Yesterday was a bit of a ride. I have to admit it has been a while since I have seen quite this much excitement and activity around Blaugust. Since 2016 the last time the Newbie Blogger Initiative took place, I have personally focused a lot more of my effort on the whole “getting new bloggers” aspect of this event. I am not sure what combination of events actually triggered this but this year we have more folks who have never participated in Blaugust than I think we have ever had… past that very first year. We still continue to have a trickle of new signups and since yesterday’s post, we added eleven. The number that I am staggered by is we have had twenty-two people sign up that have never participated in this event before.
It does make me wonder if the whole “Blaugchievements” concept is actually working as intended. Essentially there are two specifically that could be triggering this, the first being that there is an achievement for promoting the event and the second being actually recruiting a friend. Whatever the case I am pleased as punch because this event as a whole has sort of turned into my counterargument to “blogs are dead”. In order for that to be true, we are going to need to keep refreshing our numbers with new blood flowing into the blogosphere. If nothing else… this year seems to be doing that and I am thrilled beyond intelligible words.
I’ve been trying to keep my blogroll updated with the new signups each day and similarly, I am keeping the list on the media kit updated as well. However this morning I wanted to take a minute to highlight all of the first-timers who decided to do this thing. What I find most impressive however is that most of these fine folks have no connection back to me. If anything I love that this is maybe becoming less about me and more about the community that we are building.
I think a few of these sites might be still in progress, but I applaud the start nonetheless. I still remember my very first blog and getting it started and the struggle it was to muster the courage to post anything. Technically speaking I think Tales of the Aggronaut is my fourth blog in the grand scheme of things, with the others long lost to the sands of time. There are times I wish I had landed on something back when I first started and stuck with it. Not that I think I would have enjoyed e-fame, but I might have even been as well known as someone like Lum the Mad.
I have a new side project that was inspired by the discord yesterday. This version of Blaugust ran in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 with a weird thing called Blapril also happening in 2020. During all of this, I have kept a series of spreadsheets keeping track of the blogs that were participating and a number of other details. I think my new goal is to take all of this mess, normalize it, and then create a master spreadsheet to track who participated in which years. This is honestly going to be a bit daunting because each year I have mixed things up a bit and it is not like all of the spreadsheets contain the same data. I hope to at least by the end of this current event to have cobbled together something for tracking purposes.
Other than all of this… I honestly am feeling a bit rudderless when it comes to gaming. I know in a few weeks I will be back to Path of Exile with the start of a brand new league, but in the meantime, I am not sure exactly what I want to play. I am picking away at Dragonflight Alpha but with the limited testing that is going on, I have already played through the two zones I have seen twice and left relevant comments. I’ve been playing quite a bit of Red Dead Redemption II and then last night for whatever reason I landed in Outriders. I hate when I am going through one of those “I have nothing to play” phases which is clearly wrong given my massive steam backlog. Once the new PoE League starts I will have that sense of purpose again and all will be well. For now, I am just going to play whatever happens to suit my fancy.
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Good Morning Friends! Today is the first official day of Blaugust and we are already starting to see a great number of posts trickling out into the ether on the #Blaugust2022 hashtag among other sources. If you are curious about what Blaugust is, you can check out the official announcement page. However, if you don’t want to click through at its core it is a festival of blogging designed in part to spur folks back into regular blogging. It began its life as a challenge to try and get people to blog 31 times during the month of August. Over the years it has morphed and changed as needed and now is more a general stirring of activity with the hopes of keeping the fires of blogging lit. Every year we get a new think piece talking about how blogging is dead, and we serve as an anachronistic wall attempting to keep it all live.
I know for me my blog ceased to become something I did for others and now is something I do for me and my own sanity. My blog is effectively a daily journal of what is going on in my life and helps to serve as a temporal anchor. So often every week looks like every other week, but when I commit my thoughts to the blog, I can always go back in time and find out when this item happened. From there I can often reconstruct a matrix of sorts of events that happened in sequence near each other. Generally speaking, if something was significant, I probably wrote about it. So this blog started in 2009 and captures the death of family members, the arrival of new pets into my life, and all sorts of other key events that I might want to remember at a later date. Which I guess is weird considering all of this started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog.
The Truth About MMO Content Creators by Josh Strife Hayes
I often listen to YouTube videos as though they were podcasts while doing other things, and last night I listened most of the way through “The Truth About MMO Content Creators” by Josh Strife Hayes. In the video, he gets a good number of YouTubers that over MMO content to sit down and answer some questions. Towards the end of the video, he tackles the concept of whether or not to specialize and this really hit home for me. This is a topic that I see coming up almost every Blaugust, especially as folks start new blogs. Essentially there is a double-edged sword that if you specialize in a specific MMORPG or other game, you are likely going to inherit a baked-in audience of folks who are interested in content about that game. If you really get engaged with that community it might even open up other opportunities for special content creator events or maybe even further down the line… some sort of official community management position.
Those of us who have been at this blog game for a while have known MANY bloggers who have eventually found their ways into the ranks of a specific game company that they were covering. It is absolutely an exit strategy from blogging that can and does happen. However, I took the other path because I knew that as my own interests changed if I was going to keep a blog going… the blog itself needed to change with me. The life of a generalist however is a weird one, because people have to essentially stick around because of you… instead of the content that you happen to be creating at a given time. I have a massive bounce rate among my readers because I tend to go through periods where I hyper-fixate on a specific game and create a significant amount of content for it.
