Endgame Viable

Welcome To The Party, Pal (1)

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:36:33 -0400

Good Morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Mentoring

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

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

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

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

A Burger Press Tale

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

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

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

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

Video of the Day

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

Blaugust Eve 2026

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 05:55:40 -0400

Early Morning

I’m up very early again this morning. I got a new memory foam cervical neck pillow which I used for the first time last night and it seemed to work well, but I woke up about 4 feeling like I’d had a full night’s rest and I was ready to rock the day.

Earlier in my life I struggled with getting good sleep but I’m generally on the other side of that. I have a decent mattress now which I think helps tremendously, and a fairly routine sleep schedule, which I also think helps.

One thing I still struggle with, though, is finding good pillows. Every time I think I find a good one, it turns out it only works for a short time before I’m back to a plain old ordinary pillow.

Anyway, the issue with my right thumb and arm seems to have plateaued, for which I’m grateful. It makes me less anxious that something is spiraling out of control.

I’ve adapted to the lack of thumb dexterity, and do more things left-handed. If I’m careful to avoid stretching my right arm out in certain ways, the pain is minimal. I’m still taking Tylenol on a fairly regular basis, though. I’m trying to do back and neck stretches and exercises I’ve done in that past to see if that will help any, but so far nada. Just waiting on the MRI Sunday.

I’ve actually been “training” for lying in an MRI position. I think I mentioned before that lying flat on my back is pretty uncomfortable, so I’ve been practicing that by lying on the floor once or twice a day in the hope that my neck muscles in particular will get used to it before my upcoming neck and brain MRIs. The things you have to do when you get old.

Blaugust Eve

It occurred to me that I hadn’t made a post yet with the obligatory Blaugust 2026 header, so I thought I would do one this morning, on this, the eve of tomorrow’s Blaugust starter gun. In my time zone, at least.

Kudos to whoever made that image. Was it Indiecator? I’ve credited it Indiecator so apologies if that’s incorrect. The transparency is cleverly designed so it seamlessly transforms from light mode to dark mode, a rarity in blog header images.

I didn’t make a Blaugust promotion post because frankly I assumed that my blog would be the very last place anyone would find out about Blaugust. Let’s just say I don’t have a thriving community of followers here. Most everyone I see in the comments would have already been aware of Blaugust long ago.

Zero Hour?

Speaking of time zones, when exactly is the zero hour for Blaugust? Is it 8/1 00:00:00 in your local time zone or is it 8/1 00:00:00 UTC?

I’m a professional software developer and that kind of ambiguous date issue is something that I deal with on a daily basis. For the purposes of my own sanity, I will go with what I have to assume is the only true and correct answer, which is 00:00:00 UTC.

If it’s 00:00:00 in your local time zone, that would make counting posts considerably more difficult.

In any case, I’m of the opinion that most of the administrative effort of Blaugust should be off-loaded to the participants, so that the organizers don’t have to do a lot of math at the end of the event. Things are hard enough in this world without adding math. Participants can self-report the number of posts they did at the end. That makes any ambiguous zero hour timing a moot point. It’s not like there’s going to be a Congressional investigation into the accuracy of these things anyway.

Python Refactoring

Yesterday I continued refactoring my video processing python scripts with Antigravity assistance. This time I was working to clean up all the free-for-all dicts with strictly typed data classes.

I always call python code “scripts” because I fundamentally don’t believe python is a very good language for anything but scripting. It’s not a language I would turn to for e.g. service application development, though unfortunately where I work that seems to be a minority opinion.

One thing that bothers me about python is that every single python repo I encounter has a completely different strategy for package management and linting. There seems to be roughly seventeen different methods for doing those things. I greatly prefer using languages where there is one package manager and one linting tool, like Golang.

Not much else to talk about. Good luck with Blaugust everyone!

Upcoming Cervical Spine MRI

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:55:11 -0400

Health Updates

Morning!

