Blog Features

Blaugust and the Grand Experiment

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Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.

The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.

It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.

I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.

Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.

I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about.

Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post.

Blaugust 2022 In Review

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Good Morning Friends! It is that time again, time for me to attempt to tabulate all of the blog posts from this year’s running of Blaugust and hand out awards. We had a phenomenal turnout this year with a grand total of 67 blogs participating. During this one month collectively we produced a grand total of thirteen hundred and thirty-three new blog posts. This was not our highest attended year, as we had one back in 2018 with over 90 blogs participating, but it feels like one of our busiest years. The community has felt considerably more active than it has in the past, and that might be in part due to finally adding a more “general purpose” channel to the Discord called #blaugust-banter. We are still learning and adjusting each year, and this seems to have been a positive change for group cohesiveness.

Blaugust is one of those things that has more or less developed a mind of its own over the years. Originally it was a challenge for folks to blog every single day for a month, and I embarked upon this nonsense after spending the previous year blogging every day. Of note, I made it about three and a half years of daily blogging before I finally needed to dial things back a bit. I really never expected to run Blaugust more than that first year, but collectively the community has always been there to spur me forward to organize yet another one. Over the years it has shifted more into a celebration of blogging, and a time to stoke our creative fires for the next year. There will always be folks that disappear into the woodwork after August is over, but I feel like collectively this is good for the community and keeping blogging alive.

Newbie Class of 2022

One of the things I am proudest of this year is the general outreach we have had to find new voices. Some of our lists are already seasoned bloggers, some started a brand new blog just for this event, and others just rekindled the home fires of their abandoned digital homestead. Whatever the case we had a large list of folks who were participating in Blaugust for the very first time. It has long been our tradition to celebrate our newbies with a special award, and as such here is our list of first-time Blaugustans for 2022.

Now has come the time to talk about the awards. Each year we give awards out to represent the level of posting that each blogger has completed. Since this year had a bit of a Stranger Things theme going on, and since Dungeons and Dragons played such a key role in that series, I decided to use a D20 for the background of this year’s awards. For those who might need a refresher into rules here are the guidelines.

  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2022.

Before we get into the lists however it is that time again for my yearly disclaimer. I am a human being and highly fallible. If you feel that I made a mistake in the tabulation process please let me know and I will get the lists remedied as soon as possible. Some blog layouts are easier to tabulate than others and I want to share my undying love for those of you who have a sidebar widget that counts posts by month. Again if I made a mistake in my counting, please reach out to me posthaste and I will fix it.

The Bronze Club 2022

This year we had eighteen blogs that managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2022. Often times we set ourselves to a goal but fall short, however, if you think about it this way that is an average of one post a week!

The Silver Club 2022

This year we had twelve blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2022. if you spread them out across the five weeks of Blaugust, that is posting at least three times a week.

The Gold Club 2022

This year we had three blogs that managed the feat of posting at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2022. The pack thins a bit at this point because if folks are willing to post this much, they are often willing to go that extra mile does daily postings. However, on average, this is at least posting five times a week during the course of blaugust.

The Rainbow Diamond Club 2022

This year we have a very impressive twenty-seven blogs that managed the feat of posting at least thirty-one times during the month of August 2022. There are always folks who end up wildly overshooting this goal and with two blogs in the challenge, Syp managed to bring in 86 total posts between the pair of sites. All of the bloggers who make it to this level deserve our admiration, I started this nonsense and even I don’t do thirty-one posts anymore.

Honorable Mentions

While the first of the awards start with five posts during the month, it still takes a lot of effort to sign up and write even one post. As a result, we have traditionally spent some time honoring those who started down this road and joined in this nonsense we call Blaugust. This year I decided to do something a little differently and go ahead and create a themed image based on the red Blaugust 2022 logo coloration.

Final Thoughts

One of the things that I have done each year pulls together some basic statistics in an easy-to-read summary block. I would love to have some stats around Discord, but unfortunately in order to get that we would have to turn ourselves into a public community server. That feels like a double-edged sword, and I have not gone down that path yet. Regardless it definitely feels like we have had a busier community this year than we have had at any point during the Blaugust process. Without further rambling, here are some basic statistics.

  • 1333 posts were made by Blaugust 2022 Participants.
  • 67 blogs signed up and made at least one post during the month.
  • 24 blogs participated in Blaugust for the very first time.
    • Collectively our “Newbies” made a total of 376 posts.
  • 60 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze.
  • 42 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 15 posts qualifying for Silver.
  • 30 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold.
  • 26 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 31 posts qualifying for Rainbow Diamond.

