The Love/Hate for ESO Turns Once Again

Posted on April 3, 2026 by David K.

I’ve written extensively about ESO. I started during COVID with some IRL friends, took a break, came back for Oakensoul and Arcanist, took another long break, recently came back for subclassing, and now I think I’m well and truly done.

It’s the combat. I just can’t get away from the fact that I don’t like it. I’m not great at it. Passable, not great. But here’s the revelation: I don’t think I’d enjoy the game even if I was good at it. The combat is just not interesting to me. It never was. In all the roughly 5,000 hours I’ve put into it, I’ve never thought it was fun. It was just something to be endured while questing and grinding.

(And the one non-combat thing to do in the game is Tales of Tribute, but I truly despise it, and do not believe a collectible card game has any place in an MMO.)

Zenimax Online has made stunning announcements about new content, systems, quality of life upgrades, and game modes coming to the game over the next couple of years. That’s great. Great for the long-term prospects of the game as a business, and great for the people who like it.

Unfortunately, all this does is make my OCD tingle. There will be thousands of hours of content added as well as thousands of new achievements to earn. The thought of it is overwhelming, and the reason has taken me years to articulate: I want to complete the content, but I can only do that through the combat I don’t enjoy. This is why it feels overwhelming to me. I don’t enjoy the process.

That was my reason for leaving last time. I was obsessed with grinding out achievements at the expense of the terrible combat, and it was hurting my mental health. Once all of this new content lands, the problem would be multiplied for me.

Perfect example time. I decided to try veteran Vateshran Hollows. I’ve done it several times on regular, but never cleared it on vet. I figured with all the power creep from subclassing, I’d have a pretty good shot at it. Since coming back, I got everything leveled and got all new meta gear, so I followed Hyperiox’s guide on making a solo build, and went in. It was 2 hours of frustrating grind. After 17 deaths and the third wipe on the final boss due to some mechanic of one particular enemy that I wasn’t understanding, I just quit. I simply closed the game. Then I went to Steam and turned off auto-renew on ESO+.

(I logged back in to remove all my items in the guild store so they wouldn’t expire and then be deleted in emails I never open, because I had a couple million-gold items up for sale.)

The start of these sweeping changes landed yesterday. I successfully ignored my curiosity to log in and look at them.

Some people like the process of getting your head bashed in for a couple of hours, reading a guide and watching a video, and then trying again, until they’ve mastered all 50 different fights in a particular dungeon. I could do that. I was already very close on the first try. But what I finally realized is that I don’t enjoy that, and never will, and I’m tired of pretending that I do. The endless click-click, click-click, click-click metronome mini game of keeping all your skills up while interleaving light attacks, poorly, with a LOT of misses of the 50ms window while also moving, dodging, and blocking. A run of the thing is about an hour, once you know what you’re doing. (The speed run time limit is 45 minutes.) That sounds more manageable, but who knows how many runs it would take for me to get to that kind of time, memorizing every boss, and every attack pattern, and every mechanic.

And then I realized that you need to clear it ten times to unlock all the perfected weapons.

This was the final straw for me. I don’t enjoy this combat. I don’t enjoy the grind. I don’t enjoy the process. So, for the third and, I think, final time, I’m retiring.

I’m just quiet quitting this time. Last time, I made announcements with my guilds. This time, I’m just going to let it fallow. Making announcements makes people uncomfortable, regardless of my autistic need to put a cap on it. People come and go all the time. I finally figured out that it’s part of the unwritten community rules to not talk about it, so there’s no pressure either way. So I can only blog about it. Sorry, world.

I like the thought of doing content with other people now, instead of just playing single-player games. That was the best part of ESO, running dungeons and trials with guilds. I’ve looked around at a lot of replacements. I’ve heard the skill ceilings are quite high in both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV, so that puts me off of them. I want to like Destiny 2. The gunplay seems to be the right style of combat for me. But everyone agrees that the game is not in a good place right now, and it’s famously inscrutable to new players. I’ve played a few hours, and it’s not clicking. Bungie is promising a refresh, but it’s been pushed several months, due to having their hands full with Marathon, I’m sure. So I’m going to keep an eye on this.

I still love Fallout 76, bugs and crappy RNG and all.

