Endgame Viable

Where Are Your Screenshots?

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

I have no idea anymore.

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

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

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

Um…. good question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later…

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Anyway, don’t lose your screenshots!

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

However, the search continues for screenshots before 2013.

Answering 100 Questions for Webmasters

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

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

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

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

Blogging Daily In 2026

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

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

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

“if it’s not fun any more, just stop”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoya Fyodorova

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accumulated Blog Topics

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

Morning!

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

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

Taboo Blog Subjects

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

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

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

Superpowers

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

Real Life

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

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

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

Statistics

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

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

Blog Longevity

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

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

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

Final Fantasy XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EverQuest Legends and FFXIV

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

Morning!

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

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

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

EverQuest Legends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Fantasy XIV

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

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

Bathtub Robot

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

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

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

Old Dog Not Understanding HTML Day

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:36:00 -0400

I only heard of HTML Day for the first time this year when Aywren posted about it. Then I saw another Blaugust post referencing it. And another. And another.

So I thought I’d risk being ostracized from the in crowd again and talk about HTML.

As a professional software engineer and sometimes web developer, you’d think I’d be excited about something like HTML Day. But the fact is that I hate hand-writing HTML. I avoid it as much as possible.

Sorry.

Once again I’m in the uncomfortable position of looking at a fun thing people are having fun with and reacting with, “Huh? I don’t get it.”

I often react this way to coding challenges like Advent of Code, too.

I’m all about efficiency in development. I’m a strict adherent of the three virtues of programmers: Laziness, impatience, and hubris. I’ve tried to temper the hubris part in my older years, especially now that I’m surrounded by coworkers who are at least as talented at development as I am, if not more so, but it’s still lurking in there.

I survived the 1990s and 2000s when you had no choice but to hand-write HTML and standards were chaotic and every browser handled HTML differently. It was a dark time. The wounds are still fresh. I don’t want to go back to that.

These days, I hardly ever need to see HTML, let alone write any. I sometimes have to dig into my Hugo templates and fix something. But far more frequently I need to reach into the CSS to adjust something. Is CSS considered as part of HTML Day? I don’t know.

Anyway the HTML structure of a page is usually fairly simple and fixed: You set-it-and-forget-it.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<!-- tons of metadata that you're never sure which is useful -->
</head>
<!-- usually vast rolls of ugly-looking scripts or embedded css -->
<body>
<article>
<header>Title</header>
<!-- results of Markdown conversion -->
<footer>Links or whatever</footer>
</article>
</body>
</html>
<!-- not pictured: all the css attributes -->

Or something like that. I’m distinctly less knowledgable about pulling HTML5 out of my brain than the previous ones. I’d need to verify with some kind of authoritative source. Obviously I mean utilizing “laziness” and just asking AI in the chat window that’s always on the side of my IDEs now. There’s one over there right now as I’m typing this post in Antigravity IDE (which is a fork of VSCode and essentially a programming text editor).

There’s that pesky elephant in the room in 2026 again. AI. It’s hard to escape the universal answer to most development questions: I can just get AI to write or check whatever HTML I need so I don’t have to get distracted by troublesome details while I stay focused on the big picture. Laziness, hurray!

Larry Wall meant “laziness” and “impatience” in slightly different ways, but I tend to think of them literally: Let’s use the shortest possible path from nothing to finished application, so I can start using it as fast as possible.

There is ample opportunity for AI to help there. The two main goals for most of my personal development projects is for me to begin using them quickly, and secondarily to be able to understand and modify it one or two or five or ten years from now.

I suppose the crux of my perplexed attitude about HTML Day is that I don’t find hand-writing HTML to be a particularly creative endeavor.

In my mind, there’s typically one way to write HTML. There isn’t an infinite vista of creative ways to put together HTML tags for a web page. At a fundamental level they’re instructions to a computer program; they have to be written in a machine-readable way in order for browsers to understand them, they have to be in a certain order, and certain universally-understood conventions have developed over the years, which improve readability.

