Here Comes The Train: Blaugust 2019

"And so it goes on with the show
And all I hope, hope all your dreams will come true"

Pavlov's Dog

It's that time of year again. Dust off the keyboard, shake the cobwebs off the mouse, bring out that old lever-arch file filled with ideas you never quite finished...

Blaugust is back!

Ok, not quite yet but it's coming. Belghast says so and he should know. He invented it.

If you hang around this corner of the blogosphere you're going to be hearing about Blaugust a lot. Naithin and Izlain are already talking about it and now so am I. Expect a lot more of this.

Just to summarize, Blaugust is a Festival of Blogging. It started out as a challenge to post every day in August and over time it morphed into something much greater and grander than that.

The modern Blaugust incorporates lapsed celebrations like Developer Appreciation Week and the Newbie Blogger Initiative. It offers opportunities to begin or begin again. It asks you to do no more than you feel but to feel you can do what you want.

For active bloggers Blaugust can be a welcome challenge. Can you hit that mark running, each and every day? For those gone dormant, living in slow-time, it offers a structure, a scaffold, something to haul on as you pull yourself upright. For everyone who sends postcards to the void and wonders if there's anyone out there it brings the noise.

With the incorporation into Blaugust of the NBI this is also the very best time to start that blog you've been thinking about for weeks, for months, for years. Pressing Publish for the first time can be scary but Blaugust has your back.

Bel's even come up with a schedule. As regular readers will know I love a schedule the way a feral cat loves a nice, hot bath with lots of shampoo. But not everything has to be about you, does it, Bhagpuss? And Bel's schedule is so pretty!

If that's not enough belt there's also the braces of Mentorship. A whole bunch of folks who've been at this for a while have volunteered to have themselves tagged on Discord so you can tap them up for advice. I'm one but don't let that put you off. Expect a lot of old war stories you've heard before and advice that works for pretty much no-one but me. (First piece of advice for free, don't go hog wild on the metaphors).

For the full skinny read Belghast's post but for quick here are the links:

Sign-Ups
Discord Invite
Media Kit

I'm likely to be home all August for medical reasons so I have no excuse to miss a day. One serious piece of advice I would throw out there, though, is if you make targets for yourself and miss them that is absolutely fine.

Every year a whole slew of people sign up and some of them we barely hear of ever again. That is okay! Blaugust is about experimenting, trying things out, getting the feel of what blogging is like (if it's new to you) or how it could be different (if you're already in).

If it's not working for you, take a break, try it another way, rethink. If it's stressing you out then, really, stop. This isn't an ironman challenge. It's a co-operative, collaborative social event that's 100% for funzies. (Probably don't say funzies if you're 60 years old like I am, just another freebie I'm throwing out there).

Last year Blaugust saw 88 sign-ups, at least according to my count. I recorded them all in a sidebar called "The Crew", whose derivation I revealed in a post I wrote as recently as this June. Should have called it Rocket 88. Missed a trick there.

In my final piece of mentoristic advice for the day, that post was one of my very favorites of the year so far. I worked really hard on it and it came out even better than I hoped. It got no reaction whatsoever. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Once before, I built a second post out of how another had failed and Gevlon turned up in the comments to take me to task about it. He'd misunderstood my reason for writing the post but he still had a point.

Blog posts aren't your babies. You don't have to protect them. They're wild. Let them fly free. The best will go unremarked while the ones you toss out in an idle coffee break will live a life of their own that outstrips anything you could have imagined. That's just how it is. Ya gotta ride it out.

Speaking of Gevlon, currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file, if you're reading this, have you considered that Blaugust might be the time for a comeback? Now, that would break my irony meter. But go on, you know you want to. I can buy another one.

This is running way longer than planned.  Bit of a trope here.  Let's wrap it up.

Hoping to see an even bigger turnout than last year. Let's see if we can crack the ton this time!

Some Better Place

Earlier this week, Gevlon took it upon himself to analyse the outcome of this year's Blaugust as he saw it. He posted twice, first to assess the "long term effect" and then to see what blogs he could add to his blogroll as a result.

