Endgame Viable

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!

The Recluse Report - May 2026 Part 1

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 16 May 2026 06:39:00 -0400

A quick half-month has already passed, and I haven’t written very much. It’s been a pretty low energy month for me so far.

Gaming

Final Fantasy XIV Coldplay

Or was it Everlong. No, it was Evercold. That’s the new expansion, apparently slated for January 2027.

This reminds me that I’m still about an expansion and a half behind, since I’m not yet done with Endwalker. So I have six or seven months to catch up. Easily doable, if I actually log in and play, which I haven’t done for a while.

Looks like there’s a lot of new mechanics in this expansion aimed at getting people to keep logging in daily even after they’re effectively finished. Which I assume is the whole reason that “seasons” exist.

It probably isn’t going to work on me. It’s not normal to expect people to play one game for the rest of their lives.

Wartales

While I was looking at other tactical RPGs, I broke out Wartales again. My little group of 6, created three or four years ago, are still wandering around, fighting boars and hoodlums, barely surviving, never having enough gold. At my last camp I didn’t even have enough food for the whole group.

Battle Brothers

Then I fell down a deep Battle Brothers rabbit hole.

On returning to the game after a million years, I confidently took my mercenary group of about a dozen people into a fight with four wolf-mounted goblins and died to the last man in humiliating fashion. That’s when I remembered two things: Combat is hard in Battle Brothers, and I had started that game on “iron man” mode all those years ago, and thus that old game came to an abrupt end in one swift stroke.

Needless to say, I forgot how combat worked. It’s really, really complicated in Battle Brothers (or at least, really specific to Battle Brothers), and the AI is relentless and ruthless. The wolfriders stayed out of range until they pounced on unprotected people at the edges with roughly double my movement speed, and they somehow had like fourteen attacks per round. I guess goblins are much more formidable in Battle Brothers than they are in Dungeons & Dragons.

I started a new game and got deeply invested in building my bros. (And saying “bros” a lot.) I managed to get a pretty good company of 8 together through about Day 50. Then things started to fall apart by the time I reached Day 100 because the game continued to scale up in difficulty around me, while I had failed to adequately build up my bros, and I found myself suddenly losing every battle with an undergeared company that was too small.

I had gotten back to 12 bros, then I got absolutely demolished to the last man by just two giants. Then I ran into an undead horde of Wiedergangers, Ancient Auxiliaries, and two Necrosavants while trying to escort a caravan. Again, killed to the last man, and the caravan destroyed. Other examples abound. At that point I figured there was no way to proceed.

So I started another new game, this time starting with Anatomists (from a DLC), who get their strength drinking mutation potions. I’ve only gotten to about day 25 with them.

If nothing else, it’s got deeply engrossing tactical turn-based combat.

The same folks have an XCOM-style game called Menace. I haven’t seen it but I imagine the tactical combat is top notch.

Wartales and Battle Brothers are good games for when I don’t feel like talking, because they aren’t that good for recording. Only the battles themselves are worth recording. The stuff in between the battles isn’t that entertaining.

Media Production

I’ve recorded just a handful of representative battles from Battle Brothers. They’ll go into the hopper to get uploaded some months from now. The current queue contains 133 video files remaining to upload, at 2 per day.

Media Consumption

Taskmaster Season 21

I mean if you haven’t caught on to the Taskmaster phenomenon after 21 seasons or series or whatever, then I really can’t help you.

I kind of miss the old days, though, when the tasks were simpler and more open-ended. That’s the downside of success.

What?

I saw an ad for an Amazon show called Spider-Noir starring Nick Cage. I think we need to start dividing nerds who look forward to a show like that from regular nerds. I’m not saying gatekeeping is a net positive for the community, but we really can’t have Nick Cage swinging around on webs in a trenchcoat, can we? Billionaires cannot be allowed to make that mainstream, or it might as well be the same as worldwide nuclear annihilation.

Day Job

I don’t know about any other software developers out there, but where I work, we are expected to use AI every single day to “increase productivity.” (Honestly I think the emphasis is mostly on getting older engineers to embrace it, because the youngs are into it already.)

I personally find it a very boring way to work. While it is certainly possible to write code by describing it to Claude, and guiding it step-by-step, and the code will turn out perfectly fine, it’s not what I would call an exciting to work that way.

Basically you type a prompt, then you wait five minutes, then you type another prompt, then you wait five minutes, and on and on it goes, until you have the code you want.

Can anyone do that, even people who have no idea how to write code? Probably.

But can anyone apply my decades of experience in guiding Claude to a superior product that’s easily readable and maintainable without tons of technical debt? Probably not.

So in the hands of an experienced developer, it’s a great tool. In the hands of a young developer or a non-developer who is taught that immediate results are more important than long-term maintenance, your mileage may vary.

