Month: July 2018

Blaugust Reborn

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What Was Blaugust?

Back in April of 2013 I started this thing I referred to as the Grand Experiment, where I attempted to force myself to write something… anything every single day.  Prior to that I had been a very infrequent blogger to say the least, having an entire year pass between posts.  Any time I lapsed there would be this wall of pressure and anxiety that would build up that kept me from starting posting again, feeling like when I came back I needed to make some spectacular re-entry worthy of the length of time I had been gone.  The daily posting things did a lot for me and my confidence and also the level of my life I was willing to share with my readers.  For me personally… it was a good transformation and while I only kept with the daily posting for three years I have since settled into a more comfortable routine of only posting during the week days.

In 2014 I had already noticed a change in the way I wrote and how I felt about blogging in general and to some extent wanted to share that with the rest of the blogging community.  So in my infinite wisdom I decided to create an event where I challenged other bloggers to go one entire month without missing a post.  In my head I rammed together a bunch of sounds until I came up with Blaugust…  only to find out later that it was already a thing and that a bunch of Aussies had been doing a blogging festival thing for years.  My version however focused on the rigor of posting every single day and being super hard core about keeping track of who was and was not still in the race.  While entertaining this was really not healthy for the blogging community.

One of the side effects that I found is that many blogs that were started for Blaugust or were fledglings going into it…  went into massive periods of not posting anything at all as a sort of recovery period.  Similarly as the years went on those same blogs never really seemed to recover, and it is my fear that Blaugust wound up killing more blogs than it wound up helping.  Each year I tweaked the formula a bit until 2016 was my attempt at creating a kinder gentler Blaugust, and then last year I just couldn’t muster the oomph to make it happen at all and instead promoted something my friend Grace was trying.  I had this overall feeling that I harmed the community with the event, and this was only reinforced in my mind by the constantly shrinking pool of active bloggers.

What Was the Newbie Blogger Intiative?

The thing is… at the time of the inception of Blaugust it was just one of many events that the community did during the year.  The grand daddy of them all was the Newbie Blogger Initiative that ran most often during the month of May.  This was an idea originally spawned by Syp of Bio Break and he realized that game blogging was a thing that was on the decline, and the only way to keep it alive was to set out to “grow our own” as it were.  The first year was 2012 and had a flood of participation that you can see summarized here, but it helped more than anything to build a sense of community to the folks out here blogging as independent island nations floating in the internet.  There are lots of game blogging communities that gain cohesiveness through shared love of a specific product…  the World of Warcraft community for example has always been fairly tight knit and recursive.  However those of us nomads that jump around from game to game have never really had a similar family…  that is until NBI came along and crafted a sense of shared community.  Unfortunately the last running of NBI was also in 2016…  because quite honestly the tail end of 2016 and all of 2017 were extremely rough to struggle through.  There were events that happened in the real world and events that happened in gaming that caused people to fear for their own safety and sort of batten down the hatches.  All of this was an unfortunate blow to our already shrinking blogrolls.

What is Blaugust Reborn?

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The idea is simple…  lets take the best features of both Blaugust and the Newbie Blogger Intiative and sorta ram them together into one festival of blogging.  It isn’t necessarily that I feel like I am qualified to do this thing…  but it is something that someone needs to do.  Over the last few years those of us who are out here posting regularly has shrunk to a pretty small pool.  There was a time when I could never actually read down my blog roll, because by the time I got through with a day new posts were flooding in over the top of the dam.  Now I pretty regularly read down to the equivalent of “inbox zero” while taking pretty huge breaks between reading.  The world has changed and it isn’t as exciting to be out here blogging your thoughts and ideas the way it used to be, also there are a million other streams of information dividing our attention.  I still feel however that blogging creates a place for yourself in that stream if information and gives you a presence that cannot be taken away by “promoted posts” or “interest based sorting algorithms”.