This caused a small ripple in the blogosphere, with Izlain, Rambling Redshirt and UltrViolet posting in response and a number of other Blaugustians leaving comments. Some seemed to take the Goblin's analysis to heart while others questioned both its methodology and accuracy.

I just thought he'd mistaken the basic purpose of Blaugust, which is a festival celebrating blogging and a bit of a talking-shop and meeting place for current bloggers. There was some justification for the confusion, since it's true that this year's event did also incorporate the New Blogger Initiative, which is intended to increase the blog supply for thirsty readers, something it's managed to do very successfully over the years.

Despite its undeniable success in encouraging new entrants and returnees to the form, the NBI has always had an extremely high drop-out rate. Gevlon's arch-enemy, Wilhelm, has occasionally analyzed the results, albeit over a much longer timeframe than the Goblin's: the number of blogs that survive, let alone thrive, is small.

According to Wilhelm's 2013 post on the fallout from the original NBI in 2012, of a hundred and ten participants, only thirty were still active a year later. Looking at those thirty I see just five that I'm still reading in 2018 - Why I Game, Ravalation (who hasn't posted for a while but was very active until spring 2018), Ald Shot First, Beyond Tannhauser Gate and Casual Aggro.

Five out of more than a hundred doesn't seem all that impressive but clicking through the links, sixteen of those thirty blogs are still online, if dormant. What's more, quite a few were still posting in 2016 or 2017, so they had a good run.

Of the rest, six go to dead links. That makes twenty-seven. The remaining three bloggers are still active but on different blogs.  

Game Delver is C.T.Murphy, currently blogging as "Murf Versus. Warp to Zero moved to Grimmash, although the last post there was in March this year.

That leaves White Charr, a blog that was technically still live in 2018, but only to point readers to a more active blog on Tumblr. That blog turns out to belong to no-one other than Aywren, longtime resident of my own blogroll, where she trades under the name Aywren Sojourner.

Meanwhile, back at this year's roundup over at Gevlon's, Narratess pops up in the comments to point out she, too, has more than one blog. Lots of people do. Well, lots of people might.

It's hard to be sure when bloggers either retain separate identities with the intent of keeping them secret or hive off different aspects of their blogging into silos according to subject matter. It's particularly difficult to keep track of who's still active when people move without leaving a forwarding address.

Gevlon himself dropped his Blogger identity after a crisis of conscience over supporting Google. He moved to WordPress but helpfully left his Blogger blog active with a link, which is what I still use to find him.

I currently have 175 blogs in my blogroll. I was going to cull them but until I hit whatever limit Blogger imposes I can't really see the point.

As is often mentioned, Blogger has the best automated blog linking out there. It reliably and faultlessly floats the most recent post of any and all of those 175 blogs to the top of the list. By leaving them all on there I can guarantee I'll know immediately if any of the dormant ones wake up.

That's a lot better than Feedly can manage, which is why, increasingly, I use my own blog roll rather than Feedly to keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere. I have quite a few non-gaming blogs in Feedly, though, which I would be somewhat dubious about adding to the widget on Inventory Full.

It's been noticeable of late that fewer posts are popping up in my Feedly feed. I've been assuming it's because of natural attrition. As a result of Gevlon's investigations and the surrounding commentary, however, I decided this morning to click on a few of the links that hadn't sparked for a while.

I began with a music blog I follow. It's called "Music That I Like" and it's by Everett True, a music journalist and sometime performer, who I first encountered in the mid-1980s, when he was writing and performing under the name The Legend. (Link very NSFW!).

The last post at Music That I Like was just over a year ago, when Everett was raving about the very wonderful Dream Wife. He'd seemed quite depressed around that point and I was wondering if he'd finally packed it all in for good but thankfully it turns out not.

Music That I Like may not have had any new posts since August 2017 but it has a twitter feed that's still going. I clicked on that and it magically transported me to Everett's new blog, How NOT To Write About Music, where the most recent post was...yesterday!

