Blaugust

Blaugust 2023 is Coming

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Good Morning Friends! I have been looking forward to the start of Blaugust for most of this year. This is your yearly reminder that it is almost time for the yearly festival of blogging and other serialized content that I host. I think the most interesting thing about this year is going to be the fact that I am no longer really on Twitter. For a good number of bloggers, Twitter was a staple of our community, and many of us have migrated to Mastodon or other platforms over the last year. This means we have also met a whole slew of new folks during this process and hopefully can widen the reach of this whole event to a group of folks who have either never heard of it or have never participated in it. I am extremely excited to see how all of this shakes out.

What is Blaugust?

Blaugust is a month-long event that takes place in August each year that focused on blogging and other serialized content. The goal is to stoke the fires of creativity and allow bloggers and other content creators to mingle in a shared community while pushing each other to post more regularly. For years blogging has been dwindling, and in part, Blaugust was my attempt and reversing that course by compiling a bunch of veteran bloggers in one place and making it super easy to ask questions and get answers. The idea is that this festival of blogging can help reignite dwindling fires for the next year and give folks a sense of kinship as a result. Each year has taken slightly different forms and shifted to include more than just blogs, but the core mission is always the same. In this year of corporate internet staples seeming a little less sturdy, it is all the more important that each of us carve our own homes that we can call our own… that gives us a sense of permanence. No matter what happens on whatever platforms I am on… my blog remains.

Why Blaugust?

In April 2013, I made a decision that would ultimately dominate the fate of this blog for the last decade. I decided that I would force myself to write something and post it every single day. It wasn’t necessarily an easy challenge but for roughly three years I posted something every single day without pause. This forced me to get over some of the self-doubt that had kept me mired for years. I started this blog in 2009, but would often go upwards of six months without a single post. Each time I would lapse… it felt like I had to do something really special when I started blogging again or at least apologize for my absence as though there was some imaginary person out there disappointed in me. Forcing myself to “just hit publish” got me past a lot of those hangups and now I can bang out a post in my sleep… and often do consider I write around 6 am each morning. Blaugust came about originally because I wanted to share this revelation with other bloggers, that forcing yourself to write something every day can be liberating.

So I hatched the idea that if I challenged folks to make 31 posts during the month of August, and called it Blaugust… it might help others get over their own fear by immersing them in a pseudo-competition. The thing is… I learned that this maybe wasn’t the brightest idea in the world. For some folks writing 31 posts is a rather daunting feat and failing to accomplish it was just one more setback in a line of setbacks that were keeping them from blogging. So nowadays the original concept is still there, but mostly I just want folks participating to focus on “blogging more” not necessarily conforming to some mad schedule I devised. After three years of daily blogging… I needed a break and eventually landed on the schedule that I have now of trying to knock out a post every single weekday. Even then there will be times when I give myself a pass because I am just not feeling it… but the key is to get back on the schedule as soon as you can.

The Original Challenge

Blaugust at its heart has always been about celebrating the creation of content on a regular schedule. The original challenge was to post 31 times during the month of August which is 31 days long. This can be posting every day or doubling up on some days to make the schedule a bit easier. However, we also want to award anyone who starts down this path, because deciding to blog in the first place is a victory in itself. As such we give out awards based on the number of posts that you manage to knock out during the month of August. Again the idea is to spark creativity and get folks to create more content, not necessarily grinding them to dust on the millstone of some lofty goal. Here are the guidelines for each of the awards that we give out as part of this original challenge:

  • Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2023.

The Expansion Packs

Last year we introduced something that I call “Blaugchievements”. This essentially encapsulates all of the half-baked ideas I had over the years into a single series of game-like achievements that you can earn. These should all be considered entirely optional and will be considered on the “honor system”. There is no realistic way that I can track these without killing myself during the month of August, so if you tell me you earned one of these… it is good enough for me. Over the years I have introduced themed weeks, prompt lists, and all manner of nonsense, and Blaugchievements are a great way of sort of neatly tying those all together.

Originally I was going for a whole “Xbox Live” achievement toast thing and made them somewhat generic so I never had to redo them again. Then unfortunately this year I got on this whole visual theme kick and decided to redo all of them… which means going forward this is probably going to be another thing that changes each year along with the logo and assorted branding. You can view the full list of this year’s Blaugchievements here, but below is a quick rundown of the short version.

