure and I could read the eye chart at I think it was 20/30 through the bionic lens already.

The eye continues to improve. Computer screen text is getting clearer, and sunlight doesn’t hurt as much. The “new” eye wears out quickly though in front of the computer. It starts to twitch, as one’s eyes do after reading a long time. (At least my eyes do.) It just starts happening within about five minutes. So I’m staying away from the computer except for short periods. Earlier in the year, I found that with the cataract, dark themes (white-on-black text) were easier to read, but since the surgery I’ve found the exact opposite.

Okay I’m getting pretty impatient now. I want to be fully recovered right now please. The new eye is better after another day, but still a bit blurry and hard to focus on a computer monitor for any amount of time, especially text. It gets better every day, but it’s still a chore. I can see the television from a chair halfway across the room fine, though, so I’ve been watching (and re-watching, in fact) The Americans, and I started playing a little bit of The Last Of Us (Remastered) on the PS4.

So I guess I’ll write something about games this time. The eye continues to improve, and focusing on nearby things gets a little bit better each day. (Writing this post has been the easiest so far.) There’s still a slight bit of soreness there which crops up in unexpected ways. Sometimes it hurts when I yawn or squeeze my eye shut, and sometimes it feels like there’s something like a hair stuck in the eye.

Nothing new to report about the eye, except the new normal seems more normal every day. I stopped using the antibiotic eye drops as instructed, and now only use the prednisone (steroid) eye drops 4 times a day for another week. (Those drops drive me crazy because I swear they have chalk in them, as if they simply crushed up some pills and mixed it with water.) I don’t see much of anything interesting happening in gaming.

Had a rough night last night with back pain. One of those situations where there’s no way to stand, sit, or lie down that feels better. It’s a lot better today but I’ve also been working harder to keep myself still. Yesterday I tried to ignore it. Big mistake. Frustrating as it might be, there’s always less overall down time when you stop and rest rather than try to keep pushing through the pain or sickness.

In the interests of brevity and not boring everyone to death, I’ll edit the rest of these down to a few sentences. 12. “What is your family ancestry?” My family came from a group of Anabaptists who originated in Switzerland, moved to what is now Ukraine, and emigrated to Kansas en masse around 1874. 13. “What scares you?” A whole lot of things, mostly personal. 14. “What are you most grateful for?

Even with a week and a half of down time from cataract surgery, I still managed to play a few games this past month. The Witcher (Enhanced Edition), 39 hours. This is what I spent most of my gaming time doing after World of Warcraft and before surgery, and a little bit afterward to finish up the story. This is the first time I’ve finished the whole game. It got kind of weird at the end.

I uploaded the last episode of my Fallout 4 podcast yesterday. It took me a while to get the concluding episode out due to injuring my hand and cataract surgery and, frankly, a bit of malaise, but it’s finally done. Here is the series page, though it displays the episodes in reverse order. It’s a serial podcast, so it’s better if you start at the first one. In all there are 21 episodes for a total of about 5 hours of listening.

My World of Warcraft subscription ended weeks ago, and the last time I actually played was September 3rd, a month ago. I meant to go back and complete the Siege of Boralus but I got too involved playing The Witcher again. I rescued Jaina though, so that was a good-enough ending for me. I figured I should finally post what I thought of the expansion. I get the impression there’s a lot of people complaining about Battle for Azeroth.

I saw that Sypster posted about returning to Guild Wars 2, so in the absence of anything else to write about, I’ll relay my own experience with that very subject. Back in July, I went ahead and uninstalled Guild Wars 2. Partly because I’d grown to strongly dislike the gameplay (as opposed to the nominal experience of mildly disliking it), and partly because I didn’t think much of ArenaNet anymore.

I stumbled upon a headline from Blaugust alumni MMOist about Bless Online launching for reals on October 23. I’ve alternated between interest and disinterest on this title since at least 2017, but I knew I wasn’t going to spend a cent on it until I could play it first. (Especially after Bhagpuss’s first impressions, parts one and two, made it sound like as uninspired a game as it could possibly be made to sound.

