Tag / Announcement

by MagiWasTaken

TSS#66 – Blaugust, Cats, and Drafts

Welcome to another Stray Sheep. Today I’ll talk about the upcoming Blaugust event, my participation in that, and other things. I hope you enjoy this post! 

Let’s get right into it: It’s nearly August and therefore it’s time for Blaugust. But since we already participated in Blapril just a few months ago, Bel thought of something else to switch things up and combat a few issues. 

Edit: Since this might be important to a lot of people, I added the “when and where” part here at the beginning so that people can easily find out about it.

The list of blogs currently participating, and the dates of their posts are:

As you can see, I’m right up there relatively late, on the 23rd of August with a post but, honestly, I’ll probably try to post about all prompts regardless as it’s more fun that way – and I’ll link to the “host” for the prompt as well as the next “host” in line. 🙂 Looking forward to it!

The main concern about Blaugust – as far as I understood it – that some people had was that the “competition”-style might actually not help people revitalize their or other blogs. Posting 31 daily posts can be quite stressful depending on your schedule and alas it can get quite annoying to fulfil the quota, prepare blog posts, edit them in time, find screenshots, and do all of that within one month to get some badge for your blog in the end. The badge may be the cause for this “stress” that people put themselves through… and obviously, it was debatable. I personally love the 31 posts on 31 days idea for the Challenge-part and obviously, I love showing off that badge-png on my blog… but I also was never in this “I need to post more than others!” mindset but rather was thinking in that “how far can I push certain limits?” pattern. 

During Blaugust19, I posted 31 posts in 31 days and saw that I could actually reduce the time to write reviews considerably while also having more success with it by writing shorter reviews (about 1k words instead of 3-4k) where I don’t explain the game (and possibly spoil it) to my readers but instead talk about what I like and don’t like and removing everything that doesn’t add value. During Blapril20, I ended up posting 45 posts. I sadly got busier at the end of it, so I couldn’t go for the originally planned 69 posts (that exact number because I’m still a child in my head).

And if the original Blaugust idea would have happened this month, I probably would have aimed for 31+ posts again… but something has changed. Bel is trying out something new which might be more fun and we’ll just see how it’s perceived and if it works out in the end in the way that it was intended to be. Mostly, since Blapril already happened this year, though, because of the concerns above and since some people might not be willing to do “another Blaugust-type event”. Alas, we’re trying out this.

Alas, I’m announcing my participation in the Blaugust Promtapalooza – a blog “tour” of sorts where someone posts a blog post, followed by a prompt for the next day, linking to the next blog in line. That blog then writes about the prompt that the previous blog announced and then announces the prompt for the next day, along with the link to the next blog, resulting in essentially a “blog crawl” where you can make your way through 31 blogs that wanted to participate this year. Of course, you don’t have to follow these blog prompts and of course, you don’t have to read them all or write daily… but regardless of that, I’m looking forward to it, again challenging certain limitations I have and hopefully making it through the end. 

On top of that, I was hoping to keep up with most of the blogs participating this year and reading through a bunch of them every day while shouting some of them out in a blog post at the end of the week. “This is what I’ve read this week, this is why I liked these so much. Check them out!” or something like that… I’ll still have to work on the draft-idea that I had in mind but I think that might be quite cool as some extra posts… 

And then there’s also going to be the normal posts that I would have posted anyways, regardless of Blaugust or whatever. For instance, I’ve been working on one huge post about my blog’s one-year-anniversary… for three or four days now, my blog has existed for a year… so that’s really cool… and I wanted to celebrate that with some stats and my favourite posts and that kind of stuff. I feel like that might be really cool but I also am still working on it and will hopefully get it out soon. 

There will be posts about games that have come out and that are still coming out. I have three or four interviews planned but didn’t get to write the questions just yet. It’s been a bit iffy time-wise over here, especially as my sleep schedule is quite messy at the moment (again), although I’ve managed to sleep this night for the second night in a row!

Jin and Tammy are cute as always! (Btw, my palico in MHW is named after Tammy over here!)

Apart from that, I’m taking care of cats right now. My best friend and her boyfriend are not in town right now so I need to take care of them from Tuesday until Saturday (Today is Thursday! Hello, future!), which mostly means feeding them and playing/cuddling with them since they’re very social – and I also need to watch over them so that they don’t do stupid things. It’s been quite cool so far and I really am enjoying my time with them… but as far as working on blog posts go, it’s a bit tough to do that when they want to get your attention by walking over your laptop and stuff… alas, I stopped that for the entirety of yesterday… and I’ve got to stop it today, too, I think, as they are way too cute to be ignored… maybe I’ll get productive again when they are napping later on… 

But once I get some more time to write as well as some new pictures of them, I’ll post some cute ones (got the permission from my best friend!) including some interesting ideas regarding stupid thoughts I came up with while playing with the cats. I think you might like that. 

