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A Chill Blaugust

July 26, 2016 by Belghast

Over the last few weeks folks have been pinging me, asking if Blaugust would be returning. I feel like I have put off this post as long as I could possible do so. Originally I was planning on calling Blaugust this year because I simply did not have it in me. However when I finally got around to posting that statement… I had folks come out of the woodwork to suggest that the contest was cool and all, but not terribly essential to the concept of Blaugust for them. They also started brainstorming ways to make it less stressful for me personally. Essentially last year was a perfect storm of events that made Blaugust extremely hard. Firstly we had a truly irrationally large number of people participating jumping from 52 the first year to 88 the second year. There was a period of time that I thought we would be breaking 100. The thing is… for whatever reason I decided to make this thing a contest, with a win condition. That means that I needed to take the tallying of numbers and such super seriously, because I would ultimately be handing out rewards at the end of the journey. The only problem with that was that due to the participation and the large number of folks “winning” each year the concept of having a true single winner seemed super silly. As a result the last two years I have relied on a random number generation to finally pass out the prizes, and that felt somewhat icky. So this year we are rolling back to a previous revision in our magical source control system… and taking a stab at what the root of the idea really was.

Blogging on a Schedule

If you were to ask me what caused me to launch this thing in the first place, I am not sure if I could actually pin it down to a single thought. However I wanted Blaugust to be about posting blog content on a schedule. I went from being one of the least prolific bloggers to one of the most prolific in a matter of weeks when I embarked upon my “grand experiment” of blogging each and every morning. In truth it was madness that I would ever suggest that someone do the same. Ultimately this year I broke my streak on purpose just to have it done and buried and behind me. However I did manage to make it a little over three years without skipping a single day, and it is a feat that I am rather proud of. However the rhythm I have settled into as a result of posting every single week day also feels pretty great. Additionally it is far more manageable because at least for my wife and I.. the weekends are the only time we really have to do much of anything together. I can bang out a post in 30 minutes when I am under the gun of having to get to work on time, but for whatever reason my blog posts on Saturday and Sunday often times took hours. I tried a bunch of hacks to get around this, like having a reoccurring movie/television column, or a summary column that recounted the best highlights of what I did that week. However none of it felt really fresh or meaningful, and instead just superseded any planned activities that we might have wanted to do that weekend.

The core message of Blaugust has always been that blogging on a schedule is a good thing. My thought was by challenging people to blog every single day for a month, then when they decided to roll that back to every other day, or only week days… it wouldn’t seem near that daunting. For some this absolutely worked and Blaugust has seemed to make a lot of blogs more active. The only problem is it has the opposite effect as well… the challenge “broke” some people and they would go for months without making a post after the challenge wrapped up. This was absolutely an unintended consequence, and one that really bothered me from the very first year. The last thing I want to do is in some way bully people out of the blogosphere by setting up some sort of artificial gate. Additionally the whole concept of having winners bothered me as well. If you sit down and create a blog, and commit yourself to posting on it and baring your soul to the rest of us… you are a big winner in my book. Blogging is one of those things that gets in your blood, but it also takes a lot out of the person doing it. So everyone out there posting on their own blogs be it MMO Gaming, Cooking or Stamp Collecting… you are all awesome to me. So in this reboot we are no longer going to think of this as a contest, but instead a festival of sorts. I want to embrace the positives that the event can bring, without adding to the pressure everyone is already under when trying to do their own thing.

Blaugust 2016

So what we end up with is a Festival of Blogging on a Schedule. What schedule you intend to stick with is entirely up to you, and honestly even if you do keep a schedule at all. 2016 has been this year when a lot of bad stuff has happened around the world, and I don’t want my artificial contest to be something that adds stress to anyone. If you want to push yourself to blog every day, awesome. I will be watching and will be tabulating those folks at the end, with probably a special sidebar image that denotes that. However I am not putting any real prizes on the line this year. This is the year that we are doing this thing for the sake of doing it. I always got the impression that no one was really in this for the gold at the end of the rainbow… so I doubt this will make any real difference. However I am trying to de-escalate the stress of the event, and I think by no longer making it a contest that might help. The hope is that you will take this month and make your own content creation more active than it has been in the past months. That is it.. that is the ultimate goal to get folks out there creating more awesome content.