You can’t creatively decide to write <braaaaaains> instead of <head>, for example.

But perhaps I misunderstand what we mean by hand-writing HTML. Perhaps we’re talking about the creative formatting of writing. Perhaps we’re talking about the typesetting or desktop publishing of sorts that occurs in HTML pages that present writing.

First of all, I would probably remark that most of that is done with CSS rather than HTML, and CSS is even more of a set of computer instructions than HTML. There’s a vast amount of visual creativity that can be achieved with CSS, but again as a neophyte to this phenomenon I have to ask if CSS is covered by HTML Day, and if so, why? Because CSS is not HTML.

In any case, I have lost most of whatever CSS skills I had due to atrophy, and I’m happy to lean completely on AI now for that aspect of web design. Laziness!

Secondly, note that I put “results of Markdown conversion” up there in the place where the content of the blog post would be, the part that you, the reader, would actually read.

That’s because I write in Markdown, and Hugo takes that Markdown and converts it into HTML for me.

I find it vastly easier and more intuitive to creatively write in Markdown than in HTML, when it comes to simple formatting like italics and bold and headings and such.

And I intentionally keep my text formatting simple. I still think about formatting my writing like it’s going to be printed in a novel. Most novels are fairly plain text, I think it’s safe to say. Formatting changes to convey emotion or changes of perspective are (and should be) fairly rare.

The other thing about hand-writing HTML is that it just doesn’t feel like a particularly useful skill to develop or maintain anymore in 2026. For me, it’s the kind of thing you research and use once when you need it, and then forget about it until the next time.

I can’t think of many times I’ve needed heavy HTML skills in my career of software development. XML skills, definitely, but not so much HTML. Certainly not in the last 5 years. The vast majority of my time spent in HTML has been on personal projects.

In the day job, I’ve had to develop the occasional web apps for internal team usage here and there, but again, they’re usually one-off projects and not something that requires day-to-day maintenance of HTML. They’ve always been utilitarian side projects rather than the main focus of the business.

And today–I hate to keep repeating myself here, but I can only report the reality of the tools I use every day–AI does a more than adequate job of writing basic HTML and CSS for you. It’s plenty good enough for everyday working HTML needs.

How to conclude? I’m glad people enjoy creating and writing in HTML. I love that people are moving away from “the commercial web” and building their own web sites and owning their own domains and data. I’ve been doing that since the beginning; to me, it’s not a modern branded movement, it’s just “normal behavior.”

It’s just that I don’t really like hand-writing HTML, and I definitely don’t want to go back to dealing with HTML when writing creatively. Writing the words is the part that I enjoy.

Downloading EverQuest Legends

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 08:02:30 -0400

Morning! It is a Saturday morning and I 100% do not feel like writing a blog post, and in fact, largely feel like I’m “over” the rush of renewed blogging energy that Blaugust brings every year and I’m ready to move on to another project.

But alas, there are some 24 posts yet to be written. The “staying motivated” Blaugust topic week should be in the second week, not the last.

This is the dual-edged sword of writing challenges. Writing something is easy. Writing something that’s worth reading 31 days in a row is another story.

There’s value in writing every day, to practice the skill of writing which becomes rusty very quickly. But is there value in publishing what you write every day? That’s the question.

Fortunately we live in an age where quantity of content is far more important than quality of content, and we can push out whatever “slop” with confidence that it will somehow improve our following, or at least not hurt it too much.

And luckily for me, most of my blog posts are simply relating what I’ve been doing and what I will be doing. I don’t have much of the pressure of thinking up a compelling subject matter.

To illustrate this process, yesterday I took off of work early because I was exhausted from a week of go-go-go activity and wasn’t feeling too well. I ended up sleeping a lot the rest of the day, and slept way too long last night. Sleeping too much usually makes me feel lethargic, and that’s where I started today in no mood for writing.

