Endgame Viable

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.

The Recluse Report - June 2026 Part 2

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:26:53 -0400

We’re into summer now, where every day challenges the air conditioning system. July and August are the peak “every day is in the 90s [30s]” where I live.

Upgraded MacBook

I bought a new MacBook Pro. Upgrading from the old MacBook Pro was a breeze, and it magically migrated everything from the old one to the new one. Apple is actually good at some things. (By comparison, every Windows upgrade I’ve ever done involves days of starting over from scratch.)

For anything related to work or software development or writing or communications, I’m pretty much a Mac guy now. PCs are relegated to gaming and music production and video production. (Weirdly I’ve never once considered doing media work on a Mac, the place where literally everyone does their media work, mainly because I can’t stand Adobe products.)

I got a 16" version instead of a 14" version this time for the bigger screen and I think I regret it already. Unfortunately the keyboard area is also bigger, and it takes a bit of getting used to. The trackpad is enormous. And the whole thing is heavier. I didn’t really think it through. Ah well. It’s fine.

World Cup

Big Football Stuff is happening in the U.S. apparently, but it hasn’t really penetrated my selectively-curated social feeds. (YouTube, I mean… that’s the only “social” platform I use anymore.)

Blogosphere

A quick mention of Roger’s post Thoughts on Blogging Part 25. I have a lot to say on the general subject of “AI is ruining everything” but I don’t really have the energy or need to write a diatribe against all of humanity. My current personal opinion on this new age of AI is that it’s pretty similar to the dawn of commercial flight.

The bottom line on blogging for me is the same as always: Writing a blog for any other reason than the joy of writing is a fool’s errand, and, for me at least, a waste of energy. It’s always been possible for computers to read any public web sites, and AI is no different.

Unless you want to go down the road of gatekeeping your content and cutting your potential audience by 99%, blogging is like stapling a piece of paper to a board in a busy public square. Anybody can come along and read it, or, you know, take a picture of your piece of paper, or even stand there and copy down what it says onto their own paper.

Gaming

Another few weeks have passed and I haven’t even looked at my gaming PC or PS5.

But I saw Aywren’s video on FFXIV anxiety triggers and it made me think that social anxiety triggers are definitely a big part of why I don’t play MMORPGs unless there’s a fully solo guild-free path available. (And there’s something to do besides dailies or farming.)

The first time entering group content by myself is a frickin’ nightmare, because everyone else already knows what to do and I’m running around like an idiot figuring it out for the first time. And those “how to” videos don’t help much, because it’s no substitute for experience. I’m slightly less anxious in the 8-person trials or 24-person raids, because it’s slightly easier to blend into the crowd. But I’m very glad there’s no more need to run PUGs for 4-person story dungeons. I haven’t done a Duty Roulette dungeon by choice in many, many, many years.
Never heard of or done any social events in FFXIV. Must be a new thing, or a guild thing. But yeah, that would be a big anxiety trigger unless I knew someone there, which isn’t very likely.
Never role-played in an MMORPG ever. Wouldn’t even think of trying it. In FFXIV specifically, your character is defined for you and always mute, so there’s no personality to roleplay except emotes, which are all kind of the same personality. I’d only ever roleplay in more of a TTRPG setting with real humans that I could trust. But yes, it’s a big anxiety trigger.
Tanking: Yikes. See 1. I wouldn’t dream of doing that with strangers unless I already knew every mechanic by heart, and that’s not going to happen since I don’t play enough. Healing: Double Yikes. It’s actually more scary to me, because healers are more essential to group survival than the tank. Healers are expected to carry everyone; tanks can’t, and DPS can’t. In many of the guilds I’ve been in, the healer is the group leader.
Voice. I too hated voice comms for a long time. But one thing I’ve learned in life is that many people process verbal communication better than written communication and thrive on voice comms, but unfortunately I’m not one of them. I struggle to listen and comprehend verbal communication for some reason, and I have poor language recall skills so it’s not very natural to construct sentences verbally. But it’s become a little better for me since I started cranking out YouTube videos and started a remote job where I can only communicate with coworkers across voice/video. Also, I’m pretty comfortable using a mic, and actually prefer it (when I can monitor my voice with headphones) to talking without a mic. It turns it into a performance, so it’s not “me” anymore.

