Blaugust

Biggest Blaugust Ever

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Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years.

The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.

In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.

One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.

The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.

In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all.

Low Stake Hot Takes

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Krikket was the first of the mentors to offer to run with Blaugust 2025 this year, and she has been doing a phenomenal job of things. One of the things that they have been cooking is a Community Builder group project trying to get as many people as possible to make a post today on the topic of “Low Stake Hot Takes” aka things that you feel very strongly about… but don’t actually really matter in the grand scheme of things. Since I have largely not been joining in the Blaugust Reindeer Games this year for obvious reasons… I figured I would come out of hibernation and join in this nonsense. Being weirdly opinionated about insignificant things is definitely on brand with my blog. That is of course if my blog stops acting up long enough to get a post out. My web host seems to be having problems this morning, and it took me significantly longer to log in than I was expecting.

Ketchup is a Good Base, but a Bad Sauce

I have very particular feelings about Ketchup, namely that it is a really boring sauce and that there are almost zero reasons why you should be using it. Essentially there are so many sauces that are just Ketchup but better. Barbecue sauce for example, just neatly slots into every scenario where you would normally be using Ketchup. If you are not that adventurous there is always Cocktail Sauce or Sweet and Sour sauce… both of which can be made off a Ketchup base. Hell just adding Sriracha to ketchup makes it instantly a better sauce combination. Barack Obama commented on a podcast once that “In my opinion, and this is controversial in my family, but you should not eat ketchup after the age of 8”. I agree with him wholeheartedly because it just is not a good condiment. Life is way too short to smear bland tomato paste onto your food, you deserve more flavor in your life.

I am sorry Canadians… but Ketchup chips are mid as hell as well. It is the most boring flavor you could ever make chips out of. At least go with All Dressed where something more is happening. Barbecue chips are just Ketchup but better… and honestly same goes with something like Teriyaki where you can make a pretty good version of it if you use Ketchup as your base. I am just saying… Ketchup is incomplete homework. It is almost a good sauce but needs something more to make it work. Hell even the lowly Thousand Island Dressing… is a better Ketchup based sauce than Ketchup is. If you are still using Ketchup you need to expand your horizons is all I am saying. Shit you can just literally mix any other condiment you have in your house with Ketchup and almost instantly make it better. You are too good for Ketchup boo, you deserve better.

If It Makes it Two Years, It will Make it Twenty

So this is less a hot take and more just a guiding principal. Products fail for two reasons really… poor construction or mechanical failure of some critical piece. If I buy something and it survives two years, then more than likely it is going to make it for twenty years because it has left that window where the obvious failures are going to happen. I have an Alarm clock in my bedroom that I got when I was around twelve. That thing has been kicking for thirty seven years at this point and still functions every bit as well as it did when I was a kid. Maybe the buttons require a little more effort to push them, and maybe the plastic on the front is scratched up at this point, but it is a survivor and will likely keep ticking for another generation. Products are made more poorly now than they used to be, but generally speaking even in modern times… if a product you buy survives two years… it will probably just keep chugging along especially if there are minimal moving parts.

There is of course a caveat in this statement that you should do your best to regularly maintain whatever it is. There are some things I do not give a shit about, and they survive almost to spite me. There are of course going to be cases where a power spike will fry something and release the magical blue smoke, that exists outside of this concept. However if you lucked into getting something that was reasonably well assembled and operates within the tolerances it was designed to operate in… it should in theory just keep doing that pending there is no mechanical failure due to stress. I have lots of old things that I just cannot be bothered to replace, and similarly have had situations where I thought I would replace something with a shiny new bauble… only to have to fall back on the reliable one when the new one fails. I think an addendum to this is… when possible buy things with a single function. The more shit you are asking an object to do, the more likely one of them will fail within those first two years.

Listening to an Audiobook Counts as Reading A Book

This one is very near and dear to my heart because I love Audiobooks and my un-diagnosed ADHD tendencies make it very hard for me to pay attention while reading a book. I can read books, I just do so far less frequently than listening to them. My mind wanders when I read a book and before long I realize I have not been paying attention for several pages and have to flip back and re-read segments of the text so that I can glean understanding from them, even though mechanically my brain was going through the motion of consuming it. So the reason why I feel like listening to an Audiobook counts as reading, is because it activates the same centers of my brain while I am doing it. One of my favorite things that I have talked about at length is to listening to an Audiobook while I am keeping myself mechanically busy playing a game that does not require a narrative component. For me these are either MMORPGs where I am just farming content and I have committed everything to muscle memory, or playing something like an ARPG where I am similarly relying on instinct. If I stop and engage with chat or read quest text… I instantly lose the ability to consume the audio that is going into my head and glean any meaning from it.