All of which suggests that, if you want to keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere, you need to pay attention and make an effort. It would be very nice if people always announced when they're taking a break and always left a change of address post up after they'd moved, but they don't. Sometimes you have to go look for them.

I guess now I should go click through all the blogs on my blogroll and Feedly that haven't posted in a few months or years to see if they went on to another party somewhere and forgot to tell me. It'd be quite a big project, though.

I've got a week off work in November. Maybe I'll do it then.

Then We Came To The End

It's been a trip but I can't say I'm sorry it's over. Turns out there's a very good reason I don't normally post on work days. It makes me slightly stressed, it mildly irritates Mrs Bhagpuss and sometimes I just don't have much to say.

Okay, that's not true. I always have something to say. I had plenty to say last night, when all I ended posting was screenshots. I just didn't have time to say it.

Now that the summer's over and Blaugust with it, several people have chosen to cast a glance at what's behind us. SDWeasel, Gracie, Aywren, Marathal, Mailvaltar, Shadowz, Nogamara, Eldarieal, Wilhelm, Sandrian, Endalia and probably many  more I've missed. Of all the wrap parties, perhaps the most intense was thrown by Endgame Viable, where UltrViolet, all of whose Blaugust posts I have very much enjoyed, chose to engage in a vigorous session of self-criticism worthy of the Cultural Revolution at its most unforgiving. I can only admire his rigor.

I would never be so harsh on myself. One of my fatal flaws is the innate self-confidence born of being an only child who grew up in a stable and loving environment. I do tend to feel pleased with myself a lot of the time even when there's little objective justification for it.

Looking back at my Blaugust output, I find that I managed to hit my target of posting every day. I even threw in a bonus post somewhere because when I post this wrap-up I'll be sitting pretty on thirty-two posts for the month. I said "post" too often then, didn't I?

Over the month, I ranged widely across the usual topics, repeating myself and trying to justify doing so by drawing attention to it. I guess I'm still a postmodernist at heart. (That sentence would run so much better as "I guess I'm still a postmodern girl at heart" but even in 2018 I don't think I'm going to go there...)

I was planning on subbing World of Warcraft for August just so I coud get some Battle for Azeroth posts out of it (without actually buying BfA, of course) but in the end I couldn't justify it because I had too much else going on. I would never have logged in. I very much enjoyed reading everyone else's experiences of the new expansion, which sounds pretty good to me. They varied so wildly it often sounded as though people weren't playing the same MMO let alone the same content.

Instead I bought Bless Online, which gave me a good run of posts mid-month. I'll be going back for more, most likely, although the biggest effect Bless has had on me is to remind me how much better Twin Saga and Dragon Nest were - and Black Desert, for that matter - so I may return to one or more of those instead.

Most of my Blaugust posts were lengthy. There's not too much filler in there. I did notice my fact-checking was slipping a little in the latter half of the month but mostly I still managed to do the requisite due dilligence before making any statements or claims I couldn't readily wriggle out of.

I'm pleased with that but I had, as always, hoped Blaugust would encourage me to write shorter, pithier pieces. As usual, I was disappointed. It's particularly annoying because I'm very well aware that shorter posts get a stronger response and I know that I sometimes weaken my own arguments by burying the main thrust of the post under the weight of all the connections I make while writing it.

In a way, the problem is that my posts aren't long enough. Some of them really need to be 5,000 word essays, not blog posts at all. And then there's the polish - or lack of it.

Back when I used to write reviews and articles for fanzines I would sometimes spend an entire week or more working on a single article of maybe fifteen hundred words. These days I often knock something like that out in a couple of hours. I don't know whether that's progress or not.

Whatever it is, it seems to be what I do and Blaugust has taught me, yet again, that I'm likely to keep doing it whether I want to or not. I'm verbose and I'll just have to live with it.

The best thing about this Blaugust hasn't been anything I did, though. It's been what everyone else was doing. Going in, I was really feeling the lack of good, new blogs. My Feedly was thin. Blaugust fixed that.

