Regularly Playing: August 2019 Edition

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Seeing as it is Blaugust, I thought it might be a good idea to go ahead and get this feature out of the way. For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know that I have a semi-monthly series that I call “regularly playing”. The idea is for me to take a summary each month of what I have been playing and write a little bit about where I am in my mindspace with each of the titles. I then in theory us this list to update my “regularly playing” widget in the side bar until the first part of the next month.

It really serves two purposes. Firstly it gives me a pretty easy post by letting me talk a bit about what I have been playing at the time. Secondly it gives me an easy way of marking the passive of time when I am compiling the games I played on a yearly basis… which is another thing that I do. I legitimately go back and look at these posts when trying to remember exactly what I had been playing during a given time frame. I wish I had been doing them for the entire ten plus year long run of the blog. I find it interesting on a personal level to stop and assess where I am in gaming each month.

To Those Remaining

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – PC and Switch

I was admittedly a little concerned that I might be removing this game for reasons I will get into when I talk about Final Fantasty XIV. That said I have been returning to playing it of late and made some more progress. At this point I am a good way into the game, far enough to be able to have gotten the false ending and am now working towards the good ending. For those who are playing I just finished the Hidden Desert and think I am nearing finishing the Secret Lab. It has been a really long time since I have seen a weapon upgrade, so I think at some point I will need to look into finding that. This is still a phenomenal game that makes me exceptionally happy. If you ever loved Castlevania or even if you never played one before… I highly suggest checking out this title.

Destiny 2 – PC

This is another title that I thought I might be removing from the list this month, however over the last few nights I have dug back in and am working my way through the Solstice of Heroes event. I really want to get the armor and I am reaching the place where I am actually pretty close to finishing the first set. Essentially I need to run a bunch of crucible/gambit and a bunch of strikes. I started chipping away at the gambit specific requirements last night and knocked out generating 100 void orbs. Tonight I will likely do some crucible to finish out the defeat guardians bit and get my powerful gear engram from that activity. The real highlight of the event is the European Aerial Zone event which is exceptionally fun and serves as a high flying boss rush mode as you seem to be able to do superman style leaps due to I am guessing lowered gravity settings? Whatever the case it is fun as hell.

Diablo 3 – PC

I need to return to this one as I really need to wrap up the seasonal stuff before the season changes. I believe that is going to happen at the end of this month, but I am not 100% certain. Whatever the case I had a lot of fun this previous season and there are a bunch of achievements that are hanging by a thread. I should at the very least go far enough in to unlock the next stash tab. Honestly a running theme is that Shadowbringers threw everything for a loop and caused me to pretty much stop playing every other game I had been playing.

Dragalia Lost – Android

This is still my bedtime activity and probably will be until we reach a point where they stop dropping content back to back. This week they gave us guilds in game, and the Robosquid Armada lives again in Dragalia. This has more or less been our brand for doing nonsense and since most mobile gaming is nonsense it seemed to fit the bill. I am nowhere near as progressed as some of my friends, and I don’t really play this game any other time than the thirty minutes or so before I fall asleep each night. However I enjoy my nightly jaunt into mobile-diabble-land. Right now I am chasing the water variant of the Axe lady in the center panel of the above triptych, Julietta. I’ve not lucked into pulling her, but I am trying… because I am lacking a native 5 star axe-wielder in water elemental type.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I have been fully engaged with Final Fantasy XIV since just before the launch of Shadowbringers. Can we just talk about how amazing this expansion has been? It is without a doubt the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion to date and is quite possibly the best MMORPG expansion story wise I have experienced. In truth this expansion might now be my favorite Final Fantasy game in general but we will have to see what the post first credits roll content is like to determine if it actually bumps Final Fantasy VI out of its well earned spot. Weirdly the class changes have ignited in me the desire to level all of the things and as such I have been pushing a lot of alternate DPS classes through the Deep Dungeon alternate leveling system. I’ve bizarrely fallen in love with Red Mage… a finger wiggler. We are just going to pretend that the vestigial sword makes everything okay.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

Still playing this but nowhere near on the level that I was previously. War of the Spark for whatever reason didn’t really excite me, because truth be told… I am not really a huge fan of Planeswalkers . I feel like they make the game of Magic feel like something other than its original core roots, and not necessarily in a good way. War of the Spark however did something important, which was to break the mythic ceiling for Planeswalkers and allow them to start showing up at all levels… also greatly diluting the power curve of them. M20 has recently arrived on Arena and with it I am starting to tiptoe my way back into the game and also starting to factor in what my decks will look like once the rotation happens in September.

