About Endgame Viable

Hi! My name is Tom but I’m sometimes known as UltrViolet in gaming circles.

Social Contacts

Fair warning: I’m anti-social. It’s generally inadvisable to contact me because I rarely check for personal communications, so be prepared for a wait time. I’m not interested in business or marketing or networking opportunites. Endgame Viable isn’t a for-profit venture, it’s just a hobby. (However, I would be interested in playing tabletop games, if anyone is starting any groups.)

• Email: endgameviable at gmail.com. Do they still scrape emails for spam? I don’t know. Anyway email is obsolete and nobody should use it anymore.
• Twitter: @endgameviable. I never check DMs. Since TweetDeck became paywalled, I don’t use Twitter anymore.
• Discord: My id is endgameviable and I’m UltrViolet on the Blaugust Discord. Lately I’ve been trying to cut down on Discord usage, so I don’t hang out there much anymore.
• YouTube: Endgame Viable. Nope, I don’t read the comments.
• Twitch: Endgame Viable. But I almost never live stream, and certainly wouldn’t ever read the live chat under normal circumstances.
• Facebook: Endgame Viable is technically a page there. Unfortunately I don’t know how Facebook works anymore, so definitely don’t try to contact me there.
• Fediverse: I write microblog posts at @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com, but I rarely check for replies. I don’t use it as social media, in other words, just for publishing.
• You’d think there would be some way to funnel notifications from all these different systems into one place. I should look into that.

About Me

I’m an old Gen-X guy who lives alone in a 1950s suburban house with surprisingly good Internet. I live with a mackeral tabby cat that showed up at my back door in 2017. I befriended a quirky ginger cat from the woods in 2022, but he still lives outside most of the time.

I’m a software developer by trade. I currently work in the area of “infrastructure lifecycle management,” which basically means working on tools for monitoring hardware and/or cloud infrastructure. I’m one of those trendy “full-stack” “devops” developers, the ones that you throw at any software or configuration problem anywhere in the pipeline in any language on any platform (except mobile, yuck). Due to extremely good fortune that befell me in 2021, I work remotely for a large west coast tech company.

This site, Endgame Viable, is where I’ve done most of my blogging since about 2012. I often write about games I’m playing, but sometimes I write about programming or writing or music or whatever. I don’t write reviews, and I usually don’t write about myself. Since 2023, I’ve fallen into a posting schedule of twice a month.

I’ve been playing computer games pretty much since computer games were invented. Before that, I started “gaming” when my older brothers introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons around 1979. (Before that, I played card games and ping-pong with the family.) I graduated to an Atari 2600, then a TRS-80 Color Computer, then an Amiga. I moved to DOS/Windows/PC Gaming when Doom and Quake made all other computer platforms obsolete. I have consoles, but I don’t use them very much. Using a controller too much hurts my thumb.

I can trace my origins in writing “blog posts” back to around 1997, when I posted “match summaries” on a Quake clan web site. I’ve maintained one or more of my own web sites since 1998. My first semi-regular blogging, in the format that we know today, began around 2003 on my real name web site, using a PHP blog platform that I wrote myself. I wrote about politics and current events until around 2010 when I got bored with that. I still have an interest in such things, but I certainly wouldn’t write political commentary now.

I launched Endgame Viable in October 2013 because I wanted to put game-related content on its own site, and I wanted to switch to WordPress and stop maintaining my dumb PHP thing. (Actually I started in 2012 but I renamed the site in 2013.)

Then, in 2021, I got so sick of WordPress and how slow it ran on my web host that I pulled the plug on it and switched to a Hugo statically-generated web site.

Somewhere around 2022, I moved the hosting of the site entirely to Amazon Web Services. It costs me about $5 a month to host the static site with all the images there. It’s not easy to setup, though.

I’ve experimented with a custom blog platform written in Next.js, but I haven’t committed to switching over to it yet. It’ll be more expensive to host, but it’ll have more dynamic features. In any case, I only work on the blog site for a few weeks a year, if I’m lucky.

I write here under the name “UltrViolet” because it was the only name I could think of when I started. It’s the name I used in Quake, playing in the Crayola Clan. I’ve been trying to think of a different name to use for years now, a subject that itself could probably fill several blog posts.

YouTube Channel

I have a YouTube channel called, oddly enough, Endgame Viable. I post videos of games I’m playing there, because I discovered it’s a lot faster and easier to talk about games while I’m playing them, instead of trying to write about games after I play them. I tend to focus on blind playthroughs of new-to-me games, which are the most interesting kinds of game videos for me to watch.

I’ve setup all kind of scripts and stuff to automate as much of that as possible, so I don’t have to think about it too much. I just press a “record” button, stick the files in a directory, and let the scripts do all the rendering and uploading work. Usually one video uploads every night while I’m asleep.

Policies

I have some Twitter policies that govern what I say there. It’s mostly a moot point now since I don’t use Twitter anymore, and I don’t use the fediverse the way I used to use Twitter.

I would have sworn I’d written some comment policies too but I can’t find them at the moment. Comments are difficult to implement on a static blog like mine. Right now, I’m using a very lightweight third-party comment platform called CommentBox. On the plus side, I don’t have to manage anyone’s user credentials. On the negative side, the comments are hosted elsewhere and I have little or no control over them. (That’s actually a positive, to be honest.)

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