About this blog

Conquest fails and the end of an experiment

So, today is day 59 of daily posting and tomorrow’s might be the last one for a while, as I’m leaving for a 2 week trip tomorrow where I don’t know if time, energy and wifi will be readily available. No high hopes, but we’ll see.
This time I only prepared one post for tomorrow and only because at least it makes it 60 days, damn those love of round numbers, it was actually planned for today 😛
Just had an oddity in Conquests. I wrote I finished twice on my BH this week, but maybe I was wrong and only planned to do it. I looked at the counter today and it sat at 27.xxx of 30.000. So I quickly hopped over to Yavin 4 to do some RAMPAGE. Apparently I had done the dailies on a non-conquest character (getting complicated yet?) so my counter for Rampage III was at 94/150. So I killed a few mobs and it showed me the popup for Rampage I (yes, I, not II, sadly was too confused to screenshot) and at some point I got the popup for Rampage II, but the chat said +300 CXP which again matches Rampage III. I also didn’t get the Conquest rewards again, but apparently I just failed to read swtorista’s guide correctly. It says “You can complete your personal goal on as many characters as you want!” and not “as many times as you want”. Ah well, it’s not as if I went out of my way to get to 30.000 instead of 15.000, wouldn’t even say “bummer”. * shrug* I blame the multitude of days with strong headache in the last two weeks, no wonder you make these mistakes if you can’t really concentrate.

Conquest fails and the end of an experiment Read More »

Blaugust 2018 Analyzed

Belghast posted the final tally. Wilhelm chimed in. Rakuno as well.
I’m gonna steal the summary (sorry Bel):

  • 90 blogs signed up in Blaugust Reborn 2018
  • 83 bloggers made at least one post during the month
  • We added 1404 new blog posts to the community as a result of Blaugust Reborn
  • This equated to an average of 45 new blog posts per day
  • 26 Bloggers had 31 posts during the month or in a few cases considerably more

 

Blaugust 2018 Rainbow Award Logo
Officially Certified: Rainbow

So it’s official now, and I’m pretty happy. I’m usually not one to value awards or official recognition, but this was a goal I set for myself. I’m usually bad at achieving any goals that include doing something daily (except brushing my teeth, sadly the time for recognizing this as an achievement is gone for a few decades already), but I managed to do this one!

Blaugust 2018 Analyzed Read More »

Autumn Gaming Goals

I saw quite a few people just continuing to post like nothing had happened (it’s ok, you can take a break now), and there quite a few gaming goals posts.
I don’t usually do these, but right now I have some stuff planned. But these are not really hard goals, more like “this is what I originally wanted to do when I fell into an SWTOR-shaped hole” – there will absolutely no “I managed to do X out of Y”, my conscience is clear 🙂

  • SWTOR
    • Already posted here – mostly achievements and a few Levels
    • Do I want to join a guild? Maybe. Would be cool to not play solo, but… Republic or Empire? What is my main? Do I want to raid?
  • WoW
    • My plan is to buy BfA and subscribe in the first or second week of October, because I won’t have time to play before that
    • If I do it, will I try to rejoin my Alliance guild as I did in Legion, only to go back to my Horde main characters soon?
    • If I start with Horde, do I stay with my kinda dead guild of maybe 5-6 active ones or do I search for a new one? Will I be disappointed like last time?
  • Dead Cells
    • I really should pick it up again, it’s fun – but it’s hard. Maybe I should really try to get a 360 controller going and Just. Do. It.
  • Game Boy Advance
    • Maybe I should pick this up again, maybe finish Pokémon?
  • GW2
    • I should really play again, shouldn’t I? Maybe if SWTOR loses its pull and I don’t end up subscribing to WoW.
  • TESO
    • Same thing, but it just didn’t really convince me, which is a shame
  • Quake Champions
    • Yeah, I feel really guilty here – it’s fun, I should play more!
  • Cities: Skylines
    • Bought this in August 2017 but I haven’t felt like playing this kind of sim/building game

 
But there’s also stuff I’d like to try, but for that I’d have to buy it first, so it’s out for now.

