Go Team Blaugust

Words of Encouragement

I woke up this morning to see the above tweet in my timeline… and it is absolutely true.  There are days I still think I am the least likely herald of regular posting.  Most of you only know me as the guy who posts every day, but in truth that only represents about half of my time blogging.  Before that I was the most flaky and least prolific blogger out there.  I would go through streaks of posting 10-20 posts in a given month…  to having months where I only have one post at all.  Between August 2012 and late April 2013 there was complete and total radio silence.  It was by will alone that I set myself down the journey of posting something, no matter how stupid it is… every single day.  Now several years later, there is part of me that still cannot fully comprehend the madness that I started, but I also have this strong drive to keep the ball from ever touching the ground.

While this might sound counter intuitive… for me at least regular posting is much easier than sporadic posting.  Namely because of the pressure that I would put on myself.  When I would go through a big lapse, I felt like I couldn’t just start writing again with a simple post.  Instead I would have to write the most epic post ever to make up for the fact that I had been gone so long.  I felt like I had to prove something to my readers, that I was somehow worthy of them leaving me in their RSS reader all this time.  As time passed, the guilt that I felt grew and the measure of that “epic comeback post” kept growing as well ultimately leading me to wait longer before posting it.  When I write something every day I am much more open with my readers.  I talk about what is going on in my world, and how it is effecting me.  I talk about what I am enjoying and what I am not enjoying, and the whole process ends up being much more fluid.  So when I agree that if I can do it, you can to… because quite frankly all of you are far more talented than I am.

I started the Blaugust thing selfishly as a way of getting more content from the bloggers I care about.  I never expect anyone to follow me in this “damned fool crusade”.  Instead from the first year I had people coming out of the woodwork and signing up for the challenge.  Even though I keep stats and assign awards…  every single person who attempts this is a hero to me.  They are actively doing something to keep pumping out more content into our community and that is huge.  I can keep doing what I do because there are people like you out there sharing the journey with me.  We are all in this together, and I know you can finish this month and get your name in the “winner” column.  I believe in all of you fine Blaugustians, and even though the month is coming to an end… I will still be here in September and October to support you all.  We are actively making this community we have stronger, and there is a certain magic in that.  Now go write some kick ass posts!

Waltz of Doom

ffxiv_dx11 2015-08-17 21-25-42-36

 

Last night we were able to pull together the raid without any real issue and set our sights on clearing Alexander Normal.  It is amazing just how fast you can burn through all four wings when you have a team that works well together.  Even though I am essentially done gearing out my Warrior with Alexander items, I am always down for helping a full guild group knock it out.  It is extremely noticeable that our folks have been improving their gear because on turn one for example I think the bosses only actually made it up into the air twice.  Similarly we pushed the living liquid boss into the final phase before the second hands phase.  I know Kodra for example walked away with three pieces of gear that he had been building towards, and I think several others got pieces as well.  I was pretty slackerly this past week and these were actually my first Alexander runs.  I had every intention to work on getting the dragoon gear but this past week was just one where I was not in the mood to play any MMO at all.  Instead I largely played single player experiences…  or Diablo 3 AS a single player experience.  I did not even cap Esoterics and for that I am feeling a little sorry.  I could have easily had my chest piece this week, but I guess I will maybe wrap that up tonight.

ffxiv_dx11 2015-08-12 21-02-45-57

After Alexander we put more attempts in on Ravana Extreme and I think we are getting to the point where we might be able to finish it up next week.  We have now seen the entire fight and survived through the various phases, we just need to put the dance together and repeat it all successfully.  The hard part is still the phase after the swords, which means we have to spread out so that only two people are in each corner.  We didn’t quite do this and as a result we lost a handful of people.  Luckily we had a healer limit break three available so we were able to essentially push the reset button and keep on trying.  That is not exactly the way we want to beat it the first time, but if we have to I will take it.  The fight is just so much more complicated than Bismarck Extreme was, and I am anxious to get it down and farmable so we can start clearing it and Bismarck in the same night.  I want pretty weapons dammit!  In all honesty I am pretty happy with my Esoterics axe for the time being, and my retainers are once again packed full of gear.  However I will never turn down unique weapon graphics.

7 thoughts on “Go Team Blaugust”

Comments are closed.