Not that it matters. We’re dumping tons of AI-generated code into production and running full speed with it. Luckily AI can debug bad AI code just as easily as bad human code.

Home Life

In continuing efforts to simplify my life, I bought a walk-behind string trimmer. Also known as a trimmer mower. It’s basically a weedeater on wheels that you push around like a push mower, so you don’t have to carry it. It’s cool.

Cancer Corner

Recovery from my 15th infusion was much better than the 14th infusion. Mainly just felt tired and congested over the weekend. (For some reason, my sinuses seem to take the brunt of the reaction for a 4-5 day period afterward.) It was a marked improvement over the last one.

Next up, for the 16th infusion, coming soon, I’ll get the bone strengthener again. Here’s hoping it wasn’t the cause of the catastrophic 14th infusion reaction. (All the doctors said it shouldn’t have been.)

World Context

Has there ever been a sovereign country in history that came back from massive unchecked government corruption? Honest question.

Bye!

The Recluse Report - April 2026 Part 2

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 01 May 2026 11:22:50 -0400

I’m going to stop writing this post on April 28th, because I may or may not have the energy to update it on the 29th or 30th.

Then again, I started taking steroids on the 27th to prepare for a chemo infusion on the 28th, which tends to make my mind race and also makes me vomit words into a document even when it’s far too long already.

Indeed, I woke up at 3 am on the 28th and, while working with Notebook LM on video transcripts, I added even more word vomit to this document.

Gaming

Hot take: Games with complex skill progression or class feats or whatever (ahem Pathfinder: Kingmaker) that you have to study and research constantly… they should have a built-in AI chat bot in the game that you can consult. Preferably trained on actual up-to-date game data, not all the wrong or obsolete community information on the Internet. It’s 2026 folks. It’s not the dark ages anymore. Get with the times.

I suppose I should be somewhat more lenient on games that came out before 2023, but damn it’s annoying not having an AI chat bot instantly available for whatever I’m doing now, having worked with an AI window on the side of programming IDEs every day for years. A chat bot should be on the side of literally every screen on any computer program, in place of the “help” feature. Keyword-style searching is completely dead, imo. It’s natural language for me or gtfo.

Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft

I’ve stopped playing both games. Just waiting for the right mood to strike me to continue the FFXIV Endwalker MSQ, which is the one I care about more. The last quest I did was the level 88 quest As The Heavens Burn, which is the long one where you rejoin the Scions after returning from the past.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to Midnight. There’s too many games and WoW just isn’t at the top of my list anymore. I typically only have the time and energy for nothing but the best 1% of the best 1% of games. (Where “best” is defined as “games I like to play” and not “games that are commercial hits.”)

It’s kind of like books now. 99.9% of genre books are pretty meh. I only have time to read (or more likely listen to) the 0.1% that will still be remembered 30 years from now.

Anyway. Back on topic.

Vagrus: The Riven Realms

I’ve tried Vagrus before, somewhere around 2022. I made a couple of videos that I uploaded, then I returned the game. At the time, I found it was a little too complicated and had a little too much reading.

It’s a narrative-focused RPG where you play the leader of, basically, a merchant caravan roving around the desert. Most of the gameplay takes place in your imagination, because it involves reading narrative descriptions and responding with a choice: Essentially a choose-your-own-adventure game.

There is some turn-based RPG-style combat now and then, in what I call the Final Fantasy style, where you have your guys lined up on the left and the bad guys lined up on the right, and you slug it out until one team is left standing.

Recently, I remembered Vagrus and installed it again. It’s a very hard game to approach with a steep learning curve. The UI is complicated. The setting is very grimdark fantasy. Super duper grimdark, where everything is awful and you’re just trying to stay alive another day.

It’s a bit tedious to play, because every little thing is gamed out and drowning in stats. Every day of travel, every food ration, every camp night, etc. It takes a long, long time to get from one place to another place, where you can pick up some new stories or quests.

Anyway, I wouldn’t say it’s a fantastic RPG worthy of hundreds of hours, but it’s an interesting diversion, if you’re in a grimdark reading mood. And, you know, you’ve been dying to find a game where you can manage slaves as a core mechanic.

It’s a kind of tactical RPG with a really interesting animation style that looks a lot like that 70s Lord of the Rings animated movie. The story is okay, the combat is okay, but the animation is really cool. Not sure how far I’ll get into it, though. There’s too many games.

The Iron Oath

It’s another tactical RPG of the kind where you lead a mercenary/merchant group on adventures around the world, which seems to be a popular genre for some reason (Vagrus, Wartales, Battle Brothers, and The Iron Oath, that I know of).

It’s got a sort of 16-bit art style, which I find annoying*, because it’s 2026, but the combat is fairly deep and meaningful. And there’s a lot of combat. It starts out with combat and dungeon crawling, somewhat like Darkest Dungeon, then you go to a big world map for overland travel. That’s as far as I got.