So while it was not our biggest year, it was a significant bump up from the 45 participants in 2021. I think the piece of this year’s Blaugust that I am proudest of, is how much our community has grown in scope. Traditionally Blaugust has been an event that draws its participants from the same pool of bloggers, and while it is awesome that folks look forward to this event… every year we lose a few from the fold. Our impressive twenty-four new participants tell me that we are expanding our reach and moving out into other blogging spheres.

As always I am deeply proud of everyone who participated this year. Again I am a very fallible human being and if my counts do you reflect your counts, please let me know. I’ve updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with this year’s images, and the “Blaugchievements” are on the honor system. I hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2023 and whatever twists that might bring us. Lastly, I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. For many of us, this is a support structure that we can rely on, and while I may not say it often… I appreciate all of you greatly.

Who The Heck Am I

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Good Morning Friends. If we are following the theme of Blaugust this is “Introduce Yourself Week” and while I understand that I made this calendar… I never quite know what to do for this one. When you have been blogging in one form or another going on twenty years… I’ve already poured a lot of information about myself out into the ether. So instead of telling my life story once again… as I have done so many times, I thought I would share a few photos and write about them. This is a very young version of me… with Freddie Bear. I am not sure if it was originally called this on the packaging or if I gave him that name… but he was my constant companion followed by Raggedy Ann and Andy and a Sock Monkey I named Charlie. I’ve recently seen Freddie Bear and he is completely ragged from lots and lots of tiny hands hugging and loving him.

Another photo that I find funny is me and a childhood friend entering the yearly talent show, doing a dance number from Staying Alive. You would never know it from my 6’4″ blocky frame and complete lack of physical dexterity… but I was in Dance as a child. In theory, the story goes that I watched Olympic gymnasts and wanted to take gymnastics… and in our tiny town this was only taught by the local dance instructor. The “tax” that she placed upon male students, is that if they wanted to take gymnastics they also had to take tap and ballet. So I think I took around five years of tap, ballet, and gymnastics… and you could never tell it by the way I currently stumble about. It did however broaden my horizons quite a bit and I was in the regional production of the nutcracker several times as a tiny rat and as a tin soldier. I remember being so terrified of the seven-headed rat king on stage that I chewed on my plastic sword.

This is what remains of the very first automobile that I called “Bob” but being the weird artsy kid I said it was spelled without any Bs. I was a weird kid. I gave $200 for this vehicle and it carried me through college and survived a drunk lady backing into it at my wife’s apartment without so much as a scratch. It was not exactly a comfortable vehicle for someone over six feet tall to drive, but it was mine. The thing about an automobile more than anything is that it represents the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want. I come from fairly humble means and there was not a chance in hell that my parents could afford to buy me something, so I think I spent money from working as a camp counselor at scout camp on it. I was an eagle scout and got brought onto staff one year when the camp decided that they wanted EVERY counselor to be an eagle for some reason. The biggest thing I remember about that summer was when we had to clear the copperhead snakes out from under the medical building. Probably not something you would ever have a bunch of teenagers do today… but I will never forget the distinct copperhead smell.

Now I live a relatively quiet life in suburbia. We bought our home in 1999 and have seen no reason to move. We love our neighborhood because it is this blend of older folks and young families, and over the years has become significantly more diverse. Most people bought here for the same reason we did… because it was cheap. Our house is roughly 1800 sq/ft and we paid somewhere in the vicinity of 83k in 1999… which had roughly tripled in value since we have been here. The thing I dig the most about our neighborhood though is how easy it would be for us to walk to the store or to a restaurant, even though we are often too busy to do this thing. Another thing I love is the fact that we have neighborhood ducks seen above. There are several ponds in the neighborhood and as a result, dusks roam around pretty regularly in small groups. Everyone stops for the ducks because they secretly rule the town. I am just thankful we got ducks because the neighborhood across the busy road… has geese and geese are assholes.

Being the soft-hearted person that I am… we are also the house in the neighborhood that puts out food for the community of feral cats. Seen lounging on our doormat is “Greybie” who is a grey tabby male that is extremely friendly… at least for a feral. He has this weird hang-up where he knows who we are if we are walking out of the house… but gets confused that we might be the same humans if we are walking into the house. Not pictured is “Tabby” who has only recently let me start petting her. They are all fairly skittish but along with a solid black cat they represent the cats that hang out in front of our house on the regular. We are not terribly original in our naming scheme in part because we don’t want to get too attached… because feral cats have a habit of eventually disappearing.