So what I propose is a month of mildly structured posting and developing a strong mentorship community among those of us who are still out there doing it on a regular basis.  Lets help grow that next generation of bloggers and help them get started in a journey that honestly has meant more to me than I can adequately put into words.  I love feeling like I am part of something bigger than myself and I think we all do to some extent.  Let’s reignite the fires of this dwindling community and help to firmly affix the torch into the hands of a new generation of bloggers.  While gaming is very much in my wheel house… it isn’t even a game blogging festival but more one about creating a place for yourself and showing off whatever it is that you want to show the world.  You could create a blog to share your latest recipe creations or one to catalog your experiences as you start a new job.  You could share your awesome screenshots and write some notes about how you felt when you took it or what you were thinking at the time.  You could do your “daily blog” as a series of livestreams that you record and post later as a VOD or exported to YouTube.  The core concept is to create a community around the creation of new “stuff” and a sense of us all working together in the same shared space.

What About the Awards?

One of the things that has traditionally come with Blaugust is a series of made up awards that are granted to those who participant.  So far they have shaped up to look a little something like this…

  • Newbie Blogger Award – You did it, you created a new blog and by god we are going to sing your praises for doing it!
  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the Month of August 2018.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the Month of August 2018, go you!
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the Month of August 2018, you are a badass!
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You did it, you posted every single day during the Month of August 2018 and deserve accolades.

Occasionally in the past various sponsors have mysteriously shown up during this event, and if that happens… awesome I will share the bounty.  If not I am going to make nifty blog sidebar thingys for each of the various award categories.

Mentorship

One of the keys to making this work is that we need a bunch of you amazing bloggers out there to sign up as mentors.  Ultimately I feel like mentors should have roughly two years of blogging experience under their belt to be able to gauge the ebbs and flows of content creation in front of a live studio audience.  This isn’t necessarily meant as a gate keeping mechanism, but I want any participant to feel like they can turn to any mentor for sage advice.  I sure as hell am not sure if I have anything resembling sage advice, but I have quite a bit of experience in dealing with the nonsense that comes up while trying to keep a regular publishing schedule.  The mentors will all be clearly marked as such in Discord since that tends to be the thing that ultimately replaced forums for the gaming community.  I will be doing my best to be hanging out there often myself to answer questions as they arise.

Structured Format

I mentioned this above that I wanted to attempt a bit of a structured format… which is of course optional but provides us some general content areas to focus on while the event is going on.  This also helps to revive another tradition that was Developer Appreciation Week and embed it as part of this larger blogging festival as well.  So right now the weeks look a little something like this.

  • July 25th – July 31st – Blaugust Prep Week – posts about the technical details of getting started in blogging.  Tutorials, advice, tips for naming your blog… that sort of stuff to get people ready to hit the ground on August 1st running.
  • August 1st – August 7th – Topic Brainstorming Week – posts about ideas for topics that the participants can then mine for the rest of the month.
  • August 8th – August 14th – Get to Know Each Other Week – hanging out and meeting other people in this new fledgling community and hopefully gaming together a bit!  Also highly support doing some sort of collaboration on shared topics!
  • August 15th – August 21st – Developer Appreciation Week – post about the things that you really appreciate in gaming or any other community… because chances are there is a developer or designer behind the things you love.
  • August 22nd – August 28th – Staying Motivated Week – tips and tricks that you might have to stay motivated and keep creating content against the tyranny of a blank screen.
  • August 29th – August 31st – The Final Stretch: Lessons Learned – as a way of getting us across the finish line, talk about some of the experienced you had during the month and maybe things you learned about yourself.

The Details

  • The sign up form for Blaugust Reborn 2018 can be found here
  • The invite link to the Blaugust Reborn Discord can be found here
  • When you share your content please use the hashtag #BlaugustReborn for tracking purposes
    • Also share your content in the “share-your-content” channel on Discord!
  • Mingle with your other Mentors and Participants
    • Maybe even use the “gaming-together” channel on Discord for play games together!
  • Have a great freaking August!

