Blog

141 entries. 159,456 words.

2013-09

  • Bored with Everything. 2013-09-18. After I moved into a new house, I instantly became bored with all computer games. I still load up Assassin’s Creed III now and then, but I can only get through a mission or two before getting bored. I also tried to play Europa Universalis IV for a while, but I just can’t get into all the details of a Colonial Europe Simulator. Which is a shame because I think the game map looks very pretty.
    • Blog
    117 words

2013-10

  • Welcome to Endgame Viable. 2013-10-17. I stumbled onto this thing called the Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI). I found it by reading a post on a blog called Inventory Full, which is an awesome blog name, by the way. That post, which referenced a bunch of other blogs, got me thinking that I didn’t have enough MMORPG gaming blogs in my feed reader, so I went and added a bunch. Then, when I looked over the recent posts on all of those different blogs, they all had one thing in common (besides MMORPGs): The Newbie Blogger Initiative.
    • Blog
    508 words

2014-03

  • Why I Suck At Comments. 2014-03-20. I am the world’s worst blogger when it comes to dealing with comments. Partly it’s because I’m not nearly as good at “real-time” communication as writing things in advance, but mostly it’s because it’s technologically much more difficult for me to post comments at the present time. Most of my posts are written in a plain text editor and posted via. WordPress’s post-by-email feature, because I don’t have access to my site during the times when it’s most convenient for me to write.
    • Blog
    308 words

2014-04

  • NBI – Support Your Local Blogger!. 2014-04-25. I first heard about the Newbie Blogger Initiative last year, sadly just as it was ending. I thought it was a great idea then, and I still do, so I’m supporting it this year in whatever small way I can. New bloggers need all the support they can get, because it can be pretty discouraging at the beginning. I’ve been writing and blogging about various things for years, so I know all about how daunting it can be to find and build an audience.
    • Blog
    410 words

2014-05

  • Know Why You’re Blogging. 2014-05-05. There’s a lot of great advice going around about blogging this month for the NBI, and if you are new to writing or blogging (or not), you should read all of it. Thankfully many of them are summarized in the Newbie Blogger Initiative Week #1 Roundup, so I don’t have to. The only thing I can add is my own personal philosophy on this blog. But first, if you want to start a blog, just start it, and do whatever you want, and to hell with everyone else and what they think.
    • Advice
    • Blog
    553 words
  • Scheduling Posts. 2014-05-08. I saw this excellent post from Belghast a while back: Thumper Logic. The first part of his post got me thinking about my own publishing schedule, and as it is NBI month I thought a meta-blogging post would be a good topic. I too have tried to write one post a day-in the past. I applaud the effort, and anyone who can do it is far better at this than I am.
    • Advice
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Responses
    494 words
  • Blogging The Hardest Way Possible. 2014-05-15. In honor of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, in this post I’m going to talk about “how” I blog for Endgame Viable. That is, the actual process. I don’t recommend doing it this way. :)First, I play some games. Usually they are MMORPGs. This typically happens on weeknights and weekends.After I’m done playing games, the next morning I often go to a place where I can’t play any games, which is a place that rhymes with the surname of a famous Star Trek captain.
    • Advice
    • Blog
    • Responses
    1,378 words

2014-06

  • Leveling Jealousy. 2014-06-05. This post from Keen asked a question which I desperately clutched upon as a topic for a post. When a new MMO launches do you ever feel pressed to keep playing to stay at or ahead of the curve? Maybe you have friends playing who all seem to have more time than you do — does that bother you? I know it shouldn’t bother me and I’d be a much happier person if it didn’t, but unfortunately it does bother me to see other people in my circle of friends leveling faster than I am.
    • Blog
    281 words
  • Summer!. 2014-06-24. Since I’m the boss of my own blog, I’m going to declare myself on summer vacation and blog less for a little while. For one thing, I’m playing a bit less than before, and what I’m playing is mostly thoughtless grinding, so I don’t have a whole lot to report. Secondly, I decided I’m going to do Camp NaNoWriMo for July, so very soon I’m going to need to concentrate more on writing fiction than writing blog posts.
    • Blog
    130 words

