Tales of the Aggronaut

Blog Posts from Belghast on Tales of the Aggronaut website.

The First of Blaugust

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The First of Blaugust

Welcome everyone to the very first day of Blaugust…  the legit and actual month thereof.  It has been a wild ride to this point because as of just a few minutes ago we had a little over eighty blogs signed up and ready to go.  You are all proving that there is in fact a desire for this sort of thing still and that no… in spite of all of the hot takes to the contrary blogging is not in fact dead.  The reason why I did this thing was in part to stoke the fires of our community once more and see who all I could get to come out of the woodwork.  We have lived in this torporous state for far too long and it is time for us to get active again.  Blaugust is in fact a month dedicated to active posting.  We just finished the pre-game week as it were with posts on technical topics about actually getting started.  Now it is time to get out there and write some amazing content…  and with that comes a need for topics.

During this week you should see posts showing up in the community with ideas to keep you going for the rest of the month, and I have a few of my own to add to this.  However I wanted to take a moment this morning to recap just how impressive things have been so far.  First off… there is still time to participate in Blaugust even though the month has officially started.  The idea is about getting active not necessarily about posting every day, so as long as there is still some time left in the month there is time to sign up.  You can check out the official sign-up sheet here and join us on Discord for what is becoming an exceptionally active community of creatives.  There have been many conversations that I have peeked in on while sitting in a meeting this week, that have seemed really awesome.

I think now is probably the time to recap the folks participating as well.  There is a master list that I have been keeping updated if you want to incorporate it into your content or the amazing Chestnut has been maintaining a twitter list of the folks active on that platform.  Now for my own lists…  folks participating.

The Community of Mentors

The Awesome Folks Participating

In 2014 the first running of Blaugust we had 55 folks sign up and participate.  In 2015 we had our biggest year to date with 88 participants and in the last official running in 2016 we had 62.  At this point we have completely eclipsed two of the years and given the patterns that I have seen in the past of folks joining in mid month I fully expect that we will be blowing that 2015 number out of the water as well.  The level of support I have gotten in this initiative has been staggering, and I want to take a moment to everyone who is helping to make it an extremely lively place to be.  I’ve been attempting to pop my head into the proceedings as often as time allows but things have been sorta insane in my life the last few weeks.

One of the hardest parts about blogging is the fact that there are some days you are just going to have a completely blank mind.  The harder you try and materialize your thoughts so you can condense them into printed word…  the more they seem to fly around in your head at incomprehensible speeds.  Then there are days when you have too many things you want to say and they sort of log jam somewhere between your brain and your fingers.  In those cases it is good to have a backlog of topics that you can draw upon in order to force some sense of focus.  Here are some topics that I have kicked around in my head before but never actually written about.

Ten Random Topic Prompts

  • Write about the first time a game made you cry.  This could in theory be substituted for any sort of media… a book, a movie, a play…  just write about the first time you found yourself completely caught up in the story and those walls fell.
  • Write about your first online gaming experience and why it was positive or negative in shaping your opinions of online interactions going forward.
  • Go find a random screenshot that you like and write about what was going on in your head or in the game at the moment you took it.
  • Write about how you got involved in your first guild, and the sequence of events that prompted you to finally accept an invitation.
  • Write about your three favorite items from any video game ever regardless of genre.
  • Write about any goal you have achieved in the past and what it was like to work towards it and eventually get it.
  • Write about some of the positive or negative interactions you have had with the blogging community.
  • Write  about someone you met through gaming that has turned into a friend that transcended a single game.
  • Write about times where your gaming life has clashed with your real life obligations and how you have handled that.
  • Write about something you really truly love be it a Movie, Television Show, Piece of Music, Video Game or literally anything else you are super passionate about.

Finally in closing… today is an auspicious day not only because it is the official beginning of the month of Blaugust, but also because it is my 20th wedding anniversary.  It is just staggering to think about that it has been twenty years since our wedding.  I am super happy to be sharing this journey with my navigator…  because everyone knows I have zero sense of direction.

Seeking Screenshot Tool

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Seeking Screenshot Tool

This morning I am going to go in a different direction… and ask the Blaugust community with assistance on something.  For years I have been a loyal FRAPS user for the purpose of recording game screenshots.  I have a legally registered copy… that happens to have personal information in the registration details screen so I have mosaic’d it out.  There are an awful lot of pirated copies floating about but I happily plunked down my $40 and have been using it for over a decade at this point.  It has always simply worked as intended and given me the ability to record screenshots without fail.  This changed however when Destiny 2 made the weird decision to block any form of an overlay for “security reasons” there by making it so that FRAPS could not record anything successfully.

