Welcome to Blaugust, 2024!

Without Blaugust, this blog would not even exist. I’d blogged for a long time, but then grew discouraged, convinced nobody was reading the blog, tapered off and quit entirely. I was so checked out that someone stole my old domain from me and I didn’t even notice until I suddenly wanted to look up something and found my blog gone.

I still had the data. But the domain was gone.

It’s been pretty fun watching my old blog’s domain be bought by scammer after scammer, let lie fallow for a time, then be sold to another scammer for over $1K, which was pretty amazing. I tried to grab it when it went for sale, but it went for way more than I could afford.

So, that’s the power of blogging. Work hard, write a lot, and soon you, too, can have a domain worth real money to someone else.

So, usually each Blaugust, I have a theme to follow through the month. I thought I might work through my retro game backlog, one title a day, through the month.

There’s a couple of problems with this. The big one is that I simply cannot play a game every day in enough detail to write about it, and I don’t have that kind of time, either. I envy the people who seem to have whole days free to play and write about games, but that ain’t me.

Secondly, based on the super sekrit hidden tracker I wrote, I can tell that nobody reads articles about retro games. My hope was always in the “long tail”, that someone searching about it might stumble upon my blog, but that’s not the correct approach.

The correct approach would be to become a streamer. Streaming is how people discover new games these days, or learn about old games. I do sometimes stream and bring the good bits over to YouTube, but I’m not a “streamer”. I share a home office with another gamer and there’s usually a lot of ambient noise and it’s just not great.

So, I’m going in without a net. Like last year, it will be whatever occurs to me to write about. It will probably usually mostly be game related. It might be MMOs, it might be board games, might be retro games, maybe something else entirely.

I can only try my best and hope that you enjoy what I write.

Tomorrow’s blog post will be about Palworld’s Sakurajima update. Friday’s will be about our adventures in Valheim’s Ashlands. And then maybe we’ll get some RPGs in. There’s also going to be a scene from my new play, “Waiting for Mario”. Toward the end of the month, there is Retro World Expo, and then we’re off to California over Labor Day, so we’ll see what I can post on the road 🙂