The Recluse Report - July 2026 Part 1

I’ll probably pause the Recluse Reports through August, since I’m making an effort to write more “traditional” blog posts for Blaugust. I’ve already started with a few practice posts.

It’s a bit of a shock to return to olden times, where every post is confined to a single subject. It’s more limiting to write that way, and it’s easy to give up on it as too much work.

Blogging

Since my blog exists as a big directory on my MacBook full of Markdown files, it turns out that it’s fairly easy to get one of the many modern AI coding agents to work on it. I started with Claude Code but switched to Google’s Antigravity.

I set Google’s Antigravity to work on fixing all the broken image links on my blog for posts in the 2016-2018 range. It was also able to take all those images from that date range out of a WordPress zip archive, convert them to webp format and size them appropriately, and move them to my S3 bucket directory. This is one of the best tasks for modern AI: Lengthy, repetitive, tedious work.

I also set it to work on going through all my images and writing a description of each one, because I have no idea what I have in my image library anymore. I can use all those descriptions to search the images in the future.

And while I was on a roll, I set Antigravity to work on importing posts from my other blogs, a task I’ve been putting off forever. So now you can see all the embarrassing posts I did in the 2000s when I still thought the Internet was a safe place where you could write whatever and nobody would see it and there wouldn’t be any consequences. I should issue a blanket apology for everything I’ve previously written.

And furthermore, I set Antigravity to work on creating a more modern Hugo theme. AI assistance, it turns out, is really helpful when working with a Hugo blog. Hugo isn’t very intuitive, so having AI around to remember all the weird syntax and templating rules is pretty handy. Not to mention having it remember all the complexity of css styling. Typing, “Hey can you make those two things line up,” is way easier than digging into the intricacies of inner and outer style boxes and all their associated attributes.

I also had Antigravity help me add a couple of commenting features. One was importing dynamic comments from the aws database into static files so they are archived and built with the site. (I had designed the system to do that from the beginning but never got around to actually doing it.) Another was leveraging the commenting system to implement a sort of “contact form” so people can send me messages.

And I had Antigravity write a lot of documentation on how all of these blog features work because I had forgotten most of it, and will undoubtedly forget it again in the future.

In the end, over a couple of days, I had Antigravity catch up on about five years worth of blog work I’d been putting off. Pretty cool. Score another point for the advantages of static blogs over WordPress blogs.

Gaming

Another half month has gone by and I haven’t played any games, though I feel like my hyperfocusing on other projects is coming to an end, so maybe I’ll return soon. Though I honestly haven’t heard of any new games that sound interesting. Likely I’ll just go back to FFXIV or Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

There seems to be a surprising amount of buzz about Sony announcing ending support for physical media in their consoles in 2028, which made me wonder what year it was.

I’ve been doing a lot of blog work lately, and I happened to stumble on one of my old 2014 drafts in which I talked about how antiquated it felt to install Rocksmith from a CD. That was twelve years ago. Twelve years ago.

So I can only stare in baffled perplexion at the 2026 backlash over removing physical media support. The amount of sales they will lose by making that choice must surely be vanishingly small.

The very concept of “owning what you buy” seems like a quaint relic of the past, like canning your own vegetables. It feels like the market settled this a long time ago. I don’t like it and I wish it was different, but it already happened.

Though to be honest, I personally rather enjoy not having my house overrun with physical media anymore; books, DVDs, CDs, they’re all just “heavy items that I hate having to move.”

Media Consumption

Over the extended July 4 holiday weekend, I was struggling with chemo side effects (loss of appetite, vomiting, dehydration), so I spent a fair amount of time parked in front of the television watching random movies.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. I thought for sure this was going to turn out to have been written by Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame. Anyway, it was pretty good, in a Lawnmower Man sort of way.

Avatar: Fire and Ash. I fell asleep about 2/3 of the way through. I’ll be honest, I spent the entire movie not knowing who any of the characters were or what they were doing or why. Many of the characters were indistinguishable from each other. There were only two types of characters: The warrior woman archetype, and the hot-headed dude archetype. That was about it, as far as I could tell. Cool effects though.

Zero Dark Thirty. I don’t know what I expected but I wasn’t expecting a movie that started with an hour of enhanced interrogation. Overall it was okay, but fairly dry.

Bugonia. It was a lot like a Stanley Kubrick film of a Stephen King novel. Great performances, but predictable story. High marks for keeping the camera still throughout.

Home Life

I’m typing this paragraph sitting on my new recliner in my living room. All my hard work clearing a corner of the room paid off, as it took maybe 10 minutes for the delivery guys to drop off the chair.

And speaking of new things, I’ve had an elliptical exercise machine for several weeks now and have been steadily improving. At first I spent two minutes on the thing and was gasping for breath. Now I’m up to six minutes and moderately winded. This is part of my plan to try to get more exercise this summer, in the modest hope that it might help with chemo side effects and general health. I’m in the phase of “starting to exercise” where every muscle hurts when I get up every day, which I take to be a good sign.

The only thing I don’t like about the elliptical machine is that it’s godawfully heavy. I had hoped not to have anything in my house that I couldn’t move around myself, but this contraption will be sitting exactly where the delivery people put it until the end of time.

Cancer Corner

Belghast’s death from chemotherapy complications hit pretty close to home for me. I have chemo every three weeks, and I know well that it’s no joke. What I get is fairly mild in the global scheme of treatments, but still, I’ve been warned sternly to head to the ER if there’s any issues. Indeed I once developed a fever after one treatment and ended going to the ER twice for it.

Otherwise nothing much to report since my last report. It’s weird how cancer turns into an ordinary part of one’s life after a while. I don’t really think about it that much anymore.

World Context

I didn’t do or watch anything connected to the America 250 thing. Seems weird to celebrate the obvious decline of my country into backwards-looking mediocrity, betting everything on an AI future while leaving literally everything else to the rest of the world.

I only barely remember the America 200 celebrations. I think I remember a bicentennial quarter in circulation. I remember being scared to death at a fireworks show when I was a kid; I wonder if that happened at the 200th. My family was always more of the type to do a backyard family picnic on July 4th and maybe set off some fireworks in the evening, if we were visiting a sufficiently rural location. (I grew up around a lot of rural locations. I’m only one generation away from living on an actual farm.)

Bye!