This morning, while I was checking my RSS reader, I’ve found a few posts (1, 2, 3, 4 in no particular order) about another blogger that I didn’t know (and I won’t link). Apparently, he (or she) was criticizing the Blaugust initiative.

Intrigued, I’ve decided to check his (her) blog, where I’ve found not one but two consecutive posts entirely devoted to bashing Blaugust participants. For some reason, (s)he is focusing all the rage on the most active participants. Maybe the rest of us are beneath his (her) level, or maybe (s)he decided to “spare us the pain”.

The bad part is not that (s)he is critic about the initiative or about the perticipants, the thing is the superiority complex that emanates from the text.

From the last paragraph:

One blog. That’s what I’ve gained from Blaugust and that blog wasn’t created by Blaugust.

You’ve decided not to participate in Blaugust. What were you expecting to get from it? What do you think Blaugust (or those of us that decided to be part of it) owns you? What are we (the rest of the world) are going to gain from your posts?

I’ve gained from Blaugust. I started writing again after many years, I’ve found a few blogs I didn’t know (more about that in a future post), I’ve interacted with other people that were in the same boat.

I know that for a lot of people that means nothing. 6000 million people in Earth and most of them gained nothing from Blaugust. But… did any of them lose something because of Blaugust?

Somebody starts a project. Or recycle an old project, it doesn’t matter. He is working on it for no profit. A group of people joins him. You can join or not. You can suggest changes, or a different approach, different dates…

But if you just don’t want anything to do with it… just let it go.

Waiting two months and then coming to smash it looks to me like a toddler that comes and destroys the sandcastle that his (her) sibling was building. I don’t have children, maybe that is the reason why I can’t cope with adults that act like them.

I’ve never been one to put objectives on my gaming. Not long-term, at least. Sometimes I login thinking on a same-day goal, but nothing further except for skill planing on EVE, that goes for months at a time.

I see other bloggers writing goals for each month and I’m not sure if I want to do the same or not. On the plus side, it gives you some guidance on what to do each day, but at the same time, it may push you to play a game that maybe it’s not the one you want today, leading you into burning-out.

I’ve decided to try it. I’m going to put some objectives for the remaining of October and will see how it goes. If by the end of the month I feel that it was worth it, I will keep doing it, probably with more ambitious goals.

This time I’m keeping them vague intentionally, so I will not have too much pressure.

• EVE Online: At least one alliance fleet each week. Probably more, but it depends on the timing of planned ops, especially on weekdays. On top of that, I’ve recently bought my first Rorqual, and it still hasn’t paid for itself, so I’m going to work on that.
• Final Fantasy XIV: Botanist and Miner to level 50 (they are about 30 currently). After that, either Fisher 1-30 (or 50) or Black Mage to 70 (67 now).
• Guild Wars 2: Warrior or Mesmer to 80. I own this game since launch (a few weeks later, actually) but I never got a character to level cap. I’ve been playing these two lately, and I feel it’s time to cap at least one.

I am going to aim to get two of these 3, and if I end with some spare time I’ll work towards the third, but FFXIV and GW2 are in not specific order, it can go both ways.

It’s been more than one month since the last post, but I haven’t abandoned it.

I knew that I wasn’t going to write each day during Blaugust, was aiming more to once a week(-ish). Even if the total numbers are there (7 posts during the month), there were two full blank weeks that were out of my plans.

I could start making excuses of how something unexpected happened, and then I went on Holidays and… you know the drill. In the end, this is a personal project and there is no point in making excuses to myself. I’ve stopped writing for (approx.) 6 weeks and I intend to change that.

In order to get back into posting regularly, I intend to make a schedule. I am going to reserve some of my free “on my own” time to write weekly (at least). Because of how my free time changes day to day, adapting to my SO work timetable, this can be tricky. But it’s doable and this week I will have something figured out.

Probably I’m going to start some “periodic” posts, that will help me when I don’t know what to write about, or the time is shorter than expected for some reason. I am thinking of posts like “What I’m playing lately?”, “Look! screenshots” and things like that. Before committing to this blog, I took into account that writing in English was going to take me more time than writing in Spanish. Even expecting it, during Blaugust I found that it took me longer than expected. I hope this may be a way of writing shorter entries, but still feel like I am delivering something more than just a “Ping”.

And with this renewed will of writing a blog, I can finally and show my (not so) hardly earned Bronze Award for participating in Blaugust 2018.

I never got to play Everquest when it was current. I can’t remember when I put my feet in Norrath for the first time, but EQ was already free to play by then.
Since then, I’ve been trying to come back several times. I have a handful of low-level chars on different Live servers, and I’ve even created a couple of them on TLP servers when they’ve launched.
But as much as the “Old School charm” calls to me, I abandon it not much later. Especially in the TLP servers, where grouping is mandatory almost full time. Most days I can’t group the old way: go to the tunnel, start  spamming chat, try to find some ports, go to the camp… Before I can start killing mobs I’m already on my bed.

This periodical self-induced nostalgia has come back this week again. At first, I should come back to live, where I can use mercenaries to overcome the need of grouping, but… What if I would go to Norrath, but in its second incarnation?
Long story short, I’ve downloaded Everquest 2 and created a couple of characters.
Mmmmmmh. Or maybe… maybe I should come back to a TLP server on the original EQ. I’ll take it easy, slowly leveling, exploring… Maybe I can roll a second account on the laptop to duo?

I can’t understand why I would do this to myself. We are talking about a secondary game. I mean, I’ll keep playing Eve online, I’m fishing for a second game for these days where I don’t feel like killing internet spaceships. An on top of that, I’m feeling nostalgic about games that weren’t part of my “young days”.

And thinking about that is how I ended reinstalling Star Wars Galaxies. At least this is a game I actually played when it was current; post NGE but current. I remember leveling my smuggler on live when the news about closing the game came out. Ok, then: definitely, I joined Legends, a “post NGE” emulator, macro-leveled an entertainer and started leveling my commando.

It’s only that… although I’m not an uber WOW fan… you know… tomorrow we get a new expansion… I know, I know. If I join, I’m going to just level 110-120, do a couple of times each dungeon and got bored but… It’s current content.
Aaaaaaand basically this is what happens to me periodically, about 3-4 times a year. I spend 1 or 2 weeks downloading, installing and uninstalling a few games before settling on “the one”.

When I was around 15 years old, a friend of mine and me started writing a text-based game. Think something in the line of old Sierra text-games, but a lot more amateurish, of course. It was set on a fantasy medieval world, with two main kingdoms (it reeeeeeeally sounds original, eh?). One of that kingdoms was called Magen and most of the early game (we never got to complete the project) happened there.

We got the name from the color magenta, that we used for the title screen and during the game to show vitals. We didn’t manage to go far with the game, but I liked the name and began using it for characters in a bunch of single-player games.

Years later, when I was starting with EVE Online, I decided to create a second character (that became my main till today). It would be joining a PVP corporation and I would play it basically as a soldier, so I named him “Magen Sisen”. The last name was short for “Sí, Señor”, spanish for “Yes, Sir” pointing to this soldier orientation.

Since then, I’ve had a character named Magen Sisen (or some variation) on almost any MMO I’ve tried.

So… Magen is a location, a character name, a memory of an old friend, a nick and now a blog. Not bad for just five letters 🙂