What should we talk about this morning. Let’s see. War in Iran? Hard pass. The role of social media in traumatizing whole generations of humans? I’m going to say no on that one too.

Let’s go with, oh, I don’t know… my health! Again!

I’ve mentioned my right hand a few times. For background, in the span of roughly the last two weeks, I’ve lost a lot of the functional use of my right thumb (I can no longer bend it at the first joint), I’m now having trouble straightening my right elbow without pain, and I have aching pains in my right armpit/back/neck/shoulder region. The pain has gotten bad enough that I have to take Tylenol pretty frequently.

I expressed my concerns to my oncologist in a message yesterday that, given how quickly it seems to be progressing, I’m worried the pain levels may escalate beyond the point where Tylenol helps, and I’m worried about waiting for the results of next week’s brain MRI before moving on to scanning the neck area.

Without further question, she ordered a stat MRI of my cervical spine area (the neck, where all the nerves that go to the arm are), and I got one scheduled for this coming Sunday. It was literally the first available appointment anywhere within range. Still, I’ll have to drive about 35 minutes to a place I’ve never been to get it.

I’m really hopeful something will be revealed on that MRI. I’m even more hopeful it will turn out to be something that can be corrected with some physical therapy, and not some kind of degenerative nerve disease. I’ll try to think positive thoughts.

Still, if this isn’t reversible, I’m contemplating the possibility that the very last game that I was able to play with a game controller was Rise of the Ronin on the PS5. Of all the games to be the last one, that’s not exactly one I’d want to go out on.

Blaugust Preparations

Yesterday I started putting together a list of YouTube Channels I semi-regularly follow for whenever Creator Appreciation week is. Sort of a Blogroll for YouTube Channels. I tried to focus on the more independent creator channels, rather than big corporate media things who happen to also have YouTube channels.

YouTube doesn’t make it easy to export a list of subscriptions, by the way. I had to (close your eyes if you’re anti-AI) use Antigravity to build a tool to query the YouTube API to pull down my list of subscriptions and format it in Markdown for me. After that I edited the list to group them by subject category and viola.

Antigravity Refactoring

Speaking of Antigravity, yesterday I also used Antigravity to accomplish a very, very long-standing goal I had to refactor all of the Python scripts that handle my video recording, processing, and uploading pipeline.

I’m not a native Python programmer, so those scripts were patched together over years and had the look of someone who is not especially proficient at writing clean, readable Python code (they were among the first Python code I’d ever written). It was a bunch of embarrassing spaghetti code, in other words. I’ve been wanting to clean it up and modernize it for many, many years, but just never had the time and/or motivation to do so.

Well, a handful of Antigravity prompts later (actually it was dozens), and all the old crappy legacy Python formatting is gone and replaced with new, modern, clean syntax, with no change in functionality. I was even able to add a suite a tests for the complex video rendering and audio mixing pipelines to perform regression tests before and after the modernization. Easy peasy.

This morning’s YouTube upload (Nioh 3) was accomplished with the refactored scripts and to my eye appears to have worked successfully.

If only Antigravity could help with household tasks like cleaning, decluttering, and installing light fixtures. If one could buy a smart robot to do those things, I’m getting to the point in my life where I might seriously consider such a purchase. That kind of robot is probably still quite some years away in the future, but it’s starting to look at least distantly possible now, and possibly even inevitable.

For a person like me who is getting older and lives alone and has some health issues, a robot assistant is not a terrible idea. Assuming it wouldn’t murder me in my sleep.

Well that veered in a weird direction. Time to stop.

Back To Normal

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:46:15 -0400

Back To Life

Morning! I bent my self-imposed rules a bit and started writing this post yesterday afternoon. I was just going to jot down some bullet points but I got carried away. That’s why it’s too long and multi-topic’ed.

I’m glad I did, too, because I had trouble sleeping last night for some reason and I’m up again at an ungodly hour. I’m going to crash hard at some point today.

