Good Morning Folks! Today was a rather fortuitous day… that quite honestly I was not expecting. At the beginning of this year, I lost my first home in Final Fantasy XIV. I got busy with Christmas and the New Year and just was not logging into the game… and apparently completely missed the email warning me. I was more than a little heartbroken, but I played it off as best as I could. There was something always weird about that plot of land though, because specifically, I went after plot 13… aka the plot that we used to have as a Free Company in The Mists before we upgraded to a Medium in Shirogane. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance however because my mind expected it to be our old home… but no matter what I did it never would be again. Nor did I have a fucking clue at all what various options we had set because Solaria the Guild Mom took care of all of that.
Pretty much every week since coming back before Dawntrail I have entered the housing lottery. What shocked me was just how much turnover there is on a server like Cactuar in the Aether Data Center. There was never a week where I did not have at least two or three different plots in different wards to choose from. I can only remember one week when there was nothing available on The Mists, aka my ward of choice. Hell, there were even three times that a version of Plot 13 came open again. I had been hitting this Timer website periodically to tell me if a new period opened or if it was time for me to check to see if I had won. Yesterday I was completely out of it and thus missed the opening of the results period. So this morning I logged in expecting to get a refund of my downpayment but instead… I had won the plot.
As such I have spent most of this morning getting things set up to where the home is functional again. The inside is extremely bare bones, and just has the necessary vendors and amenities like a guest book, summoning bell, and aesthetician… all of which I saved from my previous home. The outdoor furnishings are starting to get there, but I am sure I will continue to tweak and add little details. I’m in Ward 28 Plot 3 of The Mists on Cactuar, which is right around the corner from the Apartment building. This creates this funny situation where I have a market board to both sides of my home and an Aetheryte across the street from it. The neighborhood is really well built up, and so far I have seen zero signs of any nightclubs… so hopefully it is a chill relaxing place. There are a few nearby Free Company homes with extremely nice setups. One of which has all of the Gold Saucer machines in the basement… but alas I think only the FC members can play them.
I’ve had assorted visits from Free Company members this morning as they logged in to check on various things. They’ve also checked in on me to see how I was doing, given that I am still very much in the deep recovery mode with COVID-19. I am not doing much better, but I am also not really doing any worse so that is something. Here is a nice shot of me and Ammo hanging out on the roof… because being able to stand on your rooftop is really important for player housing. I have a phenomenal view of the entire district. I had to place some of the things just right so that I could jump up there since I did not have a nearby roof to drop down from above as I have had in other setups. More importantly, I have now set up a recurring calendar notification to remind me that I need to log in… with plenty of time to spare. When I get extra stressed out I can lose focus on pretty much everything in the world.
Now that the outside is starting to feel nice and cozy, it is time for me to begin to sort out what exactly I want to do for the inside. Speaking of cozy… ignore the fact that I am sitting out in the pouring rain on my stargazing deck. Essentially my game plan is to build out the downstairs as sort of a bedroom/training room/gear warehouse sort of feel befitting a warrior. Then the upstairs is going to be more of a public area with all of my vendors and maybe a bunch of bookcases and such. It will come together over time, but the outdoor features are always the most important so that I don’t stick out like an undecorated eyesore in my neighborhood. I am not going to try and do all of it over night, but I do want to keep poking away at it. Maybe this is what will finally drive me to finish training all of my crafting professions so that I can start making things rather than buying them.
Anyways… on the health side. I have two more days of this steroid dose pack of Prednisone, so I am hoping that today I will start to turn the corner. If not I will reach out to the doctor and maybe try and get either an extension or some other course of treatment. I am not doing any worse, but I certainly don’t really feel any better yet.
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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.
What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.
I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.
I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.
I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.
I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.
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Good Morning Folks! Happy first day back from a long holiday weekend for my fellow United States friends. I took Friday off so as a result… today is going to be rough to get through. I am also still fighting whatever generic crud my wife brought home to me, and neither of us is in great shape. However, I am going to push through it and get shit done today. I spent most of my weekend casually leveling my new Guardian in Guild Wars 2. I am really glad that I did this experiment because Guardian had always been one of those classes that I thought I could really like… but never spent much time playing because I just was not feeling the Asura that I chose to level back in the day. As a Norn however, I have had a freaking blast and last night I pushed through to level 70 and then decided to go ahead and boost the last ten levels so that I would get a full set of gear. We’ve had friends find out the hard way that if you wait until level 80, you don’t get the gear from taking the character boost, and given that I had several sitting around… I did not want to get busy and make that mistake.
