Endgame Viable

Grab Bag - The Final Fantasy Slurry

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:31:05 -0400

Even “super intelligence” can’t think of an appropriate title for this mixed bag of disparate topics. (I ended up writing the title myself.) A major problem with blogging like this is that people will skip it immediately if it looks like a “newsletter” style of post. At least that’s what my statistics tell me.

Anyway I’m still here, trying to adjust to the impending time of year when all I want to do is go back to sleep the minute I wake up. How many more months until spring?

Gaming

Final Fantasy XIV

In my continuing attempts to catch up before Evercold, I’ve started into the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker 6.1 Main Scenario Quest with my brand new Hrothgar Warrior of Light. Thus continuing what I believe is my longest-running video series I’ve ever uploaded (9 years, 363 videos so far), documenting the MSQ quest-by-quest going back to the start of Stormblood. What I read seems to be accurate: 6.1 is a good starting point for a new character to come in.

The return to the simple adventurer lifestyle was quite quickly supplanted by lofty talk of Reflections and The Thirteeth and Voidgates and so forth, so my initial excitement for a less, you know, “Final Fantasy”-sounding story for a while was almost immediately dashed. In a moment of inspiration, I recently called this type of plotline a “Final Fantasy slurry.” Can we not raid one set of ruins for treasure without it turning into a whole thing?

To be honest, the vast majority of FFXIV “gaming” has largely consisted of reading quest text and running from one place to another place. Glorified visual novel stuff. I haven’t done very much of the more traditional style of gaming where you make decisions and problem solve and overcome obstacles for quite some time.

World of Warcraft Forever

The rest of the MMORPG world is talking about World of Warcraft Forever. I signed up for the beta but I don’t think I got anything for it. I’m curious, but not curious enough yet to drop everything and pre-order it. However, it could well be the closest thing to a high-profile “new” AAA MMORPG that we will see for the rest of our lives. The MMORPG community seems to be treating it as such.

The little bit I’ve read about it makes me think that WoW Forever is not going to be designed to be very solo-friendly though. Not at first, at least. Once they see engagement plummet and learn the entirely predictable lesson that 95% of the player base still prefers grouping-optional, non-PvP content, I’m sure that will change.

I suspect I’ll try it at some point, but I crash out of WoW pretty quickly. I gave up on Midnight after only a handful of videos. These days I prefer games that make good video recordings (or more precisely, that make good audio recordings), and WoW just isn’t good for that.

ArcheAge again?

Speaking of the MMORPG community, I will note a couple of articles on Massively OP that caught my attention:

I have to admit I don’t remember what happened to ArcheAge, but I do remember that I enjoyed playing ArcheAge for some time around ye olde 2015. Are there not one, but two new ArcheAge games in development? A quick look at their web pages and a quick consultation with ChatGPT makes me think that they will only resemble the original ArcheAge in name only.

I saw the words “action combat” on ArcheAge Chronicles so that pretty much makes it an automatic failure before it even launches. Or at least, an automatic extremely short-term MMORPG.

I hate to be negative, because I’m always called out for it, but I simply can’t help seeing the reality of the world before me. When was the last action combat MMORPG that remained in the MMORPG zeitgeist for years and years? I honestly can’t think of any. Maybe TERA?? Whatever happened to TERA? [Last-minute editor’s note: Also Black Desert.]

I just don’t think anyone has yet solved the problem of how to make action combat “feel good” in an MMORPG, and at this point it’s hard to justify any optimism that it will ever happen. Most of the time they try to wallpaper over the lag and positional issues with extremely flashy, pixel-obscuring lights and explosions. Even Dark Souls multiplayer, the action combat blueprint for most of the industry, isn’t perfect. But hey, maybe ArcheAge Chronicles will finally be the one to crack the code. Good luck to them.

GTA VI

Oh lastly I wanted to mention the impending worldwide extinction event known as Grand Theft Auto VI. I will quite likely be buying it and trying it out, though I haven’t really been into the whole GTA thing since I guess it was San Andreas.