That's partly because Blaugust this year also incorporated the Newbie Blogger Initiative. The NBI always kicks up some great new writers but this year it outdid itself. There genuinely were more posts than I had time to read even though I did try. That's a happy problem to have.

Naming names is invidious and I'll leave it to Belghast to hand out the awards but I would just like to say that, of the bloggers I had never read before, I did particularly look forward to posts from Mailvaltar, Unidentified Signal Source, Moonshine Mansion, The MMOist and MMOsey.

Those are by no means all the new blogs and bloggers I really enjoyed reading, either. It was a vintage year all round. I very much hope you'll all keep posting after Blaugust ends even if right now you've fallen in a heap, mopping your brow with eau de cologne and croaking "Never again!"

Indeed, I hope everyone who gave it a crack carries on, at their own pace and in their own time, whether what they write is to my taste or not. Blogging isn't dead yet and it's not likely to be, not with this crew at the controls.

Congratulations to everyone who made it to the end - let's do it all over again...next year!

Roll Call : NBI 2016

The NBI train is starting to roll. Lots of posts popping up, Doone is doing a bang-up job working on a permanent new home for the organization and at last we have our first actual New Bloggers!

Welcome 

Just East of West

The Wild Core Chronicles

Shadowz Gaming Blog

I'm Not Squishy

All added to the blogroll and tagged NBI 2016.

And welcome back

Pleasant Gamer

I thought that last one sounded familiar. In fact I was certain I knew the name. When I went to add it to the roll Blogger wasn't having any of it. I scanned down the list and sure enough, there's Pleasant Gamer already, tagged NBI 2015. 

I'll be adding all this year's intake to the Blogroll as they arrive, just like last year and the year before that. There are currently just under 100 blogs on my blogroll. I don't know if Blogger has a limit. I think I might find out soon though.

I'd just like to add a few words on the subject of Blog Rolls. If you're the kind of blogger who cares about things like page views, a good blog roll is a fantastic asset. 

Blog rolls are incredibly useful for gauging the temperature of the blogosphere and spotting hot topics that are crying out for you to bandwagon enrich with your own eloquent and incisive insights. A blogger in possession of a good blog roll is never in want of an idea for a post. It's not plagiarism - it's community spirit!

It's a metaphor, alright?

Better yet, a good blog roll is a destination in itself. People will use your blog as a stopping-off point in their daily round or flip to it when they're bored at work just so they can carom off onto whichever blog on your list might just have updated. I used to do it all the time before I had my own blog and I still use my own blog roll that way when I don't want to log into Feedly for some reason or other, which happens more often than you'd imagine.

My blog roll has grown to a seriously unwieldy length, although nothing like the insane descender of my Tag Tail. I used to worry a little about that but I'm past it now. Blogger seems immensely resilient as a platform when it comes to untidiness, which is one of the main reasons I like using it. Everything new floats to the top without my having to do much, or indeed anything, to keep it that way.

On the other hand, you could go for a super-clean, minimalist look and have just your very, very favorite blogs on the front page. The ones that you really recommend. Might not make many friends that way but some people have standards to maintain, I understand that, even if I don't have any of my own...

If you go for Wordpress or self-host then you'll have a lot more work to do if you want a blog roll that updates in real time. It certainly can be done - Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob (who posted his own thoughts and advice on blog rolling for the NBI of 2012) has such a blog roll and he's blogged in some detail about the fun he had getting it to work, too. 

You don't have to have a blog roll but I never think a blog looks quite complete without one. In Blogger, at least, they are quick and easy to set up and maintain and they really have no downsides that I'm aware of. Then again, I never think a blog looks complete without pictures and a lot of people would disagree with me on that one...

All About You : NBI, EQ2

I don't mean to jump the train to blogger's ennui but yesterday I did find myself coming up oddly short of a peg on which to hang my usual Sunday post. Nothing to do with a disconnect from the games or writing about them. Nothing to do with lack of desire or interest or enthusiasm. All of those are present and in good order.

