Endgame Viable

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.

Radiologist Results and GoToSocial Migration

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:19:26 -0400

Morning!

It’s another very early morning and an unusually busy day for me.

I have a dental cleaning appointment this morning, so I have to hop to it and get ready for that. (For me, that means being ready hours early and then fretting about remembering to bring everything I’m supposed to and getting there at exactly the right time.)

Afterward, a friend is coming by with a truck to help throw out an old mattress and sofa that won’t fit in my SUV. It’s an old memory foam mattress, so it’s huge, heavy, floppy, and has no handles. A nightmare to move around.

It’s a busy week for me overall, and I don’t like it. Some people thrive on busy schedules, but I get overwhelmed very quickly if I have a lot of scheduled appointments all at once, particularly more than one in a day. I ended up with a lot scheduled this week so that leaves me permanently on edge.

I’m abandoning putting the Blaugust day in the titles. That was a terrible idea.

Radiologist

In heavy news, yesterday I met with my radiologist, one of the team of doctors led by my oncologist, who are responsible for killing cancer cells in my body. It turns out that the troublesome new cancer spot in my right hip is bigger than I thought, and is actually in my right butt bone.

I feel nothing of the new spot, but I’ll be starting the process of getting radiation treatments on it next week. It starts with a “CT simulation” appointment where they will put me in a CT scanner and build a computer model of the target area (I’m paraphrasing heavily from a ChatGPT explanation). Then, I imagine a week or so later, the actual treatments begin.

Last year I received radiation treatment on a spot in my left hip, and at that time, they tattooed three dots on me: One on my left hip, one on my right, and one on my lower abdomen. They use those dots to align the machine to my body so they don’t irradiate the wrong place. They’ll be using those same dot tattoos for this new treatment.

It wasn’t clear if it would be a week of daily treatments or two weeks of semi-daily treatments. Last time it was 5 days in a week, but this time he said it could be every other day. I assume that’ll be setup later. And it all has to work around my chemo schedule.

Anyway, the goal for the upcoming radiation is to kill off this cluster of cancer cells before they decide to start spreading, because these appear to have developed resistance to the treatments I’ve been getting for the last year. I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally don’t want to host treatment-resistant cancer cells. A weird quirk of mine.

It’s all a bit of a wake-up call, and a reminder that this thing I’m going through is not over, and this period where everything has felt calm and routine and under control is going to end at some point, when the cancer cells start to evolve and adapt to the treatments I’m getting. At which point they will have to start going to one or more of the second-line treatment options. (Things like different drugs or immunotherapy.)

So that’s the latest in the ever-evolving “cancer journey.”

Incidentally, my radiologist is one of the most laid-back doctors I’ve ever met. Usually I feel like doctors are trying to rush through your appointment to get to their next one, but a bunch of times I felt like I almost had to carry the conversation with this guy. Seems like he knows what he’s doing, though.

GoToSocial

In the realm of the less existential, last year around the time all my health problems started, I stopped posting anything on my official @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com fediverse account, and eventually shut down my gotosocial instance.

Yesterday I migrated my gotosocial instance from an unraid server on my local network to a VPS up in the cloud, and turned it back on. It was easier than I expected, thanks to Antigravity doing all the research and writing a bunch of a scripts for me. I was able to restore a backup of my postgres database to the VPS and everything came up right where I left off on the unraid server.

I don’t use the fediverse much, but since I was wasting money on this VPS server anyway, I figured I might as well put something useful on it.

I continue to resist the pull of following people on social media, though. Mainly, resisting the pull of feeling like I’m friends with people who probably don’t know me and certainly care nothing for my feelings. After being away from that game for a long time, it feels a bit gross to go back to it.

My mental state is better when I approach people on the Internet as “coworkers” as opposed to “friends.”

Anyway, gts.endgameviable.com is back up, federating away.

My Earliest Blogs

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:44:30 -0400

My First Blog

Why yes, I will use that image so I don’t have to find one myself. Thank you!

The Blaugust community topic today is about your first blog. I actually think of this site as a continuation of my first blog, in a way. It’s all just “my thoughts that I put online” to me. A sort of live memoir.