And well, apart from that not much else has happened. I’m done with some of my exams. Ms Magi and I have been together for 13 months already. I’ve been really lucky to have met her. It’s a bit insane that my blog is only a month older than my current relationship. I just kind of feel like I’ve been blogging for ages now and that I’ve learned a bunch and got to know a lot of people. I guess all these thoughts could go into a separate blog post as well.

At last, there’s also the To The Moon Minisodes that I played actually… but I didn’t get to write a post about them just yet… and since I’ve been late already, I thought “why not wait a bit more and play games that I actually enjoy?”, so I did and alas, I’ll have to write a post about my recent Monster Hunter World endeavours, I’ve got some reviews and interviews in the drafts, I’ve been meaning to talk about Dark Souls 3 since I’ve been playing that on Stream, I’ve just finished Outer Wilds and wanted to review that… and then there is the Mystery Blogger Award that Megan tagged me in… and a ton more drafts sitting around!

As you can see there are a whole bunch of ideas in the work and I’ll try to get through those within the next few weeks! 

I hope you enjoyed this post. I’ve been up to a lot. Lately, I’ve been posting less but it’s mostly due to exams. Hopefully, that will change now!

Cheers!

This post is part of the Blaugust 2020 event. Wanna know more about it? Then check out my post on it or Bel’s post where he also linked everyone who’s participating! Be sure to check out the others as well!

by MagiWasTaken

The Steam Game Festival!

As a blogger who’s kind of focused around indie games and new releases as well as reviews, I always am on the search for new titles that are coming up and worth checking out or writing about. Alas, the Steam Game Festival, Summer Edition, has been a great opportunity for me to do just that: Play games that are coming out and write about things that are worth checking out.

Sadly, due to real-life obligations, I didn’t quite get the chance to do that just yet, although I did download plenty of demos. In the next few days to weeks, I’ll post about my experiences with these demos and will recommend stuff based on my first impressions in this category… The Lookout Post!

Overall, I’ve got to say that there are a lot of titles that I already played in the past from Ovid Studio’s “Metamorphosis” to TwiceDifferent’s “Ring of Pain”… But I also got my eye on a lot of new titles that I’ve been eyeing for the last couple of months, which is rather exciting. I’m really looking forward to the experience and the first impressions that I’ll be able to collect. I still haven’t really figured out how I’ll tackle these posts but it’s going to be exciting regardless of the posts’ form.

Apart from that I also have three posts on Drake Hollow planned, which should come out sometime soon. There will be an interview with the devs, once I’ve figured out what questions to throw out and which ones to keep. There will be a general informational post on the game… as well as an Indietail-Review once it’s out! So, stay tuned for that!

Cheers!

by MagiWasTaken

TSS #62 – On the Lookout!

The last Stray Sheep has been half a month ago already so I thought I’d post something in that section already. This time around, we’re talking about categories!

Currently, I’m doing mostly reviews (Indietail) since I originally wanted to do exactly that, review titles in my library and work through my backlog. The Gaming Journey also helps with that as I get to stream games and post about it (MHW, D2, etc.) that aren’t exactly “Indie” Games. So, overall, I really am enjoying that. And “everything else” is the Stray Sheep, I guess?

Well, I was planning for a while now to start up a category with informational pieces about upcoming games, new releases and promotions as well as new games that I’m excited about or that I’ve newly discovered or added into my pile of games to play. I really am looking forward to that as I’d also add the past interviews with Devs into that section and as I’d also talk about stuff like Witchmarsh, which I’ve been backing for a while now on Kickstarter!

Informational pieces would be mostly about “hype” or things that look interesting without the evaluation of potential repetitiveness or design flaws or whatever else I’d say about it. Of course, I may talk about those, too, but generally, I’d love to keep it less review-ish and actually only talk about why I personally am excited about those games and why it looks so interesting to me. I also could post my Revisited-series in there and move some of those posts to that category since they’d go hand-in-hand with the reviews, I guess?

Updates, press releases, new information, new discoveries, interviews – “On the Lookout” or “The Watch Tower” or whatever I can come up with will be the category for it! I personally am quite fond of “On the Lookout” but I’m a bit worried that it may be too obvious or too concrete in a way… it’s not like “Indietail”.

Currently thinking about using something like this as a “Logo” of sorts. Maybe with a tagline?

I even have a few games in mind to post about in that sense. I’m looking forward to it!

