Seventeen years is a long time to keep doing anything voluntarily. It's longer than I held all of my jobs. It's almost as long as my youngest kid has been alive. And if you'd asked me in 2008 why I was starting a WoW blog, I'd have given you an answer about wanting somewhere to put my thoughts on the game, which was true and which turned out to be about a tenth of what actually happened.
What I got was people.
That's the whole post, really, but let me do it properly, because it's the last week of Blaugust and this is the one I've been circling all month.
When I started, the WoW blogging scene was enormous. Dozens and dozens of us, all writing into the same small room, reading each other, linking each other, arguing in the comments about talent trees like it mattered. And it did matter, in the way that things matter when a group of people agree together that they do. You'd post something, and within a day somebody three time zones away would post a response, and by the weekend four other blogs had picked it up and taken it somewhere you hadn't thought of. That's a conversation. It just happened to be about a video game
The community outlasted the game topic, which is the part that still surprises me. The people I met through that blog are people I've now been in contact with for over a decade and a half, through expansions, through blog rebrands and hiatuses, through people getting married and having kids and changing careers and losing parents. I have watched entire adult lives unfold in the sidebar of a hobby website. I know things about these people that I don't know about neighbors I've lived next to for years.
And they know a version of me. Not the whole thing, and I've written this month about how that wall came down in pieces rather than all at once. But a real version. The guy who can't stop making alts and gets grumpy about faction war storylines and posts his hours every month. That's genuinely me. It's just me with a different name on it.
Bel is the obvious one to name here, because Blaugust was his, and because this entire month of posts exists for him. He built a thing whose whole purpose was to get people writing and keep them connected to each other, year after year, and he ran it with a generosity I don't think he ever fully clocked. That's what he gave the community. Not content. Infrastructure for a friendship network, disguised as a blogging challenge.
I've thought about that a lot this month, twenty-nine days into doing his event properly for the first time. The thing he understood is that the writing was mostly an excuse. The point was that a couple hundred people had a reason to show up in the same place every August and read each other.
There's a practical gift in here too, and I'd be dishonest to leave it out. Seventeen years of writing two or three hundred words at a time, week after week, will make you a better writer whether you intended it or not. Nobody edited me. Nobody paid me. I just did it, badly at first, for a very long time, and somewhere in there I stopped having to think about how a post is shaped. That skill has been worth more to me outside this hobby than I could have possibly predicted in 2008, and I'll leave it at that.
But the friends are the answer. If I quit WoW tomorrow, and one of these years I probably will, the blog is not the thing I'd lose. I'd lose the reason to keep showing up where those people are.
So I'll keep showing up.
Cheers,
Joar
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