Genealogy

A new blog category. While working on digitizing and transcribing all my grandfather’s World War 1 diaries and letters, I dug out all my genealogy files that I haven’t touched in a long, long time.

They’ve been dormant so long that the software I once used, Genbox on Windows, is no longer active. So I had to export my big genealogy database to GEDCOM format and look for some newer software to import into. This time, I’m looking for Mac software.

Genealogy software is often very frustrating for me to use, because I want an interface that appeals to a programmer like me who hyper-focuses on details, but they usually make genealogy software so it appeals to, you know, the majority, or what I refer to as “regular people.”

Either that, or there’s no UI design at all and you’re basically using rudimentary Access database forms on top of whatever custom database format they came up with, so moving between data screens requires 50,000 clicks.

The breakdown usually occurs in the source citation area of the genealogy software. I want fully traceable citations for every fact, whereas I imagine the average person doesn’t care about proving every detail in a court of law.

So it’s difficult for me to find genealogy software that fits my workflow, and to be honest, trying to create custom solutions is always lurking in my brain. It’s tempting to create a big directory tree full of Markdown or YAML files, where I can control every aspect of everything, and I know for sure that the files will survive far, far into the future. With any software I use, nobody’s going to be able to read Genealogy Software XYZ’s Custom Database a hundred years from now.

I tried an app called MacFamilyTree. It’s got a slick modern interface, a rarity among the sea of genealogy applications still clinging to a 1990s UI. I liked the UI, but while the storage format is ultimately sqlite, it’s not very transparent. So I rejected that one.

I briefly looked over RootsMagic and something called Reunion but they didn’t really speak to me.

I’m currently working with Gramps, an open source offering. It’s more of the plain-Access-forms-on-top-of-database UI, but it works okay, and it has a very transparent sqlite database format that I can easily read with AI-driven tooling. So I can quite easily build a static HTML web site generator by pulling data out of my Gramps database. I’d also like to make an extractor to pull all the data out and export it into plain Markdown files or even PDF files for future-proofing.

I feel like it’s almost mandatory to sign up for Ancestry.com at this point, so I made an account. It’s pretty obviously a money-grubbing subscription ripoff for casuals though, so I’m trying to avoid it.

I did sign up and subscribe to a place called Fold3, at which I’ve found a treasure trove of World War 1-related records. I understand it’s owned by Ancestry now, so there’s a bit of money-grubbing to it, in the form of the downloads being lower resolution than the originals on their site. Also the scans of documents are monochromatic, so faded writing disappears instead of just being faded. Annoying.

I also signed up to FamilySearch.org, which I believe is the LDS trove of genealogy research. There’s a lot of good stuff on there and everything so far is free. And, for my paternal surname at least, most of it is already in there and conveniently linked to source records.

One of the advantages of having a fairly unique paternal last name is that a lot of other people in my extended family have done a bunch of research for me, and I can crib from their work online. Previous generations in my family have also done a bunch of work for me. So usually I just type in my last name and hundreds of records pop up instantly.

I find genealogy research fascinating and it’s super easy for me to fall into a deep, deep rabbit hole with it. It’s another one of those alternate timeline careers I could have had.

Back in the 2000s, I digitized a huge set of surviving family photos going back to the 1800s and put them online. I built a whole set of utilities and a PHP application over months to browse web-friendly JPEG mirrors of the original TIFF files.

Recently I redid that janky old-style dynamic application with a static set of web pages I built with Claude in an hour. AI may not survive the public backlash, but my god it makes life so convenient and productive while it’s here.

I’m also building a web site for browsing my grandfather’s diaries and letters. Same thing: I had Claude build a perfectly serviceable static site generator in less than an hour, showing each diary page or letter page with an original image and my transcription next to it.

I feel sorry for future genealogists having to go through the millions of digital pictures that current generations produce. Can you imagine having to label and identify every picture you ever took on a phone? Yikes.