Yesterday was, a week after my infusion, my official “return to normal” day, chemo-side-effects-wise. Appetite returned with a vengeance, and I successfully downed both a hamburger for lunch and a Nachos Supreme from a local Mexican restaurant for supper. Though my mouth is still pretty sensitive so I’m uber vulernable to hurting myself with even mildy spicy foods for a few more days yet.

PET Results

I had a video call with my oncologist, where we went over the results of my PET scan last week. Everything is stable, however there is a troublesome new cancer spot that has made an appearance in my right hip bone. It’s very subtle, and has an SUV value of 4.6, which is just above the “nominal” level of 3.

It’s possible it’s an indication that the cancer is learning to adapt to the treatments I’m getting, so my oncologist is all over it.

She wants to do another PET scan in two months to see if that right hip spot remains stable over that time or gets larger (“progresses,” as they call it), and then we’ll decide what to do about it. (Possibly radiation.) I feel no pain or any effect at all from that spot, and there’s no danger of my hip spontaneously shattering or anything like that.

Meanwhile I’m still having trouble with my right hand (the thumb, specifically), and now I have some pain in my elbow and shoulder area. It’s getting noticably worse. I’ve never had a pinched nerve before, but it feels like what I’d imagine a pinched nerve would feel like.

The PET scan did not reveal any cancer-related causes, so the next steps are my regularly scheduled brain MRI next week to rule out brain causes, and then potentially an MRI of my neck/shoulder region. It all sounds logical to me, but I’m worried it will take too long to get to a diagnosis. In the meantime I have to be careful I don’t accidentaly drop things I pick up with my right hand.

As I’m typing this, I can barely even bend my right thumb. Many normal activities are suddenly challenging, like, say, holding a pen. I’m really hopeful it’s reversible, because otherwise, well, I don’t want to think about that.

Blaugust Preparations

After mulling it over, and seeing that there are people out there who are extremely passionate about this, I decided not to use any AI-generated imagery during Blaugust. It’s more work for me, but it’s a fairly minor sacrifice.

So yesterday I started building a new library of generic stock images that covers broad subject categories. It’s an arduous, soul-draining process. The images I use during Blaugust are going to look extremely stock and free.

However I made an AI skill to reduce some of the tedium of pulling images down from free-images.com, converting them to the right size and format, and plopping them into the proper directory in my S3 image bucket. You folks with your fancy-schmancy WordPresses have it easy.

I’ve also been combing through my recent personal photos. You can see one on this very post. That’s Gracie, and that’s a fairly common sight for me when I wake up, if I’m not following the standard morning routine. I will use that for posts where I sit in judgment of something or someone. (I try not to write those kinds of posts anymore, though, so this is probably my only opportunity to use it.)

The New Culture War

There’s been a couple of firebombs thrown into the blogosphere recently about AI. It’s a new culture war, because we definitely needed more of those. I’m conspicuously avoiding the topic despite having some relevant feelings on the subject, because everything’s already been said and all the battle lines have been drawn and there’s not much point in discussion anymore.

My personal stance on AI in content creation is pretty middle-of-the-road, I think. Not extreme in one way or the other. I have roughly the same stance on AI usage as I would have on washing machines or airplanes or microwaves. I think I will write an AI Policy page at some point to lay it all out for anyone who cares.

Final Fantasy XIV

Conveniently labeled so Bhagpuss can skip. :)

Last night I played through another quest in the Endwalker MSQ, entitled Going Underground. It took a whopping 58 minutes. Something about building a space ark.

I don’t remember if this is a thing in other MMORPGs or not: In FFXIV, when you’re following a quest giver from location to location, sometimes there are other instanced NPCs standing near the quest giver. Those instanced NPCs have little bits of flavor dialog if you click on them that are moderately relevant to the quest you’re on.

It’s completely optional, but I have a habit of clicking on every one to see what they say.

