It Actually Worked

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Yesterday was a bit of a ride. I have to admit it has been a while since I have seen quite this much excitement and activity around Blaugust. Since 2016 the last time the Newbie Blogger Initiative took place, I have personally focused a lot more of my effort on the whole “getting new bloggers” aspect of this event. I am not sure what combination of events actually triggered this but this year we have more folks who have never participated in Blaugust than I think we have ever had… past that very first year. We still continue to have a trickle of new signups and since yesterday’s post, we added eleven. The number that I am staggered by is we have had twenty-two people sign up that have never participated in this event before.

It does make me wonder if the whole “Blaugchievements” concept is actually working as intended. Essentially there are two specifically that could be triggering this, the first being that there is an achievement for promoting the event and the second being actually recruiting a friend. Whatever the case I am pleased as punch because this event as a whole has sort of turned into my counterargument to “blogs are dead”. In order for that to be true, we are going to need to keep refreshing our numbers with new blood flowing into the blogosphere. If nothing else… this year seems to be doing that and I am thrilled beyond intelligible words.

I’ve been trying to keep my blogroll updated with the new signups each day and similarly, I am keeping the list on the media kit updated as well. However this morning I wanted to take a minute to highlight all of the first-timers who decided to do this thing. What I find most impressive however is that most of these fine folks have no connection back to me. If anything I love that this is maybe becoming less about me and more about the community that we are building.

I think a few of these sites might be still in progress, but I applaud the start nonetheless. I still remember my very first blog and getting it started and the struggle it was to muster the courage to post anything. Technically speaking I think Tales of the Aggronaut is my fourth blog in the grand scheme of things, with the others long lost to the sands of time. There are times I wish I had landed on something back when I first started and stuck with it. Not that I think I would have enjoyed e-fame, but I might have even been as well known as someone like Lum the Mad.

I have a new side project that was inspired by the discord yesterday. This version of Blaugust ran in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 with a weird thing called Blapril also happening in 2020. During all of this, I have kept a series of spreadsheets keeping track of the blogs that were participating and a number of other details. I think my new goal is to take all of this mess, normalize it, and then create a master spreadsheet to track who participated in which years. This is honestly going to be a bit daunting because each year I have mixed things up a bit and it is not like all of the spreadsheets contain the same data. I hope to at least by the end of this current event to have cobbled together something for tracking purposes.

Other than all of this… I honestly am feeling a bit rudderless when it comes to gaming. I know in a few weeks I will be back to Path of Exile with the start of a brand new league, but in the meantime, I am not sure exactly what I want to play. I am picking away at Dragonflight Alpha but with the limited testing that is going on, I have already played through the two zones I have seen twice and left relevant comments. I’ve been playing quite a bit of Red Dead Redemption II and then last night for whatever reason I landed in Outriders. I hate when I am going through one of those “I have nothing to play” phases which is clearly wrong given my massive steam backlog. Once the new PoE League starts I will have that sense of purpose again and all will be well. For now, I am just going to play whatever happens to suit my fancy.

7 thoughts on “It Actually Worked”

  2. Apparently I picked THE opportune time for my blog to go live – still needs some tweaking but I figure only by using it will I know what it wants! Looking forward to being part of the community, so thank you!

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