Eleven Years of Aggronaut

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.