Endgame Viable

Hummingbirds

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:00:20 -0400

I have hummingbirds now.

Some time ago, I walked into the kitchen and saw, to my surprise, a hummingbird flitting around outside the kitchen windows. It was hovering at the glass, seemingly peering inside, like it was casing the joint, looking for something. It went back and forth between two windows before flying away.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a hummingbird around the house during summer. I’ve seen one or two every summer for years, always just a brief showing before disappearing. This was the first time I ever saw one sending a clear message: “Hey, you in there, give us food!”

I’d always meant to setup a feeder for them, but this year I finally did.

I ordered two glass hummingbird feeders, put some sugar water in them, and hung them on a shepherd’s crook hanger outside the window.

Within an hour, the hummingbirds had found it.

Now I see them buzzing around out there every day. Sometimes they get a drink and leave. Sometimes they land on top of the hanger and park there for a while, looking back and forth, like they’re guarding their territory.

I don’t know much about bird identification but basic search skills tell me they are classic Virginia ruby-throated hummingbirds. However, the ones I’m seeing don’t have a ruby throat, so I assume they’re females, or smaller young ones with muted colors.

Apparently they’ll be heading south in a month or so. But it’s been fun for now.

Sending Webmentions and Pingbacks

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:04:00 -0400

Another day, another major upgrade to the blog platform.

This time I’ve added support for sending webmentions and pingbacks to external sites referenced in posts.

I think you can probably guess how I did it by now: I used Antigravity to build out the serverless Lambda functions I required, adding onto the previous Bathtub Robot repo which handled sending fediverse notifications.

I asked Antigravity to create a diagram of the architecture:

I hope that renders on my blog. Hugo doesn’t natively support Mermaid diagrams; it supports Goat diagrams, for some reason. (Will it translate to RSS though?) [UPDATE: The answer is no, no it won’t. Oops. Note to self: Future diagrams need to be images.]

In narrative form:

A poller checks the blog’s JSON feed for updates every 15 minutes. If there’s a new post, an SNS event is dispatched. (It’s the same event that triggers posting a notification to the fediverse.) (Someday I want to work out a way to get my Hugo deployment to trigger notifications when deployment is complete.)
The link-dispatcher serverless function triggers, which extracts all the external links from the post within the <article>, and sends out SNS events for each link.
Both the webmention-sender and pingback-sender serverless functions are triggered, which perform the work of discovering the right endpoints and sending webmentions and pingbacks to external sites. (Pingbacks are not sent if the target site supports webmentions.)

I’ve tested the functions as much as I can locally (using localstack), but I won’t actually know if it all works until I publish this post, at which time it will trigger the above chain reaction of serverless functions and SNS events.

I will now embed a link to a WordPress site I own so that if it crashes spectacularly, at least it won’t hurt anybody else. Yikes, I haven’t updated that site since 2018. It’s obsolete now and needs to be destroyed.

I receive webmentions and pingbacks by leveraging webmention.io, a site that I basically never check, so I have no idea if anyone is or has been linking to my blog.

Someday I might wire up something of my own to handle that, but it’s a little more complicated to setup an always-on server to respond to POST requests. Well, not complicated per se… the word I was looking for was expensive.

I could potentially use my Vultr VPS as a webmention receiver, since it’s now running my GoToSocial instance and needs to be always on anyway. Food for thought. An Antigravity project for another day.

One thing I probably won’t do is add a list of pingbacks and webmentions at the bottom of each post page, like WordPress did. (Does it still do that?) I’ll have to find some other way to get notified if and when anyone ever references my site.

I don’t know if I’ve improved much in terms of writing during Blaugust this year, but I’ve made a shocking number of changes to the tech running under my blog’s hood this year, undoubtedly more than I ever have at once before, and that’s worth the price of admission this year for me.

And another thing…

I host this blog entirely within AWS, mainly because a baseline AWS knowledge happens to be useful for my day job. I set Antigravity to work on analyzing my AWS cost breakdown and found several things I was paying for that I no longer need.

My goal has always been to keep the hosting of the blog on AWS as close to $5/month as possible (not counting the domain name renewals). It’s been approaching $8/month for the last year though.

UPDATE: The test worked. A pingback and webmention were both successfully sent from this post.

A Dynamic Blogroll

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:24:40 -0400

A couple of quick health updates: 1) My brain MRI came back without anything unusual, 2) This infusion cycle has been going better than usual, 3) I still can’t bend my right thumb, but I got a referral to a hand specialist.

Now on to the topic du jour.

I’ve been meaning to add a dynamic blogroll to my static Hugo site for years.

Yesterday I finally started researching the nitty-gritty details of all the JavaScript and CSS I’d need and … and …

Ha, just kidding. I mean, can you imagine?

