Endgame Viable

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.

Agentic Prompts To Live By

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:18:51 -0400

Everybody hold your breath, this post is about AI, but it has nothing to do with stealing artwork or data center overcrowding. It’s a practical guide to using agentic AI assistants, something I don’t see written down very often. Usually I only see AI written about as a nebulous malevolent force hiding behind a foggy shroud of distrust.

By way of introduction, and as a way to shoehorn a different draft into this post, I pose the question: Is AI something new, or is AI merely this generation’s version of a profound technological advancement in productivity and convenience:

The washing machine replacing the need to pound clothes on a rock or whatever.
Automobiles replacing horses.
Synthesizers and sequencers replacing musical instruments played by musicians.
Digital Audio Workstations (computers) replacing analog mixing consoles and tape machines in music production.
Autotune replacing the need to practice singing.
Intellisense replacing programming documentation.
Syntax highlighting replacing the need to format readable source code.
Electricity replacing gas and oil and steam.
Plumbing replacing walking down to the river with a bucket.
Firearms replacing crossbows.
Spellcheckers replacing the need to memorize vocabulary.
Calculators replacing the need to learn math.
Google replacing the need to remember facts.
Desktop publishing replacing the traditional paste-up process.
Steam engines replacing manual labor.
Accounting software replacing paper ledgers.
Cell phones and tablets replacing desktop computers.
Touch screens replacing mice.
Computers and drawing tablets replacing canvases and paint brushes.

My current thinking puts AI in the same category as all of the things on that list. I may be wrong… AI may well be different, but how? It’s not clear to me yet. And so I approach it as something new to learn.

At home, I pretty much live in Google’s Antigravity IDE now, and at work, for software development, Claude Code is interwoven into everything we do. In other words, I use agentic AI assistance for development tasks pretty much every day.

When I say “agentic AI,” by the way, I’m not just talking about asking a chatbot some questions. I’m talking about a chatbot that “thinks.” (Airquotes because it doesn’t actually think.) It’s a chatbot that’s connected to your files and directories. You give it a goal, and it “figures things out” without having to be told what to do at every step. It either writes or runs the tools it needs to get the tasks done, while you sit back and watch.

Below are some prompts that I find myself returning to over and over again, or have used before, to make my life easier.

Code-related prompts

Review this code to improve code clarity, reduce duplication, reduce complexity, improve ease of maintenance, and update legacy code style. (Often good to do a pass or two after AI itself writes some code.)
Review this code for leaks of configuration secrets (before committing to git).
Document step-by-step instructions for how this code is deployed to a production environment.
Describe and diagram the architecture and design choices of this code (useful when approaching a new code base, something I have to do at work all the time).
Write unit tests for the new code I just added (I’m still developing strategies for prompting AI to write good unit tests, it usually brute-forces them; some folks at work are experimenting with test-driven AI development, where they get the AI to write the unit tests first before writing the code, which is a good idea I want to try someday).
Review this code for tightly coupled objects and suggest a plan to decouple them.
Build a localstack test environment for this aws code.
Look at these log errors and find the root cause of the error and suggest a solution.
Fetch the log lines related to request ID x and trace the end to end operation of the request.

Not-code related prompts

Search these hundreds of photo files to find instances where there’s a break in the sequential numbering and rename any incorrect files, and update all references to those renamed files.
Create a static web site generator to publish these hundreds of photos of an old World War 1 diary and the transcripts of each page, converting each RAW photo to a small web-friendly webp format.
Import the blog posts saved in this WordPress backup XML file as Markdown files for Hugo.
Search these hundreds of Markdown blog post files for broken image links and correct them, using this directory of images downloaded from WordPress to match the missing images. And move those WordPress images to my S3 bucket directory, resize, and convert them to webp.
Connect to aws and download the raw access logs for my blog, then generate an HTML summary report of statistics. (Real-life example here.)
Create a new Hugo blog theme with a more modern web style that supports dark and light mode.
Write a tool to use an api to transcribe the audio commentary track of these hundreds of videos as SRT files, and create a summary description of each video from each transcript. (I actually wrote most of that functionality before Antigravity, but this is how I’d do it now.)
Give me the steps to migrate my gotosocial instance and postgresql database from an unraid server on my local network to a VPS in the cloud.

If you don’t know, what happens with Claude or Antigravity (and I assume all others) is that after entering a prompt like the ones above, the AI will generate a “plan,” which is a long document that describes what it’s going to do in step-by-step detail. It may ask you to clarify things. You look over the plan, find things you want to change or improve (there’s always something), tell the AI what to do different, review the new plan, repeat, and eventually approve the plan and watch it go.

In my mind, I assume everyone who works in technology has already figured these kinds of prompts out, and probably better ones, and doesn’t need to be told any of this. But on the off chance that somebody out there still doesn’t know, or maybe hasn’t had a chance to approach agentic AI yet, this may spark some ideas of what is possible. You always have to start somewhere with new technology.

Here is an example session with Antigravity about migrating gotosocial that I copied into a page, if you want to see the conversational process in action.

With those prompts, the agentic AI is usually being directed to work on files (e.g. source code, but it could just as easily be Markdown blog files or picture files or video files) in the current directory or git repository.

I’ve done all of the things on those lists, so they are reflective of the kinds of things I’m using AI for.

Those are just samples to give you ideas. You will undoubtedly need to converse with the AI to get all the details exactly right for your situation. (See the gotosocial example above.)

