Morning Folks! Today represents the first day of what will hopefully be 31 days of writing prompts to hopefully give you some ideas as we ease into this “low key” Blaugust event. As a result I have recruited a bunch of other bloggers to help me share the prompts with you, and since I made this thing up… I get the honor of kicking things off. For those who have not been following along at home, Blaugust is an event that we run every year where originally I challenged folks to write 31 posts in a single month. Given the times we are living in, we moved this original event up to April and had Blapril this year as a way of hopefully giving folks something else to think about while we were all in lockdown.
However now that we are finding ourselves still several months in living in lockdown mode, the greater community wanted to do something to mark the normal running of Blaugust. As a result each day a new blogger is going to share a prompt with you, and each day that blogger is going to lead you to the blog of the person who will post the next prompt in sequence. For more information you should really just check out my guide post. It should give you a better run down of exactly what is going to happen. If you want to participate, all you have to do is grab the prompts that interest you and write your own posts based on them. I technically wrote most of the prompts, but I threw them in a randomizer and assigned them out so that I didn’t exactly know which one I would be getting.
Blaugust Promptapalooza – Prompt 1
If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?
Blaugust as a whole started as a game blog thing, and over the years I have been trying to make tweaks to open it up to bloggers of other fandoms. However for me… my core fandom will likely always be gaming, more specifically video games. If you want even more specificity… then I am probably most attached to online gaming in the form of MMORPGs. So if I could change anything about gamer culture, it would be to make it a whole lot more inclusive. As a whole gamers can be a horrible toxic lot, and it is really hard to justify this to anyone looking from the outside in. That said there are also amazing pockets of pure joy that take place within gaming, and it is really hard to reconcile how both exist and can often times shift on a dime.
I think we have a few problems that escalate the issue. For starters, there is still a chunk of gaming that does not view themselves as being part of the mainstream. They define themselves as being a niche culture and fight hard to protect anything that tries to change that. This insular attitude tries to push anything out that might serve to endanger their “fun”. This has so many different representations but one of the biggest that you see is the “battle between like objects”. I legitimately randomly picked a screenshot, but it will serve as an illustration. This is The Division 2, it lives in the genre known as the looter shooter… and has major competition from Destiny 2 and Warframe each with their own very stratified communities.
In the case of all three games, they are more or less fighting over the same pool of players to some extent and this is absolutely felt by the player base. So instead of playing all three and determining which one fits the specific tastes of a player, you will see segments of these communities actively bashing the other two. You see a lot of reactionary posts on Reddit or YouTube videos talking about how this is the game you should be playing and cataloging all of the wrongs with the others within the peer group. I mean I feel like this comes from the very real fear that you need players in a game to keep it active and for it to survive, but unfortunately pushing other players away is not exactly a great way of accomplishing the goal of a thriving community.
Another type of exclusion that I see an awful lot is what can be collectively termed as “Git Gud” culture. There is a constant thread of trying to push “scrubs” out of the community and force them to play better. I think in some ways this starts off as a somewhat toxic altruism… like that players are being “bad” because they don’t know any better so folks will take it upon themselves to “educate the bads”. I mean there is an awful lot of hyper cringe content in the early years of this blog that would fall into this category. The problem however is that this does not take into account that folks often times come to a game for different reasons. There is the false assumption that every player is playing a game for the exact same reasons you are.
For example I don’t play games these days to optimize my skill rotation or to be better than every other player. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my very real obligations and have a moment to chill out in a world where I feel powerful, and that does not have any of the stresses that my daily life does. I am a bad player, or at least I am in the eyes of those who feel like optimal play should be a requirement for entry. I am honestly a fairly decent player to be truthful, but I feel so much stress at the thought of doing anything with other players because I might run into someone who is going to get all up in my shit because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. I realize this is mostly a mental block on my part, but it is one influenced by lots of real life experiences with very toxic players.
On this last point, gaming is very much still struggles with anything other a White CIS Male Hetero narrative. I am using this image as an example because you notice, whoever compiled this… did not include the Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale in this image. So much of the advertising around Mass Effect also focused on the male character arc, so much so that it feels like they are intending that to be the default state even though everything I have heard is that the female arc is just plain more enjoyable. Gaming struggles at representation in a way that is natural and organic and has this bad habit of tokenism.
Another reference point, this week footage of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla started circulating showing two male warriors “embracing”. I’ve seen a lot of backlash over this, including one twitter threading going on about how “no one asked for this” and to “leave politics out of video games”. The thing is… so many have begged for more casual and natural representation of something other than the hetero-normative over the course of the last few decades. The fact it still invokes an outrage is the sign of how desperately we need it woven into the tapestry of our stories. In gaming there is such a long way to go before there is a clear “default” path and a clear “other” path.