MapleStory 2 is one of those MMOs that I never would have looked at twice, except that there’s nothing else to look at right now. See previous post lamenting the pitiable dearth of MMORPGs. The last Nexon game I played was Riders of Icarus, which I did not think much of. I even downloaded and tried it again yesterday, and I still didn’t like it. It sounds like a cool idea to have a game built around collecting mounts and such, but none of that seems to exist at the beginning of the game, which is a huge disappointment.

I was trying yet again to think of something interesting to write, when I saw Roger talking about Blaugust this morning, which led me to Gevlon talking about Blaugust, where I found out that I’m no longer an active blogger. I mean, sure, I haven’t posted in a week, whereas I normally try to post something once or twice a week. But man, talk about a tough room. Also I’m a little puzzled by his methodology.

I woke this morning to an almost literally freezing cold house, which means that we can no longer pretend that the cold months of the year won’t happen. By “we” I mean “me,” because there are some people who actually like the transition from summer to fall. I personally spend most days between November and March in three or four layers of clothes, moving slowly, barely staving off uncontrollable shivering fits, unable to concentrate, hiding in the darkness that consumes most of each day.

I mentioned that I had abandoned The Last Of Us and gotten into Horizon Zero Dawn, so of course, right after that, I abandoned Horizon Zero Dawn and got back into The Last Of Us. You see, I was always interested in seeing the remainder of the story-I was just getting frustrated with the stealth mechanics. Stealth games generally aren’t my forte. Crouching, moving slow, and hiding behind walls all the time gets on my nerves.

Trion Worlds was just acquired by a company called Gambino. No wait, it’s Gamigo. I don’t have much to say about this except I’ve never heard of Gamigo before. I’m hardly an expert in the global operations of every company in the gaming industry, but it does seem a little bit strange that the name Gamigo has never crossed my MMO radar in the last twenty years. They seem to be based in Germany, so maybe it’s not that surprising.

Bless Online launched on Steam for free the other day to exactly zero fanfare, as far as I can tell. Certainly nobody mentioned it on Twitter or in the blogosphere. I had to use my feed reader’s search feature to find the announcement on MassivelyOP. I’m a big fan of free trials when it comes to MMORPGs, and very rarely have I ever spent money on one without trying it out in some way first.

I saw a tweet the other day that made me raise an eyebrow: The content of this tweet baffled me. For starters, how do you “legally get” server code? Who are these people who could theoretically get it? One would assume that the way you “legally get” the Star Wars Galaxies server code is to contact the owner (or more likely owners) of that property and propose to buy or license it.

I’m trying an experiment this year for NaNoWriMo. Instead of writing blog posts about my progress, I’m recording “vlogs” about it. I created a YouTube channel where you can watch me ramble about my NaNoWriMo journey this year. My goal is to record a short video every day talking about my progress, the challenges I run into, how I deal with them, etc. Things that I think might be educational or inspiring or helpful or just funny to other writers.

Kind of a long one. A better day. Hilarious text-to-speech on the iPad, switching scenes, what I like about my writing so far, blanks between writing sessions, thinking about getting Scrivener for iOS, starting fresh every day, finally getting into the world of the story, bringing complex modern sociopolitical themes into the backdrop of the sword-and-sorcery city setting.

Considerably more talking than writing on day 4. Morning update: Irish accents, daylight savings, second Mythica movie, nervous about iOS Scrivener, feeling mute when I’m not able to type on a keyboard, struggling to differentiate character voices in dialog. Evening update: the story so far, NaNoWriMo community and me.

October was a slow PC gaming month, partially due to back pain making it hard to sit at in the computer chair to play games, and partially due to a lack of games that interest me right now. Guild Wars 2, 7 hours. The big burst of MMORPG activity for the month, where I caught up with the latest Living World episode. The Witcher 2, 6 hours. I finished The Witcher 1 last month, so I went and installed the second one.

This will be what I hope is a quick blog post about BlizzCon, largely inspired by peer pressure more than any real interest. In fact, the main reason this post didn’t get deleted was I needed a vehicle to say that I’m trying to reserve most of my writing energy this month for NaNoWriMo. I’m still having back trouble so typing at keyboards for long periods of time is challenging.