In The News Nobody is talking about anything except World of Warcraft’s “War of Thorns” event. It’s either the greatest thing ever, or the worst thing ever, or some variation in between, depending on where you look. However, some people are talking about the newest update to No Man’s Sky. I’ve been tempted to get this game forever, but I’m really hesitant to get a game so dependent on procedurally-generated worlds, even at a discounted Steam price of $30.

I’ve belatedly decided to officially participate in the Blaugust extravaganza. I wasn’t going to because frankly I didn’t think I’d be able to write 31 posts in August. (I still don’t think I will.) But late this past week I stumbled upon some information that I completely missed the first time: You don’t actually have to write 31 posts to participate. I figure that even in my crippled state I should be able to manage five or ten posts.

This afternoon I have an appointment with a new primary care doctor, one I’ve never seen before. I had no choice but to select a new one because I had to buy new insurance this year, and my old doctor wasn’t “in the network.” It took three months to get this appointment. I don’t like doctors even on a good day. Especially “primary care” doctors. As far as I can tell, the main goal of this type of doctor is to shove you out the office door as fast as possible with the most generic of healthcare solutions that they can think of: “Here, take this generic prescription and come back in a couple weeks if your problem’s not better.

The very brief medical news is: Yesterday, the doctor was considerably more concerned about my high blood pressure than my hands. I’ll be starting on some new medication for it. I have a followup appointment Wednesday morning where bloodwork will be done and they will see if my pressure is still in what they casually referred to as the “stroke zone.” They did an EKG and I got the distinct impression that if the readings had gone poorly, I might very well have been strapped to a gurney and carted to a hospital right then.

Today is the first day of Blaugust. I thought I would start by introducing myself, something I probably should have done a long time ago. Hi! I’m a middle-aged guy who lives alone in a somewhat rural-ish house with a dog and a cat. I’m “in my 40s,” though in truth I’m now a lot closer to 50 than I would care to admit. I was married for a time, but now I’m divorced.

I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of bloggers post their gaming goals at the start of every month. I’ve always found this both fascinating and puzzling. I myself can’t think of a time when I’ve ever made long-term planning goals for any games I’m playing. My goal-all the time, every month, every day, every time I log into any game-is to experience something fun or interesting or entertaining or challenging or surprising.

I know bloggers are always in search of topics to write about, so I thought I would throw out some ideas here at the start of Blaugust. Then I noticed some others doing that. Then I noticed topic brainstorming is actually on the schedule for the first week. Reading comprehension, yay! Anyway a__lmost all of these are based on posts that are sitting in my Drafts folder unfinished right now.

If you’re just joining us, I use the free version of a program called ManicTime to track all the games I play every month. I’ve found it to be a lot more accurate than Steam, especially for the games that I don’t run through Steam. I’m not sure I can really explain why I track this information, though. I guess so I have a record of what I’m playing, in case I ever want to look back and see.

This morning I finally saw the cataract specialist. It’s been about five months since the optometrist told me I had a cataract. It looks like I never wrote a full post about that. No Blaugust back then. :) The delay was mostly because of having to meet insurance requirements: To make a long story short, I have new insurance this year, and that insurance requires a referral from my primary care doctor, but I had to find a new primary care doctor because my old one was not in the new insurance network, all of which adds up to a lot of waiting for appointments.

Normally each Saturday I post a summary of interesting gaming news and events from my week. But this week, I haven’t seen any gaming stories of interest, and I’ve already posted a number of things about myself for Blaugust. Instead, this morning I thought I would write about these wacky World of Warcraft cinematics all the kids are talking about. Specifically, Warbringer Jaina, Warbringer Sylvanas, and Old Soldier. They’re all very good.

I think I’ve collected enough observational data now to abandon my new writing process. At first it was new and invigorating, but after a week it’s kind of irritating and not any better or faster. For posterity, here’s what I did: I turned on the webcam and recorded myself talking for about 7 or 8 minutes. I played back the video with VLC and set the playback speed slightly slower, and transcribed what I said into a Scrivener document.

EverQuest II would probably rank second on my list of MMORPGs that I wish was easier for me to get into and play more (below Lord of the Rings Online). But they sure don’t make much of effort to accommodate new or returning players. The longest I’ve ever played EverQuest II is leveling a Warden up into the 40s five years ago. Whenever I return to that character, it’s almost impossible to figure out how to play the game again, because EQ2 follows the “more-is-more” philosophy of giving out hotbar abilities every character level.