But I’ve been hearing so much about how many genuine gaming innovations are in this game, and I can’t help but reward AAA studios that continue to attempt to move the gaming industry forward beyond just “more microtranscations.”

Mortal Shell 2

Oh and lastly for real, I just downloaded Mortal Shell 2 to see if there’s anything to it. I bounced off of the first one pretty quickly. I found that it looked fantastic, but it felt awful in terms of game mechanics.

But maybe this new one will be my next quick-thinking problem-solving game.

Videos

For the folks who were waiting patiently for my daily game video upload, I noticed that my script had been throwing errors and I hadn’t uploaded anything for a week. I should probably work out some way for that script to notify me when something goes wrong.

Not that you missed much. It stopped in the middle of my extensive 3-session EverQuest Legends spree.

Music

By the way, I mentioned a while back that I was building a new REAPER DAW workstation. I completed that, but almost immediately found myself interested in other things. So that’s on the back burner again. Sigh. Quite annoyingly, my interests are constantly changing.

Sports

In sports news, week 3 of the 2026 NFL season is in the books.

The Washington Commanders pulled off an upset win at home against the defending Superbowl champion Seahawks to avoid a third loss in a row to start the season. After dropping their first two road games against divisional opponents, and losing Jayden Daniels to another elbow injury, it was looking suspiciously like their season was already over. But there’s still a glimmer of hope for a serviceable season, especially after the Eagles were embarrassed by the Bears on Monday night, and the Cowboys lost a thriller to the Ravens in Rio.

NFC East	Record
Philadelphia Eagles	2-1
New York Giants	2-1
Dallas Cowboys	1-2
Washington Commanders	1-2

Next up for the Commanders are the Colts in London (what is up with trying to export the NFL to the rest of the world?), then a road game at the Giants, two winnable games. Which they hopefully will win because after that is a road trip to San Francisco which does not sound like a winnable game.

Cancer Corner

I’m just exiting the worst part of chemotherapy cycle 22. Prior to that, I completed radiation treatments on my right hip for an area that they were calling an area of progression. However, my oncologist made it sound like it could possibly have been there all along. They weren’t sure.

In any case, they ordered a new Guardant blood test to see if anything had changed in terms of the genetics of the cancer, to see if they need to make any adjustments. My next PET scan is scheduled for late in October.

Other than chemo side effects, which typically hit me a couple days after the infusion and last three or four days, I remain fairly unaffected by the whole thing. (Not counting the time commitment of driving out to all these outpatient appointments.) The lung tumor that started everything is currently inactive and “treated,” as they call it, apparently akin to a lump of dead cells. However it’s not entirely clear to me if it’s dead forever or just sort of dormant. Cancer is complicated.

How long this reasonably good status continues is anybody’s guess.

World Context

I haven’t mentioned the state of the world in a while. Honestly it’s not a top priority in my life.

There’s so much non-substantive idiocy coming out of the American political scene that it’s impossible to wrap your head around it. The only sane reaction, it seems to me, is to ignore everything, vote when it’s time to vote, and go about your day. (Truly: I honestly believe that most controversies are manufactured to generate reactions (aka. “engagement”), so if we stop reacting, the ludicrous controversies will eventually return to normal levels of boring political scandal.)

I find it pretty amusing that both political party labels are so toxic now that candidates no longer identify which party they’re running for during the deluge of political ads that I see during football.

There simply isn’t any political news or commentary content that doesn’t jump at every daily Twitter story of the day. It’s gotten to where I have to watch an Australian comedy show “Have You Been Paying Attention” to find out what’s happening in the world.

A Funny Video For Gen-X

And finally a video I stumbled upon that made me laugh a lot. I have no idea why it was recommended to me, and have never heard of this guy before. But I’ve seen a handful of other “Gen-X content” sort of videos lately–e.g. shorts of a dour Gen-Xer asking young people “how hungry was Duran Duran?” and “what did Huey Lewis want?”–so maybe it’s because I watched those.

That’s my generation! We just kind of don’t care about pointless things. I work in a huge corporation but luckily I don’t have to endure any of that. (Not yet at least.) I would have that exact reaction if I did.