Essentially I have through testing figured out that whatever part of my brain that does the mechanical motions of gaming, and the part of my brain that understands and engages with narratives… are completely separate. While I don’t have a brain scan or anything like that, I would be willing to bet that if you looked at my brain while reading text and while listening to text narrated… that they would be lighting up the exact same areas. When I shift that narrative processing away from the audio that is playing, the loss of meaning is instantaneous. The same thing happens when I am on a conference call, and a critical priority email comes through… I lose the meaning of what was happening on the call while I am reading that email. So basically my take is that listening is the exact same thing as reading for the purpose of consuming meaning. This might not be a thing for everyone, and maybe I am just wired in this particular way… but I honestly find that I listen better when I am doing something with my hands. I used to get in trouble for this all of the damned time while growing up because I would be voraciously doodling while listening to a lecture in class instead of taking notes. I would cross link the thing that I was drawing with the subject matter that I was learning, and it was almost as though one was encoded with the other.

Similarly if I am having a conversation with someone… I will cross link whatever I was doing at that time with the conversation that I was having. As a result there are all of these inexplicable hot-wired subjects in my brain where I will be thinking about this things, and immediately jump to something totally unrelated other than at one point they were linked while listening to a conversation. Anyways the thing is… because of the way my brain works, I often just use the shorthand of “reading” a book instead of diving into the details that I actually listening to it for 10 hours while playing Path of Exile, because that is a thing that society understands more clearly. I gained the same understanding of the material that someone who read it did, and often times it is way more deeply lodged into my brain because I took away the nervous energy that was blocking my brain from getting into a flow state and listening more intently.

That’s All Folks

I think that is a sufficient amount of opinions for one morning. I have others that I could go into, but then you are getting more into the founding principles of my personality. Things like “never trust someone who does not like animals” feels like it is veering out of the “low stakes” nature of this prompt.


First of Blaugust 2025

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The Blaugust Logo that I did not create for once!

Good Morning Folks! Today is the beginning of August and as such also the official beginning of Blaugust. It is weird to see this event happening and me not really having much to do with it after over a decade of scurrying around to get things up and running. Please note… this is a good kind of weird because it is a miracle that my community is running it for me, since I could not deal with it myself this year. Krikket’s blog has been the place were a lot of details are launching and if you are curious about the event you can check out the intro post and the calendar of events and prompts post to get more details. I am still not entirely certain how much I am going to actively participate in the event, but I am at the very least following the tradition and making a proper First of Blaugust post. Yesterday I posted about the other significance of today’s date so I am not really going to go into that.

Old Man Bel with a Knock-Off Gengar Beanie

Often times we do a bit of an introduction in these here first posts, so I figure I will follow that pattern as well. Hi I am Belghast or Bel as most people who have been around this community tend to call me. I was born near the Gen X/Millennial divide and have some traits of both factions. I started this blog in 2009 during the height of World of Warcraft and it evolved over the years through various games and eventually just became my online public info dump page. Often times my posts are me working through my feelings regarding some subject, and lately with the death of my wife they can be a bit raw at times. In 2013 I challenged myself to blog every single day, and managed this for about three and a half years before relaxing the rigor and just blogging when I am feeling like it… which is still most weekdays. In 2014 this turned into the Blaugust challenge and there has been only one year where I did not run the event prior to this current year where my gracious community is running it in my absence. Over the years it became less about the challenge of blogging every day, and more about giving the blogging community a booster shot to keep folks active the rest of the year.

Double Divine Drop in Path of Exile

Lately you will find me mostly writing about my adventures in various ARPGs like Path of Exile, Last Epoch, and Diablo games. I tend to get fairly deep into the weeks and write posts that will largely be incomprehensible to anyone who is not already bought into the nonsense. However on occasion I do write targeted posts designed at trying to onboard friends into the madness of whatever I am playing. I do my best to be fairly approachable and am willing to share whatever knowledge I happen to have about whatever games I am playing. No question is too silly, especially in a game like Path of Exile that requires serious commitment to actually push through the early hours and succeed. I’ve probably played well over three thousand hours at this point and still consider myself somewhat of a newbie.