AI and Genealogy

Claude Code and the like are great at certain things, when it comes to genealogy. Setting up directories, renaming files to match patterns, creating stubs of transcription files to go along with every photographed or scanned image of diaries or letters, going through massive files of transcriptions and looking for things. Things like that. Genealogy data is usually very uniformly encoded, so AI has an easy time digesting it. (Genealogy data is also somewhat tedious to manipulate by hand, especially large bulk changes.)

One thing it’s not especially great at is transcribing handwriting from 1918. It can do it, if the handwriting is perfectly legible, but if it’s not especially legible, or it’s filled with proper names (like you find in Army Morning Reports), then the error rate is so high that you might as well transcribe it by hand, because it takes longer to fix a flawed transcription than to start a new one from scratch.

Also, Claude takes a long time to think sometimes. It’s often faster to just type out a page of transcription than to wait for Claude to mull over it. Claude is amazing, but using it is a bit like returning to the 80s or 90s in terms of processing speed. You start it, then you get some coffee and wait, that kind of thing. And you usually have to say “yes” to approve 50,000 commands it’s running under the hood.

Lately I’ve started experimenting with Google’s Claude-like offerings: Antigravity and Antigravity IDE. I think I like it better than Claude Code. It seems faster, and Antigravity IDE is yet another fork of VSCode so it’s better integrated than running Claude Code in a VSCode terminal.

There was a time when Google’s AI was absolutely awful (was it Bard at first?) so I’ve avoided it, but they seem to have caught up. Like web browsers, we’ve reached a point where all the AI offerings have roughly the same capabilities, you can just pick the one that integrates best into your existing workflows and ecosystem.

The point here is that with AI-assisted coding, the possibilities are unlimited with genealogy data, and it takes mere moments to take an idea and make it a reality. “Hrm I wonder if I can make a static web site to share my genealogy data.” Prompt, prompt. Done! Is it the greatest, most stylish web site in the world? Not even close. But it works. And it’s a massive shortcut for the hardest part of any development project: Starting it.

Media Consumption

Can’t remember what I’ve watched lately. I think I finished the new season of For All Mankind, which was average and unmemorable. I finished the last season of The Boys, which was okay I guess. (Still nowhere near as good as the first season.)

Otherwise I mainly have various YouTube videos from my followed channels running in the background most days. Lately I’ve been on a Simon Whistler kick, bouncing between his 50,000 different channels like Sideprojects and Decoding the Unknown. For the “have to play something in order to fall asleep” category I’ve been going through American Dad yet again.

Cancer Corner

I just had another chemo infusion, yesterday as of this writing. Side effects from the last two have kind of sucked, so I’m rather hoping this one doesn’t suck as much. Especially since my worst days will be right during the July 4 holiday weekend, when professional healthcare options are limited.

The only other news is I’m due for another PET scan. Otherwise everything continues routinely. Treatments are working, and I’m not getting worse (pending new scan results). I even bought an elliptical exercise machine to try to buff up a little bit, and I think it’s helping already.

Bye!

The Recluse Report - June 2026 Part 1

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:48:29 -0400

I updated my local version of hugo and suddenly my blog wouldn’t build locally anymore, and my template didn’t work. Sigh. Oh, you tricksy open source developers and your complete lack of concern for backwards compatibility.

Gaming

I haven’t launched a single game in like a month, so nothing to talk about there. In fact, I’ve barely touched my PC at all for any reason, which is why my YouTube upload scripts have stalled multiple times lately, if you’re wondering why my YouTube channel sometimes goes for a while without uploads.

I heard that Guild Wars 3 was announced. Sadly such announcements mean almost nothing to me anymore. To me, MMORPGs are as much a part of history as the Vietnam War and the moon landing. Not to mention the “announce things years before they’re actually ready” thing is quite silly.

However, if anyone could make a new MMORPG that matters in some small way, you’d have to think ArenaNet might be one to do it. However, there’s still no way to avoid any new “live service” game being designed completely around “engagement” and “revenue” and, for some weird reason lately, “extraction shooting,” instead of, you know, “fun,” so I wouldn’t get too excited.