Before I set everything up, though, and before any of those drafts can be finished and posted, I’d have to come up with a fitting name for it and hence, I gotta find something that “sticks” or that is “easy to remember” or “fitting for my ‘brand'”. I personally am not really too coherent with it just yet, although I may redesign my blog soon…

Edit: The newly created category is called “The Lookout Post” with some puns and all of that in there…

I hope you enjoyed this quick little post on categories and upcoming WIPs!

Stay safe!

Cheers!

by MagiWasTaken

Just another post about Hollow Knight

I love Hollow Knight. It’s a great game. And essentially I’ve been referencing it for a while now in my posts while playing it for fifteen hours already on stream.

So, I tried to re-create my Avatar as a Hollow Knight character but didn’t quite manage to do it and now I got this.

Tadaa!

I don’t really know what I could have done better… I’ve tried to go for an ant of sorts or a moth character but it didn’t just happen… and then I kind of went with the jester hat and the cultist robes that I kind of liked.

I’d love to create more variants like this in the future. One of my viewers on Twitch recreated my mage-avatar as a crow for the playthrough that we did on Aviary Attorney and I really liked the idea of creating characters like that.

Belghast from the Blaugust Community also has a thing like that going on with his character and everything as may want to see hin his channel banner over there. So, generally, since I’ll stick around to MHW and Catherine and Hollow Knight right now, I might as well create more mages like that. Maybe a Mage Sheep in Catherine’s case or a Witch-er armour for my MHW character… idk.
I’m rather satisfied with this one but would’ve liked it more if I had been able to “bug”-ify the character a bit more… but for now, this should work and if anyone is interested in trying your best at making a better version of this mage-character of mine, feel free to send it to me and I’ll feature all of those drawings on my twitch channel if you want to! 😀

Oh, I also opened up an Instagram account for the blog but I don’t really know how to post on IG from my PC or what content would be nice on there… I guess that’d be a good place to start for that sort of stuff :c
If any of you are interested right now in seeing me play Hollow Knight on Twitch, you may enjoy joining the discord and getting notified whenever I post something on my blog or whenever I go live. Maybe we’ll have a great time there!

I guess that’s it for today’s post. I like creating derpy drawings like that. Hopefully I’ll be able to get better at it in the future. We’ll see.

Cheers!

This post is part of a challenge called BLAPRIL. The goal is to post as much as possible during the 30 days of April. There are different themes during some of the weeks and a lot of mentors, newbies and participants participating. Feel free to check this hub-post out and check out the other participants!

by MagiWasTaken

The Stray Sheep #54 – Ugh where do I even start

Lately, I’ve been feeling sluggish and restless. I’m getting enough sleep and waking up at “normal times” but I still end up not getting much done. Therefore, I thought I’d take this opportunity and write a post about it. 

As already mentioned in previous posts, I’m not able to write up the two posts per day, which is quite bothersome. Currently, I’m on cold turkey and the need for a smoke isn’t as strong anymore but I still am missing some sort of ritual or routine that I’ve had before. During the day I quite often get a bit bored with what I do, as I’m missing a pastime, and when I’m done with certain chores, I usually end up hopping into bed again and spending time reading something or watching videos. Today I ended up napping a bunch, which isn’t necessarily good when you’ve still got two more posts to create for tonight after you’ve only created one post for the Sunday where you didn’t get the post done in time as you’ve had to create two extra posts, etc, etc. 

It’s a bit annoying. I’m procrastinating and then end up needing more time to get done with the posts that I needed for the previous days… when this post is out, I’ll need a second post for today which will probably have to wait until tomorrow as I’m done for today. 

I guess it’s a bit of a motivation issue and while I thought that blogging would be great during these times, it really is not.. after all it’s something pleasant that I now am doing all day long. And I don’t know yet how I’ll handle all this stuff when University starts next week (presumably online but still…. quite weird). Luckily, I should have enough posts for the rainbow award by the 16th, but I really want to keep going with two daily posts, even though it’s a bit stressful when you can’t really think of what to write about.

Roger from containsmoderateperil recently told me that he doesn’t believe in writer’s block when it comes to blogging – and I guess I’d agree as there’s always something to talk about, be it politics or shows that you’ve watched or other mundane activities. It can be your daily lives or what you’ve eaten recently or what you’ve been wearing, reading, watching, listening, drawing, sewing, playing, seeing, noticing and hearing lately. It can be about all kinds of things and usually, I’d come up with some stupid idea on the spot but right now it’s mostly bland stuff after 200 words. 

I was struggling with my “I hate contact damage” post as I didn’t really know how to fill the blog post with more than two hundred words… and I had about eight more posts like that, yelling at clouds for not stopping game devs from doing stupid game mechanics like that… but since clouds don’t really do much apart from floating and getting counted, I couldn’t really type too much in that post but I also didn’t want to just rant at everything in one post and as my internet connection isn’t working today, I can’t really get any screenshots for/from another MonHunLog post as I’m currently typing this out on my phone using my flatmate’s wifi connection… and therefore, a lot of post-drafts can’t be finished today either.

