A Deep Baritone and a Fiery Seven

Today my BTG Seven kicks off with some sadness, dives into the unexpected, and finishes with a predictable season…

Sad to hear that James Earl Jones has passed away. He was a wonderful actor who immortalized Darth Vader, Mufasa, and was great even in one of his first roles in Dr. Strangelove. He and his deep baritone that even made CNN good for a time will be missed.

As I started using OBS to record LOTRO in my journey on Angmar, I realized I needed to set the resolution to a reasonable level in order to be able to record and play open my 3 year old laptop. I’m thinking 1920 x 1080 will work well enough to try out since that lets me at least read the quest text. The fact text is not scalable properly in the game is a real bummer.

I had to check my resolution in LOTRO because my first foray back into Secret World Legends this year ended up with black-screen recordings. I could not record and play SWL at 4 K. The 1920 x 1080 resolution worked much better, and I’ll be using that to follow my adventures. I’m actually starting things in September this year instead of waiting until Halloween to get my taste of horror games.

My comic book club is reading the Cells at Work manga this month, and I recalled that Netflix had the anime a bit back during the lockdowns. Unfortunately, it is not on that service any further, but I did find it on Crunchyroll, which has a 7-day free trial, so I signed up and was able to get started on that series. The first episode is pretty cool, describing an attack on the body caused by pneumonia and how the cells work together to fight off the illness.

What a weekend of football! That Notre Dame upset was pretty unexpected—almost as unpredictable as the NFL 49ers inactivating my running back on Monday Night Football. So, I ended up losing my fantasy week.

This was also a weekend of fire. With the heat wave we’ve been having in California, it was not unexpected that we would have fires to accompany it. I hope the first responders all stay safe and do their jobs well; wildfires suck!

Finally, my Angels inched a bit closer to avoiding my prediction of a 100-loss season. By beating the Twins on Monday, my team is now 60-84. They are guaranteed a losing season once again, but they still have a chance of remaining the fourth-worst team in MLB and avoiding 100 losses.