Media Production

Still working on photographing my grandfather’s World War 1 diary. I’ve finished the three diaries, now there’s a lot of letters to digitize.

It’s a fascinating tale. He was one of the million Americans who were rushed over to France for the Meusse-Argonne Offensive in September 1918. He was drafted in April and was marching into the biggest American battle in history (at that time) in September; that’s how fast it was.

He was in a supporting regiment assaulting Montfaucon, which was some of the most difficult fighting of the time. We think of World War I as grotesque hand-to-hand fighting in muddy trenches, but by the time the Americans arrived the trench fighting was over and my grandfather painted a picture of the war as something that was tedious and unorganized and, for the most part, far away from him. But still muddy.

Mostly by luck he managed to miss the worst of the fighting (luckily for me), while still getting wounded by shell fragments and getting gassed and contracting pneumonia. He was in a hospital fighting pneumonia when the Armistice was announced, in a place he called Ward 10, or the “Death Ward.”

He writes in a very articulate but unemotional and blaise tone about everything, like a scientist making observations. (I believe he was a chemistry teacher by trade.) Sadly he died long before I was born, and all of his children are also now dead, so this diary and whatever I can scrounge up online are probably the only things I will ever know about his time in the war.

I recently found a gold mine of digitized records of daily morning reports from his company during the months of his diary, which corroborate everything he wrote and fill in a little more detail of troop locations. Not that I doubted what he wrote because it already fit well with the historical record and I’d found some newspaper archives a while ago. But now there’s even more of the all-important second sources.

Anyway the point is it’s still taking up most of my free time. Not to brag, but in another timeline I could have been a really good historical researcher.

Media

Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee Season 3!!!! This is, hands down, the best show on television right now.

I’d love to monetarily support the show and even watch all the Australian ads, but sadly I can’t seem to watch it through VPN in the place you’re supposed to watch it.

Luckily somebody put it on YouTube. Once again, piracy always wins out over inconvenience, a lesson that suits still haven’t learned after I can’t even count how many decades.

And since it took me so long to post this I can report I also rented Project Hail Mary. I liked the book, and I liked the movie. I was skeptical in the first act, because the dude was way more of an unlikable screw-up in the movie than I remember from the book, but it won me over in the second. But the book was better. The audiobook, specifically.

Music

I have to acknowledge the return of Rush to live performance with Anika Nilles on drums. I had heard nothing of this, and just assumed Rush was done forever since Neil Peart died. Then I started seeing crowd videos popping up all over the place, and I, too, was skeptical, but I, too, was instantly won over. Maybe it’s the cancer talking but I found it incredibly emotional.

Two 72 year olds fronting a mostly forgotten rock band (from a mostly forgotten time of musical artistry) and mostly killing it, and what I have just learned is a rising drumming superstar who is now surely set for life, absolutely killing it on some of the hardest drum parts around. Her sound is not Neil Peart’s sound, but it’s so good that it doesn’t matter. What a gift she’s giving to the fans to allow Geddy and Alex to keep playing a little longer.

No auto tune, no dancers, just 3 skilled and practiced musicians (and a background keyboardist now and then) playing complex music with little or no fanfare, and it’s basically note perfect. What a sight to see in 2026.

It reminds me of the recent Artemes II mission: A moment in time that we can all cheer for, that sort of restores one’s faith in humanity. There’s still good people in the world doing good things. The overwhelmingly positive support from the crowds as Annika nails those iconic drum fills is really heartwarming.

I hope they inspire younger generations of musicians.

I know it’s not cool to say this, but I’d like to start reclaiming the public zeitgeist a little bit and declare that 2026 is a year of amazing things so far. (As opposed to the litanies of “this year sucks” that we’ve enjoyed for the last 10 years.)

Cancer Corner

Another three weeks, another chemo infusion. I’m hearing the term “cumulative effects” a lot now.

I’ve had chemo every three weeks since last July, so almost a full year now. The treatments are working and the cancer is no longer active, but I’m starting to notice that the side effects are getting more pronounced after each treatment.

