2009 – The WoW Theme Era
Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my very first post here on Tales of the Aggronaut. I realize last week I celebrated the 9th year of AggroChat but apparently, April is just the month I start new things. It was April of last year for example that I started the whole Mixtape Monday thing for example… which incidentally is something I plan on revisiting soon. It always feels weird and self-congratulatory to do one of these posts, but also feels like something I should do anyway. Looking back I apparently missed my twelfth anniversary altogether and never saw fit to go back and talk about it. Technically I should have been making this post yesterday, but was releasing an episode of AggroChat and I have this weird hang-up about doing more than one post in a single day. According to the Wayback Machine, this is what my blog would have looked like around this time.
2011 – WayBack fails to Capture the Rift Theme Era
However, I am learning for a fact that the Wayback Machine is fallible. The graphical treatment on that first image is like the second revision of my blog theme. The very first one was a direct clone of an existing wow-based theme, given that my blog started its life as a Warrior Tanking blog. The “Sons of Hodir” themed banner would have come much later and the above image is a complete fabrication because I know by the time we reached September of 2011 I was sporting a Rift-based theme. I dove completely into Rift and was even registered as an official fansite. Truth be told last time I logged into the forums, my account was still flagged as a fansite operator. You can see a bit of evidence of this in the sidebar but this is when I switched to the blue-themed text over the brown masthead.
2014 – Non-Game Specific Theme
The ship begins to right itself around 2014 when you can see this blue masthead text actually being captured by the Wayback Machine. The main difference during the Rift years was instead of Chibi Bel wearing Zul Aman gear, it was a Chibi Bahmi seen here on the right. I am honestly wishing I had gotten in the practice of taking a screenshot of my blog every so often during its life span. For years I have mostly relied on the Wayback Machine as a way of transporting me back in time but I am guessing it is starting to succumb to the process of digital rot. This is a bit concerning because our digital memories are not going to be preserved nearly as perfectly as we might have hoped. I think this is one of those things that we maybe took for granted… but also maybe should not have. I guess I should add screenshotting my blog… to the long list of other things that I have preserved through my screenshot archive.
Chibi Bahmi Bel
Chibi AggroChat
All of the Chibi work that adorned my blog for years was done by my good friend Rae. She was one of the original members of AggroChat and is someone that at the time worked with me. I greatly appreciate all of the work that she did for me, but as the blog matured I found myself moving away from that art style. The original graphics for AggroChat seen above included Chibi versions of Rae, Ash, Kodra, and Myself… more specifically the version of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight character I was playing at the time. Ash being a bear that Rae was sitting on was not exactly a great representation, but given the other stuff, we were juggling this remained the artwork for far longer than I had intended.
2015 – The End of Chibi Era
The last era that still featured Rae’s Chibi work was in 2015. I had gone to a very streamlined look in the masthead and used a cropped version of the ESO Bel Chibi that I was at the time using as my Twitter avatar. This also begins the era of me stopping fiddling and trying to roll my own theme. I test drove several third-party paid themes and finally landed on Generate Press, and have more or less been using it since. I figure this is probably the beginning of the “modern” era of the blog as not a ton has shifted since this point. I desperately need to spend some time modifying my sidebar at this point. Some releases back WordPress added block support, and it would be so much easier to maintain if I just nuked it and started from scratch. However, that seems terribly daunting and I keep putting it off.
2017 – Beginning of Ammo Era
In 2017 we saw the first introduction of a Masthead featuring artwork from my good friend Ammo. The whole “how I met Ammo” thing is a truly contorted mess, and at some point, we are going to sit down and record an episode of Bel Folks Stuff to sort it out. Basically, I originally crossed paths with her mom Sol back in World of Warcraft as we were all on Argent Dawn US, but I am guessing I first met Ammo through Twitter. None of that really matters though because I love her artwork, and you should absolutely check her stuff out if you have ever experienced it. I mean she has a traditional website, but I still feel like the best place to experience it is via Tumblr. She cut her teeth on comics just like I did, and as a result, there is a very comic book nature to the art style. Right now she is working on enshrining my Guild Wars 2 Necromancer in artwork form, and it is so damned cool. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you all.
2019 – The Masthead Full of Ammo Art Era
Then by that time we reached the pre-pandemic Aggronaut, you have the masthead full of various individual commissions from Ammo. Each one of those was done separately but I have merged them into a single cohesive image. If you compare it to the current masthead it is missing the PSO2 and New World themed “Bels”. This madness all started however because I commissioned Ammo to draw an image for my seventh blog anniversary that I just fell in love with. I was enamored with the concept of having her illustrated the various versions of my primary “Belghast” character in each game because they all share some deep similarities.