It was laziness, that's all. I had several ideas rolling around but all of them would take a few hours to polish up to a post and it was Sunday and I'd been working all week and I mostly wanted to kick back, run around Norrath and Tyria and not have to think too much. 

So I spent Sunday morning in Skyshrine, working through the heroic signature questline there and Sunday afternoon and evening in World vs World. Doing not very much of any interest or importance to anyone, even to me.

I remember when the Withered Lands update arrived and Skyshrine along with it. Mrs Bhagpuss and I worked through the long, complicated solo questline that took us from where the griffin from Thurgadin landed to where the griffin to Skyshrine takes flight. It seemed to take forever. It probably took at least a couple of weeks. It might have been a whole month.

When you come to a new zone that's been added at level cap there is often a step change. Your old gear doesn't really cut it any more because everything past the first starting area has been tuned for the new normal. Progress slows to a crawl.

I like that. I find it encouraging and motivating, even when, as with Withered Lands, the step is a high one.

As well as slowing leveling down by a factor of five, Withered Lands was the update that introduced Advanced Solo zones, modified versions of Heroic (aka full group) Dungeons tuned for at most two players, more normally one player and an NPC Mercenary. When we finally got to Skyshrine we stepped into the contested (aka  open world) dungeon, where our backsides were neatly packaged and handed back to us by the first few mobs, as expected. 

In the olden days that would have been an end of it. I remember, for example, how The Hole roadblocked our progress in the Sentinel's Fate expansion back in 2010.

Advanced Solo changed all that. In modern EQ2 the EQ stands for equality. Equality of opportunity. No-one has to miss out on the art department's hard hours just because they don't have any friends. We all get to stroll through the galleries, together or alone.

So, I'd seen all the sights before, which is why I didn't take any screenshots yesterday. Usually, if I'm thinking of a post I'll take some shots for insurance but I was feeling lazy so I didn't bother. Plus, neither Withered Lands nor Skyshrine is much of a visual feast. The clue is in the name as far as the outdoor part goes and Skyshrine itself is one of those maps where someone thought it would be a good idea to use a filter, in this case a dark, red filter that makes everything look dull and smoky.

That aside, I had enormous fun, working through the questline from the wiki walkthrough, one-shotting whole groups of heroic Awakened with my bow, thanks to the mighty multi-attack and crit bonuses from my overlevelled gear, burning through bosses long before they could pull any of the tricks the wiki warned me about.

I do purely love being overgeared and overlevelled for old content, especially when I was badly undergeared and underprepared for it when it was new. It's one of the greatest strengths of the MMO genre.  

I can't begin to count the number of times knowing I'd become powerful enough to do something that was out of my reach before has brought me back to an MMO for another few weeks or months. Indeed, now that we have had the opportunity to compare, I prefer it as a gameplay model to the kind of always-at-level scaling that's becoming the norm.

So, I pottered through Skyshrine for a few hours and when I'd had enough and my bags were too full I meandered back to GW2, where I did my dailies on three accounts and then spent the rest of the day in WvW. Which was quiet. Very quiet. Didn't take many screenshots there, either.

It was all thoroughly good fun but it didn't give me much in the way of inspiration. All day as I played I had it in the back of my mind that I "ought" to be posting. I very nearly always post on Sundays, usually in the morning. But I didn't want to. I was feeling lazy. 

I toyed with a couple of ideas for slapping up something short but I couldn't come up with anything that seemed like it would work so in the end it got to be evening and I hadn't posted and I knew I wasn't going to and that was fine. I don't have a schedule. I don't want to have a schedule. If I don't feel it I'm not going to do it.

Tomorrow is the start of this year's NBI although posts related to it have been popping up all over the place for the last couple of weeks. This is one of them. Sort of.

There is, to my way of thinking, altogether too much angst around the hobby right now. The hobbies I might say, both playing MMOs and blogging about them. If there's one message I'd like to put across to anyone about to take the plunge it's this:

It's YOUR blog. 