To The New and Returning

Final Fantasy V – Android

There are some nights when I want to do more than just run through my Dragalia Lost dailies, and on those nights I have started playing Final Fantasy V on my Android Tablet. I’ve lamented before that I have never actually played this game legitimately. What I mean by that is that I have played through it a few times for the Four Job Fiesta, but never actually played it without restrictions like a proper game. I attempted to play it back in the day with a partially translated version of the rom on an early SNES emulator during the late 90s… and quite honestly the massive amount of frame-skipping required to make it feel like anything other than a slide show killed my joy at trying it. I’m currently up to the post Library of Ancients jaunt into the Desert, but I feel like i probably need to gather up some more levels or at least devise a plan for the Sand Worm before continuing onwards.

To Those Departing

Elder Scrolls Online – PC

I am certain I will return to Elder Scrolls Online at some point, but I played next to none of it this past month and I am not sure if I will have any time to play it moving forward. World of Warcraft Classic releases this month and with that I know it will start eating copious amounts of my time as I grind up my Forsaken Warrior. I don’t play ESO like an MMORPG really, but instead come in and work on some story content and then wander off. I’m in the midst of the Vvardenfell stuff, which was super good… but I just have to be in the right mood to play it. Once I have cleared Final Fantasy XIV out of my head a bit I fully expect to fire this back up for some relaxing weekend questing.

It turned out to be another fairly stable month with only two titles really changing up the mix. As I said in the above paragraph, this month will see the return of World of Warcraft in the form of the Classic server. I’ve lost all desire to play the live client in any form. That said I really should go back and gobble up the story content that has released since I last played. The biggest problem there is that story content doesn’t work the way it does in other games with World of Warcraft, and it would require a good deal of bandwidth to even figure out how to make sure I was not missing something. All of which are things I have not been willing to really do.

Happy Blaugust

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Today is the first day of August and with it comes two things. Firstly my wedding anniversary. My wife and I have been married Twenty One years as of today, which is weird because like I have been married longer than my baby boomer boss. Then again he is on I think his fourth marriage and I only have the one, so even though the age difference it makes sense. We’ve been that “stable” couple in our families and in theory have been the most responsible of adults… even though adulting is occasionally super hard. I am very happy to have a steady partner in this journey.

The second thing is of course the official beginning of Blaugust, though technically on the schedule it goes into July and September a bit as a sort of ramp up and ramp down. However now is the time when the posting counts towards the goal of posting something every single day of August. What you make of it however is up to you. The first year it was a very super serious event and I only really gave credit for “winning” to those who made at least thirty one days. However that had the trickle down effect of burning a lot of people out, and I fear lead to more blogs closing as a result. From that point on we have had a more relaxed festival of blogging thing going on and focusing on simply posting more regularly than trying to meet a fixed target. There are of course awards to be given at the end of the event for people who meet even the most basic of posting requirements.

As far as gaming goes, I spent last night working on the new Solstice of Heroes event in Destiny 2. I decided to go with a gaming image because I have gotten tired of the Blaugust logo leading every post so far this week. I am not sure if I am going to be able to get everything done in order to get the fully upgraded set of armor, but I had some fun last night. The specific screenshot is of me apparently breaking Gambit Prime. We tied the first round and then went into a second round where we filled our motes quickly… and a primal never spawned. In fact nothing spawned at all during the event and we just stood around killing invaders as they came over and any blockers they happened to send. It did allow me to very quickly complete the “kill seven guardians in gambit” task because we legitimately just stood around waiting for someone to spawn in.