It becomes a bit of a problem when there are eight of those NPCs tagging along with you on the path of this quest. Every single time you move to another step in the quest, you have to click on all eight of them to see what they have to say, and it gets a bit tedious.

I say “you have to” but you don’t actually have to. I just do it because if I didn’t, I’d miss something.

And in the videos I’m studiously recording, I read all of that text out loud for posterity. I don’t know if you know this, but reading out the lines of eight different NPCs one after the other and trying to make them sound slightly different from one another is a wee bit of a challenge.

But it’s fun to try, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.

The point is, I really hope they quit with the huge packs of NPC roadies traveling along with you in Dawntrail and the upcoming Evercold.

Human Curation

I read a great pre-Blaugust post from the Blaugust 2026 blogroll: In the era of AI slop, human curation is even more important.

Interestingly, I’m on YouTube all the time, and I don’t see too much AI slop in my recommendations. But I’m a very careful clicker. I don’t just click on anything in front of me, I examine the title and the thumbnail and don’t click on things if I get even a tiny whiff of AI (or non-AI) slop content.

Here’s a tip I use: If I’m clicking on a video from a channel I’m unfamiliar with, I will often open it in a new tab, so I can return to the first tab and use the “Not Interested” or “Don’t Recommend Channel” options on the original thumbnail, if it turns out the video sucks. For reasons beyond my capacity to understand, once you’re actually viewing a video, those options aren’t available anymore, and of course if you go back in your browser the whole recommendations page changes and your original breadcrumb is gone.

Anyway the above post has inspired me to make a note to make a list of human content I consume on a recurring basis and put it on the blog somewhere. Perhaps it will be a Blaugust post, since I believe Creator Appreciation is one of the themes.

Have a fantastic Wednesday!

Fixing YouTube Video Descriptions in Inoreader

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:18:40 -0400

I learned something about YouTube channels in RSS readers this morning.

tl;dr Add YouTube channels to InoReader with the channel’s url, not the channel’s RSS feed url, to preserve descriptions.

I’ve long known that every YouTube channel has an RSS feed associated with it, and I’ve used it in my Endgame Viable Firehose feed for years. If you don’t know, the “firehose” is an aggregation of my blog and my YouTube channel combined.

However, my YouTube channel feed in InoReader has had blank descriptions for a long time. At one point in the past, I remember seeing descriptions, but they disappeared and I never understood why.

Now I do.

I happened to notice Zelibeli from Blaugust 2026 went live with a Minecraft stream, and it showed up in InoReader with a prominent “live” tag. That’s neat, I thought. I’ve never seen a livestream show up in an RSS reader like that before.

Now that the livestream is over, Zelibeli’s video shows up in InoReader as a standard YouTube video, just like my YouTube videos do, and any other blog post with a YouTube embed does. Except theirs has a description, while mine doesn’t.

That’s really neat, I thought. How are they doing that?

Well, it turns out I was supposed to have used my channel’s url when adding it to InoReader, instead of the channel’s RSS feed url. The YouTube video descriptions are embedded in media:description tags instead of standard summary or content tags, so if you just add the RSS feed url, InoReader doesn’t know how to fetch the descriptions. When you add the YouTube channel url directly, it detects it as a YouTube channel and specially processes it.

So I re-added my YouTube channel to InoReader using the main channel url and voila, the descriptions re-appeared.

Neato.

I’m really glad to have stumbled on this blog post topic this morning so I could avoid talking about my health or AI controversy again.

Returning to Final Fantasy XIV

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:46:00 -0400

I woke up at about 2:30 this morning, wide awake. While rain fell and thunder rumbled outside, I spent the time impulsively “writing” a tool to fetch RSS feeds and count posts. (Antigravity did most of the work. I merely supervised.)

Perhaps it could be useful to Blaugust accountants at the end of the month.

Then I went back to sleep for a couple of hours.

I actually followed through on yesterday’s threat and played Final Fantasy XIV for the first time since (checks notes) March 16th. I finished one quest, specifically the Outside Help quest, a level 88 Endwalker Main Scenario Quest.

