I can tell from the whopping two comments on my Astellia Online impressions post that interest in this new MMORPG is simply through the roof. (Actually most people probably still haven’t even heard of it, and I wouldn’t have either if it weren’t for a random MassivelyOP article here or there.) The theme of those two comments was something like, “They’ve got to be crazy if they think anyone is going to pay $30 for an unknown Eastern game. (785 words.)

Yesterday I decided to roll the dice and bought the $30 standard buy-to-play edition of Astellia Online. I’ve heard that it’s “okay.” But I like the idea of paying a modest fee and having essentially lifetime access to the game. (Its lifetime, not mine, probably.) It's a nice-looking game if nothing else. I paid $30 for Black Desert Online back when it came out, and I haven’t regretted that choice. I only played for a month or so, and haven’t really touched it since, but I appreciate that I can still log in whenever I want to look at it. (923 words.)

I learned something yesterday that isn’t getting the attention that it deserves, so I thought I’d write a blog post about it. Are you sitting down? This is really amazing, so make sure you’re sitting down. You can now change the quest text font size in Lord of the Rings Online. I searched my MMO News feeds to find the all-caps headlines shouting this from the rooftops, but I didn’t find any. (604 words.)

I don’t know what we’re calling this Icebrood Saga thing. Is it Living World Season 5? Or is it something else entirely? I don’t know. I’ve seen people calling it Season 5 so that’s probably the label that will stick in the community. It’s a lot easier than “Icebrood Saga.” (I’m certainly not going to be abbreviating it “IS” because I don’t particularly want a bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists showing up on my web site. (1594 words.)

Even though ArenaNet is dead to me and I almost never actually enjoy playing Guild Wars 2, I decided to log in again. I’ve been hearing some good things about the new Icebrood Saga thingy, so I wanted to try it out. It’s free, after all. That’s the best thing about new content in Guild Wars 2 by far. Also it’s kind of a tradition at this point that I record my gameplay of these Living World episodes. (1425 words.)

I’m back in a “I don’t really have anything to say” blogging mood. I’ve played maybe, possibly, two hours of games in the last week. I played a little bit more of Max Payne 3, and I logged into World of Warcraft for about 20 minutes to check something. I logged in to check that a wonderful discovery someone made in Classic is, in fact, right there in Retail as well. (1021 words.)

The inevitable side effect of rediscovering an easy way to listen to new music is the rediscovery of my love to create new music. I’ve been largely stagnant as a musician since around 2000, for various reasons. It’s an extremely time-consuming hobby, at least the way I approach it. Which reminds me, Bhagpuss made me chuckle recently when he wrote: Hobbies settle people. They make life not just bearable but worth looking forward to. (1640 words.)

This one’s about Hugo, the static site generator. I’ve seen references to it all over the place during this ongoing research project. (Also Jekyll.) It seems to be popular among programmers, for reasons that should become obvious as I describe it below. A static site generator is a tool that takes a series of input files, usually plain text files, and turns them into a big directory of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files. (1673 words.)

My current thinking is that I should be looking into two distinct blogging platforms. One for the “live” blog, the most recent stuff, where people can theoretically interact and leave comments on a daily basis, and consume an RSS feed. The second platform would be for the “archives:” Mainly static pages of older posts for reference, without much of any interactivity. Regardless of how I proceed with the “live” blog, the idea of a “static site generator” for the older archives appeals to me, or one of the Markdown-based platforms I’ve previously mentioned. (1251 words.)

Welp it’s happened. Now that Blaugust is over, there’s nothing to write about anymore. :) I stumbled upon an episode of Spotify - Landmark on YouTube and sat down to watch the whole thing. It reminded me of two things: Tears For Fears is one of my favorite 80s bands, and a band from which I’ve never bought any of their music. Songs From The Big Chair is peak “huge 80s sound” which I miss from an audio engineering perspective, and I have a great appreciation for the simplicity and precision of the production in that album. (1369 words.)

The Blog Here I present the reason you should never pay attention to statistics when blogging. My views actually went down during Blaugust 2018, and went down even more during Blaugust 2019. Views and Visitors I also offer this chart as evidence that the “you have to blog every day to build an audience” advice is completely obsolete. Blogging every day is strictly for fun and/or personal growth. Building an audience is accomplished by networking, and is largely unrelated to the content you produce. (641 words.)

Writing a blog post every day is not new for me, although the exact process I used this year was new. But livestreaming every day for a month is definitely new to me. I have livestreamed before, but most of my experiments were back in 2015 before Twitch Culture became, ahem, that thing it is now. I also never made any attempt to impose any discipline on myself. I was curious how I would find the process of streaming every day. (855 words.)

Congratulations everyone on the completion of another Blaugust! Belghast put together another fantastic event, and I do not envy him now having to compile the results. :) This is the first of my posts where I evaluate my Blaugust performance as part of the Lessons Learned week. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote last year but I recall I wrote a lot, so this year I’m going to try to avoid that. (966 words.)

For what will probably be the last game in the Steam Backlog Bonanza, the 35th one on the list, I played a shooter called Serious Sam Fusion 2017 (beta). I have no idea how I got this game. I have a bunch of Serious Sam games, but I don’t remember buying any of them, and since Blaugust is over now I don’t particularly feel like doing the work to look it up. (488 words.)

Since my production pipeline is offset by a day, this should be my 31st and last “official” Blaugust post. However I’m still going to play at least one last game today on the 31st as well, which will get a blog post tomorrow. Yesterday for the 34th day of the Steam Backlog Bonanza, I returned to Rapture with BioShock 2 Remastered. This is a game I’ve owned since 2010, but never played until now. (526 words.)