I liked it, but again, not sure how far I’ll get because of too many games.

* I just find it annoying that people think 8-bit and 16-bit are “art styles,” when in reality it’s “the only thing that computers could do back then and they definitely would have made better graphics if they could have done so.”

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Probably what I played most this cycle. Bhagpuss’s recent post reminded me to dig out my ongoing five-year-old game and play a bit more.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and games like it, are among my most favorite games to record, because it reminds so much of playing D&D by myself as a kid, and making up stories with action figures and all that nonsense. Previously I played Pillars of Eternity with the same level of obsessiveness.

I’m just beginning the Season of the Bloom (Chapter 3 I think), uncovering places I haven’t seen before. I typically try to explore all the places on the map, until I run out, before pursuing main story stuff.

My party started out at level 7. I have no idea what level I’m supposed to be at this point.

Here’s a quick (ha!) summary of recent events Spoilers abound below.

Excursion 1, Exploring

For my first excursion, I went with a new group: Amiri, Valerie, Jaethal, Ekundayo, and Tristian. And my main the baron, a Vivisectionist that I originally made as a kind of joke, played by a player who doesn’t actually know how to play a Vivisectionist.

This is a terrible group, except Amiri and Ekundayo, who are must-haves and ridiculously overpowered, especially after casting Haste on them. Valerie is largely useless except as a damage sponge. I have Tristian specced entirely for healing and he has no damage-dealing abilities. My Vivisectionist is only able to do real damage when he gets a Sneak Attack, and I have yet to figure out how to reliably do those, plus I’m using a crossbow and I only have one attack per turn, which is awful compared to Amiri’s two and Ekundayo’s three.

One of the problems with Pathfinder: Kingmaker is that there are about twice as many companions as you actually need for a party, so you always have to leave half of them behind. Unfortunately some of the more interesting personalities are the least useful classes.

But I digress. It’s still a great, deep, immersive game, and I still have Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader to look forward to, which should provide many more years of Owlcat-related entertainment.

Back to the latest sessions. I drove off some bandits from a Bandit Camp without having to kill them, furthering my Chaotic Neutralness. I encountered three trolls on the road who ran away from me, but I still killed two of them easily. (It was then I realized that nobody in the party could deal fire or acid damage. I had to use alchemist bombs.)

I found a Monster Den and killed a wyvern, which was much easier than I expected, thanks to Amiri doing multiple 50+ damage criticals. There was no quest for this, so I don’t know what the point was, other than more XP.

I found a Secluded Lodge in the middle of nowhere, which didn’t seem to have much of a story to it (until later). I came across a random encounter of cultists, one of which transformed into a rather frightening owlbear, which downed Dog the Wolf for the first time. (At which point I learned that Dog the Wolf apparently cannot die permanently.)

I explored the Empty Skull Rock which was infested with Trollhounds, which were a pain in the butt to dispatch because my aforementioned party did not have anyone who can easily do fire or acid damage. I had to use all my remaining fire bombs and a handful of Acid Arrow scrolls and Scorching Ray scrolls. It was largely a wasted effort because there wasn’t much loot, however, my party gained much XP.

Then I returned to the castle for some kingdom management activities. I finally figured out how to actually build a settlement in the Outskirts, something I’ve been baffled by for literally years, so I could finally advance the How to Build a Kingdom quest line. (The UI in Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a bit opaque at times.)

Speaking of the Kingdom, I forgot to deal with the Bald Hilltop invasion for The Ancient Curse Part 2, and now I’m getting ominous warnings about the next Bald Hilltop invasion with The Ancient Curse Part 3. The next invasion is set for almost a year from now.

For such a simple-looking game, there’s just tons and tons and tons of deep lore buried in it, presumably pulled from the Pathfinder TTRPG Adventure Path of the same name, which has some twenty years of history to it, or something like that.

Excursion 2, Hunting Grounds

Then I started the Season of the Bloom quests and went on a magical beast hunt for An Amusement for the Nobles. Yikes! Difficulty spike.

I retired the old party and made a new party with Amiri, Ekundayo, Harrim, Regongar, Octavia, and me, the Vivisectionist. This is a much better party, except for Octavia, who I find pretty meh, and me. I was going to try Vivisectionist melee to see if it worked better, as all the guides indicate, but I rolled a 1 or 2 on literally every attack and missed every time, so my evaluation was inconclusive.

In the Hunting Grounds, I fought a bunch of Dire Bears and Wargs (nasty things that knock you down all the time). Then an Owlbear joined the Wargs.

Then, after healing up from that fight, a few steps later I ran into four Owlbears at once, which almost TPKed my party, but I got through it with three people left standing. Octavia saved the day with a timely Web spell on the last Owlbear, and a Dogless Ekundayo finished it off with two rounds of 4 hasted arrows. Then I returned to the hunting lodge with almost everyone at Death’s Door, and got attacked by another Owlbear, when a servant exploded and turned into said Owlbear. Yikes.