Lastly, I guess I’d mention that it’s the “Getting To Know You” week in Blaugust/Blapril right now, which is why I’ll probably do some of the tags that I’ve been tagged in over the past couple of days/months and I’ll also do some more personal Stray Sheep, I guess? I’ve got so many good ideas for posts but when it comes to writing them up, they take so much time and editing, so I didn’t get to post any of those yet…. but there’s still time until the end of Blapril2020, so maybe I’ll be able to finish those by then. We’ll see.

For now, though, I’ll have to end this post here. Thanks for reading. Hopefully, my internet connection works by tomorrow… we’ll see. If so, then I’ll finally be able to talk about MHW Iceborne and I’ll also be able to stream again or finish up my RimWorld post that has been in the works for a bit now…

Btw, The title’s referring to a great blog btw! Check them out over there! The blog author of that one makes music, writes songs and poems and she’s a lovely human being from my old school that I kind of had a crush on ages ago… although I’ve been stupid and a teen back then, so nobody cares about that anymore, I guess?

Either way. I hope that y’all stay safe and healthy!

Until the next time,

Cheers!

This post is part of a challenge called BLAPRIL. The goal is to post as much as possible during the 30 days of April. There are different themes during some of the weeks and a lot of mentors, newbies and participants participating. Feel free to check this hub-post out and check out the other participants!

by MagiWasTaken

TSS#46 – Your daily dose of internet togetherness – BLApril 2020mg!

Times are rough over here, which is why I prescribe you your daily dose of internet togetherness. It’s a drug of sorts with 2020mg of BLApril and it seems to be potent as a lot of bloggers are joining in to take part in this year’s pre-poned Blaugust-Event.

When I just started blogging last year in July, I joined a community of bloggers called the Blaugustans and it was wholesome and many people had great advice for the Newbie I was back then… and nearly a year later I’m still up and blogging the heck out of this blog. Kinda.
I’m not too active but the blog’s not dead yet and with the current state of the world I was excited to prepare a ton of posts for this year’s Blaugust – but then Bel and some other mentors ended up pre-poning Blaugust to April. Hence, the new design and the new name but the same old spirit. Lovely!

I’m eager to take part in here this month and while my initial goal was to overachieve with 62 to 69 posts, I’m not that well prepared and have not nearly enough finish posts to go with double posts for the entire month. Instead, I’ll do my best to keep up with two daily posts and I’ll try to create new posts without dropping quality on the fly during the next few days to weeks. I’ll try to hit at least the 31-post-mark and if make it to 42 or even 62 posts in April! It will be a challenge but I’m hyped up and excited to try out a few new formats and review some manga and shows, books and other kinds of media – so a whole new world will open up for me this month and I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

As far as preparation goes compared to last year’s Blaugust… it’s not as well-planned. I remember setting up “Stray Sheep” to fill the gaps and talk about other topics in between game reviews and… I’ll still do that. There will also be some tags and other posts that involve tagging other people this year… and I’m planning on also doing recaps of my streams and continue the MonHunLog, especially as I’ve just recently bought IceBorne!
Compared to last year, the overall-schedule may be a mess, but I’ll try to organise it as much as possible.

I’m still a Newbie and I still have a ton to learn but I’m trying myself at experimenting with Spacers, Galeries and other sorts of ways to structure my posts and I’d be glad to receive some feedback on that.

Overall, this will be delightful and while I’m feeling under the weather I’ll do my best to blog as much as possible so that we all experience some great internet togetherness!

To that….
Cheers!

This post is part of a challenge called BLAPRIL. The goal is to post as much as possible during the 30 days of April. There are different themes during some of the weeks and a lot of mentors, newbies and participants participating. Feel free to check this hub-post out and check out the other participants!

by MagiWasTaken

TSS#41 – We did a 24 hour stream

Happy new year everyone!

It’s been a while since I posted something on this small little piece of work that I’m calling my blog. 

So far, it’s been quite busy university-wise but I still kind of managed to squeeze in a little bit of gaming-time in my free time and I streamed all of it. Whenever I played games, I ended up streaming it on Twitch and that, after a while, lead to me reaching 50 followers on Twitch. And that’s awesome!

But that also meant that I had to do something, that I was once upon a time joking about. I once said that I’d do a 24-hour stream when I reach 50 followers on Twitch, but that was more of a joke, to be honest. But I guess people got caught up or wanted to support me or wanted to see me suffer, so they pushed me a lot whatever their reason was! 