 

 

 

Plate Dress

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You would think a work week with only two days in it would be a breeze to get through.  You would be wrong, or at least I am struggling with it.  There is something about being off work for five days in a row that really resets your mental clock.  While I had not deviated terribly in my sleep patterns…  I did deviate massively in my pants wearing patterns.  What is making this experience weirder is the fact that I represent the only management team member for my side of the office, and as a result I have people I don’t normally manage coming up to me and asking advice on issues.  However we push on because it is in fact Friday… the harbinger of another respite from work.  That said I know that come Monday morning everyone will be expecting the entire office to be firing on all cylinders so I am trying to take advantage of this lull in people actually being around the office to catch up on things.

On the blog front… I am working on some details for Monday where I talk about the return of Blaugust.  Yes that is right I am doing it again this year because I feel like the community needs something to rally around.  I do intend to shift things up a bit however and make it less about posting every single day and more an amalgam of the various events that we used to do as a community but have let slip by the wayside.  Expect a few elements of the Newbie Blogger Initiative to be thrown into the mix as well to broaden the sort of folks involved.  I will have charts and graphs and all measure of adult looking representations of my thoughts for Monday morning (I am only slightly kidding) but it isn’t quite ready for primetime yet.

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On the gaming front  I am still very much engaged with Elder Scrolls Online and looking forward to Update 19 that comes with the Wolfhunter DLC.  If I had to guess this will probably land sometime around Quake Con that is coming up August 9th through the 12th.  The main reason why I am super interested in this update is that apparently we are finally getting single line respecs…  only five years after asking for these in alpha.  I’ve always been way more into being a Hunter than a Werewolf or Vampire…  so the whole Van Helsing style outfit they are showing off is definitely in my wheelhouse.  Speaking of outfits however… I keep playing with the wardrobe system and creating my very own “plate dress” ensemble.  You can absolutely blame World of Warcraft and the Judgement set for hooking me on this appearance, but unfortunately at this moment the only skirt option I have available to me is one that is Daedric themed, so I am just sorta rolling with that appearance as a whole.

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I’ve been playing with some different combinations of pieces for the Arms and Shoulders…  the first image in this series is what I am currently wearing but I am thinking seriously of going back to this combination shown in the above image.  I think it blended better together and I dig the uncovered hands better than the various gloved options.  I also seem to have settled on running around with the adorable wolf cub as my companion as opposed to the wide variety of violent critters I also have access to.  At this point I am a few quest chains deep into The Rift and still loving the whole encountering people I interacted with in the past.  This time it was someone who dates back all the way to Bleakrock…  which makes me wonder if I had chosen differently in Bal Foyen if I would have had a different interaction.  I am guessing that would be the case, but I absolutely think I chose correctly this time around.

Anyways…  time to get to work.  Have a wonderful weekend and tune in Monday as I begin unrolling the nonsense that is to be this years Blaugust.

A Four Year Mission

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I realize this is a lot of images to link at the beginning of a blog post… but there is a good reason.  For the last four years playing Elder Scrolls Online I had a singular goal…  to see something in the live game that I have not seen since one of the last days of alpha.  I’ve talked about this before but I have been playing Elder Scrolls Online since February of 2013 when the first Friends and Family alphas began.  How I got in is because my good friend Tamrielo was one of the creators of a not insignificant amount of the quest content.  Every so often in Alpha we would be lead by him to go see something… that was a reference to one of us or one of our friends.  One of the final things I remember is running all of the way across the Ebonheart Pact area to The Rift….  and Nimalten to be specific to see an arrangement of NPCs in that town.  The date specifically was October 13th of 2013 as I have a stack of screenshots that I took at that time have have hoarded since.

Last night I managed to push my way through the Eastmarch storyline and upon zoning into the The Rift for the first time…  I couldn’t wait any longer and made a jaunt across zone to Nimalten to find what I had been waiting to see all of this time.  Granted every one of the NPCs made their way through a bit of a “Nordification” pass by the lore team, but enough survived that it is pretty obvious who they are if you know what you are looking at.  First up is my namesake aka Belgrod Sternblade (technically one of two namesakes that I know of) who has a throwaway line about his Stalwart Band of Mercenaries which is a reference to House Stalwart the guild I started in World of Warcraft back in 2004.  Next up is Waren the Wolf aka Warenwolf a long time friend of ours from the vanilla World of Warcraft days, phenomenal hunter and the target of my attempts to heal him with arrows in alpha.  Then we have Ashvorn Bear-Walker which is the slantwise namesake of Ashgar our perennial bear tank and general friend of anything that transforms into animal form.  Lastly we have Autrae Snow-Wing who is playing with her cat Dimi… that represent former AggroChat host Audrae and her then cat Dimitri.