The whole feeding outdoor cats thing… more or less started because of “Tripod” pictured above. She is a three-legged calico and has been living in our backyard for going on four years. We even have a house that she can sleep in during the winter months with bedding to keep her warm. We’ve never gotten more than a few feet from her before she moves away and as such is still extremely feral… but also shows up at meal time every day. Occasionally she has a visiting tomcat that we call “splotchie” because he has an almost jaguar-like pattern on his grey and black coat. Almost all of the ferals that we see on the regular have been captured at one point and “fixed” then had their ears notched to indicate that they were released. I would adopt “Tripod” in a heartbeat, but given we have been doing this dance for years… I doubt she would ever trust me enough to come inside.

Speaking of Indoor Cats, this is my eldest Mollie. She is an asshole. Like she loves me but also is big into “love bites” thinking that is a proper way of showing affection. So loving on her is always a juggling act of trying to keep your hand out of her mouth. We rescued her from a large dog shelter, and she had been the only cat for two years there. As a result, I think she doesn’t quite know “how to cat”, and has trouble bonding… or at least her bonding is nowhere near what you would expect from a normal cat. She loves me and spends most of the day beside me on a box with a pink fleece blanket on it… pictured above. The problem with Mollie is… she does not understand how to play with our other girls and can get a little aggressive. Leading right now to the practice of us guarding our youngest while she goes to the litter box… which I hope does not last forever.

Then you have my baby girl Josie, who we have had for two years. Not pictured is her amazing ringtail… which basically turns up on itself in a loop… as its natural resting position. We are in a period of transition right now as the three girls figure out the new normal. That said if I am sitting downstairs on the couch, she is almost assuredly laying on my legs. Until Gracie came she also used to sleep on me every night… now she is sorta feeling out the new situation. She loves boxes and sitting on them… and it is weird how she has aged since we got the youngin. Not sure if this is a matter of perspective or if she really has decided that she needs to be a big sister. She is still deeply prone to bouts of kittenhood, especially when I get out the laser pointer. I work from home and she doesn’t spend much time upstairs, but when it is about time for me to “get off work” she comes up and reminds me.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will already be well versed in Gracie. She is a mess and one of the most active kittens I have ever experienced. She has learned how to climb things that no cat has ever figured out… which means we are constantly on the defensive. She would be in trouble were it not for the fact that she is so damned adorable. We would also probably call her “Little Shit” were it not for the fact we have already had a beloved cat from our past with that unfortunate moniker. Gracie basically wants whatever she can see… and then attacks it. She is super fierce… except when it comes to her interactions with Mollie who towers over her. As a result, we essentially have to take her to the litter box a few times a day, because she is too scared to come upstairs to them. She bonded heavily with my wife, but now that she is going back to school during the day… it will be interesting to see if “daddy” is suddenly cooler than I have been to this point.

Other than that… my primary hobby is gaming and I spend most evenings whiling away the hours playing some game while snuggling with cats. I’ve been working remotely for the last three years, and it does not appear that there is going to be any change to that. I’m a fairly simple person and honestly fairly boring. I’ve been a geek since before that term was really bandied about with any sense of street cred to it. I love comic books, all manner of science fiction and fantasy, and have been pouring my soul into either artwork or writing my entire life. I need to get back into drawing again because it was a huge part of my life for the first twenty years… and then I effectively just sort of severed that part of me. I keep thinking about doing Inktober, and maybe this year will be the year I actually do.

In 1998, our first year out of college I had a sort of tragic event happen to me that I never recovered from creatively. My wife was teaching in a very small “one-horse town”, and I was having to commute almost two hours a day to work as a result. At some point during that year, she was responsible for the senior class, and their class project was to fix up and paint the recreation center. I was asked if I would be willing to paint a mural with their mascot, and I spent the night laying out a sketch for it and had not actually started on it. We were up there until after midnight, so we locked the building and I left all of my supplies. When we came back about mid-day the next day… all of my stuff had been stolen. I am not really sure how to explain how big of a violation that felt.

More than just losing the paint and brushes… it was like my language for HOW to function creatively was stolen from me. I had spent over a decade building a collection of brushes that all did different things.. found sometimes in thrift stores, some given to me by friends… I knew how each of them worked intimately. Then with all of that gone… I didn’t even understand how to begin to replace it. A new brush doesn’t perform the way one that has been used for a decade performs. So it is like a part of me just shut down and never came back… and now roughly twenty-five years later… I’ve yet to really regain the confidence to begin creating art again. I shifted to pouring all of my hopes and dreams and thoughts into words.

Sometimes a blog post develops a life of its own… and this one today certainly has. I didn’t set out to talk about this. That is the hardest lesson that I have learned over all these years of blogging, which is that you have to go with the flow of the post. Sometimes your emotions are going to spill out in the process and it is okay to show your weaknesses. It means I have to put a lot of trust in the hands of my readers, but for the most part, if you stick around here… you are not here for the topics.

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.