Naturally it was one of the nearly-an-hour-long quests that FFXIV likes to do from time to time. It was all exposition and cut scenes. Thankfully most of them were voice acted.

It occurs to me that I talk about my health quite a lot, and that must surely be one of the most boring topics to read about, but in my situation, it takes up quite a lot of my daily bandwidth. So here’s some more.

It’s day 6 of the chemo cycle and I’m feeling better this morning. I didn’t throw up any yesterday, and managed to eat a little bit more. The IV fluids yesterday morning helped a lot. I actually felt hungry when I got back home. So I’m exiting the post-chemo slump and getting back to normal operations.

My right hand gripping issue, however, seems to be growing up my arm. I’m now feeling some odd pain in my elbow and shoulder, making me think I’ve got some kind of pinched nerve in my shoulder area. I’m looking forward to ruling out any cancer involvement and finding the right doctor to deal with that, because it’s fairly annoying.

I have a virtual appointment with my oncologist tomorrow to go over last week’s PET scan results. I’ve seen them on the health portal already and they sound generally positive, but there’s some new indications on there that surprised me.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not, but my regular oncologist has been on maternity leave for many months, and I’ve been on a rotating doctor-of-the-week schedule for a while, so it was a great relief to find that she was back on duty last week.

Otherwise it’s the start of a new work week. The second week of a two-week sprint for me.

Infusion Center Sunday

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 07:50:35 -0400

It turns out I’m writing a quick post this morning after all.

One of the issues with writing daily is that I run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. Especially when I’m not feeling great and spending most of my time resting.

It’s day 5 in the chemo cycle, and I’m still pretty tired. Unfortunately my streak of not throwing up ended yesterday about 6 when my stomach suddenly decided to revolt. Sigh. I feel fine this morning, though.

Other than yesterday evening, it’s been going pretty well. Though my appetite is still gone and I’m not eating or drinking much.

A little later this morning I’m heading off to the infusion center for my scheduled IV fluids to rehydrate. I have a standing appointment for the Sunday after my infusion.

I’m starting to notice that I’m running out of videos in my upload queue for the YouTube channel. So I’ve adjusted the upload rate of my videos from two a day to one a day.

Other than that brief look at Rise of the Ronin, I haven’t played any games since, let’s see… May 19th. That was Battle Brothers.

I’d like to get back into Final Fantasy XIV, because I have to finish Endwalker and then go through the next expansion… which was… drawing a blank… Dawntrail? Was that it? I think that’s right.

Maybe I’ll make an effort to play something later today. I don’t have anything else on the agenda, except sitting around and watching television or sampling some audiobooks.

P.S. The purpose of this post was mainly testing some new stock image search features I added to my post-processing script. For some inexplicable reason, that roller coaster came up as a match for this blog post topic.

Weekend Writing Practice

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:31:45 -0400

Today I’m practicing writing a blog post on a weekend morning. However, I don’t have much to talk about. It’s a rainy, cloudy morning and I just want to crawl back in bed.

It’s chemo cycle day 4 and I still feel pretty tired and unfocused. However, I have not (yet?) had any incidents of throwing up in the morning, which is a marked improvement. The new anti-nausea med I take before bed seems to be working.

My appetite is still gone, though. I’m mostly just nibbling on bits of food through the day. “Not eating enough to keep a bird alive,” as my mom used to say.

In other news, I finished the first Dungeon Crawler Carl book. If anyone out there hasn’t read it, be warned it doesn’t have an ending. (It was fairly obvious by the 50% mark it wouldn’t have an ending.) It just stops, and the reader is fully expected to buy the next book to continue the story. I, however, will not be doing that.

I’m surprised they’re doing a DCC live-action series. It should be a Rick and Morty-style cartoon.

