Blaugust 2018 Wrap Up

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The time has come to close Blaugust 2018 and as such you are all owed a post wrapping up the numbers.  Firstly I want to give special thanks to Armagon/Nogmara for chiming in and volunteering to help when I posted on twitter this morning.  I went from the top down on the list and they went from the bottom up and we knocked out the official tabulation of posts way faster than would have been the case were I doing it entirely by myself.  Things I have come to appreciate…  blogs that have a monthly tabulation of posts.  Things that I have come to dislike…  themes that do not clearly show the date a post was made.  Regardless we made short work of the counting and as such I have a bunch of numbers to share.  Of course we are fallible human beings and if we failed to count your blog correctly, please let me know and I will remedy this.

First some general commentary.  This is without a doubt the most successful running of Blaugust to date.  The discord turned out to be a pretty excellent way of interacting throughout the month and while I got super busy with the start of the school year and things getting crazy at work…  we maintained an active community from start to finish and I am super proud of everyone who participated.  I am especially proud of my mentors and all of the time they spent answering questions for the other folks participating.  I am also super happy for all the folks who just wanted to join into the community without actually participating, so a shout out to all of the supporters.

Here are some general statistics for the month…

  • 90 blogs signed up in Blaugust Reborn 2018
  • 83 bloggers made at least one post during the month
  • We added 1404 new blog posts to the community as a result of Blaugust Reborn
  • This equated to an average of 45 new blog posts per day
  • 26 Bloggers had 31 posts during the month or in a few cases considerably more

I have to say that is some pretty impressive numbers, and I am very pleased with how things turned out as a whole.  As such now is the time to start showing the progress.  While I traditionally don’t consider myself part of the festivities, I’ve included my numbers in the list just to show as a baseline for folks to compare again.  There are a lot of people who did WAY better than I did this month.  Additionally I thought it would be interesting to track the progress of mentors versus participants, because again…  some of the participants blew the mentors out of the water as well.  For sake of making tracking easier, folks who signed up with multiple blogs were counted as a single tally rather than a tally per blog.  Without further stalling on my part… the numbers.

Bronze Award Club

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Now if you go back to my original post outlining everything, these are folks who made at least five blog posts during the month of August 2018.

Silver Award Club

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Again based on the original outline these are folks who got at least fifteen posts during the month of August 2018.

Gold Award Club

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As outlined in the original post, these are folks who got at least 25 posts during the month of August 2018

Rainbow Award Club

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Finally we have a rather large number of people who hit 31 posts in the month…  and a few went considerably over.  Grace with her two very active blogs managed to get the single highest post out which is super impressive.

I am exceedingly impressed with just how much content was put into the world by Blagust Reborn 2018, and I thank you all for particpating.  I want to give a special honorable mention however for the folks who started but never quite made those five posts to get on the chart.  Signing up and starting something is the first step and hopefully next year they will find the oomph to post a little more frequently.  The discord community will be here supporting them as they keep their blogs going throughout the calendar year.

Honorable Mentions

So there it is folks…  some amazing work for Blaugust Reborn 2018.  I am humbled by the sheer amount of support I got from the community on this, and without a doubt we will be making a come back with Blaugust Reborn 2019 in the near future.  My hope is that through the Discord community the planning process will go a little more smoothly in the future as I was sorta doing this by the seat of my pants as I went.  Thanks for proving that blogging is not in fact dead, and maybe making a bit of a resurgence.  For now I am going to close this post and go play some games, but sincerely I love this community.

Foil by Cats

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This morning I had the boldest of plans for what I was going to do with my day off…  but so far none of it has come to fruition as I keep being besieged by adorable cats wanting to snuggle.  Today begins my four day weekend, and while I will have to do some work at some point…  namely reconcile timesheets…  I have most of the day to myself.  I originally planned to tear apart my system upstairs and move it to its new case…  that is large enough to finally fit the 1080 ti that I picked up on the cheap during prime day.  So far this has not happened and I am not honestly certain it will.