For me, it’s now manifesting as something that feels like a stomach flu the weekend following chemo. My appetite is gone, there’s nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and all the fatigue and weakness that comes with all that. It’s a massive struggle to get any kind of hydration or nutrition into my body for many days, so it’s like going on a 3- or 4-day fast, which I wouldn’t personally recommend.

So I end up sitting around sucking on ice a lot, and eating tiny bits of peanut butter.

Fortunately I’ve been able to schedule some visits to the infusion center for IV fluids, which helps a lot. I’d setup a regular fluid visit on Sunday morning, but I was also able to get in for some fluids on Friday afternoon as well. They hook up a saline bag to my chest port and fill me up with fluids for an hour. It’s a huge help.

As of publishing time I’m back to normal, like nothing happened.

World Context

Not much to say. Our octogenarian president has little power to diminish my daily outlook anymore. It’s like the latter days of Reagan, where everyone pretended he wasn’t obviously declining.

For me, they just need to keep the electricity grid functioning for 5-10 more years. That’s the extent of my expectation of competence from the Federal government. For everything else I’ll pin my hopes on my State government.

The Recluse Report - May 2026 Part 2

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:36:12 -0400

First, a topic unrelated to anything else: I got an email that my trial period for Google One AI Plus was about to end. I wondered what the holy heck that was.

Apparently I’d signed up for a trial of this new “service.” I don’t remember doing that, but whatever. I might have. Who can keep track of this stuff anymore? It said it was going to start charging me for it, so I investigated.

I do remember signing up for Google One to get more storage space for Google Drive and GMail (100GB I think), because I don’t want to ever delete an email for the rest of my life, and because of a (now stalled) effort to use Google Drive for critical backup purposes.

But what’s this new Google AI Plus nonsense? I stopped reading the benefits at the first item: 2 TB of storage space. I upgraded my account immediately. Yes, please, I’ll take that 2 TB of cloud storage, thank you very much. Now can I have about 500 TB more? Sadly their plans only go up to 20 TB.

Why storage space is tied to “AI” branding is a mystery to me, but it also comes with a bunch of Google AI benefits, if you’re into that sort of thing. (I typically use OpenAI as my personal AI platform of choice.)

Gaming

Haven’t played much lately. I think I’m over my Battle Brothers obsession, and ready to find a new one. See below.

Media Production

This isn’t exactly “media production,” it’s more like “archival photography,” but it does involve “media” in the sense that it involves a camera and JPEGs and stuff.

I recently got a wild hair to digitize my grandfather’s World War 1 diaries and letters from 1918-1919.

When you get cancer you start to think about what value your life has had or could have to future society, and these diaries seem like the most important thing I should preserve for future generations of historians. If I drop dead, the chances of them being treated like the priceless irreplaceable treasures that they deserve to be are pretty slim. Believe it or not, not everyone views handwritten World War 1 diaries as important. (A stunning revelation to me earlier in life.)

The diaries are pocket-sized notebooks handwritten in pencil, and they’re still in decent condition considering their origin and age, but they aren’t getting any easier to read. The pencil is faded and pages are pretty brown. The spine where the pages are held is getting fragile.

I’ve gone through them all before, sometime in the late 1990s. I have a complete transcription of every word I could read, but back in the 1990s I only had flatbed scanner technology, and I was unwilling to smash them flat to scan them, because I was and still am pretty sure it would irreparably damage them. So I’ve never actually imaged the pages.

I consulted the world’s foremost expert on such things: ChatGPT. It’s obvious I still can’t scan the little pocket-sized notebooks with any kind of flatbed scanner. That left setting the notebooks in some kind of cradle, opening it to about 100 degrees or so, setting up a camera overhead, and taking pictures of one page at a time with digital camera technology that didn’t exist in the 1990s.

So using various DIY pieces around the house (Amazon boxes, refrigerator magnets, black cloth, paperclips, cards), I took the inside corner of an Amazon box, lined it with matte black cloth, and setup some magnets so I could use paperclips and such to delicately hold the pages in place so I could take a photo of each page individually.

