Endgame Viable

Clearing Space for a New Recliner

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:28:20 -0400

It’s been a busy weekend.

I ordered a recliner chair about a month ago, and it’s scheduled to be delivered Tuesday (tomorrow). With my growing age and uncertain future, I’ve decided to prioritize luxury and comfort, so I spoiled myself with a good recliner with adjustable headrest and lumbar support. This is the first recliner I’ve ever owned.

However I needed to clear out a path for the delivery people to get from the back door to the living room, and I also needed to clear out the space for the chair.

The biggest obstacle was a sofa sitting right where I wanted to put the chair. This is a sofa that’s been pretty much trashed by dogs and cats over the last 10 years. I never use it. In recent years it’s primarly been the nest of my cat, who sleeps on it and uses it as her favorite scratching post.

Over the weekend, I moved this sofa out of the house and into the garage, where it will sit until I can figure out how to actually throw it away. (The current plan is to rent one of those roll-off dumpsters sometime later in the summer.)

In order to accomplish moving the sofa, I ordered a couple of furniture dollies, and generally cleared away a huge portion of living room clutter. With the dollies, I was able to roll the sofa through the living room and kitchen to the back door, where I could then muscle it down the back stairs and over to the garage.

It sounds like a huge undertaking but it actually wasn’t that hard, thanks to my prodigious use of physics and leverage to my advantage. There were only a couple of times I had to use brute force, and while the sofa is big and awkward, it’s not prohibitively heavy.

Other than that, I spent a bunch of time running scripts to generate transcriptions of old videos. I have a medium-term goal of creating an LLM I can use to query all of my blog posts and videos, and these transcriptions will be part of that data set.

I use AssemblyAI for transcribing my videos these days. It works quite well. If there’s one area where AI is definitely going to put humans out of work, it’s in the area of transcriptionist. AI is pretty much bang on every time. Except for proper names. :)

The Search for a Niche Social Circle

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:03:28 -0400

I saw Roger mention Void’s post Finding A New Internet Home on the Blaugust Discord and again in his recent post.

It’s a post I could have written. In my opinion, social media as a general concept for socializing is long since “over.” It’s now dominated by an overarching stain of the sales industry, as so many things in life are these days. As a place to socialize and hang out with people? Ugh. No thanks.

The mutual-following medium itself is what makes it feel anti-social to me. Nobody is really interacting with each other. It’s just an endless stream of saying hopeful one-liners into a vacuum, like the world’s biggest open mic night.

Anyway, the point is that over the last few years, I’ve come to accept that the Internet is no longer a social “home” for me and never will be again. It was fun while it lasted.

In the old days, many of the people on the Internet with me had similar attitudes and quirkiness. It was a weird sort of pioneer spirit.

Today, I’m an oddity among the overall Internet demographic, just like I am in real life. Now it’s just as hard to find “people like me” on the Internet as it is in the real world.

Currently the social circle I’m looking for in my old age has such a niche string of descriptors that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the world would fit into it:

Gen-X
Software engineer
Generally artistic and creative
Likes to record and play games
Likes to write
Used to like writing music
Probably autistic to some degree
Has social anxiety
Has cancer

That last one is the newest addition and the one that really puts me in a pretty tiny circle of people. I can assure you that I don’t see very many people who look like gamers at the local chemo infusion center.

By way of conclusion I can only say that I sympathize greatly with the search for an online home. I imagine it’s a fairly common sentiment out there. These days I focus only on my own web site.

P.S. I deployed my new blog theme.

AI in Blaugust

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:17:53 -0400

Bhagpuss reminded me that Blaugust has been fairly anti-AI in the past, and here I am running around crowing about all my fancy schmancy new AI tools to help me blog more efficiently to get ready for Blaugust.

Past Controversy

I don’t think I was involved in Blaugust last year at all, either reading or writing, as it was about two months after my cancer diagnosis and brain surgery and I was in no condition to do much of anything but put one foot in front of the other to get through each day.

But I do remember the year before there was some controversy about a blog entered in Blaugust that was entirely AI generated. I think it was some kind of gaming news summary site.

I can only speak for myself, but to me, what they were doing with AI and what I’m doing with AI are two entirely different things.

Mediocre AI Writing

Having AI write the blog for you is exactly the kind of thing that AI is not very good at. Or, let me rephrase that: It is actually good at it, but it’s good at producing mediocre, forgettable writing.

Sometimes that’s all you need. If your goal is to blast out something to a billion people in the hope that a thousand of them click through to your web site, AI writing is a fantastic choice.

If your goal is to create yet another news aggregation site, one that is no different from the millions of other such sites out there, in the hope that maybe a handful of people accidentally click on yours instead of the others so you can generate a few cents of ad revenue, AI writing is probably going to work for you.

