Endgame Viable

Morning! It is a Saturday morning and I 100% do not feel like writing a blog post, and in fact, largely feel like I’m “over” the rush of renewed blogging energy that Blaugust brings every year and I’m ready to move on to another project.

But alas, there are some 24 posts yet to be written. The “staying motivated” Blaugust topic week should be in the second week, not the last.

This is the dual-edged sword of writing challenges. Writing something is easy. Writing something that’s worth reading 31 days in a row is another story.

There’s value in writing every day, to practice the skill of writing which becomes rusty very quickly. But is there value in publishing what you write every day? That’s the question.

Fortunately we live in an age where quantity of content is far more important than quality of content, and we can push out whatever “slop” with confidence that it will somehow improve our following, or at least not hurt it too much.

And luckily for me, most of my blog posts are simply relating what I’ve been doing and what I will be doing. I don’t have much of the pressure of thinking up a compelling subject matter.

To illustrate this process, yesterday I took off of work early because I was exhausted from a week of go-go-go activity and wasn’t feeling too well. I ended up sleeping a lot the rest of the day, and slept way too long last night. Sleeping too much usually makes me feel lethargic, and that’s where I started today in no mood for writing.

I’ve written four short post drafts for the future, so I can always draw on them if needed. One of them is about agentic AI prompts, one is about HTML day, one is about how obviously superior ChatGPT is to Google for search, and one is a response to luckyinstar’s group project.

One is a “safe” post, but three of them are firmly in the category of “posts that might be too opinionated and controversial for the Internet and I’m not sure I care to deal with any potential fallout.”

Roger posted Not Having an Opinion today, which I can relate to. Sometimes–most times, in fact–it’s not worth expressing your opinions if nobody is asking.

On today’s agenda, I’m purchasing and installing EverQuest Legends. I saw a couple of bloggers talking about it, I’d never heard of it, and it sounded … well, not interesting per se, but different, so I thought it was worth a try. I was drawn to the promise of “solo play.”

Shockingly, I not only had previously made a Daybreak account but actually still had my credentials saved. (I honestly didn’t realize Daybreak was still around. I thought they’d been bought or sold at some point.)

I have very little history with Norrath, so I’ll be approaching it as an outsider. I never played EverQuest back in the day. Of the “first three,” I played Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call. I bought EverQuest and tried it on one of my Quake clanmate’s recommendation, but I thought the postage-stamp-sized 3D viewport was garbage in comparison to Asheron’s Call’s (and most of the gaming world’s) full screen 3D environment, so I never went back to it.

In subsequent years, I played a handful of hours of EverQuest, and a modest amount of EverQuest II, but they’ve never been my main games. I even found a screenshot of a time I played EverQuest in 2018.

I’ll at least record some videos of EverQuest Legends and that’ll feed my YouTube content machine sometime later. I imagine it will be fun for a few hours.

Speaking of YouTube, I keep forgetting to mention my video of the day. That’s how much I monitor my YouTube uploading scripts. They are very much set-them-and-forget-them operations.

Today’s video of the day is when I tried The Banner Saga back in April, a sort-of tactical RPG in the visual style of Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. It was okay, but it didn’t really click with me. I went on to try a few other tactical RPGs in that time period.

UPDATE: Minutes after publishing this, I went over to the PC to click on the “Play” button for EverQuest Legends and it immediately gave me a “cannot connect to the server” message. Not a great first impression.