All of these things are about less gate keeping in video games, and more inclusion of different viewpoints. The players need to evolve, but at the same time the games need to keep pushing us to evolve. It is important that we focus on what we enjoy, and less on what games are doing to make sure others are enjoying themselves as well. One of the other important points of view that I have reached over the years, is that it is okay if you decide a game “just isn’t for you”. You don’t have to play everything, and god knows with as much content as being released each year there is no way you will ever be able to in the first place. I would love us to reach a point where we can just be happy that nice things exist for other people even if we don’t want to partake of them ourselves.
The Next Blogger
Tomorrow you will be able to find the next prompt in Blaugust Promptapalooza over at Azerothian Life. This is a really great blog by @Dragonray and focuses primarily on her adventures in the World of Warcraft. There is often times a side focus on glorious transmoggy goodness that I definitely appreciate. We all know that is the TRUE end game of MMORPGs, and I personally end up transferring gold over to alts just so I can afford to keep up appearances. So check Azerothian Life out tomorrow to continue this “blog crawl”
Yesterday was a pretty brilliant day in spite of being fairly stressful. First off we need to talk about how amazing this artwork is of my Cast Ranger from Phantasy Star 2. Some time back I had commissioned my friend Ammo to draw yet another character portrait, and she has truly outdone herself. I more or less expected it to be fairly flat shaded and she went above and beyond to capture the metallic nature of the armor and its reflections. Basically every image you see in the header of this website and the header of AggroChat.com were created by Ammo and represent years worth of projects. I cannot recommend her enough for whatever projects that you might have coming down the pipe.
Eight Original Super Famicom Cartridges
Next up I got in a package I had been waiting on from ebay. I’ve always wanted to own original copies of the various JRPGs that I played growing up, and some that I didn’t get to play because they never released in the United States. The other day out of curiosity I did some searching and stumbled onto an auction that included eight different cartridges for $50 and I could not pass that up. The titles included are:
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy VI
Dragon Quest I + II
Dragon Quest III
Dragon Quest V
Chrono Trigger
Seiken Densetsu 3
Of these titles, I of course had the United States release of both FFIV which came out here as Final Fantasy II, and FFVI which released as Final Fantasy III. I also have an english version of Chrono Trigger, but the others I did not have in any form and had always wanted to own copies of the Dragon Quest series, Final Fantasy V and Seiken Densetsu 3 which recently released here as Trials of Mana.
So “Retro” gaming right now is super hot and a big business, but I was into these game systems before it was really a thing. This is an image that I have salvaged from an old version of one of my websites. This used to be part of an image map that allowed folks to see what everything in that image, but I used to have this complicated sequence of A/B switches that would allow all of those game systems to be played on that RGB monitor. I still technically have everything listed there, but it has been packed away in my closet for awhile now because as we moved into the era of HDMI it just became a pain in the ass to get anything working. If I can remember it all off the top of my head… what you are looking at is:
Original Red/White Nintendo Famicom
Sega Dreamcast
Nintendo 64
PlayStation 2
Neo Geo CD
PlayStation 1
Sega Saturn
Genesis model 1 with model 2 CD system and a 32X (also had the power base converter somewhere)
Nintendo Gamecube
Panasonic 3DO
Sega Master System
Atari Jaguar
somewhere there is an Intellvision and an Atari but I don’t think they are hooked up.
For me it was far less about the glory of retro gaming, and more about me reliving bits of my childhood. My first console was an Atari 2600, and as a result I lived through the heyday of all of these systems but couldn’t own most of them. Once I graduated from college, got a job, and with it got my first disposable income… I went through a period of trying to snap systems up that I never got to play so I could experience them. There have been many times I have contemplated just getting rid of everything, but here lately… maybe another sign of a digital midlife crisis… I have been thinking more and more about these original systems.
Japanese Import Retro Freak Console
For awhile now I have been enthralled by the notion of the various systems that allow you to play multiple systems on one modern console with HDMI output. I was aware of three systems, the Polymega, the Retron 5 and the Super RetroTRIO Plus. The Polymega is this complicated system that involves buying a bunch of hot-swapmodules to play various cartridge based games and the base unit with no cartridge support clocks in around $400. The Retro 5 is a system that as its name states supports 5 systems, but based on my research has issues with compatiblity and audio output while also clocking in around $150. The Super RetroTRIO Plus claims is a SOC (system on a chip) based console with extremely high compatiblity and is the cheapest of the three at $80.
