Endgame Viable

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.

RSS Traffic Statistics and Kindle Obsolescence

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:39:20 -0400

Since I took two steroid pills yesterday, I, of course, woke up at 5 this morning, ready to go-go-go at full speed before I have to trundle off to my chemo treatment mid-morning.

I learned two new things out of yesterday’s Blaugust Discord.

RSS Traffic

The topic of whether to enable full text on RSS feeds came up. I’ve always enabled full text since time immemorial. After it became clear that blogging wasn’t ever going to be my day job, there wasn’t any need for me to try to nudge people to go to my web site. But that’s a different topic.

I’ve never heard anything but anecdotal evidence about whether a blogger should or shouldn’t put full text in their RSS feeds. The only hard evidence I’ve ever seen is the traffic patterns on my own web site, and out of curiosity I asked Antigravity to query AWS to find out how much of my traffic goes to the RSS feed as opposed to the actual web articles.

It turns out that in the four days prior to the query, 88% of my traffic came from fetching the RSS feed, which matched my expectations based on previous statistics. According to Antigravity, the top 5 RSS readers are NetNewsWire, FreshRSS, Miniflux, Feedly, and NewsBlur. I’ve never heard of two of those.

Of the remaining non-RSS web page requests, Antigravity reported that 57% came from search bots. The top search bots were, in order from highest to lowest: Bytespider, Googlebot, Bingbot, Amazonbot, AhrefsBot, ClaudeBot, GPTGot, PetalBot, SemrushBot, and Applebot.

Of the remaining 43% of non-RSS traffic, 75% is direct instead of things like click-throughs or internal links. “Direct” meaning someone typed in an URL or used a bookmark. That’s way higher than I would have expected, but it turns out that RSS reader click-throughs usually don’t send a Referer header so they would also count as direct.

Of my direct traffic about 40% is to the home page and about 15% is distributed among the last couple of posts I did. The rest goes to category pages for some unknown reason.

To summarize traffic for four days, July 16-20:

RSS feed: 88%
Web Site: 12%
- Search bots: 57%
- Humans: 43%
  - Direct (or maybe RSS click-throughs): 75%
  - Search click-throughs: 14%
  - Internal links: 7.5%

And I checked: Traffic from me personally only accounted for 0.074% of total traffic.

AI can give you super detailed stats if it has access to your raw access logs.

Anyway that’s why I tend to write and format my blog for mainly an RSS audience and secondarily a Google click-through audience. I want the web site to make a decent impression to first-time visitors from Google, but it doesn’t have much of any features to make it a place people live day-to-day.

Kindle Obsolescence

The other thing I learned yesterday, to my surprise, is that my older Kindle Paperwhite e-ink reader can no longer download and display books from my Amazon account. I actually didn’t think it was that old, but I got it in 2012. Oh well. Bricked now, even though it still works perfectly fine.

Luckily I had gotten a Kindle Fire tablet in 2024 and that one still works.

I’m going to use it to read Dungeon Crawler Carl while waiting at the doctor today. I got it last week because I had seen a million billion people talking about it. I kept looking at the description of the book and thinking, “There’s no way I’m going to like this book,” but world-wide peer pressure is a powerful force.

I’m deliberately reading the text of the book for two reasons: 1) I haven’t actually read a book that way for quite a while, and 2) I want to evaluate the book on the merits of the writing.

Normally I buy audiobooks, because they’re just more convenient for me, but I’ve learned over the years that a good audiobook performance can elevate let’s charitably say average writing to a much more entertaining level, which is undoubtedly why audiobooks are so popular. (Though surprisingly, ChatGPT is telling me that only 25% of book sales are audiobooks… I would have thought it would be up to 75% by now.)

I’ve read a bit of DCC already and I can confidently say that the audiobook is probably going to be more entertaining. Let’s just say I started skimming on page 2. It reads like a Reddit post banged out by someone who was drunk one night, however I should admit that I’m applying the rigorous critical standards of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat first person sarcastic “I guy” books to this one, which is outrageously unfair.