But I wasn’t happy with my aging Canon 60D for the project, bought somewhere in the mid-2000s. I especially wasn’t happy with either of the two lenses I had. I only had a telephoto lens (useless for this), and a rarely used wide-angle lens that was pretty dinged up from being dropped once or twice.

So I used this project as an excuse to upgrade my camera. I ordered a Canon R7 mirrorless camera, because apparently DSLR cameras are obsolete now, and I ordered a macro lens. (I also ordered an adapter so I could still use my old telephoto lens to take pictures of animals in the back yard with the new camera.)

The R7 is pretty similar to the 60D, just with a lot better connectivity and optics. And the battery doesn’t last very long. Which is how I found out that, no matter how many hundreds of USB adapter and charger and connection cables you have in your house, you never have the exact type you need (a long USB-C to USB-A charger cable).

It’ll take a while to photograph all the diaries. On the first day, which was coincidentally–though not thematically correctly, given that my grandfather actually survived snipers, explosions, gas, and pneumonia in WW1–Memorial Day, I got through about 12 pages of the first diary*.

* Admittedly I was feeling like crap on Memorial Day so I had almost no energy.

I’m trying to work out a standard workflow. I connected the camera to my MacBook Pro with EOS Utility to do remote shooting, so I can quickly setup the diary with the left or right notebook page facing up, do some quick manual focusing, adjust the lights and lens settings for optimal contrast, and snap a picture (RAW + JPEG).

Next I’ll have to figure out how to photograph all the letters my grandfather wrote home, a whole different set of problems to overcome, as they are all folded pieces of paper from 1918.

And, since it’s impossible for me to be a normal human being who doesn’t think they can quickly and easily become an expertly trained document archivist overnight, I’m obviously looking into TEI XML to do another transcription of the diaries.

The original transcription is in a nicely-formatted Microsoft Word document, but I don’t use Microsoft productivity apps anymore, and I hate the idea of not having a “source” document from which to build the final formatted document. I flatly refuse to write and format at the same time. The words are and will always be separate and distinct from the formatting and presentation for me.

Realistically, I’m transcribing in Markdown this time. No need to worry about not being able to read the file format in a hundred years, and it’s relatively easy to compile into a PDF or something with pandoc and some scripts.

Anyway, I’ll just be down here at the very bottom of a deep rabbit hole for a while.

Media Consumption

Mayday: Air Disasters

I noticed this show is referenced in almost every Wikipedia article about a plane crash. It’s peak 2000s Discovery Channel-style trash television.

The best part about this show is there’s about 4,000 seasons, and the low-budget actor recreations are hilarious. To the point where the unintentional comedy somewhat undermines the seriousness of the topic, which makes it even funnier. There’s also interesting interviews and information buried in and around the hilarious parts.

Of course they try to dramatize and play up the disaster part of everything to get people hooked, but it’s a tolerable level because they don’t go too far into sensationalism and exploitation in the recreations.

I started on Prime Video but then I had to switch to Plex to find seasons 13 and beyond.

Game Changer Season 8

A new season of Game Changer is starting on Dropout. Game shows combined with comedy is a good recipe.

I’m also fond of Dropout because they’re one of those scrappy independent “hey we’re doing our own subscription channel instead of YouTube” places but they’re actually good at it.

Home Life

I think I mentioned a while back that I hadn’t seen Marbles the Yellow Cat since last summer, and presumed him dead somewhere in the woods. Then, Saturday, May 23, I looked out a back window and saw a yellow cat poking around the back of the house. I opened the window and said hello, and I recognized Marbles immediately, and he meowed at me and started for the back door. He’s back!

I’ve no idea where he’s been or how he got back here, but I felt a surge of happiness at seeing this train wreck of a half-feral cat again. He disappeared right around the time I was getting diagnosed with cancer and starting treatments. I guess it scared him as much as it did me.

I have no explanations for his disappearance and return. My best guess is that someone else found him and tried to adopt him as an indoor cat. He’s definitely been eating well, because he’s pretty chunky now. But based on my experience with trying to adapt Marbles for inside, he doesn’t like to be trapped for very long except in the dead of winter, so he may have escaped his imprisonment and returned to what he thought was his actual outdoor home.

