I look forward to Blaugust every year. It’s a chance to see bloggers at their best and most numerous. It’s a chance, also, to rise to the occasion and stake out a claim to a small part of the gaming blogosphere, maybe find some new blogs to read and new friends to enjoy.
I can’t say that really happened with me this year. I wanted to go through my PS2 game backlog and write about these old classics, and I did try, BUT… it takes a long time to play these games and the one game I did do this on, for Pryzm, really felt like I was putting in a lot of work for very little return from Blaugust. And, in fact, it got no reaction. Which is usual, for me.
I feel like I am out of step with the gaming community, or at least that part of it that participates in Blaugust. As a method to get new readers, it’s a bust. My most popular posts tend to be fairly old, with my #1 being how to cheat at Wordle, etc. My only Blaugust post to receive any notable views was the one on Base44, the “vibe coding” application and game generator. Granted, that was a fun post to write.
I also failed at interacting with other people on their blogs. I got behind on posting my posts to the Blaugust Discord and then just gave up entirely, and I stopped looking at other people’s blogs unless they showed up in my Gamepad or BlueSky feed, when I would read and comment on them if I thought I could contribute. I did end up commenting more often on Massively OP than I usually do, but that was very much not a Blaugust thing.
I’ve been very stressed in my real life. I feel I have too many things going on, too many demands on my free time. There’s so much I want to do, and I don’t feel I really leave myself to do any of them, certainly none of them very well. I am learning the lyre harp and that takes some practice, along with continuing the mandolin practice. I’m recording myself with Garage Band and uploading that to Suno for it to turn my poor pickings into music.
Suno tells me that the kind of music I enjoy isn’t popular, either. Their front page is filled with fake rap and pages upon pages of EDM techno stuff. I’ve listened to some of it and some of it isn’t bad, there’s just so much of it. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else really focusing on Irish folk dance music; the little I find is “but… what if techno?”
Not many people seem to be into in-person miniatures skirmish gaming, either. But that’s fine. It’s fun to get out and meet new people and have some fun every couple of weeks, even for an introvert like myself.
I was watching Crowdsurfing the other day, and noticed there were a lot of video games getting board game adaptations these days – Assassin’s Creed, Risk of Rain, Slay the Spire and so many, many more. Hollow Knight had a really cool one. It goes in the other direction, too – Gloomhaven has a decent video game, and of course, all the old classic videogames have thousands of implementations. Monopoly GO! is super popular for some reason…
Anyway, what if someone took Malifaux and made it into a fighting game?
You could have a random point-scoring ability as the “strategy” randomly chosen for each round – Plant Explosives in the picture above. Each player would have a special combo that would be chosen in secret as their point-scoring scheme. I think it would be cool to bring Malifaux and it’s deep story, lore and characters to the wider world. Have other ways to play it. (Wyrd Games, makers of Malifaux, do have the TTRPG version of it already).
Anyway, I had this vision of chibi versions of the Malifaux characters from another recent post that tied into this, but I really wanted to get all of the Arcanist faction together. ChatGPT cannot generate this, so I had to get every character nailed down, generate them in the poses, composite it all together, and that was the header image – the kids of the Arcanists putting on a show.
Folks don’t like AI art or music much, so I couldn’t really write about that too much. This was art that never would have existed (A), and (B) if AI can draw better than an artist, that artist had better re-examine what they’re doing. AI is terrible at art. Every time I asked it to correct something, it would screw up something else. Every single one of those chibis are off model, but in the end I just went with the closest to the mark.
Also, I have nobody to play music with, so this is my chance to hear what it would sound like if I were part of a band, since I am playing one of the parts on a real live instrument. Suno just surrounds me with a band.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Dune Awakening, too, and I will probably write more about that in the coming days. The new event is kind of annoying.
So: I’ll end this here. I do apologize for sucking at Blaugust. I was hoping to really dive deep into retro gaming and then I lost my enthusiasm for it. After that, I had no plan greater than play Dune: Awakening and catch up on seasons of Taskmaster UK. Series, sorry. Serieses.