Level 8

That got everyone to level 8. I completely respec’ed my Vivisectionist to the way it’s apparently supposed to work (melee instead of ranged). And then I spent like a day and a half leveling up all the other companions, consulting with ChatGPT for each one to see what I’m doing wrong. It’s crazy how deeply complicated the Pathfinder 1E rules are. (It’s also annoying how there is one clearly “best” path for each class, and hundreds of “wrong” paths.)

Next I waited for the royal council to gather to discuss the epidemic of people exploding into magical beasts. I did some more Kingdom management stuff, like building buildings, and handling problems and opportunities. I’m starting to understand a little bit of how that stuff works, thanks to a lot of reading. (I only started reading up on how the game actually works some five years after I started playing.)

Excusion 3, Swamp Bouquet

I formed a new “balanced” level 8 party of me, Valerie, Regongar, Harrim, Ekundayo, and Linzi (suggested by ChatGPT, because they were convinced my party was too heavy on damage, as if that’s a bad thing), and went out to finish the Swamp Bouquet side quest, which I thought would be a quick diversion, but turned into an epic journey.

All I had to do was find some flowers and bring them back to the Swamp Witch, but in searching the entire map I had to fight Owlbears, a Werewolf ambush, Wargs, Giant Slugs, Hodags, and probably some other stuff I forgot. I met a satyr and a dryad, who wanted me to kill a Scythe Tree, which I had done years ago. In all, it took over two hours to get the flowers and finish that quest (for minimal reward, it must be said, but the journey is usually the reward in these games).

Investigating Exploding People

When I got back to the Throne Room the real Season of Bloom storyline kicked off. With Tristian and Jhod, I performed impromptu exploratory surgery on a volunteer to see why they were exploding from the inside out, and it turns out they had some kind of seed in them. And I had to kill another Owlbear almost by myself. At least the patient survived.

As yet it’s unclear who or what is planting seeds in people to explode them. But based on my previous encounters with the deceptive Guardian of the Bloom at the Verdant Chambers, a death trap I managed to escape back in 2023 at level 6 (after many reloads), my money’s on her.

Then Linzi told me Ekundayo was sad and wanted to throw a party for him, so I went back out to the Hunting Grounds for that, where he finally named Dog the Wolf as Okbo the Wolf.

Then Kesten Garess, a loyal vassal of my barony (who I, the player, don’t know), wanted help investigating a Shrine of Lamashtu to find out if Lamashtu cultists are behind the exploding seeds (the Witch Hunt quest). So I went down there and killed a bunch of cultists, chased their leader Tsanna to the aforementioned Secluded Lodge, and ended up exiling her.

As you can see, a lot of stuff happens in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It’s a rare game where I find myself completely immersed in the story and (usually) have no idea how much time is passing while playing.

Next I’ll be exploring the Kamelands, which looks like the next big area to tackle.

Media Production

Mostly recording Pathfinder: Kingmaker videos to continue my 5-year-long-and-counting video series. I end up losing track of time and recording videso that are way too long, which is almost unheard of for me. Then I have to chop those videos into two or three smaller videos, because I don’t like uploading videos longer than 40-45 minutes, the runtime of a one hour television show excluding commercials.

Notebook LM And Video Transcripts

Yet another tip to use AI to simplify your life, if you don’t happen to be rich enough to hire a full-time personal assistant.

I uploaded all the .SRT transcripts of my Pathfinder videos to Notebook LM, going back to the very first video, and now I can query it to find exactly which videos I talked to various NPCs across the series. (I was specifically looking for references to Kesten Gariss, an NPC name I recognize but who I see infrequently enough that I never remember who he is, where he came from, what his deal is, or what he sounds like.)

It’s like having natural language search access to super detailed blog posts I’d written for every Pathfinder: Kingmaker game session going back five years, except I didn’t have to write anything, and it knows far, far more than I would ever put in a blog post anyway.

The only hiccup is you have to convert the SRT files to TXT files before you can upload. A simple task for Windsurf to write a Python program to do just that. (Also a simple task if you want to do it by hand.)

I also ended up having to upgrade to the lowest tier paid plan so I could upload more than 50 sources. It’s a trivial amount of money for what it does, imo.

Said SRT transcripts were themselves previously generated by either OpenAI’s transcription services or, more recently, I switched to AssemblyAI’s transcription service, which is much better.

Here’s an example (Pathfinder: Kingmaker game spoilers ahead):

Find every mention of Keston Gariss in these transcripts, including the name of the file it’s in, the approximate time within the file, and a summary of what was said

Based on the provided transcripts, Keston Gariss (often referred to as Keston or Kestin, and sometimes phonetically as Kestrel or Garis) appears as a major supporting character serving as a guard captain, investigator, and eventual advisor.

