Good Morning Folks! However, by the time I actually finish this blog post, it might be afternoon. Today is the very first day of Blaugust 2024, and this year one of our mentors had a pretty great suggestion. Magi thought it might be pretty great if everyone dedicated one of their early posts to introducing themselves to the rest of the Blaugust Community. As a result, I am going to attempt this feat, but I will be honest… introductions are always a challenge. I never know what details someone might be interested in or what I have already said in the past. For the sake of this exercise however, I am going to pretend that you know absolutely nothing about me or my blog.
So with that in mind… Hi, I’m Belghast and welcome to this nonsense that I crank on a regular basis called Tales of the Aggronaut. I’ve been blogging here since April of 2009 and in total including other blogs I created period to this one… I’ve been doing this since around 2000. I am in fact an “internet old” and pretty much arrived on the internet in 1993 and was here for the very early days of the web. For a period of time in college I worked at an Internet Service Provider as a system administrator and webmaster, then worked for a college as a webmaster and computer lab admin… before making my way into the professional world as a web developer turned traditional programmer. These days I live the life of a manager over Development and Data teams. Since a lot of folks participating in Blaugust this year exist on the Fediverse, I also help to administrate Gamepad.club where the Blaugust account resides.
I have a ton of various sundry geek interests. I’ve been a Magic the Gathering junkie since the launch of Revised, have played a lot of tabletop games throughout the years, am a fairly avid reader specifically of science fiction and fantasy, and nerd out about alternative/indie/punk/industrial/metal music. I love Horror films and Monster movies and spent years working at a sports card and comic book shop and while I am not quite the avid collector and reader of comics that I used to be… I still have decades’ worth of nonsense crammed into my skull. I come and go these days in interest levels surrounding Marvel and Star Wars because quite honestly… the modern quality levels vary wildly. Growing up my dad was a professional portrait photographer on the side and I spent a lot of my childhood in the darkroom, so I still have a knack for going out and doing artsy photography every now and then.
Mostly thought… I play a lot of video games… or more so I play a number of video games a lot. There was a period of time where I could with all confidence say that if there was an MMORPG out there I had probably played it. Over the last decade or so there are a number of specifically eastern MMOs that I have not really spent much time with. However, all of the western ones from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV to Guild Wars 2 and on… I’ve logged multiple hundreds of hours in with many max-level characters. The origins of this blog started with a laser focus on “a world of warcraft warrior tanking blog” and was spun up during the heyday of the Blog Azeroth community. Over the years as my interests have changed this mission statement has also changed to where it is today… that this is just my blog and I make no thematic claims.
What I am probably the most interested in these days are ARPGs or Diablo-likes most specifically Path of Exile and Last Epoch. In the sidebar on the right side is a list labeled “Regularly Playing” and contains the usual suspects that I devote most of my time to. If you mouse over any of the game icons you will see my character information, and if there exists a profile system in that game it will link directly to that. Right now I tend to play MMORPGs very heavily when a new expansion rolls out and ARPGs when a new season starts. Right now I am knee-deep in the Settlers of Kalguur league in Path of Exile, and as a result, you are going to get some deeply in-the-weeds posts from me as I talk about my progress through that league. I am still deeply engaged in Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and while I have taken a bit of a break have a side project to level alts with a friend on the Kraken server, while we are still doing raids together every week on our Cactuar mains. On the near horizon I am really looking forward to the Janthir Wilds expansion in Guild Wars 2, and at some point when there is a lull I plan on playing through the War Within expansion in World of Warcraft but it is highly unlikely I will be playing at launch.
Watch
Since I called this post “Tour of the Aggronaut” I thought I would also do a bit of a show and tell with this website. Since this website has been active for fifteen years and has over 3500 posts during that time, there is a lot in my backlog. Most of this is accessed through a menu structure at the top of the site. I figured I would take a few sentences to discuss each of the options. So for this first image, it shows off the Watch menu. This largely links to my YouTube page and also has a link to my Twitch page… which rarely if ever gets any use these days. There was a period of time when I streamed to Twitch quite a bit and got affiliate… then just sort of stopped. Youtube however is full of our weekly AggroChat podcast episodes and a number of videos that I have recorded talking about hyper-specific features of video games in my “Bel Bungles” series.
