Endgame Viable

YouTube Channels I Follow

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:40:34 -0400

I don’t actually know if it’s still Creator Appreciation week in Blaugust or not, but I know I don’t have anything to talk about this morning so I’ve pulled up this previously-prepared post.

This is a list of YouTube channels I regularly frequent. Some more regularly than others. In truth, I only frequent maybe five of these channels at any given time, since the algorithm tends to bury channels you haven’t watched in roughly the last 24 hours.

I tried to confine the list to more “independent” creators, though the definition of “independent” varies wildly.

Comedy

History

Macabre

Movies

Chris Stuckmann

Music

Podcasts

Politics

TTRPGs

* These channels use what looks like AI-generated thumbnails or B-roll illustrations from time to time, if that’s something that matters to you. I don’t know if it’s AI-generated, mind you, it’s just a suspicion. In any case, it doesn’t detract from the content.

P.S. Speaking of AI disclosures, I used Antigravity to fetch my list of subscriptions from the YouTube API and format it in Markdown, because manually going through a big list of subscriptions and writing down their links is for the birds. So a portion of this post was technically “AI-generated.” However, I did go through and re-order and categorize the list by hand.

Reverse Engineering Old Music Projects

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:26:00 -0400

Hoo boy did I fall deep down a rabbit hole. Nothing else in life matters now but this.

Parking my Promise Table web site reminded me that I have an assortment of music I wrote and recorded in the mid- to late-90s just sitting around doing nothing, and I wondered what I should do with it.

In my old age, I feel like most of my historical “content” should be available online, whether it has any value or not. With my blog and my YouTube channel I’m quite used to “putting things out there” and getting at best a polite golf clap, at worst a deafening apathy, so the idea of publishing my music–the artistic endeavor that I slave over more than anything else–doesn’t bother me too much anymore. I fully expect people “won’t get it” and that’s fine.

There’s basically no chance of profiting from all that work (the music industry and consumer habits being what they are, the odds of any independent musician making money from music is vanishingly small these days–as are the odds of making money from any artistic endeavor–thanks “democratization of content”), so I just want to put them somewhere on the Internet where anyone can click on them and listen.

So the goal is to publish my old music. But how?

One problem I can’t quite overcome is I still have a strong interest in retaining the rights to my music. Artists have very few rights anymore, and copyright is one of them. Even if I make no money from my art, I still have rights to my art, and I should behave like a professional rights holder no matter what.

Many years ago, I registered all my songs with the U.S. Copyright Office. I want to distribute this music in a way that doesn’t completely undermine my rights. It would be foolish to expect anything good to happen, but it would be even more foolish not to plan for the one in a billion chance that someone slaps one of my songs on a TikTok video that gets 500 million views.

My first thought was to create a BandCamp account and upload my songs there. I have an assortment of 16-bit 44khz master WAV files I can upload.

Later I came to realize that I could fairly easily create a static web site that is essentially a player for my music, and I didn’t really need BandCamp or SoundCloud.

But I soon encountered a major problem. Back in the 90s, I judiciously used samples recorded from television, or downloaded from random sources on the Internet, and I didn’t keep track of where they came from or whether I could use them or not. They’re littered in my master recordings. They aren’t in every song, but they’re in the good ones.

Now I know better, and would never do that. So I can’t just drop those songs out there as-is, even though I have the master WAV files. I need to figure out how to creatively edit those mixes and masters to work around those samples.

For some songs, I can take the original mixdowns and cut and paste around the problem samples. For others, they’re buried deep in the mix and there’s no editing around it. I’d need to do a remix from scratch.

There’s another problem, though. Almost all of my old home studio gear is long gone, so recreating the environment in which I mixed a song from, say, 1995-1999, is nearly impossible.

From that diagram of my ~1995 setup, here in 2026, I only have the Sequencer Project Files, the Recorded Vocal/Guitar Tracks, and the Master Mixdown DAT Tapes.

In 2013, I digitally transferred the recorded vocal and guitar tracks from the original ADAT digital audio tapes into REAPER projects. No problem there. Well, it’s mostly raw data files, so there’s a ton of organizational and synchronization work that still needs to be done… but the data is there.

However, back in the 90s, we didn’t have DAW workstations where we could easily record hundreds of digital audio tracks inside our computers. We (specifically I) had an 8-track ADAT synchronized with MIDI gear, and mixdowns happened by playing the projects live and recording the mix by moving dials and faders around.

But I don’t have any of that MIDI gear anymore. Or the rackmount effects units I used. Or any of the mixers or time synchronization devices or anything, really.

It’s an interesting logistical problem that engages my problem-solving engineering brain.

I have the project files containing all of the MIDI notes sent to those MIDI devices, which is the most important part, but I don’t have any recordings of the sounds those MIDI devices made, other than what you can hear on the masters.

So it’s a daunting task to try to reverse engineer, remix, and remaster these old songs to remove potentially infringing samples, even in today’s DAW world where mixing and mastering music is a breeze compared to what it was in the 90s.