Original 7th Anniversary “Faces of Bel”
So left to right you have my World of Warcraft Warrior, my character from Secret World, my Exo from Destiny 1 and Bahmi from Rift, then my ESO Dragon Knight, and finally my Lalafel Warrior from FFXIV. She still has the original shirt up for purchase on her TeePublic store. That all came about because I wanted a shirt made off this image, but wanted all proceeds from the sale to go to Ammo in case anyone else bought one at some point. Then when I decided to fiddle with my masthead I asked her to take the LalaBel featured in this image and blow it up into a full-sized graphic. Then one by one as I had her draw more things for me… we kept that same format allowing me to composite them together afterward.
The Streamer Moogles
Some years back I commissioned a series of moogles screwing around with “streamer” gear. Originally this was to be part of my Twitch page for a foray into streaming that never really happened. More recently I have used them to adorn the masthead. However, the next project that I am going to give Ammo is to do a similar treatment for other cute monsters from video games. I know for example I absolutely want an Arctic Quaggan and a Choya Pinata from Guild Wars 2. I am sorta brainstorming a list of cute critters I want to be done up, and at least mentally these are going to be part of a more broad site rework. I am hoping that by the time we reach the fourteenth anniversary of the blog, we have maybe moved forward a little bit in the way it looks.
I have to admit, this is not exactly the post that I had intended to make this morning but it is the post that came out. There are times that you just have to go with the flow when writing, and that has been one of the secrets to my maintaining this site for thirteen years. I wish I had been more prolific early in this site, because as I age… I find having this living journal to be a benefit for pinpointing exactly when various things in my life happened. Here we are some 2876 posts later and I am still getting up each morning to do this nonsense. That would average out to be 221 posts a year, but we all know that is a lie since my prolific nature did not really kick in until April of 2013. The part that shocks me more though is that I have had just shy of 9000 comments… especially when you consider how freaking bad I am at actually interacting with them.
Basically what I am trying to say in my very meandering manner is… thanks for reading and being here with me on this journey.
The post Thirteen Years of Tales appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we talk about Bel and his dumb luck that seems to follow him from game to game. More specifically we talk about three exceedingly rare things that took place in short order after he came back to Guild Wars 2. From there we talk a bit about the community and how awesome they are. We also talk a bit about wrapping up Path of Fire and Living World Season 4. From there we talk about Wobbledogs, which comes from of grand tradition of griefing each other with games… but this time in a good way. Finally we talk a bit about Kirby and the Forgotten Land and more specifically Ultimate Cup Z.
Good Morning Friends! I had every intent of blogging yesterday but life got in the way. We had an extended internet outage and my normal backup of tethering to my phone was less than reliable. It took me until almost work time to sort out a reasonable connection, and then I got busy and never made it back to actually writing a blog post. Today would normally be a day I would consider part of the weekend, given that we are off for Good Friday… but given that I never blogged yesterday I feel like I should probably write something. It has been a good few days and am falling into some rhythms in Guild Wars 2.
One of the things that my friends will tell you is that I seem to have phenomenal luck when it comes to video games, or MMORPGs specifically. I think it is largely that I just farm content and as a result am getting more iterations of kills than the average person. They will deny this and tell you that I just have some magical power to doctor the dice rolls. Proof of this is that in less than a weeks time I have gotten two Ascended weapon drops from Tequatl, or as we call him Taco. I got the Pistol first and then later got another weapon choice chest, this time with Assassin stats instead of Settlers. I also finished up my Caladbolg questline and turned it into a Dagger giving me a full set of ascended weapons on both my Reaper and Harbinger builds. Not shown is a Greatsword that I crafted, but I am also slowly working on finishing out the Dark Harvest achievement for the Reaper Greatsword. Assassins is “close enough” and I have been too lazy to convert it to Marauder.