2014-08

  • Congrats Blauggers!. 2014-08-15. I just wanted to drop in and say congratulations to everyone participating in Blaugust: Belghast’s challenge to post every day during August. Clearly, I’m not participating, because I’m being a lazy bum this summer. Would that Blaugust had occurred in Blarch or Blay or Blune. Even if I hadn’t taken a vacation, my daily schedule has been turned upside-down so much that I’m struggling to find the right way to write anymore.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    251 words
  • Why Endgame Viable. 2014-08-31. Well, here’s a topic. From Rowan Blaze: Why Have I Touched The Sky? Sort of a meta-blogging topic. So my second challenge for you, Dear Reader, in these few days of Blaugust: Why did you title your blog what you did? Do you think the name still fits? My first name for this blog was Melanthius. I still think that’s a cool name that rolls off the tongue, but it doesn’t have any inherent meaning when you look at it.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Responses
    209 words

2015-05

  • FFXIV – New To Me Dungeon Diary. 2015-05-10. In my latest FFXIV ventures, I’ve done a number of level 50 dungeons for the first time, which is something I really hate, especially so long after they’ve been out. I just hate being “the new guy” in a dungeon, especially in FFXIV because it actually announces it to everyone. (Fortunately there is a reward to the other players for running with a new person, so nobody is likely to kick you out.
    • Blog
    778 words
  • The NBI And Starting A Blog. 2015-05-12. Two weeks into May, and after posting a talkback post, I realized that I hadn’t even mentioned The Newbie Blogger Initiative (NBI). This is a good indication of how bad my blogging has been lately. But enough about me. NBI is a very cool effort to promote new blogs and to spread the word that now is a great time to start a blog if you’ve been thinking about doing so.
    • Blog
    451 words

2015-06

  • Difficulty in The Witcher 3. 2015-06-08. I’ve just about had enough of the Hard difficulty in The Witcher 3. It’s fine for normal encounters, but when it comes to bosses it’s over that fine line between challenging and frustrating. And it’s not because the encounters are actually too difficult, it’s because of two things: 1) The controls are not responsive enough, and 2) It takes too long to re-load from your previous save. The controls. Arg, the controls.
    • Blog
    336 words
  • Blaugust Plans. 2015-06-14. To hold myself accountable, I’m going to announce publicly that I’m going to try to participate in Belghast’s Blaugust this year. That means posting at least 31 times during the month of August (once a day). Fortunately for me, I’m sure I have at least 31 half-finished posts in my Drafts folder that I can choose from. So don’t be surprised if you see posts about very old topics that everyone’s long forgotten.
    • Blog
    • Community
    74 words

2015-08

  • Blaugust 2015 Feeds In OPML. 2015-08-02. Somebody else might find this useful: Blaugust 2015 OPML That is a list of Blaugust feeds exported as an OPML from InoReader. Presumably you can import that into your RSS feed reader of choice (Feedly, etc.). If the URL doesn’t work directly, you should be able to save it as a file and import it that way. P.S. I got the list from Belghast’s list of 69 Blaugust challengers.
    • Blog
    120 words
  • A Year Of Blog Stats. 2015-08-12. Way back in April, Endgame Viable became a year old, statistically speaking. That is to say, in April, I had accumulated my first full year of WordPress site statistics. (The Endgame Viable “brand” was actually born on October 16, 2013, while the first post on this blog-ie. the database that powers this blog-was June 29, 2012.) I’m not one to keep a close eye on statistics, but they can be useful to see what “works” and what “doesn’t work,” and some new bloggers might be interested in what I’ve learned.
    • Administration
    • Blog
    475 words

2016-03

  • Black Desert In Tweets. 2016-03-07. Since I am too lazy/don’t have time to write a coherent post about Black Desert I thought I would take the very simple route of pasting a bunch of my tweets about it into a post. Boy was that a mistake. It turned that it wasn’t easy at all, and this post took far longer to create than I wanted it to. This is a big problem because I just got the “Learning Higher Processing Skills” quest from Ficy in Heidel, which opens up the “Pure Water for an Experiment” quest from Flaviano, which then allows you (I think) to heat Melted Copper Shards into Copper Ingots, a task I’ve been wanting to do for some twenty or thirty hours of game time now.
    • Blog
    127 words