While I was sitting in a chair yesterday morning at the infusion center getting my regular IV fluids for this cycle, I started chatting with Gemini on my phone to get some ideas for how to actually implement a Javascript blogroll. It started out as a Lambda serverless function and an S3 bucket, but by the time I got home it had simplified considerably.

I sat down and explained what I wanted to Antigravity and I had a working prototype in no time.

It was easier than I thought, because I was able to use InoReader for the entirety of the data source. I knew it could output an XML feed for folders, but I didn’t realize it could also output a JSON feed for folders. JSON is very easy to read from JavaScript.

If I didn’t have InoReader, I would have gone ahead and implemented a simple feed reader in a Lambda function to be run every hour or so. But, no need.

The biggest difficulty was figuring out where to put a blogroll in my layout. I don’t have any sidebars, so that’s out. I don’t have a lot of vertical space for a big list, either.

I ended up making a kind of stock ticker of blog post titles that I can fit at the bottom of my posts, and in between the first and second posts on my home page.

It’s not perfect, of course, but then they never are. InoReader doesn’t provide the name of the blog that created the post, only the author and the post title. So I can’t really cite the blog name, only the domain name.

I may yet build my own feed reader in a Lambda function just to fix that one issue.

For now, I set it to use my Blaugust 2026 folder as the data source.

Anyway, I hope it’s useful for someone. It’s more for everyone else than it is for me.

Other Changes

While I was tinkering with the blog, I did some other things.

I got rid of the “Related Posts” section at the bottom of posts, because I never liked it. Whatever algorithm Hugo used never came up with decent posts, and I never clicked on them. (Typically the things that get priority on my site are the things that I personally use.)

And for fans of industry-wide standards, I added Schema.org’s LSON-LD metadata to the blog, too.

And for all you IndieWeb enthusiasts out there, I added that h-card and h-entry nonsense … I mean, carefully thought-out schema … to the pages. (I personally think it’s quite silly to assign semantic meaning to css classes when there’s HTML5, but whatever, it’s no skin off my site generator.)

However, the h-cards are entirely useless because there’s a maze of additional things you have to setup before IndieWeb tools can actually consume your site, including IndieAuth endpoints and Microsub endpoints. Neither of which can be done natively on a static site, so you have to farm it out to some third-party authority you’ve never heard of, and it’s not worth the effort for roughly 7 readers.

P.S. Less than two hours after I published that, I worked with Antigravity to build a Lambda blogroll-aggregator which is now the data source for the dynamic blogroll. That means I can now show the blog title instead of just the domain name.

Community Aggregators

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:09:47 -0400

There’s been a handful of posts floating around recently talking about a community site or blog aggregator.

It started with Tipa discontinuing The Daily Blogroll. I thought it was a cool project, but for me, as a reader of blogs, it wasn’t better than InoReader. Tools like Feedly and InoReader already solve all the problems that most custom aggregators try to solve.

As a reader, all those RSS blogroll widgets on everybody’s blogs also feels pretty redundant to me. TAGN and others have a great blogroll in their sidebar, but I’m not likely to load up TAGN’s page to read blogs in the blogosphere.

I get some referrals from those blogrolls, so somebody must be reading them and clicking on them, but it just doesn’t fit into my blog-reading routine. I generally prefer to bring the blogs to me rather than going to the blogs.

But in community terms, I can see the benefit of a dynamic blogroll. The main (and only?) one being they have potential to send some traffic from bigger blogs to smaller blogs, as a way of giving back to the community. Someday I’d like to figure out how to add one to my blog. (There aren’t any handy plug-and-play solutions for static blogs that I know of.)

Scopique wrote of RSS readers in his newest post: “if I want to read posts across all feed sources in reverse chronological order, I can’t, really.” I found that puzzling because InoReader 100% does that and I’m pretty sure every reader I’ve ever seen does that. Reverse chronological order across all blogs is how I’ve read blogs for what must surely be 20 years now. First it was local readers downloading feeds to my local computer, then it was Google Reader, now it’s InoReader.

I’m sure this isn’t the intention, but Scopique’s initial thoughts on a community site sounded like a proposition to remake Facebook or Reddit again. A place where bloggers can author their posts? A community site that’s also a publishing platform sounds like nightmare fuel to me. That’s basically a WordPress instance with a lot of accounts with publishing rights. It’s basically MassivelyOP.

Disparate bloggers banding together into one super-blog to increase their reach was a thing back in the old days before social media, back when survival depended on there being something new on the blog every 15 minutes. A lot of political blogs originated that way.

But I personally wouldn’t be very interested in posting on a community mega-blog, because I want to maintain ownership over all of my content on the Internet. What happens to my posts if/when the community site eventually folds? What happens to those permalinks that are supposed to last forever?

As for community aggregators, I find most custom aggregators fit into the classic developer category of “a solution in search of a problem.” Fun to work on, but not necessarily useful.