I received a couple of retweets, raids, hosts and people eventually stopped by and followed for real even without knowing anyone, so I reached that number last Monday and ended up setting up the stream for last Wednesday. 

Now, Wednesday isn’t optimal, since I usually have University from 10 am until 6 pm but on that day I decided to skip a few classes, get a little bit of rest and just start up the stream at 9 pm CET. Thursdays don’t have any University-activities for me, so I’d be able to make it through the stream (hopefully), not miss out on any classes and at the same time not mess up my sleep-schedule as I’d go to sleep only an hour after 9 pm CET on Thursday, like a (more or less) normal human being. 

It kind of worked out as planned if it hadn’t come to a few things:

  1. I stayed up until 5 am to finish up my math assignments and then ended up oversleeping and hurrying up quite a lot to get those assignments delivered. 
  2. I didn’t nap after University because of me stressing over countdown-timers, scene layouts and other things that I haven’t set up yet, on top of me trying to support smaller streamers on Twitch by lurking in there chat, while also working on these blog-post drafts of Monster Hunter World that I have been trying to finish up! In the end, I ended up lurking in chat, tidy up the room a bit, and create a a “BRB”-Screen and a 24-hour countdown timer. 

So, I went into the stream at around 9:20 pm while a bit sleep-deprived, manned with a whole lot of coffee, no plan of what to play, an audience of a few people that’d support me for the first few hours of the stream and two pizzas. I was rather prepared for it all, even if the starting-condition sleep-wise weren’t met.

My plan for the stream was to play games for as long as possible and to not go too much into niche-territory of games so that people wouldn’t get too bored with it. After all, Twitch is still a platform for entertainment, right?

Hence, my first game of the stream was Dungreed (review on that coming out soon) where I cleared a couple of runs before switching over to Destiny 2 where I’ve completed a few gambit & gambit prime matches as well as a quest, a few bounties and two strikes; that is if I remember correctly. It was rather fun until someone noticed that it was buffering. My PC has been downloading games all-day-long and therefore has been running all-day-long, too. I should’ve restarted it. 

So, after a quick little restart (about 5 minutes) that I decided to add to the stream-time later (so we’d stream until 9:25 pm on the next day, I ended up playing more Destiny 2 before I got the BEETLE error (I’ll have to fix that eventually) and had to switch games again. That was the time where I swapped over to other games like Risk of Rain 2, Omensight, Stardew Valley, Monster Hunter World, The Red Strings Club, NieR: Automata, Catherine Classic, Overwatch, League of Legends, and Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles (not in that order btw). 

The stream was a blast, although it was rather stressful as well. I got blessed with multiple raids, host and lurks as well as people actually chatting with me, trying to cheer me up and keep me awake. I enjoyed that a lot. I was about to do a section with a detailed report and shoutouts to everyone, but I’m not so sure if that’s what people would like to read and I also don’t remember everything properly right now.

I’d like to thank Queen_Gummybear, SeptumChild, PNGcat, Jail_07, Ruxa_TV, Lobsterpants98, Tessa (other link), MsNoxi, DreuCheese, ArrogantLife, FaustDaimos, ChyloRen, itzzRaveline, Butterscotch_27, Nickodimas, and MarsaOvO for the time they spent in the chat and for the support they gave me throughout the stream! 

I’d like to thank itzzRaveline, Pagan The Wanderer, and signup25 for the hosts!

I’d like to welcome in all the new people that followed and came in to the stream, was nice getting to know ya!

I’d like to thank Butterscotch27 and Nickodimas (again) for making a few hours of the stream even greater than the other ones. They sticked quite a lot of time through with me and were possibly one of the reasons why I didn’t give up during the whole duration even with my migraine coming back up and with me being so tired at some points.

In the future, I’ll be streaming more, I guess, but I’ll also try to post more on my blog, although I’ll probably limit to bi-weekly or monthly posts. As for reviews, I’ll soon post a review on Dungreed and one on Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. 

If you’d like to see some of my first impressions of these two games, you should check out the vods on my channel. 

Either way, I hope you enjoyed this post. If not, that’s too bad, I guess. Uhm… anyways, have a nice day. I thought I’d summarize everything into one thing and well.. 

Cheers!

by MagiWasTaken

TSS#38 – It has been a while

It’s truly been a while. My last post “LoL 10th Anniversary – 2012, Nami” has been almost three weeks ago and, well, I haven’t had time to post anything for the last few weeks, and to be honest I also was lacking in motivation. Hence, I thought it’d be time to make a quick update post and talk about stuff.

Indiecator! Now with some of my drawings! UwU!

