Anniversary Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Oopsiversary

April 20, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos.

In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too.

When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.

So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.

However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.

In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.

Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them.

Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own.

Thirteen Years of Tales

April 18, 2022 by Belghast

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of my very first post here on Tales of the Aggronaut. I realize last week I celebrated the 9th year of AggroChat but apparently, April is just the month I start new things. It was April of last year for example that I started the whole Mixtape Monday thing for example… which incidentally is something I plan on revisiting soon. It always feels weird and self-congratulatory to do one of these posts, but also feels like something I should do anyway. Looking back I apparently missed my twelfth anniversary altogether and never saw fit to go back and talk about it. Technically I should have been making this post yesterday, but was releasing an episode of AggroChat and I have this weird hang-up about doing more than one post in a single day. According to the Wayback Machine, this is what my blog would have looked like around this time.

2011 – WayBack fails to Capture the Rift Theme Era

However, I am learning for a fact that the Wayback Machine is fallible. The graphical treatment on that first image is like the second revision of my blog theme. The very first one was a direct clone of an existing wow-based theme, given that my blog started its life as a Warrior Tanking blog. The “Sons of Hodir” themed banner would have come much later and the above image is a complete fabrication because I know by the time we reached September of 2011 I was sporting a Rift-based theme. I dove completely into Rift and was even registered as an official fansite. Truth be told last time I logged into the forums, my account was still flagged as a fansite operator. You can see a bit of evidence of this in the sidebar but this is when I switched to the blue-themed text over the brown masthead.

The ship begins to right itself around 2014 when you can see this blue masthead text actually being captured by the Wayback Machine. The main difference during the Rift years was instead of Chibi Bel wearing Zul Aman gear, it was a Chibi Bahmi seen here on the right. I am honestly wishing I had gotten in the practice of taking a screenshot of my blog every so often during its life span. For years I have mostly relied on the Wayback Machine as a way of transporting me back in time but I am guessing it is starting to succumb to the process of digital rot. This is a bit concerning because our digital memories are not going to be preserved nearly as perfectly as we might have hoped. I think this is one of those things that we maybe took for granted… but also maybe should not have. I guess I should add screenshotting my blog… to the long list of other things that I have preserved through my screenshot archive.

All of the Chibi work that adorned my blog for years was done by my good friend Rae. She was one of the original members of AggroChat and is someone that at the time worked with me. I greatly appreciate all of the work that she did for me, but as the blog matured I found myself moving away from that art style. The original graphics for AggroChat seen above included Chibi versions of Rae, Ash, Kodra, and Myself… more specifically the version of my Elder Scrolls Online Imperial Dragon Knight character I was playing at the time. Ash being a bear that Rae was sitting on was not exactly a great representation, but given the other stuff, we were juggling this remained the artwork for far longer than I had intended.

The last era that still featured Rae’s Chibi work was in 2015. I had gone to a very streamlined look in the masthead and used a cropped version of the ESO Bel Chibi that I was at the time using as my Twitter avatar. This also begins the era of me stopping fiddling and trying to roll my own theme. I test drove several third-party paid themes and finally landed on Generate Press, and have more or less been using it since. I figure this is probably the beginning of the “modern” era of the blog as not a ton has shifted since this point. I desperately need to spend some time modifying my sidebar at this point. Some releases back WordPress added block support, and it would be so much easier to maintain if I just nuked it and started from scratch. However, that seems terribly daunting and I keep putting it off.

In 2017 we saw the first introduction of a Masthead featuring artwork from my good friend Ammo. The whole “how I met Ammo” thing is a truly contorted mess, and at some point, we are going to sit down and record an episode of Bel Folks Stuff to sort it out. Basically, I originally crossed paths with her mom Sol back in World of Warcraft as we were all on Argent Dawn US, but I am guessing I first met Ammo through Twitter. None of that really matters though because I love her artwork, and you should absolutely check her stuff out if you have ever experienced it. I mean she has a traditional website, but I still feel like the best place to experience it is via Tumblr. She cut her teeth on comics just like I did, and as a result, there is a very comic book nature to the art style. Right now she is working on enshrining my Guild Wars 2 Necromancer in artwork form, and it is so damned cool. I can’t wait to be able to share it with you all.

2019 – The Masthead Full of Ammo Art Era

Then by that time we reached the pre-pandemic Aggronaut, you have the masthead full of various individual commissions from Ammo. Each one of those was done separately but I have merged them into a single cohesive image. If you compare it to the current masthead it is missing the PSO2 and New World themed “Bels”. This madness all started however because I commissioned Ammo to draw an image for my seventh blog anniversary that I just fell in love with. I was enamored with the concept of having her illustrated the various versions of my primary “Belghast” character in each game because they all share some deep similarities.