And, to be brutally frank, here in 2026 anyone can now create a perfectly serviceable custom aggregator using AI tooling in a day. Scopique demonstrated that in one of his posts. I made one before Blaugust because I was curious about counting posts, and to see how often the number of blogs went up (a lot, it turned out). It was super easy to get it started.

I remember one political aggregator from the old days of political blogging, before social media. It was great, until there was a huge controversy: The definition of “the community” excluded someone who thought they should belong, and someone had to make some inclusion rules. The community divided into two communities, and everyone had to decide which one they wanted to be in. A tale as old as time.

It happened in miniature with the Blaugust AI rules just recently.

So I’m pretty skeptical about communities in general.

There are usually two types of communities: Commercial and organic. The commercial ones are made by companies, and I dare say they’re the most dominant type today.

The organic ones start out fine but they’re usually destined to die out or divide because they start to feel more exclusionary than inclusionary. It’s great if you’re one of the “chosen few” but not as much otherwise.

You can see that pattern in almost every MMORPG guild that’s ever existed: There’s always “the guild” and then “the inner circle of the guild.” If you have a history attending small churches, you may recognize it there too. There’s “the congregation” and the inner circle of “the vestry.” It’s human nature to exclude people.

Just the word “community” feels so tainted these days because it’s often just a target audience for advertising. That’s the “commercial” community I mentioned, attached to every entertainment property there is. Those seem like the only communities that ever actually grow over time.

Anyway, that’s a different topic.

Back to blogs, I’m more of a proponent of the reader determining which feeds they want to read.

But from the blog owner’s perspective, community aggregators can be advantageous because they can get more eyeballs on your content.

So I usually don’t mind submitting my blog to aggregators, as it’s generally positive to accumulate more eyeballs. Often, joining a community is far more valuable for smaller blogs than bigger blogs. Bigger blogs don’t have much to gain from aggregators until or unless the aggregator itself exceeds their views.

But I don’t really want to work at adding my blog to aggregators. I’m well past the point of needing or wanting to advertise my blog. Which reminds me, I wouldn’t want to participate with any custom aggregators that served advertising, as I find that a bit on the sketchy side.

So I guess my conclusion is that I’m still a little unclear on the merit of a community aggregator in a modern world. I don’t have a clear understanding of what the problem is that needs to be addressed.

My response to blog aggregation always comes back to “just use InoReader or Feedly.” And everyone put a list of blogs you like on your site somewhere. That’s the web ring.

The only reason I can think not to use Feedly or InoReader or the like is if you don’t want to support those companies, because they definitely profit off of your RSS feeds. It’s certainly a valid argument, but to me, the level of service and convenience is worth it.

Where Are Your Screenshots?

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:35:35 -0400

I have no idea anymore.

I went looking for a Final Fantasy XIV screenshot of a scene that I vividly remember from what I thought was Heavensward but was actually from the post-credits part of A Realm Reborn, before Heavensward.

The only problem is, my gaming PC currently has almost no screenshots on it. It only has the screenshots I’ve snapped since last year, which isn’t very many. I rarely take screenshots anymore, since I now record videos.

Where are the rest of my screenshots? The ones going back to the dawn of MMORPGs?

Um…. good question.

I’ve put various backup directories on my NAS, and I found an assortment of screenshots from a RoboCopy backup system I setup many years ago. There I found screenshots from the 2016-2021 range.

I found a 2013 PC backup directory with RIFT and ArcheAge screenshots in it.

I found a bunch of screenshots on imgur, where I cross-posted screenshots with ShareX for a time. There’s over 4,000 screenshots on imgur. Many of them are probably duplicates, but who knows? Luckily they have a button to download all of your images, though their names are useless.

What about World of Warcraft? They always had this pesky thing where they put their screenshots in the Program Files directory, and I almost never backed up my Program Files directories when changing PCs.

It’s a mess. They are scattered across a wide variety of directories on many different PCs, old and new.

I never found the exact screenshot I was looking for, which I’m 100% sure I took and looked at afterward, because it was a pretty vivid screenshot. I may have even posted it in a blog post, but I never found it in the blog image library, either.

I ended up having to launch Final Fantasy XIV and go into the Unending Story, look up the exact quest, and replay the cut scene to take a screenshot of the scene I wanted.

The point is, it may be time to get AI to organize all of my screenshots, if I can even find them. Prompt: “Help me find and organize my game screenshot directories. They are buried somewhere in backup directories on this NAS. Copy them into a coherent new directory structure.”

Later…

I didn’t use that exact prompt, but something like it, to get Antigravity to crawl through three different PCs for directories containing screenshots. I made a list of all files with an image extension, and extracted those directories.

Then I looked through them and marked which of those directories looked like screenshots. I ended up with a big list of screenshot directories across three different PCs.