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This might seem silly but for me personally…  being able to see these characters legitimately in the final release of the game means a lot to me.  It also allows me to take stupid photos like the one above with the two Belghast-kin together.  Of course the moment I finished doing this nonsense I ported back to the start of the zone because I want to experience it through the natural flow instead of just jumping ahead to this one town.  I’ve been having a complete blast playing Elder Scrolls Online over the last couple of weeks and really the game has evolved to a state where it pretty much has all of the things that I think I once complained about it not having.  It has a really excellent housing system that I have been collecting patterns for…  and still what I would consider the single best crafting system in any MMORPG.  While a little costly I am a fan of their cosmetic system implementation as well as the various costumes available through either crown crates or direct purchase on the store.  The fact that subscribing to the game gets me access to all of the Expansion and DLC content, a stack of crowns each time it renews, and a magical crafting bag that lets me loot everything and not worry about bag space…  is all a “plus” in my book.  The full list of features for a subscription goes a little something like this…

  • Access to all DLC game packs in the in-game Crown Store
  • Free crowns for the in-game Crown Store
  • Access to the Craft Bag
  • Double bank space
  • Bonuses to progression
  • Extra furniture space
  • Costume dyeing
  • Double Transmutation Crystals

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I am very much in my MMO happy place at the moment, and completely oblivious to pretty much anything else apart from the occasional game of Diablo 3.  I am super excited that soon…  in one zones time I will be starting the first of the DLC content for Elder Scrolls Online.  I have purposefully delayed starting literally anything that came out past the original game… because I wanted to have beaten all 150 levels worth of content that the original game had to offer.  For the uninitiated that starts with the 50 levels worth of content in your starting faction and works its way through Silver and Gold… the new game plus, and new game plus plus that sees you travelling via Cadwell to the other two factions.  Sure it is a little weird to be helping the Ebonheart Pact fight off the Covenant while rocking the Covenant Hero title…  but whatever I can hand wave that away.

The thing that makes me the happiest about Elder Scrolls Online is how indistinguishable it is for me personally from playing any other Elder Scrolls game at this point.  I love the story arcs for each of the zones that evolve as you work your way around and help the other people…  and the little payoffs when you meet up with a character you have already helped out once before.  The amount of scripting work that went into making sure that each NPC recognizes you from every time you have interacted with that NPC before has to be staggering.  The fact that the final main story quest usually involves weaving in a bunch of characters that you met in the zone and each of them commenting on how you helped them in the past, is just so damned great.  The only thing that would push it over the top is if they introduced some Bioware style companions with romance story arcs…  because seriously the core story itself is as good as anything I have seen in a Mass Effect or Dragon Age game.

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I have an extreme amount of emotional investment in this game, not just for the fact that there are characters named after me roaming its world…  but also for the fact that I feel like I helped shape it.  I was a very active member of the alpha community and supposedly one of the more active bug reporters.  I love that there is still a core of players out there in an alpha-only guild that I am part of that has been playing off and on since the days we first got into the servers and kept reporting bugged doors.  I love the fact that there is still a hidden area on the official forums that only those first few testers have access to, and while it isn’t terribly active… feels like a little secret clubhouse that a handful of us have access to.  Every time I step foot into Tamrielo in Elder Scrolls Online it feels like coming back home, and each time I forget why I left in the first place.  The truth is…  I am an easily distracted toddler and I am sure at some point some shiny object with cause me to shift my gaze elsewhere…  but for the moment I am loving every moment of roaming this place that is both so familiar to me but still so fresh to explore.