Posted in Gaming | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Back to the Wharghabl

Posted on April 3, 2026 by David K.

I’ve reactivated my twitter account, just shy of deletion. I did it to keep up with AI developments and tech news in general. And, boy, what a time to return to watching this scene in real time, with the Oracle layoffs, and the leaking — and immediate rewrite — of Claude’s “harness.”

Even though I can’t bring myself to not follow a few key politicians (Thomas Massie, Rand Paul), I will try to minimize political content in my feed by not engaging with any of those posts.

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Yes, It Really Is That Bad

Posted on April 3, 2026 by David K.

Outrage as Oracle makes thousands of foreign-worker requests amid layoff bloodbath

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, Oracle filed for roughly 3,126 petitions to employ H-1B workers in fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Employers must submit the paperwork when seeking to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations like technology. Some 436 of those petitions were filed this year alone.

Amazon, which in January said it would axe 16,000 corporate employees, has filed for some 2,675 H-1B petitions during the same two-year fiscal period. That came on top of news in October that the retail giant was axing 14,000 corporate workers.

According to AI search results, there were 245,000 tech layoffs last year. We’re already at 90,000 this year. Someone on TikTok referenced 340,000 layoffs from the government sector as well. But, sure, the unemployment rate is just 4.4%. Something, something, lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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I Can’t Do this Any More

Posted on March 5, 2026 by David K.

I have tried to delete Twitter many, many times over the years, but I think this is the last straw. Every single day, I can see the following:

  • Our federal and state governments are utterly, shamelessly corrupt, and don’t even get me started on other world governments…
  • Privacy was a lost cause decades ago, and yet we still pretend there’s any left for anyone except the 1%
  • The criminal justice system has become 3-tiered: people at the top and bottom get away with l.i.t.e.r.a.l murder, and only the “middle class” gets punished
  • My entire 40 year career is at very real risk of being cannibalized by LLM’s
  • LLM’s are cannibalizing the entire world’s supply of chips and compute and financial investment
  • The open source world is getting taken over by the woke mob in real time
  • Every consumer-facing product and service is rapidly getting both more expensive and cheapened at the same time, and now requires an account with a subscription and tracking to even use
  • Housing has become almost completely inaccessible to people below the age of 40, and the trend is worsening, as “private equity” is moving down the chain into apartments and even mobile home parks
  • “Dating” apps have utterly destroyed personal relationships, and the answer for many is just to get on social media and rant about it, but not stop engaging with them
  • Microsoft has destabilized the entire gaming economy (which is bigger than movies now) with it’s boneheaded moves over the past few years
  • Apple keeps angling towards a unification of macOS and iOS (which they promised in 2018 they would never do), making a move back to Linux on the desktop attractive (but see the point about it all going woke)
  • Failing service-oriented businesses (like Uber) are now paying people pennies to record themselves doing menial tasks to capture training data to program the bots to take over doing these jobs
  • The birthrate has dropped below replacement levels for both the West and the East, and while this used to keep the billionaires awake at night, AI has become their hope, and that’s why all the world’s resources are being devoted to it now

In short, there’s a figurative war going on against liberty and anything that enables it, including voting for a non-establishment candidate, general-purpose computing, and a middle-class income. They have also come for any and all channels of information you used to stay informed, and any and all entertainment you might have used to escape the horrors. We are being programmed from both ends. There is no escape. There is no relief.

Between the government overreach, the surveillance built into every product, the restrictions and eventual deprecation of cash, and the burgeoning requirement for a verified ID to do anything (except vote, apparently), and the doomsday scenario slowly building to an inescapable conflagration in the Middle East, the world is crawling inexorably towards the events described in The Revelation, while at the same time pretending that it’s not happening exactly as prophesied.

Every page of Twitter’s feed angers, upsets, and defeats my spirit, and I just can’t take it anymore. And I can’t do anything about any of this but be frustrated and disappointed. Even just replying is like spitting in the wind, because someone without a “name” doesn’t exist on the platform, not even if you pay. So I can’t even register my dissatisfaction about what I’m reading.