I thought about ignoring Marbles and seeing if he’d return to his other substitute home, but he seemed pretty happy to see me and has basically stayed glued to the back porch ever since he got here (it has also been raining almost non-stop since he returned), so I started going back to the old routine of feeding him every day. I used to feed him inside the kitchen and then let him back out, but now I’m feeding him outside, because he’s a bit of a mess. He seems healthy but I should get him to the vet before letting him interact too much with Gracie inside.

By the way I haven’t seen Black Cat in a while, which is for the best. Black Cat and Gracie got in a pretty big fight one day, with neither one seeming to back down. I finally got Gracie back inside. But Black Cat hasn’t been seen since that day, so I think Gracie delivered a stern message to go away.

Gracie is one of the main reasons I started taking care of Marbles in the first place, because she never fought with him outside. They seemed to develop a mutual tolerance for each other right away, which was fairly unusual because Gracie tends to dislike other cats around the house, as seen with Black Cat.

Anyway, I’m not sure how to proceed with Marbles. In some ways, I was glad that he disappeared, because last year, with my own future uncertain due to cancer, it was a relief not to have another dependant. Now, after almost a year of treatment, I’m feeling a little better about my life expectancy, but it’s still entirely possible–possibly even likely–I won’t outlive a young cat, and dying before one’s pets seems like the cruelest thing imaginable. My only comfort is that cats are probably more adaptable than dogs, at least.

Cancer Corner

Yuck. I get chemo every three weeks. Mostly it’s fine, except when it’s not. Then it sucks.

In my case, after a Tuesday infusion, the worst part usually hits me the following weekend, so my Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday aren’t the greatest. My stomach tells me very clearly, “do not put any food or water into me or else.” My nose tells me that any kind of food smells awful. I’m constipated, and just drinking water makes my stomach complain. I throw up if I’m not careful, and sometimes even when I am. So I get dehydrated, I get malnourished, I lose weight, and I feel like crap. It’s what I think a stomach flu feels like, except there’s no fever or aches.

Once I get into this weakened state, it’s hard to crawl back out of it. It’s a slow process of drinking and eating small amounts until I start to feel better so I can drink and eat bigger amounts and eventually start feeling normal again. When it’s over it’s like nothing happened. This last time it lasted from Saturday to Wednesday, which is longer than it ever has before.

I’m usually able to request a visit to the infusion center for some IV fluids, but for whatever reason this time I wasn’t able to get an appointment until Thursday morning. (It was just past a 3-day holiday weekend, and I know they’re also in some organizational turmoil because the regular oncologist is out on maternity leave.)

It sucks. It’s the worst part of having cancer, other than the cancer part. (Which weirdly doesn’t present any symptoms to me anymore, knock on wood.)

So now I have to shove food into my face hole for the next week and half to make up for the 10 full pounds I lost over the Memorial Day weekend. Most people like losing 10 pounds, but for me it’s kind of a big deal, because I don’t have that many pounds to spare. Going from 160 to 150 as an adult male is not desirable.

One Year Cancer-versary

It’s been about a year since I first learned I had a tumor in my lung, which started my “cancer journey.” I had intended to write a stirring one-year anniversary post, but it’s not really on my radar any more. Maybe in July, the one-year anniversary of starting treatment.

Anyway, the overall 5-year survival rate for people diagnosed with lung cancer at Stage IV is about 9%. On average, patients live about four months. You can see why last summer was kind of frantic.

Now it’s been a year and I’m still kicking, feeling basically the same as I did at the beginning. Perhaps not worth a celebration, but it’s something.

World Context

This is probably a peak Gen-X opinion, but, I mean, whatever. It’s all a big farce. This America 250 cage match thing has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, while simultaneously being the perfect metaphor for America after 250 years.

Trump has to be the most famous and dangerous example of a person who failed upwards ever. The most famous “social media expert” in history. I don’t see any way out of this except to wait for this perfect storm of idiocracy to blow itself out. Hopefully the inevitable collapse of America into another “former Soviet Union” waits until after I’m dead.

Bye!