Rank	Image Count	Directory Path	Source File(s)	Sample File
1	2,848	`D:\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\screenshots\2017`	`MSI17_D.txt`	`ffxiv_01032017_212606.jpg`
2	2,627	`D:\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn - Copy\screenshots`	`MSI17_D.txt`	`ffxiv_01032017_212606.jpg`
3	1,528	`C:\Users\Tom\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\screenshots`	`MSI21_C.txt`	`ffxiv_07122021_180108_324.png`
4	1,301	`C:\Users\Tom\Pictures\SteamScreenshots`	`MSI21_C.txt`	`1063730_20210928073825_1.png`
5	572	`D:\Program Files (x86)\World of Warcraft\_retail_\Screenshots`	`MSI17_D.txt`	`WoWScrnShot_072318_160540.jpg`
6	543	`D:\Documents\RIFT\Screenshots`	`MSI17_D.txt`	`2016-08-22_205213.jpg`
7	472	`C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\11690842\760\remote\1245620\screenshots`	`MSI21_C.txt`	`20220226093834_1.jpg`
8	253	`C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\11690842\760\remote\292120\screenshots`	`MSI21_C.txt`	`20210803213917_1.jpg`
9	246	`D:\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\Screenshots`	`MSI17_D.txt`	`Screenshot_20161115_130927.png`
10	192	`D:\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\screenshots\2016`	`MSI17_D.txt`	`ffxiv_09122016_163116.jpg`

Then I asked Antigravity to copy the screenshots from those source directories and organize them into one big Screenshots folder on my NAS, and it ended up looking something like this:


\\TOWER\Photos\Screenshots\
├── EverQuest II\ [59 images]
│ ├── 2016\ (3 images)
│ ├── 2017\ (12 images)
│ ├── 2018\ (36 images)
│ └── 2020\ (8 images)
├── Far Cry 5\ [10 images]
│ ├── 2022\ (8 images)
│ └── 2023\ (2 images)
├── Final Fantasy XIV\ [4,878 images]
│ ├── 2013\ (4 images)
│ ├── 2014\ (130 images)
│ ├── 2016\ (192 images)
│ ├── 2017\ (2,848 images)
│ ├── 2018\ (114 images)
│ ├── 2019\ (13 images)
│ ├── 2021\ (1,528 images)
│ └── 2026\ (49 images)
├── Guild Wars\ [36 images]
│ ├── 2017\ (32 images)
│ └── 2018\ (4 images)
├── Guild Wars 2\ [914 images]
│ ├── 2014\ (11 images)
│ ├── 2016\ (2 images)
│ ├── 2017\ (750 images)
│ ├── 2018\ (33 images)
│ └── 2019\ (118 images)

I noticed that there are still some missing screenshots from the 2015 time range, which irritates me. Missing data is a sin against the gods.

I have a loose hard drive from an older PC that may contain those missing 2015 screenshots, but I seem to have lost my external hard drive interface for old hard drives, so I need to order another.

Anyway, don’t lose your screenshots!

UPDATE: I found my external drive interface, and I found the missing 2015 screenshots! Including the exact one I was looking for. Which, it turns out, I had already uploaded once before.

However, the search continues for screenshots before 2013.

Answering 100 Questions for Webmasters

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:23:45 -0400

I was going to talk about community sites and aggregators but I’m not quite ready to post that yet.

Instead, I’m going to blast through the 100 questions for webmasters which was referenced on the Blaugust discord. I don’t know where it came from or who wrote it or when it was written, but it sounds fairly ancient given the use of the term “webmaster.”

