Day One Rundown

Shock and Awe

That is really the only words I can think of this morning to explain my reaction to the huge turnout we have gotten for Blaugust.  I want to thank each and every one of you that is plugging away on daily posting.  I also want to thank the folks that have now joined on day two, and anyone else out there waiting in the wings that may or may not be chipping in the occasional post as well.  When I came up with this idea in part due to my wife’s own may challenge, and my love of the concept of jamming together Blog and August into one word… I thought that maybe three or four people would join in the madness.  As of yesterday we had 38 day one posts, and since then a handful more have added in on day two.

The thing I am happiest about is just how many of you have easily “grokked” my intent.  I wanted to stir things up and get folks out of the doldrums that is the summer season.  I have been doing the daily posting thing, so I thought it might be cool to challenge others to do the same thing.  That said it is far less about daily posting than posting on a regular schedule.  The other neat thing is that basically this is training for undertaking something more serious like NaNoWriMo.  I could never have completed my novel last year were it not for my getting in the habit of daily posting before then.  Basically if you can prove to yourself that you can write a ten sentence or more blog post each day, then that 50,000 word goal isn’t completely unreachable.

Day One Rundown

While this has been a bit of a pain in the ass to pull together this morning, I wanted to do a rundown of all of the posts that were made yesterday.  I’ve read them all at this point and commented on several of them, and I have to say the world you all did is amazing.  You are making this a truly amazing initiative and I have very little to do with the success.  I think we all want to do awesome things, we just sometimes need the catalyst to make it happen.

Such an amazing list of bloggers, and I am absolutely humbled to have them supporting me in this initiative.  Additionally to all these awesome posts the very cool gaming site MMO Games gave us a good write up about the event.  The also awesome Anook.com has been featuring our nook as well so it should be giving us additional bandwidth to the initiative.  So much blogger love going on I am still constantly amazed.  It is still plenty of time to get started and join the madness, just check out my Gospel of Blaugust post for the rules.

Setting Down Roots

ffxiv 2013-10-30 22-51-40-21 Over the last few years I have been flitting from game to game for some time, and it is really tiring.  What generally happens is I get into a game and then the community we have built up around it starts to deteriorate.  Without the people to sustain me, I start to get my own wanderlust since I crave the next place that has the happy guildchat spam I am looking for.  One of the more enjoyable games I have played over the last few years was Final Fantasy XIV.  Everything about the game felt “just right” until I ran out of content to level with.  I love the fact that you can pour all of your effort into one character without feeling like you are missing out on anything.  The only problem is when we last played the game shortly after launch, after you had run out of storyline quests you were pretty much forced to grind fates if you wanted to level anything else.

In the months that have followed they have patched some of these gaps.  Right now I am still doing a fair amount of FATE grinding, but I am perforating it with trips through the Duty Roulette system.  While this might seem grindy still to some, for me this is enough of a break to make me happy.  The other thing that just feels right about the game is the community.  It is this weird throwback to a time where people were generally cool to group with.  I remember during Everquest, wipes happened and no one seemed to mind… they just picked themselves up and recovered.  The WoW generation changed that, and introduced the culture of “your bad and should feel bad”.  Last night we were running Hard Mode Ifrit and I made a mistake that ultimate wiped the raid.  Not a single person was grumpy about it, they just explained what I should be doing instead and were happy to try again.  That type of attitude is just refreshing, and I keep running into it over and over.

I have this feeling like I would really love to set down some permanent roots in Final Fantasy XIV, and I am starting to try and reach out into the community.  This game has had me adding people to my friends list in the first time in literally years that I did not already know going into the game.  It reminds me of the early days of wow, when we still cared about our fellow players and were happy to collaborate and coordinate on bigger things.  One of the biggest gaps I am finding is there don’t seem to be any big public Linkshells for folks to communicate and cordinate with.  I am kicking around the notion of starting one of these.  There is so much content we have yet to see, and FFXIV is one of the only games in the last bit that all of us seem to be able to agree upon.  Here is hoping that I won’t be writing another post in a months time on how the game just isn’t doing it for me any longer.  Right now the game feels very much like home, and I look forward to logging into it each day.

#Blaugust #FFXIV

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