The Recluse Report - June 2026 Part 2

2 July, 2026. 2,372 words.

We’re into summer now, where every day challenges the air conditioning system. July and August are the peak “every day is in the 90s [30s]” where I live.

Upgraded MacBook

I bought a new MacBook Pro. Upgrading from the old MacBook Pro was a breeze, and it magically migrated everything from the old one to the new one. Apple is actually good at some things. (By comparison, every Windows upgrade I’ve ever done involves days of starting over from scratch.)

For anything related to work or software development or writing or communications, I’m pretty much a Mac guy now. PCs are relegated to gaming and music production and video production. (Weirdly I’ve never once considered doing media work on a Mac, the place where literally everyone does their media work, mainly because I can’t stand Adobe products.)

I got a 16" version instead of a 14" version this time for the bigger screen and I think I regret it already. Unfortunately the keyboard area is also bigger, and it takes a bit of getting used to. The trackpad is enormous. And the whole thing is heavier. I didn’t really think it through. Ah well. It’s fine.

World Cup

Big Football Stuff is happening in the U.S. apparently, but it hasn’t really penetrated my selectively-curated social feeds. (YouTube, I mean… that’s the only “social” platform I use anymore.)

Blogosphere

A quick mention of Roger’s post Thoughts on Blogging Part 25. I have a lot to say on the general subject of “AI is ruining everything” but I don’t really have the energy or need to write a diatribe against all of humanity. My current personal opinion on this new age of AI is that it’s pretty similar to the dawn of commercial flight.

The bottom line on blogging for me is the same as always: Writing a blog for any other reason than the joy of writing is a fool’s errand, and, for me at least, a waste of energy. It’s always been possible for computers to read any public web sites, and AI is no different.

Unless you want to go down the road of gatekeeping your content and cutting your potential audience by 99%, blogging is like stapling a piece of paper to a board in a busy public square. Anybody can come along and read it, or, you know, take a picture of your piece of paper, or even stand there and copy down what it says onto their own paper.

Gaming

Another few weeks have passed and I haven’t even looked at my gaming PC or PS5.

But I saw Aywren’s video on FFXIV anxiety triggers and it made me think that social anxiety triggers are definitely a big part of why I don’t play MMORPGs unless there’s a fully solo guild-free path available. (And there’s something to do besides dailies or farming.)

The first time entering group content by myself is a frickin’ nightmare, because everyone else already knows what to do and I’m running around like an idiot figuring it out for the first time. And those “how to” videos don’t help much, because it’s no substitute for experience. I’m slightly less anxious in the 8-person trials or 24-person raids, because it’s slightly easier to blend into the crowd. But I’m very glad there’s no more need to run PUGs for 4-person story dungeons. I haven’t done a Duty Roulette dungeon by choice in many, many, many years.
Never heard of or done any social events in FFXIV. Must be a new thing, or a guild thing. But yeah, that would be a big anxiety trigger unless I knew someone there, which isn’t very likely.
Never role-played in an MMORPG ever. Wouldn’t even think of trying it. In FFXIV specifically, your character is defined for you and always mute, so there’s no personality to roleplay except emotes, which are all kind of the same personality. I’d only ever roleplay in more of a TTRPG setting with real humans that I could trust. But yes, it’s a big anxiety trigger.
Tanking: Yikes. See 1. I wouldn’t dream of doing that with strangers unless I already knew every mechanic by heart, and that’s not going to happen since I don’t play enough. Healing: Double Yikes. It’s actually more scary to me, because healers are more essential to group survival than the tank. Healers are expected to carry everyone; tanks can’t, and DPS can’t. In many of the guilds I’ve been in, the healer is the group leader.
Voice. I too hated voice comms for a long time. But one thing I’ve learned in life is that many people process verbal communication better than written communication and thrive on voice comms, but unfortunately I’m not one of them. I struggle to listen and comprehend verbal communication for some reason, and I have poor language recall skills so it’s not very natural to construct sentences verbally. But it’s become a little better for me since I started cranking out YouTube videos and started a remote job where I can only communicate with coworkers across voice/video. Also, I’m pretty comfortable using a mic, and actually prefer it (when I can monitor my voice with headphones) to talking without a mic. It turns it into a performance, so it’s not “me” anymore.

Genealogy

A new blog category. While working on digitizing and transcribing all my grandfather’s World War 1 diaries and letters, I dug out all my genealogy files that I haven’t touched in a long, long time.

They’ve been dormant so long that the software I once used, Genbox on Windows, is no longer active. So I had to export my big genealogy database to GEDCOM format and look for some newer software to import into. This time, I’m looking for Mac software.

Genealogy software is often very frustrating for me to use, because I want an interface that appeals to a programmer like me who hyper-focuses on details, but they usually make genealogy software so it appeals to, you know, the majority, or what I refer to as “regular people.”

Either that, or there’s no UI design at all and you’re basically using rudimentary Access database forms on top of whatever custom database format they came up with, so moving between data screens requires 50,000 clicks.

The breakdown usually occurs in the source citation area of the genealogy software. I want fully traceable citations for every fact, whereas I imagine the average person doesn’t care about proving every detail in a court of law.

So it’s difficult for me to find genealogy software that fits my workflow, and to be honest, trying to create custom solutions is always lurking in my brain. It’s tempting to create a big directory tree full of Markdown or YAML files, where I can control every aspect of everything, and I know for sure that the files will survive far, far into the future. With any software I use, nobody’s going to be able to read Genealogy Software XYZ’s Custom Database a hundred years from now.