The Rules

There really is only one serious rule, and that is the sign-up sheet. If you are going to start participating in Blaugust 2016 please take a few minutes to fill out this Google Form. It doesn’t ask an awful lot but what it does is important. It asks for…

Name of Blog
URL of Blog
Schedule if you Plan on Sticking to One
Twitter Handle if you use it
How you Heard About Blaugust

That’s it, nice and simple. I will tabulate the results and keep some sort of sidebar or event page with the collected information on it.

The other thing that I would ask is if you post to twitter please use the hashtag #Blaugust2016 just as a way of making things easier for folks to see as they are posted.

Resources

There is the Blaugust Nook over on Anook, and it is a great place to ask questions and have conversations with other bloggers that are doing this thing. Twitter as well is also a great resource, and I know personally that is where I end up holding most of my conversations with other bloggers. As far as Discord that seems to be the popular thing to be doing right now… I would prefer not to start a brand new server just for this event since I already have like twenty servers in my app. There are a couple of ones devoted to blogging so going to be pestering the folks who run those to see if they mind sharing. Additionally for anyone wanting to see what has happened in previous years there is always the Blaugust Category on my own blog, which I have been more or less fairly decent about tagging related posts.

Back to the Roots

Personally I will be going back to posting every day during the month of August. That said I might be staging some of the content on Saturday and Sunday so that it posts in the morning, rather than getting up and doing them and thereby impeding whatever activities we have planned. Giving up Saturday and Sunday was a strange thing for me when I did it, and on some levels I think it was a positive effect. That said there are lots of times that I have events that happen on the weekend that it feels artificial to wait until Monday to talk about. For example the passing of my cat Chloe this weekend… happened Friday night, and by the time Monday rolled around posting about it just felt like ripping a barely formed scab off the wound that was trying to heal. So for the first time in the history of Blaugust me posting every single day won’t just be my default interaction. It is going to take work to get me back in the habit of doing it, so I will essentially be struggling with you all to up my game and make more interesting content. One last word that I want to leave you with… is while everything about this keeps saying Blog, I don’t want to limit any creative outlet. If you are a vlogger or if you do twitch lets plays, or honestly any form of regular content creation, I don’t want to exclude you from this “festival”. Please sign up and let us know what you are creating and where you are creating it, and while blog means something specific… in my mind any sort of regular content creation be it blog, vlog, stream, or podcast feels like blogging to me. Additionally this is not just an MMO or Gaming thing… if you are out there blogging about your own personal stuff or another completely different industry… I want you to know that you are welcome as well. This thing started as a part of the MMO Gaming community, because most of the other bloggers I knew… were MMO Gamers. Last year Blaugust expanded quite a bit, and I hope it will as well this year into new and interesting areas.

Regularly Playing: June Edition

June 29, 2016 by Belghast

Back in May I decided to make a monthly ritual of “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” widget on the sidebar to more closely represent the games I quite literally was playing on regular rotation. Given that it is that time again… here is the list of things for June. I added a few new games into the mix and also removed a few more… even if one is really only temporary. Doing the thing where I write a blurb about what I happened to be doing in each of them.

Rift

In a weird bit of nostalgia, I decided to come back to Rift and give it another push. There has never really been a period of time when I have not actually at least dabbled in this game, but so many times I failed to gain traction. This time around I somehow managed to push from 61 to 65 and have started on this mad mission to raise all of my tradeskills. Now having almost accomplished that I will be pushing into the Planetouched Wilds and giving it a real amount of effort. On top of this I am focused heavily on my crafting dailies, which often times means I need to venture out into the world in search of Sarleaf and Thalasite. With the shift of WoW to the Garrison for most of your farming needs… I had forgotten just how much I really did love going off and ore farming. There is just something relaxing about wandering around a zone with a purpose, looking for the next ore pop and trying to get to it before anyone else notices. It is this weird game within a game that actually seems to work well for me. I spent many an hour flying circles around Icecrown or Sholazar Basin in Wrath… and now am loving doing the same thing for Gelboro Reef. Largely I am focused on that zone since, firstly I know it pretty well… and secondly the mobs are low enough level that I can go afk as needed and make it back to the keyboard before something actually kills me. I am certain that I could be farming ore while wandering around the Planetouched Wilds, but the mobs out there are truly brutal. Whatever the reason… I am deeply invested in Rift and its community once more and loving it.