Since we last talked I have also finished up Living World Season 4, and I have to say the story just keeps getting better. I actually care about the characters of Dragon’s Watch, which is not a thing that I ever felt about Destiny’s Edge. I had a moment near the end of this season where I legitimately started to tear up a bit in reaction to the events that were happening. Well done Arena Net. I am looking forward to starting on Living World Season 5 today, but first I need to go up to my home town and help my parents with a few things. I am finally understanding why people were telling me this story was almost as good as Final Fantasy XIV… it just takes longer to get there. I am fully on board for wherever we are headed now.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend. I am wrapping this up so that my wife and I can go out real quick and try and restock on Reeses Peanut Butter eggs before they disappear forever… or at least until the Halloween equivalent comes out. One last thing… before I go… a parting gift. I wanted to add the profession and elite spec icons to the AggroChat chat server and struggled to find them in an easy to download form. After much sifting about I scraped a full set from the wiki, and have uploaded them to a file sharing service. These are the 200 pixel set which seemed the most useful place to start. They are archived with 7zip, which hopefully you have and if you do not… you should absolutely get. This should make it easy to add the specs to discord, slack, or any other chat software that supports custom emojis.
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Good Morning Friends! Today is the eighth anniversary of the first time we released an episode of AggroChat. While technically we are in our ninth calendar year and as a result “season 9” in my confusing and contorted numbering, Sunday April 13th of 2014 is when the show first saw the light of day. This weekend we released our three hundred and eighty fifth episode of the podcast, and honestly… all these years later I am not entirely certain how we have managed to keep it going. I think part of it comes from the significant shift our lives have undergone in these nine years. As a result AggroChat became this weekly touch point where it guaranteed that we would all be online and talking to each other… the fact that other people listen to it is sort of incidental.
When we started this show we were all in the habit of hanging out on voice chat while gaming, regardless of what that game happened to be. We had these broad reaching discussions every single night, which is ultimately the spark of inspiration that we should record that. As time and our lives shifted, those moments where we were all in the same place at the same time became more fleeting. I think the Saturday evening ritual of recording the podcast became something that we could count on and as a result kept it going. I think another secret to our success, if you can call it that… is the fact that none of us have really taken it too seriously. It is a thing that we do every week but it also doesn’t have a real reason to exist other than for our own entertainment.
Most of us hail from an earlier era of the internet, when things were done for passion or fun… and not necessarily as a vehicle for monetization. As a result we have never planned or even attempted to make any money from the things that we produce. That means we don’t really have a “boss” and are not beholden to the expectations of our listeners other than out of common courtesy. We do this thing every single week and if you are into it cool… and if you are not then maybe don’t listen. The weird thing is we have maintained a fairly consistent listenership over these eight years. We have some episodes that spike the numbers, like any time we do one of our spoiler shows for Final Fantasy XIV. Then we have super esoteric episodes that no one listens to like when we go heavy into something extremely niche like competitive sudoku. Enough people listen on the regular however to keep the numbers spinning, and through a pretty wide variety of platforms.
If we were doing it for the numbers though we would have considered this podcast a failure years ago however. I don’t get that many readers and we collectively get even fewer listeners. However like all passion projects it is effectively keeping itself going because it is a thing that we do together collectively. I will admit there are times when depression hits me and I consider shutting it all down, but then I remember that I am not doing this to make metrics go up. In the art world there is this concept of “outsider art”, where folks make art because they want to, not because they are beholden to some traditions of what makes art good. I’ve always sort of thought my blogging and podcasting are my version of that. Sure I have the knowledge to do something differently and could chase statistics or optimize the fuck out of everything… but why would I be doing it? I feel like I would be generating a lot of stress for little benefit to anyone involved.
So I guess the question is… how long will we keep this going? To that I give you a hearty shoulder shrug, because I have no clue. I am not even sure how we have managed to keep it going this long. Pending we don’t miss many shows we will be releasing our four hundredth episode in July, which seems like a significant milestone. When we started this there were a large number of peer podcasts that we were active with, and we have outlasted most of them. I am not sure what that says about us. We are either really stubborn or really oblivious, because we sorta just keep doing the same thing over and over. If that is your jam then we welcome you along for the ride, and if it is not… that is cool too. In the meantime however we will probably still be over here in the corner doing our own thing.
I never really know what to do for the anniversary of a thing that I created. Coming up soon is the thirteenth anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut in general and again no clue what to do for it. The only regret that I have all these years later is that we would have chosen a better name for the podcast. Tales of the Aggronaut made sense in the original context… which was a Warrior Tanking blog. AggroChat was more or less the fake name that we gave the podcast because it was spun out of the Aggonaut blog…. but then it just sort of stuck for lack of better options. I wish we would have come up with something that sounded a bit more inviting because our discussion is almost never anything close to “Aggro”. However once you have lived with something for as long as we have this name… it becomes hard to change mentally. So here we are… the AggroChat crew and will probably stay that until the end.
Thanks for being along on this ride with us.
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