The Ancient Gaming Noob
Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?Wilhelm Arcturus
And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here? I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then. We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal. I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I st
17. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

Blaugust and Wondering If Blogging is Dead?

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

17. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

And, if it is dead, what I am still doing here?

I jumped into blogging back towards the end of 2006 when the popularity of the medium was, if not at its peak, certainly close to it… though some where saying it was already past its prime by then.

We were probably long beyond the point where having a blog made you special in any way, and getting past where blogging about a topic might get you a career move or a book deal. I mean Julia & Julie was already a book (and later a movie) before I started blogging (though that was a blog on Salon, so perhaps not representative of the medium), as was that one about the life of being a waiter and a few others.

And while blogging being a more common practice makes it harder to be noticed and called out as special, it didn’t mean the medium was dead. And I wasn’t looking for a career move out of blogging in any case. As documented, I already managed that with a BBS back in the early 90s and by the time I started a blog I had a career and a position that paid better than any equivalent in video games… plus a family and a mortgage that would be difficult to sustain had I any talent in video game development.

So the medium was perhaps dead by the time I started in the sense of being an easy way to be discovered as a stepping stone to something else, though that was not entirely uncommon for some time after I started.

Still, it was a heady time. There were lots of blogs around no matter what topic you were delving into and more showed up every day. I jumped into the MMORPG sub-genre zone, the state of which was immortalized by Michael Zenke as he took the 2007 XKCD online communities graphic and made a little map of our corner of the blogosphere. Look at us.

The community of old

Some of those site persist. Heartless still posts and Raph still keeps his blog going. A few still stand, like Kill Ten Rats and Terra Nova, but get no updates. Others are around, but on different mediums. Lum, perhaps the ur MMO blogger, left behind the many iterations of Broken Toys and now has a substack or something like it… I don’t know, Substack had a nazi problem at one point and I don’t remember where he landed… while Damion Schubert of Zen of Design mostly trolls people on Twitter with bad opinions about Star Wars.

More though are just memories, shadows on the Internet Archive. Long was the reach of VirginWorlds and its podcast at one time, but now the site stands no more.

During that era being an MMO blogger of any quality and sufficient quantity could push you into the belief that you might actual be relevant that to the genre, that your opinions might matter. They didn’t, but community managers, always looking for some way to escape the inbred echo chamber that official forums tend to become, seemed keen to pay bloggers some attention now and then if only to break up the perpetual complaining of their site regulars.

Brent from VirginWorlds got a card

People could afford to be picky. You could take a stand, take a side, champion a cause or a very narrow point of view and get a following. I got kicked out of the EVE Blog Pack for not being sufficiently devoted to the topic. (Also, JFC there is a kind comment from Gevlon on the post at that link. That belongs in a museum!) Dedicated WoW bloggers would not talk to me because I wrote about other games. We argued with each other. SynCaine and I used to have at each other in what became known as the Friday Blog wars. I was nearly part of a holy war because I was insufficiently effusive about Warhammer Online, only to have most everybody dump the title and walk away a couple months later.

It was a happy and chaotic time and, not coincidentally, the peak era for Google Reader, the handy, easy to use, free RSS feed reader that Google killed in 2013 because they wanted everybody to use Google+ instead… and then Google+ was so flawed that they killed that too.

Sure, new venues show up. There were podcasts, and for a while podcasters were all the rage, taking the limelight from all but the most famous bloggers. And then there was Facebook and YouTube and Twitter to contend with, and even Tumblr seemed to be a thing… until Verizon bought that and screwed it up.

XKCD, again on the pulse of the internet, had a comic about that too!

But all of those got along pretty well. I appeared on quite a few podcasts, syndicated my blog feed to Facebook, made some YouTube videos, and even did things on Tumblr. I just got my 11 year badge on my Tumblr account in June.

Then came Twitch, and I kind of want to blame the demise of blogs on that. Certainly if we look at the annual page views for my blog for all the full years from 2007 to 2023, things start to go down hill not too long after Twitch becomes a thing in 2011.

Page view for TAGN by year

I mean look at that line. It feels like the body blow of Twitch and the demise of Google Reader conspired against me, to mix a metaphor.

And I am especially prickly about Twitch because it now dominates the attention of community managers, still keen to escape their self contained forum hell and whatever sub-reddits they are being assailed from. The peak of my ire remains the EVE Vegas 2018 where I gave a presentation about the EVE Online blogging community and the value of the written word in recording the vibrant history of the game… and they put my presentation up against the Stream Fleet broadcast, which meant about six people sat and tolerated my plea… honestly, I should have bought them all a cocktail for enduring me… while literally everybody else, all CCP team members included, went to the Twitch event.