I don’t know the history of DCC but reading it kind of makes me mad. If this was the standard of super popular books when I was in my twenties and thirties, I might have made a more serious effort to write and publish. Foolish me thinking I still had to write to the standards of the 70s and 80s. I remember when everyone made fun of Dan Brown’s writing. How quaint that seems now.

The LitRPG genre in particular makes me mad, because one of my NaNoWriMo drafts was about an NPC in an MMORPG. I thought it was dumb and didn’t work when I wrote it, because I was trying to be serious instead of comedic. Now there’s Epic NPC Man YouTube videos from Viva La Dirt League and an entire massively popular genre about people being trapped in RPGs. Ugh.

Anyway that’s my max one hour time limit. Way too many words to vomit out at this time of day.

The Rhythm of Chemo

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:08:20 -0400

I’m waiting for someone to drop by and pick up a table. I can’t think of anything else to write at the moment, so I thought I would write a bit about the beginning of my next chemo cycle. This will probably be the biggest topic on my mind for about the next eight days.

I live my life in three-week cycles. Basically one week out of every three I feel a bit off, and downright sick for about four days of that week. Every third Tuesday I get a chemotherapy infusion, and the next one is tomorrow. So while I’m technically on the last day of my previous cycle, it feels like Monday is the start of my next cycle.

That’s for two reasons: First, I need to take two steroid pills on the day before my infusion, which is today. (Also I get a steroid in the infusion tomorrow, and I take steroid pills the day after the infusion.)

Steroids have a significant effect on me, mostly my brain, which starts to race at a million miles an hour through about Thursday, then I crash and burn. In the meantime I have trouble sleeping Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night. Steroids also upset my stomach a little bit. Less so now that I take half the dosage I was taking before, for just that reason.

So on Monday I start to “feel” different, a day before the infusion, because of the steroids.

The last few cycles I’ve noticed a second effect: I start to feel some of the effects I experience after the infusion a day or two before the infusion. I’m sure it’s purely psychosomatic, but it’s real. I feel less appetite, I feel a little queasy, I start to burp and hiccup a little more, and this time, I started to get a little congested yesterday.

I asked the infusion nurses about it to see if I was crazy, and they all said that yeah, a lot of long-term chemo patients experience that. There’s some kind of triggering effect of knowing that you’re about to start the next round of chemo.

It’s a weird feeling.

I’m going to ask my oncologist tomorrow about another issue I’ve just noticed over this past weekend: The grip strength on my right hand has gone down pretty dramatically. I’m suddenly unable to pull open one of those fruit cups with the plastic tops with my right hand. I can’t grip the plastic tab with my thumb and forefinger tight enough.

I don’t know if it’s related to chemo or cancer, but they constantly ask me about the feeling in my hands and feet. Apparently chemo can cause nerve damage over time, and it starts in the hands and feet. I also have a minor history of carpal tunnel syndrome (I assume) because of a lifetime of keyboard usage.

Anyway, time’s up.

Trying Rise of the Ronin on the PS5

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:48:56 -0400

To try out the new recliner, I plugged the PS5 into the television again. (Previously it had been plugged into my recording PC to record Nioh 3, but I gave up on that game some time ago.)

I got a game called Rise of the Ronin, something I’ve seen on the Playstation Store for quite a while and wondered if it was a blatant rip-off of Ghosts of Tsushima. It was a free download because of some subscription or another I have, which is probably wasting my money.

I can report that it isn’t, at least for the first hour, but it’s not an especially great game either. It’s kind of Souls-like-ish but the gimmick is you actually play two different heros (“twin swords”), the second of which will distract enemies, and you swap characters when you’re downed by an enemy. Mechanically it doesn’t change much except it gives you more chances before getting killed for good.