If your goal is to write something you’re proud of that you actually want to read again later in life, that you think is reflective of your own personality and your views, and if you, you know, enjoy writing, AI writing isn’t a great choice.

My Use of AI

So back to how all this relates to Blaugust. After the changes I talked about, is my blog AI-generated now? Definitely not. I write all of my blog posts myself. If there is any AI-generated content within the boundaries of the article itself, I’ve always marked it as such.

It would be pointless for AI to write my blog for me. But wait: Maybe I can setup something to have AI continue writing the blog after I’m dead. That would be pretty funny. (But only for me.)

But does AI now assist me with the parts of blogging I don’t like doing? Definitely.

I don’t like writing titles or summaries or picking tags or images. Many, many, many of my posts are delayed or abandoned because of that. I’ll get to the end of writing a post, realize I’m not actually done and I have to come up with a title and a summary and an image and I’ll just say, “Screw it then, I won’t post this.” It’s happened dozens if not hundreds of times over the years.

I consider those things “metadata.” You could argue that the title is a part of the article itself, and I could probably be convinced of that. But not the summary, and not the tags.

As for the image, I consider that metadata as well, and not part of the article. If it were up to me, I would not put a featured image on every blog post, but reality demands that every blog post in an RSS feed have an image associated with it. Occasionally I need to embed an image within an article to illustrate something, which I do consider part of the article, but it’s fairly rare the way I write.

What’s Blaugust For

Blaugust was originally about challenging people to write a blog post every day. Everyone has to come up with a different system for doing that.

A very common system is to “bank” a series of blog posts beforehand, so you can publish those on the inevitable days when you don’t feel like writing. Is that cheating?

If the goal is to encourage people to write every day, to establish a writing habit every day, then yes, that’s cheating. But if the goal is simply to publish a post every day, then no, that’s not cheating, that’s smart and necessary time management.

I personally have always taken the Blaugust challenge quite literally to mean “write and publish a blog post from scratch every day.”

That’s challenging for me, and that’s the challenge I try to take on for myself. I want to maintain a habit of writing something every day. Merely publishing something every day is less challenging, because you can pull from drafts and any number of other sources to come up with something. But to write something interesting on a blank page every single day for a month? Big challenge. (See: NaNoWriMo.)

Blaugust Efficiency Workflows

But since I’m a busy adult, I can’t be spending all day on a single blog post. I need to get them done and out the door as fast as possible so I can move on with my normal day.

So in order to facilitate that, I usually gear up for Blaugust by creating a workflow that I think will give me the best chance to efficiently put pen to paper and write every day. I usually take the Blaugust opportunity to try something new, and see if it makes my blogging life better or worse.

This year, there are two new things: One is some AI-assisted tooling to help with the tedious metadata and file management associated with every blog post, which increases the speed that I can publish. The second is a new way of writing in honor of Belghast: Sitting down in the morning and banging out a post with no pre-planning, like this one.

This Year’s Blaugust

I would encourage this year’s Blaugust leadership to define the rules and attitudes regarding AI very clearly, with examples.

If it’s just “don’t use AI” then that’s extremely vague and open to interpretation. These days, that might also exclude spell checking and grammar checking.

I haven’t seen WordPress in a while but I’m confident they would have added a fair amount of AI tooling in there. Even if you can’t see it in the UI, you surely have to know someone is utilizing AI in the WordPress code that displays your blog, or in the creation of the ads that your free WordPress site shows. To say nothing of all the AI used at the network level.

In any case, if this year’s Blaugust powers-that-be consider “AI assistance” the same as “AI generated” and that gets me kicked out of Blaugust, so be it. It’s not the same, but I’m too old to be bothered trying to argue or explain what should be obvious with a little research.

I would still write a post every day in August to honor Belghat’s memory, with or without the Blaugust label.

I feel like I’ve been extremely clear about what I use AI for and what I don’t use AI for, so readers can be confident about what they’re reading. I even added a footer at the bottom of every page to announce it.

I have nothing to gain by “tricking” visitors to my site. There’s exactly zero effort put into marketing my blog, and I honestly have no idea what the stats are for my posts.

Okay I’ve gone on about this way too long this morning.

Demonstrating the Blog Post-Processor

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:16:48 -0400

Aw screw it, I’ll make this post tonight too, since I’m on a roll right now. This is how I’ll be able to write a post a day for Blaugust.

For reference, here’s the post referenced in these screenshots.

I start a blog post by typing this:

make post

The new post opens within the Antigravity IDE editor and I start typing Markdown until I’ve had enough. That and only that is the part that I find fun about blogging.

Then I go over to the Agent chat on the right and type:

post process the last post

That triggers the AI skill I wrote today. Then I answer a series of questions about metadata. First it gives me a selection of three different titles to choose from. In this case the choices sucked so bad that I typed in my own.

Then it generates three summaries and asks which one I like. I didn’t like any of them, but the first one was good enough and I could trim off the irrelevant bit at the end.