1. Please introduce yourself.: Hi, I'm Tom aka. UltrViolet.
2. How long have you been making websites?: My first website went online somewhere in the 1998 timeframe.
3. And what got you into the hobby?: I saw other people with web sites and thought it was cool.
4. What kind of website are you most interested in?: Blogs and applications.
5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?: I usually have an overall goal but probably more of the latter.
6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.: Hrm. For web site design? Can't think of any.
7. What's your favourite part about making websites?: Having a place to put my thoughts.
8. And the thing you struggle with the most?: Finding the time.
9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?: I strive for consistency.
10. How confident are you with CSS?: Confident as long as I have resources to find the exact syntax.
11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?: I can't recall ever seeing or using `dl` before. It surprises me that browsers support it because it sounds ancient.
12. What is your favourite HTML element?: I don't have a favorite.
13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?: I'm not the right target audience for this quiz. Previously I just started typing tags into a blank file but today I'd likely be asking AI to build a starting template for me.
14. Do you know JavaScript?: Yes. Kind of.
15. How about PHP?: Yes. Or I did, but I haven't touched it in years and I doubt I ever will again.
16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?: Visual or ideological? It has a visual theme but not an ideological one.
17. Are you more focused on content or design?: 100% content.
18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?: Yes.
19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?: Fun to look at, but I wouldn't want to stay there.
20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?: Yes and yes, but not regularly.
21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?: I don't like buttons and I try to keep banners small.
22. What do you think of button walls in particular?: I don't know what that is, but it doesn't sound like I'd like it.
23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?: It was look similar, but I might not use Hugo again if I were starting over.
24. Are you envious of other people's websites?: Sometimes.
25. What text editor do you use?: VSCode or forks thereof.
26. Why do you use that one?: I'm very comfortable typing into programming text editors.
27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?: I host my images from an AWS S3 bucket.
28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?: I don't know what that is.
29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?: Not much. It's static.
30. Do you keep local backups of your files?: The local files are the source of truth, the git repo online is the backup.
31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?: Simple.
32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?: I often stick to purple highlights.
33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?: Not really.
34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?: I know _of_ many webmasters.
35. Do people in your real life know about your website?: Some, but they don't care.
36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?: Twice a month is my goal.
37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?: Rarely.
38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?: Mostly hobby-focused and sometimes outside world-focused.
39. Do you do web design professionally?: No.
40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?: No. My official title is software engineer.
41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?: Almost never. Email is obsolete tech.
42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?: I don't look at social media much anymore.
43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?: I only hang out in a couple Discord channels.
44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?: Not usually.
45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?: I used to have more than one but I've consolidated into one site now.
46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?: Many topics.
47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?: It's my "writer" self.
48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?: Hrm, don't think so?
49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?: Sure.
50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?: Ugh. Too hard.
51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?: Ugh. Too hard.
52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?: I try to use HTML5 semantic tags on my blog.
53. Do you consider different browsers?: Not really. Chromium is the universal browser now.
54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.: I'm stuck in Chrome because it has all my bookmarks.
55. And what OS are you on?: MacOS usually for development.
56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?: MacOS/Linux just happens to be easier for development.
57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?: Mostly.
58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?: Hate it.
59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?: They're obsolete.
60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?: No and I've never heard the term before.
61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?: I mean all blogs are cliches, so I guess yeah.
62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?: My blog is pretty much exactly how I want it.
63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?: Kind of but I don't practice so not really.
64. What are your favourite resource sites?: I know of none off the top of my head. Google I guess.
65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?: Undoubtedly.
66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?: Start slow.
67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?: Ideally all styling should be in CSS, but I'm not religious about it.
68. What do you think of frameset layouts?: No idea what you're talking about without Googling it.
69. How about table-based layouts?: I avoid tables where possible.
70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?: One-column always.
71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?: CSS for sure.
72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.: Disagree.
73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?: Never. Always the latter.
74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?: Intermediate probably.
75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?: Sometimes.
76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?: It's been so long I don't remember, but probably by looking at other websites.
77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?: No.
78. Thoughts on floating elements?: I don't like things floating on my websites.
79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?: I usually use em or %.
80. Do you have a favourite font?: Not especially, but I tend to gravitate toward sans-serif fonts.
81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?: Maybe and I have no idea.
82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?: Rarely. I usually only go to trusted sites.
83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?: Rarely.
84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?: The content.
85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?: No I don't collect.
86. How often and for how long are you online?: I'm online pretty much all day every day, in the sense that there is always a phone or computer nearby that is connected to the Internet. I'm not always looking at it, though.
87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?: Somebody like me.
88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?: I can't remember what distinguishes XHTML from HTML but it sounds like obsolete tech.
89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?: Yes. It's my job.
90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?: I use Hugo.
91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?: No. What good is it?
92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?: No.
93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?: Yes, I write in Markdown in a VSCode-style text editor.
94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?: Not that I know of.
95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?: Yes, everybody is embarrassed of their old work, but I've never deleted anything.
96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?: I'd leave it an archive for sure.
97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?: Nothing much.
98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?: Nah.
99. And do you optimise the images on your website?: In that I size them fairly small and use webp, yes.
100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.: That was a lot.

Blogging Daily In 2026

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:47:45 -0400

Morning! I’m back from an early morning “simulation CT” appointment where the radiology folks mapped out the pelvic bone they’re going to zap with radiation. They said it would be 2-3 weeks to get on the schedule for that. It was really quick and easy, and most of my time was spent driving there and back.

Otherwise, I wanted to address a comment Bhagpuss left on my last post that I pretty much agree with. (Sadly I can’t link directly to my comments. Maybe someday.) The key part was:

“if it’s not fun any more, just stop”

I agree. With each passing day, I’m approaching the point of just stopping Blaugust.

I was in a nice comfortable blogging pattern and now I’m outside my comfort zone and wondering what it’s all for. Can I keep doing Blaugust? Sure. I still have the organizational skills to pull off a post every day. But do I want to? Um… not especially?

I wanted to make a tribute to Belghast by writing something every morning, and I’ve learned that Belghast was even more superhuman than I realized, because that is hard.

I wanted to try something new this Blaugust, which I did, and it was hard.