I’ve written four short post drafts for the future, so I can always draw on them if needed. One of them is about agentic AI prompts, one is about HTML day, one is about how obviously superior ChatGPT is to Google for search, and one is a response to luckyinstar’s group project.

One is a “safe” post, but three of them are firmly in the category of “posts that might be too opinionated and controversial for the Internet and I’m not sure I care to deal with any potential fallout.”

Roger posted Not Having an Opinion today, which I can relate to. Sometimes–most times, in fact–it’s not worth expressing your opinions if nobody is asking.

On today’s agenda, I’m purchasing and installing EverQuest Legends. I saw a couple of bloggers talking about it, I’d never heard of it, and it sounded … well, not interesting per se, but different, so I thought it was worth a try. I was drawn to the promise of “solo play.”

Shockingly, I not only had previously made a Daybreak account but actually still had my credentials saved. (I honestly didn’t realize Daybreak was still around. I thought they’d been bought or sold at some point.)

I have very little history with Norrath, so I’ll be approaching it as an outsider. I never played EverQuest back in the day. Of the “first three,” I played Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call. I bought EverQuest and tried it on one of my Quake clanmate’s recommendation, but I thought the postage-stamp-sized 3D viewport was garbage in comparison to Asheron’s Call’s (and most of the gaming world’s) full screen 3D environment, so I never went back to it.

In subsequent years, I played a handful of hours of EverQuest, and a modest amount of EverQuest II, but they’ve never been my main games. I even found a screenshot of a time I played EverQuest in 2018.

I’ll at least record some videos of EverQuest Legends and that’ll feed my YouTube content machine sometime later. I imagine it will be fun for a few hours.

Speaking of YouTube, I keep forgetting to mention my video of the day. That’s how much I monitor my YouTube uploading scripts. They are very much set-them-and-forget-them operations.

Today’s video of the day is when I tried The Banner Saga back in April, a sort-of tactical RPG in the visual style of Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. It was okay, but it didn’t really click with me. I went on to try a few other tactical RPGs in that time period.

UPDATE: Minutes after publishing this, I went over to the PC to click on the “Play” button for EverQuest Legends and it immediately gave me a “cannot connect to the server” message. Not a great first impression.

Why It's Called Endgame Viable

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:36:32 -0400

Morning! This is my third attempt at today’s blog post.

The first one was going to be a very helpful post I prepared yesterday about some of the ways agentic AI has simplified my project and development life, some prompts and examples that I return to again and again. I decided to postpone that one because recent Blaugust discord activity reminded me that people absolutely hate AI.

The second one pointed that out, and generally mused about how the Internet is just filled with expressions of hatred all the time, even from good people doing good things, even in the communities you hang out in, and how much I don’t fit in with that world of hatred-slinging and I don’t really want to be part of it, but I thought it was too grumpy and judgmental to post.

So now I’m looking at Krikket’s blog post ideas for inspiration.

I’m not going to introduce myself, because I’m too old and cynical to think I’m going to meet anyone like me on the Internet. If you’d read my abandoned second post for today, you’d understand more about that. This post might provide some useful context.

The story behind my blog’s name, you ask? Well, that’s such a fascinating story, let me explain. I actually don’t remember if I’ve ever related this or not. Surely I have somewhere in my past.

Around the time I thought of the name, which was around that grand old year of 2013, when we were still spoiled for choice of good, inventive, interesting AAA or even AA MMORPGs to play every day, you couldn’t throw a rock around a discussion of class choice without someone asking, “Yes, but is class X viable at endgame?” I saw that phrasing so often I started to laugh every time I saw it.

Clever me, I thought, would co-opt the name Endgame Viable as a subtle reference to MMORPGs, and everyone out there doing Google searches for “hunter viable endgame” or “warrior viable endgame” would accidentally end up on my web site.