  • Nintendo Switch
    • I’d really like to try one with one or two games. Maybe Zelda, Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart, Dead Cells… but why bother, I have a 360 I’m ignoring.
  • FFXIV
    • This is the only MMO right now where I’m like “I want to try this, but I have no time!” – I really have enough MMOs available
  • Graveyard Keeper
    • As SynCaine put it, “Graveyard isn’t perfect […], but in terms of pacing and how it affects your enjoyment, its an improvement over Stardaw Valley IMO”

Autumn Gaming Goals Read More »

This was Blaugust Reborn 2018

Hooray, we did it! We made it through 1 (or 31, or any number in between) posts in the month of August! Congrats Blaugustians new and old!
I don’ have much to say, so this is purely a statistics meta post:

  • 31 consecutive posts in August
  • exactly one post per “day”, as in sleep cycle. Two or three came 1-2h after midnight, but before I went to bed.
  • so I think I’ll get a “Rainbow Diamond Award”, yay!
  • as I started in July, this makes 42 consecutive days with one post per day each
  • including this post, I wrote 10463 words (subtract 50 for emoticons I guess, this wasn’t scientific counting)
  • the average post length was 349 words
  • the median post length was 262 words
  • the longest post was 1043 words
  • the shortest post was 106 words, so even for whatever threshold you use, I wouldn’t say I cheated
  • WordPress says I had 551 visitors, which is more than 10 times the normal amount. Thanks for reading 🙂
  • 43 comments, oh wow! (I guess nearly half of them were me responding though)
  • even though I was away on vacation for a few days… it wasn’t two weeks, so scheduling in advance worked fine
  • I’m not sick of posting, so I might continue for a bit, but latest mid-September I’ll have to take some time off anyway
PS: Blaugust has come to an end and this is my thirty-first post – thank you Belghast and all participants.

This was Blaugust Reborn 2018 Read More »

Still motivated I guess

This week’s theme is “Staying Motivated Week” and that’s kinda bad for me, because I’m still 100% motivated, I’m just content-starved 😛
I know this blog is a mix of me journalling my exploits in games, sometimes bragging about my meager achievements, and some random rambling – but as you noticed this is hardly a blog about my life outside of gaming – I wrote such a blog for years, elsewhere. Maybe it’s refreshing to just being able to focus on one (very broad) topic, maybe it has to do with not posting with my real name. To be fair I’d say I’m still telling friends on IRC and Discord and Messengers enough of my daily life that I could as well be still blogging. That would at least provide ample material for a daily post, not just for a month, but longer. I really like what Belghast is doing – although it’s not daily daily anymore, to me that’s still one of the most high-frequency blogs I know, but I didn’t run the number, maybe Syp and Wilhelm are close or even ahead. I’m checking their feeds daily if I have time, and in the winter, when not commuting by bike, those 3 are probably my first blogs to check. For once the time zones are not all bad, because I can read their “yesterday” post on my morning commute. But just because I’ve read them for years that doesn’t mean they’re exclusive. This Blaugust I’ve noticed a few people I’ll definitely put on my daily list – and a ton of others that will move to my regular “Games” category. Also time and time again I find it fascinating that there are some people I can have awesome discussions on Discord but their writing style and/or topics just don’t fit me well, sorry folks – I’m nearly as finicky with blogs as I am with podcasts, so please don’t take it personally.
Anyway, Blaugust went very well and now it’s just the home stretch of four days. I’m not sure if it was mostly “I’m taking up this challenge and want to finish with the Rainbow Diamond Award” or, more likely, the Discord was awesome and everyone was chiming in, asking questions, answering questions, and talking about life, the universe, and everything (wow, that was an oxford comma’d oxford comma sentence, is this even legal?).
 
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my twenty-seventh post.

Still motivated I guess Read More »

Never thought I’d do that

“Just booked a short holiday and the first thought was: argh, have to schedule 4 posts!” as I wrote on Discord last night – so while I (for the first time in my 18+ years of sporadic blogging) made a real effort to prepare posts during an absence from my computer… I didn’t prepare something for today.
Also kinda sucks if it’s your last day at work before a short 1 week holiday and you got so much to do you don’t get to play much. Or maybe because you pre-wrote 3 blog posts… I guess I even at one point posted Blaugust is a bad time for continuous blogging for me because I tend to leave the country for at least a week every year. Only a few days this time though, and it only came together early this week, no planning months before.
I’m playing my Operative (Imperial Agent) right now, trying to get him to 70 asap. I needed to finish Yavin 4 (having finished Rishi yesterday) but – and I might be wrong – you can only do certain Weekly quests once per account, at least I couldn’t do Yavin twice when I tried, a few weeks ago. So I first had to do this on my Bounty Hunter (need to use up those Command Level XP boosts, and really, really want to reach CL 300 this month). Also did Black Hole on her, as it counts towards the weekly Conquest and then threw in a quick 15mins of Ziost. Didn’t I just say I had no time to play? Well it’s past 1 am already. So my Operative s 68 now and ready to start either Oricon, Ziost, or KotFE – I guess I’ll do Ziost to unlock the dailies first (as usual) and I think I never did Oricon – but I’ll hopefully be Level 70 by the time I finish Ziost (for the 5th? time?) and then I’ll probably switch to another character again – I don’t really enjoy this class, although the class story from 1-50 was kinda neat.
I also started a Sith Marauder in the last few days, finished Dromund Kaas and sitting at Level 20. Part of my ongoing project to a) have one of every advanced class at 50 or more and b) experience the same story line with a character of the other gender. So far I had done a female Jedi Shadow (after a male Sage) and now a female Marauder (after a male Juggernaut). Still a lot to do.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my twenty-second post. And I have no shame to backdate it 2h – this counts for yesterday because I’m still awake.

