Good Morning Friends. This morning’s post is going to be a bit meandering, but stick with me and I promise I will wrap things up into a point. One of the things that I have long lamented was the closing of Toys R Us. Sure it generally offered the highest possible price point you could pay for an item, but what I miss is the foundational memory that it provided for me growing up. Getting to go to Toys R Us was a big deal because it was this magical place that had every toy that you knew about and a lot more than you had likely ever seen before. It was an even bigger deal for me because I grew up in a tiny town with Walmart as the only retailer, which meant that I had to make a special trip to the “Big City” in order to go there. This also meant that generally speaking I was on my best behavior in the vague hopes that maybe just maybe my parents would let me go to the magical oasis of toys.
Another piece of this puzzle is that my wife and I have had this weird pipe dream for years. We always wanted to create a store that had a jumble of all of our interests. So there would be a section for used books, teacher stuff, video games, vintage toys, and tabletop games all rolled into a single store. The closest thing to this that really exists is Gardner’s Used Books here in the Tulsa area and I feel like it probably only really exists because it was run at a loss for decades as a bit of a tax dodge for a successful accountant. Now that it has been taken over by his daughter though, the place has even got better and probably actually properly is a successful business. There are tales of warehouses full of stock that he bought throughout the years that have never seen the light of day. Going to Gardner’s at least in some part harkens back to some of that magic of a Toys R Us trip because there are just so many interesting and unexpected things to see.
Because of these combined interests, one of the things that I really enjoy is what I collectively refer to as “Shop Tube”. There is a wide array of channels devoted to running a brick-and-mortar store, specifically in collectible spaces. They generally offer a behind-the-scenes day in the life of a store experience as folks bring in items to sell and they figure out how best to price them. Since my wife and I have never really prioritized our daydream of running that penultimate combo store idea we have… this gives me a bit of a way to live vicariously through the eyes of folks who did go down that road. I’ve talked before about Toy Federation which has become a Sunday morning ritual of watching their new video each week. I’ve also talked a bit about Retro Rick’s Game Point channel which is actually close enough to me to reasonably go there, and at some point, I probably will.
So all of this said… when the YouTube algorithm started suggesting to me this new channel with a weird name, I was primed to click through and see what it was about. Essentially it is a Toy, Video Game, and Children’s Clothing store located in Jasper Indiana, and the channel is devoted to the process of standing up this store and then annexing the other part of the building to expand the business and the assorted growing pains that come with that. What is so cool about the store is that it is purposefully built to be a spectacle giving kids that magical experience of roaming through a place with seemingly endless possibilities. The name is explained… but also does not really matter because it is extremely memorable.
The channel is most often presented through the narration of Dallas the owner and his co-owner girlfriend, and the cast of characters that work at the store. What is so cool about this experience is that it is targeted specifically towards trying some interesting things out. For example, there is a giant bin of Mr/Mrs Potato dolls and parts and kids can effectively build their own custom-made ultimate version to buy. There is a Lego table with cups letting you fill up whatever parts you want to then purchase. There is a free make-your-own bracelet table with tons of assorted beds dumped into a big bin with pipe cleaners letting kids have a little arts and crafts activity for free as part of the total experience. Everything is bright and colorful and specifically designed in a way to be at the eye level for the target demographic… kids… or adults who are kids at heart.
The thing is this channel and store go much further than just a YouTube thing, but are attempting to be a force of interesting activities in their small community. On September 13th they held a Mario Kart Tournament and gave away store credit to the winners. The channel showed off the behind-the-scenes process of getting ready for the event and trying to figure out how to make a very cool and memorable trophy for the winners. It was just generally fun to watch a bunch of kids and a few adults having a blast playing Mario Kart. There are future plans to do something totally different and hold a Hot Wheel race throughout the store as their next big event. It feels like they are genuinely trying to create interesting memories for the kids who frequent the shop, and I am here for it. Like I said before… that is the big thing that the death of Toys R Us robbed us of, is those deep foundational memories from childhood.
Right now the channel is honestly sort of criminally underrated. It only has around 2200 subscribers but is doing some really interesting things. They recently started a live Saturday show from the store and Dallas has wired up a few cameras so that they can swap between the podcasting area in the Video Game store and behind the counter in the Clothing/Toy side of the store. What is sort of infectious is the generally chaotic energy of the store owner which has deep “big kid” vibes to it. More important than that though is that the employees seem genuinely happy there. There are often asides in the videos where one of them has been roaming around with a go-pro and just yammering unscripted about whatever is on their mind. A good number of retail store channels are very clearly staged and at least loosely scripted, and this just has more of a “giving a toddler your camera” vibe.