I don’t know if that trick actually worked or not. Probably not. But that’s why it’s called Endgame Viable.

Also, I thought at the time that the ideal blog name was exactly two words long, inspired as I was by such other popular blog names as Bio Break and Inventory Full.

Now that I’m older, and thinking of myself as “old”–even though I’m only old by marketing demographic measures and not by human lifespan statistics–I’ve started to think of the name Endgame Viable as taking on a slightly darker meaning, as I enter what will surely be the “endgame” of my actual life.

And that’s it. That’s the story.

Have a great day!

Links to Other Blaugust Posts

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 05:52:00 -0400

Morning!

This is going to be an easy one, because it’s just links to other Blaugust posts I’ve been collecting.

I’m off to a brain MRI appointment this morning and then throwing away a mattress and sofa, which was supposed to be yesterday but plans changed, and then somehow squeezing in time for the day job.

Blaugust Reading

You may or may not be aware that it’s almost impossible to actually read the posts blasting by at a thousand miles an hour during Blaugust, let alone interact with them in any way. I’m struggling with this again, as usual.

However I’ve been randomly clicking on titles in my RSS reader for the last five days, and I noted posts that resonated in some way. Perhaps this will help those blogs somehow.

Almost all of these blogs are of the post-WordPress IndieWeb style, and many of them are developers. A lot of them don’t have comment sections.

I don’t normally follow or hang out with developers, even though I am one. I find that, since the beginning of the Internet, the kind of developer who blogs and talks a lot is often a very opinionated and ideological developer, the kind who proudly deletes all their big tech accounts and runs all their web sites off of a solar-powered Raspberry Pi and looks with disdain on anyone who doesn’t follow their lead. (I exaggerate. Slightly.) I’m much more in the pragmatic category of old developer mostly looking for ways to optimize the day job. But it’s fun to check in on that other world from time to time.