I got to the first boss on a ship, almost beat him, but died in the end because I couldn’t remember which buttons did what. Because of course it’s one of those controller games where they just make up random buttons to do important actions, and the majority of the game experience is un-learning the muscle memory of previous games to get the buttons right for this game.

(In this case, the triangle button is the vitally important parry button, which has literally never been done before in any action RPG, so overcoming that muscle memory is quite an ask.)

I haven’t played a controller game in a long time, and boy did it show. It doesn’t take long for my hands and thumbs to start telling me, “It isn’t natural to hold something like this!” Once again we lament that all games are made by people with no concept of human aging.

Otherwise, the game and the story is completely forgettable so far. It’s cursed to be a perfectly servicable, average game, which might as well be an abject failure in today’s over-saturated game market.

That’s it, that’s the review.

The Recluse Report - July 2026 Part 1

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:10:09 -0400

I’ll probably pause the Recluse Reports through August, since I’m making an effort to write more “traditional” blog posts for Blaugust. I’ve already started with a few practice posts.

It’s a bit of a shock to return to olden times, where every post is confined to a single subject. It’s more limiting to write that way, and it’s easy to give up on it as too much work.

Blogging

Since my blog exists as a big directory on my MacBook full of Markdown files, it turns out that it’s fairly easy to get one of the many modern AI coding agents to work on it. I started with Claude Code but switched to Google’s Antigravity.

I set Google’s Antigravity to work on fixing all the broken image links on my blog for posts in the 2016-2018 range. It was also able to take all those images from that date range out of a WordPress zip archive, convert them to webp format and size them appropriately, and move them to my S3 bucket directory. This is one of the best tasks for modern AI: Lengthy, repetitive, tedious work.

I also set it to work on going through all my images and writing a description of each one, because I have no idea what I have in my image library anymore. I can use all those descriptions to search the images in the future.

And while I was on a roll, I set Antigravity to work on importing posts from my other blogs, a task I’ve been putting off forever. So now you can see all the embarrassing posts I did in the 2000s when I still thought the Internet was a safe place where you could write whatever and nobody would see it and there wouldn’t be any consequences. I should issue a blanket apology for everything I’ve previously written.

And furthermore, I set Antigravity to work on creating a more modern Hugo theme. AI assistance, it turns out, is really helpful when working with a Hugo blog. Hugo isn’t very intuitive, so having AI around to remember all the weird syntax and templating rules is pretty handy. Not to mention having it remember all the complexity of css styling. Typing, “Hey can you make those two things line up,” is way easier than digging into the intricacies of inner and outer style boxes and all their associated attributes.

I also had Antigravity help me add a couple of commenting features. One was importing dynamic comments from the aws database into static files so they are archived and built with the site. (I had designed the system to do that from the beginning but never got around to actually doing it.) Another was leveraging the commenting system to implement a sort of “contact form” so people can send me messages.

And I had Antigravity write a lot of documentation on how all of these blog features work because I had forgotten most of it, and will undoubtedly forget it again in the future.

In the end, over a couple of days, I had Antigravity catch up on about five years worth of blog work I’d been putting off. Pretty cool. Score another point for the advantages of static blogs over WordPress blogs.

Gaming

Another half month has gone by and I haven’t played any games, though I feel like my hyperfocusing on other projects is coming to an end, so maybe I’ll return soon. Though I honestly haven’t heard of any new games that sound interesting. Likely I’ll just go back to FFXIV or Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

There seems to be a surprising amount of buzz about Sony announcing ending support for physical media in their consoles in 2028, which made me wonder what year it was.

I’ve been doing a lot of blog work lately, and I happened to stumble on one of my old 2014 drafts in which I talked about how antiquated it felt to install Rocksmith from a CD. That was twelve years ago. Twelve years ago.

So I can only stare in baffled perplexion at the 2026 backlash over removing physical media support. The amount of sales they will lose by making that choice must surely be vanishingly small.