Endwalker Highlights and Lowlights

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:16:42 -0400

I finished the Endwalker Main Scenario Quest, at least up to 6.0.

I don’t know what comes next, but I understand there’s somewhat of a story “reset” after this point.

I’ve been wanting to change my main character for a while, but I’ve never found a good time to do it. It always felt weird to experience the Main Scenario Quest with a different character, since it’s always been my old character (pictured above) saving the world and building relationships with the Scions. I’ve even tried to age her a little bit with each expansion to make her look older and wiser. But the conclusion of 6.0 seems like a fantastic time to retire one character and swap in a new one, because it really felt like The End of the story.

I’ll have to come up with some hand-wavy headcanon reason for why my new main character has all the memories of the previous main character, and why all the Scions think the new character is the old character. (A major defect in the FFXIV story presentation… their expectation is that you’ll use the same character from the beginning to the end of time.)

Final Fantasy is all into souls, so it isn’t that far-fetched to imagine the old main character fell into a coma but their soul got shoved into the body of a new main character because “something something aether transferrence.”

Anyway here’s some highlights and lowlights from the expansion.

Highlights

Voice acting. I’m always pretty enthralled by the voice acting in FFXIV, and this expansion was no different. As always, I just wish all the MSQ dialog was voice acted, but I have to imagine it’s more of a logistical impracticality than a lack of money in their case.
The Mothercrystal. AN 8-PLAYER TRIAL WITH NPCS. The greatest thing ever. (The NPCs were not as good as one might hope, though, they routinely led me astray.)
Endwalker. That is, the last quest in Endwalker, which is usually named the same as the expansion, which in this case was Endwalker. They really know how to end a story with a bang. Really felt like a definitive “end” to a multiple-expansion-long story arc.
Meteion. A very creepy character with great voice acting. Too bad she wasn’t in it more.
Hurray for nihilism. Really enjoyed the overall theme of existential nihilism toward the end. Beats the ordinary fantasy fare about power-hungry primals and Ascions any day.
Drunk Urianger.
Y’shtola turning us into frogs.
Loporitts are pretty funny.
The Ranged DPS role quest chain was a pretty good story too.

Lowlights

In From The Cold. The quest where you had to sneak around as a lowly Garlean soldier without any superpowers. Worst, most annoying quest that Final Fantasy XIV has ever done. Besides the weird fact that anyone can apparently just kidnap and neuter the Warrior of Light whenever they feel like it, the mechanics were awful.
Children Are Our Future. The quest where you follow that kid around the Garlemald ruins to unlock an aetherial current. Second worst, most annoying quest that FFXIV has ever done.
Worthy Of His Back. The quest where you fight Venat in a solo duty. Extremely annoying to go from dead simple questing gameplay up to that point to suddenly hard raid-level gameplay for one quest.
As The Heavens Burn. The one where you had to play as Alphinaud and Alisaie for a while. Do I really have to say that it sucks to have to play a whole different job that you’re unfamiliar with and don’t care that much about? Make it a cut scene. (Same for A Frosty Reception, where you play as Thancred sneaking around a Garlemald base.)
Waiting two plus hours in the Duty Finder for The Dark Inside trial. I get that we’re supposed to be sociable and play together because whatever, but nobody plays that trial anymore and waiting sucks. Give us the ability to run trials solo, too. They proved it’s possible in this very expansion. Surely 90% of the playerbase would love it. Surely less than 10% of the playerbase can easily jump into an 8-person group for the MSQ whenever they feel like it. Why are we still catering to them? Get Claude or Gemini to figure it out if it’s too hard for you, sheesh.

Comments

Did we really need the Zenos thing? It felt rather out of place. I can’t imagine anyone was out there thinking, “Oh I can’t wait to see more Zenos and resolve that storyline.” At least it’s over now. I hope? Luckily it wasn’t that intrusive except at the end.
Most of the Scions didn’t have much of a story arc, they were just “there.” Thancred, Y’shtola, Estinien, and G’raha Tia, in particular. The twins at least had some family drama. And Urianger had a little bit of drama with long-forgotten Moenbryda’s parents. Otherwise not much. G’raha always seems like he’s bashfully hitting on my character though, I can’t tell if that’s intentional or not.