First I feel like I need to start off with why I use FRAPS rather than in game screenshot tools.  It all comes down to the fact that I like posting a significant number of screenshots in my morning posts…  and that I am lazy.  I cannot remember what the directory MMO number 376 that I have installed on my system uses for screenshot storage.  As a result I like having everything dumped into the same directory where I can filter through them quickly, and eventually archive them off to my network attached storage.  I have a truly nonsense number of screenshots stored out there at this point.

Ultimately what I am looking for feature wise…

  • ability to capture fullscreen, borderless and windows screenshots without capturing the window frame or my desktop
  • ability to save to the format of choice… I tend to dump things to JPG because my blog gets grumpy if I upload PNGs anymore
  • ability to work flawlessly without having to constantly check to see if its on
  • ability to change the target directory and dump everything to one place
  • ability to bind whatever it is to work off of PrtScrn button because its habit

For years FRAPS did all of these things but one of the recent Windows 10 updates seems to have changed that.  Now any time I launch a game I need to kill FRAPS and relaunch it to get the overlay to work properly.  This means that it is now a fiddly mess and it makes me grumpy.  So what I am asking you my community is…  is there a hidden gem out there for screen capture that I am unaware of?  Now I am going to talk about some of the alternatives that I have used.

GeForce Experience

Seeking Screenshot Tool

This one seemed like a no brainer given that I run Nvidia based cards and this ends up installing to your system regardless if you want it to.  It isn’t a flawless system but it was the only reliable way that I seemed to have to be able to record Destiny 2 given that the overlay is hardware based and not something executing at a software level.  Its major flaws were the fact that it would not dump to a single directory, but instead a series of directories named off of what the game executable thinks it is.  This causes some weirdness when the game developers don’t actually go back and fix the name of their executable… for example the Quake Champions screenshots I have are in a directory called “PC” or Dauntless for whatever reason shows up as “Archon” which was maybe an early name for the game?

Another flaw is that you cannot change what format the screenshots are dumped in as it always saves to PNG, which involved me going through a morning ritual of converting all of the screenshots that I was going to upload to JPG to bypass the nonsense size limit.  Lastly and quite possibly the most damning problem is when I happen to be running a game in windowed mode…  it records my entire desktop like the above screenshot.  This means I either need to drop it in photoshop and cut out the window or just live with the fact I am posting a postage stamp for a screenshot.  Not ideal to say the least given that when I am streaming I occasionally run things windowed so I can see what is going on in stream etc.

Dxtory

Another screenshot software that has been recommended to me numerous times is Dxtory by ExKode which is I believe a Japanese based software house.  It is also in the 30-40 dollar range price wise and does a really good job of capturing both images and video.  The problem is… it would occasionally just stop working and not give any indication of this.  I would be playing along thinking everything was working as intended… I would still have an overlay in game indicating that the software is active…  then when I sit down to write a blog post the next morning I would have zero screenshots to show for the previous nights play time.  The unreliable nature and the fact that this was not an every night occurrence made me move away from it.  Some times it would go for three or four nights without flaking out on me… and other times it would happen multiple times in the same night.  I was not able to find any sort of pattern around it.  Whatever the case however it was unreliable and I opted to move away from it.

Greenshot

This is an open source software mostly designed to capture regions of an image much like windows clipping tool.  However it does in fact have an unattended screenshot mode and as a result I attempted to use it as my software of choice for awhile.  The problem is that when running Windowed Borderless… it would intermittently alternate between taking a screenshot of my desktop and taking a screenshot of the game.  This became problematic given that I was missing a bunch of screenshots and again… maybe had nothing to show for my night of gaming come blog post time.

Seeking Screenshot Tool

The core problem is that most of the screenshot tools don’t really do the thing that I want them to do given that they are largely focused on capturing video…  and not capturing still images.  I have StreamLabs OBS for those moments when I want to capture video so I have that covered.  However what I want instead is just a reliable screenshot tool that I can use with literally every game I play, so the images don’t get lost somewhere on my hard drive.  I may give Dxtory another spin because it has been numerous years since I last tried it.  Ultimately however what I really want… is FRAPS to stop being a butt and just work again.  In the meantime however, I would love to hear some of your suggestions for screenshotting games?  Do you still rely on the in game screenshot tools, or have you consolidated to using some tool other than the ones I have mentioned?

 

Because Rocks

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While we are still very much in Blaugust prep week, I am going to take the morning off and talk about some non-Blaugust stuff.  First off the above embedded video is the YouTube version of this weeks Podcast where we talk at length about our feelings regarding Battle for Azeroth.  Of the crew Grace and I are the only two that are really still connected to World of Warcraft in any major way, and the show itself became a bit of an extended version of the feelings we are both having.  This weekend I spent a good deal of time prepping characters for the expansion since I had not really done that yet, and can abuse the event that is happening as a way to get some reasonable gear easily.