  • Reading the Manual – Read the introductory blog post with the rules of the event.
  • Joining the Cause – Sign-Up for Blaugust.
  • Recruit a Friend – Convince another blogger to participate in Blaugust.
  • Spreading the Madness – Promote Blaugust on your blog or through your social media of choice.
  • Friend of Wumpus – Join the Blaugust Discord.
  • Sharing is Caring – Post your content in the “Share Your Content” Channel.
  • Forum of Friends – Take part in a discussion on the “Post Discussion” Channel.
  • The Pet Tax – Post a picture of an animal friend on the “Stuff and Things” Channel or create a blog post about them.
  • Friend Like Me – Answer a question posted on the Blagust Discord or help out a new blogger.
  • Shared Thoughts – Comment on a blog post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Federation of Bloggers – Sign up for a Fediverse account and follow the official Blaugust account.
  • Getting Inspired – Write a blog post inspired by a post from another Blaugust participant.
  • Pickup Group – Play a game or take part in an activity with one or more Blaugust participants.
  • Hot Topics – Write a blog post based on the Blaugust Prompt List.
  • Welcome Wagon – Write a blog post based on the first week’s theme of Welcoming Folks to Blaugust.
  • Introduce Yourself – Write a blog post based on the second week’s theme of Introducing Yourself.
  • Creative Appreciation – Write a blog post based on the third week’s theme Appreciating the works of some Creative or Company.
  • Staying Motivated – Write a blog post based on the fourth week’s theme of how you have managed to Stay Motivated.
  • Lessons Learned – Write a blog post based on the fifth week’s theme explaining some of the Lessons you have Learned through Blaugust.
  • Going Platinum – Complete All of the Blaugchievements for Blaugust 2023.

The Event Calendar

One of the things we have had during several of the Blaugust events is a calendar of themed weeks. This should be considered completely optional but is there only to serve as a loose scaffolding for anyone struggling to find something to write about. August usually has Five Weeks and as a result, we have five different themes. Again no one should feel under any obligation if they do choose to write about the themes, to actually make an entire week’s worth of posts. Here is this year’s event calendar:

Here is a quick rundown of the idea behind each of the themed weeks:

  • Welcome to Blaugust Week (August 1st – August 5th) – The idea behind this week is to give a specific time to be actively talking about Blaugust and welcoming new members to the fold. This could also count as promoting Blaugust for the “Spreading the Madness” achievement. The hope is that drumming up some heavy activity of talking about the event might allow us to pick up a few more stragglers.
  • Introduce Yourself Week (August 6th – August 12th) – The idea behind this week is to have some structured time around getting to know the other bloggers. I realize that those of us who are veteran bloggers might have already written half a dozen introduction posts by now, but it is a great time to share anything interesting you might have in your arsenal.
  • Creator Appreciation Week (August 13th – August 19th) – Developer Appreciation Week or the D.A.W. was an event that took place in the blogging community independent from Blaugust but eventually died out. The more modern idea is to show appreciation for the things and creators that we love. This could be authors, musicians, developers, artists, or even other bloggers, with the focus being on sharing something that we love so that maybe others might appreciate it as well.
  • Staying Motivated Week (August 20th – August 26th) – As we get towards the end of the event, the activity can often trail off a bit. The goal of this week is to share some of your own tips surrounding how you keep motivated and stay focused on creating content. If you are new to the event, you might share some of the things that have helped you stay engaged during Blaugust.
  • Lessons Learned Week (August 27th – August 31st) – This week is a reminder that the goal of Blaugust is to refresh the content creators out there for the coming year, and not to burn them out in the process. Some folks are going to cross the finish line and immediately go dormant and others will want to process their thoughts about the proceedings. This space is reserved as a bit of a cooldown lap so that you can share your own experiences.

The Prompt List

In 2020 we tried something a little different. Due to folks needing something to focus on other than the constant frustration and stress of lockdown… we ran our normal Blaugust event in April of that year… and called it Blapril. By the time August rolled around, none of us were really ready to do a fully Blaugust event… but I had enough of a request from the community to do something. As a result, I tried this ill-fated idea of a blog posting webring of a sort called “Promptapalooza”. It failed miserably, largely because the concept was not super easy to grasp and my explanation of it… was lacking. What it did give us however is a really nice list of writing prompts. So as a result there is no reason not to keep using these. Again this is considered part of the optional content but serves as a well of ideas for when your creativity might be running low.

