Endgame Viable

Contents

Back To Life

Morning! I bent my self-imposed rules a bit and started writing this post yesterday afternoon. I was just going to jot down some bullet points but I got carried away. That’s why it’s too long and multi-topic’ed.

I’m glad I did, too, because I had trouble sleeping last night for some reason and I’m up again at an ungodly hour. I’m going to crash hard at some point today.

Yesterday was, a week after my infusion, my official “return to normal” day, chemo-side-effects-wise. Appetite returned with a vengeance, and I successfully downed both a hamburger for lunch and a Nachos Supreme from a local Mexican restaurant for supper. Though my mouth is still pretty sensitive so I’m uber vulernable to hurting myself with even mildy spicy foods for a few more days yet.

PET Results

I had a video call with my oncologist, where we went over the results of my PET scan last week. Everything is stable, however there is a troublesome new cancer spot that has made an appearance in my right hip bone. It’s very subtle, and has an SUV value of 4.6, which is just above the “nominal” level of 3.

It’s possible it’s an indication that the cancer is learning to adapt to the treatments I’m getting, so my oncologist is all over it.

She wants to do another PET scan in two months to see if that right hip spot remains stable over that time or gets larger (“progresses,” as they call it), and then we’ll decide what to do about it. (Possibly radiation.) I feel no pain or any effect at all from that spot, and there’s no danger of my hip spontaneously shattering or anything like that.

Meanwhile I’m still having trouble with my right hand (the thumb, specifically), and now I have some pain in my elbow and shoulder area. It’s getting noticably worse. I’ve never had a pinched nerve before, but it feels like what I’d imagine a pinched nerve would feel like.

The PET scan did not reveal any cancer-related causes, so the next steps are my regularly scheduled brain MRI next week to rule out brain causes, and then potentially an MRI of my neck/shoulder region. It all sounds logical to me, but I’m worried it will take too long to get to a diagnosis. In the meantime I have to be careful I don’t accidentaly drop things I pick up with my right hand.

As I’m typing this, I can barely even bend my right thumb. Many normal activities are suddenly challenging, like, say, holding a pen. I’m really hopeful it’s reversible, because otherwise, well, I don’t want to think about that.

Blaugust Preparations

After mulling it over, and seeing that there are people out there who are extremely passionate about this, I decided not to use any AI-generated imagery during Blaugust. It’s more work for me, but it’s a fairly minor sacrifice.

So yesterday I started building a new library of generic stock images that covers broad subject categories. It’s an arduous, soul-draining process. The images I use during Blaugust are going to look extremely stock and free.

However I made an AI skill to reduce some of the tedium of pulling images down from free-images.com, converting them to the right size and format, and plopping them into the proper directory in my S3 image bucket. You folks with your fancy-schmancy WordPresses have it easy.

I’ve also been combing through my recent personal photos. You can see one on this very post. That’s Gracie, and that’s a fairly common sight for me when I wake up, if I’m not following the standard morning routine. I will use that for posts where I sit in judgment of something or someone. (I try not to write those kinds of posts anymore, though, so this is probably my only opportunity to use it.)

The New Culture War

There’s been a couple of firebombs thrown into the blogosphere recently about AI. It’s a new culture war, because we definitely needed more of those. I’m conspicuously avoiding the topic despite having some relevant feelings on the subject, because everything’s already been said and all the battle lines have been drawn and there’s not much point in discussion anymore.

My personal stance on AI in content creation is pretty middle-of-the-road, I think. Not extreme in one way or the other. I have roughly the same stance on AI usage as I would have on washing machines or airplanes or microwaves. I think I will write an AI Policy page at some point to lay it all out for anyone who cares.

Final Fantasy XIV

Conveniently labeled so Bhagpuss can skip. :)

Last night I played through another quest in the Endwalker MSQ, entitled Going Underground. It took a whopping 58 minutes. Something about building a space ark.

I don’t remember if this is a thing in other MMORPGs or not: In FFXIV, when you’re following a quest giver from location to location, sometimes there are other instanced NPCs standing near the quest giver. Those instanced NPCs have little bits of flavor dialog if you click on them that are moderately relevant to the quest you’re on.

It’s completely optional, but I have a habit of clicking on every one to see what they say.

It becomes a bit of a problem when there are eight of those NPCs tagging along with you on the path of this quest. Every single time you move to another step in the quest, you have to click on all eight of them to see what they have to say, and it gets a bit tedious.

I say “you have to” but you don’t actually have to. I just do it because if I didn’t, I’d miss something.

And in the videos I’m studiously recording, I read all of that text out loud for posterity. I don’t know if you know this, but reading out the lines of eight different NPCs one after the other and trying to make them sound slightly different from one another is a wee bit of a challenge.

But it’s fun to try, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.

The point is, I really hope they quit with the huge packs of NPC roadies traveling along with you in Dawntrail and the upcoming Evercold.

Human Curation

I read a great pre-Blaugust post from the Blaugust 2026 blogroll: In the era of AI slop, human curation is even more important.

Interestingly, I’m on YouTube all the time, and I don’t see too much AI slop in my recommendations. But I’m a very careful clicker. I don’t just click on anything in front of me, I examine the title and the thumbnail and don’t click on things if I get even a tiny whiff of AI (or non-AI) slop content.

Here’s a tip I use: If I’m clicking on a video from a channel I’m unfamiliar with, I will often open it in a new tab, so I can return to the first tab and use the “Not Interested” or “Don’t Recommend Channel” options on the original thumbnail, if it turns out the video sucks. For reasons beyond my capacity to understand, once you’re actually viewing a video, those options aren’t available anymore, and of course if you go back in your browser the whole recommendations page changes and your original breadcrumb is gone.

Anyway the above post has inspired me to make a note to make a list of human content I consume on a recurring basis and put it on the blog somewhere. Perhaps it will be a Blaugust post, since I believe Creator Appreciation is one of the themes.

Have a fantastic Wednesday!