Endgame Viable

Contents

Health Updates

Morning!

What should we talk about this morning. Let’s see. War in Iran? Hard pass. The role of social media in traumatizing whole generations of humans? I’m going to say no on that one too.

Let’s go with, oh, I don’t know… my health! Again!

I’ve mentioned my right hand a few times. For background, in the span of roughly the last two weeks, I’ve lost a lot of the functional use of my right thumb (I can no longer bend it at the first joint), I’m now having trouble straightening my right elbow without pain, and I have aching pains in my right armpit/back/neck/shoulder region. The pain has gotten bad enough that I have to take Tylenol pretty frequently.

I expressed my concerns to my oncologist in a message yesterday that, given how quickly it seems to be progressing, I’m worried the pain levels may escalate beyond the point where Tylenol helps, and I’m worried about waiting for the results of next week’s brain MRI before moving on to scanning the neck area.

Without further question, she ordered a stat MRI of my cervical spine area (the neck, where all the nerves that go to the arm are), and I got one scheduled for this coming Sunday. It was literally the first available appointment anywhere within range. Still, I’ll have to drive about 35 minutes to a place I’ve never been to get it.

I’m really hopeful something will be revealed on that MRI. I’m even more hopeful it will turn out to be something that can be corrected with some physical therapy, and not some kind of degenerative nerve disease. I’ll try to think positive thoughts.

Still, if this isn’t reversible, I’m contemplating the possibility that the very last game that I was able to play with a game controller was Rise of the Ronin on the PS5. Of all the games to be the last one, that’s not exactly one I’d want to go out on.

Blaugust Preparations

Yesterday I started putting together a list of YouTube Channels I semi-regularly follow for whenever Creator Appreciation week is. Sort of a Blogroll for YouTube Channels. I tried to focus on the more independent creator channels, rather than big corporate media things who happen to also have YouTube channels.

YouTube doesn’t make it easy to export a list of subscriptions, by the way. I had to (close your eyes if you’re anti-AI) use Antigravity to build a tool to query the YouTube API to pull down my list of subscriptions and format it in Markdown for me. After that I edited the list to group them by subject category and viola.

Antigravity Refactoring

Speaking of Antigravity, yesterday I also used Antigravity to accomplish a very, very long-standing goal I had to refactor all of the Python scripts that handle my video recording, processing, and uploading pipeline.

I’m not a native Python programmer, so those scripts were patched together over years and had the look of someone who is not especially proficient at writing clean, readable Python code (they were among the first Python code I’d ever written). It was a bunch of embarrassing spaghetti code, in other words. I’ve been wanting to clean it up and modernize it for many, many years, but just never had the time and/or motivation to do so.

Well, a handful of Antigravity prompts later (actually it was dozens), and all the old crappy legacy Python formatting is gone and replaced with new, modern, clean syntax, with no change in functionality. I was even able to add a suite a tests for the complex video rendering and audio mixing pipelines to perform regression tests before and after the modernization. Easy peasy.

This morning’s YouTube upload (Nioh 3) was accomplished with the refactored scripts and to my eye appears to have worked successfully.

If only Antigravity could help with household tasks like cleaning, decluttering, and installing light fixtures. If one could buy a smart robot to do those things, I’m getting to the point in my life where I might seriously consider such a purchase. That kind of robot is probably still quite some years away in the future, but it’s starting to look at least distantly possible now, and possibly even inevitable.

For a person like me who is getting older and lives alone and has some health issues, a robot assistant is not a terrible idea. Assuming it wouldn’t murder me in my sleep.

Well that veered in a weird direction. Time to stop.