Blog Features

Blaugust 2023 In Review

by

Good Morning Friends! It is that time again… Tabulation Day, aka the day in which I spent the morning counting up all the blog posts from all the participants. This year I want to give a huge thanks to a few people who helped out, most specifically GamerLadyP who organized a self-reporting thread on the Discord and MagiWasTaken for getting up well ahead of me due to timezones and providing me a full count of all 104 participating blogs that I could use as a verification method. I also want to give a huge thanks to everyone who got the word out this year and spread the news of Blaugust, because I am still fairly overwhelmed by the participation. I had wondered what my abandonment of Twitter would do to the event, but it is very clear that the Fediverse and Mastodon specifically have embraced this particular brand of nonsense. I mean I guess it makes sense given that anyone who is interested in DIY Social Media… is also highly likely the sort of person to host their own blog.

Let’s talk about some of the statistics from this year:

  • 104 Blogs Signed Up for Blaugust.
    • Of those Blogs 100 Made at least one post during the month of August.
  • We had 56 folks sign up for Blaugust who had never participated before.
  • During this past month, Blaugust Participants created 1459 Content Posts.

That is truly wild folks. This is easily the most active year of Blaugust we have ever had, and that is pretty cool considering this is both the 10th time we have run Blaugust and the 10 years since the very first one. I’ve said this many times before, but over the years Blaugust has developed a mind of its own, and even if I dropped off the face of the earth… I think someone would follow along behind me to keep the initiative going. This is also the first time in years that I have actually done the daily posting thing… which is weird considering I was already posting six times a week but I made that little extra effort in honor of our tenth year.

Newbie Class of 2023

One of the things that has completely blown me away this year is the large amount of participation from folks who have never participated before. Each year one of the goals of this event is to cultivate new voices to join our community. Blogging has for years been called a dying tradition, but many of us who have participated in this event and the pseudo-predecessor Newbie Blogger Initiative have stood in constant defiance of that viewpoint. Now some folks that signed up are legitimately new to blogging, while others have been seasoned veterans that just never got involved in this process before. We welcome them all however as first-time Blaugustans and as such there is an extra special award for them.

The Awards and Methodology

Now we reach the moment where I talk about the various Awards associated with Blaugust. I tried to carry forward the general styling elements that I ran with during this event when I created the badges. These will all be available on the Blaugust Media Kit in the full-resolution version if you want to snag them for your blog’s sidebar. For anyone who needs a bit of a refresher on our rules, here are the guidelines that the awards are assigned based upon.

  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 Posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 Posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2023.

Before we get to the lists however it is time for my yearly disclaimer. I am a human being and as a result highly fallible. This year I had quite a bit of help in the tabulations, but if you feel that we made a mistake please feel free to reach out and let me know. Some blog layouts are much harder to tabulate than others… and we do our best to count them all. I am extremely thankful each year for the folks with much more standard layouts, those with self-tabulating calendar widgets, and at a minimum those who use hard date stamps rather than relative ones. Again if you feel like we made a mistake we are very open to negotiation.

The Bronze Club 2023

This year we had thirty-seven folks who managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2023. Since a lot of this event is about posting more often and finding your own schedule to follow. Five times during the Month of August would be around one post a week… which seems like a completely reasonable schedule.

The Silver Club 2023

We had a dichotomy emerge this year where folks either posted a little bit or a whole heck of a lot, so some of our other awards are a little sparse. This year we had seven blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2023. To continue the theme of choosing a schedule, this would equate to posting at least three times per week. Especially if you landed on something along the lines of a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule… this also seems completely manageable.

The Gold Club 2023

Now that we get down to Gold, we are oftentimes in the territory of folks who already have a predetermined schedule and just follow that. For example, I have been on the Gold Team for years because I tend to post at a minimum Monday through Friday, and due to the podcast on Sundays as well. This year we had two blogs post at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2023. Keeping the schedule thread rolling forward, this would be around five times per week.

The Rainbow Diamond Club

This year we had a fairly massive Twenty-Nine blogs that managed the feat of posting at least thirty-one times during the Month of August 2023. There are always some folks who end up wildly overshooting the goal and we had ten of them this year. I actually put in the extra effort this year to join the Rainbows, but I will likely never match someone like Syp or Wilhelm who traditionally posts a truly outrageous number of posts on the regular. Everyone who makes it to this level truly deserves all of our admiration, which this time around… sounds weird to say considering I am actually sitting among them.

Honorable Mentions

While the first awards category begins with five posts during the month, it still takes a lot of effort to sign up and put yourself out there with even one blog post. Sometimes the tyranny of the blank screen gets the better of us. Other times you really want to participate but life gets in the way. I feel like it is really important that we take the time to celebrate all of the folks who made that first step and give them the hope that they will return next year with even more content. I think last year was the first time I created a badge just for them, and I am continuing that new tradition this year. This year we had twenty-five folks who made that first step.