Dallas aka the face of the Duck Duck Blue channel had/has another channel with nine years worth of content called Tendo’s Trash. Once I started watching the Duck Duck Blue videos, the algorithm of course started recommending various videos from that channel. It was way more focused on Thrift Shopping, Garage Sales, and hitting up the Goodwill Bins to find deals to ultimately then flip on eBay or stock an Antique Mall Booth. It has the same chaos goblin vibes that Duck Duck Blue has but is a bit less focused. However, it also gives a bit of a behind-the-behind-the-scenes view of all of the events that led up to the grand opening of the store. There are over nine hundred videos on that channel dating back nine years, so I doubt I will be getting through all of them, but it has been interesting seeing the process that they went through to stock the store almost entirely through aggressively seeking out garage and estate sales.
If you are a child of the 80s/90s and have deep foundational memories centered around visits to the toy store… then you might legitimately dig all of this. I am legitimately hoping that five years from now we don’t find out that Tendo was a milkshake duck, but so far he seems like a genuinely good dude with a good heart.
The post Duck Duck Blue appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Blaugust 2024 In Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
There is a thread that sprung up on the AggroChat slack that has been largely demonizing the process of leveling in MMORPGs. The consensus seems to be, that games should allow you to immediately drop into content with your friends without any requirement to push through levels and push through gearing. On one level I absolutely get where they are coming from, but on another… I genuinely love the process of leveling. Games struggle to provide content that feels meaningful, but at the same time is generally low-pressure. When you hit the endgame, there is this propensity for expecting that players want the difficulty dial cranked up to eleven. I am fine with difficult content, but I also don’t want things to be “sweaty” all the time. In fact I need large swaths of chill gaming in order to distance out the spikes of frustration.
Yesterday I rolled a brand new Guardian in Guild Wars 2, and I have been having a blast going through the motions of doing a ton of content I have done several times before. However the introduction of leveling and earning new things each time I level… makes the process enjoyable. I am also getting to see story content again with fresh eyes. This is a huge part of why Ace and I rolled alts on Kraken server in Final Fantasy XIV, was to experience those early days of the game all over again. There is something charming about starting over, so much so that there are a few times I have legitimately considered creating an alt account in Guild Wars 2 so that I can see the game with the same eyes I would as a brand-new player. I get that this is not something that most players would want to do… but also I am also a huge proponent of the seasonal model in ARPGs, and after experiencing Pandaria Remix think it might be an interesting thought experiment in MMORPGs as well.
Part of the reason why I end up rolling so many characters during what is effectively a limited event like a Path of Exile league… is that every so often I just get that itch to start over. For example, I have played through Cyberpunk 2077 up to the “Embers” quest chain something around eight or nine times at this point… only actually finishing the game on two of those play-throughs. I could not tell you how many times I have put at least 40-60 hours worth of playtime into a Bethesda game… only to start all over again the next time I get the itch to play one. In Minecraft, I almost never continue in the same world for more than a few weeks at a time because I get this urge to explore and “break” the world and once I have satisfied that urge I can move on with something else. I’ve played through the entirety of Mass Effect start to finish at least four times… with individual segments like my favorite Mass Effect 2 even more times. There is just something comforting and compelling about revisiting some of my favorite games.
So while leveling is a chore to most players… for whatever reason my brain is keyed to crave it. I leveled three characters during the Pandaria Remix event in World of Warcraft and one of those characters is now the character I am starting to play in War Within. Similarly, in Final Fantasy XIV I already have five jobs at level 100 and am continuing to level more as I do daily content. Before Endwalker released I pushed everything that I had on my account to level 80 and while I think I burnt myself out in the process… I also had a hell of a lot of fun experience with all of these different gameplay styles while doing content that was deeply familiar. I have at least a half dozen different Warriors scattered between multiple servers in World of Warcraft, and I enjoyed creating and leveling all of them.
I think the problem that I have with games that don’t have leveling… is that the characters I am playing oftentimes don’t feel like they are mine. Like I don’t really have a concept of “character” in roleplaying terms, but I have a deep investment in character as a sequence of my interactions and gearing decisions. All of my characters are me and in spite of playing on many a roleplaying server for the better sense of community… I don’t really do roleplay. However I remember when I acquired this item or that item, or when I got a new ability that I had been wanting and played with it for the first time. I remember each and every Path of Exile character when I managed to push across the line toward viability and was able to start ripping through content and farming it. Similarly, I have a stable of characters in Guild Wars 2, that I boosted that I feel almost no investment in.
Guild Wars 2 is really free with its character boosts, either in the form of partial boosts that come in the birthday gifts or the level 80 boosts that you end up getting each expansion. After seeing how much more I care about my Guardian while going through the process of leveling him… I feel like I might have robbed myself of a critical experience to enjoy these characters by taking those boosts. I’m legitimately contemplating deleting characters, and rerolling them over time so that I can expand my stable of characters in a more organic fashion. In truth… I am probably still going to use a boost to get a free set of gear, but I am planning on using it around 70-75 after I have already leveled through the content most of the way naturally. This character feels more “mine” than my baby Asuran Guardian that I boosted ever did.