It’s all so utterly emasculating, humiliating, and depressing. The promise of a de-wokified Twitter was that it would become an egalitarian voice against power. In response, “power” has made moves which prove that they will not be held accountable, no matter how much is spoken about their misdeeds, their misplaced loyalties, and their greed. I don’t believe Musk thought this is where it would wind up in a couple of years, but I’m certain that “power” is absolutely delighted with the results, and that’s why no one is screaming about how Twitter needs to be taken away from him anymore.

Posted in Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Ace, by Allie Sandt

Posted on March 4, 2026 by David K.

I’ve been losing my taste for all my old music lately. I’ve found a new vein of music on Apple Music, and this song in particular has been lodged in my brain for days. I finally stopped and looked up the lyrics, and now I think I know why. The explanation would be a bit too personal, even for this site, but it has helped me see more of myself, and for that I’m grateful.

Don’t leave me in the dust
Already can’t breathe
I watch my troubles rust
Just so I can go to sleep
No damage to be done
If I’m laying in the sun
With a glaze over my eye
And the people passing by
I hand out second chances
Like they’re my job to deliver
You dry them out in the desert
So I try to cry you a river
Runs far
In my mind
To where you are

Oh there’s that song again I know
And it’s haunting me yeah it’ll never leave
Oh there’s that song I never wrote
And it follows me west to another sea

My vision starts to go
You’re all that I can see
And life continues on
For everyone but me
Slow fading in the sand
The river’s in my head
But suddenly I see your hand
And it reluctantly extends
But are they second chances
If pushed away when given?
Please take another card
I’m just some sad magician
Ran far
In my mind
To where you are

Oh there’s that song again I know
And it’s haunting me yeah it’ll never leave
Oh there’s that song I never wrote
And it follows me west to another sea

And as I take my final breath
I hear that same old tune again
And maybe it’s not what I lost
But dreaming what it could have been

Oh there’s that song again I know
And it’s haunting me yeah it’ll never leave
Oh there’s that song I never wrote
And it follows me west to another
Follows me west to another
Follows me west to another sea

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Updating the Ignored Wisdom

Posted on February 27, 2026 by David K.

In the age of “AI”, a graphic is now going around, which allegedly shows a slide from a presentation at IBM circa 1979.

It makes great sense, which, of course, means that companies couldn’t care less. My prediction is that when the upper levels figure out how to get the consultants to use AI to produce an actual summary of the absolute buffoonery happening in the middle levels, we’re going to learn that the middle had more to fear from AI than the lower levels.

Now someone has updated the slide for the obvious new use cases.

But I hardly see the point of the comparison. We’ve seen decades of war crimes committed by both parties, and the only person who went to jail was one of the whistleblowers. It’s not like the Department of War has anything to fear over being held accountable for Geneva convention violations anyway.

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It’s Made of Holes

Posted on February 27, 2026 by David K.

Many years ago, when I worked with English folks, I was about to go to Coventry, England. My coworker was telling me they were famous for their blood sausage. I asked what was in it. He said, “The holes.”

“The holes?” I asked.

“Yes, you know, the holes. The ear holes, the eye holes… the… holes.”

This has stuck with me for almost 30 years now. All processed meat products are just the recombined leftovers of the real cuts.

Pic for reference. 

Posted in Humor | Leave a comment

Adventures in Corporate IT Absurdity, SSL Certificate Edition

Posted on February 20, 2026 by David K.

After several years of developing my main Ruby on Rails project on my personal MacBook Pro, (like any sane developer), events have conspired to push me back to using my ossified corporate laptop for development. I didn’t expect to mind too much.

Even though I’ve worked almost exclusively on a Mac for all these years, I’ve always made sure that the corporate laptop can do the job. I have admin access (so many places won’t allow this), so I can install Ruby via RubyInstaller, and go from there. I’ve even been able to install some nice-to-haves, like a good git GUI. (Tower, which, on a Mac is sublime, but at least has a Windows versions, and is dual-licensed, FTW.)

What I wasn’t prepared for was the change in the workflow. Any tool that doesn’t use the Windows networking stack has to include the corporate firewall cert in its trust chain to access the internet. In the past, RubyInstaller has handled this “SSL problem” for bundler. I’ve had to work it into npm as well.

