Blaugust2025 Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years.

The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.

In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.

One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.

The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.

In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all.

The Blaugust Logo that I did not create for once!

Good Morning Folks! Today is the beginning of August and as such also the official beginning of Blaugust. It is weird to see this event happening and me not really having much to do with it after over a decade of scurrying around to get things up and running. Please note… this is a good kind of weird because it is a miracle that my community is running it for me, since I could not deal with it myself this year. Krikket’s blog has been the place were a lot of details are launching and if you are curious about the event you can check out the intro post and the calendar of events and prompts post to get more details. I am still not entirely certain how much I am going to actively participate in the event, but I am at the very least following the tradition and making a proper First of Blaugust post. Yesterday I posted about the other significance of today’s date so I am not really going to go into that.

Old Man Bel with a Knock-Off Gengar Beanie

Often times we do a bit of an introduction in these here first posts, so I figure I will follow that pattern as well. Hi I am Belghast or Bel as most people who have been around this community tend to call me. I was born near the Gen X/Millennial divide and have some traits of both factions. I started this blog in 2009 during the height of World of Warcraft and it evolved over the years through various games and eventually just became my online public info dump page. Often times my posts are me working through my feelings regarding some subject, and lately with the death of my wife they can be a bit raw at times. In 2013 I challenged myself to blog every single day, and managed this for about three and a half years before relaxing the rigor and just blogging when I am feeling like it… which is still most weekdays. In 2014 this turned into the Blaugust challenge and there has been only one year where I did not run the event prior to this current year where my gracious community is running it in my absence. Over the years it became less about the challenge of blogging every day, and more about giving the blogging community a booster shot to keep folks active the rest of the year.

Lately you will find me mostly writing about my adventures in various ARPGs like Path of Exile, Last Epoch, and Diablo games. I tend to get fairly deep into the weeks and write posts that will largely be incomprehensible to anyone who is not already bought into the nonsense. However on occasion I do write targeted posts designed at trying to onboard friends into the madness of whatever I am playing. I do my best to be fairly approachable and am willing to share whatever knowledge I happen to have about whatever games I am playing. No question is too silly, especially in a game like Path of Exile that requires serious commitment to actually push through the early hours and succeed. I’ve probably played well over three thousand hours at this point and still consider myself somewhat of a newbie.

Over the course of this blog’s life I have devoted a lot of time and effort to various MMORPGs. Most recently that has been Guild Wars 2 because its a-la-carte nature fits my gameplay and mental state most clearly. Similarly I have also created getting started content for that game and many others, but a lot of my posts are recounting whatever stuff I have been getting up to either solo or with my friends. For example on Thursday nights I have been getting together with some of my friends and running Fractals or whatever happens to fit the menu for that night. In theory at some point if we ever gather enough people to do it, we might change these into Strikes which require 10 players instead of 5 players. Occasionally I will flip the script and go hardcore into another MMORPG for awhile, like Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft… but that has happened considerably less frequently lately than it previously did. The forced grouping nature of a lot of those games are a real turnoff when I am deep in turtle mode and staying away from other human beings.

Weekly AggroChat Podcast Episode

In addition to the semi-daily blog, I also record a semi-weekly podcast with a bunch of friends on Saturday nights, and publish the episodes on Sunday. The crew assembled are all folks that I met through gaming including a bunch of people that I used to raid with back in the early days of World of Warcraft (Tam, Thalen, Kodra), and then some friends that I picked up along the way back when twitter was actually good… and not an awful mess. Ammo for example does all of the artwork on this blog and the masthead represents something like a dozen different individual commissions that I have composited together over the years. Grace is someone that I met through Twitter initially but over the last decade we have become close enough that we literally consider each other siblings. Ash is someone that I initially met through Tam but sort of fell in love with them and they are genuinely one of the best people that I know on the planet. Just like with the blog we do absolutely nothing to really promote or monetize anything, because quite frankly it is just a time each week when we set aside to hang out with each other… and a show occasionally happens.

I have three cats with wildly different personalities. Mollie is now our eldest and she has some problems… namely she doesn’t fully understand how cats should cat and is scared of everything. Though at some point over the last year she decided she now lives on the bed… and gripes at me until I make it every morning and put her self warming pad in exactly the right position. Josie is my sweet baby… that has no coordination and can’t quite figure out how to retract her claws at the appropriate time. She has gotten more leery of the world as she has aged, but is still an amazing snuggler when correctly motivated. Gracie is the baby in every sense of that word, and cannot fathom that anyone exists on the planet that does not love her with all of their heart. Especially with the death of my wife, she is pretty much glued to my side 24/7 and goes where I go. Mollie snuggles with me when I first get to bed each night, but runs like hell when Gracie shows up and claims daddy. Josie sadly has not slept on the bed in awhile, but will occasionally jump on my side for some serious head-scratches before wandering off wherever she has decided to go that evening. Josie especially loves windows and sleeps during the day in these upstairs bathroom windows that were about half the size they should be for a cat of her girth.

That’s it folks. That is what you are in for with this blog. I do dumb things and then write about them, and occasionally post cute cat photos. Fair warning there have been a lot of “Sad Bel Times” posts lately as I deal with the ramifications of my wife’s passing. Stay awhile and listen… or don’t… its your call.

Biggest Blaugust Ever

First of Blaugust 2025