Blaugust 2023: It's Not You, It's Me

This is my fourth or fifth time participating in Blaugust.  In previous iterations, I didn't always include the note in my post titles, so it's a little hard to tell.  I've been writing this blog for over fourteen years now.  The first several years were definitely my most prolific, with the first full calendar year of the blog having a total of 77 posts, almost 30 more than the next highest output total, 2 years later with 49.  All that being said, I've always managed to keep up a pace of at least once a month, with 21 posts being my lowest total ever in 2021.  

When this blog started, it was exclusively about World of Warcraft.  I was a relatively new player at the time, but I had a plan to try to level a character of each class to the maximum level. I started playing during the original Burning Crusade expansion but developed this plan during Wrath.  It took me around a year and a half to complete the goal.  That goal then expanded to a character from each class from each faction and then got completely out of hand during Legion when I ended up with over 40 max-level characters.  

As I worked through these goals, I would diligently track my leveling time for each character and sometimes write about which leveling paths I found to be the fastest.  At some point, because I'm a financial guy in real life, I also started writing analyses of Activision-Blizzard's earnings releases and conference calls, back when you could actually glean meaningful information about World of Warcraft from those.

About two years in, I start also playing and writing about other games, starting with RIFT but eventually expanding to include Wildstar, SWTOR, FFXIV, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2.  I tend to keep this blog very gaming focused and rarely post anything personal here, although that has changed a little bit in recent years.  Generally, it tends to be a weekly or bi-weekly update on what I've been doing in the games I play.

The blog is intended to be more of a personal journal for me than something I expect to be widely read or utilized.  It's a way to document my gaming journey and a nice distraction to sit down and regularly write stuff that has nothing to do with finance or accounting.  If the only writing I ever did was accounting memos and financial statement footnotes, I don't think that would be great for my personal development or mental health.  

On Thursday of this week, I'll publish my regular update on how things have been going with the various games I play and my initial thoughts on the FFXIV Fan Fest.

Cheers,

Joar