2016-06

  • NBI 2016 – Kill Hippy GIFs With Fire. 2016-06-07. The topic of animated GIFs came up in the NBI Discord this morning so I thought I’d write a little bit about it. I hate animated GIFs. That is all. No, really, I hate them. I lived through the 1990s World Wide Web, so I have vivid memories of the days when every advertiser put obnoxious blinking animated GIFs in every web ad, making every web page into some crazy dystopian night-time Las Vegas scene with blinking neon signs in every direction.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Opinion
    514 words

2016-07

  • A Post-by-Email Test. 2016-07-05. Today I am trying to enable posting by email on my blog again.
    • Blog
    13 words

2017-05

  • Accountant, Bourne, 10 Cloverfield Lane. 2017-05-20. Last weekend I rented The Accountant on Verizon VOD. It was decent, but not quite good. I felt a pretty strong connection to Ben Afleck’s character because I can identify with many of the symptoms he reeled off about “high functioning autism.” I’ve never been diagnosed but I’ve always assumed I’m on the Asperger’s spectrum somewhere, enough to be recognizable, but not enough to be debilitating. The plot that went on around him, though, wasn’t all that interesting to me (corporate accounting woohoo).
    • Blog
    • Media
    310 words
  • Note on Comment Approval. 2017-05-31. I apologize, but at some point in the last couple of weeks, WordPress decided that I needed to approve every single comment regardless of who it came from, so you may see some delays with comments showing up. I have no idea why it’s doing this. I can only assume some random thing changed with WordPress or Akismet or Jetpack recently. I’ve fiddled with some settings again tonight to see if it helps.
    • Blog
    73 words

2017-06

  • FFXIV – Heavensward, What Happened?. 2017-06-23. Still bumping around doing miscellaneous tasks of little import in Stormblood. But lately I’ve been thinking about Heavensward, the previous FFXIV expansion. I pre-ordered it early and was in there on early access launch day, but looking back on it two years later, I didn’t play it very much at all. (Yet for some weird reason, I remained subscribed the whole time.) In FFXIV ARR (2.x), I leveled all of the following jobs to 50: Bard, White Mage, Dragoon, Black Mage, Miner, Botanist, Carpenter, Weaver, Alchemist, and Leatherworker.
    • Blog
    • MMORPG
    687 words
  • FFXIV – Dun Scaith. 2017-06-26. It was a big weekend for me in FFXIV, as I managed to finish up the Heavensward Main Scenario Quest, so I stand ready to begin Stormblood this week (just in time for everyone else to be finishing it :). However, since there is usually a two or three day lag between my gaming events and posts about them, let’s continue with last week’s adventures… Normally I try to stay semi-focused on meaningful progress when I’m in an MMORPG, but I had a bit of time to kill Thursday so I started wondering if I could pick up two more points of item level so I could check out Dun Scaith, the final alliance raid in Heavensward.
    • Blog
    799 words

2017-07

  • FFXIV – Stormblood Story Summary. 2017-07-19. I’m going to make an attempt here to summarize the FFXIV Stormblood story for my own future reference. There are going to be spoilers ahead if you haven’t played, although I’ll try to keep it fairly high-level and leave out every detail of how everything turns out. (That means I’m not going to tell you who lives and who dies, muhahaha.) (You can consult any of a wide variety of Wikis if you really need all the details, and may I also suggest the 58 video series I uploaded to YouTube if you get really bored and need to see all the spoilers?
    • Blog
    1,053 words

2017-08

  • The Thirteenth Doctor. 2017-08-08. Here are just a few thoughts about the announcement of The Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, because I wanted to schedule a post for today, my first day back at work (yuck), and this was the only text I had available. I don’t have a problem with a female The Doctor. Whittaker was very good in Broadchurch. And that’s about the extent of my thoughts about the announcement. I’ve never looked up to The Doctor as a male role model, and can’t even conceive of anyone who has, or what it might be like to be a man who believes they’ve lost their favorite male sci-fi role model.
    • Blog
    682 words