I switched to the audiobook version of Dungeon Crawler Carl for some portions of the second half. I was expecting it to be better, but I didn’t care for it. The narrator sounded like a video game voice actor more than a storyteller. He was doing what I call the “generic male video game action voice” where they exhale loudly at the end of every phrase, which is a big turn-off to me. Maybe it was intentional, since it’s a book about a video game.

I had gotten a handful of audiobooks of award-winners or near-award-winners a couple weeks ago, since my credits were about to expire, so I turned to another audiobook.

I started an audiobook of The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, read by Joel de la Feunte. The difference in prose style and audiobook performance is night and day. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, though. It’s beautifully written, but it drops you into the middle of a dense, unfamiliar world without much grounding. It reminds me of Dune, except Dune wasn’t that opaque.

Someone on the Blaugust Discord pulled out of the event because there was no rule banning AI-generated images. I don’t really know how to react to that.

I mean, I do know but it reminds me of trying to have a conversation with someone who is obstinately anti-abortion. It’s difficult to say something in a way that validates the opposing viewpoint while simultaneously undermining its credibility. For example, to me, grabbing stock imagery and grabbing AI-generated imagery is essentially the same shortcut.

For myself, I generally try to find a non-AI image for my posts first, because that’s by far the fastest way to find an image. But if I don’t happen to have something in my library that fits, that’s when I turn to the AI generator, which is the second-fastest method.

But I’m thinking about trying to refrain from using AI header images for Blaugust.

Ironically, using AI to assist. I asked Antigravity to give me the top 10 subjects of my posts over the last couple of years, and with that list, I’m going to see if I can find some non-AI images to cover those subjects.

Besides the fact that I don’t relish the idea of pissing off the radically anti-AI crowd, the big disadvantage of AI-generated blog header images is that they tend to all look the same: Bland, corporate, forgettable.

I even ordered some markers and paper to see if I can actually draw some line-artish nonsense to cover those top 10 subjects. I imagine that will turn out to be comically hopeless, because of two reasons: I only draw on paper maybe once every 10 years, and I’m still struggling with some loss of grip strength in my right hand, so holding a pen is surprisingly challenging.

My first idea to make non-AI images for Blaugust was to generate AI images and then hand-copy them onto paper with markers. I thought that would be a hilarious workaround. But I probably won’t do that. But then how could you tell?

Anyway, have a great weekend. I probably won’t write tomorrow morning.

Chemo Cycle Day 3

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:04:54 -0400

I didn’t write anything yesterday morning because I had to get another PET scan. I wrote about those back in March. Scans are how they monitor cancer activity. It’ll be a few days before I see the results. I have a virtual visit with my oncologist scheduled for next week to go over them.

It’s Friday morning now, day 3 of the cycle, and the post-chemo effects are really starting to kick in. The first effect is fatigue, so I slept a ridiculous amount last night. Roughly 12 hours. This morning I feel incredibly dopey and sluggish.

On the previous two cycles, I threw up the morning of day 3, but so far this morning I feel okay. I got a new anti-nausea med this time which is supposed to help with my previous “morning sickness.” I take it before bed. It’s actually an anti-psychotic med but it was found to have good chemo anti-nausea effects too. It also pretty much knocks me out after taking it.

By day 3, my appetite is mostly gone, my taste buds are out of whack, and I don’t feel like eating or drinking anything. However I have to eat and drink anyway, because the more dehydrated I get, the worse I feel.

So I’m sipping on ginger ale and ice cubes. And for food I’m trying something different this time: Cake. During this time period, my body is way more interested in sweets than savory foods. Savory foods taste pretty awful.

But in any case, I can only eat or drink small bits at a time. It’s a chore. I basically have to nibble on something all through the day instead of having individual meals.

Anyway, not much else to talk about this morning. Or at least, I’m too tired to think of anything else. I need to start psyching myself up for the day job.

Bullets on Chemo and InoReader and DCC

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:34:10 -0400

Oof. It’s really hitting me today that some mornings you really don’t feel like writing. This is why daily blogging is so challenging, and why I’m practicing before Blaugust arrives.