Final Thoughts

This year was a wild ride. Firstly I did not think we would have anywhere near the participation of a normal year given the turmoil that Twitter has been in. That platform was really the origination point of this event, and I thought we might get a number of the regulars back that just happened to catch my blog post announcing it, but I didn’t really expect much in the way of growth. I’ve never been so happy to be completely wrong about anything. The Fediverse is a fertile new ground for bloggers, and it tends to attract the type of folks who want to be out there expressing themselves… on their own terms. This gives me so much hope for blogging as a medium going forward. Sure we might be losing Twitter as a viable home, but we are also expanding out into new territories that are potentially going to be better in the long run.

In the lessons learned department… I think for the most part having an official Mastodon account on Gamepad.club has worked extremely well. I think next year I might need to script something that goes out and boosts posts rather than what happened this year. Essentially each morning I would log into the account and then proceed to flood everyone’s timeline with what had accumulated since the day before. I can’t say that this worked terribly well because it felt like I was a bit of a nuisance. The other big takeaway is that when you get over 100 participants… Tabulation Day aka this morning… becomes “a lot”. Next year we will be tweaking the rules a bit to require self-reporting your blog posts at the end of the event. This is going to make life so much easier for me specifically, but for everyone who helped me out in getting tabulations started.

As always I am so deeply proud of everyone who has participated this year. The tyranny of the blank screen is a real thing. So often it takes me pretending that I am writing to myself to hit the publish button each morning, so I understand what many folks have to overcome to put themselves out there. Again I am very fallible, and if you feel like I made an error in my tabulations, please reach out to me from any of the many platforms I use, and we can talk about it. By the time of posting this, I should have updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with all of the awards, so feel free to snag them and do whatever you want with them. I hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2024. 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.

Last Day of Blaugust 2023

by

Good Morning Folks! As I am sitting here writing it is the dawn of the last day of Blaugust 2023. There was so much content generated, and tomorrow I will likely do a bit of a summary when I talk about the event as a whole. I wanted to start out this morning with a bit of expectation-setting. In an average year, the “tabulation day” as I personally refer to it is a bit of an arduous undertaking. Normally we talk around fifty or so blogs that I have to review and count posts on. This year we have one hundred and three… by far the largest participant pool I’ve ever seen. So please be patient with me as I undertake the task of tabulating everything and calculating the rewards. Tomorrow is the day when I get really grumpy for everyone who has a less standard blog layout without a clear monthly post index. Really it is the more Instagram-like interfaces that fluster me the most with irregular tiling.

I know of at least one blogger who I am going to ask to tabulate their results for me because instead of writing traditional blog posts they created their blog as threads on the Fediverse. It is just too damned hard to track these, and while I want to be super inclusive about this event… we gotta figure out a better way if this is going to be a thing that more people do. I think next year if we have anything even vaguely close to this number of bloggers, I am going to have to write something into the rules for self-submitting your blog post count for the month. I mean the entire event is already largely on the honor system and I am already scared to death that I am going to miss count someone’s posts and dump them into the wrong category. It has happened before. Some blogs are just harder to count than others and when you are doing a ton in a row in as short a time frame as you can… mistakes occasionally get made.

I am still delving around the 150 depth and having a blast doing so. I’ve upgraded my resistance and light radius in order to go much deeper, but for the moment this seems to be my happy place. I am not sure if this league’s RF character is stronger than the last league, but it feels at least as tanky. I know flipping Fire Trap to my chest piece seems to have increased my damage output significantly. I dinged 95 last night and am about a quarter of the way into the next level. I spent my passive tree point last night on some quality of life, and 10% more area of effect for Righteous Fire. I wasn’t entirely certain why, but my radius seemed really small to me… so anything to increase that would be pretty great. I know that I am missing the AOE Gems/Radius bench craft on my Necklace which I have not lucked into unveiling so far this league. I spent a bit of time last night running Jun missions on the Raider in an attempt to get it with no real luck so far.

I spent quite a bit of time on the Storm Brand Templar soon-to-be Inquisitor last night. I am still very much in the “ugly duckling” phase of this build and don’t have much in the way of defensive layers yet. I did pick up a pair of Call of the Brotherhood rings with Lightning to Cold conversion, giving me a grand total of 96% of Lightning Damage converted to cold. I am contemplating trying to work a Heatshiver into the build so that would add some fire damage as well. I still think I want an Inpulsa chest, which is going to be pretty expensive… but thankfully “Delve Provides” to borrow a motto from Jorgen. I already have more than enough currency to pick up whatever I need, but I do like to keep a buffer for more of my bullshit projects. Random comment though… the new Kirac’s Vault outfit is pretty freaking great minus the weird helm. I had this glowing eyes/black hood thing from a random cosmetic box and I think it goes nicely with it… and then matched it with some wings I had from a previous supporter pack and two wand graphics.

Anyways also on the docket this weekend, is Starfield. I preloaded it this morning and play on poking my head in when the early access begins tonight/tomorrow. I am not sure if I will give this a ton of attention, mostly because I am still fairly invested in the Path of Exile league. However, it might surprise me, and grab me in the same way that Skyrim did so many years… when I pretty much disappeared from raiding for a week because I could not stop playing the game. I am hoping for a great experience, but I am also trying to cool my jets when it comes to hype. I know Bethesda games can be a bit buggy, but honestly… I’ve enjoyed all of them. Hell, I even enjoyed Fallout 76 quite a bit at launch and had zero problems with Fallout 4 in spite of so many people lampooning it at the time.