Unfortunately I made the decision to main Horde this expansion before I experienced the nonsense War of the Thorns quests…  but as part of that decision I have been prepping my Warrior, Deathknight, Demon Hunter, Warlock and have been pushing up my Paladin.  Now it had been awhile since I had done one of the class order hall missions, and I was immediately struck by now good tone wise it felt to be gathering up the paladins on either side of the fence to work together towards the goal of saving Azeroth.  I am not sure how we got to this point where all of the past gains of the Legion expansion are out the window and we are back to a forced Red vs Blue narrative.

One of the things we talk at length about in the podcast is just how bad the Advertising campaign feels.  Firstly we are divided as a nation and as a world by so many serious issues right now that it just feels irresponsible to be pushing more of that for the sake of selling your product.  Secondly…  in our experience World of Warcraft isn’t a dividing line but instead something that brings people together with the stupid artificial boundary between Horde and Alliance just being an inconvenience that maybe keeps you from playing with some of your friends.  I tell this tale in the podcast but I figured I would talk a little bit about it in person.

When I went to take my ITIL training and eventually take the test, there was a significant amount of waiting around because of a scheduling mistake.  This meant me and the trainer of the class had to sit around and hang out for a bit while waiting on my online time slot.  During this we realized that we both had played World of Warcraft and were both raiders back in the day…  but on opposite sides of the fence.  Instead of it becoming a discussion about Horde vs Alliance… it became a discussion about our shared experiences leading guilds and raids and all of the weird things we had encountered in the process of doing that.  We both immediately realized we had more in common in our experiences than different and focused in on those things…  rather than some nonsensical artificial rivalry.

Because Rocks

So as I find myself prepping for the launch of this expansion I end up thinking about the expansion that could have been.  Had we continued the class fantasy and kept moving forward towards a unified Azeroth it could have been so amazing.  Legion was probably the strongest World of Warcraft content to date and in part it was so strong…  because the Horde and Alliance factored so little into it.  There is a sequence in Stormheim that feels awful as you are forced back into the shoes of Red and Blue but everything else feels so good as you are working side by side with the other faction to face bigger evils.  That is the World of Warcraft I want, where we take on things bigger than ourselves as we face what will be the obvious resurgence of the Old Gods.

I feel like Battle for Azeroth is the expansion that no one wanted, and I have arrived at this point by listening to my social media feed made up of a bunch of long time WoW players.  Sure there are a few people I know who were excited for the War Mode…  but only because they rolled on a PVP server to be with friends and don’t want any part of that nonsense and will be turning it off completely.  It just seems like a weird gamble to triple down on the faction versus faction thing, when it felt so amazing to get away from it completely.  I keep hoping that maybe they will throw us for a loop and that the factional nonsense is short lived, but I somehow doubt that.

Because Rocks

I will be there with my hordelings hanging out with that side of my gaming family, but I am not going to be super pumped about it especially with the way that the early questing has gone so far.  We are fighting a war “because rocks” and that we don’t want the other side to get any of these macguffins of ultimate power.  Here is hoping that things get better from here.

Syndication and Social Media

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Syndication and Social Media

This morning I have struggled a bit to get off the ground and coalesce into writing something that might be valuable to someone else.  One of the things you see a lot with my blog is me attempting to be honest with my readers.  This isn’t really the point of this mornings post but i would say if you are struggling with something…  let them in on it.  I’ve said before that blogging is therapeutic and at the same time lowering your guard a bit is too.  Now I am not saying that I recommend this practice for everyone, because it does in fact give trolls an attack vector.

The thing I wanted to talk to this morning is the interwoven relationship between blogging and social media.  I can say without hyperbole that almost every one of my social media accounts exists because of this blog as I sussed it out as another possible syndication venue for my content.  It is not a coincidence that both my twitter account and my blog both started in April of 2009, because twitter has long been the vehicle that bloggers get together to talk to one another.  This is why I asked for twitter handle as part of the sign up instead of other social media options.

I think the reason for this is that twitter is better than any platform at the quick distribution of a blog link.  You have enough characters to provide a quick summary, a link and an image enticing your readers to click through and visit your post.  The retweet culture allows someone to pass your information on… without passing too much of themselves in the process and I think that simply leads to more folks passing more information around than on other platforms.  Granted in the era of the quoted retweet that changed a bit, but I still feel like that platform is the best place to quickly distribute content.

The thing is…  I don’t just think this I know this from the statistics.  I’ve been running google analytics since day one and that has given me a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t work for the purpose of spreading my blog.  If I had utilized this more fluently rather than the generally lazy way that I do… I could be a hell of a lot more popular than I actually am.  However it does tell me things about which platforms work and which do not.  Let’s talk for a moment about the content I share and where it gets consumed.

Direct Traffic and RSS

First off one of the things you need to know is that the majority of your readers are probably still to this day going to be consuming your content through an RSS Feed Reader.  Before sitting down to write my post I ran some numbers for the past year of usage and only 14% of my traffic comes from any referral source.  This means the majority of my readers are either coming in directly or through an RSS feed reader.  There are some other statistics that I have through WordPress that tell me that the majority of my readers are in fact coming in through RSS.

