Endgame Viable

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.”

This post is for day 14 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

This post is for day 13 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

This post is for day 12 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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!

This post is for day 11 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This post is for day 10 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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 instead of , 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.

This post is for day 9 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

This post is for day 8 of Blaugust 2026.

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!

This post is for day 7 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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.

This post is for day 6 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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.

In the realm of the less existential, last year around the time all my health problems started, I stopped posting anything on my official @[email protected] 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.

This post is for day 5 of Blaugust 2026.