However, I’ve upgraded my app to Rails 8, and RubyInstaller’s Ruby won’t run the app server any more, so I’ve been forced into using WSL. Now, I tried this early on (when it was a translation layer), and quickly decided that it was terrible, and fundamentally broken for Rails development. Microsoft rather quickly admitted defeat, and released a version 2 (which was a full VM). “It does what it says on the tin,” but I’ve avoided it ever since, because native Ruby worked just fine.

Also I can’t use Kamal to deploy the app to a Linux VM, because that relies on key-based SSH authentication, and my company simply doesn’t allow it. I mean, are they supposed to support the industry-standard way of deploying web apps to Linux hosts or something!? Are you crazy? They have to put every session through Cyberark and log every keystroke, right!? So now I’m also forced to containerize the app, and deploy it to Azure’s Web Apps for Containers service, which is a terrible product with the worst dev tooling I’ve seen in 20 years of cloud services.

So now I’ve spent literally days working out how to deal with the SSL problem in several more contexts.

First, you have to get the WSL Linux made aware of my corporate certs. On Ubuntu, that involves putting them in /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and running update-ca-certificates.

Okay, that wasn’t too bad, but it was still a new trick I had to learn.

Second, you have to get the Docker image of the app aware of them, so that when you build the image, the build process can do things like install packages and bundle gems. In the Dockerfile, that involves something like:

COPY ./script/misc/certs/theirs/firewall_bundle.crt /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/firewall_bundle.crt
RUN update-ca-certificates

Easy, right? It’s the same thing.

Now there comes the problem of the az command. I tried to debug why my ASP container wasn’t running my image, so I naturally tried to do az webapp log tail... because the online version of the log viewer in Azure’s web portal is literal trash, and takes forever to scroll to the bottom. This has led to many hours of working through the issue with AI.

The first error messages were, again, about SSL. After several back-and-forths, AI finally pointed out that the error messages were from Windows, and I had to learn the harsh lesson that WSL will “fall through” to running Windows binaries if it doesn’t find a native one. I complained to Claude, and he said:

“Yeah, the Windows PATH passthrough in WSL is one of its worst design decisions.”

So I installed the native Linux az command, and still the horrors persist. So I tried patching az‘s Python environment to include the certs. Then I got even weirder errors. Something about the corporate certs being broken because they don’t have an “AKI extension.” I complained again to Claude, and he said:

Yeah. To summarize the chain of absurdity you just had to debug:

  1. Corporate firewall does SSL MITM with a malformed cert (missing AKI extension).
  2. WSL silently falls through to the Windows az. exe instead of telling you it’s not installed.
  3. Linux az ships with Python 3.13, which is stricter about certs than anything else on your system.
  4. AZURE_CLI_DISABLE_CONNECTION_VERIFICATION works for half the code paths but not the one you need.
  5. The Azure CLI’s own log streaming function doesn’t honor its own disable flag.

None of that is your fault. It’s layers of bad defaults and incomplete implementations stacked on top of each other.

An independent search on Google about SSL AKI gave me this snippet:

Validation Issues: If the AKI is missing, malformed, or does not match the issuer’s SKI, it can lead to certificate verify failed errors, particularly in strict environments like Python 3.13 or with outdated proxies.

Uh… yeah. No kidding.

This is your brain. This is your brain on Windows trying to do anything that resembles modern web development. I can work around this, but, dang. Between Microsoft and #CorporateIT, this is so much harder than it needs to be. What a disaster. And I know what I’m doing.

Posted in Programming | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Getting a Prescription in 2026

Posted on January 29, 2026 by David K.

I got new insurance this year.

Had an appointment at the first of the year. The office took a copy of my new insurance card. Saw the doctor. She prescribed 2 medications. One needed a prior authorization, the other was ready later that day. I picked it up. There were only 14 of 60 prescribed. I found out when I got home. Insurance wouldn’t fill more without a prior authorization for *that* mediation as well.

Called the doctor’s office. Oh, yeah, insurance companies need prior authorizations after the first of the year. Also, I screwed up by picking up a partial fill. See, this is pain medicine. They can’t just prescribe more. They can’t do anything unless I see them again. I get an appointment in a few days. The doc re-prescribes. They promise to do a PA.