The Recap

That my friend is Blaugust and in a few weeks we will be starting the whole proceedings. I thought maybe I was a little late in getting the information out there, but it seems like last year I made this post on the 15th so I’m potentially a bit early. As is my tradition, I am closing the post with a bit of a “too long didn’t read” recap that hopefully serves as a “call to action”.

  • The Sign-Up Form for Blaugust 2023 can be found here. Since logging in with a Google account has been a source of consternation for some, I have removed that functionality. If you still cannot for whatever reason sign-up but want to participate please let me know. Only those that I am tracking will be assigned awards.
  • The invite link to the Blaugust Discord can be found here. Participation in Discord is entirely optional but also a great way to bounce ideas off the existing community.
  • If you feel inclined to do so please use the hashtag #Blaugust2023 for tracking purposes and to make your content easier to find for those watching the proceedings.
    • We also highly suggest that you utilize the Share Your Content” channel in the official Discord.
  • This year we have an official Blaugust social media account over on Gamepad.Club a Fediverse/Mastodon server that I help admin. During the event, I will be watching the above hashtag and boosting all of the posts.
  • Mingle with the participants of Blaugust 2023. Get out and see the blogs, read the posts, and comment frequently! These folks represent a social structure that you can lean on for advice in the coming years. I deeply value the ties I have made with other bloggers and started this process as an attempt to cement those and build new ones.
  • If you are so inclined there is a “Gaming Together” channel on Discord for those impromptu grouping activities. I believe there was even some discussion of doing a one-shot D&D adventure this year.
  • If you find yourself getting stuck at any point feel free to rely on the weekly schedule or the prompt list for inspiration or you can hop on Discord and talk through your issues.
  • You can also check out the new Blaugchievements list for anything that might spark your creativity and check one of those off.
  • Welcome to Blaugust 2023. As always if you have any questions please feel free to ask. My door is always open but I might be slow to respond because I have a bad habit of idling on pretty much all the social platforms at once.
  • If you want an archive of all of the various logos and such from this year or past years of Blaugust, please check out the Blaugust Media Kit page.

Final Thoughts

Without you, Blaugust would just be a dumb word that Bel bashed together one year in his head. I feel like I also need to state that ALL of this is optional. You can sign up for Blaugust just because you want to feel like you are part of a community of bloggers, even if you don’t write a single post next month. The challenge exists in its original and expansion forms to add a bit of fun to the mix, but the real Blaugust is the friends we met along the way. As always if you have any questions about any of this… my comms are always open. Thanks for helping to make this nonsense memorable each and every year. Much love, and please… spread the reach of this event, because I love seeing new faces showing up each year.

Blaugust and the Grand Experiment

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Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.

The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.

It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.

I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.

Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.

I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about.

Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post.

Blaugust 2022 In Review

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Good Morning Friends! It is that time again, time for me to attempt to tabulate all of the blog posts from this year’s running of Blaugust and hand out awards. We had a phenomenal turnout this year with a grand total of 67 blogs participating. During this one month collectively we produced a grand total of thirteen hundred and thirty-three new blog posts. This was not our highest attended year, as we had one back in 2018 with over 90 blogs participating, but it feels like one of our busiest years. The community has felt considerably more active than it has in the past, and that might be in part due to finally adding a more “general purpose” channel to the Discord called #blaugust-banter. We are still learning and adjusting each year, and this seems to have been a positive change for group cohesiveness.

Blaugust is one of those things that has more or less developed a mind of its own over the years. Originally it was a challenge for folks to blog every single day for a month, and I embarked upon this nonsense after spending the previous year blogging every day. Of note, I made it about three and a half years of daily blogging before I finally needed to dial things back a bit. I really never expected to run Blaugust more than that first year, but collectively the community has always been there to spur me forward to organize yet another one. Over the years it has shifted more into a celebration of blogging, and a time to stoke our creative fires for the next year. There will always be folks that disappear into the woodwork after August is over, but I feel like collectively this is good for the community and keeping blogging alive.

