Endgame Viable

Morning! This is my third attempt at today’s blog post.

The first one was going to be a very helpful post I prepared yesterday about some of the ways agentic AI has simplified my project and development life, some prompts and examples that I return to again and again. I decided to postpone that one because recent Blaugust discord activity reminded me that people absolutely hate AI.

The second one pointed that out, and generally mused about how the Internet is just filled with expressions of hatred all the time, even from good people doing good things, even in the communities you hang out in, and how much I don’t fit in with that world of hatred-slinging and I don’t really want to be part of it, but I thought it was too grumpy and judgmental to post.

So now I’m looking at Krikket’s blog post ideas for inspiration.

I’m not going to introduce myself, because I’m too old and cynical to think I’m going to meet anyone like me on the Internet. If you’d read my abandoned second post for today, you’d understand more about that. This post might provide some useful context.

The story behind my blog’s name, you ask? Well, that’s such a fascinating story, let me explain. I actually don’t remember if I’ve ever related this or not. Surely I have somewhere in my past.

Around the time I thought of the name, which was around that grand old year of 2013, when we were still spoiled for choice of good, inventive, interesting AAA or even AA MMORPGs to play every day, you couldn’t throw a rock around a discussion of class choice without someone asking, “Yes, but is class X viable at endgame?” I saw that phrasing so often I started to laugh every time I saw it.

Clever me, I thought, would co-opt the name Endgame Viable as a subtle reference to MMORPGs, and everyone out there doing Google searches for “hunter viable endgame” or “warrior viable endgame” would accidentally end up on my web site.

I don’t know if that trick actually worked or not. Probably not. But that’s why it’s called Endgame Viable.

Also, I thought at the time that the ideal blog name was exactly two words long, inspired as I was by such other popular blog names as Bio Break and Inventory Full.

Now that I’m older, and thinking of myself as “old”–even though I’m only old by marketing demographic measures and not by human lifespan statistics–I’ve started to think of the name Endgame Viable as taking on a slightly darker meaning, as I enter what will surely be the “endgame” of my actual life.

And that’s it. That’s the story.

Have a great day!