You get to decide when you post, what you post, how often you post, whether you post. I can't speak for the other platforms but in Blogger at least you also have a measure of control of who can comment and even over who reads everything you write. 

Yes, you can have a blog that only people you invite can see - a bit like guild chat I guess. I don't recommend that but it's a thing, if you want it. The important part to remember is

It's YOUR blog.

It doesn't belong to your readers or your commenters or The World. It doesn't belong to whoever owns and operates the platform. You can pick it up and move it somewhere else if you want and if one day you find the game's not fun any more you can take it down and that's an end of it because

It's YOUR blog.

And because it's yours you can skip a day or a week or a month or a year and then, when the mood or the muse takes you, you can spin it back up. You can opine on the burning issues of the day or burble on about your characters or what you're doing to the back yard (Hi, Belghast - I really like those posts, by the way...). 

Just because you got into blogging via the gateway drug of reading MMO blogs doesn't mean you have to write about nothing but MMOs (even though I do). As I think I mentioned

It's YOUR blog.

Write about what you want. Write when you want. Write how you want. And if you don't want to write then don't. 

It's a lot less stressful that way and a lot more fun.

NBI 2016: Incoming!

It's that time of year again! Or to be precise it's past that time of year. The great tradition that is The Newbie Blogger Initiative usually rolls around in May but this year it's kicking off a month late.

It looked for a while as though we'd be skipping a year but in the end Doone stepped up to the plate. Thank you, Doone!

I'm a bit vague on exactly what's planned but I'm sure it'll all come together somehow. The forums are still up and running, there's a Twitter feed and even something called Discord, about which I know nothing. I'd never even heard of it before. I'm guessing it's some kind of voice chat...

If you've ever read a blog and thought "I could do that" or even "I could do better than that" now's the time to prove it. Go on, give it a go! Blogging may be a whole lot of things but one thing it's not is hard to start.

The easiest way is to just grab yourself a free Blogger or WordPress account and follow the instructions. If you get stuck (you won't) just ask!

The NBI Head Office

Blogging has a fairly high turnover/attrition rate. If you read blogs you'll have noticed that. As blog readers we all need a constant stream of new blood and you could be it! Doesn't that sound appealing?

The NBI has a pretty good record for helping people to get started and supporting them through those early days and weeks. It certainly beats spinning a new blog up out of nowhere and hoping someone notices. Every year sees some great new blogs that go on to run and run. And some that don't but that's fine too. It's not for everyone but you won't know until you try, will you?

I'd particularly encourage anyone who already comments on blogs to make the move to a blog of their own. It really is a natural progression. I always click through new names in my comments in the hope that the link will go to a blog I haven't read before. When it does, in most cases I add it to my blogroll and when it doesn't I'm always just a little bit disappointed.

Here's looking forward to a June filled with lots of new clicks and no disappointments! Now 
let the blogging begin!

The Beat Goes On

I'm not the biggest fan of blogging about blogging. I was hoping I might get past the latest wave of despondency without comment but it seems a little disingenuous to carry on as though my Feedly wasn't filled with posts bemoaning boredom, burnout, or malaise.

It's not as if we haven't been here before. MMO blogging has a handful of themes that play over and over again like the never-ending musical loops in the games themselves. After a few years of reading blogs it becomes apparent that there are only so many topics and all of them have been done to death.

The same thing happens with the MMOs. Killed one dragon, you've killed them all. The tunes you can play on a fiddle may be without number but if you're bored of hearing the sound of four strings being scraped, plucked or struck then it hardly matters how many ways someone can come up with to go on doing it.

On the other hand, if you're someone who just purely loves the sound, who can't but jump up and dance every time the fiddler begins to play, then the very idea of ennui never enters the picture. Folk and jazz clubs around the world are busy with aficionados who've been nodding along for decades.

Most of us, though, go through a folk club phase only for a while, if we ever go through one at all. For a few weeks or months or years little seems more appealing than an evening in the pub with a pint of Old Duckfeather in hand and a buzz of conversation counterpointing the tales of maidens' virtue lost.