So, uni’s been keeping me super busy lately and because of real-life stuff usually jumping in at the worst times possible, I didn’t really manage to post lately. I’m really behind on my math studies with me just barely making it through the math assignments right now and with the end of the semester (and hence, exams) approaching slowly. Over the last few weeks, I had also all kinds of other meetings to attend to, as well as doctor’s appointments – and I kind of ended up neglecting my blog quite a lot.

I also ended up streaming whenever I had the free time to do so and it’s been quite a lot of fun. I’d like to post at least once per week if possible with a few short posts here and there if my time schedule, as well as my sleep schedule, allows me to but we’ll see in the future. My blog’s not dead and I don’t plan on abandoning it at all.

So that’s it for the update. I thought I’d also talk about the LoL-Anniversary-series and.. well… I don’t really play any champs that came out after 2012, so I stopped posting about the Lore and builds and stuff as noted in my last post. I mean, there used to be a time where I played tons of Tahm Kench, Braum and Bard but Riot Games hasn’t really shown any love to these champions in quite some time. Next patch, Braum should receive a bit of a buff but I’m not so sure if I’ll play him again, especially as the meta’s currently a state with Support not being as fun as it used to be, for me personally (but that’s something I’d talk about in another post).

I’ll probably do posts like that in the future again here and there but I may separate the Lore & opinion parts into one post while doing the Showcase & Guide parts in a different post since those parts don’t really mix well together, I think… Not so sure, we’ll see about that in the future.

Other than that, there’s been some changes over here. My new PC is nearly ready to be built but I’m still missing the case which was supposed to arrive today but apparently will arrive next week instead as Amazon told me just now. Although that kind of sucks, it’s not that problematic as I’ve already waited two weeks for it and as I may as well wait another week, right? Patience is a virtue after all!

RIP Solaire – I found out the other day 😦

Once I’ve got that PC, I’ll probably be able to cover more games on here since there’s Indie Games out there that my current hp-laptop can’t handle! Also, I wanted to revive the “Late to the Party”-posts but my laptop can’t handle Dark Souls or The Witcher 2 or the Bioshock-games, so I can’t post about those… and I’m really looking forward to playing Monster Hunter World! That’s gonna be awesome!

Uhm, that’s it for the update, I guess. To sum it all up, I’ll try to post about stuff at least weekly and maybe more often, depending on how much time I’ll have.

And to anyone who read this far through my post, I wish y’all a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Enjoy your time and don’t stress yourself too much over presents and stuff. 🙂
(and to anyone who hasn’t read this far, I wish y’all happy holidays, too, lol)

Cheers!

Edit: Also Crywank’s breaking up soon and now I’m sad (boo hoo)!

Another Edit: I kinda got the idea of putting out drawings from Frostilyte’s blog, so check his blog out if you’d like to and if you’ve got the time!

by MagiWasTaken

LoL Anniversary – 2009, Janna

League of Legends turned ten years old, this year, which is one of many reasons to celebrate!

Hence, I thought I’d make a few posts (though a bit late) about my favourite champions in my favourite role, kind of like a introduction to those champions or a guide without the strategies and all of that but with more lore and reasons for why I enjoy playing the featured champion. I’m a Support Main and mostly play hard-engage and enchanter/babysitter supports but I’ve been trying to get better at poke-supports as well, lately with Xerath as my latest addition! 

For the sake of not making one super long posts (with probably around 10k words), I’ve decided to instead feature one post per champion per year, with ten featured champions/seasons in total! I may continue this sort of posts afterwards as well or feature two champions in one post if there’s a bit less to say about them, but I’ll decide that in the future, probably.

Before we head into the first post, I’d like to talk about two things:

1 – I decided to rename the “Late to the Party” “column” into “The Gaming Journal” where I’ll post anything that isn’t a review while also keeping it gaming-related. For instance, my goal is to make multiple posts regarding my first steps in MHW once I’ve started playing that, similar to what DerLoarp did (back in the day) at petebackwelcome, a blog that no longer exists. 

2 – Currently, you are still able to receive a ton of extra rewards in League of Legends for just playing the game, if you’ve created an account before Oktober 16th (I believe?). There’s not only the Anniversary-exclusive “Annie-versary”-Skin but also a lot of extra rewards like bonus capsules, tokens, gemstones, chests & keys, skin shards, TFT-eggs, a random Legendary Skin Permanent (!) and other rewards that are awarded by playing ten games. You’re eligible to receive these rewards until the end of this week, so you better hurry if you’d like to get those freebies!

Back when I started, Zyra has just come out, I believe, which was somewhere around 2012 (I was 13 back then). Hence, I don’t know what League of Legends was like up to that day but I certainly enjoyed playing champions that came out before that. In fact, my first support champion was Taric, The Shield Of Valoran! But while I’d love to feature him in these posts here, I can’t do it at all, mainly for the reason that he’s been updated to a more fabulous version of his former self that I’m not really playing right now. 