On Saturday I ground out another Gift of Battle because the anniversary buff was in place, making it got considerably faster. I am sure there were ways that I could have made it more efficient, but I started around 10 am and wrapped up around 2 pm, taking me about four hours of focused gameplay to get through it. During most of that time, I was in the Eternal Battlegrounds either capturing objectives or defending Stonemist Castle when our group held it. I am still not entirely certain why I enjoy WvW so much, but there is just something about being a ranger and harassing enemy armies at range that I enjoy. More specifically I really enjoy defending objectives and getting up on the wall and raining down arrows on the entire mass of players.
The good thing about grinding out that Gift of Battle was that I ended up with a ton of Jade Heroics as a result. So when I boosted to level 80, I popped over into one of the borderlands and bought seventeen Maguuma Scrolls giving me a huge boost in Hero Points. I then zoned out from the Guild Hall into Seitung Province and after running around and collecting all of the Hero Points there, I was able to unlock Willbender completely. I’ve been super curious about the Hammer Heal Alac Bender for awhile, but based on what I saw from Snowcrows it seems like the ideal version currently is with a spear which makes it even better. I’ve really enjoyed Guardian Spear and as a result, now I am running around with a scuffed version of the build while wearing Celestial Gear since that can kind of do everything… while also not being necessarily the best at anything.
Right now my goal is to complete the original storyline this evening, and then from there, I am not sure if I will keep pushing up through the Living World content or take a break from Guardian and go back to my Ranger main. Based on what I heard from Thalen this weekend, it seems like maybe the Janthir meta is starting to get a bit easier and as such I would probably like to start farming it nightly. I also need to get better at catching the other key metas as they are spawning, because I really should be doing some of the Heart of Thorns content weekly. I really need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Coins and as such I need to start hitting the leyline event each day for a while. I am getting really close to being able to craft the Juggernaut legendary and mostly at this point it is just a matter of deciding that I am willing to buy the rest of the trophies that I need.
In other weekend news, I pushed across the finish line and picked up my ridiculous pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I am now way less under pressure to do PVP each day, and feel considerably better about that… but would have been super sad had I not picked up this monstrosity. PVP Roulette is still a really good way to get a quick experience boost on characters and as a result, I will still probably keep doing it whenever I am in the mood to play some FFXIV. We did not do our weekly raid nonsense in part because we were down an Ash but more so because I was feeling like complete crap. It is a bit of a bummer as I really do enjoy the Arcadion raid. I’m in a bit of a weird place with FFXIV at the moment, because I feel like I have accomplished everything I wanted to do in Dawntrail. I cleared the normal raid and completed a set of gear from it… and am mostly okay with just muddling about aimlessly until the next content drop whenever that happens.
Last week we got news that Last Epoch was going to be doing a cycle reset with some updates, and I figure I will hop on this train on the 19th. I did not really play Last Epoch much this cycle in part because Dawntrail was a thing… and then once that wound down a bit the new Path of Exile League was a thing. Bad timing on both parts meant that while technically I got a character to empowered monoliths I didn’t really play that much. A cycle reset will mean that I can go through the experience of a fresh start mid-cycle and hopefully feel better about the current state of the game because I will be in the mood for it. I am not sure if I am going to go down the same path I did for leveling, but the whole fire warpath smite thing was pretty fun. Any other builds that I am interested in feel like they are way more gear-dependent and while there are a few key items for the build I was playing… it worked just fine without them.
Until then however I seem to be in a Guild Wars 2 frame of mind, and I am going to ride this until it peters out. I am not sure if I will be playing the new Guardian a ton, shift back to my Ranger… or even maybe revisit my Warrior or Necromancer which I still enjoy playing. Ranger is still probably the most fun to do group content on, but he is also one of the more selfish characters that I have given that I am not really providing much to a party setting. That was in large part why I wanted to play around with Heal Alacrity Willbender on the Guardian because it is way more group-centric, but also seems to be a really good solo experience. Anyways that was my extended weekend… hopefully yours was also pretty great minus the whole being sick thing.
