blaugust

Blaugust is Coming

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Goodbye NBI

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As of this morning the month of May is officially over and with it goes the Newbie Blogger Initiative for 2015.  I have some mixed feelings about the 2015 run, but in the important ways it seemed like a success.  The good folks at MMOGames had offered me the ability to highlight NBI specifically during my “bonanza” blogging round up.  The problem being there was a pretty massive falloff in the amount of blog content after the first two weeks.  I still highlighted the Talkback Challenges but found it quickly hard to make an entire post made up of nothing but Newbie Blogger Initiative content.  So I guess the question I am trying to answer is what specifically caused this cooling effect in the posts?  Generally speaking in past years if anything there is a ramping up with new people joining the initiative as the month goes on and folks having a burst of activity right towards the end.  That didn’t really happen this year.

That said any program that gets new people into blogging is a success in my book, and as I have said many times our community needs a constant fresh infusion of people willing to add their spin to the conversation.  Here is a relatively final list of the Class of 2015, so you should absolutely add these blogs to your blog reader and check in on their progress every now and then.

Blaugust is Coming

I’ve had a lot of questions and commentary asking me to do the Blaugust event again this year, and since I had been mostly coy about this…  as of this morning I am committing to making it happen once again.  For those who did not participate in the process last year, or were not around the blogosphere…  Blaugust is a festival of sorts devoted to the regular creation of blog content.  Above anything else I have become known for my mission of posting something every single day on my blog.  Granted there are lots of bloggers who do this and should be celebrated.  I know personally I saw a massive spike in my readership when my content deliver became for lack of a better word “predictable”.  The idea for Blaugust is simple…  post at least one post each day during the month of August.  That is thirty one days of posts, and if you win the competition you get the pride of being able to display one of our badges on your site showing you “won”.  Additionally last year we had various prizes to give away and I am sure that will be the case again this year.

The big thing that is going to have to change this year is I am going to have to wrap some tools around the process.  My life during the month of August revolved around making sure that everyone had gotten in their blog post each day.  Where this got squirrely was when I factored in our Aussie bloggers who were blogging from the future, and even our six hour offset European bloggers were a challenge to keep track of.  What is going to happen instead is that in order to participate you will need to submit each blog post through some sort of a form that is going to keep track of if you posted for a specific day.  This should help out some of the folks that would end up posting after midnight, when they really intended the post to count towards the previous day.  The important thing is the regular creation of content, not necessarily technically when you post it.  We have a two month reprieve, but I wanted to get notice out there that I would in fact be doing Blaugust yet again, so that folks could start psyching themselves up for the “marathon”.

Infernal Horsebirds

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This weekend I managed to push my crafters in Final Fantasy XIV to level 21, which gave them access to a whole new set of gear and allowed me to get rid of the other set I had been using.  I figured this was as good of a place to rest for a bit as any.  With only eighteen days until the head start I don’t figure there is a real chance that I will actually be able to push my crafters to 50.  With that in mind I opted to start working on my Rogue a bit this weekend.  For awhile now I have been torn as to which class to push next, and I have juggled both Monk and Ninja.  What finally pushed me over the edge to Ninja was when I managed to get the Malignant Mogknives to drop awhile back.  As such this weekend I managed to go from level 28 to almost level 34 which is not the fastest progress in the world but still acceptable.  I figure I will speed up significantly in a few levels when I can realistically start doing Coerthas for FATEs.

For the time being I am running FATEs in the Costa Del Sol region while queuing for whatever the max level dungeon happens to be.  Currently that is Brayflox Longstop which also gives me the opportunity to pick up the couple of pieces of the Infantry set I had been missing.  I have no idea if I will manage to push up Ninja to 50 before the expansion, or if I will return to Crafting madness, but in either case I certainly have plenty to do to keep me engage until things launch.  I really should devote a weekend day to the Post Moogle quests because I really do not think they would take that long.  I did not end up with as much play time this weekend as I thought I would, otherwise I probably would have done precisely that.  One of the things that I think is amazing is that as a Free Company we are still bringing in new people.  Sure it has slowed down from the initial burst of players, but over the weekend we added another five members or so through our extended networks.  This gives me hope for Heavensward and our ability to get things like the guild airship.  I am certainly excited about the prospects this expansion has for our group.

Satisfaction of the Year

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The Birth of a Community

I think this year more than any other we say what was previously an island of disconnected city states merge into a real community.  Last January I posted a rather grumpy piece lamenting the lack of community, and throughout the year you all have strived to prove me wrong.  I am not sure what exactly it was about this year in particular that seemed to draw everyone together, in part I think it was because this year was the year of multiple events, that I hope will repeat themselves this coming year.  Since we have reached the end of a pretty epic year of community, I thought it was a good time to reflect back upon what we have achieved.  There were individuals who say that blogging is dead, but I think wholeheartedly we have proved them wrong.