I don’t want to necessarily talk about the numbers because I have a larger audience than some folks and a much smaller audience than others.  I use analytics for the purpose of learning about the data not necessarily as creating a benchmark to judge my success on and I highly suggest if you decide to go down that road you adopt a similar stance.  The big thing I want as a takeaway however is that RSS is in fact not dead and you are going to see a large number of your users that are not accessing your content  directly.  As a result I highly suggest you check your own blog out in a news reader and make sure it looks like you want it to look.  Since I am not trying to drive ad venue I syndicate my entire blog out over RSS instead of snippets…  your mileage may vary here.

Social Media

In the above bit I mentioned that only 14% of my readers come as referrals from any other source and that also includes social media.  As it stands right now I syndicate my content in the places that are built into WordPress, so that when I hit publish it also sends my content out there as well.  Here is a rundown of where all said content goes…

  • Twitter – This is my primary social network
  • Facebook – At some point along the line I created a Facebook account just for the blog.  I don’t use this network much.
  • Google Plus – Hold out from that era when we thought Google Plus would rule the world and a lot of us bloggers started hanging out here.
  • GPlus “Page” – Similar hold out where I thought it was a good idea to create a Tales of the Aggronaut page.
  • Tumblr – I don’t even know why I do this, but it was an option in WordPress so might as well.

These are effectively the places that I can push to each day when I hit publish without further interaction.  The only publish option that I am not utilizing is Path…  which if I am being completely honest I  don’t know what the hell it actually is.  It’s seems to be an iPhone thing and since I am not an iDevice user I have never actually encountered it.  Now since only 14% of my traffic comes in through referrals…  I could make an argument that syndication doesn’t actually matter.  However I feel like putting your stuff in front of as many eyeballs as possible is always going to be a generally good idea.

Let’s talk a bit about where that referral content is coming from.

  • 25% – Twitter – this is my primary platform for engagement so it probably isn’t shocking that the vast majority of my click-through’s come from it.  It probably says way more about my willingness to engage with it than the actual power of the platform.  My tweets don’t really go viral so it isn’t like I am getting a crushing number of hits this way.
  • 12% – Bhagpuss.blogspot.com – That is right… my appearance in the Inventory Full blog roll is quite literally beating every social media platform but twitter.  Thanks Bhagpuss!
  • 9% – Facebook – this shows up as a few different addresses but combined together it equates to a little less than 10% of the referral traffic.
  • 2.5% – Google Plus – There are still folks actively using this platform in spite of the fact that I am not.  At one point I had a nonsense number of people following me so there may be some residuals from that?
  • 1.3% – Reddit – Not something I actively engage with but a handful of my blog posts have made their way to Reddit where they got significant action.  Getting anything on Reddit means you are going to have a constant trickle of users from there clicking on the links as people search.
  • .32% – Tumblr – I mean it makes a lot of sense given that my posts are not exactly formatted in the Tumblr way and I don’t spend any time engaged with that platform other than occasionally going on a reblog bender reposting cool comic book art.

Now as an academic experiment I extended out my timeframe and looked at all traffic I have ever gotten to my blog.  At that point a bunch of data points change… namely my referral rate goes up to 26% of my traffic and the influence of twitter drops to only 11% of that…  with WoW.com coming in second at a little over 8% showing the sheer influence of being part of the World of Warcraft blogging community used to be.  To round out the top five… you have Google Plus at number three, Facebook at number four, and Reddit at number five.  It is funny how things change over time.

Engagement

Ultimately my take away from all of this is that social media syndication is worth it… but only if you plan to engage with those communities.  I feel like my numbers don’t really point out that Twitter is the most superior platform but instead that it is the only platform I am willing to actively engage with.  It is the place where people know my name and respond to the things I say… and on the other platforms I am just a weird guy that refuses to use his real name or picture.  Granted my real name is pretty freaking easy to find and I have tweeted out my picture a few times… so it is a personal choice thing not like a witness protection program thing.  Ultimately I feel like you get out of social media what you put into it as far as blogging goes.  I still feel like it is my favorite way to link up with other bloggers, but especially now that we have the discord and how active it has been…  maybe that could shift into being that primary vehicle of communication for the community.

Regardless don’t feel like you have to do social media if you are not comfortable doing it.  My engagement brings me in some hits but in the grand scheme of things it accounts for a very small percentage of my total users.  The effect that is impossible to capture however is where people found out about my site in the first place.  I have a sneaking suspicion that if you somehow managed to factor that into the equation… then social media would have far more weight in the equation that it appears to have.  I choose to put my stuff out there and over time have built a community of regular readers, and if you do the same you will build your own circle of readers as well.