In other news, I wrapped up my Griffon yesterday and now officially have every mount unlocked on my account. This one was a little bittersweet because despite all of this effort and expenditure of gold… I still don’t really like this mount. It feels like a worse version of the Skyscale, which I guess I already understood. Maybe it is better if you are crossing a large distance and starting at a really high vantage point… but getting up off the ground is miserable. One thing that I really wish Guild Wars 2 was better about is organizing all of these “system” unlocks into a category of Achievements. For example, if they had one place where you should see all of the Legendary item quests, all of the Mount quests, and anything that unlocks a specific system it would be far less obtuse to players. As it stands you essentially have to live on the Wiki in order to figure out how to do any of these things… which is a challenge as I am trying to determine what my next “long grind” is going to be.
I also spent some time yesterday crafting a new set of award badges for Blaugust 2024. I apologize to everyone who has participated this year because I have not really been engaged. August was a really rough month for me, and I have felt like I was largely phoning it in because I just did not have enough spoons for anything else. There were times this month that I thought I should have probably ended the event at the decade mark because I just was not feeling it. I think that is more the viewpoint into this specific month and how busy it has been and less about the event as a whole. I might start actually accepting more help in the planning and running of the event in future years though, and I have leaned way the hell more on my mentors than I have at any other time. Huge thanks to Jaedia and Magi who have carried a lot of the burden.
The post The Defense of Leveling appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! My morning has been a bit on the odd side. I had to get up super early, run into the office, do a few things, and then get back home before an 8:30 meeting. As a result, I am getting a bit of a late start to the day. There is a topic that I have been mulling over in my head and I thought I would use today as a time to open a discussion. This year with Blaugust we have had a significantly larger reach than we have in previous years. At the time of writing, we have one-hundred-seven participating blogs and fifty-nine of them are completely new to the Blaugust event. This means our community is growing, but also as it grows some of the collective cultural tenets of the community are changing a bit. Right or wrong this was an event born out of the MMORPG Blogging community, and most of us old-timers have created blogs where we ramble on about our thoughts regarding the games we are playing and the new games on the horizon that we find ourselves pining for.
I appreciate a fresh perspective as folks arrive who have been wholly disconnected from this original community. I think there has been a good deal of shared growth since we opened up the call to pretty much anyone who creates regularly syndicated content in whatever form that takes. However this year I have seen a few entrants that are very clearly using Large Language Models as part of their daily routine. This feels like we are approaching a slippery slope here, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. I’ve screwed around a lot specifically with Large Language Models that generate images off prompts. I’ve spent most of my time playing around with Stable Diffusion, and that is precisely what I think of it as… “play”.
It is a toy that I can fiddle around with and get some curious results from, but nothing I am doing do I truly consider to be a creative endeavor. I know other folks who have been in this same blogging pod for a while do the same. Sometimes we need an image to break up the text of a post, and can’t find anything that fits our exact requirements so it is pretty easy to turn to a picture generation machine and have it poop out something to fill this void. The thing is… when I do this, I don’t take any sense of pride in “creating” something because I did not. I typed some words into a magic box and it spit out a visualization, and while that visualization might be appealing it is a largely unrepeatable event. What I take pride in are the words surrounding that visualization that I pulled from my head.
So I am finding myself in a weird state looking at the prospect of folks having LLMs spit out the text for their blog posts, even if they are tweaking them later. Blaugust originally was an event centered around writing. That is humans who are sitting down to commit the thoughts that they are thinking to the digital page and then share them with peers. Typing some prompts into a machine and having it generate thoughts for you… feels like a bit of a violation of that original goal. I don’t care what ChatGPT regurgitated from stolen data… I care about what YOU think as the person behind the screen typing the thing that I am reading. I find zero value something that an LLM generates that is formatted to look like a number of posts that it consumed that were written by someone originally.
So I find myself in an awkward position. Blaugust 2024 as the rules of the contest stand, does not have any text forbidding the use of large language models to generate posts. As a result, I find myself having to tolerate some things that seem distasteful to me personally… and given the number of back-channel comments that I have received other Blaugustans also find it distasteful. Going forward for 2025 and beyond there is likely going to be an “Anti-AI” rider that the mentors will have to work through. Again I don’t so much care about the “AI as Clipart” trend of using it as something vaguely pleasant looking to break up large blocks of text. What concerns me is using Large Language Models to generate text posts instead of sharing your own thoughts.
I’m not purposefully trying to be a Luddite, but also believe there is value in human creativity that cannot be replaced by a regurgitation of consumed source material. Maybe I am off base here, and folks don’t mind the concept of LLM content mills… but given the number of sidebars I have had with folks I am guessing that will not be the case. Anyways I am opening this discussion, feel free to drop me your thoughts and feelings below.
The post Blaugust and Large Language Models appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