Then it asks which tags I want to use for the post. It selects from among relevant tags already used by the blog, or suggests new ones if none fit. These were fine.

Then the really time-saving part. It takes those tags and some keywords from the post and searches my existing image library for anything that might work for the post. It keeps picking the same DALL-E images that I reserve for my Recluse Reports so I told it to generate a new one.

Then it writes a prompt for what it thinks the blog header image should look like. So far it thinks every blog image should be a picture of a computer doing something. The skill constrains it to 1000x400, white background, and modern line art. I can put in my own prompt if needed.

After approving the prompt, it generates three possible images and asks which one I like. They all look pretty silly to me but hey, “mediocre” is “good enough” in this new-fangled world we live in. I picked the one that looked like it would crop the best. AI always generates a square image and they’re cropped to 1000x400.

Then it asks what to name the new image in my library. It makes some guesses or I can type something in. It will file the image in the correct folder by year and month, which is my media library filename convention. It will also convert to webp and crop to the right size.

When it’s done it gives me a summary of what it did. It also renames the temporary post filename to the final blog post filename. Here we can see all the updated metadata that I hate to write.

When all that’s done, I run the following to upload the new image to my S3 bucket on AWS so it’s available to link in posts.

make sync-images

For someone used to a blog hosting service, that probably sounds like a shocking amount of work for one blog post. But if you’re building a static blog from a local directory full of Markdown posts, it’s a huge time and energy saver.

I even used AI to do all the tedious bits of starting this very blog post.

Can you locate and list any screenshots taken in the last hour?

Copy all those screenshots to the endgameviable-media/2026/07 directory and convert them to webp, and rename them to antigravity-post-processing-{num}.webp with a sequential number for each one, in datetime order.

From the project endgameviable-hugo directory, I want you to run “make diary” and in the body of the new post, which will be in project dir endgameviable-hugo/content/post/2026/07, embed all of those screenshots using the {{< cloudimg >}} shortcode. The image src will start with 2026/07.

AI is absolutely fantastic at doing the tedious bits and I’ve never understood why anyone would think that’s the slightest bit controversial or arguable.

Starting to Update the Blog Theme

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:45:13 -0400

One more test post.

I’ve been working on updating my blog theme to give it a little more modern kick. Modern, at least, in the manner of whatever Gemini gets from its “modern-web-style” plugin.

You guessed it: I’m just prompting Gemini to do it for me, through the medium of the Antigravity IDE. Who has the time or energy to keep up with all the crazy css rules out there these days? Not to mention all the Hugo theme rules.

As with most AI-assisted projects, most of the work was done to my satisfaction in less than an hour, but I’ll be tweaking it for a while before making it live. It should be ready in time for Blaugust.

With this test post, I’ll be capturing screenshots of my AI post-processing assistance skill in order to write a future post demonstrating the whole thing.

I’m quite pleased to have a significant portion of the crushing weight of tedium lifted from my shoulders for every blog post, so I can focus on the fun part: Writing.

Turning Off Editor Suggestions in Antigravity IDE

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:31:08 -0400

I can now reveal that the extremely annoying auto-writing “feature” of Antigravity IDE can be turned off when working with a plain Markdown (or any text, presumably). Go to the lower right corner of the IDE, click on Antigravity - Settings, and turn off “Suggestions in Editor.”

This knowledge will allow me to continue writing blog posts within Antigravity IDE, as opposed to switching editors back and forth.

For the purposes of this post, it means I can continue testing my AI metadata workflow.

I’m generally happy with it now, however the UI for AI skills is rather primitive. It’s a throwback to the 90s when every UI was a command-line UI where the computer would ask you a question, give you a list of options, and ask you to type the number of the option you wanted to do. Yuck.

Believe it or not, some people in technology still prefer to work that way. I work with some people who are avid Linux command-line folks, and a UI like that is entirely natural to them.

Interacting with AI agents is mainly done through a chat-style interface, so it’s basically like a command-line interface, so those really old-school UI conventions are back again.

I wonder if I can get Gemini to write a program to give me a windowed UI instead.

The answer is: Kind of. It suggested using the native “ask_question” feature, which is a slightly improved UI within the chat window interface.

There’s one other thing I want to fix in this AI skill (a permissions issue with file copying), which may necessitate yet another test post later.

Fighting Markdown Autocomplete and A Whopper

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:16:31 -0400

I just went out to Burger King and got a Whopper combo. This is the biggest meal I’ve eaten since probably last Thursday. Over the weekend, for example, a big meal for me was a Jello cup or a piece of cheese.

One thing I’m really hating about Antigravity IDE is that whenever I type in Markdown–that is, whenever I type a blog post–it thinks I want suggestions for how to complete every sentence, as if it’s making suggestions for how to complete code.