2017-11

  • Blogging In A World That Hates Blogs. 2017-11-20. I usually prefer to post nothing instead of a post about blogging*, but since Roger brought it up, and I just said two posts ago that there’s nothing to blog about, let’s talk about blogging! Rather than write something that stands on its own, I’m just going to respond to the parts of Roger’s post that jumped out at me, as if it were a Usenet post. The Nature of the Beast “I’ve written several pieces that I’m proud of.
    • Blog
    • Responses
    1,459 words

2018-05

  • GDPR Compliance Missive. 2018-05-25. Today, May 25th (a Friday, amusingly enough for those of us who know that Friday is the worst day to deploy new things), is the day that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect for the European Union, so, since I have a web site on The Internet, and I know there are Europeans who occasionally visit this site, and supposedly I’m a professional in the information technology field, I wanted to write about it quickly.
    • Blog
    1,697 words

2018-06

  • On Blogging More. 2018-06-18. This is an amalgamation of an old draft from March 2017 that I never got around to publishing, probably because I never found a picture for it, and some new thoughts because the subject came up again this past week. My keyboard, stylistically distorted purely for artistic effect, not at all to mask the dust and dirt that showed up because of the side lighting angle. Roger wrote a post called Where Have all the Bloggers Gone?
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Writing
    2,366 words

2018-07

  • Flipping The Tables For Blaugust. 2018-07-29. I’ve belatedly decided to officially participate in the Blaugust extravaganza. I wasn’t going to because frankly I didn’t think I’d be able to write 31 posts in August. (I still don’t think I will.) But late this past week I stumbled upon some information that I completely missed the first time: You don’t actually have to write 31 posts to participate. I figure that even in my crippled state I should be able to manage five or ten posts.
    • Blog
    • Writing
    272 words
  • Primary Care Doctors. 2018-07-30. This afternoon I have an appointment with a new primary care doctor, one I’ve never seen before. I had no choice but to select a new one because I had to buy new insurance this year, and my old doctor wasn’t “in the network.” It took three months to get this appointment. I don’t like doctors even on a good day. Especially “primary care” doctors. As far as I can tell, the main goal of this type of doctor is to shove you out the office door as fast as possible with the most generic of healthcare solutions that they can think of: “Here, take this generic prescription and come back in a couple weeks if your problem’s not better.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    347 words
  • The Medical Report. 2018-07-31. The very brief medical news is: Yesterday, the doctor was considerably more concerned about my high blood pressure than my hands. I’ll be starting on some new medication for it. I have a followup appointment Wednesday morning where bloodwork will be done and they will see if my pressure is still in what they casually referred to as the “stroke zone.” They did an EKG and I got the distinct impression that if the readings had gone poorly, I might very well have been strapped to a gurney and carted to a hospital right then.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    367 words