I wrote down three bullet points last night to expand this morning, and I’m looking at them now like a complete stranger wrote them. They were fascinating topics yesterday, but this morning they sound like … like … some phrase that’s a funny indication of how much they don’t sound fascinating.

My sluggishness this morning could be from two things: One, it’s been storming and raining all night, and still is, and the morning air is just thick and heavy and dark, and two, physical effects of chemo drugs from yesterday, though they don’t usually start to hit me until tomorrow.

Okay, now to expand on the bullet points.

Bullet 1

Yesterday’s chemo treatment was one of the fastest since I started. I arrived at 9:30 and I left about 12:00. Normally there’s much more waiting around than that.

The process normally is:

Check in
wait
check vitals
draw blood
go upstairs to the oncologist’s office
check in
wait
sometimes check vitals again for some reason
talk to oncologist for 15-20 minutes
leave
wait for blood test results, usually the longest wait that can take hours, sometimes get something to eat, sometimes just hang around the hospital
check back into infusion center (I go back to the infusion center when I receive both notifications that both blood test results are done on my health portal app)
wait
go back to a room
get hooked up to the IV thingy
get non-chemo drugs like steroid or B12 shot or bone strenghener, anywhere from 1 to 20 minutes depending on the week
potentially wait for chemo drugs from pharmacy
get chemo drug (pemetrexid) for 10 minutes
unhook from IV
go home

Anyway yesterday the waiting times were minimal. I didn’t get much opportunity to read Dungeon Crawler Carl after all. And I was actually able to get some day job work done when I got home for a change. Fascinating stuff.

Bullet 2

Next bullet point.

I was looking over my InoReader RSS subscriptions yesterday and noticing an annoying issue that I’ve never figured out: Sometimes blogs show two copies of every post in the feed, even though there are definitely not two copies of every post in the actual rss feed.

I started asking ChatGPT for explanations and it gave me a bunch of suggestions that were completely wrong. “The most likely reason is you’ve subscribed to the blog twice.” Yeah that is probably the most likely reason but obviously I’ve checked and double-checked and triple-checked that a million times over the years. So it’s not that.

But upon further investigation, it turns out I did have two subscriptions to the offending blogs. One subscription was to the blog.com/feed/ url and the other was to the blog.com/feed url. For unknown reasons, InoReader shows duplicate posts in the folders where I was subscribed to the non-canonical blog.com/feed url.

Bullet 3

And the last bullet point: While pondering the amount of manual effort it would take to fix the above url conflicts, I decided instead to purge all the old subscriptions and start again.

Especially the Blaugust folders. I’ve got folders for Blaugust 2018, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, all filled with idle and defunct blogs and a bunch with mismatched feed urls and duplicate posts. For some reason the 2024 folder especially has a bunch of non-canonical feed urls.

So the plan is to purge all those folders and all the other folders I never read anymore and re-import a new Blaugust 2026 folder whenever there’s a 2026 OPML available.

Bonus Unplanned Bullet

Last night I actually sat down and read a book, something I haven’t really done for a long time. And I can see why, too. It’s actually difficult for me to just sit and read for long periods of time anymore. My eyes just aren’t used to it, and after two cataract surgeries, it takes a lot of correction to even see the text. At least on an e-reader. I kept trying different glasses to see which worked best and I settled on some 3x magnifying readers from a drugstore.

I got up to about 50% of Dungeon Crawler Carl. It’s a dern quick read, especially when you realize you can pretty much just skip all the extremely lengthy descriptions of video game mechanics and itemizations and fighting mobs and bosses over and over again.

That’s it. I’m done. Good luck reading that. I’m not editing it.

P.S. I did edit it a little. I commented out some pretty critical DCC talk to save it for Blaugust. It’s hidden in plain sight, but if you really like DCC you probably would want to skip it.