Never thought I’d do that Read More »

Blaugust Reborn point five

Half of the month is over and so far I managed to post daily. Most days it was easy, but I’m in a phase of playing games on a daily basis, which is not the norm.
Some days I was really glad I had a handful of drafts prepared, some days had filler posts I’d never make without the daily challenge I set for myself. At least I never forgot to post (had one scheduling fail where I typo’d the day, doh), but I posted just after midnight a few times before I went to bed. I dated those back to 23:59, that’s the amount of slack I’m allowing myself. Ald wrote something similar and I agree, I won’t force myself to post after August and be back to a highly irregular schedule.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my seventeenth post.
PPS: I typed this on my phone on the subway and it’s outrageous how much better autocomplete is in English over German on Android.

Blaugust Reborn point five Read More »

My gaming history

This week is Get to Know Each Other Week at Blaugust, and I had this page draft I wanted to publish for a while, so I just did that. Because it’s nearly midnight, I got in some gaming time today, but overall got up too early, came home too late and so I’m posting a draft, still going strong with one post per day 🙂
This page called Gaming History (which I will not reproduce here) shows a list of games I played and that I either think worth mentioning at the time, or which just had such a big impact that I wanted to write down when I started playing them (not necessarily when I stoppped).
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my ninth post.

My gaming history Read More »

Of dilemmas and other things

Came in later for work today because I had to run some errands in the morning, took a longer lunch break and then stayed an hour longer to finish something. That’s why I got out only just before 20:00 and that’s when the shops close. I had originally planned to grab something on the way home, but I wasn’t too hungry anyway so I skipped dinner.
That’s not the dilemma though, it’s that there’s like 50 new blog posts to read because all the Blaugust participants are eagerly writing. Reading blog posts takes time. That means I don’t really have time to play games tonight I guess (did half an hour of Dead Cells and then gave up for the night again), and so I have nothing to write about. What a dilemma. #firstworldproblems
But this week is Topic Brainstorming Week and I guess that’s not my cup of tea anyway. I wouldn’t say I’m 100% not creative, but I’m usually reacting instead of acting when writing things. I’m good at correcting stuff (short things and longer things like theses), I’m not good at producing any kind of text that’s not stream-of-consciousness blogging or chiming in on a topic with an opinion. And boy do I have opinions about stuff 🙂
At least I managed to write a proper post for tomorrow already, because I won’t be home and so far I don’t want to break my streak.
PS: Blaugust has started and this is my second post.

Of dilemmas and other things Read More »

Blaugust – Keep up with the news via RSS

People are different, so of course browsing habits are different as well, some preferably use their smart phones (I don’t), some use laptops or desktop machines. I suppose people playing video games are still mostly in the last camp although I’ve seen some impressive gaming laptops recently. But I digress, some people have a list of links to blogs they click through daily or weekly, some just type in the URLs, but many people use so-called RSS-Feeds to keep up with new posts on various websites, very often blogs.
To quote Wikipedia:

RSS (Rich Site Summary; originally RDF Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication) is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format.

There are several RSS readers for desktop and mobile use, and a lot of websites that do this, for example Feedbin or Feedly or many others. I use Tiny Tiny RSS that I host on my own server.
Anyway, should you be interested in following all the participants of Blaugust Reborn this year, I created an OPML file (explanation) that you should be able to import into your feed-reader of choice. I will try to update it every few days at least, so you might want to add the latest participants manually. There’s also a plain TXT with the feeds.
If this doesn’t make sense at all, feel free to hit me up on Discord or comment for further explanation and how I can persuade you to love RSS 🙂

Blaugust – Keep up with the news via RSS Read More »