February – Birth of Alliance of Awesome

While not really an event in the truest sense, it was still a pretty significant event in the year for me.  In February of this year some events happened that ended up in the forming of a much larger gaming community to be known as the Alliance of Awesome.  With the launch of the Landmark alpha… we quickly realized that each of us needed to be in as many as seven different “guild” based server channels to be able to keep in contact with everyone playing the game… especially since friends lists simply did not exist at that point.  It was proposed that we found a much larger community made up of all of different parts.  This alliance of guilds would pool resources and eventually even a chat server.  While at the end of the year I realize that maybe some of the ideas didn’t work as well as we had hoped…  there are still more of us in almost daily contact than there are not.

The idea that there would always be a friendly Alliance of Awesome guild in whatever game we happened to be playing was something that has for the most part stayed true to the original intent.  The only part that didn’t quite work was trying to create an actual Alliance of Awesome branded guild in Wildstar.  I feel it is still best if we stay separate guilds, just ones collaborating in a larger sense.  The biggest change in this direction was moving to using the same Teamspeak server graciously hosted for us by the ever amazing Saia.  Some things have worked well, others not so much…. and other groups have faded away from the core.  At the end of the day I think this was a really positive move for the community as a whole, and anyone that wants to participate is still more than welcome.

May – Newbie Blogger Initiative 2014

This may we saw a return of the seminal blogging event that at least to some extent started all of the momentum.  Several years ago Sypster started this contest and last year I believe was the third year.  Essentially it is a month for the elder bloggers in our community to encourage folks to start their own new blog and join our community proper.  For this year the catalyst was Doone as has been for a coupe of years, but he was joined by an excellent cast of helpers in the forms of Izlain, J3w3l, ModeratePeril, and Joseph Skyrim.  It was a bit hard for me to find numbers this morning when I was pulling together this post but based on my best guestimates and this list, it seems like we had 45 new bloggers join the fray during the month of May.

I did a quick run through of all of those blogs and as close as I can tell out of that initial group of 45, at least 30 are still active…  and I judged activity by having any posts within November or December.  That gives us right at 66% of the participating blogs still alive and kicking today.  When you add to this that there are still a large percentage of blogs from past years up and running as well that graduate from being a newbie to a mentor…  this really is one of the best events to grow our community each year.  I am extremely proud to be a participant each year, and I am excited to see a new crop of bloggers arrive on my “Class of” blog roll.

August – Blaugust 2014

The idea behind Blaugust started on an absolute whim.  I did not want to lose the momentum we build each year with the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  While that event is going on, folks are posting hard and heavy… and then as it finished the posts start to taper off again.  The idea was simple enough, get some of the most seasoned veterans in our community to take up the challenge of posting something new each and every day like I do.  When I proposed this idea I thought maybe at most I would get five or six people that were willing to take up the banner.  However this absolutely developed a life of its own, and before I knew it I had 52 people signed up to participate. I have to say I was completely overwhelmed with the support I got from the community on this one… and for the most part my entire August became about nothing but keeping track of Blaugust.

What I was even more impressed by was the level of participation.  At the end of the month I had 50 that actually participated, and of those 28 actually had “won” the challenge and managed to post something each and every day.  The biggest frustration with the whole event was that I had not really planned very well, and keeping track of who posted when became a very manual process.  As a result this coming year I am going to have to engineer a different solution to make it less intensive on my part, and allow me to make the daily recap posts a bit easier.  I never intended for this process to be something that “new” bloggers partook of, and as a result we saw a marked decrease in posts after it… since most folks needed a break after running that marathon.

October – Bragtoberfest 2014

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Bragtoberfest was the brainchild of Izlain from Me vs Myself and I and the Couch Podtatoes podcast.  During September there was the beginning of some pretty horrible stuff happening in the gaming community as a whole.  Bragtoberfest was Izlain’s way of combating that by trying to get back to the roots of gaming… playing to have fun.  The mission statement was simple:  Bragtoberfest aims to make it fun to be a gamer again. We all game, and most of us also either blog, stream, vlog or podcast about games as well. Why not combine the two into a month-long event? 

During the month of October there were several competitions bringing folks together for the purpose of competing in a game.  These ranged from Strife to Team Fortress 2 and everything in between.  Not being a super competitive gamer myself, I did not join in as much as I would have liked.  That said I felt like I supported the mission by helping to provide a few logos here and there. Additionally many of us gave exposure to the event with recap threads and announcements on our own blogs.  This morning as I was trying to pull together numbers for all of these things, I struggled to find firm numbers of participants.  That said I know it was well over 20 bloggers who joined in during the month of October.  Hopefully this one will happen again next year and like everything, we can grow upon it.  The Bragtoberfest tag on Izlain’s blog seems to be the best summary of the event as a whole.

