Where did today go? How can that possibly be the time? I had so much more that I needed to get done today, but here I am writing a blog post! What happens to my priorities during Blaugust every year?
There's a video uploading at the moment. It's not going to be ready by the time I leave for the engagement party that our Trello page says is of emergency importance. It seems Trello is running my life now. Since I'm probably not going to be home before midnight, I'm going to stick this one up now and just hope that everything works, or at least that if it doesn't that you guys will forgive me for my recalcitrance.
Things didn't go completely to plan with the recording of the video, but at least this way the feature film is only 25 minutes instead of the hour that the original one was going to be. I also had to crush a bunch of commentary into about half the time, so I hope that everything makes sense and that I didn't miss anything important.
I gotta go, but when the video uploads, I hope that you enjoy it.
Well, we're a week into the festival of blogging wonderfulness that is Blaugust, and I have to say that I've been really impressed by the quality of stuff that's been being produced each day, by both groups of Blaugustinians, the internet ones as well as our little club of A-town lunatics. Keep it up, guys.
For those of you that are starting to flag a little under the strain of producing regular content, may I recommend this little list of prompts started by Belghast, every time I revisit it there's some new ideas that I wouldn't mind trying, but then I remember my schedule and figure that if the people are expecting devastatingly difficult quizzes about Italian history, and that it would be rude to disappoint them in favour of something that people might actually want to read.
According to the schedule, today is the day for me to post another Wesnoth vide. A couple of weeks ago, about the same time that I took my annual pilgrimage back to Silvium, the Wesnoth development team put out this cry for help, looking for more programmers to help them speed up a development cycle that has slowed to basically nothing. There's been an amazing response of interested people that has probably given the game a bit of a shot in the arm, but it got me thinking about the way that games die.
Wesnoth is twelve years old. It dates back to the days of Morrowind, Tactics Ogre and Medieval Total War, but it's still being developed, and still being played. You can't play Medieval Total War on windows 8 for love nor money any more, but Wesnoth is still ticking along. I'm not sure what I'd do without Wesnoth, which has been a stand-by for me for a long time, the only evergreen game that I can always go back to. Whenever I've been looking or something to play, I've always been able to head over to wesnoth.org, download a new version, and find all sorts of new and interesting things that people have created using this generic fantasy game as their toolkit..And if I want to, I can help them do it, despite my lack of useful skills, because Wesnoth is so easy to mod, all you need is a text-editor. This community of creative people have been building this game that they love together for so long, and come up with so much excellent stuff, that there's always something new to discover and enjoy.
If she ever does finally die, it will be a sad day, but I know that I'll never forget what is was to be part of this team of creators dedicated to the open-source movement and doing it for the love of it, instead of for material gain. I hope that day is a long way off, though, and until then, I'm going to keep contributing however I can, which today appears to involve recording movies of me being terrible at the game.
This year the Leaflocker is participating in the mad attempt to write 31 posts over the month of Blaugust, as envisioned by our friend Belghast. We generally advocate a more relaxed, self-regulated pace around these parts, but since the Leaflocker editors are well-known masochists, we're going to jump in and give it the old college try (if we knew a Brasenose fight song, we'd be singing right now). If you're visiting for the first time because you too are playing along, do let us know below, so that we can follow you too, and here's a hearty welcome to the virtual wunderkabinet that is the Leaflocker: where if history is anything to go by, the world is made up of turn-based strategy games, pictures of geeks in ties, more popes than you can poke a stick at, plenty of useless trivia, and long run-on sentences our high-school English teachers would be ashamed to be associated with, and if we end up with the Blaugust we're currently aiming for, that won't be that far off. If you followed a link looking for a gaming blog, well...we're not a gaming blog, but we like to think we have a gamer's perspective on life.
Oh, and we have this conceit of pretending that there's more than one of us in the editorial team. It's just one of our quirks. Don't worry too much about it.
We kick off this blauging festival with a returning feature from our efforts last year (the first time that we've successfully met our Blaugust goals since the heady days of 2011), UnwiseOwl's inept attempts to play the open source turn based strategy game Battle for Wesnoth. In today's educational film, our hero struggles to defeat his own voice-box, ventures bravely but foolishly into the never-before-attempted world of recording video, learns just how much can be done with 32 hitpoints and a sword, and loses what has to be one of the easiest gaming missions in existence. Enjoy!
Happy Blaugust first, everybody. I hope we'll talk again tomorrow.
