Endgame Viable

Contents

Good Morning

“Good Morning Friends.” That was how Belghast started most of his blog posts. I like to try something new with every Blaugust, so in honor of the one came up with this event, I’m going to try an homage to his style by writing more personal, from-the-hip blog posts this August.

My plan for Blaugust is to get up every morning, start a blank post, and write whatever comes to mind. Ideally I’ll set a timer to write for perhaps 30 minutes, however I’ve consistently failed to start such a timer.

Since I don’t have a theme this year, I’ll likely be relying on Krikket’s calendar of prompts.

“What made you decide to do Blaugust this year, and what are your personal goals?”

I was perfectly happy posting twice a month. That’s a very sustainable pace for me. I don’t know what, if anything, I would have done with Blaugust this year if we hadn’t heard the awful news of Belghast’s death.

Given his momentus influence on my part of the blogosphere, I felt like I had to do something to honor his memory, and Blaugust felt like the very least that I could do. So here I am.

I’ve generally avoided becoming a Blaugust Mentor over the years, so I don’t know what’s been happening behind the scenes, but I want to send a huge thank-you to the organizers of Blaugust this year. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to pull this together so quickly.

Anti-Mentoring

Incidentally, I’ve never lobbied to become a Mentor because I would be a terrible blogging mentor, especially in 2026. My advice for new bloggers is usually: Don’t do it! It’s a terrible idea! Has there been a new blogger “success story” in, oh, I don’t know, the last 15 years? Not that I know of.

Mainstream blogging in 2026 is usually the forgotten last component of an overall multi-media brand strategy, and it’s been that way for at least 10 years.

Otherwise, blogging is mainly for people who really like to write, first and foremost. People who will find a way to write whether they’re writing on the Internet or not. As a long-term hobby, it’s almost always a money sink.

However, I will note that based on the new blogs I’ve seen in Blaugust the last few years, there seems to be a rise in “indieweb”-style blogs, a backlash to the big corporate WordPress-style blogs and a return to early 2000s blogs where you had to write your own platform in order to blog. These types of blogs tend to be dominated by programmers who like to DIY. (I’m one of those, too.)

A Burger Press Tale

Anyway, that’s enough soapboxing. This is supposed to be about mundane anecdotes.

Yesterday I tried a “burger press” for the first time. I was searching for a device to make hamburger patties, something like what I remember from my youth, which was just a round burger-sized metal container with a plunger on one end.

All I found were tons of variations on these contraptions called burger presses, so I gave one a try, thinking, oh well I guess these must be improvements on the very simple device I remember from the past.

It turns out they are not improvements. They are huge, cumbersome, awkward, inefficient, and hard to clean. I am planning to throw mine right into the garbage, and go back to searching for the old plunger-based device like I remember.

Video of the Day

I have an automated pipeline that uploads my game videos to YouTube every night. I’ve spontaneously decided to force them on you this month. Today’s YouTube upload: World of Warcraft Midnight. One of the last ones before I got bored with the expansion.