Endgame Viable

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.

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.

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.

This post is for day 4 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

This post is for day 3 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

This post is for day 2 of Blaugust 2026.

“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.

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.)

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.

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.

This post is for day 1 of Blaugust 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Morning! I bent my self-imposed rules a bit and started writing this post yesterday afternoon. I was just going to jot down some bullet points but I got carried away. That’s why it’s too long and multi-topic’ed.

I’m glad I did, too, because I had trouble sleeping last night for some reason and I’m up again at an ungodly hour. I’m going to crash hard at some point today.

Yesterday was, a week after my infusion, my official “return to normal” day, chemo-side-effects-wise. Appetite returned with a vengeance, and I successfully downed both a hamburger for lunch and a Nachos Supreme from a local Mexican restaurant for supper. Though my mouth is still pretty sensitive so I’m uber vulernable to hurting myself with even mildy spicy foods for a few more days yet.

I had a video call with my oncologist, where we went over the results of my PET scan last week. Everything is stable, however there is a troublesome new cancer spot that has made an appearance in my right hip bone. It’s very subtle, and has an SUV value of 4.6, which is just above the “nominal” level of 3.

It’s possible it’s an indication that the cancer is learning to adapt to the treatments I’m getting, so my oncologist is all over it.

She wants to do another PET scan in two months to see if that right hip spot remains stable over that time or gets larger (“progresses,” as they call it), and then we’ll decide what to do about it. (Possibly radiation.) I feel no pain or any effect at all from that spot, and there’s no danger of my hip spontaneously shattering or anything like that.

Meanwhile I’m still having trouble with my right hand (the thumb, specifically), and now I have some pain in my elbow and shoulder area. It’s getting noticably worse. I’ve never had a pinched nerve before, but it feels like what I’d imagine a pinched nerve would feel like.

The PET scan did not reveal any cancer-related causes, so the next steps are my regularly scheduled brain MRI next week to rule out brain causes, and then potentially an MRI of my neck/shoulder region. It all sounds logical to me, but I’m worried it will take too long to get to a diagnosis. In the meantime I have to be careful I don’t accidentaly drop things I pick up with my right hand.

As I’m typing this, I can barely even bend my right thumb. Many normal activities are suddenly challenging, like, say, holding a pen. I’m really hopeful it’s reversible, because otherwise, well, I don’t want to think about that.

After mulling it over, and seeing that there are people out there who are extremely passionate about this, I decided not to use any AI-generated imagery during Blaugust. It’s more work for me, but it’s a fairly minor sacrifice.

So yesterday I started building a new library of generic stock images that covers broad subject categories. It’s an arduous, soul-draining process. The images I use during Blaugust are going to look extremely stock and free.

However I made an AI skill to reduce some of the tedium of pulling images down from free-images.com, converting them to the right size and format, and plopping them into the proper directory in my S3 image bucket. You folks with your fancy-schmancy WordPresses have it easy.

I’ve also been combing through my recent personal photos. You can see one on this very post. That’s Gracie, and that’s a fairly common sight for me when I wake up, if I’m not following the standard morning routine. I will use that for posts where I sit in judgment of something or someone. (I try not to write those kinds of posts anymore, though, so this is probably my only opportunity to use it.)

There’s been a couple of firebombs thrown into the blogosphere recently about AI. It’s a new culture war, because we definitely needed more of those. I’m conspicuously avoiding the topic despite having some relevant feelings on the subject, because everything’s already been said and all the battle lines have been drawn and there’s not much point in discussion anymore.

My personal stance on AI in content creation is pretty middle-of-the-road, I think. Not extreme in one way or the other. I have roughly the same stance on AI usage as I would have on washing machines or airplanes or microwaves. I think I will write an AI Policy page at some point to lay it all out for anyone who cares.

Conveniently labeled so Bhagpuss can skip. :)

Last night I played through another quest in the Endwalker MSQ, entitled Going Underground. It took a whopping 58 minutes. Something about building a space ark.

I don’t remember if this is a thing in other MMORPGs or not: In FFXIV, when you’re following a quest giver from location to location, sometimes there are other instanced NPCs standing near the quest giver. Those instanced NPCs have little bits of flavor dialog if you click on them that are moderately relevant to the quest you’re on.

It’s completely optional, but I have a habit of clicking on every one to see what they say.

It becomes a bit of a problem when there are eight of those NPCs tagging along with you on the path of this quest. Every single time you move to another step in the quest, you have to click on all eight of them to see what they have to say, and it gets a bit tedious.

I say “you have to” but you don’t actually have to. I just do it because if I didn’t, I’d miss something.

And in the videos I’m studiously recording, I read all of that text out loud for posterity. I don’t know if you know this, but reading out the lines of eight different NPCs one after the other and trying to make them sound slightly different from one another is a wee bit of a challenge.

But it’s fun to try, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.

The point is, I really hope they quit with the huge packs of NPC roadies traveling along with you in Dawntrail and the upcoming Evercold.

I read a great pre-Blaugust post from the Blaugust 2026 blogroll: In the era of AI slop, human curation is even more important.

Interestingly, I’m on YouTube all the time, and I don’t see too much AI slop in my recommendations. But I’m a very careful clicker. I don’t just click on anything in front of me, I examine the title and the thumbnail and don’t click on things if I get even a tiny whiff of AI (or non-AI) slop content.