P.S. I finished speedrunning my alt Machinist character through Endwalker so that I can switch to it for 6.1 and beyond. I had previously bought him a Shadowbringers MSQ skip, and recently I bought him a level 90 job boost for Machinist so I didn’t have to grind from 66 in dungeons for weeks, so then I was able to pick up the Dawntrail Viper job at level 80 and use that for the MSQ run.

It took about 16 1/2 hours, not counting the roughly nine total hours of waiting time for The Dark Inside trial and the roughly three total hours of waiting time for The Final Day trial.

But he’s now ready to take over starting from 6.1, Newfound Adventure.

Disappearing Daylight

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:47:04 -0400

I don’t have much to talk about. Just not in the mood for writing.

Daylight is rapidly disappearing, which always puts me in a foul mood.

I’m in the midst of receiving radiation treatments on a breakout cancer spot in my right pelvic bone. It’s going well. Though I have no way of knowing one way or another, to be honest, since again, it’s all happening at a cellular level and I feel none of it.

Radiation treatments are incredibly easy, at least the ones that I’ve gotten. You just lie there while the machine works on you, and you see and feel nothing during the process. Then you leave. It would be easy to convince oneself that literally nothing happened, except for the fact that it’s a lot of trouble to go through for a ruse.

Games

I heard there was a new World of Warcraft: Forever announcement. I can’t really tell what it’s supposed to be, but I signed up for the beta. I think it’s like WoW Classic but … different? WoW Classic but on an alternate timeline? WoW Classic but like if there had been a different expansion from Burning Crusade?

It’s like a fork of the original WoW Classic going off in its own direction. It’s not clear what need it’s serving. I guess it’s serving the “make everything like it used to be, but better” crowd. But couldn’t they have achieved the same thing if they froze WoW Classic at the original game?

I can’t roll my eyes hard enough at the “it’s about making friends and playing together” nonsense in the announcements. Are we still doing this? It’s been so, so many years and game designers are still thinking we’re going to meet new friends inside our MMORPGs? It’s like listening to a politician talking about the everyday needs of their constituents, when they’ve clearly never been inside a grocery store in their life.

(I’m of the opinion that friends are made outside the game, and those relationships are brought into the game from the outside. Nobody is looking for new social relationships inside games anymore.)

Speaking of MMORPGs, over the weekend I played some more Final Fantasy XIV, continuing my hopeless quest to finish recording the Endwalker and Dawntrail expansions before Evercold launches. Storywise, the Scions finally got into the Space Ark and went to space. They’ve arrived in Ultima Thule and walked into what I can only describe as a survival horror situation. I’m getting pretty close to the end of the pre-patch Endwalker story.

And I’m enjoying this part of the story. For all the silliness in Final Fantasy, they tackle some sophisticated themes from time to time. Currently it’s all about existential nihilism. It’s been a recurring refrain of the expansion. If it’s a certainty that all life will eventually end in the heat death of the ever-expanding universe, what is even the point of living? Fun stuff like that.

I was gleeful to see that I was able to complete the Mothercrystal 8-person trial with a party of NPC Scions rather than having to enter the Duty Finder to find a PUG. That’s the first time I’ve seen that in FFXIV. I don’t know if that’s a new phenomenon or not, but I previously thought they couldn’t or wouldn’t do the trials solo like that. (A quick search reveals the next one won’t be like that. Bummer.)

I can’t imagine I’m going to finish Endwalker and Dawntrail by the end of the year. Almost every single main scenario quest is a full gaming session for me.

It’s probably not a great idea to plan to play Evercold when it launches anyway. The last time I played a FFXIV expansion at launch I spent most of that time sitting in queues.

Surely they can’t keep making these quests so very, very lengthy going into Dawntrail and then on into Evercold? Can they put somebody on their development team to ensure that quests take no more than 15 minutes when you read all the text out loud? But no… it’s 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, two hours.. there’s just no limit.