This is the problem with making plans sometimes is that other plans sorta insert themselves in the middle of them.  Right now I am chilling on the sofa with cats as I type my morning post, and considering I don’t think I slept terribly well…  I am largely okay with this situation.  An alternate strategy is to play World of Warcraft and work on leveling the Demon Hunter while trying to finish Jessica Jones season 2 and start Luke Cage season 2.  Whatever the case…  I needed a break because the rigors of work have been nonsense.  I only wish that my wife could have also had a similar break.

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Right now I am a little over halfway to 116 and finally reaching the point I have already quested through in Nazmir.  I look forward to seeing how the rest of the zone goes since I largely stalled out on it as soon as I dinged 120 and became obsessed with gear acquisition on the Warrior.  I am enjoying Fury quite a bit, but I have never really had the soul of a dps player…  but I do like that it gives me an option to run when someone else is able to tank.  I still however feel the need to push up a viable tank since that is largely the role I always inhabit in group play.  My hope is by the end of this break I will be back at 120 and potentially have eclipsed where my Warrior is gear wise.

However… for the very moment I am going to get back to snuggling with cats.

Tarnished Hope

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Yesterday was a bit of a trying day for me personally.   I’ve personally been bought into this notion that Mastodon provided a kinder gentler alternative to Twitter, but yesterday largely proved that notion completely wrong.  The Fediverse has been the welcome home of the disenfranchised and marginalized, which is awesome since Twitter has not done a great job of protecting that group in any way.  However some events happened recently and because of them I am glad that I joined up several weeks ago rather than right now at this time.  I was able to see what I thought was the ActivityPub community in its native state, talking about interesting things openly and publicly and willing to friend each other just as easily.  I was able to get settled in quickly with the help of a whole slew of people who offered useful advice as I docked myself into a corner of this big maelstrom of interesting things.

I started out on Mastodon.cloud which was a large overflow instance to the original flagship of Mastodon.social.  However I quickly realized that maybe being on a big disconnected instance was not the best idea in the world.  As such I made the migration to Elekk.xyz which is awesome and started funding the patreon a bit to help out in its maintenance.  However when my good friend Liore decided to fire up her own private instance…  I found myself making the jump yet again to Nineties.Cafe and I am extremely happy I did.  It is sort of this protective bubble where the people I already knew and the friends of those people are hanging out and talking freely about our interests.  It has made it very easy to drown out the events that are happening over in “fedi” aka the federated timeline.

Effectively some weeks back Wil Wheaton joined Mastodon and like any denizen of twitter had some difficulty adjusting to the weird mix of things going on here and all of the little social norms that I talked a bit about the other day.  However with increasing fervor there was a move to push him off of the platform, and while there are folks who have very valid concerns…  most of what I saw regularly in the form of shitposts from Fedi was effectively the consensus of “fuck him for being famous”.  As such it felt like a defense coalesced with the goal of pushing the infection out of the system, and in that I saw a lot of behavior that I had seen on Twitter and other social media platforms that is normally targeted at those same disenfranchised and marginalized people that I talked about at the beginning of the post.

Essentially I was watching the bullied become the bullies, and it saddened me greatly.  I thought I had found a quiet corner of the internet that functioned the way I remember the internet first feeling during those heady early days of the nineties.  I’ve compared Mastodon to early IRC or to the BBS era…  but the last couple of days have felt like anything but that.  I am not saying that the folks who pushed back are evil or wrong, just that the tactics that they were employing were the exact same thing that I have seen employed against them in the past.  The only real comment I have made on the issue was last night.

I guess today yet again proved that we can build a better technology, that has the potential for better community engagement. But we can’t necessarily guarantee that everyone is going to be willing to be better human beings. Human beings still suck, and I welcome the robot overlords that will come after us.