October – Alliance of Awesome Extra Life Marathon

One of the best things to come out of Alliance of Awesome this year…  is the fact that we participated as a team in the Extra Life marathon.  This all started with a random conversation between Zelibeli and myself about how we had always wanted to participate in the Extra Life 25 hour of gaming event.  Both of us had not done so yet for the same reason… we questioned if we could actually manage to stream all 25 hours given our family lives.  With the birth of AofA we kicked around the idea of having a Relay style stream, where each of us took a 2-3 hour block and then tagged off to another stream.  This became a logistical problem since we were all using Twitch at the time, and you could not create a “team” unless you were at the partner level… and quite frankly none of us were popular enough to actually have that.

Thankfully along came Hitbox which offers the ability to create a team at the most basic membership… and we were off and running.  We created an Extra Life team… and not having a clue what kind of participation we would get, I set a very sober goal of $200 as a team.  We blew that goal completely out of the water, with a participation of 9 gamers…  we managed to reach $1728 which to me is an absolutely staggering amount.  My hope is this year we can be a bit more organized and maybe raise more by getting the awareness of what we are doing out there a bit more.  Additionally my hope is to find someone who is a twitch partner that is willing to get an Alliance of Awesome twitch team created for us.. since that will open the door for folks to stream from the current generation of consoles as well.

December – Bloggy Xmas

Finally we had one last event that wrapped up last week with Christmas.  My good friend Syl game to me with the idea of doing a sort of blogging advent calendar.  It seems there is a local tradition in her area where folks in the villages decorate the windows of homes and stores to represent a day of the advent calendar.  I started work on a logo, and she spruced it up by adding in the d-pad snowflakes and bam we had another event ready to run.  I think she originally intended to have one blogger per day, but just like with Blaugust she was a bit overwhelmed by the folks wanting to participate.  I tried to pull together some numbers this morning but it seems like for the 25 days of the event she had 45 participants, meaning most of the days had two different bloggers posting.

The overarching theme of the event was to write something about community, and I personally wrote a post about my need to keep growing my own communities by adopting awesome people.  For the full effect of the event you have to check out the Bloggy Xmas website that gave us a really awesome advent calendar layout for the months post.  My hope is that we will grow this to be an even bigger event next year.  The community focus seems fitting since this was a year of so many awesome events bringing the community together, all the while existing in a climate where there was so much negative being caused by other gamers.  I feel like our little community stood as a beacon for the fact that gamers could in fact get along, and not just get along but thrive.  I want to thank all of you out in the community who participated in any of the events, or just kept your own personal blog active throughout the year.  I feel we represent the best values our community has to offer, and I hope we can make next year even more amazing.

2014 Blaugust Wrap-up

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Wrapping Up Blaugust

This mornings post has taken a bit longer than I had originally hoped for and is caused by a number of reasons.  Firstly I slept in extremely late this morning, and secondly we cleaned the house for a bit before I finally sat down to tabulate the results of this months contest.  Additionally it took me a bit longer to roll all of the dice than I had intended, but here I am writing the wrap up post.  There is no way I can adequately express in words what this entire endeavor has meant to me.  Like I have said more than a few times…  I really expected to get maybe five participants at most in this month long challenge and instead at last count we had 52 individuals that joined in.

More than that I have watched a fledgling community solidify around the shared challenge.  There has been so much cross posting as part of this event, where someone will post an idea… that will spark another blogger, and another until it has echoed through the entire community.  We’ve had discussions on the meaning of gamer, a handful of surveys and and most recently an interesting discussion on what exactly our blogs name means.  My ultimate hope is that going forward this connective tissue we have built will stay just as strong as it has the last month.  There has been some talk about trying to organize a series of twitter chats using a specific hashtag to have long freeform discussions about the things that matter to us in our community.  I think I would love to see someone take the ball and run with this one, because I know it works well in my wife’s mathematics communities.

Blaugust Survivors

In my mind each and every person that participated in the contest is amazing.  I want to thank you all so much for taking the time to devote to this initiative.  Even if you couldn’t post every day… your attempts and struggles mattered to me.  Towards the end of the challenge I became extremely focused on who was posting every single day, but I don’t want you all to lose sight of the fact that just by joining in you have won to me.  As such I want to take a moment to recognize every single member of this Blaugust community and give you a nifty little banner that you can attach to your blog with pride.  You came, you saw, you rocked this Blaugust thing!  I’ve kept the images huge on purpose to allow you to scale it down to fit your blog without losing resolution.

Blaugust Winners

The next group that I want to recognize is all of the folks who spent hour after hour making sure they had a new post each and every day.  I cannot express in words just how awesome you all are.  Some of you are seasoned veterans at this blogging things, but even more interesting is just how many on this list have not even made their first year anniversary yet.  I know it was a struggle for some, but you all rose to the occasion and created some extremely interesting content as a result.  You not only survived Blaugust, but you kicked its ass and are taking a victory lap.  Once again you get a nifty doodad for your blog, to significant that you Won Blaugust 2014.