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Good Morning Folks! Because of the quirks of the calendar, the day that was normally “Tabulation Day” aka September 1st took place on a Sunday. It just so happened that I was rather sick yesterday, and today is a Holiday here in the United States. As a result of both of these things, I pushed my tabulation activities to this morning where I have spent it counting posts on blogs. Huge thanks to everyone who used the self-reporting form, as it was a great boon to speeding this up. Last year was a big year, and I honestly did not expect this year to grow even beyond that… but shockingly we did. Huge thanks to everyone who helped to get the word out, and it still shocks me how well this event works without the existence of Twitter. For years this was largely something that spawned from Twitter for folks who were actively on Twitter, and the last two years have proven to me that it really had nothing to do with that social community and more to do with the spirit of the bloggers who were participating.
Here are some of the Statistics for this year:
116 Blogs Signed Up for Blaugust.
Of Those Blogs 113 Made at least one blog post during the month of August.
We had 67 blogs sign up that had never participated before in a Blaugust Event.
During the past month, Blaugust Participants created 1978 Content Posts.
What has shocked me is that I honestly believed we would have a big drop-off from last year. There were a lot of things at play, it was the 10th year running the event, and Mastodon was booming due to the relative implosion Twitter was experiencing, which then led to a huge surge in DIY tech as folks felt the need to stake their digital claim to some real estate that they controlled out on the internet. This year we’ve continued to see a bit of a broadening of the event as it found its way to new writers. This has led to a few growing pains, because quite honestly… nothing about the way I had been running events really works at this scale. So going forward we are going to need to make some tweaks to the formula to make it a little easier for folks to participate and consume the output. It was an event very light on any sort of scaffolding in large part because many of us have known each other for well over a decade. I still find it wild that any of you are willing to follow me for this nonsense on a yearly basis.
Blauginner Class of 2023
One of the changes that we made mid-flight this year was changing from the terminology of “newbie” to something unique to us… The Blauginner. Newbie has always had a bit of a weird negative connotation and I thought it was time for us to move away from that. Blauginner is something that a friend of mine threw out there when I was shopping for ideas, and it was so silly that I knew we had to roll with it. Each year we lose blogging voices from the community, either because life went in another direction or just plain burnout. One of the core goals of Blaugust, especially after the loss of the Newbie Blogger Initiative has been to stoke new blogging voices and cultivate a renewable resource. As such I think it is extremely important to take time each year to acknowledge the folks who set forth on this journey for the first time regardless if they managed to make any of the other awards.
Now we reach the moment where I talk about the various Awards associated with Blaugust. I tried to carry forward the general styling elements that I ran with during this event when I created the badges. These will all be available on the Blaugust Media Kit in the full-resolution version if you want to snag them for your blog’s sidebar. For anyone who needs a bit of a refresher on our rules, here are the guidelines that the awards are assigned based upon.
Bronze Award – You made at least 5 Posts during the month of August 2024.
Silver Award – You made at least 15 Posts during the month of August 2024.
Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2024.
Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2024.
Before we get to the lists however it is time for my yearly disclaimer. I am a human being and as a result highly fallible. This year’s tabulation was quite daunting given the large number and not reaching out for additional help. If you feel that I made a mistake please feel free to reach out and let me know. Some blog layouts are much harder to tabulate than others… and I do my best to count them all. I am extremely thankful each year for the folks with much more standard layouts, those with self-tabulating calendar widgets, and at a minimum those who use hard date stamps rather than relative ones.
One final note. Authors that have multiple blogs in the competition are tabulated individually for each blog but the award assigned is for the total contribution of the Author.
The Bronze Club 2024
This year we had Thirty-Six folks who managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2024. Since a lot of this event is about posting more often and finding your own schedule to follow. Five times during the Month of August would be around one post a week… which seems like a completely reasonable schedule.