A Random Photo from Outriders
So if we take Outriders for example as a random game that popped into my head. When I have been going through one of my periods where I am playing a lot of it, I might legitimately write something about the game every single day. During these periods of fixation, this means that someone might stumble across my posts and follow me because they too are super interested in this game. However, when eventually I move on to talking about something else, it can lead to a pretty jarring experience when I randomly shift to talking about building things in Minecraft for example. To the consumers of your content, you are often viewed as a monolith attached to a specific topic that they first engaged with. I’ve seen this play out not only in my own audience but in the audience of countless YouTubers that shift between games.
A very early Genshin Impact Video by Demone Kim.
A prime example of this playing out is something I have seen with the YouTuber Demone Kim. I originally started following his content when I was super into Genshin Impact and then as I lost interest in that game I stopped clicking through to his videos quite so much. I know when he too fell always from the game he got a good deal of backlash from the Genshin community for abandoning the game that made him popular. When he shifted to New World and I eventually caught back up with his content, it was a regular occurrence during his live streams of someone popping in to berate him for not playing Genshin. Then again when he shifted from New World to V Rising… the same happened but this time with New World fans. The more tightly you associate with a specific game the harder it is for you to eventually pivot and move away from it.
I went through my own version of this when I stopped playing World of Warcraft for the first time and transitioned in a big way to Rift. I know my Twitter account lost what felt like half of my followers when I started talking about how great of a game Rift was. At this point, I am some thirteen years into this journey and have come to the realization that if someone is still reading my content, it means that they are here for me. If they wanted to jump away I have given them countless reasons over the years to stop reading. I realize that I will never reach the level of saturation that a devoted blog might get, but I also know that my content will effectively remain evergreen for those who are interested in it. So essentially the choice between being a specialist and being a generalist is that you are either pinning your fate to the success of a specific game or franchise, or you are taking a chance on folks sticking around for you the person behind the screen tickitytacking away at the keyboard.
Gracie snoozing on my wife’s lap
There is also the distinct possibility that folks stick around here for the eventual adorable animal photos as well. So with that, I welcome you all to Blaugust. As always if you want more information about the event then check out the announcement post or the media kit page that has all of the relevant links. I am trying to keep my blog roll updated with all of the folks running in the event but given that there were four signups while I slept, I am certain to be lagging behind. There is still plenty of time to join in this nonsense and I look forward to seeing the overwhelming flurry of posting. Thanks to everyone who shows up and makes this event interesting each year. You, fine folks, are Blaugust and I am merely the person who lights the fuse each year.
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Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are back and instead of Bel being sick this time we have Kodra who sounds awful. First up we start with a discussion about Tam’s experiences with the Steam Deck and how it is a phenomenal device. From there we talk about Tam dropping down to 1440p high framerate after spending time running at 4K and how he has been a better experience. Ash talks about Digimon Survive finally released and his experiences with the game. Bel gets into Dragonflight Alpha for World of Warcraft and talks about his first few weeks. From there we talk about some of the early experiences with Multiversus and the high-quality smash bros style gameplay. Kodra talks about the upcoming Kickstarter for Nara: Facing Fire. Tam talks about Anno: Mutationem and its interesting take on Cyberpunk and that it is not at all connected to the Anno Series. Finally, we wrap up with some discussion of the recent Ocarina of Time TAS play for Summer Games Done Quick.
Good Morning Friends! I spent another night roaming around the countryside in Red Dead Redemption II. This is something that I have been told by friends who have played the game… but this world is damned gorgeous. Once I managed to slow down my own pace of only tackling a single quest at a time, the entire pace of the world seemingly slowed as well. I sat down to play this and before I knew it three hours had passed and it felt like minutes. This is really only something that happens to me in a large way when I get into the “just one more turn” cycle of a 4x game. There are so many times that I am on my way to do one thing, and a side event will pop up that catches my attention. I lifted a horse off a lady and took her back to town for example. I dig the way that the game gives you temporary waypoints for these activities without completely removing what was your previously tracked waypoint.
When I first started the game over a year ago, it was after playing Witcher 3. As a result, when it came time to name my horse I named it Roach since that horse was such a reliable companion. So far this Roach also seems to be an overwhelmingly reliable companion. Similarly, Roach seems to always be tied up nearby whenever I need a ride. I got waylayed by the O’Driscoll gang that just happened to have a stagecoach. After dispatching my assailants I hid their bodies and took the Stage Coach off to the fence to get a little pocket money. I wondered exactly how this would work, but after parking the Coach in the barn… my trusty Roach was tied up on the fence line waiting for me. It seems like I picked a fitting name.
The other thing that I have noticed is that while I am a bandit… I tend to make the good guy choices more often than not. I did not like being an enforcer for a money lender, and quite honestly wish I had an option to just give them some of my money as a result. It seems like I make more than enough money killing O’Driscolls who are constantly hunting me it seems. I made the mistake of riding into Blackwater the other night when the waypoint system went nuts and tried to take me through there. It is disturbing just how fast the roaming bands of lawmen found me. I’ve got someone down in that area that the game is pointing me towards and I am not really sure how best to get to them.
All in all this game is acting as the perfect diversion to keep me from burning out on Path of Exile. The new season dates have been announced and I know in a few weeks I will be grinding up an entirely new set of characters. I am pretty set on playing the Inquisitor, and as a result, I am cool to taper off my playtime for the moment and dive into something completely single-player. It is funny how for me at least I have to be in the right frame of mind to attach to a game. This was true for Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile that I bounced off so many times, and has been true so far with Red Dead Redemption II. I have to be in the mood for a specific sort of game experience to really open up to it. I think this is why the whole AggroChat Gameclub thing galled me so much in the past, is that it forced me to play a game that I wasn’t necessarily into it at that exact moment… and wound up ruining the experience of playing those games because my brain viewed it as homework.
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