Mainly because it doesn’t really fit my writing style.

My normal writing pattern is to go about my day, have a thought at some random time, turn to my laptop and write down a few paragraphs about it, then return to my day while the idea continues to percolate in the back of my head. Periodically I’ll return to my laptop and type a bit more about whatever the thought was, and over the course of many days or even weeks I’ll have something that might be a complete thought.

It’s not a great way to write if you want to make a living at writing, but it’s a pretty low-impact method for me.

I’m not going to give up on Blaugust just yet, but I’m going to adjust my method and see if I can move back toward my comfort zone. I definitely don’t want to experience a big letdown at the end of Blaugust.

I’ll go back to jotting down paragraphs at random times during the day. (Honestly I’ve been doing that all along anyway: Right now there are four short drafts over in the file explorer sidebar I’ve made since August 1st, and another document of about seven topic bullet points.)

The daily plan now is, instead of sitting down to write something every morning, I’ll sit down and review those fragments and find something I can touch up and post quickly. And it may or may not actually be in the morning, it might be later in the afternoon, or after the work day.

But if I don’t find something… that’s where the big question mark is. Will I give up for the day? All unknown. Weekends are also a question mark. I definitely prefer to write during the week, and not so much on weekends.

Luckily, since there’s a firehose of blog posts flying out there in Blaugust-land, it’s not too hard to find a topic to riff on.

Incidentally, I’ve drafted Obsidian as the location where I jot down fragments of posts. I haven’t really done that before. Usually they accumulate as files inside my Hugo repo that sometimes get committed and sometimes don’t.

After Blaugust, I also want to try to adjust my Recluse Reports, so I have that in the back of my mind too. Instead of one big post with many different topic sections, I want to try to make each section its own relatively small post. I haven’t come up with a workflow for that yet. I’ll probably be using the rest of Blaugust to experiment on that.

The key for me is finding a low-impact workflow. Bhagpuss mentioned it can take him 3 hours to write a post. It’s not unusual for it to take that long for me, too, and I don’t really want to spend that much time on blogging.

I’m aiming more for the range of a half hour to sit down, read over and polish a draft from the queue, add the metadata and an image, and publish it.

Most of this post, for example, was written yesterday afternoon.

P.S. For anyone else publishing their posts by committing Markdown files to a git repo, I added a pre-commit hook that checks to make sure I remembered to add all the appropriate Blaugust metadata on these posts, and it has just saved me some embarrassment because I definitely forgot them today.

Zoya Fyodorova

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:13:00 -0400

Oof. It’s definitely an “I don’t feel like writing” kind of morning, so I will pull from the stack of drafts. Blogging daily is a real chore and/or takes up a lot of time; it’s impossible to imagine doing this outside of Blaugust.

I also don’t like feeling the constant compulsion to keep checking other blogs and feeds and social media and discord all the time. I had largely detoxed from that over the last couple years. It’s hard to maintain a work/life balance with work and also during writing challenges.

I happened upon a Blaugust post from luckyinstar extending an invitation for a new group project to research something new and write about it.

I might be bending the rules a bit, because I saw others leaning more into the research part, while I interpreted it as simply, “tell us something new you learned.”

This subject fell into my lap. I accidentally learned about a Soviet actress named Zoya Fyodorova, incongruously mentioned in an otherwise forgettable Sideprojects video I was listening to about Soviet-era serial killers covered-up by the state.

Zoya Fyodorova was not a serial killer, but a famous actress in Stalin-era Soviet patriotic films, who made the mistake of falling in love with American Navy officer Jackson Tate at the end of World War 2.

Stalin’s Soviet state obviously disapproved, and yada, yada, yada, Fyodorova was arrested for espionage when they found out she was pregnant with Tate’s child. She was imprisoned in a gulag and separated from her child.

After Stalin died, she was released, and she even managed regain custody of her daughter Victoria and return to film.

Then, in the 70s, the daughter Victoria was allowed to leave the Soviet Union to meet her father Tate, and never returned. Her mother was also able to leave the Soviet Union and meet her former lover Tate, but she unfortunately returned home.

Fyodorova was later found murdered, shot in the back of the head. Her murder is unsolved to this day, but various sordid theories abound involving the KGB or organized crime, which I don’t find particularly relevant to the main plotline.

I just found it to be a classically tragic story about ordinary human lives ruined by intractable political machines, a tale as old as time. It would probably make a good movie.

The Wikipedia page is littered with warnings about facts and writing style, but it has the basic outline of it. Victoria Fyodorova, the daughter, published an autobiography written by Haskel Frankel in 1979 called The Admiral’s Daughter. It’s out of print but somehow you can borrow it from The Internet Archive, if you can figure out how that works.

Accumulated Blog Topics

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:51:00 -0400

Morning!

I’ve long since lost count of how many chemo infusions I’ve gotten, but ChatGPT calculates today will be my 20th since I started last July, which sounds right to me.