Newbie Class of 2022

One of the things I am proudest of this year is the general outreach we have had to find new voices. Some of our lists are already seasoned bloggers, some started a brand new blog just for this event, and others just rekindled the home fires of their abandoned digital homestead. Whatever the case we had a large list of folks who were participating in Blaugust for the very first time. It has long been our tradition to celebrate our newbies with a special award, and as such here is our list of first-time Blaugustans for 2022.

Now has come the time to talk about the awards. Each year we give awards out to represent the level of posting that each blogger has completed. Since this year had a bit of a Stranger Things theme going on, and since Dungeons and Dragons played such a key role in that series, I decided to use a D20 for the background of this year’s awards. For those who might need a refresher into rules here are the guidelines.

  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2022.

Before we get into the lists however it is that time again for my yearly disclaimer. I am a human being and highly fallible. If you feel that I made a mistake in the tabulation process please let me know and I will get the lists remedied as soon as possible. Some blog layouts are easier to tabulate than others and I want to share my undying love for those of you who have a sidebar widget that counts posts by month. Again if I made a mistake in my counting, please reach out to me posthaste and I will fix it.

The Bronze Club 2022

This year we had eighteen blogs that managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2022. Often times we set ourselves to a goal but fall short, however, if you think about it this way that is an average of one post a week!

The Silver Club 2022

This year we had twelve blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2022. if you spread them out across the five weeks of Blaugust, that is posting at least three times a week.

The Gold Club 2022

This year we had three blogs that managed the feat of posting at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2022. The pack thins a bit at this point because if folks are willing to post this much, they are often willing to go that extra mile does daily postings. However, on average, this is at least posting five times a week during the course of blaugust.

The Rainbow Diamond Club 2022

This year we have a very impressive twenty-seven blogs that managed the feat of posting at least thirty-one times during the month of August 2022. There are always folks who end up wildly overshooting this goal and with two blogs in the challenge, Syp managed to bring in 86 total posts between the pair of sites. All of the bloggers who make it to this level deserve our admiration, I started this nonsense and even I don’t do thirty-one posts anymore.

Honorable Mentions

While the first of the awards start with five posts during the month, it still takes a lot of effort to sign up and write even one post. As a result, we have traditionally spent some time honoring those who started down this road and joined in this nonsense we call Blaugust. This year I decided to do something a little differently and go ahead and create a themed image based on the red Blaugust 2022 logo coloration.

Final Thoughts

One of the things that I have done each year pulls together some basic statistics in an easy-to-read summary block. I would love to have some stats around Discord, but unfortunately in order to get that we would have to turn ourselves into a public community server. That feels like a double-edged sword, and I have not gone down that path yet. Regardless it definitely feels like we have had a busier community this year than we have had at any point during the Blaugust process. Without further rambling, here are some basic statistics.

  • 1333 posts were made by Blaugust 2022 Participants.
  • 67 blogs signed up and made at least one post during the month.
  • 24 blogs participated in Blaugust for the very first time.
    • Collectively our “Newbies” made a total of 376 posts.
  • 60 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze.
  • 42 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 15 posts qualifying for Silver.
  • 30 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold.
  • 26 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 31 posts qualifying for Rainbow Diamond.

So while it was not our biggest year, it was a significant bump up from the 45 participants in 2021. I think the piece of this year’s Blaugust that I am proudest of, is how much our community has grown in scope. Traditionally Blaugust has been an event that draws its participants from the same pool of bloggers, and while it is awesome that folks look forward to this event… every year we lose a few from the fold. Our impressive twenty-four new participants tell me that we are expanding our reach and moving out into other blogging spheres.

As always I am deeply proud of everyone who participated this year. Again I am a very fallible human being and if my counts do you reflect your counts, please let me know. I’ve updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with this year’s images, and the “Blaugchievements” are on the honor system. I hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2023 and whatever twists that might bring us. Lastly, I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. For many of us, this is a support structure that we can rely on, and while I may not say it often… I appreciate all of you greatly.