The very concept of “owning what you buy” seems like a quaint relic of the past, like canning your own vegetables. It feels like the market settled this a long time ago. I don’t like it and I wish it was different, but it already happened.

Though to be honest, I personally rather enjoy not having my house overrun with physical media anymore; books, DVDs, CDs, they’re all just “heavy items that I hate having to move.”

Media Consumption

Over the extended July 4 holiday weekend, I was struggling with chemo side effects (loss of appetite, vomiting, dehydration), so I spent a fair amount of time parked in front of the television watching random movies.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. I thought for sure this was going to turn out to have been written by Charlie Brooker of Black Mirror fame. Anyway, it was pretty good, in a Lawnmower Man sort of way.

Avatar: Fire and Ash. I fell asleep about 2/3 of the way through. I’ll be honest, I spent the entire movie not knowing who any of the characters were or what they were doing or why. Many of the characters were indistinguishable from each other. There were only two types of characters: The warrior woman archetype, and the hot-headed dude archetype. That was about it, as far as I could tell. Cool effects though.

Zero Dark Thirty. I don’t know what I expected but I wasn’t expecting a movie that started with an hour of enhanced interrogation. Overall it was okay, but fairly dry.

Bugonia. It was a lot like a Stanley Kubrick film of a Stephen King novel. Great performances, but predictable story. High marks for keeping the camera still throughout.

Home Life

I’m typing this paragraph sitting on my new recliner in my living room. All my hard work clearing a corner of the room paid off, as it took maybe 10 minutes for the delivery guys to drop off the chair.

And speaking of new things, I’ve had an elliptical exercise machine for several weeks now and have been steadily improving. At first I spent two minutes on the thing and was gasping for breath. Now I’m up to six minutes and moderately winded. This is part of my plan to try to get more exercise this summer, in the modest hope that it might help with chemo side effects and general health. I’m in the phase of “starting to exercise” where every muscle hurts when I get up every day, which I take to be a good sign.

The only thing I don’t like about the elliptical machine is that it’s godawfully heavy. I had hoped not to have anything in my house that I couldn’t move around myself, but this contraption will be sitting exactly where the delivery people put it until the end of time.

Cancer Corner

Belghast’s death from chemotherapy complications hit pretty close to home for me. I have chemo every three weeks, and I know well that it’s no joke. What I get is fairly mild in the global scheme of treatments, but still, I’ve been warned sternly to head to the ER if there’s any issues. Indeed I once developed a fever after one treatment and ended going to the ER twice for it.

Otherwise nothing much to report since my last report. It’s weird how cancer turns into an ordinary part of one’s life after a while. I don’t really think about it that much anymore.

World Context

I didn’t do or watch anything connected to the America 250 thing. Seems weird to celebrate the obvious decline of my country into backwards-looking mediocrity, betting everything on an AI future while leaving literally everything else to the rest of the world.

I only barely remember the America 200 celebrations. I think I remember a bicentennial quarter in circulation. I remember being scared to death at a fireworks show when I was a kid; I wonder if that happened at the 200th. My family was always more of the type to do a backyard family picnic on July 4th and maybe set off some fireworks in the evening, if we were visiting a sufficiently rural location. (I grew up around a lot of rural locations. I’m only one generation away from living on an actual farm.)

Bye!

Clearing Space for a New Recliner

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

It’s been a busy weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Search for a Niche Social Circle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P.S. I deployed my new blog theme.

AI in Blaugust

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

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

Past Controversy

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

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

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

Mediocre AI Writing

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

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

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

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

My Use of AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Blaugust For

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

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

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

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

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

Blaugust Efficiency Workflows

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

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

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

This Year’s Blaugust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demonstrating the Blog Post-Processor

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

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

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

I start a blog post by typing this:

make post

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

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

post process the last post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

make sync-images

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting to Update the Blog Theme

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

One more test post.

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

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

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

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

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