Endgame Viable

Contents

My First Blog

Why yes, I will use that image so I don’t have to find one myself. Thank you!

The Blaugust community topic today is about your first blog. I actually think of this site as a continuation of my first blog, in a way. It’s all just “my thoughts that I put online” to me. A sort of live memoir.

This page from the Internet Archive isn’t really “my blog” but it’s one of the first things I ever published on the Internet. It’s a Quake match update on a web page owned by the sysop of the Quake servers. The page was created by hand in Microsoft FrontPage and uploaded to the server with ftp.

“03/23/97 - Check out The Ungrateful Dead Matches page for the results of the UD vs. Gunslingers match. Following our match, The Gunslingers played a match with Flag!, which I was able to record as an observer. The demos are available in the WarRoom. -Sal”

That was me. Salamander was my Quake name back then. Then, when I joined the Crayola Clan, my name became ]CC[-UltrViolet, minus the “a” because it was too long for a Quake name.

I got my first domain name uvtek.net and started putting my thoughts out into the world in blog-like form in 1998. It looked something like this (another from the Internet Archive). You may notice a surprising similarly to what Blue’s News looked like in 1998, because back then, to me, that was the epitome of clean web design.

That page was also hand-crafted in Microsoft FrontPage and updated via. ftp.

Somewhere around 2003 I built a blog platform from PHP and MySQL and started using it. I’m having trouble finding evidence of it in the Internet Archive, though. I used to put a redirection on the front page and that probably messed up their crawler.

But here is the code for that blog platform on github.com. I guess you could call that my “first blog” in the sense that it’s the first blog software I wrote, and it’s the first blog site I ran that would be recognizable as a blog by modern standards. It’s funny seeing those “last modified 16 years ago” date stamps.

Technically there may have been earlier prototypes of that blog code but I don’t remember them.

I moved from uvtek.net to thomaskrehbiel.com around 2008-ish, according to the Internet Archive. I retired my custom-built blog platform and moved to WordPress around 2012-2013 because I couldn’t be bothered to keep up with the maintenance anymore.

That’s also when I started Endgame Viable, which I intended to be for gaming stuff. It morphed into a more general purpose blog over time.

I switched Endgame Viable to a Hugo static site generator in 2021, and around that time I decided I wanted to consolidate all of my online presence into Endgame Viable (mainly because it was my only blog with actual followers), which has been a long and slow migration process that is still not finished.

Health Updates

In other news, yesterday I got a call from my oncologist with results from my neck MRI: There’s nothing cancer-related in the neck region affecting the arm nerves, which is good news. However I still can’t bend my thumb. Next up is a brain MRI on Thursday.

I previously mentioned that a new small spot of cancer has shown itself in my right hip. My oncologist and radiologist have consulted with each other and agree this is a site of progression that needs to be dealt with, so I’m going to be getting some radiation on that spot. I have an appointment to see the radiologist later today.

Directory Organization

I’ve spent the last couple days of doing massive reorganizations of my blog-related directories on my laptop. I’ve done so much agentic AI-driven reorganization of files and code cleanup that I ran out of tokens a couple of times. Running out of AI tokens in the middle of an operation feels like what I imagine getting cut off from a severe drug addiction must feel like. I will happily pay any amount of money to turn on that agentic assistant again.

I was finally able to get my comment system decoupled enough from endgameviable and organized into a monorepo for publication in case anyone wants to see how it works: spiritriot-comment-system on github. All the documentation in there was written by AI, because I couldn’t be bothered. The point was to get something started, instead of continuing to put it off forever.

And there’s my timer going off. Have a great day!