My sole recorded contribution to the discourse is this meme.

Highlight of my Presentation

Okay, there were a few more people than that. But still, as a metaphor for the state of blogging in the eyes of the community team it was unparalleled in its poignancy.

And that is certainly one way to look at things. The written word out maneuvered by a bunch of shallow attention seekers like Asmongold, who probably couldn’t string together three coherent sentences about a day at the zoo without checking to see which animals were trending and should be featured in his latest tirade against the people who dumbed down zoos so that they are no fun anymore.

Or, you know… maybe it is my topic of choice.

I mean, if you look at the arc of my so-called popularity, it might very well describe the ascendancy of MMORPGs and their eventual fall from the top of the food chain.

I mean, WoW hasn’t been on fire since the run up to Cataclysm and has felt the pinch of declining subscribers since Warlords of Draenor, which is when the panic really set in down in Anaheim. Star Wars: The Old Republic was in some ways the last gasp attempt to get an old school subscription model expansions and so on MMORPG off the ground… and it had to go free to play.

If you go look at EVE Offline, the site that tracks the New Eden online user count and has done so for ages now, you will see that the peak of online concurrence was in May of 2013, when 65,303 accounts were logged into the game. That was before free to play, the peak of EVE Online’s paid popularity.

Maybe in my pursuit of the same topic over and over again for 18 years I have ended up in an internet backwater, no longer of interest to any sort of mainstream audience. Maybe it is merely MMO blogging that is dead.

Or maybe it is the written word, or the long form written word that has fallen out of favor… not that I would call what I do “long form” in a world where Stephen King exists. Magazines are dead, newspapers are dead, books are not dead but not as popular, and we like to get our daily doses of news and gossip in the short little squirts of social media.

Maybe it is the words… or the quantity of words? Maybe I would be more popular if I just kept to 140 or 280 or 500 or however many words are the limit of the modern attention span.

Should I eschew words and just do pictures? Take the ultimate path against the trend against reading?

No, that can’t be it. I literally have another blog that is just pictures and it isn’t even a tenth as popular as this, my bloviation platform. Though, then again, it is pictures from an MMO… a pretty, spaceship MMO, but an MMO all the same and those aren’t so popular any more as noted above.

Of course, the real question at the heart of this is not whether or not blogging is dead, but whether or not it matters.

I have said on a number of occasions that I would keep doing what I am doing, cranking out an excess of words on the trivial or obscure twists of fate and business in a niche sub-genre of the PC gaming market even if I had no readers.

I am not sure that is 100% true. Zero readers might be too much quiet. But I’ve kept going at the same pace… hell, an increased pace if words per post are any measure… even as readership has declined. For a brief peak period I could count on as many as 2,500 page views in a day on a regular basis. Now I’m happy if the number breaks 500, and I suspect that I would continue to cater to an audience that added up to just 100 page views a day, even if most of them were comment bots.

The writing isn’t the joy… the writing is work and I often stare at my drafts folder and say, “Nah, not ready to finish that one. That one is for another day… or maybe never.” Then suddenly something will come up and I will be inspired and I will crank out 500 or a thousand words in a quick burst of energy, a flurry of words and typos flooding the screen, and I will press the Publish button and off it will go, another post done.

And there is the pleasure, the having written. The ability to go back and filter through what happened a year ago, five years ago, and so on, the act of going back and reading something you wrote in a different era to see if or how your opinions have changed. Did I soften on this expansion or that release? Am I nostalgic for some title I panned? Maybe?

Sometimes I kind of want to go back and try Warhammer Online. Not enough to play the pirate server version of it, but I think about it sometimes. Was it really that bad? Did I miss something in it? Is the me of 2024 more or less likely to play something like that?

Probably less likely, in all honestly. My patience for the genre has constricted quite a bit.

And occasionally somebody else comes along and finds some old post of mine, some piece of history from the genre and gets a kick out of it or is reminded of some past venture. Just the other day Asher Elias, leader of the Imperium, was writing something up and said that he was happy to have found some written records of old Reavers operations somewhere on the web.

Preserving a small sliver of the player lore of New Eden is just part of the job.

And anyway, how can blogging be dead if all these people showed up for Blaugust? Look at them all! Here, in 2024, in an age where some people can’t string together three sentences on what they did over the weekend without injecting a meme or an emoji, 117 blogs made the list.

