Good Morning Folks! I’ve been back in my happy place each evening of curling up on the sofa with my laptop and usually a cat and listening to an audiobook while I played copious amounts of Path of Exile. There is just something about having two different parts of me engaged at the same time that brings me joy. Mechanically I am happily grinding away at whatever objective I am focusing on in the ARPG, and then mentally I am having a story told to me. It brings me back to happier days as a kid of doodling while listening to storytime. Yesterday however was a bit of a sad day because I started the morning thinking that I would go home that night and start the next book in the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi after finishing up the previous one Sunday night. Then I realized… I had no more books in that series. For whatever reason I was thinking that another “space opera” series by that author was connected.
That bummer moment however should not blunt the joy I felt consuming this series. Looking back at my Bookwyrm account, I started the first book on August 26th and wrapped up the last on September 17th. So that was most of a month of chilling out with an ARPG and a book and enjoying life. I guess really if you think about it there is a primary trilogy, a book that retells the last book in that series from a different perspective, and then two different anthologies fleshing out the world from a wide number of different but connected perspectives. Through all six books, a cohesive tale is told, even though no single book keeps the same central character throughout the entire story. This is legitimately my favorite part of the series. It is telling a story of a world more than it is telling a story of a single person, even though the same cast of characters keeps popping up regardless of the scenario.
In many ways, it reminds me of another obsession of mine from when I was a bit younger. I stumbled onto Santiago in a battered paperback form at a used bookstore in college and I mostly picked it up because I liked the cover and the “A Myth of the Far Future” tagline. To the best of my knowledge that “major motion picture” never happened. In truth, the novel was something like the 11th book in the “Birthright” series where Resnick created this entire universe out of disconnected novels. Each one focuses on a specific legend of the far frontier, so you might be hearing about a character in one book… and then pick up the next in the series and it is from their perspective. The thing is… Scalzi is just a better writer and gives his characters far more depth and personality.
I didn’t particularly care about any of the characters from Santiago or any of the other dozen or so novels I read in that series, I cared about the world. With Old Man’s War, I feel like I have a personal relationship with each character that the story focuses on. Even when someone seems outwardly evil, you find out that maybe there is a bit more behind that story. There were several times in the story where an entire alien race was considered to be the villain… but we as the reader were given a viewpoint into one particular member of that race to help explain their actions. This elevates the storytelling past hero/villain iconography to something grounded in experience and emotion. My sadness when I realized I was out of books… comes from the fact that I wanted to know more about these rich characters.
Before this year I had never consumed anything by John Scalzi, I am taking a break from his work and diving into another author that I had never read anything from. I am not entirely certain why I chose Mistborn over any of the other series by Brandon Sanderson, but I did and started it last night. It took me a few chapters to switch gears from space opera to fantasy thieves but I think I am on board now. I know absolutely nothing about this series other than the name that kept popping up periodically in my timeline. So far it reminds me a little bit of Locke Lamora, but not enough to shape my opinion. There are already a few characters that I like, and a few others that I dislike but I feel like that is probably intentional. The mythology of the world seems rich, so I am probably going to enjoy it. That is very much a thing for me… I need thick worlds filled with cultures and symbology to keep me going.
Anyways… time for me to wrap this up and move on with my day. If you have never read the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi it is most definitely something that I would recommend. I am sure in another month’s time when I have consumed all of the books available in Mistborn series I will give you my opinions of that as well.
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Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
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Good Morning Friends! It is that time again… Tabulation Day, aka the day in which I spent the morning counting up all the blog posts from all the participants. This year I want to give a huge thanks to a few people who helped out, most specifically GamerLadyP who organized a self-reporting thread on the Discord and MagiWasTaken for getting up well ahead of me due to timezones and providing me a full count of all 104 participating blogs that I could use as a verification method. I also want to give a huge thanks to everyone who got the word out this year and spread the news of Blaugust, because I am still fairly overwhelmed by the participation. I had wondered what my abandonment of Twitter would do to the event, but it is very clear that the Fediverse and Mastodon specifically have embraced this particular brand of nonsense. I mean I guess it makes sense given that anyone who is interested in DIY Social Media… is also highly likely the sort of person to host their own blog.
Let’s talk about some of the statistics from this year:
104 Blogs Signed Up for Blaugust.
Of those Blogs 100 Made at least one post during the month of August.
We had 56 folks sign up for Blaugust who had never participated before.
During this past month, Blaugust Participants created 1459 Content Posts.