This page from the Internet Archive isn’t really “my blog” but it’s one of the first things I ever published on the Internet. It’s a Quake match update on a web page owned by the sysop of the Quake servers. The page was created by hand in Microsoft FrontPage and uploaded to the server with ftp.

“03/23/97 - Check out The Ungrateful Dead Matches page for the results of the UD vs. Gunslingers match. Following our match, The Gunslingers played a match with Flag!, which I was able to record as an observer. The demos are available in the WarRoom. -Sal”

That was me. Salamander was my Quake name back then. Then, when I joined the Crayola Clan, my name became ]CC[-UltrViolet, minus the “a” because it was too long for a Quake name.

I got my first domain name uvtek.net and started putting my thoughts out into the world in blog-like form in 1998. It looked something like this (another from the Internet Archive). You may notice a surprising similarly to what Blue’s News looked like in 1998, because back then, to me, that was the epitome of clean web design.

That page was also hand-crafted in Microsoft FrontPage and updated via. ftp.

Somewhere around 2003 I built a blog platform from PHP and MySQL and started using it. I’m having trouble finding evidence of it in the Internet Archive, though. I used to put a redirection on the front page and that probably messed up their crawler.

But here is the code for that blog platform on github.com. I guess you could call that my “first blog” in the sense that it’s the first blog software I wrote, and it’s the first blog site I ran that would be recognizable as a blog by modern standards. It’s funny seeing those “last modified 16 years ago” date stamps.

Technically there may have been earlier prototypes of that blog code but I don’t remember them.

I’ve imported all of those old database-based posts from 2003 onwards into this blog. You can find them on the Archives page, if you dare.

I moved from uvtek.net to thomaskrehbiel.com around 2008-ish, according to the Internet Archive. I retired my custom-built blog platform and moved to WordPress around 2012-2013 because I couldn’t be bothered to keep up with the maintenance anymore.

That’s also when I started Endgame Viable, which I intended to be for gaming stuff. It morphed into a more general purpose blog over time.

I switched Endgame Viable to a Hugo static site generator in 2021, and around that time I decided I wanted to consolidate all of my online presence into Endgame Viable (mainly because it was my only blog with actual followers), which has been a long and slow migration process that is still not finished.

Health Updates

In other news, yesterday I got a call from my oncologist with results from my neck MRI: There’s nothing cancer-related in the neck region affecting the arm nerves, which is good news. However I still can’t bend my thumb. Next up is a brain MRI on Thursday.

I previously mentioned that a new small spot of cancer has shown itself in my right hip. My oncologist and radiologist have consulted with each other and agree this is a site of progression that needs to be dealt with, so I’m going to be getting some radiation on that spot. I have an appointment to see the radiologist later today.

Directory Organization

I’ve spent the last couple days of doing massive reorganizations of my blog-related directories on my laptop. I’ve done so much agentic AI-driven reorganization of files and code cleanup that I ran out of tokens a couple of times. Running out of AI tokens in the middle of an operation feels like what I imagine getting cut off from a severe drug addiction must feel like. I will happily pay any amount of money to turn on that agentic assistant again.

I was finally able to get my comment system decoupled enough from endgameviable and organized into a monorepo for publication in case anyone wants to see how it works: spiritriot-comment-system on github. All the documentation in there was written by AI, because I couldn’t be bothered. The point was to get something started, instead of continuing to put it off forever.

And there’s my timer going off. Have a great day!

UPDATE: I did an emergency update to my comment system to add Akismet anti-spam scanning to the backend because I received my very first successful spam probe from France this morning.

Neck MRI Completed

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:10:20 -0400

Morning! It’s a gray and dismal rainy start to this Monday morning, the start of another work week. And, for me, the start of a new work sprint.

I already regret putting the Blaugust day in the post titles. I was trying to make it easier for anyone counting, but it really looks ugly.

MRI Complete

Yesterday I drove clear to the other side of the city to get an MRI on my neck. I drove a complete circuit around the circular bypass highways around the city.

The MRI itself was uneventful, and took about 30 minutes. The hospital that contained the imaging center was eerily empty on a Sunday.

Every time I get an MRI, I have to fill out a blue piece of paper with a gigantic list of questions about things that might be metallic implants in my body to worry about. Since I’ve lost most of the dexterity in my right thumb, it’s rather difficult to hold a pen to fill out such a form, so I felt like a child scribbling with a crayon when answering the “reason you’re here” question.