In my process of consuming reviews and thrashing about on the interwebs, I discovered that apparently there was a fourth option that I was unaware of. The Retro Freak is a Japanese emulation console, that out of the box supports Famicom, Super Nintendo, Super Famicom, Genesis, Mega Drive, Turbografx 16, PCE Engine, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advance titles and the prices vary but you can pick it up from Play Asia for $230. With adapters you can play American Nintendo games as well as Game Gear and Sega Master System. This covers a broad range of the game systems that I would actually like to play and it also has the added benefit of being able to dump rom images from your cartridges to an SD Card allowing you to play the games without having to break out the original cartridges each time.
Now we are swinging back around to why exactly I decided to purchase all of those Japanese games. One of the features of both the Retron and the Retro Freak is the ability to apply game patches when you load a game. So within a few minutes I was able to gather up a few translation patches from RomHacking.net, load them onto the SD Card and now I can play each of these games in English. There are a truly staggering number of these cartridges that have been translated by fan groups, and when you combine this with the fact that there is almost no retail value for the Japanese import cartridges on the open market, it becomes a very reasonable way to play these classic titles. I found another auction for the original 3 Final Fantasy games on the Famicom for right at $20 shipped, and I plan on playing them through translations as well.
So last night I spent a good chunk of my evening playing through various games and putting the console through its paces. I have it running through my Elgato HD60 Pro capture card with the scanlines option turned on. Since I played most of these games on a television growing up, it just looks weird to me not to have artificial scanlines enabled. I am super impressed with both the quality of the emulation and the sound output, because effectively everything sounds like I remember it sounding. Castlevania Bloodlines is a cartridge that a lot of emulation systems butcher, and it played exactly like I remember it.
The only negative that I have run into is some weirdness with the controllers. The default one that it comes with is not amazing, and through the course of the night stopped registering some of the inputs. I had read online that the system had wide support for all XInput and DirectInput controllers. However in practice this does not seem to be the case and it appears that everything you use with it needs to be able to operate in the DirectInput scheme. This rules out any Xbox style controllers that are not capable of specifically switching to D Input. PlayStation controllers appear to work, but the Hori Fight Commander that I was hoping to use has some button switching capabilities and this appears to completely throw the console off.
The controller I finally settled on is my 8BitDo 3N30 pro+ bluetooth controller, connected with a USB Cable to the console. I had to manually switch this to D Input mode, but after doing so it largely worked as intended. I did encounter some weirdness, but it was manageable. I was having trouble remapping the controls however, so at some point I will likely swap out to another controller. I ordered one of the RetroBit official Sega Saturn controllers that I am hoping will fill the need perfectly. I greatly prefer the two rows of three face buttons configuration that the second Genesis and Saturn controller had. This specific Saturn style controller was designed for the Nintendo Switch and as a result has more buttons which should come in handy as the Retro Freak requires you to make keybinds for its in game menu and return to the main menu buttons.
All in all I am having a freaking blast and enjoyed playing a whole slew of games last night on various platforms. I am super happy for example to have a console that I can play digital pinball classics like Alien Crush from the PC Engine. I wish the Retro Freak had support for the Super CD games like Castlevania: Rondo of Blood… but I guess for those I will just have to play emulators on my computer. I mean that has always been an option, but there is just something about playing games on a console, even when that console is just running emulation. The Retro Freak also appears to have a thriving community and folks developing custom firmware that I might explore at a later date once I figure out the limitations of the official one. For now I am just super happy to have a system that outputs to HDMI and can play all of my original cartridges.
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I have to warn you at the beginning of this post, that I may in fact be going through some sort of a digital midlife crisis. I am not exactly sure how I have ended up here, but over the last few weeks I have found myself missing the “forum age” of the internet. For those who did not cut your teeth in that era, it seemed like every group and community had some sort of forum as their primary internet presence. I am not exactly sure what my first forum was, but I can recall being part of one for every major guild that I was in starting with Everquest. It was often times the core social hub of the group and where all of the plans got made.
The forum that I remember practically living on however was the Argent Dawn US Server forums. So many of the people that I still hang out with to this day came from interactions with this site, and the IRC server that eventually sprung up connected to it. Ynubet my horde side guild leader was a good natured forum troll, and to be honest I probably could have been described in that manner as well. Whatever the case this era is what ultimately lead me to start blogging. I was pretty prolific in posting long winded threads that dissected an issue and tried to sway individuals to my point of view. At some point I realized that effort would probably better spent in a blog post rather than as yet another forum rat.
As new technologies arrived, we tried to adapt that same sort of function to other tools. Slack was the first thing that I can recall trying to make work as a viable forum replacement. For the most part it does, except for the fact that no one actually pays money for their guild slack. That means you are limited to 10,000 comments and as a result you are constantly losing any semblance of history. In my experience this seems to be responsible for the feeling that you are having the same conversation over and over, since there is no consistent thread that you can return to when you want to add fresh thoughts to it.