Destiny: The Taken King

While I have slowed down considerably in this game, there are still regularly sessions of it… namely because I have been trying to get fellow AggroChat member and good friend of mine Grace settled in game. Monday night we managed to get her to level 40, and pushed through the Taken King quest content… which means that there is an entirely new world waiting for her of endgame stuff. With Iron Banner going on this weekend, I highly expect that the two of us will be working on that or at least attempting to show her the ropes of the event. We also have several more steps in the recruit a friend process, but as we get her gear level up there it should get easier to do cooler stuff. Other than that other games have taken priority over the last few weeks, namely with my return to active duty in FFXIV and running stuff in Rift. Hopefully the Iron Banner will be a good event to get me back into focus and moving forward in Destiny once more. I feel pretty disconnected, and I miss the Thursday night Challenge of Elders stuff horribly, I just had a few crazy weeks with the St Louis trip, and Kansas City trip… and a bunch of other random occurrences that knocked me out of my schedule. Hopefully I can start to rebuild said schedule and get moving forward once more.

ArcheAge

In a similar fashion to Rift, I have suddenly become involved and attached to the ArcheAge community as well. Right now I am largely focused on leveling, but at some point I plan on doing all the tradeskilly things in this game as well. Last year the AggroChat crew made a serious push into this game, and while we faded into the background… I still found it extremely enjoyable. Additionally like I said yesterday, many of the early toxic aspects of the community as a whole seem to be gone. Right now I am trying to get back in tune with the game and try and remember how the hell to do half of the things. On the positive as I grind away at questing I seem to keep getting really nice drops for weapons and armor… however I remember that most of the best stuff I had was crafted. I just happened to time my return to coincide with some welcome back campaign, and I keep accruing rewards into my inventory that at some point I will figure out how to use. Mostly I would like to hit the level cap before worrying too much with them, but I believe some of them are xp bonuses that I might as well use now. If you are actively playing I am Belglaive on the Tahyang server, but I am not sure what all it requires to actually friend someone in game. I am not sure if cross server friends lists are a thing there like they are in Rift.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

I spent most of the month deeply frustrated with this game, namely because I was sitting at what felt like an artificial gear cap and being prevented from progressing in the story. Since then however I managed to get a Void Ark run with some friends and got over whatever anxiety I happened to have about tanking it. As a result I am now sitting at 205 gear score, and bumping up against the Nidhogg trial in the story. It is my hope that at some point this week I can get a few friends together and run this and hopefully complete the 3.3 patch story. I am still enjoying the game, but I lack the drive to play it… that I have in say Rift or ArcheAge right now. For at least the foreseeable future my activity in game is probably going to be limited to our Tuesday night activities, or the occasional expert or other event that I organize with friends. I love playing this game… but right now I only seem to love playing it with a group of friends logged in at the same time. It is still an amazing game, but it has shifted into the sort of role that World of Warcraft has been in the past… that game that I only played when there was an organized activity.

World of Warcraft

This one admittedly is barely making the list, and keeping its space on my sidebar. Right now I am occasionally logging in to run Garrisons and get my free gold, but not doing much more other than that. There has been talk of myself, grace and a few others doing random old world content for transmoggy bits and honestly… that right now is about all I am interesting in World of Warcraft as a whole. I feel like I am in a “desperately waiting for the Legion pre-patch” mode. Largely because I am tired of not having any bank space, and removing any of my outfits is simply not an option. I am not joking when I say that right now the only important thing to me in this game… is looking cool with my collection of old raid gear littering my bank vault. If the new transmog system were actually patched in… I would more than likely go through a flurry of activity as I once again do awesome old world content for cool threads. However I quite literally have hit a point where I maybe have 15 bag slots total between inventory, bank and void storage…. so I simply cannot play Belghast anymore without risking removing something. So instead… I run the occasional garrison mission as I alternate through my army of alts… and then log out once again.