2018-08

  • Blaugust Introduction – Blaugust 1. 2018-08-01. This is my back yard and the raucous neighbors who frequently visit. Today is the first day of Blaugust. I thought I would start by introducing myself, something I probably should have done a long time ago. Hi! I’m a middle-aged guy who lives alone in a somewhat rural-ish house with a dog and a cat. I’m “in my 40s,” though in truth I’m now a lot closer to 50 than I would care to admit.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    659 words
  • Blog Post Topic Ideas. 2018-08-02. I know bloggers are always in search of topics to write about, so I thought I would throw out some ideas here at the start of Blaugust. Then I noticed some others doing that. Then I noticed topic brainstorming is actually on the schedule for the first week. Reading comprehension, yay! Anyway a__lmost all of these are based on posts that are sitting in my Drafts folder unfinished right now.
    • Blog
    • Discussion
    726 words
  • The Cataract Report – Blaugust 3. 2018-08-03. Not from today, but from 2010, the last time I saw an eye doctor before 2018. This morning I finally saw the cataract specialist. It’s been about five months since the optometrist told me I had a cataract. It looks like I never wrote a full post about that. No Blaugust back then. :) The delay was mostly because of having to meet insurance requirements: To make a long story short, I have new insurance this year, and that insurance requires a referral from my primary care doctor, but I had to find a new primary care doctor because my old one was not in the new insurance network, all of which adds up to a lot of waiting for appointments.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    774 words
  • New Writing Process Didn’t Work – Blaugust 5. 2018-08-05. This photo of boats is completely relevant to this post! I think I’ve collected enough observational data now to abandon my new writing process. At first it was new and invigorating, but after a week it’s kind of irritating and not any better or faster. For posterity, here’s what I did: I turned on the webcam and recorded myself talking for about 7 or 8 minutes. I played back the video with VLC and set the playback speed slightly slower, and transcribed what I said into a Scrivener document.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Writing
    507 words
  • Back Yard Bird-Watching – Blaugust 7. 2018-08-07. The classic and ubiquitous American Robin from many years ago at a different house. My dad was an avid backyard bird-watcher. He would setup bird feeders and watch all the wildlife that showed up through binoculars from the living room. In the early days of video cameras, this was back in the 80s, I remember he’d setup one of those monstrous suitcase-sized VHS camcorders on a tripod to record birds at the feeders.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    690 words
  • The Hand Report – Blaugust 8. 2018-08-08. This morning I went to another doctor’s appointment, the fourth one in the last nine days. This time I went to see a hand specialist, as I had been referred from my primary care doctor. I was amazed to be able to get an appointment to see him two days after calling. It’s interesting to see the kind of people you find in waiting rooms. Based on my meager experience the last couple of weeks, doctor’s offices seems to be the social hotspot for people over 60.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    805 words
  • Nineties News Nostalgia on Netflix – Blaugust 9. 2018-08-09. I just finished watching the American Crime Story: The People Versus O.J. Simpson series on Netflix. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure it deserved to win any Emmys, but I enjoyed it anyway, especially the second half of the series. I didn’t remember a lot of the twists and turns. I didn’t see much of anything about the whole OJ Trial when it happened. I remember the basic framework of it: The Bronco, the trial, the gloves, the acquittal.
    • Blog
    • Media
    • Musings
    297 words
  • More Netflix Documentaries – Blaugust 10. 2018-08-10. You might have noticed I don’t post a lot about games here, and that’s mostly because I haven’t played much of anything in the last month. So the “here’s what I played last night” style of post is completely off the table for me so far in Blaugust. It makes it kind of hard to think of something to say. :) I could tell you what I watched last night, which was a Netflix documentary called Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist.
    • Blog
    • Media
    550 words
  • My Oldest Computer Files – Blaugust 11. 2018-08-11. My dog likes to be involved with everything. They say everything’s been written before and there’s nothing new to write on a gaming blog. Well, okay, I say that, because I’m lazy and not very motivated. I keep looking at all the mountains of writing prompts floating around Blaugust, including the ones I wrote, and thinking, “Meh, I’m just not interested in writing about that today.” Then, suddenly, a revelation! Wilhelm’s post on installing ZMud contained this passage:
    • Blog
    • Musings
    880 words
  • Developer Appreciation Overthinking – Blaugust 18. 2018-08-18. The Blaugust theme of the week is Developer Appreciation, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write on this topic. It’s one of those situations where I have to decide whether to write what I think everyone expects, or write what I actually think. I’m sure the intention here is to simply state, “I think games are great and I don’t think developers should get death threats on Twitter!
    • Blog
    • Musings
    830 words
  • Blaugust Performance Self-Review – Blaugust 31. 2018-08-31. Back in July I filled a directory with 70 photographs for potential use in Blaugust posts. Last chance to use them! This is Chingoteague. I'm not sure if this is sunrise or sunset but let's just say it's sunset to fit the theme of the post. It’s time to review my performance in Blaugust! Setting goals is only half the battle in self-improvement. The other half is evaluating your performance to see what worked, what didn’t work, and how you can improve for next time.
    • Blog
    • Musings
    • Writing
    2,723 words