Sports

The NFL season has begun. The Washington Commanders predictably lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in their season opener, however they were at least in the game the entire time, and had a chance to tie in the end, which was somewhat surprising.

But still, after their shocking run to the NFC Championship game in the 2024 season, the Commanders have fallen back to their standard cursed level of play where they mostly look pretty average and lose most games by one score or less because of a crucial dropped ball or missed field goal or blown tackle, and it feels pointless to waste any energy watching their games.

I watched the U.S. Open women’s and men’s finals over the weekend, the first time I’ve done that in a million years. Tennis sure has changed since the last time I was into it. It’s … a lot faster. To the point where it’s not that fun to watch. Also, every tennis player now appears to be a 7 or 8 foot tall linebacker.

Okay that’s enough of an update.

Building a MacBook REAPER DAW

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:45:05 -0400

I took an extra day off and had a 4-day weekend over the Labor Day holiday, during which I was under the weather most of the time thanks to chemo side effects.

This round of chemo hit a little harder than last time, so I went into hibernation from which I’m only just now emerging. Most of the time I felt like I was in a stupor and just wanted to sleep all day.

This morning, comparatively, I feel like I have more energy than I know what to do with, and I popped awake very early, ready to do a million things at once.

I’m not getting any younger, and I honestly don’t know how much longer I have in this life, so lately I have a tendency to make much more rash decisions than I normally do.

So I’ve decided to build myself a new music production workstation. I wanted to build a new workstation because I don’t want to mix music and gaming on my gaming PC. It’s been messy and I don’t like it. (Not least because games these days fill up a 2 TB SSD in seconds.)

This time I’ve decided I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: I’m going to use my MacBook Pro as the basis for my REAPER DAW (digital audio workstation).

I investigated buying a Windows laptop to use as the REAPER DAW, because I’ve always done all my music work on Windows, but I quickly discovered that buying a Windows laptop is nowhere near as easy as buying a MacBook. There are 50 different brands, each with 50 different variations, and none of them are quite right for what I want.

Windows laptops tend to fall into three basic categories: Cheap, business, or gaming. Gaming laptops tend to have the power I want, but they always have a ridiculously expensive GPU that I don’t need in this case. Business laptops could work, but none of the three categories typically have the USB or Thunderbolt ports that I want.

So I thought, well, I already have a MacBook Pro that is pretty powerful and can easily drive REAPER and external hardware. And after some experimentation it was clear that REAPER runs exactly the same on MacOS as it does on Windows, and the project files are 100% compatible between MacOS and Windows (not counting variations in plugins).

So yesterday, Labor Day 2026, I pulled the trigger and started cleaning up a small side room to serve as my new mini music studio.

And I got on Amazon and started splurging on the gear I need to set up a basic little DAW around my MacBook. Said gear being things like a docking station, an audio interface, and a desktop rack and power supply.

The docking station was quite a bit more expensive than I expected, because I wanted one with full Thunderbolt 5 support and enough USB ports to deal with all the USB devices I’ll be hanging off of this Christmas tree.

It feels weird to spend extravagantly on myself. I’ve always been fairly frugal and I avoid spending money if I don’t need to, and I’ve always lived well within my means, now more so than ever. But due to getting older and having cancer, I’m starting to adopt a “you can’t take it with you” sort of attitude. It’s a bit embarrassing.

The pragmatic in me knows I have to be cognizant of healthcare costs. Right now, insurance pays for most everything. But who knows how long that will last? How long will I be able to work? What happens to my job when the AI bubble inevitably bursts? What happens after I retire? If I live that long? All questions that circle in my head all the time.

But for now, we live a day at a time and pursue our passions, as long as it doesn’t actively bankrupt us.

Google Maps Voice Change?

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:54:04 -0400

Here’s something I thought was important to tell everyone.

Earlier today I drove out for chemo infusion #21 (has it been three weeks already?), and as always I pulled up the Google Maps app to tell me how to get there, even though I know how to get there by now.

Quite quickly I noticed a change in Google Maps. Over the years I have come to think of the Google Maps navigation voice as the “Google Lady.”