It’s ready to pickup. I wait 15 minutes in line. I pay for it. Clerk asks if there are any questions. I check the count. It’s 14 again. I get shuttled to another window. I wait another 10 minutes. Pharmacist explains that it needs a PA. I tell them that’s what I thought I had. I return the partial fill on the spot, hoping this will keep the prescription active in order to get the PA sorted out.

I call the office again. They again claim I’ve got a PA.

I finally call my insurance. They claim they’ve never received the request.

It’s now past closing hour at the doctor’s office on a Friday. I’ve been out of pain meds for 3 days, and now have to wait the weekend.

Snowpocalypse. Everything is closed Monday.

Called the office on Tuesday morning. Point out that I’ve gotten new insurance, which they have on file, and ask if this is a problem. Yep. That’s the problem. She doesn’t admit where they screwed up, but the PA lady resubmits the PA, and claims it’s ready right now. “Go pick up your meds!” she says cheerfully.

If only.

I call Walgreens.

Now, understand that Walgreens will not let you call the pharmacy directly. The number for the local franchise goes through some horrible call center. It will ask you what you want. You have to say, “pharmacy.” Then it will try to convince you that it can help you, and you have to say “pharmacy” again. Then it tells you for the millionth time what the store hours are. Then it reminds you that if this is a life-threatening emergency, then what the actual heck are you doing calling us? *Then* you get a handler. *Then* you get to explain your situation. *Then* you get put through to the *actual* “dispensing” pharmacy. *Then* you get to explain your situation *again*. Then you get to be told that the PA is *still* not done.

I call the insurance company. They are actually helpful. They sort out the fact that they keep approving only 14. I’m told that they will now fill for 60, but that it will take 24-72 hours to go through the system. In today’s hours. Up to 3 days. In this era of instant global communication.

I call the pharmacy. I wait. I get hung up on. I call again. I get through. Not done.

Next day, I call the pharmacy. I get through. Nope. Call tomorrow.

I call today. I wait 5 minutes on the Walgreens line, and am dropped. I call again. I wait another 5 minutes, give the explanation, get transferred to the pharmacy. Get dropped. I call again. I wait another 5 minutes, I give the explanation again, I get transferred again, and… they still don’t have it.

Tomorrow’s the deadline of 72 hours. Trying to get this medication has taken almost 4 weeks at this point. Four calls to the office. Two calls to insurance. I’ve lost track of the number of calls to Walgreens. Each time, I’m told to wait 1-3 days for this to “go through.”

Does anyone want to bet that the PA will have gone through by tomorrow, and I can finally pick this up? At this point, does anyone want to bet that this *won’t* require another call to insurance to confirm that it’s FUBAR’d, and that I have to have *another* doctor visit to start over from scratch!? Because not only do I strongly suspect this, I’m rapidly losing my will to live on this planet any more.

UPDATE: They did NOT have the PA. I finally asked if I could pay for it out of pocket. Yes. How much? $77. Wait. Person on the phone says, “Let me apply a coupon code for you…”

$22.

Does anyone involved with this bizarre situation understand how much quality of life this affords me? I’m ashamed to admit how much I would pay for it. I’m not rich, but I can pay $22 dollars for two months of pain meds out of pocket. I’d RATHER pay $22 every two months to NEVER CALL THE INSURANCE COMPANY OR WALGREENS ABOUT THIS AGAIN.

Insurance companies: What in the world are we doing here?

Americans: Why are we putting up with this? Oh, right, because Congress does absolutely nothing to help people any more.

Posted in Health Care | Tagged | Leave a comment

All is Vexation and Vanity of Spirit

Posted on January 14, 2026 by David K.

Ecclesiastes 1:14-18, “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, l am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

I referenced this scripture in counseling once to a UPC pastor, expressing my frustration with the futility of life. He blew off my interpretation, and tried to tell me that this theme in Ecclesiastes was sarcasm. Despite our early relationship, and wanting to be properly deferential, so certain was my conviction that it was as real as anything ever was, I told him that I didn’t believe that. Like, at all.

And 30 years later, he betrayed all the deference, trust, and loyalty I had given him, and I pray that I never have to see or hear him or anyone in his family again.

Talk about vanity and vexation of spirit.

Once he and his wife are dead, I can speak about it openly, and I don’t give an unholy crap what his sons will think about it.

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