About Endgame Viable
Hi! My name is Tom but I’m usually known as UltrViolet in the gaming biz.
I’m a middle-aged guy who lives alone in an old somewhat rural-ish suburban house with a dog I adopted and a cat that adopted me.
I’m a software developer by trade. I currently work generally in the area of “infrastructure lifecycle management,” which, for me, basically means working on tools for monitoring infrastructure.
Anyway this blog is where I write about stuff if I feel like it. Mostly I write about games I’m playing, but sometimes I write about programming or writing or music or whatever.
I’ve been playing computer games pretty much since computer games were invented. I started “gaming” when my older brothers introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons around 1979. I graduated to an Atari 2600, then a TRS-80 Color Computer, then an Amiga. I moved to DOS/Windows/PC Gaming when Doom and Quake made all other computer platforms obsolete.
I can trace my origins in writing “blog posts” back to around 1997, when I posted “match summaries” on a Quake clan web site. I’ve maintained one or more of my own web sites since 1998. My first semi-regular blogging, in the format that we know today, began around 2003 on my real name web site, using a PHP blog platform that I wrote myself. I wrote about politics and current events until around 2010 when I got bored with that. Anyway I certainly wouldn’t want to touch politics and current events now.
I launched Endgame Viable in October 2013 because I wanted to put game-related content on its own site, and I wanted to switch to WordPress and stop maintaining my dumb PHP thing. (Actually I started in 2012 but I renamed the site in 2013.)
Then, in 2021, I got so sick of WordPress and how slow it ran on my web host that I pulled the plug on it and switched to a Hugo statically-generated web site.
I write here under the name “UltrViolet” because it was the only name I could think of when I started. It’s the name I used in Quake, playing in the Crayola Clan. I’ve been trying to think of a different name to use for years now, a subject that itself could probably fill several blog posts.