Prologue and Investigation

PF1-20211111000001 - Pt 2 - Prologue

Approx. 00:54:57: Keston introduces himself as a fighter of “House Geres” in charge of the mansion guards for Swordlord Jamandi Aldori.

Approx. 01:11:20: Lady Jamandi informs the Baron that while they are away, Keston will investigate the night’s events to find out who in Restov is working for Pitax.

PF1-20211204212610 - A Bitter Rival, Old Sycamore Tree

Approx. 00:00:11: Keston meets the Baron and reveals his investigation proved their innocence; Tartucio was the real spy for King Irovetti.

Approx. 00:01:39: He identifies Tartucio’s location and tasks the Baron with bringing him in “dead or alive”.

Approx. 00:03:31: He shares his backstory: a former noble of House Geres disowned by his father for breaking a strategic engagement with a widow to be with a commoner girl named Tanya.

Reporting and the New Barony

PF1-20230509191819 - A Bitter Rival, Sacred Hall, Tartuccio…

Approx. 00:09:48: The Baron notes that Keston must be informed of Tartucio’s death.

Approx. 00:23:23: The Baron reports Tartucio’s fate to Keston at Oleg’s Trading Post. Keston rewards the Baron and pledges to stay to help guard the post.

PF1-20230513213500 - Stag Lord Fort (remixed)

Approx. 00:37:51: Jamandi mentions Keston gave her a full report on the encounter with Tartucio.

PF1-20230514143017 - A Noble Welcome, Reception, Barony Business

Approx. 00:18:52: Keston appears at the Baron’s victory banquet in Restov, seemingly having had a bit too much to drink.

Approx. 00:26:47: He arrives at the Baron’s new capital, transferred by Jamandi to serve the new barony.

Approx. 00:30:02: He provides an official tour of the new capital square and tavern.

Approx. 00:34:09: He explains the purpose of the throne room and the strategic map for the Baron.

Kingdom Management and the Trolls

PF1-20230514204003 - More Barony Business, Capital Square

Approx. 00:01:23: Lander Lebeda advises against trusting Keston, claiming he is now a “broken man”.

Approx. 00:07:04: Keston discusses his exile again with the Baron and suggests he would be well-suited for the position of Warden.

Approx. 00:19:05: Keston brings reports of a troll invasion in the Gnarlmarches and suggests the Baron investigate personally.

PF1-20230523213438 - Kalikke and Kanerah, Barony Business…

Approx. 00:22:06: Keston reports new, troubling news of trolls in the Gnarlmarches that seem fireproof and highly organized.

Approx. 00:23:26: He recommends the Baron visit the mage Bartholomew to learn why the trolls have changed.

The Season of Bloom and Witch Hunt

PF1-20260426123500 - The Seed of Sorrow

Approx. 00:14:38: During the monster-birthing epidemic, Keston conducts an independent investigation and finds “something nasty” requiring the Baron.

Approx. 00:05:48: In a letter, Keston explains he left court to lead a militia to reassure the common folk. He reports finding a shrine to Lamashtu in the Kamelands where cultists gather.

PF1-20260427180306 - Witch Hunt 1 of 2

Approx. 00:16:01: Keston meets the Baron near the Shrine of Lamashtu to coordinate an ambush on “Moon Day”. He expresses deep disgust for the cultists’ rituals.

PF1-20260427184000 - Witch Hunt 2 of 2

Approx. 00:05:32: During the ambush at the shrine, Keston is hit by a cultist and knocked unconscious.

Approx. 00:14:56: After the battle ends and the Baron revives him, Keston urges the pursuit of a runaway priestess.

Approx. 00:17:39: He joins the Baron in tracking the runaway through a gorge.

Approx. 00:23:25: At the Secluded Lodge, Keston prepares to arrest the suspects and awaits the Baron’s interrogation.

Approx. 00:42:06: Keston executes the Baron’s final judgment on the priestess, banishing or executing her based on the player’s choice.

Here’s another example. It’s not actually every instance for some reason, but it’s a start. More spoilers probably.

After updating the sources, list every instance where I had to reload a previous save, including the filename and approximate time, and what the situation was

Based on the transcripts, here are the instances where a previous save was reloaded due to a Total Party Kill (TPK), a quest failure, or a desire to avoid a specific situation:

1. Thorn Ford (Against Kressle and Bandits)

Filename: PF1-20211130000001 - Pathfinder Kingmaker Pt 5 - Stolen Land, Thorn Ford.txt

Approximate Time: 00:17:10

Situation: The party charged into battle while low on health and was “chopped down” by Kressle and her bandits. Because there were no autosaves in the middle of the map, you had to reload to the beginning of the location, describing it as a “miserable last chapter”.