Here’s a tip I use: If I’m clicking on a video from a channel I’m unfamiliar with, I will often open it in a new tab, so I can return to the first tab and use the “Not Interested” or “Don’t Recommend Channel” options on the original thumbnail, if it turns out the video sucks. For reasons beyond my capacity to understand, once you’re actually viewing a video, those options aren’t available anymore, and of course if you go back in your browser the whole recommendations page changes and your original breadcrumb is gone.

Anyway the above post has inspired me to make a note to make a list of human content I consume on a recurring basis and put it on the blog somewhere. Perhaps it will be a Blaugust post, since I believe Creator Appreciation is one of the themes.

Have a fantastic Wednesday!

I learned something about YouTube channels in RSS readers this morning.

tl;dr Add YouTube channels to InoReader with the channel’s url, not the channel’s RSS feed url, to preserve descriptions.

I’ve long known that every YouTube channel has an RSS feed associated with it, and I’ve used it in my Endgame Viable Firehose feed for years. If you don’t know, the “firehose” is an aggregation of my blog and my YouTube channel combined.

However, my YouTube channel feed in InoReader has had blank descriptions for a long time. At one point in the past, I remember seeing descriptions, but they disappeared and I never understood why.

Now I do.

I happened to notice Zelibeli from Blaugust 2026 went live with a Minecraft stream, and it showed up in InoReader with a prominent “live” tag. That’s neat, I thought. I’ve never seen a livestream show up in an RSS reader like that before.

Now that the livestream is over, Zelibeli’s video shows up in InoReader as a standard YouTube video, just like my YouTube videos do, and any other blog post with a YouTube embed does. Except theirs has a description, while mine doesn’t.

That’s really neat, I thought. How are they doing that?

Well, it turns out I was supposed to have used my channel’s url when adding it to InoReader, instead of the channel’s RSS feed url. The YouTube video descriptions are embedded in media:description tags instead of standard summary or content tags, so if you just add the RSS feed url, InoReader doesn’t know how to fetch the descriptions. When you add the YouTube channel url directly, it detects it as a YouTube channel and specially processes it.

So I re-added my YouTube channel to InoReader using the main channel url and voila, the descriptions re-appeared.

Neato.

I’m really glad to have stumbled on this blog post topic this morning so I could avoid talking about my health or AI controversy again.

I woke up at about 2:30 this morning, wide awake. While rain fell and thunder rumbled outside, I spent the time impulsively “writing” a tool to fetch RSS feeds and count posts. (Antigravity did most of the work. I merely supervised.)

Perhaps it could be useful to Blaugust accountants at the end of the month.

Then I went back to sleep for a couple of hours.

I actually followed through on yesterday’s threat and played Final Fantasy XIV for the first time since (checks notes) March 16th. I finished one quest, specifically the Outside Help quest, a level 88 Endwalker Main Scenario Quest.

Naturally it was one of the nearly-an-hour-long quests that FFXIV likes to do from time to time. It was all exposition and cut scenes. Thankfully most of them were voice acted.

It occurs to me that I talk about my health quite a lot, and that must surely be one of the most boring topics to read about, but in my situation, it takes up quite a lot of my daily bandwidth. So here’s some more.

It’s day 6 of the chemo cycle and I’m feeling better this morning. I didn’t throw up any yesterday, and managed to eat a little bit more. The IV fluids yesterday morning helped a lot. I actually felt hungry when I got back home. So I’m exiting the post-chemo slump and getting back to normal operations.

My right hand gripping issue, however, seems to be growing up my arm. I’m now feeling some odd pain in my elbow and shoulder, making me think I’ve got some kind of pinched nerve in my shoulder area. I’m looking forward to ruling out any cancer involvement and finding the right doctor to deal with that, because it’s fairly annoying.

I have a virtual appointment with my oncologist tomorrow to go over last week’s PET scan results. I’ve seen them on the health portal already and they sound generally positive, but there’s some new indications on there that surprised me.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not, but my regular oncologist has been on maternity leave for many months, and I’ve been on a rotating doctor-of-the-week schedule for a while, so it was a great relief to find that she was back on duty last week.

Otherwise it’s the start of a new work week. The second week of a two-week sprint for me.

It turns out I’m writing a quick post this morning after all.

One of the issues with writing daily is that I run out of things to talk about pretty quickly. Especially when I’m not feeling great and spending most of my time resting.

It’s day 5 in the chemo cycle, and I’m still pretty tired. Unfortunately my streak of not throwing up ended yesterday about 6 when my stomach suddenly decided to revolt. Sigh. I feel fine this morning, though.

Other than yesterday evening, it’s been going pretty well. Though my appetite is still gone and I’m not eating or drinking much.

A little later this morning I’m heading off to the infusion center for my scheduled IV fluids to rehydrate. I have a standing appointment for the Sunday after my infusion.

I’m starting to notice that I’m running out of videos in my upload queue for the YouTube channel. So I’ve adjusted the upload rate of my videos from two a day to one a day.

Other than that brief look at Rise of the Ronin, I haven’t played any games since, let’s see… May 19th. That was Battle Brothers.

I’d like to get back into Final Fantasy XIV, because I have to finish Endwalker and then go through the next expansion… which was… drawing a blank… Dawntrail? Was that it? I think that’s right.

Maybe I’ll make an effort to play something later today. I don’t have anything else on the agenda, except sitting around and watching television or sampling some audiobooks.

P.S. The purpose of this post was mainly testing some new stock image search features I added to my post-processing script. For some inexplicable reason, that roller coaster came up as a match for this blog post topic.