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I've mostly been doing my own thing and ignoring the Blaugust themes -- but this is the last day of Creator Appreciation Week™, so I'd like to share what I've been watching on the youtubes.

Something I've wondered is what role time plays in storytelling for live service games. The gaps between major updates may not translate to equivalent periods of time passing in-universe, but it gives players a lot of room to get to know characters. If you're coming in as a brand-new player and slamming through the entire story in one go, do big moments for characters have the same impact?

The next GW2 expansion, Janthir Wilds, is launching soon. I've posted a bunch of stuff about SotO on fedi, but I should organize my thoughts about that in one spot. Fair warning: most of my thoughts are rather critical.

There will be spoilers for the SotO story in this post!

In a previous Age, Comcast launched a TV channel for Gamers. It was a lot of talk shows and PR-parroting, but it had a gem that seems to be forgotten: Portal.

I got back into 40k when Rogue Trader came out last year. I had some ultramarines and necrons back in the early 00s, but what I really liked was the Black Library: inquisitors and space wolves and regular-old guardsmen being ground up into nothing to keep the machinery of a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy running for one more day.

In my line of work, we have a perennial problem: somebody wants a forms to collect data. Most of Web Development is making <form>s for one person, validating the data, and showing it in a table to somebody else. Some times, people don't want their Web Developer to make a form; instead, they want to make their own forms, like building a SurveyMonkey thing.

I played EVE on and off for the first ten years of its life. I saw it featured on Portal, thought it was gorgeous, and immediately went to sign up on their forums and for their closed beta. There's a lot I can say about it, but I wanna retell a story from New Eden. Unlike most EVE stories -- tales of titanic conflicts and betrayals years in the making -- this one is tiny.

Between our second Eberron campaign and Blood Lords, we had a brief foray into Paranoia: Red. It was an interesting TTRPG that sounded up our alley, but ended up being a bad fit for the group.

A few months ago, I Joined a My Little Pony campaign. I took the opportunity to bring back somebody who died before their time as Clean Inn, an earth pony aligned to the element of honesty, employed by Her Majesty's royal government. And some thoughts on the Essence20 TTRPG system.

When our first Eberron campaign came to an abrupt and disasterous end, we decided our next stop would be Baldur's Gate. I made a hexblade warlock and ended up with a paladin, which is the biggest swing I've had a character's story take.