Blaugust 2022 in the Rear View
Normally, this post would be my time to reflect back on my Blaugust experience. How did I find it? What did I learn? That kind of thing. But… I’ve already done that. There was an achievement, you see. So… I had to. Which is amusing in some respects. I’m very much not a completionist, and I even said (at least to myself, if not actually in a post… although I’m near certain I did, despite not being able to find it now) that I wasn’t going to go after the achievements and just see where I landed.
The problem came when I realised at some point, that I had pretty much got them all. Not finishing then would just be crazy. *cough*
Blaugchievements 2022
I still have mixed feelings about the inclusion of these, despite the fact I hit them all. Once this post is over and done with, I expect them to fade largely into the background. Unlike the Blaugust general participation badges (at the time of writing this post, down at the bottom, in the left-side footer), I don’t expect I’ll display them.
Now, I’m not going to run through every single achievement and how I got it. Just where I think extra detail is either helpful, interesting in some way, or clarifying how I consider any of the trickier ones to have actually been achieved.
If there are any questions on any I don’t cover, happy to answer! If you’re interested in the description text for each achievement, it’s linked in the title above.
Getting Started Blaugchieves
- Reading the Manual
- Joining the Cause
- Recruit a Friend
- Spreading the Madness
At the start of all this, I was so sure I wasn’t going after the achievements that I had a bit of a chuckle over UnwiseOwl’s Discord comment but largely forgot about it.
To such an extent that after I did a mental u-turn and started to look at how I might finish, I thought it was ‘Recruit a Friend’ that was going to break it for me. Then… Somewhere, the memory of this exchange tickled the lightbulbs of memory, and I went to check if I was recalling rightly or hopefully.
Yay, rightly!
Discord Blaugchieves
- Friend of Wumpus
- Sharing is Caring
- Forum of Friends
- The Pet Tax
- Friend Like Me
In this category of achievements, I thought it was going to be The Pet Tax that broke my run. It calls for participants to share an image of their bestest animal buddies in the #stuff-and-things channel.
Much to my ongoing sadness, I do not have a pet. We’re not home enough to make good dog owners, and my wife is terrified of cats. No interest in fish, amphibians, or even birds really. So that’s us. Belghast is a smart man though, and prepared for this contingency, with the allowance of sharing other cute animal pics should one of our own not be available.
Ta da! –>
Social Blaugchieves
- Getting Inspired
- Pickup Group
Leap-frogging post ideas from my fellow bloggers is one of my favourite approaches to blogging anyway, so no encouragement needed there!
A few of the other-blogger inspired posts are:
- Look, Maybe It Isn’t so Bad — Although actually, this one came off the back of a comment rather than a post.
- Living in an MMO — Paeroka posed the question of which MMO world we might choose to live in, if we had to. Rakuno had a go at this prompt as well!
- The Ascent Early Impressions — This post would never have happened without UnwiseOwl calling us bloggers together to collectively tackle a look at the month’s Humble Choice offering.
Pickup Group was the other I thought I would end up missing out on. My timezone isn’t exactly conducive to playing realtime with my fellow bloggers. The odd time I’ve joined in for a round of Among Us or similar, it has entailed waking up far earlier than is natural to do so.
But then I realised… Nothing in the achievement description text said it had to be synchronous play.
Kluwes, UnwiseOwl and I all played out turns of our XCOM 2 Succession Game during Blaugust, and shared a gaming experience together, albeit one shared across time.
Post Blaugchieves
Trying to find some of these posts again caused a couple moments of panic! I forgot which ones I’d done from the prompt list, and then confused my in-week Creative Appreciation post with the prompt one, and just generally started to worry I’d missed a trick that was going to cost me platinum after all.
But nope! Got all my ducks in a row after all; fortunately, I was not mistaken in my earlier run-through of checking off the achieves.
My post on CGP Grey was inspired by the prompt: Tell us about some of your favorite creatives (writers/artists/bloggers/streamers/etc) and explain why/provide examples, which if I’d been smarter and timed it better, could’ve served as double duty for Creative Appreciation.
Platinum!
So with all those done, there we go! I can, I believe, claim Platinum! Not something I expected going into this, but I’m no less pleased for having done so now at this end of things.
I was going to append some discussion on the new blogs I encountered this Blaugust in this post — but the Blaugchievement portion ended up being longer than I imagined, so that’ll have to await another day.