Things Removed From List

Overwatch

Zero clue why on this one… but the game released and I just have had no desire to really play it. I am amped about just how excited everyone else seems to be about this game, but honestly it feels like I am more interested in talking about the world and the characters… than actually playing it. If the player versus bots game were more compelling I would likely play it more often, but right now it feels like to enjoy it I need a group of friend to play it. Ironically I have a huge group of friends playing it… but I think I am going through a “quiet time” phase where I just want to piddle around on my own in games rather than do a lot of organized play. The few nights I rode along with people… I lasted 3 to 4 games before feeling the need to run and hide again. I am certain at some point I will once again get the Overwatch bug, but the truth is I am just not that into competitive games.

Diablo 3

Removing this one again temporarily because well…. the season is over. I have accomplished everything I could ever hope to accomplish, and now is the quiet time until the next patch. This will be returning once again as another season starts and we all go through the crazy happy madness that is a season launch. For a bit I was still farming for pets and such, but with the addition of several games this got removed from the docket. I still very much love this game and look forward to adding it back to the list, but for the moment we are in the off season and the game for me at least is dormant.

Racing Snail

June 16, 2016 by Belghast

Out of Advice

This month is of course the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative… and I have been horrible at supporting it so far. Normally I have filled my blog with various sundry related information about blogging, and if you really want you can probably still take some of that as completely valid. I know this event works, but the problem is… at this point I just feel like I am out of advice to give without simply rehashing a bunch of old themes. The truth is I really don’t know what I am doing, and while sometimes I put on the front that I do… I spend the majority of my time winging it. Sure before I wrote a single line on Aggronaut, I had planned a lot of stuff like the domain name and hosting provider, but that is not to say I didn’t have a much earlier not fit for public consumption blog on blogger. Back then… I just started blogging, and it is I feel honestly good to just go make some mistakes on your own without the intervention of others. My original blog was a semi-private ordeal talking about my life, my family, and all sorts of random events in large part surrounded on our sudden and bizarre desire to start camping. I say camping… but what I really mean is hanging out at a lakeside resort in an RV. It was real and snarky and sometimes raw… but it had a very specific audience of folks who actually knew me in real life. Those people didn’t care about my gaming, and in most part would probably find it strange.

So when I created Aggronaut it was by purpose designed to be completely divorced from my real life. The idea was I would have the real world blog for people who knew me… and then the other blog to talk about my passions. That didn’t exactly work because I’ve found that while I can write in a mostly anonymous fashion talking about people and events from my real life setting… I can’t exactly keep them out of my topics. I’ve tried not to name names in my blog as a sort of “protect the innocent” fashion in part because my wife works in a very skittish profession. I never wanted anything I might say to reflect badly upon her. I would say that I probably filter myself a lot, but the truth is I really don’t have that many inflammatory opinions. What I personally consider ranting about subject… I’ve often been told is just polite but impassioned discussion. So as I sit down and try and thing of advice to give a budding blogger, I am really finding myself completely empty this year. Just because I have been doing something longer, doesn’t mean I have any better grasp on how things should work. I don’t know what I am doing… and it is perfectly okay to not know what you are doing. I’ve somehow made that work for over seven years now, and I suppose I will continue to make it work for the foreseeable future. I lack the ego however to tell you t hat my way is the correct way, because I know I don’t even know if it is right for me. Next week I might get new information that makes me question everything about what I have done for the better part of this decade, and that is also okay. Basically if you want to write… just go write.