So left to right you have my World of Warcraft Warrior, my character from Secret World, my Exo from Destiny 1 and Bahmi from Rift, then my ESO Dragon Knight, and finally my Lalafel Warrior from FFXIV. She still has the original shirt up for purchase on her TeePublic store. That all came about because I wanted a shirt made off this image, but wanted all proceeds from the sale to go to Ammo in case anyone else bought one at some point. Then when I decided to fiddle with my masthead I asked her to take the LalaBel featured in this image and blow it up into a full-sized graphic. Then one by one as I had her draw more things for me… we kept that same format allowing me to composite them together afterward.

Some years back I commissioned a series of moogles screwing around with “streamer” gear. Originally this was to be part of my Twitch page for a foray into streaming that never really happened. More recently I have used them to adorn the masthead. However, the next project that I am going to give Ammo is to do a similar treatment for other cute monsters from video games. I know for example I absolutely want an Arctic Quaggan and a Choya Pinata from Guild Wars 2. I am sorta brainstorming a list of cute critters I want to be done up, and at least mentally these are going to be part of a more broad site rework. I am hoping that by the time we reach the fourteenth anniversary of the blog, we have maybe moved forward a little bit in the way it looks.

I have to admit, this is not exactly the post that I had intended to make this morning but it is the post that came out. There are times that you just have to go with the flow when writing, and that has been one of the secrets to my maintaining this site for thirteen years. I wish I had been more prolific early in this site, because as I age… I find having this living journal to be a benefit for pinpointing exactly when various things in my life happened. Here we are some 2876 posts later and I am still getting up each morning to do this nonsense. That would average out to be 221 posts a year, but we all know that is a lie since my prolific nature did not really kick in until April of 2013. The part that shocks me more though is that I have had just shy of 9000 comments… especially when you consider how freaking bad I am at actually interacting with them.

Basically what I am trying to say in my very meandering manner is… thanks for reading and being here with me on this journey.

Eleven Years of Aggronaut

April 17, 2020 by Belghast

This week of Blapril is a week about introducing yourself to the community and letting us know interesting things about you. I more or less have been dodging this bullet because I am not sure if there is anything left that is interesting to tell about me. However on this the 11th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog, I am going to talk a bit about myself and its origins. This was in no way planned when I laid out the week structure of this event, and quite honestly until this morning I had completely forgotten that it was my anniversary. Sure I have it marked on the Calendar… but my Google Calendar and not the one I use for work purposes. In the past I have had my act together and commissioned artwork from my good friend Ammo to mark this event, but in the time of pandemic I clearly do not have my act together.

Once upon a time in another life, I was a forum troll. I mean that in the best possible version of that term, because I was not disruptive other than complaining when someone got what I considered to be an unfair ban on the blizzard forums. Some of my earliest memories were making epic long form posts on various game forums. That was sorta my shtick, I would squeeze all of my thoughts about something in a big chunk of prose and unceremoniously place it on a forum that could not care less about my thoughts and feelings. The various guilds I was part of also had extremely active forums, and I too would post a running commentary of events there. This more or less stayed the same until the beginning of this blog, but I will get to that.

In March of 2005 blogging was all of the rage among some of my friends, and it was more or less spread out between three sites: Blogger, Xanga and Live Journal. All three of which are shockingly still in business, because I was almost certain that surely something called Xanga would have died by now. Given that I was very much a google early adopter, I started writing a deeply personal blog on Blogger, and sharing it with only a handful of really close friends. This is a blog that I hope never sees the light of day because everything on it is super cringe worthy. Among various things it chronicled my experiences learning how to RV and being thrust into that world when suddenly my wife decided that we needed to buy one. My wife has a habit of making random decisions like that when we are forced to go through traumatic events. We bought our house in part due to the fact that her childhood home burnt down for example.

The RV thing was a reaction of wanting to be closer with family after the suicide of our nephew. This is also why I played a Hunter as a main in World of Warcraft, because this event happened shortly after the launch of the game and knocked me completely out of reality for a good two months, at which point when I returned to the game all of my friends had out-leveled me by a large margin and Hunter was the only class that I was capable of soloing on at a fast enough pace to catch up. Major life events have some weird ramifications, and I think this blog was a way of me dealing with some of the ones we were going through. I only shared it with a small circle of my friends, because the things I wrote about felt too personal to actually share on something like a guild forum. This is probably the first time that I was introduced to the concept of writing as therapy, which admittedly I have later explored many times with this blog.