Google Lady was gone, replaced by some imposter lady’s voice. A decidedly younger, extremely AI-sounding voice. I suppose I should be surprised only that it took so long to switchover to the “obvious AI voice sound.”

I had to listen to it more than usual because an accident forced me to divert off of the highway down into the mean streets of the city.

I have labeled the new voice Millennial Fry Lady Voice. Because they do that young-person thing where every sentence seems to run out of gas at the end; the woman’s voice drops into a vocal fry for the last word or two.

It’s a very funny voice pattern to me. At the end of every sentence it’s like, “Oh I just can’t be bothered to finish with the same energy I started.” It’s a very professional-sounding voice that simultaneously sounds like they couldn’t care less about what they’re saying. “Like, turn up here or whatever.”

Stumbling Over the Blaugust Finish Line

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:39:07 -0400

It’s the last day of Blaugust 2026. I don’t really want to write a “how my Blaugust went” post, because everybody’s writing them, but I don’t have any other ideas for the last day.

I did successfully post 31 posts in 31 days, so I can still do that, for whatever that’s worth. Once I abandoned the idea of actually writing a new post every morning, it was pretty easy. It didn’t even take that much of my time.

Well, it was less easy in the final week or so, as I had completely jettisoned all interest in blogging from my mind. I only kept posting out of a misguided sense of sunk cost fallacy.

The gaming competitor in me can’t help but note that posting once a day is nowhere near enough to “win” a Blaugust competition anymore. (The most posts win, right?) I notice that a lot of the IndieWeb folks tend to publish blog posts like they’re writing tweets or microblogs, so they’ll put out four or five paragraph-long posts in a day.

I could never do that, because there’s too much metadata required for each post, and it would quickly become too high of a ratio of work-to-fun.

I consider the “publishing” part of blogging to be the most time-consuming, least fun part. Which I take to include editing, formatting, thinking of titles, finding images, and picking tags. This year, that part didn’t take that long, thanks to a bunch of helpers I concocted.

The actual “writing” part of blogging is no big deal for me, and it’s usually something I do as a normal part of my every day.

A major question for me is what to do now that Blaugust is over.

I like the idea of posting more frequent, more focused, shorter posts. So I’ll probably try that for a while.

Statistically speaking, Blaugust didn’t really do much for me. When you weed out all the bots and RSS hits, there was a very clear trend downward in views per post over the course of the month.

The main thing I learned from the event is that I’m not cut out to sit down and write a post every morning. I knew that already, but I wanted to try it out anyway. But most of the time, there’s nothing to talk about, and then you’re stuck writing a “there’s nothing to talk about” post which is just a waste of effort.

So why do I blog?

I don’t feel much compulsion to mentor the world with explanations for everything I’m doing. I don’t feel like being a “thought leader.” I find a lot of thought leaders are… how shall I put this… wrong about things? Not worth emulating? Not always, but enough that it’s a relatively safe bet.

Much of what I want to accomplish with my blog is a sort of running memoir. A record of my life, or at least the parts that I don’t mind talking about. I reminder of what I did in the past.

Okay the work day’s over and I don’t have any more excuses for putting off writing the end of this post.

What’s it all mean? I think there’s supposed to be some kind of philosophical conclusion to be drawn from this month’s experience, but I can’t be bothered to think of one.

At this moment I can’t imagine doing another daily Blaugust like this. I’m definitely going to turn into a “once a week maybe” blogger from here. There’s just no upside to blogging daily, other than the “challenging yourself” aspect, which gets old pretty fast.

My cat is now trying to sit in my lap so that’s another convenient excuse to postpone the end of this post.

Oh here’s one new thing I learned: I get the most referrals from Google blogs. I don’t know why. But it’s very clearly there in the stats.

And I think that’s probably good enough. A last gasp of written content for the end of Blaugust, stumbling over the finish line to crash into a water table and twist an ankle.

Changes To The Blog During Blaugust

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:19:22 -0400

We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here in the last couple of days. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t like writing blog posts on weekends.

So here’s a list of changes I’ve made to the blog before or during Blaugust this year. Which I wrote down over a week ago.