Listen
Next up is the Listen menu that links to AggroChat.com our podcast website. At some point in the future I might be pulling this content into Aggronaut.com because really there is not a lot going on over there and largely serves just to be a clone of Aggronaut. When we first set it up all seven of us hosts were actively blogging on our own platforms, and the goal of AggroChat.com was to coallate all of this together in a single place. Nowadays however I am the only one still actively blogging with any regularity and it is mostly just a carbon copy of the posts here on Aggronaut. Bel Folks Stuff was a really fun interview podcast series that I did with some of my friends. I still really want to get it started back up at some point because they were fun deep dives into a person I am close with. There is also a page of guest appearances I have made on other podcasts and such.
Social
The social menu links to my How to Find Me page with links to various social media and where I play various games with server and character information. There is also a direct link to my primary social media account over on Gamepad.club in the Fediverse as well as links to the Super Dungeon Friends discord and the Blaugust Discord. I really should throw up a link to Spoopy Town which is a discord I run dedicated to horror, cryptids, and good-natured conspiracy theories… though to be perfectly honest it is mostly just Jaedia and I chatting back and forth.
Features
Over the fifteen years of this blog I have decided I was going to start various features… only to abandon them after a while. The Features menu is where a lot of these ideas end up and they are all tied to various categories within WordPress. Probably the one I am most proud of is Mixtape Mondays where every Monday for I think 23 weeks I posted a unique mixtape with some album art that I created for it. I had a lot of fun doing these, and I still listen to most of them… but also it was really hard to keep creative inspiration to keep churning out new ones that also did not sound like anything I had created before. I might revisit it at some point, but it was still a really cool thing that I enjoyed doing.
Game Tools
These are technically a feature of the website but grew into their own thing. Essentially there are a lot of games that I play and in them… there are a lot of third-party tools and websites that I use while playing them. The “Game Tools” section is a place where I keep track of these things, partially for public benefit, but partially because several years might have passed since I last played a specific game and I want to have a good place to jot these things down so I will remember them. There are a few games that I still need to update to the new single-page format specifically FFXIV and Elder Scrolls Online. It is on my todo list, specifically since I am actively playing FFXIV right now and finding lots of useful resources that I did not know about previously.
Core Beliefs
The last area is what I refer to as my “Core Beliefs” and is essentially a page where I state things that I take as true. In this era of negotiable facts, I thought it was important for me to plant my flag in the ground and list out the details that are not negotiable for me. That is not to say that I am not constantly learning and adjusting details in my head and eventually evolving these beliefs, but if you have deep concerns with this page it is unlikely we will ever truly see eye to eye on issues. Essentially this is my page of “this is where I stand on these things” and if you have an issue with my stance on things… then it is cool if you no longer want to read my content. I am very much an acquired taste and it is fine if you never acquire it.
So there you go friends… a bit of a fresh introduction and a tour of the website. It is just about to stop being morning as I am still working on this thing. So I guess my initial comment was truthful as I have continued to get sidetracked and distracted from my task. I hope you all have an amazing Blaugust. I started this nonsense eleven years ago and am still consistently amazed that anyone else out there is down for this thing. I am very afk most of the time in Discord but if you need something specific feel free to page me with an @Belghast and I will try and answer any questions you might have. I am very much the sort of person who creates something… sends it out into the world… and then hopes someone else out there enjoys it. This means I am far more comfortable being behind the scenes than I am getting up close and personal. I will always be an introvert at heart, and most days as I write these blog posts I am pretending that I am just talking to myself. As a result blogging also is rather therapeutic because I am telling myself things I think I need to hear.
Anyways! I am going to hit publish and send another mess of nonsense out into the aether!
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