In 2009 I was the leader of a fairly active guild in World of Warcraft and one of the leaders of a raid called Duranub Raiding Company. I had things that I felt like sharing about the game in general, Warrior tanking, and the act of leading both a guild and a raid. I thought I had some stuff figured out and wanted to share those thoughts with the world, and in the process of having these feelings I stumbled across a specific blog that inspired me to create Tales of the Aggronaut. The Wordy Warrior was a blog written by a warrior tank that was also a guild and raid leader, and I was enthralled by it. The blog was written by Criss Fowler or @Aeridel who eventually went on to work at both Riot and Blizzard and now works for That Game Company, the folks behind Journey, Flower and recently released Sky on mobile platforms.

It was through this blog that I was introduced to the Blog Azeroth community and so many awesome people that I still have in my greater monkeysphere like @Fimlys, @StoppableForce, and @Saresa (who at some point twitter apparently unfollowed for me and I have only recently refollowed). Funny story… Stop has the honor of being the very first person that I followed on Twitter. This community is ultimately what lead me to create a twitter account in the first place. It was a really exciting time to be a blogger, because it seemed like every week we got to greet a brand new crop of blogs that were springing up constantly surrounding this game we all loved. Ultimately it was the sort of community that I sought to help create with my participation in the Newbie Blogger Initiative and eventually the spawning of Blaugust and now Blapril.

However like so many things, eventually disillusionment set in. I got frustrated with World of Warcraft and with that my posting frequency tanked significantly. When I eventually left the game for the first time with the launch of Rift and shortly after the launch of Cataclysm, I found my readership tanked significantly. World of Warcraft and the Blog Azeroth community were really supportive… of World of Warcraft blogs and bloggers, but once you strayed outside of that fold be it on your blog you would ultimately see just how singled threaded segments of that community were. The day I started writing about Rift instead of World of Warcraft I saw about half of my twitter followers vanish over night, which was a really stark wake up call for someone who thought of a lot of these people as friends.

That has always been a challenge for me when it comes to blogging and social media. I come from the early age of the internet, back when we were crawling around in MUDs and on IRC. In fact I met my wife of almost twenty two years on IRC, so these were people to me and not just pixels. I’ve built so many friendships over the years that have transcended the games we played to the random things that are happening in our lives. AggroChat entirely is made up of people that I met through gaming and that we continued to be friends when the controller was set down or the servers went offline. So it came as a shock to me that people are fickle, and in turn lead me to even post less because this thing I thought I was part of wasn’t really as solid as I originally thought.

At that point it was really cold to be on the outside of the Warcraft community looking in, and while I found new friends out here in the blackness of space, it was a different sort of community. If you existed outside of an established game community, you sorta had to be an island nation that occasionally had treaties with other island nations, but effectively were doing your own thing. There was a great freedom that came with that, and once I stopped sulking around 2012… I began the next era of Tales of the Aggronaut where I was going to regularly post and I was going to be far more open about the things that are happening between the gaming sessions. I was always deeply cagey about sharing my life with my readers until daily posting forced me to be brutally honest at times just to come up with something to fill the page.

I still very much feel like an Island Nation at times, but I would like to think that the ties I have with other Island Nations are stronger than they were in those early years. I would also like to think that with things like Blaugust existing and transitioning into a fairly active Discord, that we have more of a social latticework for new bloggers to find easier footing than I did when I first set adrift from the content life-raft that was Warcraft. It is fundamentally a different time for bloggers and blogging in general now than it was during those halcyon days when this was all new and exciting. There are so many other things fighting for our attention and it seems that now Vlogs and Streaming have consumed almost all of the oxygen in the room… to the point where it is exceedingly hard to sign up for any sort of credentials on a blog alone.

I still however prefer to read a long sequence of thoughts placed painstakingly on a page than to listen through fifteen minutes of rambling in video form that never quite reaches a cogent point. Hell I would rather read fifteen pages of rambling than watch most videos, and unfortunately as a reader of Tales of the Aggronaut you are all too familiar with rambling posts. With that I think it might be a good time to actually wrap this thing up. I feel like I have told this tale multiple times, and each time it ends up coming out a little different. On this anniversary of this blog, I once again want to thank you all for being part of this experience. I could and likely would continue doing this without you, because I ended up turning it into therapy… but it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.