Who The Heck Am I

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Good Morning Friends. If we are following the theme of Blaugust this is “Introduce Yourself Week” and while I understand that I made this calendar… I never quite know what to do for this one. When you have been blogging in one form or another going on twenty years… I’ve already poured a lot of information about myself out into the ether. So instead of telling my life story once again… as I have done so many times, I thought I would share a few photos and write about them. This is a very young version of me… with Freddie Bear. I am not sure if it was originally called this on the packaging or if I gave him that name… but he was my constant companion followed by Raggedy Ann and Andy and a Sock Monkey I named Charlie. I’ve recently seen Freddie Bear and he is completely ragged from lots and lots of tiny hands hugging and loving him.

Another photo that I find funny is me and a childhood friend entering the yearly talent show, doing a dance number from Staying Alive. You would never know it from my 6’4″ blocky frame and complete lack of physical dexterity… but I was in Dance as a child. In theory, the story goes that I watched Olympic gymnasts and wanted to take gymnastics… and in our tiny town this was only taught by the local dance instructor. The “tax” that she placed upon male students, is that if they wanted to take gymnastics they also had to take tap and ballet. So I think I took around five years of tap, ballet, and gymnastics… and you could never tell it by the way I currently stumble about. It did however broaden my horizons quite a bit and I was in the regional production of the nutcracker several times as a tiny rat and as a tin soldier. I remember being so terrified of the seven-headed rat king on stage that I chewed on my plastic sword.

This is what remains of the very first automobile that I called “Bob” but being the weird artsy kid I said it was spelled without any Bs. I was a weird kid. I gave $200 for this vehicle and it carried me through college and survived a drunk lady backing into it at my wife’s apartment without so much as a scratch. It was not exactly a comfortable vehicle for someone over six feet tall to drive, but it was mine. The thing about an automobile more than anything is that it represents the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want. I come from fairly humble means and there was not a chance in hell that my parents could afford to buy me something, so I think I spent money from working as a camp counselor at scout camp on it. I was an eagle scout and got brought onto staff one year when the camp decided that they wanted EVERY counselor to be an eagle for some reason. The biggest thing I remember about that summer was when we had to clear the copperhead snakes out from under the medical building. Probably not something you would ever have a bunch of teenagers do today… but I will never forget the distinct copperhead smell.

Now I live a relatively quiet life in suburbia. We bought our home in 1999 and have seen no reason to move. We love our neighborhood because it is this blend of older folks and young families, and over the years has become significantly more diverse. Most people bought here for the same reason we did… because it was cheap. Our house is roughly 1800 sq/ft and we paid somewhere in the vicinity of 83k in 1999… which had roughly tripled in value since we have been here. The thing I dig the most about our neighborhood though is how easy it would be for us to walk to the store or to a restaurant, even though we are often too busy to do this thing. Another thing I love is the fact that we have neighborhood ducks seen above. There are several ponds in the neighborhood and as a result, dusks roam around pretty regularly in small groups. Everyone stops for the ducks because they secretly rule the town. I am just thankful we got ducks because the neighborhood across the busy road… has geese and geese are assholes.

Being the soft-hearted person that I am… we are also the house in the neighborhood that puts out food for the community of feral cats. Seen lounging on our doormat is “Greybie” who is a grey tabby male that is extremely friendly… at least for a feral. He has this weird hang-up where he knows who we are if we are walking out of the house… but gets confused that we might be the same humans if we are walking into the house. Not pictured is “Tabby” who has only recently let me start petting her. They are all fairly skittish but along with a solid black cat they represent the cats that hang out in front of our house on the regular. We are not terribly original in our naming scheme in part because we don’t want to get too attached… because feral cats have a habit of eventually disappearing.

The whole feeding outdoor cats thing… more or less started because of “Tripod” pictured above. She is a three-legged calico and has been living in our backyard for going on four years. We even have a house that she can sleep in during the winter months with bedding to keep her warm. We’ve never gotten more than a few feet from her before she moves away and as such is still extremely feral… but also shows up at meal time every day. Occasionally she has a visiting tomcat that we call “splotchie” because he has an almost jaguar-like pattern on his grey and black coat. Almost all of the ferals that we see on the regular have been captured at one point and “fixed” then had their ears notched to indicate that they were released. I would adopt “Tripod” in a heartbeat, but given we have been doing this dance for years… I doubt she would ever trust me enough to come inside.

