The last post I made on this blog was for Blaugust in 2019, but my 2020 wasn’t exactly the best either mentally or physically. I know I’m in good company there.
Regardless, I’m basically going to be ignoring the blaugust prompts, and using this as an excuse to do some writing for my stable of massively underdeveloped characters. I plan to get Monday/Wednesday/Friday posts out for these, so that can be something to look forward to. In time, I would like to get back to using this as an expansion of thoughts from the podcast. But for now, writing for writing’s sake will have to do.
Hey Friends! Happy Blaugust! I feel like since I am the instigator of this nonsense I am obligated to make a day one post, even though this year it lands on a Sunday when I am already making a Podcast post. For those who are completely oblivious to this thing called Blaugust, you should check out the 2021 kick-off information post here. If you just want a high-level overview, since August of 2014 I have been running an event where I challenge folks to write 31 posts during the month of August. This has morphed and changed slightly over the years, but essentially the core of the initiative is to spur active blogging in the community. Even if you don’t want to post every day, it is a time to dust off that blog and be more active in the blogosphere.
The Participants
It is by no means too late to sign up, and you can do so through the official sign-up form here. Currently, at the time of writing this, there are thirty-eight folks who have signed up to participate in this nonsense. I would greatly appreciate you going out there and show these blogs some love.
If you want to participate, it is pretty simple. Either start a new blog or dust off an old blog and start writing. Sign up using the official sign-up link just to make sure you are going to get credit. Tag your posts with #Blaugust2021 just to make it a bit easier to track them for participants. Join the Discord so that you can mingle with your fellow Blaugustans and chat about “bloggery” things. Finally, get out there and comment on other blogs as you hopefully collect enough inspiration to keep going for all thirty-one days of the initiative. If you want images or information, it is all collected on the Blaugust Media Kit page. If you work better with bullet point lists, I have you covered as well.
As always if you have any questions feel free to reach out here or on the discord. Happy Blaugust and welcome to this initiative!
The post Happy First of Blaugust 2021 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we had the whole gang back and start the show talking about how Bel was apparently replaced by a totally different person as he both healed a few dungeons and ran raid content in FFXIV as a mage class. From there we talk a bit about Blaugust which is starting the day this show releases. The rest of the show is sort of a rapid-fire remembering of games that had dropped off our radar over the years or that we just plain forgot about. We talk about MMORPGs gone by, games that had DLC releases, or just games that we started but never actually got back around to playing. We dive a bit into Genshin Impact and the most recent content release as well as apparently the ability to play your pc/mobile account on the PlayStation 5. Lastly we finish the show with a discussion of Ghostrunner, a movement puzzle platformer game featuring a deep cyberpunk aesthetic.
Good morning friends. I sorta did everything in the wrong order this morning and as a result, I have been struggling to get started on this blog post. I thought for a while about trying to do a Favorite Fridays post, but really if I did one it would have been for the server that I play on in FFXIV. Right now I am clinging super hard to FFXIV because it has been a glimmer of joy in an otherwise lightless void of a week. We have a weekend starting however so that is at least a really good thing. I still find myself glued to the continued trickle of news about Blizzard’s wrongdoing even though I know I should probably stop watching it for my own mental health. I do want to reiterate that yesterday’s post was not a call to get people to leave World of Warcraft, but instead to provide some options for folks who have never played another MMORPG.
I really do love Cactuar the server I have played on since the release of the game. More recently the server has become widely known for the place where he-who-must-not-be-named plays, but really Cactuar has been amazing since day one and has largely been unaffected by e-celeb’s presence. During Stormblood, there was a random day when someone was shouting to the entire zone in the Loch’s talking about the Dodo Appreciation Society and giving everyone a Dodo minion that would come up and open a trade window. Similarly we have a player who has been travelling around the zones offering everyone a pet rat. I had to bring my own rat out just to make sure he knew I was already indoctrinated. Thing is… this is by no means a strange occurrence because people are constantly doing interesting and weird things on the server and I love it greatly.
In other news my friend Lonen reached the point in the main story quest where she needed to do the sequence of three dungeons in a row. We pulled together a Free Company group last night so she could have her first public tanking experience be a pretty chill one. The shocking portion of this is that I brought along my Scholar and healed. Well in truth Eos healed and I mostly just casted dots and nukes while we burned through the packs of mobs. I don’t really heal at all but I have White Mage and Scholar both sitting at 50. Astralogian is boosted to 60, largely because I did not want to level it and I wanted to get rid of all of the low level healer gear I had clogging my vaults. I am not a terribly good healer, nor am I really attentive to hotbars.
I spent the first years of my MMO gaming life as a healer. I played a Cleric in Everquest and the Complete Heal rotation was about the least engaging way to play a game. That was not however what killed healing for me. I could handle the slow pace of Root and Nuke gameplay and I could even handle spending most of my time sitting on the ground to regenerate mana. What I could not handle however was the constant calls at all hours of the night to log in and come resurrect someone because they took a bad death and were about to lose a level. This distaste for healers has carried over into modern life and other than a brief stint going to raids as a Holy Paladin, I have never really spent any significant amount of time as a healer. Thing is though, for the most part a lot of the healing classes in FFXIV are actually enjoyable. While leveling White Mage and Scholar and I actually spent a fair amount of time queueing for random dungeons.
Well friends, I think that is all I have in me this morning. I hope you all have a very good weekend and can get some much needed rest. I am probably going to pour myself further into Final Fantasy XIV and keep working on the Machinist and Dragoon. I might even try my hand at healing some more because last night was fairly enjoyable. If you are looking for a server, I highly recommend Cactuar. It can be a pain in the butt to get onto, but generally speaking if you roll a character first thing in the morning you can get in. Make sure you check the official server status page to see if you can create a character or not.
The post Keep Cactuar Weird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