So far we have managed to gather up 60 players in this blogging game. One of them is a daily Vlogger but that counts too (we love you Wolfy). Generally speaking we still have a few trickle in after the first of August, so there is absolutely still time to sign up and participate. We are down a bit from our high of 90 participating blogs last year, but then again that makes a bit of sense given that we took a year off from the event and there was a bit of a nostalgic rush of folks signing up. I expect to see a few more sign-ups but I am not sure if we will make up the 30 player gap. The truth is… it isn’t for everyone and I am not going to shame the folks who tried it out last year and decided it wasn’t for them. Without further waffling about… here is the list as it stands today.

On some level what we are trying to accomplish here feels a bit anachronistic, given the shift away from blogs and to new media. However this yearly re-igniting of the fires seems to be helping. Last year was the first year that we started the Blaugust Discord, and for the first time in all of the incarnations of Blaugust, Newbie Blogger Initaitive and the Developer Appreciation Week… we managed to keep something going all year long. At any point you could pop into the Discord and see activity within the last few days, and often times had people actively chatting. I cannot fully explain how happy that made me even when I myself would get busy and fail to chime in on topics.

When I first started this blog it was in the heyday of World of Warcraft blogging, and we were in the middle of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. With that came the extremely active Blog Azeroth community and its outreach to anyone who was interested in writing about the game. My very first twitter folk were attached to that community, and even today there are folks like Jess that I see on an almost nightly basis in Final Fantasy XIV. I made ties that have lasted over a decade and a lot of that was because Fimlys maintained an IRC channel associated with that community and more specifically the Twisted Nether Blogcast. The constant interaction lead to forming some pretty deep bonds that still last today, and it was my hope that Discord could play the same role with our community.

When I stopped blogging about World of Warcraft, I felt like I was falling into a vacuum and a lot of what I dealt with for those first several years was trying to carve out a community of some sort outside of a single game. There were a bunch of us out here on the frontier that would flit back and forth between games and has our own Independent Island States of a sort. Syp was the first to really unite the clans with the Newbie Blogger Initiative, and each time we ran an event we rallied together towards the same cause. Blaugust was born out of that desire to get people together and meld together all of these independent voices into something more cohesive.

I am emboldened by this event because each year we meet brand new people who are out here on the outskirts of other communities doing our own thing. I feel like we do finally have a broader sense of togetherness, a common spirit that we are all laboring towards the same goal of making this community a better place. I am truly happy to share this journey each year with you, but more importantly I am constantly excited to see it keep on happening without my prodding. Each of you that participates is critical to this process, and I want to thank you all for continuing to join me in this madness.

Happy Blaugust Everyone! Now here are the links I keep sharing each time I post the blog list. If you have yet to sign up please make your way to the Google Form and do so. If you have ever wanted to do this, then take a chance and we will be there to support you along the way.

WordPress Follow Button

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Over night there was a bit of a conversation snippet that came up among the mentors. Ammers from Backlog Crusader mentioned that she had noticed a number of the sites didn’t have the easy to use WordPress Follow button, in spite of being almost all wordpress based sites. The reason behind that is simple, because it is a missing feature if you roll your own blog using WordPress.org software. There is a plugin that is effectively must have software called Jetpack, that adds in a lot of the functionality you get with the managed WordPress, but not quite all of it. I had planned on doing a deep dive into plugins in another post but for now you will need that installed.

Ultimately this had been something I had in my own backlog of things to research. However stuff and things always got in the way and I forgot about it. This morning before sitting down to write the post I decided to figure this out. Truth is it is fairly simple but has a bunch of prerequisites for making it work. As you can see in my sidebar I now have a WordPress Follow button ready to go and we are going to show you how as well. I followed a guide on this blog to verify everything but I will also be walking you through the steps.