Incidentally my attempts to “train” for lying down for the MRI were largely unsuccessful, and my neck positively screamed with discomfort the entire time I was in the machine.

Luckily they have a device that sort of locks your head in place with inflating balloon-like bladders on both sides of your head. It’s a big help, but I still felt like I could have easily busted through that system and turned my head. There’s some kind of huge imbalance in my neck muscles, and my head constantly wants to turn to the right while I’m lying on my back, and I have to fight to hold my head still while I’m in the machine.

I try to use some dumb mental tricks during the MRI to pass the time and take my mind off of how uncomfortable my neck is. Since it was top of mind yesterday, I mentally described my blog’s comment system as if giving a presentation. I kept telling myself “this is so easy!” even though my neck muscles felt like they would tear themselves in half any moment. In the past I would mentally sing songs inside the machine. Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody was a favorite.

Anyway, I’m mostly convinced the MRI is not going to show anything wrong with the nerves going to my arm. At that point it will probably not be my oncologist’s problem anymore, and then I’ll have to figure out what kind of doctor I need to find to zero in on what is actually going on and it’ll be a huge exhausting ordeal.

But maybe I’ll get lucky and there will be a clear cause showing on the MRI. I also have a brain MRI coming up this Thursday, one of my regularly-scheduled brain checkups after having a tumor removed and Gamma Knife radiation last year. I fervently hope my arm issue is not caused by something in my brain. (That seems unlikely.)

Comment Updates

I pushed a huge change to my DIY comment system yesterday. You can authenticate with Google, Mastodon, or IndieAuth. Or just keep using an email address. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this by August of 2026, but yes, as a professional software developer, I played the role of product owner and directed Antigravity to do most of the work.

Behind the scenes I also built a complete local testing environment out of Localstack, which was very useful in getting everything tested. Localstack emulates AWS resources, which I learned about and worked with at the day job.

It’s tempting to write a long blog post describing the comment system, but since it is, as previously mentioned, August of 2026, we live in an age where I can simply provide a link to a git repo and any old run-of-the-mill AI tool can write a complete analysis of every part of it. And frankly you, too, can direct any old agentic AI service to build a static blog comment system in a couple days. It’s a fairly straightforward concept, in software engineering terms.

Incidentally I originally devised the system in a way that anticipated installing it on any static blog, not just mine, but of course I’ve done exactly zero testing of that concept. Maybe someday. Honestly it’s probably just a few more AI prompts away (e.g. “identify any problems with installing this comment system on a different blog with different aws resources and make a plan to resolve them.”) Someday I’ll get it all packaged together into one nice convenient GitHub repo.

Death of WordPress?

Here’s an interesting factoid I discovered yesterday: I asked Antigravity to run a quick analysis on the list of blogs in Blaugust and found, to my great surprise, that the vast majority of participating blogs are not WordPress blogs. I found roughly 80 of the ~115* blogs did not have the telltale “WordPress” in the generator meta tag. Surely this is a banner day for the eventual demise of what I call the WordPress Industrial Complex.

Not that there’s anything wrong with WordPress. It’s just that they almost single-handedly created most of the bloat and inefficiencies and security concerns of the entire Internet.

* UDPATE: That number is already obsolete within an hour of posting it. Owl’s OPML now has 127 blogs and Roger is reporting 138 participants on Discord.

Video of the Day

I forgot yesterday’s video of the day. It was the last video I recorded of Nioh 3, when I encountered a random boss that soured me on the entire experience, as Nioh bosses tend to do.

This morning’s video is another from when I tried to play Resident Evil 4, in preparation for getting the new Resident Evil Requiem, which I still haven’t gotten yet.

It’s an ill-fated attempt to play RE4 because I still haven’t gotten very far into it, mainly because for some reason the game flickers horribly on my monitor. I often have weird problems like that with RE Engine games.

P.S. I did something different this morning and asked Antigravity to spellcheck this post. It found and corrected four minor problems.

Comment Authentication Options

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:34:30 -0400

Morning! I awoke too early again this morning.

Yesterday I mowed the front and back yards with the riding mower (I live on about a one-acre lot, so push mowing is not an option), then I used my string mower to trim around the house, which is, unfortunately, a push mower. It was hot and humid outside but I wanted to get it done before the predicted rain today.