2. Tusk Gutter’s Lair (Against the Giant Boar)

Filename: PF1-20211130000002 - Pathfinder Kingmaker Pt 6 - Tuskgutter, Prove Your Worth, Tecnic League Encounter.txt

Approximate Time: 00:33:43

Situation: The giant boar, Tusk Gutter, evaded nearly every attack and “gutted everyone” in the party one by one. You reloaded the most recent autosave to attempt the fight again.

3. Temple of the Elk (Against the Bear-like Treant)

Filename: PF1-20211203000000 - Pathfinder Kingmaker Pt 9 - Stolen Land, Temple of the Elk 1.txt

Approximate Time: 01:00:00

Situation: The party was mauled by a massive Bear-like Treant while trapped in their own Grease spell. You noted that everyone was “dead, period, the end” and reloaded after several party members fell.

4. Stag Lord Fort (Multiple TPKs)

Filenames: PF1-20230509191819 - A Bitter Rival, Sacred Hall, Tartuccio, Stag Lord Fort TPK.txt and PF1-20230510210250 - Stag Lord Fort TPKs.txt

Approximate Time: 01:12:01 (First file); 00:18:22 and 00:31:05 (Second file)

Situation: The party was repeatedly “obliterated” and “wrecked” by the Stag Lord and his lieutenant, Akiros Insmort. You reloaded multiple times, concluding that the fight might be “unwinnable” at level 4 without a better strategy.

5. Stag Lord Fort (Quest Timer Failure)

Filename: PF1-20230513213022 - Attempt to change party.txt

Approximate Time: 00:05:00

Situation: While attempting to change your party composition, the game informed you that you had failed to complete the quest in time, ending the story. You reloaded a quicksave to try and finish the fort before the timer expired.

6. Sorrowflow (The “Death Loop”)

Filename: PF1-20230523213438 - Kalikke and Kanerah, Barony Business, Sorrowflow Disaster.txt

Approximate Time: 00:36:17, 00:38:07, and 00:39:24

Situation: While accompanied only by Kalikke, you were repeatedly “insta-killed” by Ferocious Slurks. You described being “stuck in a death loop” and reloaded the same autosave three times before deciding to abandon the encounter entirely.

7. Avoiding Random Encounters

Filename: PF1-20230705205351 - Pt 24, Sorrowflow Continued, Barony Business, Storyteller.txt

Approximate Time: 00:17:41

Situation: You mentioned that you “only had to reload once to avoid a random encounter” while traveling back to your capital from Sorrowflow.

8. Lone House (Against Branded Trolls)

Filename: PF1-20230708171046 - Troll Trouble, Lone House, Troll Fighting (no commentary).txt

Approximate Time: 00:22:02

Situation: After the entire party went down to regenerating trolls, you realized there was no autosave from your camp. You were forced to load a save from when you first arrived at the Lone House and redo the entire sequence.

9. Troll Lair Depths (Against Hargulka and Tartuuk)

Filename: PF1-20240115112421 - Troll Lair Depths, Kargulka Defeated.txt

Approximate Time: 00:30:19

Situation: The party was “brutally” defeated after the boss fight difficulty spiked “instantaneously” in real-time mode. You reloaded to re-attempt the encounter using turn-based mode.

10. Candlemere Tower (Against War Wisps)

Filename: PF1-20260405151801 - The Curse of Candlemere Continued, Fighting Wisps.txt

Approximate Time: 00:15:16 and 00:17:56

Situation: The party was overwhelmed by Ancient Will-o-Wisps and War Wisps. You reloaded twice after major party members were downed by devastating lightning attacks.

11. Candlemere Tower (Avoiding Combat)

Filename: PF1-20260405161033 - The Curse of Candlemere Continued, Rismel.txt

Approximate Time: 00:49:54

Situation: After hearing lightning from a nearby group of wisps, you decided you had “had enough fighting” and “cheated a little bit” by reloading a previous quicksave to avoid the battle entirely.

12. Verdant Chambers (The Ambush Trap)

Filename: PF1-20230722111942 - Ghoul in the Swamp, Trap at the Verdant Chambers.txt

Approximate Time: 00:14:54 and 00:43:08

Situation: Following quest instructions to go alone, you were ambushed and “permanently knocked down” by bandits and summoned monsters. After dying multiple times to the trap and the inability to escape the map, you reloaded a save from before you left the capital and decided to abandon the quest.

13. Swamp Witch’s Hut (Amiri’s Death)

Filename: PF1-20230709202437 - Swamp Witchs Hut, The Old Beldame, Camping, Scythe Tree, Slugs.txt

Approximate Time: 00:53:06

Situation: During a fight with giant slugs, Amiri died permanently from Constitution damage. You reloaded to a point after your last camp to “save scum” and keep her from dying.

I haven’t really said this, but AI is my personal assistant for many everyday tasks now.

I keep seeing stories about people getting duped and suckered and misled by AI chatbots (e.g. in a recent John Oliver story), but I personally haven’t seen any of that.