For the post this morning, I’m going to review my topic notes and throw out some accumulating thoughts. Many of the topics I’ve written down just don’t warrant a post, and I can cover them in the size of a tweet.

Taboo Blog Subjects

Roger wrote: Which Subjects Won’t You Write About? — Contains Moderate Peril,

This is easy: Work, family, friends, politics (sincerely, at least, or in a persuasive or rhetorical way), religion (ditto), feelings.

Admittedly it took me a while to learn, but we’re not writing into a vacuum on the Internet, and there are some topics where I just don’t want to deal with any potential feedback. It’s similar to how I wouldn’t blurt out certain topics in a real-life conversation. If we lived in a world where blog comments never evolved, it might be another story.

Superpowers

The recent Blaugust group project was about superpowers, but I can’t answer this whimsically because, 1) superpowers aren’t real, and 2) I’d pick the most pragmatic one, which, for my current life situation, would be regeneration. We all live in frail vessels that routinely break down.

Real Life

I stumbled on this post: The Internet Doesn’t Exist - Matt’s Blog.

All of this is to say that The Internet is yours, and it is mine, and despite the title, it is real life. And because that is true, it requires us to treat it as such. Don’t be an asshole on the Internet, even if you can get away with it.

I agree with the conclusion, but I strongly disagree that the Internet is real life, a hypothesis I’ve been developing for the last 5 years or so. It’s more accurate to call it a shared fantasy (or delusion).

Statistics

Prior to this Blaugust, I developed an AI skill which analyzes my raw web access logs from AWS (the massive logs where there’s one line for every request to your web site) and generates a nifty statistics report. Finally I can answer the age-old question, “Why did the bar go up or down seemingly at random that one day?” I can just ask AI.

Reviewing the stats I can say with some high confidence that I need to reimagine my Recluse Reports or retire them. A regular potpourri “newsletter” post is apparently an awful idea, which stinks because it’s my favorite and simpliest, least time-consuming way to write.

Blog Longevity

I think Roger may have been referring to this post: What happens to our blogs when we die? | Michael Harley. I marked that post as well, as it hits pretty close to home for me, and it’s a subject I’ve thought about many times before.

I have a local copy of almost everything I’ve ever written on the Internet going back to 1998 (not counting emails) when I had my first domains, and in addition to that, my intention every time I post something is for it to stay exactly where it is on the Internet forever. But, you know, easier said than done. I did recently break many links on my real name site and have yet to think of a way to restore them.

The point is I have thoughts about it, most of which revolve around somehow leveraging the Internet Archive. If anything is going to survive far into the future, that’s surely one of the top candidates.

Final Fantasy XIV

I played through two more quests in FFXIV last night: Agriculture Shock and Sage Council. One took 30 minutes, the second took almost an hour.

When people speak of liking the Main Scenario Quest of FFXIV, I’m almost positive they mean that there are certain moments within the MSQ that are good and memorable. I would argue that the overall majority of story time in the MSQ is a bit dull, punctuated by moments of greatness here and there, which are often delivered by quality voice acting peformances.

The cut scene at the end of Sage Council was one of those highlights of the MSQ, in my opinion. (The part before, where you have to find 8 people to click on, could go jump in a lake, though.) I have to admit I’ve largely forgotten Moenbryda’s role in before Heavensward and certainly forgotten what relationship she had with Urianger. Anyway it was a rare moment of character development for Urianger (or anyone, really).

ChatGPT calculated I have about a month of Endwalker story remaining, if I can manage to play two quests a night. And about three months of Dawntrail story ahead of that, at the same pace. Theoretically I can comfortably catch up before Evercold arrives in January 2027.

Of course I’ll be burned out completely by then, manage only a handful of quests at the start of Evercold, then stop playing for four years again.

P.S. I spent OVER AN HOUR finding that screenshot for this post, which nobody is going to understand anyway, and now I’m in danger of being late today. What an utter waste of time finding non-AI images for blog posts is. Arg. Frustrating. Rage against the non-AI machine! Convenience surpasses all human ethical concerns!

UPDATE: Obviously I was exaggerating for comedic effect and don’t think my personal convenience trumps ethics. Only your ethics. Ha, zing, more comedy!

EverQuest Legends and FFXIV

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:31:00 -0400

Morning!

Happy Monday. It’s officially the start of a new chemotherapy cycle for me. We’re back right where we were last time. Today it’s steroid pills at home, tomorrow it’s a trip to the infusion center for pemetrexed and bonus bone strengthener zoledronic acid. Then, if all goes according to schedule, we can look forward to feeling tired, sick, dehydrated, and malnourished Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and back to normal by next Tuesday.

Yesterday I mowed the front and back yards. I tried to beat the heat by starting at 10 o’clock, but it was already plenty hot enough, and the grass was still wet from dew, so it was all around an ineffective strategy.