A Good Note

Over the last few days I have become progressively more active in the Rift community. There is something comfortable about coming back to this game, and I find myself obsessing with all of these little details. The experience has been something akin to catching a movie on cable television that you have not seen at decades… and then having a sudden swell of feelings for how much you used to love that movie. Coming back to Rift this time feels very much like dusting off a favorite tome and reading it again with new eyes. There are some things I am coming to terms with, namely that unlike so many games… it is unlikely that I will find many of my closest friends interested in joining me. As I have learned time and time again… Rift is not really their game and especially the AggroChat crew can rattle off a list of reasons why. That said… it has always sorta been my game, and been something that I supported regardless if I was actually playing with it. I’ve said time and time again that Rift is essentially all of the features I ever wanted in a video game compiled in one game… and they just keep adding more features as time goes on. That said it is also a much harder game than I have grown accustomed to, and as a result for the last several years since the launch of Storm Legion I have struggled a bit to find my place in it. I was extremely slow getting to level 60, and I am just now getting to 65, so the speed and difficulty of leveling was something I had a difficult time reconciling now that I am extremely used to the fast pace and ease of leveling in the “modern” mmo. I’ve long said that my favorite time period in World of Warcraft was Wrath of the Lich King, and I’ve just realized that Rift is as though you stopped the clock in a time period before content started to get watered down to appeal to a wider audience. That is not to say that Rift does not have a lot of solo-able features… but if you intend to play at the highest levels of the game you are going to need a group and dedication to your character.

All of this aside I am in this position where I am really enjoying the depth of this game, and finding myself with this entire list of things that I want to accomplish. One of the best parts of the game for me personally is the way that they have changed the wardrobe system. Now when you pick up an item, you collect its appearance and can then assemble outfits out of these appearances without needing to fiddle with any of the actual loot. The fact that there are also zero negatives like a gold sink associated with it, means I am constantly changing my wardrobes around, and I guess at times this is a positive. Within the Rift forums and Discord there was a contest called “Planetouched Style”, the idea being that you assembled an outfit that represented a certain planar theme and then went out into the world and found a location that fit the theme to take a screenshot. The first image was my entry, going for a sort of “Papa Legba” feel for it… and then finding an area out in Seratos that really shows off the deathyness. Much to my shock… I apparently nabbed second place in the contest. So I am now the proud owner of the 5th Anniversary edition racing snail… completely with flames decorating the shell. This goes nicely with my 4th Anniversary mount that I already spent damned near all of my time riding. I am excited and humbled to somehow have managed to win, but it was a great note to end the day on yesterday.

Letter to New Bloggers

June 1, 2016June 1, 2016 by Belghast

A Newbie Month

This is one of those mornings where I apparently forgot to set my alarm clock and am damned thankful that apparently I only woke up thirty minutes late. So everything feels rushed and it is not exactly the proper mood for a contemplative post. Today marks a few things… firstly it is my mothers birthday and I have already remembered to send her a text so she would have a message waiting on her when she wakes up. I will of course follow up later with a proper phone call… but I wanted to get that early strike in there first. Secondly this is the beginning of the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative month. This is something I have participated in since 2013, and feel a sense of obligation each year to do so again. The problem is that after all these years I am questioning if I have any fresh wisdom to give out to the participants. Blogging is one of those things that while we can commune as a group… there comes a point where you are sitting in front of the tyranny of the blank page and only you can push through it. We all have mornings when thinking let alone blogging is a difficulty, and for me this is one of them. However as per my own statement… I am going to push through and make something happen.

So You Want to Blog

It seems like almost every year I start the proceedings off with something along the lines of that paragraph. The truth is, only you can really look inside of yourself and see if there is a blog there waiting to spring forth into the world. For me personally… I guess I was always a blogger and just never quite realized it. I was extremely prone to posting “big damned walls of text” in on any subject I happened to be passionate about. Early on the topic of choice were the White Wolf World of Darkness role-playing books or the Palladium system. Later it became games as I even started writing reviews of Saturn and Playstation games for a small emulation and general gaming website. I really came into my own when it came to MMOs and I haunted the forums of pretty much all of the games I played be it Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes or eventually World of Warcraft. I had this burning drive to talk about the things I was interested in and to share my ideas, and while a lot of my topics were fostering the community… a lot of them were just talking about my experiences.