Weekly Fractal Nonsense in Guild Wars 2

Over the course of this blog’s life I have devoted a lot of time and effort to various MMORPGs. Most recently that has been Guild Wars 2 because its a-la-carte nature fits my gameplay and mental state most clearly. Similarly I have also created getting started content for that game and many others, but a lot of my posts are recounting whatever stuff I have been getting up to either solo or with my friends. For example on Thursday nights I have been getting together with some of my friends and running Fractals or whatever happens to fit the menu for that night. In theory at some point if we ever gather enough people to do it, we might change these into Strikes which require 10 players instead of 5 players. Occasionally I will flip the script and go hardcore into another MMORPG for awhile, like Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft… but that has happened considerably less frequently lately than it previously did. The forced grouping nature of a lot of those games are a real turnoff when I am deep in turtle mode and staying away from other human beings.

Weekly AggroChat Podcast Episode

In addition to the semi-daily blog, I also record a semi-weekly podcast with a bunch of friends on Saturday nights, and publish the episodes on Sunday. The crew assembled are all folks that I met through gaming including a bunch of people that I used to raid with back in the early days of World of Warcraft (Tam, Thalen, Kodra), and then some friends that I picked up along the way back when twitter was actually good… and not an awful mess. Ammo for example does all of the artwork on this blog and the masthead represents something like a dozen different individual commissions that I have composited together over the years. Grace is someone that I met through Twitter initially but over the last decade we have become close enough that we literally consider each other siblings. Ash is someone that I initially met through Tam but sort of fell in love with them and they are genuinely one of the best people that I know on the planet. Just like with the blog we do absolutely nothing to really promote or monetize anything, because quite frankly it is just a time each week when we set aside to hang out with each other… and a show occasionally happens.

My Delightful Mess of Children

I have three cats with wildly different personalities. Mollie is now our eldest and she has some problems… namely she doesn’t fully understand how cats should cat and is scared of everything. Though at some point over the last year she decided she now lives on the bed… and gripes at me until I make it every morning and put her self warming pad in exactly the right position. Josie is my sweet baby… that has no coordination and can’t quite figure out how to retract her claws at the appropriate time. She has gotten more leery of the world as she has aged, but is still an amazing snuggler when correctly motivated. Gracie is the baby in every sense of that word, and cannot fathom that anyone exists on the planet that does not love her with all of their heart. Especially with the death of my wife, she is pretty much glued to my side 24/7 and goes where I go. Mollie snuggles with me when I first get to bed each night, but runs like hell when Gracie shows up and claims daddy. Josie sadly has not slept on the bed in awhile, but will occasionally jump on my side for some serious head-scratches before wandering off wherever she has decided to go that evening. Josie especially loves windows and sleeps during the day in these upstairs bathroom windows that were about half the size they should be for a cat of her girth.

That’s it folks. That is what you are in for with this blog. I do dumb things and then write about them, and occasionally post cute cat photos. Fair warning there have been a lot of “Sad Bel Times” posts lately as I deal with the ramifications of my wife’s passing. Stay awhile and listen… or don’t… its your call.

Blaugust in Another Castle

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Good morning folks. I am slowly getting back to my normal self. It is going to be a long road… covered with many potholes… but bit by bit I am returning to some resemblance of the person I was. I got a second good night of sleep, and probably would have gotten more hours were it not for the fact that my mom called as I was heading to bed… and then talked for an hour and a half. I love her… but she has never known social queues and also has zero chill when it comes to not telling me everything that she is thinking at that exact moment. She like everyone simply cares about my well being and is worried about me. Legitimately… I never knew this many people actually cared. I’ve mostly thought of myself as background noise most of the time, but apparently I am noticed and appreciated.

My friend Krikket has gotten the ball rolling on the Blaugust 2025 festivities with the traditional Blaugust is Coming post detailing all of the information. My mind went in a bajillion directions when my wife passed away, but one of them was to go into the mentor area of the Blaugust discord and admit to them that I could not do this. Krikket was the first person to offer to take up the mantle, but almost immediately everyone chimed in and just ran with it. This is the most beautiful thing for me because I wanted to build some semblance of a community that could exist without me… and apparently I did just that. I think it was Wilhelm/TAGN that created the logo… which admittedly captures the essence of pretty much every logo I have ever created. They busily planned in the mentor channel and I sort of let it all wash over me, not really paying much attention until yesterday when the announcement post went live.

