Hey, this thing still on? Yes? Good.

A while back my buddy Belghast announced that he would once again be running Blaugust this year. Each year he runs this community event to encourage folks to blog every day (or close to it) in August. Much like NaNoWriMo and other similar events, it’s a nice way for new bloggers to find their voice, for those of us that still enjoy the blogging format to find new blogs to read, and for all the participants to encourage each other and bounce ideas off each other. I’ve participated in Blaugust once, years and years ago, and while I’ve not blogged in (checks date of last post) a VERY long time, I thought it would be fun to start it up again as we cruise towards fall/winter, which are prime gaming months.

Like I mentioned, it’s been a really long time since I’ve done this, so perhaps a reintroduction and a little background is in order. I blogged for a good long while under the name Moxie at my World of Warcraft focused blog, Battle Priestess. This was back during the original Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King years, before Twitch streaming was a thing and when blogs and podcasts were all the rage. There was a thriving video game blogging community back then, and all those blogs were funneled into my Google Reader feed. Lots of us used Twitter as a way to chat outside of the blogs and promote our posts.

Can we just pause for a moment to remember Google Reader? RIP my friend. You are missed. I guess these days we can say the same for Twitter.

Anyways, eventually I branched out and started playing other games, and I started blogging about those as well. Then, well, life happened. My husband and I have moved multiple times, I changed careers, we lived through some harrowing political times, we built a house while living in a hotel for 6 months, we lost pets, we adopted new ones, there was an entire pandemic, we transitioned to 100% remote work, my husband has dealt with some serious health issues and somewhere along the way, the blogging stopped.

These days everybody is focused on Twitch but I’m a writer at heart. I’ve never felt comfortable in front of cameras or talking in front of people, and my gaming time is my “wind-down” time after work, so that added stress of feeling like I need to entertain an audience just doesn’t work for me, although I do enjoy watching streams on occasion.

So – last week I pulled out this little placeholder blog and domain that I’ve been sitting on for a while, since I rebranded to TeaghanPlays a few years ago. The reason for the rebrand was simple – I don’t play games as “Moxie” and never really have, with one notable exception, Wurm Online. Moxie as a name doesn’t really fit most fantasy universes and is extremely hard to get in games anyway, so I started going by my preferred in-game name, Teaghan. All of my previous posts from BattlePriestess have been imported here for posterity, so this is basically the same content at a new URL.

As for me personally, I’m in my 40s, she/her, married to a great nerdy dude who works in IT and runs an online collectible trading card game shop. We live in the lovely Shenandoah Valley with our four cats: Toliver, Bailey, Smudge, and Sylvie. I work as a cloud engineer to pay for my gaming and crafty habits, and when I’m not gaming I enjoy knitting, crochet, cross-stitch, diamond painting, flower gardening, and travel.