2018-09

  • Week End – Carbine, CCP, Daybreak, Witcher. 2018-09-08. I started to write three or four blog posts this week, didn’t finish them, and didn’t want to post them. Instead I decided to cram all of them together into one summary post for the week. This allows me to post, but without the bother of crafting long essays that have beginnings, middles, or ends, when everything I want to say can be summed up in a paragraph. No wonder listcicles are so popular!
    • Blog
    1,275 words
  • Cataract Surgery Day. 2018-09-18. This is probably the last chance I’ll have to write anything before I get a cataract removed from my right eye. I’ll have scheduled this post to publish Tuesday morning, theoretically about the time of the surgery. I say “theoretically” because there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together and I feel like there’s at least a 50% chance I’ll arrive at the appointment and they’ll tell me, “Sorry we can’t proceed because some random thing wasn’t done right.
    • Blog
    593 words
  • Cataract Removed. 2018-09-19. 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.
    • Blog
    214 words
  • Day Two Without Cataract. 2018-09-19. 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.
    • Blog
    299 words
  • Day Three. 2018-09-20. 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.
    • Blog
    181 words
  • Day Four. 2018-09-21. 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.
    • Blog
    185 words
  • Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 1. 2018-09-27. 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.
    • Blog
    1,192 words
  • Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 2. 2018-09-28. This is a photo I took in the New York Cloisters museum some years back. Seemed appropriate for the Jesus talk down below. 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.
    • Blog
    820 words
  • Comfy Questions and Answers, Part 3. 2018-09-30. 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?
    • Blog
    576 words

2020-10

  • Resident Evil 3 Demo. 2020-10-19. I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon.
    • Blog
    • Consoles
    • Videos
    530 words

2021-08

  • The First Day of Blaugust. 2021-08-01. It’s the first day of Blaugust, and it’s a dreary one.
    • Blog
    654 words
  • On Music Posts. 2021-08-03. I have what I have to assume is an abnormal reaction to music posts.
    • Blog
    416 words
  • A Two-Fawn Morning. 2021-08-06. We interrupt this blog post creation for an unscheduled visit from some deer.
    • Blog
    265 words
  • Like Pulling Teeth. 2021-08-10. I would say that getting me to talk or write about myself is like pulling teeth, but I’ve had five or six teeth pulled in my lifetime (or more, I honestly don’t remember), and a ton of root canals, and a ton of dental work in general, so pulling teeth is no big deal to me.
    • Blog
    235 words
  • What's Up With That?. 2021-08-13. I have the day off today, and I have to talk for a moment about the What Up With That SNL sketches.
    • Blog
    191 words

2022-03

  • Bellies. 2022-03-20. I don’t want to write this, because it will make it real.
    • Blog
    238 words

2022-06

  • My First Roll20 Game Wasn't Terrible. 2022-06-26. 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.
    • Blog
    2,949 words

2022-07

  • Blaugust 2022. 2022-07-18. Blaugust is back for another year. I don’t really need to explain it, just go do the thing.
    • Blog
    • Writing
    276 words

2022-08

2022-09

  • What's Top of Mind. 2022-09-17. A new blog post series idea.
    • Blog
    426 words
  • Reading Fail 2022 - Top of Mind. 2022-09-20. 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.
    • Blog
    322 words

2022-10

2022-11

  • Twitter Firestorm - Top of Mind. 2022-11-05. I suppose the social pressure is mounting to the point where I have to say something about Twitter.
    • Blog
    733 words
  • Mid-November Bullets - Top of Mind. 2022-11-14. I’m all about throwing old traditions out the window because they don’t make sense anymore, so I present: The Mid-Month Update.
    • Blog
    329 words
  • Twitter Firestorm, Part 2. 2022-11-20. So Twitter turned into a ghost town overnight, which was somewhat inevitable I suppose.
    • Blog
    1,362 words
  • Ghastly. 2022-11-25. I found out that my nephew died unexpectedly a few days ago.
    • Blog
    116 words

2022-12

2023-01

  • January 2023 Bullets. 2023-01-01. It’s a new year, whoopie. Nothing particularly noteworthy to report.
    • Blog
    747 words
  • Mid-January Top of Mind 2023. 2023-01-16. An unexpectedly stressful start to the work year and a return to some gaming, instead of doing anything productive.
    • Blog
    629 words

2023-02

2023-03

  • Ignorance Is Strength - March 2023. 2023-03-15. 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.
    • Blog
    1,906 words
  • Gen-Z Sleeper Agents - March 2023. 2023-03-31. It’s been a somewhat uneventful couple of weeks of mundane daily routine.
    • Blog
    2,312 words