I only converse with AI on technical subjects, and have never asked it for, say, mental health advice, and very rarely on writing advice. (Though I do ask it for medical advice now and then, mostly in the area of translating doctor-speak into layman’s terms… a handy resource when you have cancer.)

ChatGPT has never flirted with me, though it does tend to be more “supportive” than I’d like. I tend to ask it open-ended questions, and avoid hinting at the answer I want or expect. I pretty much talk to it exactly like I’d IM with a more junior-level coworker, and assume that I’m always smarter.

It’s fairly easy for me to spot a human spouting nonsense (see: anyone in sales, or any Internet forum), so it’s also fairly easy for me to spot AI doing the same thing, so I can’t really relate to a person who believes AI hallucinations.

Media Consumption

Nobody 2

I fell asleep for a time somewhere in the first half of the movie, but I didn’t feel like I missed anything. It is what is is: Nostalgic actors probably having a lot of fun making a generic action movie. It’s almost like The A-Team, to be honest.

For All Mankind Season 5

Previously on For All Mankind: Season 1 was fantastic, seasons 2 and 3 were good, season 4 was meh.

Season 5 appears to be continuing the trends of season 4, meaning that it’s basically a show about distracting old-age prosthetics, with some space stuff happening in the background.

And once again, they’re hoping viewers are too scientifically illiterate to realize that Mars has 1/3 of Earth’s gravity.

Other than that glaring scientific error in every scene on Mars, it’s fine. Not as good as before, but fine. Great acting, even if they keep ignoring the interesting plots (Titan anyone?) for the boring plots.

The Boys Season 5

Speaking of shows that had a fantastic first season, then were surprised by their own success and didn’t have a plan to continue:

The new season of The Boys is pretty much the same as seasons 2 through 4: Just kind of doing stuff that seems like the kind of stuff people liked in the first season, except lacking any coherent narrative. This time, however, there seems to be an attempt to wrap things up and pretend that’s how they planned it all along.

Anyway it’s the only kind of superhero genre show I can stand: The ones where the superheroes are all deeply flawed and terrible human beings.

Day Job

I don’t know about anyone else’s software development job, but mine is pretty much run by AI development tools now.

Our leaders told us to take a whole week, ignore our regular work, and use AI tools to do our work instead. Apparently there are still people out there who don’t automatically turn to something like Cursor or Claude Code or Windsurf for everyday engineering work, so they’re really pushing to ingrain that in all engineers. (My company is particularly enamored with Claude Code and its reusable “skills.”)

And, presumably, they’re trying to weed out engineers who refuse to learn new skills, a somewhat crucial innate skillset for engineering in a big company in the modern world, where everything table flips every year or so.

As I get older, I personally find it more and more difficult and mentally taxing to leap headfirst into brand new technology, but I still retain my lifelong interest in learning new things, so it’s not that hard for me to at least try.

All that is to say I’ve been experimenting with making a Claude Code Skill to query our application logs in Splunk and analyze the results and organize them into a simple, readable output. (Crawling through Splunk logs to find a trail of evidence in a production cloud application you can’t readily access is pretty tedious.)

It works great (mostly), it took less than a day to make (with Claude), but in terms of compute resources required and cost-to-serve, a regular old Python script would be far superior in the long run. But we get pretty much unlimited Claude tokens at work right now, so full speed ahead on spending other people’s money!

I don’t think of myself as an AI apologist, by the way. I just tend to use things that are super obviously convenient and useful. For every 1 incident of AI leading me astray, there’s 100 where it didn’t. That’s way better than Googling search results or asking real people.

And yes, I know the AI bubble will definitely burst someday and the economy will tank. I just hope we can still use AI after that, because having to go back to doing tedious work by hand would suck. Hopefully it’ll wait until I can retire. Or until I’m dead from lung cancer (financially I’m not quite sure yet if it would be better if that happens before or after I retire).

Home Life

A traumatic thing happened to me: I accidentally bought Bread & Butter pickles instead of Kosher Dill pickles.

Hot Chocolate

Another traumatic thing happened to me: I spilled almost a full cup of hot chocolate on my mouse and 1/4 of my computer desk. This kind of thing almost never happens to me, but I was fully into leveling my Pathfinder: Kingmaker companions, utterly lost all situational awareness, and whacked that cup right over and it got hot chocolate everywhere. I froze in total disbelief.

Luckily it didn’t spill into the keyboard or any of the computer equipment on the floor. The buttons on my Razer DeathAdder mouse survived less than 24 hours after getting drenched with hot chocolate, so I ordered a new mouse. This time, since Razer mice recently seem… I don’t know… what’s the word… Bad? Cheap? Flimsy? I got a Logitech mouse to try out instead.

The new Logitech G502 mouse also seems pretty cheap and flimsy, but it works. Has anyone else noticed that a $75 gaming mouse today feels like a Fisher Price plastic baby toy compared to the ones from twenty years ago?