Traditionally we have this pattern emerge where folks generally either get Bronze or Rainbow, without a lot of folks in between the two extremes. This year given the larger sample size, we had more folks get Silver and Gold but it still more or less fits the same larger pattern. This year we had Nine blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2024. To continue the theme of choosing a schedule, this would equate to posting at least three times per week. Especially if you landed on something along the lines of a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule… this also seems completely manageable.
Now we get to the folks who usually have a pattern already and are sticking with it… aka the Gold Club. This has been the territory where I have lived for years in this competition because I largely post weekdays only. This year was particularly fraught for me, and as a result, I barely squeezed by with the minimum number of posts to count as Gold. This year we had Nine blogs that posted at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2024. Keeping the schedule thread rolling forward, this would be around five times per week.
Let’s be honest… the whole Rainbow Diamond thing is a bit nonsensical. Years ago when I decided that maybe posting Thirty-One posts during a single month was a bit harmful and burn-out inducing… I watered down what was the previous highest rank to 25 posts, and then created this “S-Tier” as a way of acknowledging folks who went above and beyond in the event. All of that said I continue to be impressed by the number of folks who end up going for the highest possible award in the event and this year we had Thirty-Four folks who posted at least thirty-one times during the month of August 2024. I am still not entirely certain this is a healthy pace, but it is impressive to see regardless.
Now friends… we get into a bit of controversy. We had two Blaugustans who leaned on large language models heavily for the generation of their content. In coming years we will likely have some sort of an “AI Rider” that describes what is and is not allowed for the event. I mentioned growing pains… and this is one of them. This is an event designed to push folks to create content and at the core of this… is human creativity. As such I just cannot bring myself to list these two contenders on the same list of the others who gained the Rainbow Diamond award, and as such they are getting theirs but with a bit of an asterisk. Technically there was nothing in the rules to stop folks from having a large language model pump out an entry into the event, so technically they accomplished the highest awards… but it does not mean that I have to enjoy the fact. This is probably petty of me, but unfortunately, this is the event that I have kept going, and as I have been reminded many times… it is my call.
To back away from that awkward situation, it is time to actually talk about something good. I think it was two years ago when I first decided to create an honorable mention badge for folks because really I think it should be acknowledged. Signing up for this event, putting yourself out there, and deciding that you are going to try something new really is a lot. Sometimes there are folks who have technical difficulties along the way, or life has other plans, but I still feel like it is important the cherish the willingness to participate. Maybe some of them will return next year, have a better start and even get all the way to the end with a shiny new award to show for it. This year we had Twenty-Six folks who made that very first step.
Every year it seems like I learn some lessons from running this event. I am always exceptionally thankful for all of the help that I get from the mentors. They often act as a sounding board for a number of my ideas. As such there are likely going to be some changes coming in the months between now and the next Blaugust. Not that we have had to deal with much yet, but it is finally time that we create codes of conduct for the event and wrap one of those nifty bots around the discord sign-up process. We did have to deal with some “selling to the community” weirdness this time around, which I was not expecting but should likely receive some clear differentiation between what is promoting your content, and what is promoting your business.
As I said above we will also be tackling the concept of large language models and this competition because I feel like it is important to lay out a framework for what is and is not allowed. None of this is terribly fun, but I guess this is to be expected when we have grown so massively over the last few years. I guess it is time to start treating this event as a proper project and not just something that I do once a year and for some reason other people follow along with. It was a bad year for me across the board, and I did not spend nearly as much time as I had previously engaged with the community. It is a bit of a bummer because it seems like that is really the magic bit of this formula. On the self-tabulation form, almost everyone across the board commented about how much they enjoyed the community. The cool thing is that thanks to the discord… that doesn’t have to stop when September begins.
As I am every year, I am deeply proud of everyone who participated this year. I apologize for being a bit of an absentee leader, but am booned by how well things continue to run in my absence. Again I remind you that I am a deeply flawed and fallible person, and if you find an issue with any of my calculations please reach out and let me know. I did my best to tabulate the posts, but when it relied upon me counting breaks between posts… around twenty-five my eyes occasionally began to fuzz out so my counts might be slightly off in a few places. By the time of posting this, I should have updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with all of the awards, so feel free to snag them and do whatever you want with them. I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. I appreciate you all greatly.
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