In like a Lamb and Out like a Lion - #Blaugust2021 Day 29

Well, well, well . . . here we are. It's late Sunday night, and I haven't written a blog post yet. In fact, we've arrived at the final three days of Blaugust! It's the home stretch! 

The theme from this week is "lessons learned" from participating in this Blaugust, so let me think a bit here and see if I can impart any pearls of wisdom.

1- August goes in like a lamb and comes out like a lion . . . for me at least. This happens every Blaugust and it's the one thing I kind of cringe about every time I take the challenge. At the beginning of August, I have TONS of free time in the mornings, and I love to use that in entirely selfish pursuits like videogame blogging and writing music. By the time August is over, the kids are all back in school and my morning free time has shrunk by a couple hours, which makes finishing Blaugust always a little hectic.

my brain on Blaugust

If I was smart, I'd write a big backlog of blog posts at the beginning of August, but that's not gonna happen! When else am I going to also play games to write about? I suppose just knowing what I'm committing to makes all the difference. Accepting that the tail end of August will be busy is probably enough.

2- Rotate the diamond to see the facets. I had a great time writing a couple of short musical YouTube intros for a friend's kiddo yesterday. I won't name names, but he's trying to motivate his son by allowing him to upload videos to a YouTube channel based on good grades. I don't know if I would have been his first choice had he not been reading along with my blog posts this month where I shared my musical history. 

Writing a quick 10-20 second intro

I'm happy I spent the time to write that out. A lot of people probably didn't think of me as being someone who is involved in music and songwriting, and instead maybe narrowed me down to "dad who plays video games" or "game designer who likes to write" or "Old Wizard101 fan/dev that writes about games," which are all totally fine labels with me. Sometimes I just need to be a bit more forthcoming with information about my life instead of being so timid about the reception.

3- Your time and attention is a gift. Can I just say how especially awesome my fellow Blaugust contributors have all been? We had a great set of participants this time and I've loved reading what I could from this massive amount of collective blog posts.

I do feel like I need to name a few names in particular: Tipa from Chasing Dings, Nimgimli from DragonChasers, and Aywren from Spot of Mummery (and Gaming and Geek Life Blog) have all been consistently favoriting and retweeting my posts on Twitter. Of course, everyone has been really great, I have the best followers and y'all really make me feel supported, but these particular Blaugust contributors made me really feel part of a community for Blaugust. It was greatly appreciated.  I wish I was as supportive as they have been. They're great examples.

Thank you all for the good impressions!

4- People are strange when you're a stranger -- I love writing about games that are outcasts to society. Games like Project Gorgon and 7 Days to Die are so easy for me to write about because I feel like a reporter diving in to a strange game with interesting rules that most people aren't familiar with or have simply forgotten exist. I love playing travel guide to games like this. I wish I could approach all games with this mentality, and I do to some extent. 

I have several mobile games that I love that I'm pretty sure most of my game buddies have never tried before. I even like  . . . wait for it . . . a few NFT-related games. 

Hanging out in editor mode on the level I made in Blankos

Y'all remember when Blankos got destroyed at E3? It wasn't pretty in the Twitch chat. Embracing that is . . . uh . . . scary, but to be honest, this is totally the type of game I'd write about because, games are strange when you're a stranger.

So there you go! Thank you all for reading along. Y'all rock. 

Happy Dueling!