And then one day going to the club doesn't feel like such a great idea any more. The thought of another night of men with full beards and fingered ears bellowing into a mic, while intent young women saw earnestly at the catgut, seems oddly unappealing. And it's starting to rain and there's that new HBO series people at work keep talking about that you haven't caught up with yet, so you decide to stay in, just for tonight.

Next thing you know you're someone who used to go to folk clubs but doesn't any more. Then, in a while, folk clubs are a thing of the past. Your past. Probably a thing you don't even mention. Your new, non-folkie friends would find it all a bit...well, you know...

So there you are, or rather there you aren't. You're not at the folk club any more but the folk club is still there. People who aren't you still go. For a while people ask where you are and then they don't, any more, only once in a while, when someone says "oh that reminds me of old whatshername. Whatever happened to her, anyway?".

Maybe one day, a long while later, you get that feeling - is it nostalgia? You wonder what the old place is like these days. Do any of the old gang still go? But when you wander along - just out of curiosity, you don't really miss it, you've moved on, it was your past but still, you just wonder - the club has gone.

The pub has closed. It's a coffee place now. They don't have live music. You feel something's been lost but you don't know what it is. You walked away. You didn't want it. Why should you care that it's gone?

Except it hasn't gone. Only gone away from you. Somewhere in town some of those same earnest young women, not so young any more, are still sawing away. They have children now and their children are dancing to the fiddler's tune.

About the only thing that you can't have back is your past. That and the time you spent there. If that's what you're searching for you'll come home sad and disappointed. But if it was the music...well, the music never stopped. The music never does stop. It never will. Just listen and you'll hear it.

Which is why you shouldn't worry over taking a break, over walking away, over moving on. If you're done, you're done. Maybe you're done for now, maybe you're done for good. Either way, if you're not feeling it you can't force it. Listen to your heart.

Forget about folk music. I wish I could. Let's get back to MMOs and blogging about them.

MMOs aren't going anywhere. They're going to be around longer than you are. If you need them, if you want them, they'll be there. And while there are MMOs there will be bloggers blogging about them. Take your time out, your sabbatical, your re-calibration.

We'll miss you. We'll welcome you when - if - you come back. Some of the faces may have changed. You might have to find a new game to call home. The club moved along a few streets, some new people joined, some old people left but really nothing changed. You'll fit right in. It'll be like you never left.

Or maybe it won't. Maybe you'll come a couple of times and realize it was a bad idea. That you don't really know any of these people and you don't want to play the games they're playing now, or read about them, or write about them. Now you know. It was just a phase after all. And that's fine, too

This time last year we had the 2015 Newbie Blogger Initiative. For once I thought to tag all the blogs that came out of it as I added them to my blogroll, so I can see who's still around. I added sixteen of them. Ten of those blogs were still posting in 2016. Four posted in the last week.

It looked as though we weren't going to have an NBI this year but Aywren let slip the news that Doone is going to host the event a month later than usual, in June. The well replenishes itself. Let's hope so, anyway. Spread the word.

I should declare self-interest here. I read a lot of MMO blogs and I need a steady supply. If people are leaving then new people need to start! It's fun. Really, it is. Give it a go. If you don't like it you can stop. And start again. And stop. As often as you want.

If you want proof, look at Nils. Hasn't posted a word for two years. Comes back, posts once, gets nine comments. The folk club door is always open. And it's always open mic night.

Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a "folkie". I did go to some folk clubs a few times back in the late 80s but only against my better judgment and only because someone else made me. I do not have a beard. I will never have a beard. I don't even drink real ale. It was just an analogy, all right? Geez, don't take things so literally, you guys...

Therre's Something In The Waterrr!! : The Return Of The NBI

A little over a year ago Syp of Bio Break and Massively fame ran a month-long event intended to encourage would-be bloggers to take the next step. This year Doone at T.R.Red Skies and Roger at Contains Moderate Peril have taken up the challenge.