I cannot fully express in words how thankful I am that this is going to happen, and that I am not having to touch anything. I am still trying to keep the media kit page updated, since that page gets a lot of hits during the event. You can find relevant things like the sign-up form and links to the various social accounts and discord. I am not 100% sure how much I am going to participate in Blaugust proper but I am signing up. It is going to be interesting taking a backseat to this event, but quite honestly… I am very happy I am not having to drive. That was honestly a thing that I learned with the guild that I lead in World of Warcraft… I mad everything too personal to my vision. In truth with Blaugust I wanted to create something that was malleable and could be formed into whatever vision it needed to take that year. As such I tried my best to keep a light touch on the steering wheel so that if I ever needed to jump from the moving vehicle I could, and let someone else take over. Apparently that more or less has worked.

Rebuilding Normal

I’ve had this string of big deep emotional posts lately, but I am not sure what new revelations I have for you this morning. I’ve come to realize that I was not the one mangling our sheets… because making the bed each morning is as simple of an act as pulling up the corner I turned down. I’ve also decided that laundry is super simple since I almost entirely wear dark colors, and can simply chuck things directly into the washing machine until I have enough to run a load and then run it regardless of what day of the week it is. I ordered a whole mess of Chinese food last night so that I can eat on it for most of the weekend. Other than that I am just trying to carve out something resembling a new normal. I need to talk to my boss this morning and find out how Human Resources wants me to codify all of the time I have been taking. I made some early inroads for dealing with some of the financial and insurance things, but quickly came to the point where I am going to have to have final death certificates before I can actually wrap any of that up.

I desperately need to go out into the garage and clean, so that I am going to have room to stack the things that will be coming from her classroom. Essentially on the day of the visitation, her teacher friends offered to pack up her room for me and separate what were educational resources and what were personal effects into different sets of boxes. The thing is… my wife would have wanted to pack everything up herself, but I am just going to allow them to help me with this thing. My vehicle can hold a lot of stuff and it will be easy enough to drag things home. I just need to clear out some of the boxes that I have not broken down yet, and take a load of cardboard to the recycler in order to make room to stack this new stuff. The ideal time to give away teachers resources is right now, just ahead of a new school year… but I am not sure I am going to have it in me to deal with any of it this year.

She also took up 80% of our closet and I intend to go through all of that at some point and find some organization to donate it to. There is always a high demand for professional clothing that fits larger women’s sizes, especially among the whole “pathway to work” type organizations. So I know at some point I would want to donate that, because there is no use in any of the clothing effective just rotting in my closet. We already regularly donated quite a bit of stuff so I have zero qualms about this being the avenue she would have wanted. Her dad was saying something about selling things… but he has always focused on the money and for me… it is more about helping others than trying to profit from this situation. Sure we spent plenty of money over the years on nice things… but I largely view that as the cost of existing as a human and not something I am going to ever attempt to recoup.

There are things that I want to do… but I have to reach the point where I don’t feel guilty for doing them. Like we had talked about getting rid of the nasty loveseat in the loft, so I am absolutely going to do that. I am however probably going to replace it with another comfy couch option and set up my consoles out there. Originally we had planned on turning it into a reading nook for her to curl up, and that would have been lovely… but that is also not necessarily me. I prefer reading from bed when I am reading books, and then more often tend to consume books in audio book form while I am playing games. So I am will be taking the initial inspiration and then just shifting it to make sense for me. I still want to maintain the living room as a more generic space and don’t want all of my consoles hooked up out there. I have my Switch 2 hooked up but that is about it, and that is also a pretty lightweight affair.

Whenever I deal with giving away the educational resources in her office… I am probably going to start shifting that space into more of a hobby room. I used to love painting miniatures, and I just never really maintained that hobby throughout the years. I liked painting way more than I actually liked playing the war games associated with it. I’ve always wanted to get into 3D Printing, so I am thinking her office might be the ideal place to set that up. Again… I am going to have to reach an emotional point where I can deal with even going into her office… let alone packing it up and giving it again… but someday. I feel guilty even thinking these thoughts. I don’t want to erase my wife from this house, but it also seems silly to have entire rooms of the house that are no longer functional because they were devoted to a thing that will never happen again. She was way less emotional about everything than I am… so I would like to think she would want me to re-engineer the spaces to fit my needs. Its just really fucking hard.

She was always the person who kicked me into action on all of the little ideas that we had. I was the one who was mostly happy with the status quo, because the status quo was simple. I am going to have to channel my wife if I ever want to get anything done. I miss her so god damned much. I am so angry that this happened and I am not sure that will ever change. She was my person, and I never imagined a world without her. Now that I have to deal with that reality… I am trying my best to cope with it. One life ended on July 2nd at 8 pm… and out of the ashes of it I have to figure out how to build a new life.