I still have a lot of hope in Mastodon and Pleroma and the rest of the little islands that live in the ActivityPub Fediverse, and I am super glad that I have found my little island full of refugees from the nineties.  I just saw a lot of the same behavior that I have on other social media platforms and it made me a little bummed about the whole experiment.  However I will keep moving on and keep looking for the good things out there happening.  There are needlessly folks who feel safer after yesterdays events, and that is good I guess.  I just wish it wasn’t at the cost of reverting to the same flavors of toxic gate keeping that had been used as a weapon against “the other” before.  Yesterday just made me think a little too much about this quote from Animal Farm:  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Reluctantly Fury

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This morning is a hard morning, because I am struggling to wake up.  I apparently had a way more active night than I realized, because in my mind I slept all the way through.  However my wife told me a tale this morning that tells otherwise.  Apparently I fell asleep with the television on and at some point during the night she woke up and decided that it should be turned off.  The television remote was on the end table on my side of the bed so she proceeded to wake me up and tell me to turn it off.  Instead of doing this… I apparently proudly proclaimed that “I peed”.  At which point she tried to tell me no.. please turn off the television…  to which I again proudly replied “but I already peed”.

This apparently happened a couple more times before I finally reluctantly turned off the television.  I remember absolutely none of this happening at all.  In my mind I went to bed and slept all the night through without incident, but I am guessing my generally groggy state this morning is due to the fact that I didn’t in fact do that thing.  I have been taking a dose of nyquil before going to bed because I have been fighting this nameless crud, and I am wondering if the sleep inducing nature of that…  lead to my odd behavior.  Regardless it is blogfodder as I call it, and like so many things I probably shouldn’t tell you…  I am telling you anyways.

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Last night I managed to get the Demon Hunter to 114 and finish out the quests in Vol’dun.  At this point I have moved him on to Nazmir which is a zone I never quite finished on the Warrior before getting caught up in the madness of world questing.  As I was winding down on the Demon Hunter I decided to make one more pass on the Warrior to see if there were any quests up that I absolutely had to do.  It was around this point that I decided to try out Fury in proper and get my bars set up.  Now at this point I don’t have a great combo of weapons for Fury as I am have a spear from world questing that came in around 320 and an axe that came from a world boss I believe at 289ish.  It is good enough to get started, but generally speaking I have had hell getting weapons this entire expansion so far.  I was hoping that onehander fury was a thing again and I could just drop some fist weapons crafted by my leatherworker, but that is apparently not a thing.

The shocking truth is…  Fury is amazing.  It feels good and shockingly feels like I have more moment to moment survival than I do as a protection warrior.  Basically this is now my world questing form and will probably run dungeons as such also to help build out the rest of my gear.  This is the expansion where apparently I am maining Fury on the Warrior, however that is not enough of a consolation prize to give up my mission to level the Demon Hunter and tank on it.  It does at least make me feel like maybe I didn’t completely waste the first two weeks of this expansion leveling a character that would be permanently shelved during this expansion.  Maybe just maybe at some point they will apply some tweaks to the way protection feels and I can dust off the sword and shield.

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Another thing that I poked my head into last night was Destiny 2, and for starters the lighting model feels totally different as evidenced by the way this ship looks.  As far as the changes… I am still wrapping my head around what weapons do what.  What I thought was going to happen was that we could put any weapon in any slot.  What actually happened was that weapons are still divided by Kinetic, Energy and Power slots and then to confuse things further…  the weapons are split by what sort of ammunition they use being primary, special or heavy.  Fusion Rifle, Sniper Rifle and Shotgun all now are counted as special weapon types and are divided between the first and second slot.  What I had hoped was that I could run around with Uriel’s Gift in the first slot, Merciless in the second slot, and then a Sword in the third slot.  That is not a thing since Merciless and Uriel’s Gift both occupy the same slot.

None of this works exactly how I remembered them explaining it in the first live stream about Forsaken, however I have also not been following the changes terribly close.  So technically there probably are ways you could have a shotgun in the first two slots, but I am not sure how viable that is actually going to be.  The infusion however works much better to where it is slot based and not weapon type based.  That said we still can’t do what we were able to do in TTK era of feeding trash drops from one class to become infusion fuel to push up another class which is unfortunate.  Supposedly the changes feel really good, but I am on a mission to level the Demon Hunter so I did not give it that much time.  I hope to explore it more over the long weekend break.