Blaugust Weekday Style
The last several days I have done a pretty significant rundown of the posts from the previous day. However as I only have thirty minutes to an hour to post in the morning, and that whole feature is pretty time consuming I am probably going to have to stop that over the week. Either that or I might just edit it back in when I have a moment. So far things seem to still be going awesomely. Lots of interesting posts coming out, and I think it is awesome that they aren’t all traditional gaming posts either. I am seeing a lot of different depth, including quite a few helpful tutorial type posts.
What amazes me is I honestly thought by day three or four I would see a lot of falloff as folks decided this daily posting madness thing was not for them. However instead I am starting to see the length of the individual posts increase. A few folks that might have started with minimal posts have ones that are not starting to get significantly meatier. If nothing else the initiative has met my goals for it, which was to essentially shake up a boring time in the blogosphere and get it hopping again. I think it makes a nice pair to the Newbie Blogger Initiative, one beginning at the beginning of the summer and the other at the end as folks are wrapping up and preparing for the fall.
Day Three Rundown
- House of Witches
- Blue Kae
- Lock and Bolt
- The Chindividual
- Murf Versus
- XP Chronicles
- Star and Shadow
- Hello Cynical Badger
- Gaming Conjecture
- Alternative Chat
- Ash’s Adventures
- Me vs Myself and I
- JVT Workshop
- The Keen Gamer
- Chris Sanders
- Aggro Range
- Rambling Thoughts About WoW
- Irrelative Collection
- Missy’s Mojo
- Contains Moderate Peril
- The Mystical Mesmer
- Beyond Tannhauser Gate
- I Have Touched the Sky
- Shadoe’s Miniature Adventures
- Simcha’s Many Lives
- MMO Quests
- Bio Break
- Echoes From the Abyss
- Welsh Troll
- The Ancient Gaming Noob
- Herding Cats
- Looking for Playtime
- Healing the Masses
- Power Word: Remix
- Life of a Pleasant Gamer
- Thalen Speaks
- WoW is in the Details
- Leaflocker (day one)
- Leaflocker (day two)
- Leaflocker (day three)
Guardians With a Guildie
This weekend was an odd one with us having a birthday party up near the lake for my niece on Saturday and my wife staying there to spend a few days with her mom. Since I would be all by myself I tentatively planned on seeing Guardians of the Galaxy Sunday morning for a matinee, but oddly enough when I got home from the party I had a message waiting on me from a longtime friend and guildie. It seemed he has the same idea and wanted to know if I was interested in going to see it with him. The initial plan to see it at the IMAX fell through since they were sold out, so we changed venue to here in my town at our smaller theater. I have to say it was pretty awesome to see Vernie, as from what the two of us could remember it had been about two years.
It is kinda sad that we live in the same town but see each other that infrequently. Both of us tend to land on the side of being a little introverted, so while we always seem to enjoy meeting for lunch or something similar… we never seem to think of doing it. It seems like a lifetime since we worked together, and in reality it has actually been a decade ago. I keep trying to figure out ways to get him on where I work, but the positions never seem to line up quite right at any given time. In any case we met yesterday for an 11 am movie and went to Baja Jacks a local texmex place. If you’ve been to a Moe’s or a Chipotle you know the concept. The subway build your own thing model, but I like this local place considerably better than the chain versions.
As far as the movie it was pretty awesome. Guardians of the Galaxy has always been somewhat of a third string Marvel franchise, so I think it is pretty great that they are bringing them to the forefront. In reality they are having to scape a bit to get “movie worthy” comics due to some pretty poor licensing arrangements around certain characters. For example I’ve heard that the “Avengers” series of movies cannot involve any mutant humans, because the folks doing the X-Men movies have fully reign over those. Similarly Spiderman was farmed off and licensed separately as well as the punisher… so they have fragmented what was meant to be a cohesive universe. All of that said I am happy in a way because it means that we are getting to see some properties that would have been on the fringe.
I’ve always thought Rocket Raccoon was a badass, so was happy to see him brought to living breathing CGI life. The voice actor and the animators did a great job of bringing him together and making him a sympathetic character. The movie definitely has a “loveable band of misfits” vibe to it, and it works well. This is not the dark brooding “I’m batman!” flavor of super hero movie, but instead a crazy technicolor romp through the galaxy. For what it is, it is really awesome and they managed to infuse a ton of humor in the mix. I mean zany humor and not the normal gallows humor that seems to infect the super hero genre. I feel like they have themselves another interesting property on their hands, and I would totally plunk down money to see another film with the same crew. I do wonder how they might integrate this into the overall avengers storyline. It will be interesting to see what happens, and if you can wrangle your own guildie to go see it with… I highly suggest you do.
Dragoon Soars
This weekend my central gaming focus was to push my dragoon to level 50 and be able to run the big kid stuff with my friends. When I got home from seeing guardians I made the final push and dinged. The awesome thing is I had a ton of gear waiting on me, since through running dungeons with my other 50 jobs I had picked up a number of things. Moments after hitting the level I had replaced pretty much all of my dragoon set. I opted to pay the 2000 or so gil per item and apply a glamour to go back to my dragoon armor appearance. However the moment I set foot into my first dungeon… I got a chest piece that was a significant upgrade and therefor wrecked the appearance again. I am considering just reverting my gear back to the original appearance and drying it all white to match the chest piece. I realize I have had this graphic numerous times in the past, but something about the white version just looks awesome.
I spent most of the evening running around the map attuning myself for the various dungeons that have gone in since launch. There are a significant number of them and if you are curious how to get attuned to each check out this helpful post I found. Right now the only things I am not attuned for involve some serious quest work to unlock like Crystal Tower. I should not however be holding by my friends when it comes to options for things we can run. I really want to try Pharo Sirus, but I question if we have the gear yet. Granted Tam has all the gear in the world right now since he has had some pretty good luck with drops and is the only one of us to successfully complete his relic weapon.
Writing Prompts
Here come another set of writing prompts for you avid Blaugust initiates. Once again do not feel any specific compulsion to write about them, I am just churning them out to help those who get stuck. You can see a full list of all of the prompts to date on the Blaugust nook forums.
- Has there ever been a game encounter you were afraid of? For example I am spooked of tanking Garuda hard… has there ever been a fight or encounter you dreaded?
- What is the coolest moment you and experienced with a game community? Has someone gone out of their way to help you, or was there a really interesting player in a community you have been a part of?
- Do you collect in game pets? Various games have turned this into a minigame but are you a pet collector? If so why? If not why as well?
#Blaugust #GuardiansOfTheGalaxy #FFXIV