Updated to the latest version of Hugo, including addressing all the deprecation warnings.
Refreshed the about page.
Added a links page, simplified the menus.
Addressed broken images in several years’ worth of older WordPress-imported posts.
Created a set of Antigravity skills to streamline posting and image processing.
Added a new Hugo theme to freshen the look of the site.
Imported archived posts from three other older blogs.
Created access statistics and cost analysis report pages.
Updated Spirit Riot comment system.
- Added authentication to allow commenting with a Google account, Mastodon account, or IndieAuth account.
- Fixed some security holes.
Created Bathtub Robot blog companion services (an upgrade from a previously half-finished project).
- Added automated fediverse post notification because I will forget to do that manually 100% of the time.
- Sends webmentions and pingbacks to external sites.
Not exactly related to this site per se, but I parked three other old WordPress sites, with redirects, using CloudFlare Pages, as part of my effort to put all my Internet content in one place.
- everettrenshaw.com (my old writing site).
- promisetable.com (my almost never-used music site).
- swampip.com (my old political blog).
Also unrelated to the blog, but I resurrected my gotosocial instance gts.endgameviable.com and migrated it to a VPS.

Two Content Discoveries

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:54:11 -0400

Push The Roll

I started listening to the Push the Roll Podcast with Ross Bryant. If you have any knowledge of the TTRPG Actual Play space, you know who Ross Bryant is, but if not, he’s an improviser who appears on Dropout.tv now and then. He’s unofficially known as The Greatest Role-Player In The World. Or something like that.

Anyway he started a kind of horror anthology podcast where he assembles a group of mid-tier TTRPG player staples and a special guest to play a Call of Cthulu one-shot where they improvise the whole scenario based on a random title submitted by listeners. (Actually I don’t know if he started it, or if an already-established podcast brand started it and recruited him to headline it. I think probably the latter.) It’s a lot like that old HBO series Tales From The Crypt, except it’s an improvised podcast.

Anyway, it’s fun. If you like improvised horror stories where the Cthulu mythos ruins lives in demented ways. They all end pretty much the same way: Everyone dies, goes insane, or some combination thereof. And there’s lots of laughs along the way.

The Sketch Show

Recently I discovered an old ITV show called The Sketch Show, which has fundamentally changed my opinion of UK comedy.

I used to think that all comedy that came out of the UK was the best kind of comedy, created by intelligent people for intelligent audiences. Particularly sketch comedy shows. Your Monty Pythons, your Mitchells and Webbs. The kind of comedy that proves the theory that comedians are the smartest people in society.

Then I saw The Sketch Show, which features much younger versions of Lee Mack and Tim Vine. I don’t know where this show fits in the pantheon of UK comedy television history, or what the people of Britannia think of it, but it’s the most unapologetically low-brow sketch comedy I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s just a rapid fire succession of bad puns and visual gags, over and over and over again, seemingly 100 different little scenes per episode.

It’s impossible to imagine that somebody convinced television executives that it made financial sense to build complete sets for 30-second gags. It’s no wonder it only lasted for two series.

I’ll give it credit for being a different kind of sketch comedy, but oh man, it’s a train wreck of non-stop groaners. It’s so much of a train wreck that I couldn’t stop watching it, and have devoured every episode of both series.

Pros and Cons of AI Technical Writing

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:21:49 -0400

Whoops I have nothing prepared today either. Let’s talk about AI writing. People love talking about AI writing, don’t they?

Everyone knows that AI is quite bad at creative writing, however there’s one area where I think AI writing is perfectly acceptable, and that’s technical writing.

Technical writing doesn’t have to be creative. It’s just there to communicate information concisely and accurately, so that the reader can absorb and use that knowledge, or use it as a reference.

In the day job I’ve been working on a spike document to investigate some new strategies for automated testing, and as an experiment I’ve been getting Claude to write most of it.

Claude is quite capable of explaining technical topics in a way that a knowledgable engineer can read it and understand it. So no problem there.

However Claude is not particularly adept at structuring documents for narrative flow. And it has a habit of throwing in extraneous sentences and subjects that aren’t particularly relevant to the topic at hand. And it tends to run on a bit. Not every subject needs a complete encyclopedia entry.

