Welcome to Blaugust!
Every year, Belghast tries to revive those halcyon days when blogs were relevant to the world of games. It’s all video and podcasts now. The thing about video is that it isn’t really very searchable — same with podcasts. If you want a bit of info, you’re not going to find it in a video. If you just want to skim something, you’re not going to find it in video.
Blogging, though — blogging is cheap and easy. You don’t need special equipment — well, no more special than what you have in front of you right now. You don’t need to have anything but something to say, and you can say whatever you want. Just write down some words, doesn’t matter if they’re pro or not and actually, it’s better if they aren’t. Weird, but one of the best bloggers I ever read wrote raw and uncensored about the games he played and the life he led and I read every word he wrote and asked for more. He dipped out before the Great Twitter Exodus and I don’t know what happened to him.
That’s the problem with writing on ephemeral platforms like Twitter and even Mastodon; your words come and go. Search engines might find them for awhile, but in most cases, what you write leaves an impression for only a little while.
Blogging is forever. What you write down today, anyone can read at any time in the future — even you. I started blogging in…. June of 2005. More than 18 years ago. And I can go back and relive what I was doing back then, which was, apparently, writing comics for my EverQuest guild, Crimson Eternity, chronicling our raids.
I’ve taken breaks now and again, some breaks lasting for years. On one of those breaks, I was disconnected enough from blogging that I lost my blog — and worse, lost the domain name, which has now been stolen from me twice. (This second time, I almost got it back… but the domain registrar noticed my interest and auctioned it off for more money than I was willing to pay). And so here I am, with technically my third blog (my first one was an experiment way back in the 90s, lost to time now). I came back from that years long blogging break to participate in Blaugust, and I haven’t missed one yet.
If you’re stuck on what to blog, it’s super simple, really. If you’re a gamer, what are you playing? What did you just finish playing? What did you think about it?
Read comics? Which ones? Heck, I can’t keep the plots straight to them. Let me know.
TV shows? Movies? Music? You can blog about anything. Writing is as easy as thinking of someone you know who would love to hear from you, and then write to them. Vonnegut always claimed he wrote for an audience of one — his sister. He knew what she liked.
Me? I write for you, the person who is reading this. You might be one of my friends from Discord, or Ex-Twitter, or Mastodon, or from games I play, or you may even be me in ten years. Weirder things have happened. I read what I wrote in years past and I remember games and people I haven’t thought about in years, and I always remember the good times — gaming together, or commenting on each others’ blogs, or just enjoying what I now know was a simpler time before things really starting setting fire to the dumpster.
This is just an intro post, so I’ll leave it there. I do have some themed posts I want to do this month, but the idea isn’t big enough for a month of posts, so I’ll get to that later.
Link me your blog post. I’ll definitely visit and say hello.
Wow. I just checked the availabilty of the old domain name and it’s going for over £3k. But you could have it with a .net or ,org for less than £10. .co.uk is even less than that. Apparently the restrictions on use for all of these no longer exist so anyone can use them. I don’t know if those domains are more expensive to maintain.
Ironically, your interest has presumably driven the .com version up to a price where no-one is ever going to buy it.
Yes, that was it exactly. When the first spammer grabbed it, he wanted $250 from me for it. I said no. So he eventually lost interest and let it expire. GoDaddy had it for sale then, and when I went to claim it, they sent it to auction instead. I signed up on their auction site immediately and bid on it. Then someone else bid on it, then I bid on it again, and then some scammers raised it into the stratosphere.
I read later that showing any interest at all at any time before five minutes before the auction is up ruins your chance of getting a domain.
I am disgusted with the whole thing.