So, before I knew it, 2021’s Blaugust was already over. It’s September now. Hooray! As part of my goals, I wanted to dedicate at least one post each week to the week’s theme, potentially write two game reviews per week, and I wanted to continue the FF14 posts every Sunday. Other goals consisted of putting up more videos on YouTube, streaming as per usual, and editing more stuff.
In terms of posts, I managed to post daily as per usual. There have been times where it was getting quite late and where I wasn’t able to finish it in time before midnight, so I worked on the post until later, resulting in it getting scheduled as planned but I slept longer than usual. The YouTube stuff didn’t work out for me as I noticed some issues with sound and visuals desynchronising in OBS whilst recording,… and then I tried it again and again, and essentially ended up not really feeling up to the task of doing much there. Effectively, something came up whenever I wanted to record stuff but luckily, I managed to at least put out the video for yesterday’s post in time. That’s basically the first video I put out in two months. I’m not super happy with that situation as I really enjoy creating written content and I haven’t been able to quite appreciate the process of video content just yet. I may try again in the near future but I don’t wanna do that while I’m under the pressure of exams and other offline stuff if that makes sense.
Now, as far as posts go, I managed to post 31 posts on 31 days, keeping up my 247-day streak (248 days if you count today’s post). At least I managed that!
The post that took the longest to write up was probably my Blaugust Participant Appreciation Post. Because I wanted to say nice things about most if not all people participating, I had to do lots of research on people and that resulted in the write-up taking a lot longer than planned. Also, I didn’t want to make every entry sound the same which was a bit hard, to be honest, mostly due to the many people that post about World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV Online, and other MMOs. So, when I summed up their blogs, I’d end up struggling to find variations of “They write about MMOs” but I think I still succeeded in adding a personal note to everyone. One entry in that post (as some people on the Discord pointed out) actually gave me a bit of a headache. I had “history” with this person and was honestly a bit scared that it may come up again if I don’t include the person or if I’m honest about the person, and hence, I kept it short. I feel like that was the best course of action there and with my comment here on that, I hope that that makes sense without stirring anything up. I feel like it was important for me to make clear that that’s long forgotten. I probably don’t even have to do this or explain anything but uh, I got anxieties and my head overthinks stuff like this a lot, so I remember a lot of the stuff that happened two years ago and alas, I end up still worrying that it may bite me in the butt… even two years later.
My most successful post this month was my post on how to protect yourself from hate raids. It’s relevant and obviously, it does well because of that but more importantly, I shared it in a couple of discords with streamers in it – and it resonated well with a lot of people that messaged me about how easy it was to implement some of these safety measures and how they could now rest assured. Some people found it easier to understand than other “guides” or articles. Others were thankful for the effort. I even included a TLDR section at the end, which is something that I dislike actually but some people don’t like reading and tend to skim through anyway… so I’d rather have it help a lot of people than having people force themselves to read through everything. As it turns out, a lot of people liked that, too. In the end, I’m just glad that it may help people. Since it seems to reach people that means that those people may recommend the information that I offered to other people and hence, it could lead to a lot more people feeling assured that nothing can happen to them. Hate Raids are very much still a threat, though, even if you can limit the impact a little bit. Luckily, Twitch is going to take action soon, as Raven mentioned. There’s also going to be a “protest” or “boycott” today in the form of #ADayOffTwitch where a lot of people won’t stream in support of the victims of the hate raids and the constant harassment of marginalised creators. I won’t stream today either.
Throughout Blaugust, I published a few takes on all sorts of topics, including the Blizzard Boycott where I stated that boycotts don’t quite have the impact nowadays to change much but it still shows a lot of the victims that you support them, which is a good thing. I also had a take on Spoilers, content theft and DMCA, as well as the “Play To Satisfaction” idea. There were also some other comments I posted but overall, those were the main ones that did well among all the comment-style posts.
For the Getting To Know You Week, I also put in some effort to introduce myself properly and let others know about stuff I’m doing and stuff I was and am interested in. Later, I also struggled with whether or not I should stick to “Indietail” or call the format “Review” in the title but in the end, I stuck with Indietail after all. I mean, it’s what I do. It’s catchy. It’s “awkward but charming” which is something that a friend called me once and I’m quite proud of that tagline, I guess? Very much in line with “getting to know magi week”, I wrote a week later about my favourite developers. For two days, I also wrote about the GamesCom and the new upcoming Indie Games. It wasn’t quite the same as my first time at the GamesCom but I still enjoyed writing about it – hence, uh, check out Part 1 and Part 2!
I also published reviews on Kingdoms and Castles, Goose Goose Duck, Undertale, Clan O’Conall, HUMANKIND, and Lamentum! So, I got to write six reviews in four weeks, so I didn’t quite hit the “two reviews per week” goal but I still enjoyed the process of pushing myself a little with that specific goal. But, I also managed to share my first impressions on Back 4 Blood, ENCHAIN, Billiards Dungeon, and Maritime Calling, which is why I don’t feel like I completely failed. I also finally got to play Endless Space and the Bioshock Infinite DLC! Hence, I was able to continue the Late to the Party series that everyone forgets about. It’s not the most high-traffic series on the blog, I get that, but it’s fun to write up some non-review thoughts on games after completing them or after finally playing them and I’m having fun, so that’s all that counts.
There are also a bunch of other posts that I didn’t mention at all but I’m afraid, you’ll have to look for those yourself over here. I really enjoyed this year’s Blaugust and while I didn’t manage to publish more than one video on YouTube and while I didn’t manage to read up on other people’s posts, I did have a lot of fun and got to try out a few different approaches to reviews, posts and other stuff, so I’ve had a lot of fun. I’d say I have learned that I need to practice a lot more when it comes to video content and motivation. It’s easy to find a reason not to do something “yet”. It’s hard to get to that “yet” before it’s too late, I guess. I’ll have to work on that and maybe record some first impressions again some time!
Hope you enjoyed this post! I was wondering if I should also write about my streams and stuff but I decided against that as I’m currently rather tired and as I feel like that deserves a post of its own. I’ll make sure to write about it soon-ish and until then, I hope that you have a nice day and that you get to read some nice posts by all the other participants as well!
Cheers!
This post is part of the Blaugust 2021 event. For more information on that, check out this post!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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