Blaugust

How long has it been? It’s been so long that I forgot how to log in to the blog. How long has it been? It’s been so long that I forgot I changed the theme. How long has it been? Well, long enough. I got back into blogging a bit over a year ago because of Belghast’s vast network of blog-friends. I always struggle with blogging because it takes a lot of time, and I don’t really have any insights into gaming. I’m just… a gamer, and old enough that I can raise my kids to be gamers and old enough that my grandchildren are gamers. I’m at the place where I’m not old enough to be a boomer but not young enough to be anything else. I’ve never felt I really fit in to any group or demographic; I just lurk at the edges. ...

Magi over at Indicator was tagged by a “Mystery Blogger”, and like any good virus, he went on to infect at a “R” value of 10 other bloggers, including me. I know all this cool science virus fact stuff because we are in a pandemic. Yay for the learning. The award was created by a blogger named “Okoto Enigma”. Mentioning the tagger and the creator are two of the Mystery Blogger Award rules. There’s a bunch of other rules that I’m not going to follow because I want to get to the fun stuff. You can read all about them at Magi’s post or Okoto’s original post. ...

This is the last Blaugust Promptapalooza post for this year! It’s my first one, and I really feel badly that I missed all the previous ones. I loved some of the prompts, didn’t like some of the others, and there were some I just couldn’t think of anything to say. I learned a lot from reading others’ posts and met some new friends – yeah, I know that’s cliche, but even cliches can be true. ...

I thought and thought and thought about what I would want to use as the header image to this post. Communities… I was watching the game dev documentary on Netflix last night and when Richard Garriot’s segment came up, I remembered that glorious day so long ago when the Ultima Online community came together to assassinate his avatar, Lord British, on the day of that MMO’s opening. Community – can’t live with them and can’t… um, can’t get fooled again. ...

Wow. I’d hate to be in the shoes of UltrViolet of Endgame Viable, who has the unenviable task of asking the question: What are you looking forward to the most over the course of the next year? … because this year has been a dumpster fire. Not for gaming; the pandemic has been great for gaming, with people stuck inside all the time. But for everything else. I’m ready for 2020 to be over. 2021 could be even worse. Although some people I know have had Covid, none of them has died. Everyone in my family was either able to work from home or were an essential employee, so we were able to keep our jobs. Tropical Storm Isaias cost us hundreds of dollars of food, but we were okay. ...

I don’t even know if that title makes any sense. Anyway. A bunch of the prompts from the past week have dealt, in some way, with content creation. A lot of people have disagreed with my interpretation of that task as a method of drawing people to a website for the purpose of monetizing them in some way and getting your message and your content seen by those who’d enjoy seeing it. ...

When I saw what Telwyn of Gaming Sans Frontières had for a Blaugust writing prompt, I knew exactly what the answer would be: What piece/s of technology would you have the hardest time living without? And I can answer that because I just recently had to live it. Earlier this month, Hurricane Isaias menaced the entire east coast of the United States without ever really doing much damage, and everyone from Florida to North Carolina breathed sighs of relief. But it was an arrow that was pointed right at New England. It came barreling through Connecticut and dropped tornadoes and trees alike through its rampage. Most of Connecticut was without power for at least awhile; my neighborhood was without power for five days. ...

I thought I was so incredibly original when I started using the tag #loveinatimeofcorona on all my Instagram posts back at the beginning of the pandemic. Now I see it everywhere. And I saw it everywhere on Instagram, too. But now it’s everywhere. The header image was captured from a video by Dr. Panda called “ ”. It’s a really good and informational video explaining the pandemic and its origins to children. ...

“Content creation” – it’s one of those words like “influencer” or “social media” that seem vague but have come to have very specific definitions in modern times. Content creation, as I understand it, is stuff generated to be ranked highly in search engines in order to entice people to follow it to your website, at which point they will be monetized and you will eventually get paid. Today’s writing prompt, from Joar’s Warcraft Alt Addiction, is: ...

I at first didn’t want to write anything about fear, the topic of the first Blaugust Promptapalooza prompt. I’d much rather talk about the second one, which was easy, and all prepared. But, I came into this Blaugust thing determined to write a post for each writing prompt. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean I get to skip each. The things that are hard, are the things on which I should focus. ...