Black Cat

It’s spring time, and that can only mean one thing: A new cat appears out of the woods around my house. (I’ve thought for a long time that there’s a feral colony of cats somewhere out in the woods behind my house.)

Yellow Cat, who I eventually named Marbles, and then Mr. Tangiers Foxface Whitesocks, came and went. Sadly he disappeared last year, never to be seen again. The sad fate of half-feral cats… they just kind of vanish sometimes. Probably dead in the woods somewhere, but maybe scooped up by someone else.

This time it’s Black Cat. The Internet seems to like to call these things Void Cats. I’ve seen this little guy or girl slinking around the front and back porch, a cat probably about a year old

My cat Gracie has also noticed. I’m not really in the market for a new cat, what with having lung cancer and all. But I take my queues from Gracie, who is the final arbiter of whether cats should be chased off or not. So far Gracie doesn’t seem to like Black Cat hanging around her back porch, and has gone into banshee scream mode a couple of times, which she never did with Marbles. Black Cat doesn’t seem too intimidated, and continues to hang around the back porch.

Cancer Corner

I’ll be honest, I’m dreading my 15th chemo infusion on the 28th, after the 14th one gave me such an unexpected sucker punch earlier in the month.

I’m going to try to prepare better for the worst, though it’s not especially easy to prepare to meet one’s nutritional needs when everything tastes and smells gross and curdles your stomach. Most of my traditional foods are off the menu.

It is now the 30th as I write this. So far, I have not had a repeat of the infamous 14th chemo reaction. But that reaction and the subsequent ER visit didn’t begin until Thursday night, which is tonight, as I’m writing this.

However I did not get the bone strengthener this time, because it turns out I only get that every other infusion. I’ve been drowning myself in water and eating well today, and taking anti-nausea meds preemptively. I don’t feel as congested as last time.

I’m pretty tired as evening rolls around though, as I’ve been working from home all day. But no signs of fever, so I’m hopeful this will be a regular, boring infusion cycle.

World Context

After getting my new “REAL ID” triple-checked and verified state driver’s license last year, I was also going to get a passport just to make things easier in this new ID-centric world we live in here in America, but I guess I won’t now.

In other news, I saw a news story that cited a poll where almost half of Gen Z wishes they could live in a world before social media.

Maybe Gen Z isn’t so bad after all. Maybe the world has a future.

I haven’t been on any kind of social media in many years (unless you count YouTube). It’s better. Way, way better. Normalize making regular social media users the fringe outcasts of society, I say.

Bye!

Endgame Viable

Turning Off Editor Suggestions in Antigravity IDE

Fighting Markdown Autocomplete and A Whopper

Automating Blog Metadata with Custom AI Skills

Feeling Human Again

Belghast's Passing

The Recluse Report - June 2026 Part 2

Upgraded MacBook

World Cup

Blogosphere

Gaming

Genealogy

AI and Genealogy

Media Consumption

Cancer Corner

The Recluse Report - June 2026 Part 1

Gaming

Media Production

Media

Music

Cancer Corner

World Context

The Recluse Report - May 2026 Part 2

Gaming

Media Production

Media Consumption

Mayday: Air Disasters

Game Changer Season 8

Home Life

Cancer Corner

One Year Cancer-versary

World Context

The Recluse Report - May 2026 Part 1

Gaming

Final Fantasy XIV Coldplay

Wartales

Battle Brothers

Media Production

Media Consumption

Taskmaster Season 21

What?

Day Job

Home Life

Cancer Corner

World Context

The Recluse Report - April 2026 Part 2

Gaming

Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft

Vagrus: The Riven Realms

Banner Saga

The Iron Oath

Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Excursion 1, Exploring

Excursion 2, Hunting Grounds

Level 8

Excusion 3, Swamp Bouquet

Investigating Exploding People

Media Production

Notebook LM And Video Transcripts

Prologue and Investigation

Reporting and the New Barony

Kingdom Management and the Trolls

The Season of Bloom and Witch Hunt

1. Thorn Ford (Against Kressle and Bandits)

2. Tusk Gutter’s Lair (Against the Giant Boar)

3. Temple of the Elk (Against the Bear-like Treant)

4. Stag Lord Fort (Multiple TPKs)

5. Stag Lord Fort (Quest Timer Failure)

6. Sorrowflow (The “Death Loop”)

7. Avoiding Random Encounters

8. Lone House (Against Branded Trolls)

9. Troll Lair Depths (Against Hargulka and Tartuuk)

10. Candlemere Tower (Against War Wisps)

11. Candlemere Tower (Avoiding Combat)

12. Verdant Chambers (The Ambush Trap)

13. Swamp Witch’s Hut (Amiri’s Death)

Media Consumption

Nobody 2

For All Mankind Season 5

The Boys Season 5