It’s very annoying. After I typed that short sentence, it wanted me to erase it and rewrite it as something like, “I bet I could get it to stop with some work. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a bit annoying.” It’s not “a bit annoying.” It’s all caps INCREDIBLY ANNOYING.

And by the way, I have already asked about how to turn it off, and done the things it suggested, and it’s still doing it. I will have to write the post in VSCode instead and switch back to Antigravity to do the post-processing, which is also annoying, because I like to work in one app from start to finish.

Anyway, the burger was good. <- That was an AI-suggested sentence, and I thought it was funny, and something I would write, so I kept it as-is.

This test was for AI-automated tagging of the post. It’s not working the way I like yet. It’s a little better now.

Automating Blog Metadata with Custom AI Skills

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:55:28 -0400

The main obstacles for me to publishing lots and lots and lots of blog posts are:

Creating a title
Creating a summary of the post
Choosing or creating an image for the post
An endless loop of perfectionism that requires every word to be perfect before publication

I can’t do much about that last one, but the first ones are solvable.

Many, many of my posts have sat in drafts forever because I just didn’t feel like doing those things. I can type into an editor window all day, every day, and output voluminous amounts of sentences and paragraphs. But without metadata it’s useless for blogging.

Today I’m working on some AI helpers to do those things for me, or at least suggest things for me that I can tweak. I can’t stress enough how much I hate writing metadata for blog posts. The part of a blog post I care about is the text between the first word and the last word.

So I’ve created a Gemini skill (well, I told Gemini to create a Gemini skill) that will propose 3 titles, 3 summaries, and find an image based on keywords in the post. It also has the option to generate an image if no good matches are found. It also renames the post files properly and places the images in the right directories, ready to upload to my S3 bucket.

It took some back and forth to work out all the details. I saw Roger talking about trying out AI and he seemed frustrated that it required more effort than he expected. It does. You have to talk to it like you’re talking to a child.

For the record, I edited the AI-generated title and summary a bit.

Anyway, this post is mainly a testbed for the Gemini skill. I’ll probably do more.

Feeling Human Again

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 08:18:45 -0400

This is an experiment.

I’m thinking about Blaugust coming up, and what I can do for Blaugust, and how I might honor Belghast during Blaugust. The best I can come up with is to try to emulate his style: That is, get up in the morning, write for a short, fixed amount of time, and publish it. I always thought of what he was doing as a variation of Morning Pages as described in The Artist’s Way, a book I read in the early 2000s.

I don’t usually blog that way, because it’s a very raw and vulnerable way for me to write. I prefer for there to be an impenetrable wall between me the author and you the reader. I’m more of a pre-social media type of writer, where you wrote for books or magazines or newspapers without any expectation of seeing much of anything in the way of reader responses. The modern expectation of writing in a “parasocial” way is fairly gross to me. See also: How I never respond to YouTube comments or talk to that audience.

Anyway, here goes.

It’s Tuesday, so it’s been a week since my last chemo infusion, and right on schedule, today’s the first day I feel human again, after a weekend of feeling sick.

The pattern is like this: Tuesday and Wednesday I feel fine. Thursday I start going downhill. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I feel sick, can’t eat, can’t hydrate. Monday I start feeling better. Tuesday I feel like nothing happened. Give or take a day or two.

It’s my first day back at work after a 4-day weekend. Don’t really remember what I was doing before. I checked in and was quickly reminded there was a high-pressure urgent task that needed to be done. I’m not personally responsible for it, but I’m following along and consulting on it where needed.

For my morning entertainment I watched a bit of Glass Cannon’s Under An Iron Sky actual play. I’m on Season 3. I went to Chaosium.com and bought a couple of books with the appropriate code in the hope that they will make another season, because it’s pretty fun to watch. (They play Pendragon, a TTRPG set in Arthurian Legend.)

I’m making some hard-boiled eggs for breakfast. I bought a new saucepan just for boiling eggs, one that is taller than it is wide so that the water actually covers the eggs, which was shockingly hard to find.

Last night I started re-watching Band of Brothers for some reason. I think it was because I saw it referenced in some random YouTube “tank expert rates tank scenes in movies” video and thought, “Huh, that was a really good show and I’m looking for something to watch while I continue to rest up.” It is, in fact, a really good show. However, there’s a lot of shaky cam nonsense that I don’t particularly care for.

Thus concludes this morning page. I actually spent way more time editing and revising this than I should have, because it’s such a foreign way of writing for me.

P.S. Because I’m lazy and hate doing these things, I used AI to help create the title and the summary for this post.

Belghast's Passing

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:22:48 -0400

I’m devastated to hear about Belghast’s passing. I have few words to offer, as I’m not in a position to do much writing at the moment. But he was a constant source of good in the world of MMORPG blogging and I always enjoyed his work. He will be greatly missed. All my condolences to his family and friends.