The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob: Blaugust Arrives and You Call This Prep?

On the first day of Blaugust… I wrote a post about Blaugust. No surprise there.

Blaugust, back in its early origins, was a goal, a challenge, to write a blog post every day for the whole month of August. It has softened up a bit over the years, merging a bit with the Newbie Blogger Initiative idea, to become more of… well, as it says on the logo… a festival of blogging.

You can read all about it here. It is not too late to join!

But I hold myself to the traditional goal of the event and plan to post daily for a month.

Which, of course, means I am in a bit of a panic here on day one. How the hell am I going to find something to write about every day for a full month?

That is my usual lack of confidence speaking. It ignores the fact that not only have I managed to fulfill that task in every Blaugust so far, I wrote more than a post a day for a full month just last month. July could count as my Blaugust.

In fact, if you look at the stats of the blog, I have effectively write more that one post a day for most of the years that the blog has been around. In 2009 and again in 2017 I only wrote 350 blogs during the calendar year. Those were my worst years ever. Given that my goal is a post every weekday, which adds up to about 260 posts in a year, I am well ahead of the curve.

None of which can dissuade my brain from trying to calculate out how I am going to make it this year. The past is old news, I have to do this today, this week, this month! Aigghhhhh!

It is good thing that this is, according to the suggested calendar for the event, prep week. So let me do some planning here in front of a live studio audience to see if I can calm myself down a bit… or let you in on my thought process, which might be a more useful/scary way to look at it.

Blaugust 2019 Schedule

How to fill up that calendar?

Well, to start with, I can skip that last week, that is September. I’ll worry about next month when it arrives, though that Monday will probably still be a summing up post about the event.

The other weeks each have a topic, I can probably make something out of each of those… except developer appreciation week. I appreciate devs, and wouldn’t necessarily want their career path, but I never know what to say when people get on that appreciation topic. I’ll find something. So that is five topics for August, five posts down, including this one, 26 to go.

Then there are my standard weekly FML posts. The league goes on through the end of the month, so that is a post every Wednesday, so four more knocked out, 22 to go.

There is also the monthly look at the SuperData numbers and the EVE Online monthly economic report, plus there will be an August patch update for EVE Online. Oh, and month in review, the cornerstone of every month! That brings the number of posts down to 18.

What is coming up in August?

There is the final two aspects of the Season of Skills event in EVE Online and another EVE Online stress test event. And my 13th anniversary of starting off in EVE Online lands this month. That is four more posts easy, so call it 14 needed now. (I’ve already written that last one too.)

WoW Classic is coming. Launch day is August 27. I wish it was earlier in the month, but you get what you get. There will be at least one looking forward post, the launch day post, and a post about the chaos of the first night. At least four posts this month will likely be about that, so now we’re to 10.

What else is coming up?

DC Universe Online is launching on the Switch on August 6th. Might be worth a mention, just to keep track of what Daybreak is up to. That gets us to 9.

Time to look in the drafts folder.

I have three almost complete posts in there, all started with Blaugust in mind. I should be able to knock those out. That leaves us at 6 posts. I need to come up with six new post ideas over the course of August. That doesn’t sound too bad.

Likely topics:

Ops I fly in EVE Online
Looking at Dota Underlords after a couple weeks of play
Looking at Teamforce Tactics, a Dota Underloards competitor
TorilMUD introducing a new character class… 36 year old MUD is still going
My Pokemon Go 3 year anniversary
The Switch Lite – my daughter an I have been talking about that
Something about my new keyboard
Kickstarter project review
Something about books/movies/TV

Things I will jump on if they happen:

Any Daybreak announcements/rumors
BlizzCon rumors
CCP making people mad in EVE Online through words or deeds… some more
Anything particularly quotable in the MMORPG space
Waves of nostalgia, my own or from others

From all of that I think I might be able to scrape out 31 posts, one for each day of Blaugust. We shall see.

So welcome to Blaugust!

In furtherance of Blaugust spirit, I present a list of the current participants according to the master list that Bel has. There are some old, well established blogs there, some brand new ones, some that have been quiet for a while, and some that won’t need to change pace to plow through the event with a month’s load of posts.

The list is in order of when people signed up so I can just compare the end of Bel’s list with this list and add people as they appear. Hopefully he won’t sort the list, since there isn’t a time stamp field or anything.

For those with a social media bent, there is also a Twitter list of participants that Chestnut put together, as well as a Blaugust subreddit on Reddit that Bel launched because there is apparently not enough pain in his life. (That might just reflect my own experience with Reddit however.) And UltrViolet has a post up with an OPML file of the RSS feeds for the participating blogs if you want to import them all into your feed reader.

Anyway, there are all the blogs on the list. I’ve clicked on every single one and only had to fix one URL. Of course, Bel’s post today also has a list up as well, but I already did the work on this one so I am keeping it.

The Redundant Ancient Gaming Noob

Thursday, August 1, 2019

Blaugust Arrives and You Call This Prep?

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