For me, a person who is not exactly in stellar physical condition irrespective of any current health issues, it was a lot of work, and this morning my whole body aches.

I spent the rest of yesterday working on the blog.

On the agenda for today is driving clear across town to get an MRI on my neck, and continuing to work on the comment system for the blog.

I’m working on adding real-life authentication to sign in for comments, another long-standing goal of mine. With Blaugust popping off, it seems like a good time to work on that.

Initially I’m adding Google auth and IndieAuth, two authentication schemes on the opposite spectrum of the privacy spectrum, which I find delightfully confounding. Is he a corporate shill or an indie darling? Nobody knows!

So far, adding Google auth was spectacularly easy.

Adding IndieAuth is nowhere near as easy. This matches my general web experience, where niche developer-focused solutions tend to be far less user-friendly.

Auth schemes I won’t be adding include Facebook and X, in case you’re wondering. I use Google auth as my primary Internet identity provider, so that’s why I wanted to add that one. The rest can go pound sand, as far as I’m concerned. Unless there’s a huge public demand for something.

However, I may also add a Mastadon authentication, because it looks straightforward and I know there are a lot of Mastadon users in this corner of the blogosphere.

There isn’t a huge benefit of authenticating to leave comments here, by the way. It mainly prevents anyone else from leaving comments under your name. Activity on my blog is so low that such a problem doesn’t exist anyway. The whole authentication addition is mainly a development exercise for me to play with something new.

Anyway I hope to roll all of that out to the blog by the end of the day today. Hopefully without completely breaking everything.

As for the MRI, I can report that my right thumb and arm have not been bothering me as much lately, and in fact I can bend my right thumb slightly more than I could a few days ago, so I’m hopeful that the underlying cause may be addressable with something like physical therapy rather than surgery.

I tried to read some Blaugust posts and even post some comments but, man, there’s a lot. I want to focus on more of the post-WordPress-era DIY blogs this year if I can.

Because WordPress still vexes me even from beyond the grave. I still have the same persistent problem where I simply can’t comment on WordPress blogs because of some annoying login issue. It keeps detecting that I have to login with my old blog’s WordPress credentials to post a comment even when I don’t want to, and of course my credentials are long gone, so it never works and I have to give up because I simply can’t be bothered to debug that issue.

And that’s about all I have time for. I forgot to set a timer once again, but I want to get back to working on the comment system.

Welcome To The Party, Pal

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:36:33 -0400

Good Morning

“Good Morning Friends.” That was how Belghast started most of his blog posts. I like to try something new with every Blaugust, so in honor of the one who came up with this event, I’m going to try an homage to his style by writing more personal, from-the-hip blog posts this August.

My plan for Blaugust is to get up every morning, start a blank post, and write whatever comes to mind. Ideally I’ll set a timer to write for perhaps 30 minutes, however I’ve consistently failed to start such a timer.

Since I don’t have a theme this year, I’ll likely be relying on Krikket’s calendar of prompts.

“What made you decide to do Blaugust this year, and what are your personal goals?”

I was perfectly happy posting twice a month. That’s a very sustainable pace for me. I don’t know what, if anything, I would have done with Blaugust this year if we hadn’t heard the awful news of Belghast’s death.

Given his momentus influence on my part of the blogosphere, I felt like I had to do something to honor his memory, and Blaugust felt like the very least that I could do. So here I am.

I’ve generally avoided becoming a Blaugust Mentor over the years, so I don’t know what’s been happening behind the scenes, but I want to send a huge thank-you to the organizers of Blaugust this year. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to pull this together so quickly.

Anti-Mentoring

Incidentally, I’ve never lobbied to become a Mentor because I would be a terrible blogging mentor, especially in 2026. My advice for new bloggers is usually: Don’t do it! It’s a terrible idea! Has there been a new blogger “success story” in, oh, I don’t know, the last 15 years? Not that I know of.

Mainstream blogging in 2026 is usually the forgotten last component of an overall multi-media brand strategy, and it’s been that way for at least 10 years.

Otherwise, blogging is mainly for people who really like to write, first and foremost. People who will find a way to write whether they’re writing on the Internet or not. As a long-term hobby, it’s almost always a money sink.

