Blog

Coffin Dude Get

by

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.

Ten Years of Blaugust

by

Good Morning Friends! This is potentially going to be the last reliable blog post from me for a bit. Next week I am going to be dealing with the in-person training that I talked about in a post the other day. As such I expect to not be able to blog in the morning, and when I come home I fully expect to crash very fast and very hard. Last night was a bit of evidence of that happening already. I had a fairly stressful day of work and by the time I wrapped up around 6 pm, I was just dead to the world. I left off in Guild Wars 2 sitting outside the Tomb of Primeval Kings having only made it part of the way through that quest sequence before crashing the other night. While the will was there, I was struggling to stay asleep so I really made no forward momentum yesterday. I’m thankful I at least hit a checkpoint in the quest that I was on so that I can continue at a relatively straightforward place.

I’m exceptionally happy that I managed to get everything ready to go for Blaugust this week instead of having to deal with it in the evenings next week. While the sign-ups have only been open for a few days at the time of writing we have 25 bloggers, four of which are brand new this year. There has also been a significant bump in activity in the Discord which has been cool to watch. There was a bit of a screw-up on Wednesday when I announced everything… somewhere buried within the wall of nonsense was apparently a link to the old sign-up form. Thankfully I could tell by date range who had signed up and copied them over to the participant list that I maintain. I use this list to drive my blogroll which I keep updated as often as I can. I’ve been keeping everything updated on the Media Kit page as it serves as the true permanent resting place of all information assorted with Blaugust in general.

I’ve come to the realization that I think this is the 10th Blaugust. I probably should have made a much bigger deal about that when it came to the design.

What always throws me off is 2017… the year that I didn’t do a Blaugust event. I had allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event. That entire year was a rough one for me, but by the time 2018 rolled around… I had so many people come out of the woodwork to tell me how much they missed Blaugust and hoped that I would be running one that year. It was really that moment that lit a fire in me to keep me moving forward in spite of how exhausted I might be. So while we missed a year… there was also 2020 when we technically had two Blaugust events… one of which we called Blapril and the other gave us the prompt list.

Every year I seem to try something slightly different, while also keeping all of the things that worked well in the past. Whatever year we added Discord was probably the single best change for the longevity of the event. The first Blaugust was run more or less through the ill-fated Anook platform, and they even went so far as to sponsor an award in 2015 the second year. I still think that platform idea was really cool and is sort of what we are trying to do with Gamepad now… carving out a community. The “new thing” this year is that I set up a Blaugust account on Mastodon, and the idea is that I will use it to boost all of the posts that come across with the #Blaugust2023 hashtag. I tried to do this, but I always sort of hated spamming everyone that had no clue what the fuck Blaugust was from my personal account. This also gives folks an option to follow Blaugust without following me… given that I can sometimes be an acquired taste and I know of at least a handful of people who occasionally participate in the event that have zero love for me personally.

Not directly related to Blaugust, but it has been cool to watch Gamepad grow over the last half a year. I think we went live in November of last year, and during that time we’ve picked up a little over 120 accounts, and currently, at the time of writing this, 106 of them are active…. which is a pretty dang good retention rate. Mastodon and the larger Fediverse are really the social media of choice for me. Sure I am putting my thumb on the scale by choosing to run this out of Gamepad, but ultimately it is my event… so I am going to do the thing that I find most comfortable. A lot of bloggers had already moved to the platform so it doesn’t really seem too far-fetched to make it a home base for the event going forward. I’ve posted about the event on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram… but none of those really feel comfortable to me. I am not sure how many folks we will get from those anyways.

I think my hope in running it out of Mastodon, is that it will introduce us to an entirely new community of folks. We already have several sign-ups from folks who had no connection to our core group before we started talking about it on the fediverse. That is EXTREMELY exciting for me. My hope has always been for this thing to spread to different communities and spider out so that we have LOTS of blogs active and happily posting away throughout the year. In this year of internet bonfires… and the if not death of Twitter… the mutation of it into something I no longer want to be associated with… having a place to call your own is way more important than it ever was before. I had the realization that because of my blog… I am exceptionally easy to find. If I lost touch with someone along the way, they can always find me here. For most folks… the tapestry of connections that we have woven between each other is relatively tenuous. If you put your faith in corporate social media as your digital sense of place… then when you lose one of them you also lose your foundation. While self-hosted bloggers have gone out of fashion… we represent a sense of permanency and stability that is hard to remove.

Anyways… did not mean to ramble off in the direction of techno-religiosity… but there you have it. I feel like we need to take back control of more of our internet presence. Gamepad for example is run by folks that I trust and I believe in… and if something needs to happen to it, the portability of Mastodon allows me to migrate elsewhere. Worse comes to worse I can fire up my own private instance just for me, and continue to truck along with the same social connections. My blog is my digital front step, and anyone can find me here along with any of the other connections that I might be active on. That is a weird peace of mind in this time of digital uncertainty.