  1. Install Jetpack and enable the plugin
  2. Enable Subscriptions (all 3 sliders) under Jetpack > Settings > Discussions > Subscriptions section
  3. Make sure JSON API Is enabled.
    1. Scroll to bottom of Jetpack > Dashboard Screen
    2. Click the Modules Link
    3. Find JSON API and make sure it is enabled

Now that we have verified the prerequisites you can actually generate your button knowing it will work successfully once you have embedded it. On the WordPress Developer site there is a handy tool that generates a button for your site. It gives you a handful of options as seen above. Unfortunately I had to disable the follower count because my sidebar only has so much real estate, and the button doesn’t dynamically adjust to fit the space allowed. Simply fill in your site information and hit generation and it spits out some HTML that we are going to use in the next step.

Now we just need a final resting place for the code. You could of course integrate it directly into your theme if you wanted to go through that effort. Personally I slapped it in a Custom HTML sidebar widget and called it good. Now the truth is this is going to harm page load performance since it violates best practices for the placement of script blocks. That said… it is very hard to use ANY plugins on your site that will not ultimately violate the best practices and strand script blocks in all sorts of inopportune places.

WordPress.com offers a rather good RSS reader, and now you have made it much easier for someone to add your site to it. The truth is I had not been focused on using it as a primary blog reader, in part because I have a premium subscription to Feedly, and do my reading through it. During the great fallout that happened with the death of Google Reader, that just happened to be the product I gravitated towards. WordPress.com however is a site I regularly use because thanks to the Jetpack addon it gives me access to manage all of my wordpress sites in a single dashboard. Definitely worth checking out if you have never done so.

Choosing a Platform

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Yesterday I talked about the two most challenging aspects of starting a blog, namely deciding what to write about and what to actually call your creation. Today I am diving into probably what is the next step in the process, that is where to put your content. I need to make a bit of a disclaimer. I use WordPress and have done so for the last decade and some change. That is likely going to make me a little bit biased towards that platform. However I’ve also used blogger and a number of the other tools I am about to talk about.

One of the first decisions that you ultimately need to make is just how invested in the process you are going to be, both from a financial standpoint and from time investment standpoint. Ultimately technologies are going to fall into one of two buckets that I feel like you need to understand before we get any deeper into the weeds.

  • Managed – A managed solution is largely one that is hands off to the users. What I mean by that is you won’t have to patch anything yourself and will always be on the latest version. You simply insert your content and move on with your life. As a result you will have less freedom to make significant changes to the tools and will largely have to deal with things that are going to frustrate you just because that is how the software works. If you have no server management or programming experience and don’t really want to change that, then this is probably going to be your comfort zone.
  • Self-Hosted – If you like to tinker with things and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, then you might be interested in installing and setting everything up yourself. This is going to give you absolute control over exactly how everything functions on your site. However this also means you are going to need to be constantly vigilant in your patching and maintenance of the site. Every single day someone is looking to compromise your self-hosted site and you have to be prepared to fend off those attacks. If the thought of this stresses you out then it is probably not for you. However if you have a deep instinct to fiddle with things until they are just right, then welcome to the land of having to SSH into servers!

Mostly to this point I have talked about time investment, but there is also the aspect of monetary investment. A lot of the “free” options also offer a subscription plan that adds some additional features. If you are going the self-hosting round you are going to need a handful of extra things.

  • Hosting Plan – You will need to effectively “rent” server space from a provider and this varies wildly in pricing and features. In both cases their most basic single site hosting is less than $6 a month. However these can scale up depending on the sort of things you want access to.
  • SSL Certificate – Now that google shames sites that do not have one… I would suggest that getting an SSL Cert is just part of the game these days. Again this is going to vary based on your choice on option one. My host for example gives us free LetsEncrypt certs, but others only support the paid variants that can be anywhere from $30 a year to $200 a year depending on encryption level.
  • Domain Name – You are going to need a name to send people to your hosting. Some of these will be included with your hosting plan, however you really need to read the fine print to make sure that you can take your domain name with you if you choose to sever the contract. If you are registering one on your own these generally range between $15 and $30 per year depending on the registrar.