I lathered up with sunscreen and wore my big floppy hat and N95 mask, so I must surely have looked like a circus freak out there, but I had no sneezing from grass and dust and got no sunburn on my delicate, shriveled, dry, chemo-altered skin. I listened to a Glass Cannon TTRPG podcast.

EverQuest Legends

Over the weekend I played a bit of EverQuest Legends. I’m not an EverQuest afficianado so I know nothing of optimization. I made the funniest-sounding character combo I could think of: A Froglok Monk/Necromancer. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone starting out in EverQuest and not picking the Froglok as your starting race.

I started in the tutorial, although I would have sworn I’d picked the option to skip it. It was quite boring but I got a quick refresher of the basics: Find and Hail and Give.

I ended the tutorial early and came out in Gukta, a tent city of frogloks in the Rathe Mountains. All new to me. Never heard of any of these names before. I commenced trying to find any NPCs who would actually talk to me and give me a quest (it’s surprisingly hard to find quests in a game called EverQuest), and managed to locate exactly one at first, an Exterminator looking for spider eyeballs.

For all the talk of using Find in the tutorial, none of the quest givers were in the list of NPCs in the Find window. Only the merchants and guildmasters and tradecrafters were there. Inconvenient.

Eventually I found some other NPCs with stories to tell and quests to give. As far as I can tell, there’s no quest log, so I had to write them all down in a document. As I was reading out this one NPC’s story about a sword broken in three pieces, I quickly learned that the word “Guk” is not a word I want to prounounce out loud on a video. Whoopsie. Guess nobody thought of that back at EverQuest lore headquarters.

Ultimately, the main thing I accomplished was killing skeletons and kobolds and spiders and mosquitos to reach level 3 in a couple of hours of gameplay. Seems to be the main activity in the game so far, along with running back and forth. Typical 90s MMORPG game loop: Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, fight, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, sell loot.

I was particularly interested in finding “the lore” in EverQuest, because I know nothing of it. Unfortunately it’s not exactly overflowing with lore in Gukta at level 1. It’s hidden deep among the NPCs and you have to work to find somebody who will say a single word to you. And when you find someone, it’s only a couple of sentences like, “We don’t like those trolls.” There’s no town elder standing around waiting to share the rich history of Gukta and its people with you. I guess that’s what the Internet is for.

To my eye, EverQuest Legends plays exactly like regular EverQuest. I know there are significant mechanical differences with the multi-class thing, but it’s not immediately apparent at levels 1-3.

A bare minimum of effort was made to make it more playable on modern computers, but not much. If you were hoping for a font size selection, you’re only going to find integer UI size multipliers (x2, x3, x4) and barely-adequate anti-aliasing, for example. There wasn’t even a display resolution selection for me; it just used my desktop resolution.

Anyway, it was kind of fun for a while, but I can’t imagine a world where I’d get hooked and play more than a handful of hours. Was it worth buying? Probably not. The regular EverQuest seems perfectly adequate if I wanted to experience that world.

Final Fantasy XIV

After the world of 90s MMORPGs, last night, I went back to Final Fantasy XIV and finished two more Endwalker quests (No Job Too Small and Wise Guides) in the endless Main Scenario Quest railroad, now at the level 88 stations. We’ve just unlocked the rest of Labyrinthos and are in the “let’s tour the new area” phase of questing, while waiting for somebody to find adamantite for the Space Ark aetherburners.

The Loporitts are back in Wise Guides, pushing my vocal cords to the limit, as they all sound like Mickey Mouse. The Loporitt-focused videos for Endwalker, incidentally, are among my more embarrassing rank amatuer voice acting efforts in FFXIV, but we push them out to the channel anyway and continue on with our life as if nothing happened.

Bathtub Robot

On Saturday, I built some AWS Lambda functions to detect new posts in my RSS feed and post a notification on my newly-resurrected fediverse GoToSocial instance. It worked perfectly on the first try.

I call it Bathtub Robot. (I use a random word generator to name my projects.)

I, of course, used Antigravity to build it, test it locally, and deploy it in a little over two hours, but it was seeded with code that I had written a few years ago. I documented my conversations here if you somehow haven’t yet experienced “pair programming” with agentic AI.

Endgame Viable

Hummingbirds

Sending Webmentions and Pingbacks

A Dynamic Blogroll

A New Blogroll

Other Changes

Community Aggregators

Where Are Your Screenshots?

Answering 100 Questions for Webmasters

Blogging Daily In 2026

Zoya Fyodorova

Accumulated Blog Topics

Morning!

Taboo Blog Subjects

Superpowers

Real Life

Statistics

Blog Longevity

Final Fantasy XIV

EverQuest Legends and FFXIV

Morning!

EverQuest Legends

Final Fantasy XIV

Bathtub Robot