Some songs I can reconstruct easier than others, but some songs are going to require starting from scratch. Some songs I want to remix just because I did a rotten job of it back in the 90s.

It all starts with finding and loading all of the old project files. In the 90s I used Cakewalk products (Cakewalk Pro Audio was the first DAW for Windows, as far as I was aware), so it’s all Cakewalk files. Luckily for me, there’s still a free download of Cakewalk SONAR that is available from BandLab, so I can still read those project files.

I don’t want to work in SONAR anymore, though. I use REAPER now. So there is a step of exporting those old projects and importing them into REAPER.

But the lack of MIDI devices is a big problem. Reverse engineering those older songs back to a point where I can work with them today, in a modern DAW context, is, well it’s already been said… daunting. But not impossible!

My rabbit hole project is starting down the road to recovering those songs and recreating my old recording environment in REAPER.

I set out to find VST plugins to emulate all those missing MIDI devices. The complete list of devices is: A Yamaha TQ5 tone generator, a Yamaha SY77 keyboard, a Roland SC-88 tone generator, and a Boss DR-660 drum machine. And there’s also an Alesis NanoPiano, but I actually still have that one.

There used to be a Roland Sound Canvas SC-88 VST plugin made by Roland, and I had it, and it was great, but they discontinued it and I failed to get the lifetime unlock license in time. Maybe there’s a pirate version out there somewhere.

ChatGPT told me about a VST plugin called Swayed which purportedly emulates a Yamaha SY77, including SysEx compatibility. I shall endeavor to try it.

ChatGPT told me about another VST plugin called KQ Trixie which purportedly emulates a Yamaha TQ5, including SysEx compatibility. Music I made with a TQ5 is very, very, shockingly old, and probably not suitable for public distribution anyway. But it would be nice to recover them just for my own amusement. (Much of that music was driven by an Amiga computer, before 1993.)

ChatGPT told me it was easy to find Boss DR-660 drum samples that you could load into whatever VST sample player you wanted, so that’s a potential avenue to explore. But I’m sure it would be a pain to setup. (I have a vague memory of setting that up before, actually, now that I think about it.)

I wondered if it was possible to buy those old devices again. I’m an affluent member of capitalist society, surely I can find a way to throw more money at this problem.

It didn’t take long before I found a used Boss DR-660 and a used Roland SC-88 on Reverb in good condition, and I clicked those Buy Now buttons. Could it be a scam? Maybe, but it’s a weird way to scam people. The SC-88 I bought is actually the Japanese version so I have to get a step-down transformer so it doesn’t blow up when I plug it in here in the U.S.

If those two devices work when they arrive, that will solve 75% of my problems. I can plug them in, play MIDI sequences to them, and record everything they do to one of a thousand DAW tracks in REAPER, and never worry about losing a MIDI note again.

Or, they could be lemons and I’ll be out a bunch of money and back at square one.

I wasn’t able to find any used Yamaha SY77 keyboards to buy, nor the rackmount TG77 tone generator version of the keyboard. The Swayed VST is my only option for now, or else replace all those parts with new VST synth parts by guesswork.

To reiterate, it’s a daunting project. It’s all in service of remixing and remastering some old songs to remove some samples, so I can set up a web page to publish them.

Since obviously nobody actually listens to music that way, I’m also investigating how music distribution works in the modern world for places like Spotify, etc. (Initial investigations provide an easy answer: DistroKid.)

Should anyone ever say to me, “Oh you wrote a song, can I hear it?” It would be cool to be able to send them a Spotify link or something.

So that’s my secret music production project. That was kind of a big wall of jumbled text up there, but that hurricane of disorganized thought closely resembles what’s inside my brain during sudden rabbit hole excursions like this. It’s an exciting time, and a challenging exercise just to bring some order to it.

Retiring Old WordPress Sites

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:04:13 -0400

I had three old WordPress blogs that were just decaying out there on the Internet, using up power and space for nothing.

Those three old sites haven’t been updated since somewhere around 2018, so it’s safe to say they weren’t going to suddenly spring back to life. In the development world, we love to build and deploy things, but we rarely think about destroying them when their usefulness has passed. (Trust me, in my day job, I run into this all the time.)

It was time to get rid of them, park those domain names, and redirect all those old links to this site.

This task was somewhat tangentially inspired by a Blaugust post I saw earlier: Re: The Loss of Links Continues | Michael Harley. My internal response to that post was something along the lines of: “You mean, there are people who don’t think about permalinks staying permanent? This has to be explained?”

And then I pondered my own shameful link rot problem. A couple years ago, I tore down my real name blog and replaced it with a Hugo landing page, but I also wiped out all the old permalinks on that domain, so those links have been broken for a while now. It’s bothered me ever since it happened.

It bothered me, but not enough to fix it. The trouble was, it’s a real chore to setup redirections for hundreds of links by hand. But now, with Antigravity’s help, during this Blaugust burst of blog-related productivity, I was able to setup a redirection file to restore those links on my real name domain, so they now redirect here. Far too late, perhaps, but it least it doesn’t bother me anymore.