So it definitely needs a human editor. Getting Claude to write a document is very much like playing the role of an editor, sending messages to an author who doesn’t quite get what you’re trying to say, but keeps trying anyway. Eventually you get frustrated and go in and fix it yourself.

Claude writes in Markdown, which doesn’t translate very well to Google Docs, which is the preferred document format at work. That’s another obstacle to overcome.

The other thing about Claude in the day job is that it’s very slow. It takes a long, long time to think before returning with answers. It’s so slow that it’s borderline not worth waiting for it, and it could actually be faster to manually complete the tasks. I don’t know if it’s Claude in general or just my employer’s plan, but it’s by far the slowest AI agent I’ve ever used, to the point where it’s pretty frustrating.

Basically you type a prompt, and then tab away to some other task to work on while you wait for the AI to think and respond. Maybe you get up and go get a drink. Maybe you watch a bit of something on YouTube while you wait. Usually you’ve forgotten what you were doing by the time the AI answers. It’s really, really slow.

When I use Google’s Antigravity at home, it’s vastly faster. I mean it’s night and day.

Claude didn’t used to be that slow, so I have to assume it’s buckling under the pressure of all the queries it has to deal with, now that everyone at work is judged in their performance reviews by how much they utilize AI to speed up their day-to-day activities. Ironically, because Claude is so slow to respond now, AI is actually slowing us down. Whoopsie.

So will I be using AI from now on to write complete technical documents from start to finish? Probably not, unless I couldn’t care less about the topic or the audience. It’s not very efficient. But would I use AI explanations in my own technical documents? A hybrid approach makes sense. If I can read AI’s writing and understand it enough to act on the information, and it’s accurate, why not pass it along to other engineers?

And I know what you’re thinking: It is accurate. I check it all the time. Nobody would be using AI if it was wrong all the time. And for the times Claude does get something wrong, I yell at it and revel in its groveling apologies.

Vestigial Death Throes of Habit

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:15:50 -0400

Morning! I’m back with another live-written post on the morning of publishing day. I stopped doing this because it’s difficult and largely unfulfilling, but today I don’t have anything else readily available to post.

To be honest, in my mind, I’ve fully left Blaugust behind and moved on to other things. These are just the vestigial death throes of habit, and not wanting to give up mere days before the end.

In health news, I have radiation scheduled on the annoying spot of cancer in my pelvic bone starting the week after next, just after Labor Day. I expect it to be completely painless and have little effect on my life, other than having to drive out there every other day for two weeks.

In television news, I stumbled on the show Last One Laughing UK seasons 1 and 2, which is a who’s who of UK comedians. I know UK comedians way better than I know American comedians for some reason. Are there any American comedians anymore? I really don’t see them. There’s no American version of Taskmaster, for example. Anyway, the show was quite funny.

Otherwise, I’ve been working on various aspects of my secret music production project, which has lost a bit of focus since the initial frenzied steps.

I’ve been working to digitally transfer DAT tapes into REAPER projects. I got through 30 tapes or so, then my 30-year-old DAT deck started making very ominous, loud, electrical popping noises. ChatGPT thinks it might be the power supply dying.

I stopped, with about 15 tapes left to go. Luckily I deliberately ordered the tapes from most important to least important, so I’ve completed the ones I really wanted to get. The ones that are left, I honestly don’t know what’s on them.

I’m going to try the deck again today and hopefully that popping was just a one-time thing. Maybe it overheated and I should power it off between tapes from now on. I have little choice but to keep trying because it’s not like I can buy a new DAT player in 2026. The deck only has to last for another 15 tapes or so.

I previously mentioned I bought a used DR-660 drum machine, and it works. I also bought a used Roland Sound Canvas SC88pro, and it also works. The latest insane purchase is a used Yamaha TG77 tone generator I found on ebay. Like the Sound Canvas, it’s a Japanese model, so I’ll have to use a transformer. Fingers crossed that it will also work. That would be the last puzzle piece in restoring my old music tracks.