Hot Shower and Tall Toilet

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I flat out lied yesterday morning.  No blog post ever happened because it was one hell of a weird day.  First off I did not sleep hardly at all Sunday night.  I am not sure what was up but I spent most of my night tossing and turning and staring at the clock as it kept ticking up towards our 5:30 wake up time.  Then Kenzie our oft times asshole cat woke us up around 5… because apparently she was afraid we would over sleep?  I took Monday and Tuesday off this week to combine it with Wednesday that we were getting for the 4th of July.  This has given me a five day weekend… and it has been glorious.  Now when I originally took the time off it was as the suggestion of my boss… given that it was shaping up that I was going to be the only manager in the office Thursday and Friday.

There was nothing really planned at all, but my wife decided to take this opportunity for me being off to schedule a bunch of things that otherwise needed to happen.  So as it went yesterday we had an appointment at 8 am, 10 am and 11 am…  originally just to give estimates but some scope creep happened.  Some time ago… around the 13th of February we had an issue where we had NO hot water at all.  You can read that post if you want more details but the long and short of it is…  our Hot Water Heater had a manufacture date of 1977…  making it one year younger than me.  Hot Water Heaters are in theory not supposed to last forty years… and as a result ours was full of a sediment made largely of calcium deposits that were getting sucked up with the hot water and clogging all of our delivery points.

So we knew at some point we would need to get all of that fixed but the estimate our Air Conditioning company that also does plumbing gave us…  was pretty painful.  They laid out three options for us and all of them involved a certain amount of work to “bring it up to code” which in truth is something we just had to take them at their word.  Back in February we managed to remove the clog from the shower which restored functionality and allowed us to kick the hot water heater replacement down the road a bit.  So yesterday we had intended to get a second estimate from a local business, and instead had a bit of scope creep.

Home ownership is largely a long string of things that annoy you about your house.  One of these was the fact that in our main downstairs bathroom we had a shorter than normal toilet.  You have to understand that I am 6’4″ and a good deal of that height is in my legs… making less than comfortable to use said toilet over the last almost twenty years.  The other problem is that toilet never really flushed amazingly well and took 15 minutes for the huge tank to fill between uses.  However like so many things with a home… you just sorta live with it until you reach a critical break point.  While we were dealing with the hot water heater we asked for an estimate to get that replaced with a taller toilet… and apparently what I was really wanting was an ADA compliant toilet which is roughly 18 inches tall instead of the 15 we currently had.

Essentially the estimate we got for the hot water heater and the toilet…  installed and ready to go was less than the lowest estimate we got from before.  The guy had time to do it yesterday so we went ahead and made it happen…  and now I have the toilet I have always wanted.  It is going to take some getting used to given this feels a lot taller than our previous one…  and the fact that the person who flipped our home did not remove the tank to the toilet and just painted around the old one… meaning we have some ancient wallpaper now showing.  That will be handled during a future frantic weekend but for the moment I am supremely happy… and given that at the last minute I had to dip into my birthday money because the amount the guy told us to pull out of the bank was a little off…  we are calling this my birthday present instead of our anniversary gift.

I am guessing we will call the Hot Water Heater the Anniversary gift and my god… the shower was glorious this morning.  I guess I did not realize how far gone the 40 year old one was… because we have been taking showers for some time with the knob all of the way to the hot side.  I damned near burned myself this morning because the new unit works significantly better.  The water pressure though… that is the big difference and while I had to take the shower head off and fish out some bits of calcification with tweezers…  once reassembled the end result was phenomenal.  It really is the little things that make you happy in life.

This has been an insane weekend of doing stuff…  that saw us disposing of a bunch of things that had been sitting around taking up space including the 250 lb HP Laserjet 5si office printer that we were originally trying to find a good home for.  We now know what it is going to take to remodel the bathroom as well so we can start planning accordingly.  We’ve spent much of the extended weekend talking about all of the things we can do that are just cosmetic that will improve our opinion of rooms like the kitchen.  Unfortunately this has meant not a ton of gaming, but if I have to sacrifice of that to use the bathroom comfortably and have a hot shower…  then it seems like a perfectly acceptable sacrifice for now.