On the forums for the server I used to play on… I became one of the white hats that regular rode in to chastise the evil doers, but at the same time freely shared game advice if I had any to give. If you have ever found yourself doing these things… chances are you really do have a blog inside of you waiting to get out. Now the real challenge is trying to direct that unfocused information into a meaningful form. Many bloggers will tell you that the secret to success is to pick a niche and stick with it… and become the be all end all site to go to for that subject. That is probably some absolute truth, but it is also something I was never terribly good at. This blog after all launched as a “Warrior Tanking Blog” just about as niche as you can possibly get… but the problem is I felt like a fraud doing that. I was no real expert in being a warrior, nor was I an expert in tanking. Both were things that largely came naturally to me, and it was baffling for me to try and explain what was largely pure instinct. So I took a step back and decided to refocus on Raiding… until I realized that I wasn’t a particularly brilliant raider either. We did what we did to win and at our own pace, which isn’t exactly a sterling example of the craft. As a result I kept setting up branding and then knocking them down… until I finally wound up with this simply being “my blog” without any other pretense, because “bel saying things” was a focus that I could actually stick with.

You’ll Need a Name

Ultimately where I am going with this… is that you are going to need a name to call your blog. Some people have created perfectly brilliant names… that they quickly outgrow when they go through a similar digression like my own blog did. I am lucky that “Tales of the Aggronaut” was fairly generic and that I could keep adapting it pretty easily to whatever I happened to be doing. Aggronaut was my attempt at a clever name for a tank… and since I rarely don’t tank at least a little it has continued to work. Other folks have created a perfectly lovely name for say a Warlock blog… only to find out later that playing a Warlock is not their primary calling in life and as a result they have to come up with something else. Ultimately my advice I guess would be to come up with something that represents you the writer, and not necessarily the subject. Clever names are awesome, but only so long as they actually are something that you feel comfortable sitting down and writing posts behind. There are an awful lot of famous blogs out there… with completely boring or descriptive names.

I think most people envision brilliant branding of their website from the starting gate, but in truth you are probably better of just picking some minimal window dressing until you get a feel for where exactly you are going. I maybe jumped into this whole concept with two feet hitting the ground in that I bought my domain name and had it completely set up and ready to go before I wrote a single post. I guess that makes sense given that I write code for a living, but in truth you don’t need to do any of this quite yet. Your best option is to simply lean on good ole WordPress.com or Blogger.com rather than to try and do the self hosting thing right out of the gate. I lean heavily towards WordPress simply because you have a lot more options for if you decide to transition to self hosted at a later date. Technically you can do the same thing with Blogger but the process is less seamless and from what I have read in “how to” articles way more hassle than the other option. There is of course Tumblr as an option, but you are exposing yourself to a way more problematic community right out of the gate than I would suggest for any fledgling blogger.

You’ll Need Readers

Now for the hard part… you’ve named yourself and set up a site… now you need to hang out yours “open for business” sign and wait. This is the part of the equation that can drive you completely insane when you realize that no one is actually reading what you are writing. This is going to happen to everyone, but the positive of starting a blog during this month means that the other bloggers are going to at least help try and get you started. Self promotion is one of those things that I am particularly bad at. In theory you want to put your blog in front of as many eyeballs as you can, which means syndicating it to pretty much all of the available options. I syndicate my posts each day to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google Plus… and this is essentially like casting a net out into the water. If you get a nibble more than likely folks will add your blog to their RSS feed and be done with it… and then you have a potential reader for life. That is unless you do something so horrific as to cause them to go through the effort of actually removing a blog. For me at least… once a blog makes it to my RSS feed I am pretty much going to read them forever.

The problem is… your stats will always seem insignificant. You can drive yourself completely mad looking at them for too long when you watch as this post that you spent five minutes on got ten times the readers than that gem you spent several days on. Amassing regular readers is a bit of a waiting game, but I will say that there are a few factors that seem to factor in. Firstly you need to have some sort of a schedule. Since taking my recent breaks my readership has gone to shit, but previously when I was doing the post every single day thing I had a fairly steady stream of readers each and every day. Secondly you have to give them something interesting to read, and this can come from several different directions. My personal theory is that if someone is going to read you for long one of two things are going to be happening. Either you are posting such a wealth of information about a very specific subject as to turn yourself into the “resource” for that community, or they are sticking around because they care about you as a person. I’ve tended to focus on the second part of that statement, and as a result have shared some super personal information with my readers. It sometimes works, but ultimately you are going to have to figure out the points that work for you. The problem with giving blogging advice is no two blogs are the same… nor do they even have the same goals. We can throw information at you, but you will have to figure out which bits are relevant to you.

I wish you luck and look forward to reading your blog

Bel