Ten Years of Tales

April 17, 2019 by Belghast

Ten years ago today I installed WordPress for the first time and decided to put digital pen to paper and roll out the mat of Tales of the Aggronaut. At that time I doubt I had a thought in my head about it lasting anywhere near this long, nor growing into what it has become. Tales of the Aggronaut was not my necessarily my first blog… and the previous incarnation is floating out there still in the ether never to be spoken of again. However this blog combined a bunch of things that I was already doing… namely writing big walls of text. I was one of those folks that would come into a game forum and write big posts talking about my feelings about this thing or that thing… or offering support and advice to those who were in need. I was a fairly active member at the time on the Argent Dawn server forums, and a lot of the people that I am still in contact from those days I met amongst a bunch of lines of text… and the eventual IRC server that spawned from it.

Ten years seems like a momentous number, but I just could not really think of anything I wanted to do to mark the occasion. At this point many days it is a struggle to get myself to log in and make a morning post, let alone come up with some grand promotional scheme. Instead we are going to have a quiet birthday… which is in truth how I prefer to celebrate my actual annuals these days as well. There are many blogs out there that are far longer in the tooth than this one, but I think well aged blogs is a bit of a rarity these days. I know my own blog roll is full of blogs that have gone into the sands of time… that I just cannot bring myself to delete. Blaugust has helped quite a bit, and I am planning on this year potentially outshining last year now that we have a fairly active Discord community surrounding it. I am thankful for my regulars… and I hate to say this because it sounds vain but… anytime I get a notification saying someone liked one of my posts it is a little burst to keep me going.

The other interesting thing about the passage of ten years is just how different my life has become in that time. When I started this blog I was a dedicated Guild and Raid leader making our way through the newly released Ulduar raid and struggling a bit at the jump up in difficulty between it and Neo-Naxxramas. I was also completely devoted to World of Warcraft and namely playing the Warrior class. I also had very definite opinions on raid tanking and various other aspects of the game… thinking myself to be some font of knowledge for the community. I had opinions and I was very willing to share them damn the consequences… because I was in my early thirties and thought I had figured an awful lot of things out.

Now we scan forward to today… and I am a leader of people with fifteen people under me as I transitioned from development to management. As a result I am not longer leading anything at all in my off time and doing really good to be a member of literally anything. While I still organize people around concepts and ideas… I have tried my best not to be the one actually holding the reins. While I used to raid on a near nightly basis… I can’t bring myself to even commit to raiding once a week for a few hours. Where I used to spend every night grouped up with other people and usually on voice chat… I can’t bring myself to communicate with other human beings regularly once I am officially off the clock. Where I used to think I had a clue what I was doing… I am now in my 40s and know that I know next to nothing about most topics and it seems like I am imposing myself when I share my opinions on things. While I am still very much an MMO player… I find myself playing them all effectively on solo mode or maybe with a very small group of people in tow.

Another thing that has changed significantly over the years is how much of myself I am willing to put into these posts. I’ve shared with you deaths in the family, times I am struggling with one thing or another, and things that have happened that brought me joy. I shifted my writing style from being disconnected from the readers… to trying to invite you all into my world for a few minutes each morning as I write. I can’t say that anything I write about is actually interesting, but it is at least grounded in the reality of where I am and what I am doing at a given moment. The truth is I would be far more popular if I would simply stick to a single topic and become an official site for a specific game. Those folks are the ones with the large readership, but me… I am more of an acquired taste. If you are not interested in me as a human being… then chances are you won’t be sticking around for very long.

All of that said… I am thankful for the people that I do have that regularly check in on my world… and it is shockingly a larger number than I ever expected it to be. In ten years almost 200,000 unique individuals have visited Tales of the Aggronaut… and while I am certain a good number of those unique users are bots because internet… it still means that I have introduced myself and my point of view to way more people than I ever expected I would. During that time I have made 2028 posts including this one… which would have been a larger number were it not for the fact that I barely made any posts during the first four years of this blog. Every day however a few hundred of you come and visit my world and I am thankful for the company. It makes me wish I had the fire to do more to actually push this blog and the disconnected community that supports it on a regular basis. In theory I should be pushing a discord or a reddit or some other venue… but instead I would just rather enjoy knowing the fact that I have a bunch of quiet users out there tagging along with me as I do things.

This isn’t exactly the triumphant post you make when you reach a milestone like this, but in truth I didn’t really want a bunch of fanfare. You out there… reading this blog… and an important part of it even though you may have never actually interacted with me directly. Even though I largely write like I am talking to myself, I do appreciate knowing there are people out there that care. As far as words of wisdom to leave this post on… I am not entirely certain I have any. I guess we will see if Tales of the Aggronaut makes another ten years… though at this point I cannot imagine what the world and my life will be like during that time. My blog is as much therapy as it is a purposeful act of creation, and I thank you all for taking the time to listen.