Speaking of Indoor Cats, this is my eldest Mollie. She is an asshole. Like she loves me but also is big into “love bites” thinking that is a proper way of showing affection. So loving on her is always a juggling act of trying to keep your hand out of her mouth. We rescued her from a large dog shelter, and she had been the only cat for two years there. As a result, I think she doesn’t quite know “how to cat”, and has trouble bonding… or at least her bonding is nowhere near what you would expect from a normal cat. She loves me and spends most of the day beside me on a box with a pink fleece blanket on it… pictured above. The problem with Mollie is… she does not understand how to play with our other girls and can get a little aggressive. Leading right now to the practice of us guarding our youngest while she goes to the litter box… which I hope does not last forever.

Then you have my baby girl Josie, who we have had for two years. Not pictured is her amazing ringtail… which basically turns up on itself in a loop… as its natural resting position. We are in a period of transition right now as the three girls figure out the new normal. That said if I am sitting downstairs on the couch, she is almost assuredly laying on my legs. Until Gracie came she also used to sleep on me every night… now she is sorta feeling out the new situation. She loves boxes and sitting on them… and it is weird how she has aged since we got the youngin. Not sure if this is a matter of perspective or if she really has decided that she needs to be a big sister. She is still deeply prone to bouts of kittenhood, especially when I get out the laser pointer. I work from home and she doesn’t spend much time upstairs, but when it is about time for me to “get off work” she comes up and reminds me.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will already be well versed in Gracie. She is a mess and one of the most active kittens I have ever experienced. She has learned how to climb things that no cat has ever figured out… which means we are constantly on the defensive. She would be in trouble were it not for the fact that she is so damned adorable. We would also probably call her “Little Shit” were it not for the fact we have already had a beloved cat from our past with that unfortunate moniker. Gracie basically wants whatever she can see… and then attacks it. She is super fierce… except when it comes to her interactions with Mollie who towers over her. As a result, we essentially have to take her to the litter box a few times a day, because she is too scared to come upstairs to them. She bonded heavily with my wife, but now that she is going back to school during the day… it will be interesting to see if “daddy” is suddenly cooler than I have been to this point.

Other than that… my primary hobby is gaming and I spend most evenings whiling away the hours playing some game while snuggling with cats. I’ve been working remotely for the last three years, and it does not appear that there is going to be any change to that. I’m a fairly simple person and honestly fairly boring. I’ve been a geek since before that term was really bandied about with any sense of street cred to it. I love comic books, all manner of science fiction and fantasy, and have been pouring my soul into either artwork or writing my entire life. I need to get back into drawing again because it was a huge part of my life for the first twenty years… and then I effectively just sort of severed that part of me. I keep thinking about doing Inktober, and maybe this year will be the year I actually do.

In 1998, our first year out of college I had a sort of tragic event happen to me that I never recovered from creatively. My wife was teaching in a very small “one-horse town”, and I was having to commute almost two hours a day to work as a result. At some point during that year, she was responsible for the senior class, and their class project was to fix up and paint the recreation center. I was asked if I would be willing to paint a mural with their mascot, and I spent the night laying out a sketch for it and had not actually started on it. We were up there until after midnight, so we locked the building and I left all of my supplies. When we came back about mid-day the next day… all of my stuff had been stolen. I am not really sure how to explain how big of a violation that felt.

More than just losing the paint and brushes… it was like my language for HOW to function creatively was stolen from me. I had spent over a decade building a collection of brushes that all did different things.. found sometimes in thrift stores, some given to me by friends… I knew how each of them worked intimately. Then with all of that gone… I didn’t even understand how to begin to replace it. A new brush doesn’t perform the way one that has been used for a decade performs. So it is like a part of me just shut down and never came back… and now roughly twenty-five years later… I’ve yet to really regain the confidence to begin creating art again. I shifted to pouring all of my hopes and dreams and thoughts into words.

Sometimes a blog post develops a life of its own… and this one today certainly has. I didn’t set out to talk about this. That is the hardest lesson that I have learned over all these years of blogging, which is that you have to go with the flow of the post. Sometimes your emotions are going to spill out in the process and it is okay to show your weaknesses. It means I have to put a lot of trust in the hands of my readers, but for the most part, if you stick around here… you are not here for the topics.