After he got changed a couple of times, though, I switched over to some other support champions and amongst them were Morgana, Soraka, Fiddlesticks and – the champion that today’s post is about – Janna, the Storm’s Fury! 

Note: I’ve only named these five champions, as they are champions that I actually play and as these came out in 2009, don’t flame me.

Janna, The Storm’s Fury can be called a protective spirit or even a goddess of the poor people in Zhaun and the sailors on Runeterra’s seas. She’s been known for ages and stories about her helping those in dire need have been told in many countries. Janna, which is the Shuriman word for “Protector”, often shows herself in the form of a blue bird that helps those that pray for her or as a breeze that warns the sailors of approaching storms. 

There’s a ton of cool and cute short stories that you can read in League of Legends’ “Universe”-page that show you all of her different sides: The Protector and the Storm’s Fury! 

In-game her abilities reflect her windy character quite well. 

Her passive ability, Tailwind, grants her and all allies that move towards her increased movement speed while also granting her bonus damage based on her movement speed on her auto-attacks and her W-active. 

Her Q-ability, Howling Gale, summons a whirlwind at her current location which gets bigger and travels wider the longer she charges it, damaging and knocking up enemies that it hits.

Her W-ability, Zephyr, not only has a passive part that increases her movement-speed when it’s off cooldown but also has a damaging active part. When you skill your W, the blue bird known from her Lore flies around her.

Her E-ability, Eye of the Storm, shields an ally champion or turret, granting them protection and attack damage. This shield is rather big but decreases over time, though the cooldown gets reduced for every champion knocked away/up or slowed by her abilities.

Her ultimate, Monsoon, first knocks away all enemies and stuns them for a brief moment before slowly healing all allies in the area around her.

These abilities make her an excellent enchanter who’s able to protect her allies with a lot of disengage-abilities, overall utility, a shield and an AoE-heal. Because of that, she doesn’t usually pack all that much of a punch, making her quite an easy target to kill when caught out of position. In the laning phase, I usually poke enemies with my Zephyr and Auto-Attacks, so that we eventually can engage on them and take a kill or blow their summoner spells. When they try to engage, I try to disrupt them from doing so by placing a Howling Gale nearby and knocking them up before they try anything funny. 

Champions like Nautilus, Thresh, Blitzcrank and Pyke are usually your worst enemy when you’re playing Janna, as they all have a hook or grab of sorts on top of other sorts of follow-up-damage or crowd-control.

However, I usually perform rather well when I’m playing against poke-matchups, other enchanters or champions like Alistar or Rakan who try to engage with their abilities and set up a kill or two with their abilities, as their W-abilities can be cancelled with Janna’s Howling Gale or Monsoon ability. 

My rune-setup for Janna usually looks like this. 

Summon Aery allows you to poke a lot more while also adding a bit more shield value to allied champions. Mana Flowband lets you regenerate a lot more mana. Celerity increases Janna’s movement speed by 1% but also makes all movement speed bonuses 7% more efficient, which is great to have on her thanks to her passive and Zephyr. Scorch is great for games where you’re able to poke a lot, as it adds a lot of extra damage over time to your W-damage. You’ll want to poke a lot, as you most likely will take Frostfang over Coin and as you’ll want to stack up your Mana Flowband relatively fast, using Zephyr. Alternatively, you may want to take Water Walking instead of Scorch – if you want to roam more – or take Gathering Storm for longer games. In the second tree, I usually go for Inspiration with Magical Footwear and Cosmic Insight. Magical Footwear saves you 300 Gold on shoes but also grants you a bonus of 10 movement speed while Cosmic Insight grants you 5% of cooldown reduction (CDR), max CDR, Item CDR, and Summoner Spell CDR.

If you want to, you may as well go for the Resolve Tree (2nd) with Boneplate Armor and Revitalize for increased shielding and healing on top of a bit more survivability. 

Note: This is just my set-up, you may play it in every other way if you want to as well. 

As this post has now ended up being a lot longer than usual, I’ll abbreviate the item-section by just saying that I usually go for 

Ardent Censer -> Athene’s Unholy Grail -> Redemption and then go for some tankier items like Shurelya’s, Solari, or Zeke’s Convergence. As for boots, I usually take the boots of mobility as they make you go fast. Depending on the enemy team, though, you may want to opt-in for Ninja Tabis, Mercury Treads, or the Boots of Swiftness. 

Anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this type of post. Tomorrow, I’ll be featuring another enchanter support but from 2010! 