There are a bunch of ancillary fees that can happen as well. For example I purchased the theme that I use which gave me a lifetime subscription and the ability to use it on as many sites as I like. If you decide to dip into podcasting there could possibly be fees for hosting the MP3s. Essentially self-hosting could possibly be a money pit and you need to go into it prepared for things like bandwidth overrages to be a thing you may have to at some point deal with when your site pisses off some group of miscreants and they fire down a DDoS on you.

Managed Free

Today I am mostly going to dig into the free options that are managed because they allow you to get something started quickly. On another day I will dig further into the whole self-hosted thing.

Blogger

Blogger has been around forever and offers a great jumping off point to blogging. It requires you to have a google account, but at this point I think everyone has one of those as google now owns our soul. Back in the days of Google Reader this was a really compelling option because it had lots of baked in tools for directly connecting your BlogRoll to it. The site allows for some basic customization, allowing you to tweak some of the settings if you know basic HTML/CSS. It offers some of the better support for posting by email, if that is a thing you want to do.

The big negative that I see with blogger is the fact that it is connected to Google. Google has this bad habit of canning products that they cannot figure out how to monetize. The death of Reader made me deeply question the future of Blogger as a platform. It hasn’t really received much in the way of updates since 2016… other than recently stripping out support for the now defunct Google Plus social network… aka another thing that Google killed. That said Blogger has seemingly survived until now and may surprise me and be something that effectively lasts forever.

https://www.blogger.com

WordPress

WordPress effectively comes in two variants… WordPress.com the managed option and WordPress.org the self-hosted option. The managed version also offers subscriptions, but I am going to largely be talking about the freebie version. What you get is a pretty solid option that allows you to write posts and post images. You have a bunch of themes to choose from, but really can’t do much with any of them apart from change some colors or slap a logo on them.

To get any real customization you need to start ponying up for a subscription plan that will give you a lot of the functionality that the Self-Hosted version gives, but honestly never quite as much. WordPress excels at allowing you to snap functionality in through plugins, and the Managed variant has none of that support. The biggest thing it has going for it is the ease of which it is to move a Managed site to a Self hosted site. I think the biggest benefit here is that you could start out with something small and free and decide you wanted to branch out into something bigger without much hassle. There are tools to export Blogger to WordPress as well, but it is nowhere near as seamless.

https://wordpress.com/

Tumblr

If you just want to write some text and throw some pictures of video with it, and don’t really care much about the rest of the features… then Tumblr may be for you. I’ve used it quite a bit over the years and have my own Tumblr blog that I syndicate content to. I am not the biggest fan of Tumblr as a whole but it gets a firm “It’s Fine” from me. The main reason why I would use Tumblr over something else is one of two scenarios. Firstly you mostly want a photo blog, but want the ability to throw words with those photos in something that makes more sense than an Instagram. The second reason is if you are part of a community that has already planted its flag on Tumblr and decided it is home.

I spent minimal time on Tumblr as a content delivery medium, but I weirdly do have several followers there that consume Tales of the Aggronaut in that manner. If you are already reading Tumblr then you might as well turn it into your blogging platform.

https://www.tumblr.com/

Medium

I largely feel like Medium was started as a place for when a Twitter post isn’t enough. However it has evolved into a really solid means for writing content. If you don’t care about the look and feel of your blogging experience, but you want really solid text crafting tools… then Medium might be for you. It is the most boring and bland presentation as far as sites go… white background and black text. However if you are a minimalist at heart it might appeal to you. The only time I have used Medium is when I want to write a story that isn’t necessarily connected to my blog, because thematically it doesn’t really make sense. It is PERFECT for that, but I’ve never actually followed someone on Medium directly. It is possibly the least bloggy feeling of the blogging options?

https://medium.com/

I am certain there are other tools out there that might fit your needs. You should in theory make a perfectly reasonable blog with a Facebook page for example. Ultimately you need to find what works best for you personally, and I feel all of the above options are a really great starting place. They all let you get started within minutes of signing up for an account and post content. As I said earlier I will dive into the self-hosting thing a bit later, because it requires a lot more care and feeding.