Writing

Blaugust: Not Good Enough Says Gevlon

Izlain15 Comments

I don’t follow the Greedy Goblin aka Gevlon, so I wouldn’t have seen his post were it not for posts from Contains Moderate Peril and Endgame Viable. I have however read many a post particularly from Syncaine about his writings and this is part of the reason I don’t follow. It seems that Gevlon is the trolling type, or if he isn’t an outright troll, he does tend to have some controversial views that probably provide page hits but little in the way of reputation. This is fine though, to each their own I say, and if he carries on despite some posts outright blasting him, then he’s really dedicated to his craft. I laughed when he would talk about League of Legends or PUBG and his strategies to game the system wouldn’t work. But I digress.

In Gevlon’s recent post, the Goblin goes on to crunch some numbers (albeit it only appears that he is looking at October’s post numbers, why he passed up on numbers for September is beyond me) of which show a decreased posting output from the upper echelon of posters from Blaugust. He didn’t bother looking at blogs that didn’t make the at least 25 posts back in August, which would further skew things. He listed this blog having 10 posts, which was probably true for October, which isn’t even a completed month, and doesn’t count the 17 posts I made in September.

Most of us that participate in Blaugust are already established. We encourage newbies to join in or start a blog, and some do. Very few stick with it, and those of us who have been blogging for any consistent amount of time know that it takes time and committment to keep a blog going. As Roger said, Blaugust can be a crash course into blogging, and many will find themselves exhausted at the end of the event. But is the event made in order to retain a larger blogosphere? I would argue that no, this isn’t something that requires further commitment. Generally speaking most of us have our own self-imposed rules and schedules and we all fall back into that which is naturally comfortable after an event like this one. It started as a challenge for established bloggers to push themselves to post every day for a month. To that end, it pushed many of us to do that and for many this wasn’t the first time.

What made Blaugust Reborn a little different is that it included the Newbie Blogger Initiative tenets this year, so we also were encouraging new bloggers to get involved and for non-bloggers to start. So the combination of the two may show the attrition more than usual. Regardless, as a blogging event, I’d say it was very successful, as it has been in all the years where it was run. Gelvon says this isn’t enough, but I think if even one addition is made to the wider blogging community, then that was a positive effect. Deriding it just because people have lives outside of blogging leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Looking at his list I see plenty of people still blogging, we just don’t usually blog once a day. There is mention of a “Goon that he won’t link to” which I assume is Wilhelm, as he’s the only blogger I see talking about EVE these days. Whatever the case, I see a thriving community of bloggers that are still doing their thing, and have been for years. For some of us, when you’ve been doing this for so long it becomes a part of your life, for others it can easily be written off. I hope to see more events in the future and will participate as they come along. If no one sticks around afterward, let’s just think of it like a party that has come to an end. Everyone goes home and back to their own lives. This is okay.

15 thoughts on “Blaugust: Not Good Enough Says Gevlon”

  2. Yes, that is me to whom he is referring. I think the final straw was a couple of his regulars asking me to clarify a point of disagreement with him and discovering that Gevlon was wildly misrepresenting the situation. Proving him wrong is a sin in his book, so he has to vilify me instead.

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      • He’s not a troll, far more like a super-dedicated cult member. He isn’t playing a character or doing something he doesn’t believe in just for a reaction.

        He’s is just incredibly, incredibly limited in his thinking (he learns games at the slowest rate I’ve ever seen, and it takes him months to work out the simplest problems, all while blogging/documenting his struggles), while at the same time having nearly unlimited amounts of time and patience to put into whatever is his singular focus at the moment.

        He’s the kid who is convinced he can get through a wall by bashing his head into it, who also has an extremely thick head and nothing better to do but smash said wall for 16hrs a day. Most of the time he bashes a thick wall and outright fails (EVE, LoL, PUBG), sometimes he finds a wall thin-enough to make some progress (welfare epics-era WoW).

        All of the above makes for good comedy. The real problem with Gevlon is he is also a very well-documented racist of the worst kind, as his Reddit post history shows. That’s the reason I stopped giving him attention.

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  5. I’m moderately uncomfortable about having Gevlon in my blogroll given his widely-known political views. I didn’t follow his blog until fairly recently, although I long knew of it from his spats with SynCaine, Wilhelm and Tobold. I was tempted to follow SynCaine’s lead and just stop paying him any attention at all, but as Paul Greengrass was saying in relation to his controversial choice of subject in his latest movie, it’s ultimately better to engage with those with whom you disagree rather than ignoring them.
    I try only to react to his musings on gaming, though, and now on blogging, since I am not a political blogger myself. His post on Blaugust was odd but then many of Gevlon’s posts are odd. He went through a period of actively seeking out new blogs to read – he tried all the blogs on Syp’s massive blog roll – and was underwhelmed with the scope and quality. He seems to have a purely utilitarian attitude both to gaming and blogging, whereas most MMO bloggers (and gamers) have very different reasons and motivations from being “useful” or “successful”.
    The oddest thing about his Blaugust summary was that he chose to base his post count on half of October rather than all of September (or indeed all the full elapsed time since Blaugust ended). That seems to have made the statistical element, such as it is, too arbitrary to be meaningful. In the past, Wilhelm, with whom Gevlon has fallen out so badly he won’t even say his name, has done some analyses of long-term survival of NBI bloggers that were a lot more informative and detailed. The attrition rate is indeed high but we all expect that.
    I got several excellent additions to my blog roll out of this year’s event, which I though was the best and strongest so far, so I would count it a roaring success.
    (Sorry if this duplicates).

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