Honestly the list of uses just goes on and on and on. I use it all the time. I can barely remember what it was like to have to remember or lookup complex command or programming language syntax to do all those things by hand.

Just recently I used it to decode a MIDI timing sync audio signal from a recording from 1995, and generate timing information for a modern REAPER project.

I don’t know what the future of AI holds, legally or ethically. All I know is, like many technical advancements of the past we now take for granted, like the IDE, or syntax highlighting, or Intellisense, it sure would suck to have to go back to doing general development tasks the hard and slow way.

Reviving A Boss DR-660 Drum Machine

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:03:42 -0400

I bought a used Boss DR-660 Dr. Rhythm drum machine (manufactured in 1989) on Reverb a while back, and it arrived. I originally bought one of these around the year 1992 or 1993. It was my main source of drum sounds throughout the 90s.

It was packed well, so I was optimistic. I even got a nice note. Confusingly, and ominously, it came with a fresh coin battery.

After unwrapping, the device was in excellent physical condition. It’s actually in better condition than the one I owned back in the 90s.

However there’s one problem: It came with the wrong power supply. Not only isn’t it the original Boss BRA-120 adapter, it’s a third-party adapter that supplies the wrong power. The DR-660 requires 12V AC, but this adapter supplies 12V DC. Not only that, but the cable looked like it had been patched or repaired at some point.

So I didn’t plug it in immediately to see if it worked or not.

Luckily I was able to find a replacement power adapter on Amazon that supplies the correct power. It arrived several days later.

Once I was able to supply correct power, I eagerly turned it on and watched the display with anticipation. And immediately saw a “battery low!” message. Well, that explains why they sent a battery with it. I noted that wasn’t disclosed in the Reverb listing. Ah well.

Most of the old gear of this type from the 80s and 90s has a little coin battery in them, and they’re all dying or dead now. If you’re lucky, the gear was designed so you can easily replace the battery. Otherwise, prepare to get out a soldering iron.

If you’re looking to buy old gear like this, check the status of the battery.

After consulting ChatGPT, it was clear that the DR-660 had an easily replaceable battery. So I took the back cover off and beheld a rather significant obstacle.

There was a secondary circuit board, called a “jack board,” completely covering the spot where the battery was held. I could see the battery holder by shining a flashlight in between the two circuit boards, and there was no way to reach it without moving that jack board.

It appeared there was nothing physically securing the jack board in place, except a couple of copper strips of tape, and the jacks themselves. So I set to work trying to pry the board loose from the back cover. It took a while, and a lot of careful prying with a small screwdriver, but eventually it popped loose.

And there was the elusive battery holder.

I replaced the battery with the one that came with the package and put everything back together. I powered the DR-660 on, watched it initialize and boot up again, and the “battery low” message was gone. Success!

I plugged in a MIDI cable, plugged the outputs into my audio interface, and ran a test with one of my old songs that I’d loaded into REAPER. It worked! The DR-660 received MIDI notes, played the samples, and I was able to record them in REAPER. There was no extraneous noise or hiccups.

I have substantial work ahead of me to reprogram it like I had it in the 90s. I used some rather unconventional drum kits which aren’t going to be in the factory programming, so I have to recreate them from memory and by examining my old MIDI files.

Incidentally, I was able to simulate a DR-660 in VSTi form using a TX16Wx software sampler and a set of DR-660 samples downloaded from the Internet. It works, but it’s a pain to setup, and it doesn’t quite sound right. So I’m glad to have the real thing.

EverQuest Legends Sub Cancelled Already

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:33:36 -0400

Tipa is one of the only people I see playing EverQuest Legends regularly: EverQuest Legends: There’s no way this is going to last. – Chasing Dings!

And is EQL attracting many people who didn’t play it back in the day?

I can only speak for myself, but no, no it isn’t.

I got to level 3 and I feel like I’ve already seen everything that the game will ever be, which I assume is this: Go to a spot, whack some seemingly random mobs to death, collect loot and XP, return to sell loot. While noting every polygon in the extremely triangular terrain.

It’s certainly a nice recreation of my memory of MMORPGs of the 90s. Back then, those game tasks were new and exciting and fired the imagination. Now not so much. I don’t really feel like I need that in my life anymore.

Am I compelled to race to level 50 and see what exciting adventure awaits at the endgame? Not really. Am I eager to take on the evil villain and save the townsfolk? Um, what villain? What town?

I’ve already concluded that there isn’t much story to see in EverQuest. So since the game itself doesn’t deliver any lore, I can just read whatever lore I need on the Internet without bothering to launch the game.

I have to imagine most of the stories that came out of OG EverQuest were stories of interactions with other players. Or stories of people selling their accounts. I remember a lot of those. Oh, and the classic: Stories of recovering a corpse.

These days, I’m quite happy to play with no other players on the server at all. The novelty of Internet socializing from the 90s, when many of the people you met were the same societal outcasts as you, has long since soured.

Anyway I can’t imagine they intended EverQuest Legends to run for the next 20 years as their star property. It’s quite obviously a short-term cash infusion because surely Daybreak or whoever it is that still runs EverQuest and EverQuest II can’t possibly be very profitable.

I can’t even make decent videos out of the game. The combat is boring to watch, and there’s hardly any NPCs that say any meaningful dialog to read out loud in interesting ways.

So yeah, I already cancelled my subscription. I played a total of maybe 3 hours? Not bad for a modern game launch, actually. Typically I’m bored with new games within the first hour.

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.