Blaugust 2023

Blaugust 2023 In Review

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

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

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

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

Newbie Class of 2023

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

The Awards and Methodology

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

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

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

The Bronze Club 2023

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

The Silver Club 2023

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

The Gold Club 2023

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

The Rainbow Diamond Club

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

Honorable Mentions

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

As always I am so deeply proud of everyone who has participated this year. The tyranny of the blank screen is a real thing. So often it takes me pretending that I am writing to myself to hit the publish button each morning, so I understand what many folks have to overcome to put themselves out there. Again I am very fallible, and if you feel like I made an error in my tabulations, please reach out to me from any of the many platforms I use, and we can talk about it. By the time of posting this, I should have updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with all of the awards, so feel free to snag them and do whatever you want with them. I hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2024. Lastly, I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. For many of us, this is a support structure that we can rely on, and while I may not say it often… I appreciate all of you greatly.

A Packed Weekend

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Screenshot from Path of Exile showing a Righteous Fire Inquisitor firing off Scorching Ray with the Shaper Beam Micro-transaction.

Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.

A screenshot from Sir Gog's review of recent 3.22 Path of Exile spoilers showing off the Unending Nightmare atlas passive node.

Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.

My Baldur's Gate 3 Party does a murder of some Gnolls

Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.

Screenshot from the Code: Action mini game in Honkai Star Rail where I have created a movie poster themed after The Matrix called "Super Hacker" featuring Blade as Neo and Silver Wolf as Trinity.

There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.

A screenshot from Palia Beta showing off my plot and the fact that you can have multiple storage chests.

I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.

A screenshot from The Witcher Netflix series during happier times in Season One with Geralt and Yaskier/Dandelion

I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.

Photo of me and Greybie our Tigerstripe Grey Tabby Stray "Community Cat"

Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.

I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.

Coffin Dude Get

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Good Morning Friends! Whelp I took a bit of a gamble and it paid off. I was running out of time to get Luocha with the new banner arriving soon. To be honest… I don’t really love this character but after playing with him… he is freaking broken as far as healers go and I needed a second healer. So I spent $30 in additional pulls and managed to luck out and get him. I had hit pity off free pulls at the beginning of his banner only to get a different 5-Star champion, so I was hoping that would not happen again. Now I can rest on my laurels and gather up pull currency because Blade is next up, and I don’t need him at all. My hope is to be able to gather up a stockpile and take a run at Kafka when her banner opens.

I’m really looking forward to the next patch dropping because it looks like we might be finishing up the Luofu story arc with another big boss fight. I am not super enthralled with “Space China”, and am very happy to be leaving it behind. What I am probably looking forward to the most… is a new boss theme because both the Herta Station and Jarillo-VI boss fights are absolute bangers. It will be interesting to see what themes they choose to go with for this boss theme. I’m also looking forward to some of the events that are going to be happening. The museum event essentially proved to me that this team can do some really interesting stuff with mini-events. If my information is correct, this should drop tomorrow, which may or may not actually be “tonight” my time.

In Blaugust news, the other day I did this dumb image showing off the ten different logos we’ve had over the years. So far the whole Vaporwave/Arcade/Yearbook thing I have going on this year seems to generally be better received than my Stranger-Things-inspired look last year. Truth be told… I don’t really consult anyone when I start crafting the yearly nonsense. Maybe I should, but honestly… this has always sorta been my thing and I am shocked as fuck that anyone follows along. One thing that is a bit different this year from previous years is that I have taken over the generation of the OPML file to make importing into an RSS reader a bit easier. My long-term goal is to automate this, but for the time being I am doing some dumb stuff with Google Sheets and =CONCATENATE().

We still have fourteen days until the official beginning of Blaugust, and each day more sign-ups are flowing in. I sorta regret the way the event is falling with me being in training all day every day this week. Normally speaking I would be a bit more active on social media to keep the interest levels high. However I just can’t really do that, and after not “peopling” for the last three years… by the time I get out of training, I am just drained. I didn’t even do anything resembling coherent gameplay last night as I bounced from one game to another. I am pumped however that regardless of my lack of support this week we are already sitting at 38 sign-ups as of the time of this posting. Given that we always have a number of “buzzer beaters”, and even some folks who decide to start after it is already in progress… I have a feeling this is going to be a rather “lorge” year.

There is still plenty of time to sign-up and add your blog, and no shade at “buzzer beaters”… because I habitually am one. I’ve seen a lot of new traction on Discord which is really nice as well. I feel bad that I am not active this week, but I hope to make up for it next week when my life begins to shift back to normal. I’m really looking forward to this Blaugust because even if no one else signed up… we already have an interesting mix of new people interested in our yearly nonsense. Still not sure how many of these morning posts I will be able to knock out this week, but I am going to try and get as many of them as I can before exhaustion claims me. It does not help that Gracie was an asshole and started screaming at the top of her lungs at around 10 pm… and finally got locked out of the bedroom around 1 am.

I hope yall are having a most excellent week though! Unfortunately, since I have to pass three certification exams by the end of the week… it isn’t like I can do my trick of just disassociating until I am on the other side of the frustrating thing that I don’t want to deal with. I need to soak up knowledge so I can regurgitate it back on an exam.