2023-04

2023-05

  • The Cliff - May 2023. 2023-05-15. Redfall flops, Party-based RPGs, Baldur’s Gate videos, Kubernetes, and the news. A relatively uneventful time slice of life.
    • Blog
    1,861 words
  • Data Loss - May 2023. 2023-05-31. Party-based RPGs, ChatGPT-powered Twitch embeds, and catastrophic NAS failures.
    • Blog
    2,026 words

2023-06

2023-07

  • The Coming Blaugust - July 2023. 2023-07-15. Blaugust 2023, a little Pathfinder, setting up an ActivityPub server, what I’ve been watching, and a little more.
    • Blog
    1,522 words
  • The Imminent Blaugust - July 2023. 2023-07-31. Blaugust 2023, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, blog site updates and microblogging, a nutritional reset, and more, in the summer heat.
    • Blog
    2,606 words

2023-08

  • Nothing But Baldur's Gate 3 - August 2023. 2023-08-15. There’s nothing else in the world for me right now except Baldur’s Gate 3. (No spoilers, though.)
    • Blog
    1,346 words
  • Creator Appreciation 2023. 2023-08-16. Some hastily-written thoughts about Creator Appreciation week for Blaugust.
    • Blog
    964 words
  • Unspoken Community Standards. 2023-08-23. Some thoughts and observations about the perilous minefield of unspoken community standards, and editing your own words.
    • Blog
    1,275 words
  • Vacation - August 2023. 2023-08-31. Blaugust retrospective, Baldur’s Gate 3, videos, vacation, and more. A fairly bland and uninspired effort.
    • Blog
    1,368 words

2023-09

2023-10

2023-11

  • Autumn Leaves - November 2023 Part 1. 2023-11-15. Snowrunner, voting, blog work, audiobooks, and more. Well, not much more than that, really.
    • Blog
    2,395 words
  • Next.js - November 2023 Part 2. 2023-11-30. World of Warcraft did a thing. New Next.js and AWS blog development. Dev vlogs. Lower Decks. Fairy Tale. Thanksgiving vacation. A work presentation. Jupyter.
    • Blog
    2,536 words

2023-12

  • Cold - December 2023 Part 1. 2023-12-15. It’s cold. Monster Hunter games. Devlogs. Doctor Who and Indiana Jones. Next.js development. Slow time at work. Dentist and poison ivy.
    • Blog
    2,035 words
  • End Of Year - December 2023 Part 2. 2023-12-31. Oops the year’s over already. The return of Baldur’s Gate 3. Best year for gaming? YouTube stats declining. Trapped in British quiz shows again.
    • Blog
    2,424 words

2024-01

  • Start of Year - January 2024 Part 1. 2024-01-15. The 2024th one. Baldur’s Gate 3 finished. Warhammer Rogue Trader started. Juggling CRPG videos. Taskmaster, New Zealand, Australia, and Guy Montgomery. A new cataract enters the ring.
    • Blog
    1,911 words
  • Grumpasaurus Rex - January 2024 Part 2. 2024-01-31. Searching for a game to enjoy. Lies of P, Alan Wake, Palworld, Enshrouded. Voicemeeter Banana. Fantasy High Junior Year. Røde PodMic USB.
    • Blog
    3,456 words

2024-02

  • Toxic Bosses - February 2024 Part 1. 2024-02-15. Steam Next. Toxic bosses in Lies of P and Nioh. Hellpoint. Dimension 20. New computer glasses.
    • Blog
    1,808 words
  • Leap Day - February 2024 Part 2. 2024-02-29. Last Epoch 1.0. Nightingale Early Access. Lies of P done. Lords of the Fallen in progress. Mitigating microphone noise with console tables. Making Let’s Play videos. Dimension 20. Java.
    • Blog
    4,646 words

2024-03

2024-04

2024-05

  • May - May 2024 Part 1. 2024-05-15. Social media retreat, replacing coffee with tea, a little gaming, actual play shows, and that’s about it, really. At least I refrained from talking about TTRPGs this time.
    • Blog
    1,711 words