That is truly wild folks. This is easily the most active year of Blaugust we have ever had, and that is pretty cool considering this is both the 10th time we have run Blaugust and the 10 years since the very first one. I’ve said this many times before, but over the years Blaugust has developed a mind of its own, and even if I dropped off the face of the earth… I think someone would follow along behind me to keep the initiative going. This is also the first time in years that I have actually done the daily posting thing… which is weird considering I was already posting six times a week but I made that little extra effort in honor of our tenth year.
Newbie Class of 2022
One of the things that has completely blown me away this year is the large amount of participation from folks who have never participated before. Each year one of the goals of this event is to cultivate new voices to join our community. Blogging has for years been called a dying tradition, but many of us who have participated in this event and the pseudo-predecessor Newbie Blogger Initiative have stood in constant defiance of that viewpoint. Now some folks that signed up are legitimately new to blogging, while others have been seasoned veterans that just never got involved in this process before. We welcome them all however as first-time Blaugustans and as such there is an extra special award for them.
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 2023.
Silver Award – You made at least 15 Posts during the month of August 2023.
Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2023.
Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2023.
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 I had quite a bit of help in the tabulations, but if you feel that we made a mistake please feel free to reach out and let me know. Some blog layouts are much harder to tabulate than others… and we do our 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. Again if you feel like we made a mistake we are very open to negotiation.
The Bronze Club 2023
This year we had thirty-seven folks who managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2023. 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.
We had a dichotomy emerge this year where folks either posted a little bit or a whole heck of a lot, so some of our other awards are a little sparse. This year we had seven blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2023. 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 that we get down to Gold, we are oftentimes in the territory of folks who already have a predetermined schedule and just follow that. For example, I have been on the Gold Team for years because I tend to post at a minimum Monday through Friday, and due to the podcast on Sundays as well. This year we had two blogs post at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2023. Keeping the schedule thread rolling forward, this would be around five times per week.
This year we had a fairly massive Twenty-Nine blogs that managed the feat of posting at least thirty-one times during the Month of August 2023. There are always some folks who end up wildly overshooting the goal and we had ten of them this year. I actually put in the extra effort this year to join the Rainbows, but I will likely never match someone like Syp or Wilhelm who traditionally posts a truly outrageous number of posts on the regular. Everyone who makes it to this level truly deserves all of our admiration, which this time around… sounds weird to say considering I am actually sitting among them.
While the first awards category begins with five posts during the month, it still takes a lot of effort to sign up and put yourself out there with even one blog post. Sometimes the tyranny of the blank screen gets the better of us. Other times you really want to participate but life gets in the way. I feel like it is really important that we take the time to celebrate all of the folks who made that first step and give them the hope that they will return next year with even more content. I think last year was the first time I created a badge just for them, and I am continuing that new tradition this year. This year we had twenty-five folks who made that first step.
This year was a wild ride. Firstly I did not think we would have anywhere near the participation of a normal year given the turmoil that Twitter has been in. That platform was really the origination point of this event, and I thought we might get a number of the regulars back that just happened to catch my blog post announcing it, but I didn’t really expect much in the way of growth. I’ve never been so happy to be completely wrong about anything. The Fediverse is a fertile new ground for bloggers, and it tends to attract the type of folks who want to be out there expressing themselves… on their own terms. This gives me so much hope for blogging as a medium going forward. Sure we might be losing Twitter as a viable home, but we are also expanding out into new territories that are potentially going to be better in the long run.
In the lessons learned department… I think for the most part having an official Mastodon account on Gamepad.club has worked extremely well. I think next year I might need to script something that goes out and boosts posts rather than what happened this year. Essentially each morning I would log into the account and then proceed to flood everyone’s timeline with what had accumulated since the day before. I can’t say that this worked terribly well because it felt like I was a bit of a nuisance. The other big takeaway is that when you get over 100 participants… Tabulation Day aka this morning… becomes “a lot”. Next year we will be tweaking the rules a bit to require self-reporting your blog posts at the end of the event. This is going to make life so much easier for me specifically, but for everyone who helped me out in getting tabulations started.
As always I am so deeply proud of everyone who has participated this year. The tyranny of the blank screen is a real thing. So often it takes me pretending that I am writing to myself to hit the publish button each morning, so I understand what many folks have to overcome to put themselves out there. Again I am very fallible, and if you feel like I made an error in my tabulations, please reach out to me from any of the many platforms I use, and we can talk about it. 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 hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2024. Lastly, I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. For many of us, this is a support structure that we can rely on, and while I may not say it often… I appreciate all of you greatly.
