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.
I don’t think you suck at Blaugust. 🙂 You might not have hit your own personal goals, but the ‘event’ is and has always been ‘whatever you can manage’ and life being what it is – welp. The fact you wrote at all is a big win.
I know I don’t often comment, but I do enjoy reading most of your stuff. ^^
Well, you know my debt to you can’t be measured; it was you who inspired me to begin blogging 🙂
I’m going to open by saying I realy think you might have some imposter syndrome issues running in the background here. I’ve been reading gaming blogs for getting on for twenty years now and writing one for almost fifteen and I have my own pantheon of Great Gaming Bloggers, in which you are and have always been very close to the top. West Karana was an inspiration and a great loss when it vanished and Chasing Dings has been a joy since you returned. Also the bridge blog was great, too! Honestly, there are very, very few other bloggers in the ‘sphere who can match either your range or your depth of experience and certainly very few who can express themselves so clearly and evocatively.
On commenting, something I never really mention but which has always been true is that I deliberately refrain from commenting on certain, favorite blogs because almost everything posted there is worthy of a comment and I’m slightly concerned that my constant commenting will start to feel unwelcome. I know this can happen because before I had my own blog, I did exactly that on a couple of blogs and in both cases the bloggers in question got so irritated they eventually blocked me from commenting. Of course, I was a lot more combative then! So you can generally assume that I always have something to say about everything you post (Possibly excepting the ones on coding, which I don’t generally understand.) even if I haven’t actually said it.
On the question of topics, I find the Malifaux posts absolutely fascinating. I really look forward to them. I still don’t begin to understand it but it’s a rich and nuanced world and I would love to see it turned into a video game. Presumably turn-based, which would mean I could actually play it. I’ll have to look into getting a copy of the TTRPG rules, not to play but just to read them so maybe I might understand what’s going on a little.
This is already a long comment, so I won’t go into the Suno/AI content in as much detail as I could but anything you want to write about either would be very welcome. AI is so divisive but in this part of the blogosphere there are at least half a dozen regular users and advocates for its constructive uses and several more who like to test it to destruction, so it’s not like *everyone* hates to hear about it. I think there are genuine issues over the ethics of the way it was originally constructed and more so on the way it’s being forced into the digital environment but in terms of creativity it’s a tool and a very useful one. When guided by a human hand and mind, it can produce results of worth and to dismiss that is just like all the previous dismissals of new ways of making things that always happen when anything turns up that seems to allow “the wrong people” to make art. There’s a LOT of vested interest gatekeeping going on, in other words.
As for Suno as a platform for displaying the work itself… pfah! Only yesterday I was wishing they’d have a version that was purely creative, separate from the supremely irritating gameified ecology they’re trying to foster. If and when I share what I’ve been doing, it will not be on Suno itself, which would be like handing out fliers to a basson recital at a death metal gig. Not that there’s much death metal at Suno, or bassooning… just EDM wall to wall.
The dirty secret about AI is that you can use it to make *exactly* the art you desire. If you don’t have that art inside you, or if you can already make it without AI, then it’s of little value but if you do and can’t then it’s revelatory. The songs I’ve made this year are some of my favorites ever and I’ve been obsessed with music all my life. I could go on but I’ll stop, a comment thread not really being the place for a mission statement…
“Suck at Blaugust”? Pshaw! Poppycock, I say!
Pure quantity: I just looked at your monthly archives: 17 posts for August, and under 10 posts for each of the previous four or five months. That means you doubled your output for the month- congratulations!
You have a point about Blaugust being what you put into it. But you had other things that occupied your attention, and to my thinking there is nothing wrong with that. Blogging is (IMO) about life; life should not be about blogging, unless it is your main source of income or something.
Obviously there are people who enjoy your blog. And hopefully you enjoy writing it: I would propose that your joy in writing is the more important factor.
Oh, that is the take-away, and I am trying to write more. But yeah, a lot of it is paralysis; does anyone want to read about these things or am I just doing it for myself? I think, in the end, to continue, it has to be for myself and I hope other people come along.
I also had a boating accident and got injured! That put a roadblock in for a little. And, I was hoping to get the Analogue 3D N64 clone this month and go through the Nintendo 64 games I’ve been collecting, but THAT got delayed, so pretty much: Analogue’s fault…
Thanks for the comment!
Malifaux’s TTRPG is called “Through the Breach”, brief description here that also includes the background of TtB and Malifaux (and also The Other Side, their WH40K-inspired system). https://www.wyrd-games.net/through-the-breach
All the games use a regular deck of cards called the Fate Deck to resolve things instead of dice. Most Malifaux players use specially themed Fate Decks, but some just use regular cards.
As someone who is not an artist, I don’t feel I can really tell an artist how they should feel about text-to-image generators. I know, so far as coding, something LLMs are supposed to be good at, that they are terrible at coding. I was initially worried about programming as a profession, but at the moment — if a mindless machine can do your job better than you can, maybe it should. Coding being only a small part of most programmer’s jobs.
Suno, well, yeah. I mostly like the music I make there because I imagine myself in a band playing it. I was in an Irish contradance band once; I loved it so much. The band broke up, with about half the band reforming to play as an old time music band which didn’t require as many, or any, Irish flutes and whistles, and so I was dumped. It hurt, but I understood. Here’s their current incarnation on Facebook –> https://www.facebook.com/people/The-Crabapples/100069923915603/
That’s Bob Silberstein on the mandolin, and he’s the one who got me to learn to play one. Eventually. Many years later.
Anyway, comment all you like. I love reading your blog (on which I should also comment more) and am glad you read mine.