Endgame Viable

Contents

Morning! It’s a gray and dismal rainy start to this Monday morning, the start of another work week. And, for me, the start of a new work sprint.

I already regret putting the Blaugust day in the post titles. I was trying to make it easier for anyone counting, but it really looks ugly.

MRI Complete

Yesterday I drove clear to the other side of the city to get an MRI on my neck. I drove a complete circuit around the circular bypass highways around the city.

The MRI itself was uneventful, and took about 30 minutes. The hospital that contained the imaging center was eerily empty on a Sunday.

Every time I get an MRI, I have to fill out a blue piece of paper with a gigantic list of questions about things that might be metallic implants in my body to worry about. Since I’ve lost most of the dexterity in my right thumb, it’s rather difficult to hold a pen to fill out such a form, so I felt like a child scribbling with a crayon when answering the “reason you’re here” question.

Incidentally my attempts to “train” for lying down for the MRI were largely unsuccessful, and my neck positively screamed with discomfort the entire time I was in the machine.

Luckily they have a device that sort of locks your head in place with inflating balloon-like bladders on both sides of your head. It’s a big help, but I still felt like I could have easily busted through that system and turned my head. There’s some kind of huge imbalance in my neck muscles, and my head constantly wants to turn to the right while I’m lying on my back, and I have to fight to hold my head still while I’m in the machine.

I try to use some dumb mental tricks during the MRI to pass the time and take my mind off of how uncomfortable my neck is. Since it was top of mind yesterday, I mentally described my blog’s comment system as if giving a presentation. I kept telling myself “this is so easy!” even though my neck muscles felt like they would tear themselves in half any moment. In the past I would mentally sing songs inside the machine. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was a favorite.

Anyway, I’m mostly convinced the MRI is not going to show anything wrong with the nerves going to my arm. At that point it will probably not be my oncologist’s problem anymore, and then I’ll have to figure out what kind of doctor I need to find to zero in on what is actually going on and it’ll be a huge exhausting ordeal.

But maybe I’ll get lucky and there will be a clear cause showing on the MRI. I also have a brain MRI coming up this Thursday, one of my regularly-scheduled brain checkups after having a tumor removed and Gamma Knife radiation last year. I fervently hope my arm issue is not caused by something in my brain. (That seems unlikely.)

Comment Updates

I pushed a huge change to my DIY comment system yesterday. You can authenticate with Google, Mastodon, or IndieAuth. Or just keep using an email address. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this by August of 2026, but yes, as a professional software developer, I played the role of product owner and directed Antigravity to do most of the work.

Behind the scenes I also built a complete local testing environment out of Localstack, which was very useful in getting everything tested. Localstack emulates AWS resources, which I learned about and worked with at the day job.

It’s tempting to write a long blog post describing the comment system, but since it is, as previously mentioned, August of 2026, we live in an age where I can simply provide a link to a git repo and any old run-of-the-mill AI tool can write a complete analysis of every part of it. And frankly you, too, can direct any old agentic AI service to build a static blog comment system in a couple days. It’s a fairly straightforward concept, in software engineering terms.

Incidentally I originally devised the system in a way that anticipated installing it on any static blog, not just mine, but of course I’ve done exactly zero testing of that concept. Maybe someday. Honestly it’s probably just a few more AI prompts away (e.g. “identify any problems with installing this comment system on a different blog with different aws resources and make a plan to resolve them.”) Someday I’ll get it all packaged together into one nice convenient GitHub repo.

Death of WordPress?

Here’s an interesting factoid I discovered yesterday: I asked Antigravity to run a quick analysis on the list of blogs in Blaugust and found, to my great surprise, that the vast majority of participating blogs are not WordPress blogs. I found roughly 80 of the ~115 blogs did not have the telltale “WordPress” in the generator meta tag. Surely this is a banner day for the eventual demise of what I call the WordPress Industrial Complex.

Not that there’s anything wrong with WordPress. It’s just that they almost single-handedly created most of the bloat and inefficiencies and security concerns of the entire Internet.

Video of the Day

I forgot yesterday’s video of the day. It was the last video I recorded of Nioh 3, when I encountered a random boss that soured me on the entire experience, as Nioh bosses tend to do.

This morning’s video is another from when I tried to play Resident Evil 4, in preparation for getting the new Resident Evil Requiem, which I still haven’t gotten yet.

It’s an ill-fated attempt to play RE4 because I still haven’t gotten very far into it, mainly because for some reason the game flickers horribly on my monitor. I often have weird problems like that with RE Engine games.

P.S. I did something different this morning and asked Antigravity to spellcheck this post. It found and corrected four minor problems.