Now For the Prizes

As with any contest there have to be prize winners and a good chunk of this morning was spent rolling a lot of dice and recording the results.  You can check out the full spreadsheet here of the rolls for each of the winners.  I am not sure how long my prizes will last but quite honestly I would love to give each and every one of the winner something for being so amazing.  I’ve had a few people mention that they are willing to donate for the cause, so over the coming weeks I might see if I can make that happen.  However for the time being… the final results are in and…

  1. Grand Prize – Alternative Chat
  2. Also Awesome 1 – Missy’s Mojo
  3. Also Awesome 2 – I Has PC
  4. Also Awesome 3 – Echoes From The Abyss

I will be getting with each of you over the next few days to pass out your prizes.  If I still have prizes left to give I will be going down the spreadsheet and sharing the love as best I can.  Hopefully the whole prize thing doesn’t lose sight on the fact that all of you that participated are awesome, and strength willing I hope to do this same thing again next August.  Here is hoping we can continue to support the creation of awesome content in our little community.  I hope you all enjoyed yourselves, and I look forward to the next event!

Two Posts from the End

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Life Got In the Way

While my daily blogging routine is set in stone now and I am absolutely unshakable in my devotion… my whole keeping tabs on the Blaugust event apparently wasn’t.  As a result I had managed to get massively behind in reading all of the blog posts and crediting them in my Google Drive spreadsheet.  I am not sure if I will be running this event again in the future, but if I do I will have to engineer something more manageable for keeping track of whether or not someone had posted during that day.  As the contest went on I stopped being quite so strict as to account for people posting in a different time zone than say their blog is configured.  I noticed a lot of double posts on one day, and then occasional lapses.  I finally reasoned this out to be someone posting after midnight, and quite frankly I didn’t feel like being that hardcore about the requirements.

Additionally I am making a executive decision and counting Wow In the Details among the grand prize contestants instead of as somehow a contestant with an asterisk.  They started one day late but have since double and triple posted several days to make up for it, and since they have not broken the posting pattern at all…  I just can’t in good faith hold them behind for starting a single day late.  Since I am being loose on the whole posting after midnight thing… I didn’t feel like I could hold her to somehow being excluded from the grand prizes for starting a single day late… when she has not dropped a day since.  In a future running of the contest I would hope to have some sort of self serve / honor system that allowed folks to tick off a post when they make it.  The Nook thing is great for having all of the posts in one place, but no better for tracking than anything else.

Two Posts From the End

At this point I see two distinct camps among the participants.  There is one group that has enjoyed the challenge and the motivation to post more.  Then there is another group that feels like they have committed to something but later wished they had not.  In any case at this point we have a long list of people “winning” the competition already by continuing to post daily.  I have to say how massively proud I am of you all, especially the folks who either started their blogs for Blaugust or came from the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I originally intended this to be mostly a thing for Veteran bloggers, a way to inspire them to ratchet up their posting frequency and be willing to most more “off the cuff” topics.  What I did not expect was just how many participants we would have.  At last count I believe we have 52 total blogs that are competing in the contest and of those 29 are currently in the running for the spoils of victory.

If you see your name in the above list, then you should pat yourself on the back for making it this far.  If you don’t see your name in the list, you should still pat yourself on the back for participating.  It has been amazing to sit back and watch as this whole thing unfolded around me.  I never expected to gain the amount of traction that it has, nor did I expect quite so many people to be vying for the finish line.  I have met several new faces through this process, and I believe there has been a lot of time mingling among the various writers participating.  The challenge now is to take this momentum that we have here and keep it going through the rest of the year.  I am not suggesting that each of you adopt my schedule of daily blogging forever… but hopefully you’ve proved to yourself that you can do it.  If you can do daily posting, you can easily cut back to a every other day schedule.  It is up to you to figure out what exactly fits your time and desires, but I encourage you to find a schedule of some sort.

The Finish Line

Now for some final business details as we stare down at the finish line.  Firstly, if you are on this list make sure I have some form of contact information for you.  That means you either need to be following my twitter, my anook, my steam, or have arranged some other method for me to contact you.  On September 1st I will be rolling the dice to determine who wins all of the prizes I mentioned in the announcement post.  For sake of novelty, I plan on using actual dice 2D10 or percentage dice as they are often known.  As a programmer and a gamer I have learned not to trust random number generators.  My goal is to use a dice cup to remove my own influence from the rolls as well.  The most important thing however is that you check the spreadsheet to make sure I have given you full credit for all of your posts… especially if you are NOT on the above list but believe you should be.  Thanks to everyone who has participated in making this an interesting month.