This was actually supposed to be published on the 12th. :) I saw an interesting post from fellow Blaugustian Cascade: Making a Comment System with Eleventy and Netlify - cascading.space. Implementation of comments on a static blog is a topic I’ve wrestled with for lo these past three and a half years. The short version is: You can’t do it. The long version is: You can do it, but probably not the way you want to. I’ve been using a third-party comment system called CommentBox. It’s very...| Endgame Viable - Dev
Aywren had a great idea for a post topic that I felt inspired to steal for Blaugust. I also run a static blog, built with Hugo and deployed to AWS (Amazon Web Services). It’s been running since 2021. I write in Markdown instead of HTML, though. I personally shudder at the thought of writing in HTML–I had quite enough of that in the 90s. I prefer to keep post content 100% separated from formatting and layout (it’s a programmer thing). I write in a very old-school non-WYSIWIG way, in a pl...| Endgame Viable - Dev
I was taking a look at the functionality of CommentBox, the third-party comment system I’ve been using on the blog for a while now, and noticing that there seem to be some bugs in authenticating with any method other than Google. I didn’t notice because I use Google to authenticate on the Internet roughly 99% of the time. Also, I don’t often comment on my own blog. I then noticed that CommentBox hasn’t had a new blog entry on their site since 2018, and I didn’t see any activity in t...| Endgame Viable - Dev
tl;dr I’m trying Commentbox for comments. My general opposition to comment sections on blogs almost entirely boils down to convenience. It’s very inconvenient to post comments on blogs. Full stop. Specifically logging in to post comments. It’s also very inconvenient to host comments on a homegrown, static blog site, like mine. Now I could list off a slew of security, legal, and ideological reasons to oppose blog comment sections, but still, it’s a handy way to communicate with blog au...| Endgame Viable - Dev
I wrote down this draft of a brainstorming session in May 2023, and as I read it again in November 2023, I realize I was foretelling the future. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is the origin story of the latest round of tinkering to the blog site. Here we go again. Once again I find myself wanting to redo my entire web site from scratch, to write and deploy my own custom blog platform, because nothing else out there does quite what I want. The What This time, I want to combine a trad...| Endgame Viable - Dev
I thought I’d attempt to concisely describe the behind-the-scenes of this site. There’s been some updates after a flurry of new development activity in the last month or so. The Blog Endgame Viable is a static site, as of 2021. There are pros and cons for static sites. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you have some kind of background in web development. Every blog post begins as a Markdown file written on my MacBook in a text editor (I use VSCode, although I just learned that Obsidian als...| Endgame Viable - Dev
I thought I should evaluate how static blogging has been going after almost two years. I’m generally happy with how the blog runs right now. Pages load very fast on desktop and mobile, which is what I like to see in a well-managed web site. It’s hosted entirely within AWS (except comments), meets most all of my original design criteria from 2019, and costs about $2/month, which is an acceptable amount to waste on an obsolete social media model. Hosting comments should be free, but I broke...| Endgame Viable - Dev
There’s a land rush of ActivityPub implementations going on right now, and I’m in it. Belghast (who I can’t credit because his account is private now) popped back onto Twitter to report that Tumblr is working on ActivityPub support, which reassured me that I might be onto something here with a blog-centric ActivityPub server. I think writefreely is also essentially an ActivityPub-based blog platform, except you need ssh access and technical expertise to install it. (Which, to be fair, y...| Endgame Viable - Dev
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Some time within the last year, I wondered why TTRPG rulesets are still distributed as books. As opposed to being distributed exclusively through virtual tabletops, or some form of digital asset management system. We currently have to buy D&D books six different times if we want to access them at a table, or on Roll20, or on DNDBeyond, or Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry VTT, or whatever other place. That’s because the thing you’re buying is still, essentially, the text of a book. But surely t...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
Where do I even begin to write about the epic story of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the even more epic story of playing Baldur’s Gate 3? There’s just so much to talk about. See: Some two hundred hours of videos I’ve uploaded. Baldur’s Gate 3 has been my main game since August, so I spent nearly half a year with this game, not counting a two-and-a-half month break where I didn’t play much of anything. I think overall I’d say it’s the best turn-based CRPG I’ve ever played, and certain...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
This will be very short. I played Starfield for a little over an hour and then returned it. It’s a wait-for-a-sale game, in the same bucket with most all of the Assassin’s Creed games. It’s pretty, and they’ve improved on the improvements they made in Fallout 4, but it’s nothing special. Just an ordinary, do-the-same-things-again, take-no-chances, factory-produced AAA game, like any other you can buy these days. It’s somewhat strange that it took them eight years to make this, whe...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
Spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3 below, although not any story spoilers. Just combat spoilers, if that’s a thing. UPDATE: Some people are probably here to quickly find out how to kill these Death Shepherds. The short answer is: Don’t let them cast that No Rest for the Wicked to instantly resurrect their fallen comrades, including the other Death Shepherd. I used things like Counterspells or Polymorph. Also I think it’s easier if you damage both Death Shepherds equally until you’re ready...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
I read Wilhelm’s post on Dror Ragzlin and I had to set the record straight on what actually happened in that room. Massive spoilers below, at least for the first areas of the game (I believe this is all Act I). Readers beware. When I first read his post, I didn’t read the full post because after 45+ hours I hadn’t encountered Dror Ragzlin yet and didn’t even know who it was. I was struck by how different Wilhelm’s playthrough sounds from mine. Apparently there are people who simply ...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
What is there to say about Baldur’s Gate 3 that hasn’t already been said? I genuinely don’t know, because I haven’t read much of what anyone’s said so far. But I’ll start with something I haven’t seen mentioned in the casual enthusiasm so far: This game is riddled with bugs. It’s the buggiest RPG I’ve seen since any average MMORPG launch in the late 1990s or early 2000s. You can’t take two steps in the game without running into a texture bug, or a camera pointed off into s...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
As luck would have it, May’s Humble Choice includes Bendy and the Dark Revival, which is a game that I picked up on Steam a few months ago. Bendy and the Dark Revival is a stylish first-person spooky game. I bought it mainly on the strength of the funny-sounding title and the screenshots. I was playing Resident Evil games at the time, and it promised to be another game in the survival horror genre, and it had decent Steam reviews, so I gave it a try. I don’t particularly like writing anyt...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
It’s an average choose-your-own-adventure game. April’s Humble Choice selection includes The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante: In Times of the Fall of the Blessed Arknian Empire, an indie game which I got on Steam last year mainly on the strength of its title alone, and have played for about five hours. Sir Brante tells the story of, you guessed it, Sir Brante, a man who grows up in a somewhat grimdark heteronormative patriarchal fantasy theological setting which is obviously modeled afte...| Endgame Viable - Gaming
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Blaugust inspired me to make some much-needed technical changes to the blog this month, which I will now try to recall for posterity.| endgameviable.com
It’s getting better, but it’s still not quite a “main game” for me.| endgameviable.com
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