I mean, two of them are mine, and one of those is just pictures of internet spaceships, but still, that is quite a turn out for our little corner of the internet.

As always, if you can find the time, please visit some of our participants. We all like a page view or three when we can get them.

The Ancient Gaming Noob
Welcome to Blaugust 2024!Wilhelm Arcturus
The first day of Blaugust has arrived! Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs! Blaugust – 2024 Edition I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year. Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready. There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out. It is a month long event and you can
1. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

Welcome to Blaugust 2024!

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

1. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

The first day of Blaugust has arrived! Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs!

Blaugust – 2024 Edition

I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year. Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready.

There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out. It is a month long event and you can join at any time.

So how do you get involved?

Here is everything you need to know about Blaugust but were afraid to ask, in easy link form.

Blaugust initial Announcement – All this info in a longer format
Blaugust 2024 Eve – Last minute event updates
Blaugust Sign-Up Page – Get yourself officially on the Blaugust list
Blaugust Discord Server – Come hang out with fellow Blaugust participants
Blaugust Mastodon Account – The official social media organ of Blaugust
The Blaugust Prompt List – Post idea central
Blaugchievements – Achievements you can claim during Blaugust
Blaugust Media Kit page – Where to find the Blaugust logo in various sizes
Blaugust Participants List – A Google sheet of who is in it to win it
Blaugust OPML File – All the RSS feeds for participating blogs

What is in the event for you?

That is sort of up to you, really. We do have a community that has been hanging around on Discord for a few years now, a community that persists between each annual event.

If you think it will boost your readership by 10,000%, perfect your SEO, and get you a job in publishing then you might be a bit let down.

If you want to rub elbows with other bloggers, see how they approach things, trade tips and recipes, and find yourself mildly perplexed as how several curmudgeons like myself with days jobs still crank out a thousand words a day… this is the place. I’ll even let you in on my person secret: Low standards. Nearly 7,200 posts in to this it is quite clear I’ll push the “publish” button on just about anything.

If you need structure to help you write, you can find that. There are prompts above and people will riff off of each other’s post ideas and the various weeks of the event each have their own theme.

Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 3rd) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
Introduce Yourself Week (August 4th – August 10th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
Creator Appreciation Week (August 11th – August 17h) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
Staying Motivated Week (August 18th – August 24th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
Lessons Learned Week (August 25th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

I am kind of bad at Blaugust, more because my ability to write about any particular idea is very much influenced by my mood. So the prompts tend to be right out unless somebody tackles one in a way that inspires my own riff. I do try to at least do one post on each of the weekly themes, often during the designated week.

I wrote in my previous post about the 2024 event, there are achievements and awards and shiny badges to be displayed when all is said and done, on the other side of things when we reach September.

We do have quite a few blogs here on day one. Here are all the participants so far. Please try to take a bit of time to visit as many as you can.

And off we go. First post in. Just 30 days left.

Other Blaugust first day posts to look at:

Inventory Full – Good Grief! It’s Blaugust! Again!
Chasing Dings! – Welcome to Blaugust, 2024!
Monster Lady’s Diary – Welcome To Another Blaugust
Time to Loot – Blaugust 2024 is Here!
Words Under My Name – Blaugust2024 Day 1 – An Introduction
The Friendly Necromancer – Welcome to Blaugust 2024! Life is crazy!
Many Welps – Re-Introductions
Indiecator – Blaugust 2024 is here!
Living Out Loud – Blaugust Introduction
Cubic Creativity – Blaugust 2024: The First Post of Blaugust
Juha-Matti Santala – Blaugust 2024: Batteries included
Nerdy Bookahs – Blaugust 2024: Here we come!
Wa Wa Wa – Introduction, Because of Blaugust
AI MMORPG News – Unleash Your Inner Blogger: Dive into Blaugust 2024!
Shadowz Abstract Gaming – Welcome, Hello, Glad you’re here #Blaugust2024
valentine’s days – welcome to blaugust 2024!
StarShadow – #blaugust2024 Introduction ~ Day 1
Aywren’s Nook! – Blaugust 2024: First Post of Blaugust
The Dragon Chronicle – First Post of Blaugust 2024
Kelly’s World – Motivation for posting more- Blaugust 2024
Notes by JCProbably – Birthday Month with a side of Blaugust
Heartless Gamer – First Post of Blaugust

The Ancient Gaming Noob
Welcome to Blaugust 2024!Wilhelm Arcturus
The first day of Blaugust has arrived! Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs! Blaugust – 2024 Edition I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year. Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready. There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out. It is a month long event and you can
1. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

Welcome to Blaugust 2024!