The main hub of activity is the new forum they've set up, which this time is planned to be a permanent fixture, providing an ongoing resource and source of support and advice for bloggers old and new. The whole thing kicks off officially on October 1st but don't feel you have to wait until then to get started.

Last year well over one hundred blogs were created on the back of the NBI. A year later, Wilhelm at TAGN in his absolutely invaluable role as Chronicler of All Things MMO, checked back to see how many were still up and running. That turned out to be thirty, a pretty good score in my opinion, and some of the bloggers who began as Initiates last time, like Ocho of Casual Aggro , return this year as Sponsors.

If you've ever read a blog and thought "I could do that", you were right. You could and you very probably should. You might even find you enjoy it. 

Of course, I'm not really thinking of you. Oh no, my reasons for promoting the NBI are entirely selfish. Last year's crop produced two blogs that became personal favorites of mine, blogs I've read throughout the year and which have given me great pleasure, plenty to think about and a lot of laughs. I'm hoping this year brings at least a couple more blogs as good as Why I Game and That Was An Accident!

You could be working on one of them right now. What's stopping you?

Newbie Blogger Initiative

So, I get this email a few weeks back from Syp of Bio Break and Massively fame and since I don't get so many emails from other bloggers straight out of the blue I am naturally intrigued and reply right away. It turns out he has this project going to bring bloggers and would-be bloggers together in a species of kaffeeklatsch only without the coffee, sad to say.

Well, I am flattered to be asked which goes without saying, and all the more when I see who else is in the gang. Around sixty, which is a lot of bloggers and in that three score there are plenty of names I know and plenty of blogs I read, too. Some time this month we are all going to write about how we came to this blogging game, which is a story I am looking forward to hearing from some of the names on that list and that is for sure. There's a list right down at the bottom (borrowed from  MMOQuests without permission! Thanks Stargrace!). If you haven't visited any of these fine sites before then here's your chance!.

Anyway, it seems the point of all this hard work on Syp's part is to encourage anyone that has  been thinking of starting their own blog to take the plunge and to set up some place where they can get advice and feedback and bounce ideas around. On that account he has set up a forum and invited anyone that is interested to take a look-see and maybe throw in their hat.

Until then, if anyone has any questions, other than why I seem to be channeling the ghost of Damon Runyon or maybe Bill Kotzwinkle, the  

Newbie Blogger Initiative is over here

So if you are wondering whether this blogging thing could be for you come over and hang out! Ask questions, get advice, share ideas.There's never going to be a better time to get started. Just remember, there is no coffee. Or cake.


NBI Sponsor Blogs: Games and Geekery, The Wild Boar Inn, MMO Fallout, Tastes Like Battle Chicken, Grimnir’s Grudge, Roll One Hundred, Dragonchasers, Ardwulf’s Lair, Inventory Full,Jaded Alt, Ark’s Ark, Tremayne’s Law, Blog de la Burro, Just One MMOre, DocHoliday’s MMO Saloon, High Latency Life, MMO Gamer Chick, Skycandy, Nomnom.info, Hunter’s Insight, Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle, Berath’s Brain Burps, Epic Slant, Bullet Points, Professor Beej,Journeys with Jaye, Screaming Monkeys, Welcome to Spinksville, Vicarious Existence, Casual is as Casual Does, Star Shadow, I Have Touched The Sky, The Ancient Gaming Noob, Just One More Unlock, A Ding World, Yeebo Fernbottom’s MMO Love In, Stropp’s World, Kill Ten Rats, The Jedi Gambit, Beau Hindman, Blue Kae, Gankalicious, Live Like a Nerd, Casual Stroll to Mordor, Tish Tosh Tesh, Casting a Shaddoe, A Green Mushroom, ALT:ernative, Parallel Context, ETCmmo, Avatars of Steel, Tales of the Aggronaut, West Karana, Contains Moderate Peril, The Stories of O, Levelcapped, LOTRO Fashion, Mr. Meh’s Supplication, Malchome’s Mind/Restokin, Nerdy Bookahs, T.R. Red Skies, MMOQuests