As for the other three obsolete sites, I set out to create three tiny static sites, consisting of exactly one index.html landing page that says “go to Endgame Viable,” and find a place to host them for free.

Github Pages would have worked, but I discovered that CloudFlare Pages also supports a _redirects file to redirect people going to old links. (I think Netlify also supports it, but I can’t vouch for that.) Undoubtedly there are other options available but I picked CloudFlare Pages almost entirely because I had a CloudFlare account. (Which I honestly don’t remember setting up.)

I asked Antigravity to build a landing page for those three old sites, based roughly on the visual style of the WordPress pages that would be replaced. I tweaked them a little, but not much. How they look doesn’t matter that much to me. The only important thing is that there’s a prominent link to Endgame Viable.

I’ve already imported all the posts from those old sites into Endgame Viable. Since Antigravity has access to all the backup files from the old sites and all the imported files in my current Hugo site, I was also able to get it to automatically create a _redirects file that maps each of the old post permalinks on the old sites to the new url of the imported posts on Endgame Viable.

Then I setup three new git repositories on my github account, and committed those three local directories of files. Which was essentially just two files for each site: An index.html file and a _redirects file. One of them also had an image.

Then I loaded up CloudFlare and found where you add Pages. (Not easy at first, because CloudFlare’s UI seems overly complicated to me.) I added one “application” for each of the three sites, connected each to the appropriate github repo, and enabled it. They were live almost instantly … with temporary development urls.

So I added a custom domain for each of the CloudFlare Pages, and went to my domain registrar and changed the nameservers to point to CloudFlare Pages.

Hopefully by the time this post publishes, the DNS changes will have propagated and the new sites will be live.

Two days later…

It was taking forever to propagate the domain change. But it turned out I had to make some additional changes to the DNS records that I didn’t expect. Once I fixed that, the changes propagated almost instantly, the new static sites were live, and WordPress was gone, forever exorcized from my life.

Everett Renshaw (writing)
Promise Table (music)
Swamp of Ineffectual Presumption (politics)

While I was at it, I changed my real-name site from a single Hugo-built page to a plain static index.html file as well, so I no longer need AWS Amplify to build it. It was a huge waste of compute just for a landing page.

Thomas Krehbiel

And that was it. Three old WordPress sites killed off in no time, one Hugo site reduced to an index.html . It took a single day. Not counting the waiting time and fixing the DNS records. The Internet now uses just a tiny bit less power thanks to me. We need all the power we can get to keep Antigravity running!

P.S. Right after I created three new github repos, I read this other Blaugust post about github outages and its unsustainable exponential AI-driven growth: GitHub’s growth | Sal’s. It’s me! I’m hastening github’s demise!

Secret Hyperfocusing Musician

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:29:45 -0400

Oh my. I’m caught in the awkward position of not having a post prepared for this morning. It kind of feels “normal” to post every day now. I was on a roll there for a while, on a comfortable pace getting posts prepped the afternoon before.

It’s not that I don’t have posts drafted. It’s that it’s taking a long time for some domain names to change nameservers and propagate, so I can’t talk about what I expected to talk about today. I thought it surely wouldn’t take more than 24 hours, but it’s taking, well, more than 24 hours.

So this morning I’m off to a regular followup appointment with the brain doctor to go over the results of my last brain MRI. I’ve seen the test results, and they appear nominal. Meaning everything’s the same as it was last time: There’s still a hole where they removed a tumor, and there’s still scar tissue where they irradiated two baby tumors, and there’s no sign of any new cancer growth.

Normally I would resent having to drive all the way across town just to hear what I can plainly read on the health portal, but on this particular day, I’m keenly interested in asking if they have any ideas about why I can’t bend my right thumb anymore.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve fallen down a very deep rabbit hole with a secret music production project. I don’t talk much about my secret musician alter ego on this blog, mainly because it’s been almost entirely sitting on a closet shelf for the last 20 years. But every now and then I suddenly revive my interest and work on a project.

One reason I haven’t done much with my music hobby is that I tend to fall deep into a different world when I’m working on it, to the complete exclusion of everything else in my life, like eating, sleeping, and work. Minor things like that. So I’ve developed a somewhat unhealthy attitude of, “Well, if I can’t dedicate 100% of the day to this hobby I love, from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, why even bother?” And then 20 years went by and I can barely play a guitar anymore. Learn from my mistakes, kids.

I’m still trying to work out a healthier way to approach it in my old age. I’m told this hyperfocusing is a feature of neurodivergency. It’s just so, so frustrating to have a project idea and not be able to work on it because of some other commitment, like the aforementioned eating, sleeping, and work. C’est la vie.

Anyway, I’ll have another post about the secret music project at some point in the future, because writing about music production is also quite fun. (I doubt there are many music producers or sound engineers among my readership, though.)

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.