It is weird… I can be super critical of games like Diablo IV, but completely give a pass to other games that people are memeing. I think it mostly depends on how important I consider the genre. For me the ARPG is just such a fundamental part of me as a player, that my disappointment got the best of me with Diablo. However, Bethesda games are just something I play for fun on the side from my more mainline MMO and ARPG games. They are just a fun goof rather than my main course. I think maybe that is also why I didn’t really have any problem with the DC movies that so many people lambasted… because I am just not super invested in them. Investment breeds contempt.

Now time for my second “Anyways” of the post. I hope you all have a great day and a happy last day of Blaugust. Remember… tomorrow will be a stressful day for me. Please give me some space to do the things needed to tabulate the posts.

Windswept

by

A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.

I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.

At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.

Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.

Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.

I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.

Over One Hundred Blogs

by
Ten years of nonsense Blaugust image showing the logos from various years... Blaugust 2015 Blaugust 2016 Blaugust 2018 Blaugust 2019 Blapril 2020 Blaugust Promptapalooza 2020 Blaugust 2021 Blaugust 2022 and Blaugust 2023

Friends… I am completely floored. Yesterday we got both our hundredth and hundred and first sign up for Blaugust 2023. This prompted me to look up what our past numbers looked like. The highest participation year ever was 2018 with 90 blogs. There were a lot of factors going into that, not the least of which was having had a somewhat lowkey 2016 and me needing to entirely take off 2017 for running the event. It created a sense of nostalgia about the event I think, and I had numerous folks track me down and ask me if I was going to run it again. When I brought it back folks seemed to come from out of the woodwork and flock to the event, and until this year we had never really captured that kind of lightning in the bottle.

Screenshot of the Blaugust Gamepad.club account on Mastodon

This year is a similarly odd year in that we are in a state of turmoil when it comes to social media. Blaugust was in large part an event that was started on Twitter and dominated by folks who participated in the event in that manner. With me transplanting myself from Twitter to Mastodon last year, I was admittedly somewhat concerned that the interest just would not be there. What has happened instead is that we have gotten traction with folks who had never even heard of the event before. Over half of the blogs that are participating in Blaugust this year are first-timers. That is really freaking huge, but I guess not super shocking. The fediverse as a platform is way more interested in interaction than Twitter ever was, and the number of random conversations that I have struck up with complete strangers has been massive. Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole seem to be a platform with lowered barriers and in many ways lowered inhibitions.

Screenshot showing Indiecator.org and the Blaugust 2023 - Participant Appreciation Post

If you have a minute I would suggest you pop over to Indiecator the blog run by Magi, and check out his Participant Appreciation Post. On one hand, Magi is a Blaugust success story. If my memory serves me right, he started his blog around the beginning of Blaugust in 2019, signed up as a newbie… got 31 posts in his first year, and is now a rather prolific blogger. Last year he assumed the mantle of Mentor to help out other bloggers and has been aiding significantly this year in trying to keep the roles on the Discord set. However, none of that is why you should go read that blog post. You should read it because he took the time to crawl through every single blog (that had signed up to that point) and write a paragraph talking about them. It is a phenomenal post and does a great job of showing the breadth of folks that we have gathered here.

The very first Blaugust logo from 2014 with the text It Came From the Summer Haze! Blaugust Thirty One Days of Blog Posts

I get a lot of credit for Blaugust because I happened to be the idiot who rammed Blog and August together and tried to make it a thing. As I have stated before, I wasn’t even the first person to do this. There was a whole Australian Blaugust dating back to 2010 that Leaflocker and Alecat were part of. I will forever be grateful that they joined in my brand of nonsense instead of being cross with me for stepping on their toes. There is a separate version of Blaugust over on the #MTBoSBlaugust hashtag that my wife helped spawn based on ours, and I’ve heard of similar events out there in the aether. I am somewhat shocked at how far this dumb little idea I had back in 2014 has spread. I am deeply humbled that so many of you keep showing up every single year to participate and spend the rest of the year chatting way in the Discord.

If you are seeing a bunch of information about Blaugust flying by, and you have found your way here… there is still plenty of time to sign up and join in this particular brand of nonsense. I would suggest you check out the information post from mid-July outlining everything about the event. It has links to various key things like the Sign-Up Form and explains how you can participate. While I am overwhelmed that we have officially broken the hundred blogs barrier, there is always room for more. Though it might take me a bit longer to tabulate the results this year than it has in past years. We are only eight days into the month and I am already a bit overwhelmed by the participation. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone that is participating this year and everyone who has participated in any year over the last decade. It has been a wild ride and I am thankful to count you all among my friends. This year set a bar that I am not sure we will ever beat again, but if nothing else we are proving that blogging is still a vibrant means of expression.