2024-06

  • Broken Slack - May 2024 Part 2. 2024-06-01. Busy hands games. More about Glass Cannon shows than you probably care about. Dune and Planet of the Apes. Broken Slack.
    • Blog
    2,188 words
  • Summer Is Here - June 2023 Part 1. 2024-06-15. The heat is on. It’s on the streets. And in my house. More about lexical selection errors and Hitler documentaries than you probably want.
    • Blog
    1,593 words
  • A Review of an Audible Review. 2024-06-20. Or: What Must It Be Like To Be That Person
    • Blog
    1,936 words
  • Eliminate human tyranny! - June 2024 Part 2. 2024-06-30. The end of a hot June. A summer of MMO stuff apparently. Subtitling. A lot about The Three Body Problem. A couple of movies.
    • Blog
    2,623 words

2024-07

  • Elden Ring DLC - July 2024 Part 1. 2024-07-15. Finding a groove in the Elden Ring DLC. Fool Us, July 4 movies, Stainless Steel Rat audiobooks.
    • Blog
    1,642 words
  • July 2024 Part 2. 2024-07-31. Blaugust, Elden Ring DLC, REAPER templates, television, movies, and audiobooks, the value of code coverage, and poison ivy.
    • Blog
    2,276 words

2024-08

  • Introducing Me to Blaugust 2024. 2024-08-01. A somewhat disturbing AI-altered photo from 2022 to introduce myself.
    • Blog
    465 words
  • Saturday Musing About Blaugust Systems. 2024-08-03. A return to the good old days of just typing whatever I’m thinking on a Saturday morning. Were they really good days? Read on to find out! What a cliffhanger!
    • Blog
    1,119 words
  • AI-ing Yourself. 2024-08-06. Bloggers turn to AI to find themselves.
    • Blog
    1,961 words
  • Recent Blog Updates. 2024-08-07. An impending tropical storm, now uploading Elden Ring DLC videos, some small updates to the blog, time blindness, and Blaugust controversy?!?
    • Blog
    974 words
  • Does AI Steal?. 2024-08-09. A discussion of whether or not AI steals from artists.
    • Blog
    1,061 words
  • August 2024 Part 1. 2024-08-15. Elden Ring DLC completed, a burst of Disney+ activity, Song of Ice and Fire audiobooks, changes at work.
    • Blog
    2,299 words
  • Parasocial Media. 2024-08-16. On content addiction and the parasocial nature of social media.
    • Blog
    526 words
  • Youtubers I Watch. 2024-08-18. A simple post for a humid day with no air conditioning.
    • Blog
    630 words
  • How I Hung A Computer Monitor Over My Bed. 2024-08-21. While I rest my back in bed, I explain a little bit about how I hung a computer monitor over my bed.
    • Blog
    648 words
  • The Recluse Report - August 2024 Part 2 [+audio]. 2024-08-31. A long one. Wrapping up Blaugust, RSS summaries, Elden Ring DLC done, Dragon’s Dogma 2, a busted PodMic, Reafir, Saturn’s Children, the dentist and insurance.
    • Blog
    2,818 words

2024-09

2024-10

2024-11

  • Election Day Diary 2024. 2024-11-05. Random notes from an exciting/terrifying election day in America, which somehow doesn’t talk about politics.
    • Blog
    2,664 words
  • Post Election Remarks 2024. 2024-11-10. 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.
    • Blog
    1,995 words
  • The Recluse Report - November 2024 Part 1. 2024-11-16. All is bleakness and despair, Supermassive games, leaves, Bluesky, election distraction, eh, that’s pretty much it.
    • Blog
    1,290 words
  • The Recluse Report - November 2024 Part 2. 2024-11-30. Dark Pictures Anthology games, an assortment of random media consumption, a filling at the dentist.
    • Blog
    1,360 words

2024-12

  • The Recluse Report - December 2024 Part 1. 2024-12-15. Game announcements, the dream of AI-generated video descriptions realized, a week of watching movies, Fall of Casseroles wrapup, a shocking real estate development, and a lot of crazy news this month so far.
    • Blog
    3,086 words

Just so I know, this is a list template.