Discord came along as well, and it has more or less been widely adopted because it is “free” and as a result doesn’t have the issue of constantly losing your history. The challenge with both of these however is there is a sense of immediacy to conversations. Yes you can rattle on about something at length, but it is often times miserable to come in hours or days later and have to perform thread necromancy in order to interject your thoughts into an existing conversation. The organization is also very rough for anything other than random live chat, and the fact that it is so easy to spawn one… means that as I have talked about before we are dealing with a deluge of them available for us to join.
I am as guilty as anyone, in that I kept looking for something better than the forum. I got wrapped up in twitter and google+ and what seems like a myriad of other things all the while not quite understanding what I had lost in the process. There was a specific niche that forums filled, of providing asynchronous communication on topics that could carry out over a number of days rather than a number of minutes or at most hours. During the forum era we used to crave that immediate communication that we have everywhere, but now that we have it… I find myself longing for a slower pace. This is probably just me getting old, but yesterday I followed this madness and created a forum attached to this blog.
It is live and effectively “open for business”. I researched a few options but ended up falling back on the technology that we used to use back in the day for that old school feel. You can reach the forum through a new “Chat” menu, where I have also included the Blaugust and Bel Stream Time discord… even though the later rarely gets used because I don’t really stream much anymore. This might be a horrible idea and it might be the case that no one else feels nostalgic about this era of the internet. The alternative however is one I am willing to take a risk on, that folks miss this sort of interaction and are just needing a place to have it. I spent about two hours last night cobbling this all together, and I am sure there will be changes as we go. However for now I am throwing this project to you my readers to see if you have any interest in it.
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Good morning everyone! We are nearing the beginning of August and with that comes the beginning of a Blaugust event. This year has not exactly gone as planned and in an attempt to raise spirits back in April, we celebrated what is traditionally the “Blaugust” event. However there had been some rumblings within the community of wanting to do something in August. It was too soon to do a proper “thirty one days of posting challenge”, but we still wanted to do something to mark the traditional time period.
What we are doing instead is something that I am calling “Promptapalooza” and it is effectively a blogging relay. I’ve gathered up a number of volunteers and each day during the event a new blogger will be sharing a prompt with the community and writing about it. For everyone participating in the festivities, be it a prompt bearer or just a content creator watching from the sidelines, this should in theory give us thirty one days worth of prompts to hopefully inspire some interesting topics. Most of the prompts are designed to be fairly general since as we expand our community it is less specifically “gaming focused”.
Participant Blogs and Dates
To kick things off here is a list of the various “Prompt Bearers” and their blogs, along with the days that they will be posting a prompt. For those who want to cheat, you can see the full list of participants along with tentative topics here, but be warned some of these topics may change as we get closer to the actual date of posting. The idea being that this event will also serve as a “parade of homes” as we call it here, as each new post will identify who will be posting the next days prompt.
Since I apparently have a knack for over complicating things, the way this is going to work has changed a little bit after some discussion with the Blaugust community as a whole. Here is an attempt at a straight forward rundown of how the process is going to go, and here is also hoping that we manage to pull this off without someone getting confused along the way.
On the date specified above, a given content creator is going to share a prompt with the community.
The content of the post is in theory going to address that specific prompt.
Content creators have been assigned a prompt, but also have been given leverage to swap these out as they see fit and I will be trying to keep the master list updated to represent this.
Near the bottom of a days post, the content creator will share the name and site link for the next content creator in sequence. This will lead the community to where they can find the next days prompt.
Everyone “playing along at home” should receive thirty one days worth of fresh prompts to pick and choose which ones they wish to create content based on.
The process should also shine the light on the various prompt bearers sites and hopefully drive traffic to them for participating.
When a prompt based topic is shared, please use the Hashtag #Blaugust2020 in order to increase visibility and allow folks to find them easily.
A Low Key Drop In Blaugust
My hope is that this spurs some conversation and inspires folks to write about some of these topics. I greatly appreciate all of the individual content creators who have signed up for this process. I realize it was a bit contorted to get off the ground, but I extremely thankful for all of the support. It has been the strangest year on the books and with it we have each had to adjust to a bunch of challenges along the way. The goal with the “promptapalooza” is to create something that folks will feel fine dropping in and out of as they see topics that inspire them.
As always the discord is open for discussion as we go through this event, and my “inbox” is always open to questions. I will be trying to keep this post with clarifications if they are needed. I hope this goes well and as always I greatly appreciate all of the help that I get from our broader community. Without you all out there cheering me on, there would not be a Blaugust.
The post Blaugust Promptapalooza Guide appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