However, I will note that based on the new blogs I’ve seen in Blaugust the last few years, there seems to be a rise in “indieweb”-style blogs, a backlash to the big corporate WordPress-style blogs and a return to early 2000s blogs where you had to write your own platform in order to blog. These types of blogs tend to be dominated by programmers who like to DIY. (I’m one of those, too.)

A Burger Press Tale

Anyway, that’s enough soapboxing. This is supposed to be about mundane anecdotes.

Yesterday I tried a “burger press” for the first time. I was searching for a device to make hamburger patties, something like what I remember from my youth, which was just a round burger-sized metal container with a plunger on one end.

All I found were tons of variations on these contraptions called burger presses, so I gave one a try, thinking, oh well I guess these must be improvements on the very simple device I remember from the past.

It turns out they are not improvements. They are huge, cumbersome, awkward, inefficient, and hard to clean. I am planning to throw mine right into the garbage, and go back to searching for the old plunger-based device like I remember.

Video of the Day

I have an automated pipeline that uploads my game videos to YouTube every night. I’ve spontaneously decided to force them on you this month. Today’s YouTube upload: World of Warcraft Midnight. One of the last ones before I got bored with the expansion.

Blaugust Eve 2026

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 05:55:40 -0400

Early Morning

I’m up very early again this morning. I got a new memory foam cervical neck pillow which I used for the first time last night and it seemed to work well, but I woke up about 4 feeling like I’d had a full night’s rest and I was ready to rock the day.

Earlier in my life I struggled with getting good sleep but I’m generally on the other side of that. I have a decent mattress now which I think helps tremendously, and a fairly routine sleep schedule, which I also think helps.

One thing I still struggle with, though, is finding good pillows. Every time I think I find a good one, it turns out it only works for a short time before I’m back to a plain old ordinary pillow.

Anyway, the issue with my right thumb and arm seems to have plateaued, for which I’m grateful. It makes me less anxious that something is spiraling out of control.

I’ve adapted to the lack of thumb dexterity, and do more things left-handed. If I’m careful to avoid stretching my right arm out in certain ways, the pain is minimal. I’m still taking Tylenol on a fairly regular basis, though. I’m trying to do back and neck stretches and exercises I’ve done in that past to see if that will help any, but so far nada. Just waiting on the MRI Sunday.

I’ve actually been “training” for lying in an MRI position. I think I mentioned before that lying flat on my back is pretty uncomfortable, so I’ve been practicing that by lying on the floor once or twice a day in the hope that my neck muscles in particular will get used to it before my upcoming neck and brain MRIs. The things you have to do when you get old.

Blaugust Eve

It occurred to me that I hadn’t made a post yet with the obligatory Blaugust 2026 header, so I thought I would do one this morning, on this, the eve of tomorrow’s Blaugust starter gun. In my time zone, at least.

Kudos to whoever made that image. Was it Indiecator? I’ve credited it to Indiecator so apologies if that’s incorrect. [UPDATE: It was Jaedia, sorry!] The transparency is cleverly designed so it seamlessly transforms from light mode to dark mode, a rarity in blog header images.

I didn’t make a Blaugust promotion post because frankly I assumed that my blog would be the very last place anyone would find out about Blaugust. Let’s just say I don’t have a thriving community of followers here. Most everyone I see in the comments would have already been aware of Blaugust long ago.

Zero Hour?

Speaking of time zones, when exactly is the zero hour for Blaugust? Is it 8/1 00:00:00 in your local time zone or is it 8/1 00:00:00 UTC?

I’m a professional software developer and that kind of ambiguous date issue is something that I deal with on a daily basis. For the purposes of my own sanity, I will go with what I have to assume is the only true and correct answer, which is 00:00:00 UTC.

If it’s 00:00:00 in your local time zone, that would make counting posts considerably more difficult.

In any case, I’m of the opinion that most of the administrative effort of Blaugust should be off-loaded to the participants, so that the organizers don’t have to do a lot of math at the end of the event. Things are hard enough in this world without adding math. Participants can self-report the number of posts they did at the end. That makes any ambiguous zero hour timing a moot point. It’s not like there’s going to be a Congressional investigation into the accuracy of these things anyway.