I tried an app called MacFamilyTree. It’s got a slick modern interface, a rarity among the sea of genealogy applications still clinging to a 1990s UI. I liked the UI, but while the storage format is ultimately sqlite, it’s not very transparent. So I rejected that one.

I briefly looked over RootsMagic and something called Reunion but they didn’t really speak to me.

I’m currently working with Gramps, an open source offering. It’s more of the plain-Access-forms-on-top-of-database UI, but it works okay, and it has a very transparent sqlite database format that I can easily read with AI-driven tooling. So I can quite easily build a static HTML web site generator by pulling data out of my Gramps database. I’d also like to make an extractor to pull all the data out and export it into plain Markdown files or even PDF files for future-proofing.

I feel like it’s almost mandatory to sign up for Ancestry.com at this point, so I made an account. It’s pretty obviously a money-grubbing subscription ripoff for casuals though, so I’m trying to avoid it.

I did sign up and subscribe to a place called Fold3, at which I’ve found a treasure trove of World War 1-related records. I understand it’s owned by Ancestry now, so there’s a bit of money-grubbing to it, in the form of the downloads being lower resolution than the originals on their site. Also the scans of documents are monochromatic, so faded writing disappears instead of just being faded. Annoying.

I also signed up to FamilySearch.org, which I believe is the LDS trove of genealogy research. There’s a lot of good stuff on there and everything so far is free. And, for my paternal surname at least, most of it is already in there and conveniently linked to source records.

One of the advantages of having a fairly unique paternal last name is that a lot of other people in my extended family have done a bunch of research for me, and I can crib from their work online. Previous generations in my family have also done a bunch of work for me. So usually I just type in my last name and hundreds of records pop up instantly.

I find genealogy research fascinating and it’s super easy for me to fall into a deep, deep rabbit hole with it. It’s another one of those alternate timeline careers I could have had.

Back in the 2000s, I digitized a huge set of surviving family photos going back to the 1800s and put them online. I built a whole set of utilities and a PHP application over months to browse web-friendly JPEG mirrors of the original TIFF files.

Recently I redid that janky old-style dynamic application with a static set of web pages I built with Claude in an hour. AI may not survive the public backlash, but my god it makes life so convenient and productive while it’s here.

I’m also building a web site for browsing my grandfather’s diaries and letters. Same thing: I had Claude build a perfectly serviceable static site generator in less than an hour, showing each diary page or letter page with an original image and my transcription next to it.

I feel sorry for future genealogists having to go through the millions of digital pictures that current generations produce. Can you imagine having to label and identify every picture you ever took on a phone? Yikes.

AI and Genealogy

Claude Code and the like are great at certain things, when it comes to genealogy. Setting up directories, renaming files to match patterns, creating stubs of transcription files to go along with every photographed or scanned image of diaries or letters, going through massive files of transcriptions and looking for things. Things like that. Genealogy data is usually very uniformly encoded, so AI has an easy time digesting it. (Genealogy data is also somewhat tedious to manipulate by hand, especially large bulk changes.)

One thing it’s not especially great at is transcribing handwriting from 1918. It can do it, if the handwriting is perfectly legible, but if it’s not especially legible, or it’s filled with proper names (like you find in Army Morning Reports), then the error rate is so high that you might as well transcribe it by hand, because it takes longer to fix a flawed transcription than to start a new one from scratch.

Also, Claude takes a long time to think sometimes. It’s often faster to just type out a page of transcription than to wait for Claude to mull over it. Claude is amazing, but using it is a bit like returning to the 80s or 90s in terms of processing speed. You start it, then you get some coffee and wait, that kind of thing. And you usually have to say “yes” to approve 50,000 commands it’s running under the hood.

Lately I’ve started experimenting with Google’s Claude-like offerings: Antigravity and Antigravity IDE. I think I like it better than Claude Code. It seems faster, and Antigravity IDE is yet another fork of VSCode so it’s better integrated than running Claude Code in a VSCode terminal.

There was a time when Google’s AI was absolutely awful (was it Bard at first?) so I’ve avoided it, but they seem to have caught up. Like web browsers, we’ve reached a point where all the AI offerings have roughly the same capabilities, you can just pick the one that integrates best into your existing workflows and ecosystem.

The point here is that with AI-assisted coding, the possibilities are unlimited with genealogy data, and it takes mere moments to take an idea and make it a reality. “Hrm I wonder if I can make a static web site to share my genealogy data.” Prompt, prompt. Done! Is it the greatest, most stylish web site in the world? Not even close. But it works. And it’s a massive shortcut for the hardest part of any development project: Starting it.

Media Consumption

Can’t remember what I’ve watched lately. I think I finished the new season of For All Mankind, which was average and unmemorable. I finished the last season of The Boys, which was okay I guess. (Still nowhere near as good as the first season.)

Otherwise I mainly have various YouTube videos from my followed channels running in the background most days. Lately I’ve been on a Simon Whistler kick, bouncing between his 50,000 different channels like Sideprojects and Decoding the Unknown. For the “have to play something in order to fall asleep” category I’ve been going through American Dad yet again.

Cancer Corner

I just had another chemo infusion, yesterday as of this writing. Side effects from the last two have kind of sucked, so I’m rather hoping this one doesn’t suck as much. Especially since my worst days will be right during the July 4 holiday weekend, when professional healthcare options are limited.

The only other news is I’m due for another PET scan. Otherwise everything continues routinely. Treatments are working, and I’m not getting worse (pending new scan results). I even bought an elliptical exercise machine to try to buff up a little bit, and I think it’s helping already.

Bye!