The Ancient Gaming Noob

Od: Wilhelm Arcturus

1. Srpen 2024 v 17:15

The first day of Blaugust has arrived! Welcome to the 11th annual running of the blogs!

Blaugust – 2024 Edition

I haven’t been very good about the build up to Blaugust this year. Fortunately the event doesn’t rest in any way on my shoulders, and others, Belghast especially, have been out there spreading the word and getting things ready.

There are currently 75 or so blogs registered to participate in the event, but that doesn’t mean that you are left out. It is a month long event and you can join at any time.

So how do you get involved?

Here is everything you need to know about Blaugust but were afraid to ask, in easy link form.

Blaugust initial Announcement – All this info in a longer format
Blaugust 2024 Eve – Last minute event updates
Blaugust Sign-Up Page – Get yourself officially on the Blaugust list
Blaugust Discord Server – Come hang out with fellow Blaugust participants
Blaugust Mastodon Account – The official social media organ of Blaugust
The Blaugust Prompt List – Post idea central
Blaugchievements – Achievements you can claim during Blaugust
Blaugust Media Kit page – Where to find the Blaugust logo in various sizes
Blaugust Participants List – A Google sheet of who is in it to win it
Blaugust OPML File – All the RSS feeds for participating blogs

What is in the event for you?

That is sort of up to you, really. We do have a community that has been hanging around on Discord for a few years now, a community that persists between each annual event.

If you think it will boost your readership by 10,000%, perfect your SEO, and get you a job in publishing then you might be a bit let down.

If you want to rub elbows with other bloggers, see how they approach things, trade tips and recipes, and find yourself mildly perplexed as how several curmudgeons like myself with days jobs still crank out a thousand words a day… this is the place. I’ll even let you in on my person secret: Low standards. Nearly 7,200 posts in to this it is quite clear I’ll push the “publish” button on just about anything.

If you need structure to help you write, you can find that. There are prompts above and people will riff off of each other’s post ideas and the various weeks of the event each have their own theme.

Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 3rd) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
Introduce Yourself Week (August 4th – August 10th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
Creator Appreciation Week (August 11th – August 17h) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
Staying Motivated Week (August 18th – August 24th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
Lessons Learned Week (August 25th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

I am kind of bad at Blaugust, more because my ability to write about any particular idea is very much influenced by my mood. So the prompts tend to be right out unless somebody tackles one in a way that inspires my own riff. I do try to at least do one post on each of the weekly themes, often during the designated week.

I wrote in my previous post about the 2024 event, there are achievements and awards and shiny badges to be displayed when all is said and done, on the other side of things when we reach September.

We do have quite a few blogs here on day one. Here are all the participants so far. Please try to take a bit of time to visit as many as you can.

And off we go. First post in. Just 30 days left.

Other Blaugust first day posts to look at:

Inventory Full – Good Grief! It’s Blaugust! Again!
Chasing Dings! – Welcome to Blaugust, 2024!
Monster Lady’s Diary – Welcome To Another Blaugust
Time to Loot – Blaugust 2024 is Here!
Words Under My Name – Blaugust2024 Day 1 – An Introduction
The Friendly Necromancer – Welcome to Blaugust 2024! Life is crazy!
Many Welps – Re-Introductions
Indiecator – Blaugust 2024 is here!
Living Out Loud – Blaugust Introduction
Cubic Creativity – Blaugust 2024: The First Post of Blaugust
Juha-Matti Santala – Blaugust 2024: Batteries included
Nerdy Bookahs – Blaugust 2024: Here we come!
Wa Wa Wa – Introduction, Because of Blaugust
AI MMORPG News – Unleash Your Inner Blogger: Dive into Blaugust 2024!
Shadowz Abstract Gaming – Welcome, Hello, Glad you’re here #Blaugust2024
valentine’s days – welcome to blaugust 2024!
StarShadow – #blaugust2024 Introduction ~ Day 1
Aywren’s Nook! – Blaugust 2024: First Post of Blaugust
The Dragon Chronicle – First Post of Blaugust 2024
Kelly’s World – Motivation for posting more- Blaugust 2024
Notes by JCProbably – Birthday Month with a side of Blaugust
Heartless Gamer – First Post of Blaugust

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