Python Refactoring

Yesterday I continued refactoring my video processing python scripts with Antigravity assistance. This time I was working to clean up all the free-for-all dicts with strictly typed data classes.

I always call python code “scripts” because I fundamentally don’t believe python is a very good language for anything but scripting. It’s not a language I would turn to for e.g. service application development, though unfortunately where I work that seems to be a minority opinion.

One thing that bothers me about python is that every single python repo I encounter has a completely different strategy for package management and linting. There seems to be roughly seventeen different methods for doing those things. I greatly prefer using languages where there is one package manager and one linting tool, like Golang.

Not much else to talk about. Good luck with Blaugust everyone!

Upcoming Cervical Spine MRI

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:55:11 -0400

Health Updates

Morning!

What should we talk about this morning. Let’s see. War in Iran? Hard pass. The role of social media in traumatizing whole generations of humans? I’m going to say no on that one too.

Let’s go with, oh, I don’t know… my health! Again!

I’ve mentioned my right hand a few times. For background, in the span of roughly the last two weeks, I’ve lost a lot of the functional use of my right thumb (I can no longer bend it at the first joint), I’m now having trouble straightening my right elbow without pain, and I have aching pains in my right armpit/back/neck/shoulder region. The pain has gotten bad enough that I have to take Tylenol pretty frequently.

I expressed my concerns to my oncologist in a message yesterday that, given how quickly it seems to be progressing, I’m worried the pain levels may escalate beyond the point where Tylenol helps, and I’m worried about waiting for the results of next week’s brain MRI before moving on to scanning the neck area.

Without further question, she ordered a stat MRI of my cervical spine area (the neck, where all the nerves that go to the arm are), and I got one scheduled for this coming Sunday. It was literally the first available appointment anywhere within range. Still, I’ll have to drive about 35 minutes to a place I’ve never been to get it.

I’m really hopeful something will be revealed on that MRI. I’m even more hopeful it will turn out to be something that can be corrected with some physical therapy, and not some kind of degenerative nerve disease. I’ll try to think positive thoughts.

Still, if this isn’t reversible, I’m contemplating the possibility that the very last game that I was able to play with a game controller was Rise of the Ronin on the PS5. Of all the games to be the last one, that’s not exactly one I’d want to go out on.

Blaugust Preparations

Yesterday I started putting together a list of YouTube Channels I semi-regularly follow for whenever Creator Appreciation week is. Sort of a Blogroll for YouTube Channels. I tried to focus on the more independent creator channels, rather than big corporate media things who happen to also have YouTube channels.

YouTube doesn’t make it easy to export a list of subscriptions, by the way. I had to (close your eyes if you’re anti-AI) use Antigravity to build a tool to query the YouTube API to pull down my list of subscriptions and format it in Markdown for me. After that I edited the list to group them by subject category and viola.

Antigravity Refactoring

Speaking of Antigravity, yesterday I also used Antigravity to accomplish a very, very long-standing goal I had to refactor all of the Python scripts that handle my video recording, processing, and uploading pipeline.

I’m not a native Python programmer, so those scripts were patched together over years and had the look of someone who is not especially proficient at writing clean, readable Python code (they were among the first Python code I’d ever written). It was a bunch of embarrassing spaghetti code, in other words. I’ve been wanting to clean it up and modernize it for many, many years, but just never had the time and/or motivation to do so.

Well, a handful of Antigravity prompts later (actually it was dozens), and all the old crappy legacy Python formatting is gone and replaced with new, modern, clean syntax, with no change in functionality. I was even able to add a suite a tests for the complex video rendering and audio mixing pipelines to perform regression tests before and after the modernization. Easy peasy.

This morning’s YouTube upload (Nioh 3) was accomplished with the refactored scripts and to my eye appears to have worked successfully.

If only Antigravity could help with household tasks like cleaning, decluttering, and installing light fixtures. If one could buy a smart robot to do those things, I’m getting to the point in my life where I might seriously consider such a purchase. That kind of robot is probably still quite some years away in the future, but it’s starting to look at least distantly possible now, and possibly even inevitable.

For a person like me who is getting older and lives alone and has some health issues, a robot assistant is not a terrible idea. Assuming it wouldn’t murder me in my sleep.

Well that veered in a weird direction. Time to stop.