The Links

MogBlog
- What to play when you’re trapped in the hospital. I find myself hanging around hospitals more and more so this was greatly appreciated.
Anarchaepteryx
- re: AI use in communities. Reactions to AI are always interesting or amusing. Though admittedly I tend to prefer the “how to use AI better” kind of reaction over the “I hate AI now and forever and so should you” reaction.
Tabitha
- Auto-Fitting Text with CSS Only, No JavaScript. I liked the old desktop-emulation style of the blog layout.
Fyr
- Garden Food 2026. I’ve had a weird desire to figure out how to grow tomatoes for many years, but never pulled the trigger. Also, there’s a rotating tagline at the bottom and the one I saw was something like “commercialized social media is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the internet” and I thought hell yeah it is and wondered where that thought came from and if that’s a common thought among younger generational bloggers and if it is, maybe there’s hope for the future.
Littlelum
- Remember to Eat Food. First time I can ever remember seeing someone other than me talk about forgetting to eat. Apparently a lot of people do this.
82MHz
- Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop?. Before AI, there was a vast amount of human slop on the Internet. I’d estimate as much as 90% of the Internet was slop before AI came along. So yeah, I’m not too bothered by AI slop. Use the same rules to avoid AI slop as to avoid human slop, i.e. “don’t click on things.”
- Why a Raspberry Pi shouldn’t be powered through it’s GPIO pins Back in the early 90s I was more familiar with the electrical workings of computer components and sometimes tinkered with hardware (my first hard drive was a DIY build kit), and Raspberry Pi talk reminds me of that, so this post was a bit of a blast from the past.
Joelchrono
- Not paranoid, but respectful “AI steals artwork” I went over this in 2024. “Training” is not stealing. Training on legally obtained copyrighted material is not stealing. If the training material was obtained illegally (and it can be proven in court), that’s a different story and the copyright owner has a case. Regardless, there are few legal precedents yet. Laws still haven’t caught up. New laws need to be written. They won’t be, because politicians.
MATT’S BLOG
- I Fixed Music Discovery Interesting. I had largely given up on music discovery after 15 years of tepid pop music and this new age of AI-generated music.
- There Is An Annual Blaugust Controversy I mean there isn’t, but everybody keeps talking about it like there is. I’ve seen exactly one respectful comment about the AI policy, then a lot of blog posts talking about a raging controversy. Shrug. And there’s that term “small web” again.
Jak2k
- Fuck Open Source! A ban on AI code in Codeberg? Codeberg is what?
- Abandoning GitHub Oh that’s what Codeberg is. I haven’t been keeping track of github ownership and whatnot. I only use it occasionally, but my company uses the enterprise version extensively.
BurgeonLab
- Costs: Price of a Personal Site on the Smallweb What’s a “Smallweb”? Why are there always new terms for things? I personally wouldn’t count electricity or Internet connectivity as a cost of blogging.
Nyman
- Licenses suggestions for your vibe-projects Funny. I have actually wondered which license to use on my github repos from time to time. This is a blog that looks like a Windows 95 email client, which is a crazy inventive design choice.
Aywren’s Nook | Gaming & Geek Blog
- What I’ve Learned About Making Better YouTube Videos. Video production: A fascinating topic. Though Aywren is describing how to make better “algorithm-worthy” videos… whereas I’m more interested in the technical aspects of video and audio and not much into building a community. There was a time when I wondered how much money I could make from YouTube but as soon as they changed the monetization threshold to 1000 subscribers that went out the window. The modern success pattern seems to be buying subscribers and a content sweat shop work ethic.
Vanderwal
- The Guideline of Two Things Not to Discuss Is Now Three More confirmation that yes, AI is, in fact, a controversial subject.
Notes by JCProbably
- Ocean of Grief Yeah, losing a pet sucks. I held onto Bella’s dog stuff for many years before I finally threw them away. I even kept a bag of dry dog food in a cabinet for years. And I still have a dog bed sitting by the front window.
JAG’s Workshop
- OpenAI Defends Itself Against Apple’s Lawsuit in the Court of Public Opinion A blog with surprising difficulty finding links to posts, as all of their article links go to external sites and not their own blog (even the RSS link). Anyway, the AI wars continue. There doesn’t seem to be much about this case to advance AI copyright precedent though.
Heart Soul Machine
- The Politics of Care I always appreciate a political post that isn’t a food fight, and muses about an actual policy topic. It’s a rarity in today’s world.
Noisy Deadlines
- A few strong opinions about AI I would hardly call these “strong” opinions. “I don’t consider AI-generated artwork to be art” is about as mainstream of an opinion as you can get, imo. Here’s a strong opinion: I don’t consider it “art” to put a header image on a blog post. It’s “work” but “necessary” because of “the algorithm” and “human nature.”
blog//x2600.cc
- Write.as/Blaugust response to: NoisyDeadlines More on AI in Blaugust, because there definitely needs to be more said about that.
michaelharley.net
- How I make my blog posts more resilient A fellow Richmond, Virginia blogger? Amazing! Found this one in the fediverse. I have also gone through importing old posts into the blog. I never think to write down any lessons learned though.
- Why I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi for browsing I abandoned Firefox so many years ago I can’t even remember why, but at the time Chrome was the hot new thing. I think I’ve tried Vivaldi before, don’t remember why it didn’t stick. Reminds me I should try again to unstick myself from Chrome.
Kelly’s World
- Debugging comments: Nope, its Dam Spam I know this is no consolation but the best thing that everyone can do to mitigate spam is to leave WordPress. The entire world’s army of spammers are working day and night to penetrate WordPress, while largely ignoring everything else. At least, that’s my experience.
A late entry: crosenthal.com | Courtney Rosenthal
- Applied Chords Ref Sheet. I haven’t studied music theory in a million years but it’s cool stuff. My mom was a piano teacher and she had an old weathered book about music theory that I remember devouring when I was much younger.