My dad was an avid backyard bird-watcher. He would setup bird feeders and watch all the wildlife that showed up through binoculars from the living room. In the early days of video cameras, this was back in the 80s, I remember he’d setup one of those monstrous suitcase-sized VHS camcorders on a tripod to record birds at the feeders. He was very protective of the backyard birds. If any neighborhood cats strayed too close, he would get a little pump-action BB gun and actually shoot at the cats from a downstairs bathroom window until they left the property.

This morning I went to another doctor’s appointment, the fourth one in the last nine days. This time I went to see a hand specialist, as I had been referred from my primary care doctor. I was amazed to be able to get an appointment to see him two days after calling. It’s interesting to see the kind of people you find in waiting rooms. Based on my meager experience the last couple of weeks, doctor’s offices seems to be the social hotspot for people over 60.

I just finished watching the American Crime Story: The People Versus O.J. Simpson series on Netflix. It’s pretty good. I’m not sure it deserved to win any Emmys, but I enjoyed it anyway, especially the second half of the series. I didn’t remember a lot of the twists and turns. I didn’t see much of anything about the whole OJ Trial when it happened. I remember the basic framework of it: The Bronco, the trial, the gloves, the acquittal.

You might have noticed I don’t post a lot about games here, and that’s mostly because I haven’t played much of anything in the last month. So the “here’s what I played last night” style of post is completely off the table for me so far in Blaugust. It makes it kind of hard to think of something to say. :) I could tell you what I watched last night, which was a Netflix documentary called Evil Genius: The True Story of America’s Most Diabolical Bank Heist.

They say everything’s been written before and there’s nothing new to write on a gaming blog. Well, okay, I say that, because I’m lazy and not very motivated. I keep looking at all the mountains of writing prompts floating around Blaugust, including the ones I wrote, and thinking, “Meh, I’m just not interested in writing about that today.” Then, suddenly, a revelation! Wilhelm’s post on installing ZMud contained this passage:

The quest for non-WASD games to play using only the right hand on the mouse inevitably leads to either strategy games or isometric action RPGs. I’ve been through a number of strategy games already and I just can’t get into them right now. In the past, I’ve turned to Path of Exile in this kind of situation (because it’s free), but this time I decided to try out the trial version of Diablo III for the very first time.

It was probably inevitable. I went ahead and pre-ordered the World of Warcraft expansion Battle for Azeroth one day early. There’s a couple of reasons I caved. First, I was thinking about buying a new game anyway. Even though I said I wasn’t going to buy Diablo III, I started contemplating it. I did in fact load up Path of Exile Sunday night and play a little bit of my old characters (level 13 is my highest level guy there), and it wasn’t as fun as I expected.

I re-activated my World of Warcraft subscription this morning and played the new expansion for about 45 minutes. Hardcore! I had some hope that I might avoid spamming posts about Battle for Azeroth, but what else is there to talk about? I also made an appointment to take my dog and cat to the vet next week. Not exactly riveting stuff. I’m going to refrain from mentioning any of the negative observations I made and just focus on the good things.

The second problem with writing post after post about Battle for Azeroth, besides boring everyone to death, is that nobody is going to read them. Everyone is avoiding spoilers, so nobody is going to click on a post about the expansion two days in. (I wouldn’t, and I’m generally not reading WoW posts right now.) As of this writing, ManicTime says I’ve played the expansion for a total of 2.

I’m already tired of writing about Battle for Azeroth and I’ve played for less than 4 hours. It’s possible that you can infer something on how I feel about MMORPGs in general right now, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s imagination. Big news, though: I installed an addon! Bagnon, the one (of many) that merges all your different bags into one big bag. In the past I used LiteBag for that, but it didn’t seem to be updated for 8.

Thanks to a post from Leo’s Life, I learned about a web site called Realm Pop. It’s a very simple site that charts demographics information about all of the World of Warcraft servers. I’ve always suspected that I played World of Warcraft on a fairly low population server (Undermine), but now I can finally see it in black-and-white: 232,356 players. And that is including the populations of its two “connected” realms, Anvilmar and Xavius.

The Blaugust theme of the week is Developer Appreciation, but I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to write on this topic. It’s one of those situations where I have to decide whether to write what I think everyone expects, or write what I actually think. I’m sure the intention here is to simply state, “I think games are great and I don’t think developers should get death threats on Twitter!

Today is not just an “I can’t think of anything to write” day, it’s an “I actively don’t want to write because I hate the way I write” day. I was working on a post about comments last night but it’s not finished and I don’t want to post it until it is. It’s been, what, two days since I reported on Battle for Azeroth, so surely there must be a clamoring for news there.