Feel free to comment on anything you liked or disliked. Have a nice day 🙂

I’m taking part in this year’s #IntPiPoMo. If you’d like to participate or get to know the other participants, feel free to check this post out!

by MagiWasTaken

The Stray Sheep #35 – en passant

So, I thought I’d talk about the new headers I made for my blog (which I’m rather proud of!), how uni has been (as it just started), and what the current situation/final decision on the Heartbeat review is & something else.

Regarding the “en passant”, I thought it’d be cool to talk about how my week’s been now and then, like a diary – but public. And I like chess, so “en passant” felt like the right choice to make here!
Also “en passant” is a lot better than “Headerache!”, right? 🙂

The original pic

First things first, I love Dr Pepper and I thought the blog should resemble that.

But I needed more cans for that, so I had to buy three more cans which I enjoyed a lot (of course) and then I just shot the photo of this Dr Pepper Wall, made it look better (saturation and stuff?), then I’ve also added different “effects” to it. I really love the Pixel and Spiral one! Though the mosaic-esque (mosaesque? :D) is quite neat as well… Oh well, they’ll cycle through at random, so whenever you reload the page, you’ll see one of eight different header pictures! I may add more to the future and do special ones for Christmas and stuff but for now, these should be good enough.

The reason for me changing it at all was the fact that I actually wanted to do that quite early on when I created my blog back then in July, but then I kind of forgot and when I got annoyed by my headers being so different every time and also not cropped in the right way, I thought I should make a change.

That change was to crop them all in the recommended way, resulting in some games not being recognizable (as a friend mentioned, while someone else said that it sucks).
Also it didn’t make sense to see a header of “Cat Quest 2” when you’re reading a review on any other game.
Now, it looks better, in my opinion, and I’m kind of proud of it. Also, I can get rid of around 78 Dr Pepper cans. I’ll show you some in this post, I guess!

On to the other topic: University!

Uni has just started and I kicked it off with a fever, which was why I missed six hours worth of philosophy classes about Nietzsche, Freud, something about “objectivity, rationality and relativism” – and my Geometry course, which sucked. But apparently, those classes (apart from Geometry) were too full anyway, so that a friend of mine couldn’t listen to the Prof at all. I may have to change my Tuesday-lectures, which will be difficult and annoying to deal with.

Wednesday is my new Monday!

On Wednesdays, I’ve got Uni from 10 am to 6 pm and from 6 pm to 9 pm I’ve got literature club meetups. The courses themselves are quite full as well but really cool. I’m learning about thought experiments in one lecture while I’m trying to understand Machiavelli’s “Discorsi” in another. It’s quite cool actually. The other three hours are filled with math classes, so that’s that, I guess. On Thursday and Friday, I ended up having a huge migraine again, so I decided not to go to uni and instead ask a friend to send me pics of it.

So, I’ll be rather busy in the upcoming semester but I’ll also learn a lot for sure!

And the nearly-last topic is about Heartbeat, again.

I had a huge headache for quite some time now – and it may have been caused by me thinking too hard about whether or not I should review it. Recommending it means supporting a transphobic dev, while not recommending it would means giving some devs at Chumsoft shit for one dev’s views. Not writing a review about it, would be like denying that game’s existence solely based on someone else’s political views… in the end, I’ve decided not to post at all, which I’ve declared in a post-posting-edit, in “Large”. Thought I should say it here as well.

Last but not least: Drama with a person twitter

I don’t like it when people argue and I myself don’t like arguing at all, either. If possible I’d like to resolve things nicely. A while ago I got that rude message (which I’ve made a post about that was meant to be a bit uplifting as in “Don’t change yourself for others” or something like that).
Long story short, that person was rather rude to me in the private messages, called me a stalker in several tweets as I’ve answered to her message once and she kept blocking me, then unblocking me to write a rude and toxic message before ultimately blocking me again.

In the end, I decided to block her myself, too. Blocking someone doesn’t seem like something an adult should do as you should try to just avoid people on your own when you can’t get along with them. Blocking people is like running away while ignoring someone is a bit less childish, in my opinion, but I guess sometimes it’s necessary.

So, all in all:

Ever since I decided not to post about Heartbeat and ever since I’ve blocked that toxic person, my head’s been better, so I guess it’s all fine now. I’m quite sure that the Heartbeat-matter messed with me more but removing all kinds of saltiness and toxicity can’t be bad. Next step would be to stop playing League of Legends, I guess! (that’s a joke btw)

Tomorrow I’ll have to get some duties done and finish this other review here up, but I may as well post it on Monday or Tuesday, as I don’t want to stress myself too much, still being sickly and all of that.

Either way, I hope you all enjoyed this post and I hope that you all are well/not sick at all. Stay hydrated!

Cheers!