The post Blaugust 2023 In Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! As I am sitting here writing it is the dawn of the last day of Blaugust 2023. There was so much content generated, and tomorrow I will likely do a bit of a summary when I talk about the event as a whole. I wanted to start out this morning with a bit of expectation-setting. In an average year, the “tabulation day” as I personally refer to it is a bit of an arduous undertaking. Normally we talk around fifty or so blogs that I have to review and count posts on. This year we have one hundred and three… by far the largest participant pool I’ve ever seen. So please be patient with me as I undertake the task of tabulating everything and calculating the rewards. Tomorrow is the day when I get really grumpy for everyone who has a less standard blog layout without a clear monthly post index. Really it is the more Instagram-like interfaces that fluster me the most with irregular tiling.
I know of at least one blogger who I am going to ask to tabulate their results for me because instead of writing traditional blog posts they created their blog as threads on the Fediverse. It is just too damned hard to track these, and while I want to be super inclusive about this event… we gotta figure out a better way if this is going to be a thing that more people do. I think next year if we have anything even vaguely close to this number of bloggers, I am going to have to write something into the rules for self-submitting your blog post count for the month. I mean the entire event is already largely on the honor system and I am already scared to death that I am going to miss count someone’s posts and dump them into the wrong category. It has happened before. Some blogs are just harder to count than others and when you are doing a ton in a row in as short a time frame as you can… mistakes occasionally get made.
I am still delving around the 150 depth and having a blast doing so. I’ve upgraded my resistance and light radius in order to go much deeper, but for the moment this seems to be my happy place. I am not sure if this league’s RF character is stronger than the last league, but it feels at least as tanky. I know flipping Fire Trap to my chest piece seems to have increased my damage output significantly. I dinged 95 last night and am about a quarter of the way into the next level. I spent my passive tree point last night on some quality of life, and 10% more area of effect for Righteous Fire. I wasn’t entirely certain why, but my radius seemed really small to me… so anything to increase that would be pretty great. I know that I am missing the AOE Gems/Radius bench craft on my Necklace which I have not lucked into unveiling so far this league. I spent a bit of time last night running Jun missions on the Raider in an attempt to get it with no real luck so far.
I spent quite a bit of time on the Storm Brand Templar soon-to-be Inquisitor last night. I am still very much in the “ugly duckling” phase of this build and don’t have much in the way of defensive layers yet. I did pick up a pair of Call of the Brotherhood rings with Lightning to Cold conversion, giving me a grand total of 96% of Lightning Damage converted to cold. I am contemplating trying to work a Heatshiver into the build so that would add some fire damage as well. I still think I want an Inpulsa chest, which is going to be pretty expensive… but thankfully “Delve Provides” to borrow a motto from Jorgen. I already have more than enough currency to pick up whatever I need, but I do like to keep a buffer for more of my bullshit projects. Random comment though… the new Kirac’s Vault outfit is pretty freaking great minus the weird helm. I had this glowing eyes/black hood thing from a random cosmetic box and I think it goes nicely with it… and then matched it with some wings I had from a previous supporter pack and two wand graphics.
Anyways also on the docket this weekend, is Starfield. I preloaded it this morning and play on poking my head in when the early access begins tonight/tomorrow. I am not sure if I will give this a ton of attention, mostly because I am still fairly invested in the Path of Exile league. However, it might surprise me, and grab me in the same way that Skyrim did so many years… when I pretty much disappeared from raiding for a week because I could not stop playing the game. I am hoping for a great experience, but I am also trying to cool my jets when it comes to hype. I know Bethesda games can be a bit buggy, but honestly… I’ve enjoyed all of them. Hell, I even enjoyed Fallout 76 quite a bit at launch and had zero problems with Fallout 4 in spite of so many people lampooning it at the time.
It is weird… I can be super critical of games like Diablo IV, but completely give a pass to other games that people are memeing. I think it mostly depends on how important I consider the genre. For me the ARPG is just such a fundamental part of me as a player, that my disappointment got the best of me with Diablo. However, Bethesda games are just something I play for fun on the side from my more mainline MMO and ARPG games. They are just a fun goof rather than my main course. I think maybe that is also why I didn’t really have any problem with the DC movies that so many people lambasted… because I am just not super invested in them. Investment breeds contempt.
Now time for my second “Anyways” of the post. I hope you all have a great day and a happy last day of Blaugust. Remember… tomorrow will be a stressful day for me. Please give me some space to do the things needed to tabulate the posts.
The post Last Day of Blaugust 2023 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
