Good Morning Friends! This is potentially going to be the last reliable blog post from me for a bit. Next week I am going to be dealing with the in-person training that I talked about in a post the other day. As such I expect to not be able to blog in the morning, and when I come home I fully expect to crash very fast and very hard. Last night was a bit of evidence of that happening already. I had a fairly stressful day of work and by the time I wrapped up around 6 pm, I was just dead to the world. I left off in Guild Wars 2 sitting outside the Tomb of Primeval Kings having only made it part of the way through that quest sequence before crashing the other night. While the will was there, I was struggling to stay asleep so I really made no forward momentum yesterday. I’m thankful I at least hit a checkpoint in the quest that I was on so that I can continue at a relatively straightforward place.
I’m exceptionally happy that I managed to get everything ready to go for Blaugust this week instead of having to deal with it in the evenings next week. While the sign-ups have only been open for a few days at the time of writing we have 25 bloggers, four of which are brand new this year. There has also been a significant bump in activity in the Discord which has been cool to watch. There was a bit of a screw-up on Wednesday when I announced everything… somewhere buried within the wall of nonsense was apparently a link to the old sign-up form. Thankfully I could tell by date range who had signed up and copied them over to the participant list that I maintain. I use this list to drive my blogroll which I keep updated as often as I can. I’ve been keeping everything updated on the Media Kit page as it serves as the true permanent resting place of all information assorted with Blaugust in general.
I’ve come to the realization that I think this is the 10th Blaugust. I probably should have made a much bigger deal about that when it came to the design.
What always throws me off is 2017… the year that I didn’t do a Blaugust event. I had allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event. That entire year was a rough one for me, but by the time 2018 rolled around… I had so many people come out of the woodwork to tell me how much they missed Blaugust and hoped that I would be running one that year. It was really that moment that lit a fire in me to keep me moving forward in spite of how exhausted I might be. So while we missed a year… there was also 2020 when we technically had two Blaugust events… one of which we called Blapril and the other gave us the prompt list.
Every year I seem to try something slightly different, while also keeping all of the things that worked well in the past. Whatever year we added Discord was probably the single best change for the longevity of the event. The first Blaugust was run more or less through the ill-fated Anook platform, and they even went so far as to sponsor an award in 2015 the second year. I still think that platform idea was really cool and is sort of what we are trying to do with Gamepad now… carving out a community. The “new thing” this year is that I set up a Blaugust account on Mastodon, and the idea is that I will use it to boost all of the posts that come across with the #Blaugust2023 hashtag. I tried to do this, but I always sort of hated spamming everyone that had no clue what the fuck Blaugust was from my personal account. This also gives folks an option to follow Blaugust without following me… given that I can sometimes be an acquired taste and I know of at least a handful of people who occasionally participate in the event that have zero love for me personally.
Not directly related to Blaugust, but it has been cool to watch Gamepad grow over the last half a year. I think we went live in November of last year, and during that time we’ve picked up a little over 120 accounts, and currently, at the time of writing this, 106 of them are active…. which is a pretty dang good retention rate. Mastodon and the larger Fediverse are really the social media of choice for me. Sure I am putting my thumb on the scale by choosing to run this out of Gamepad, but ultimately it is my event… so I am going to do the thing that I find most comfortable. A lot of bloggers had already moved to the platform so it doesn’t really seem too far-fetched to make it a home base for the event going forward. I’ve posted about the event on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram… but none of those really feel comfortable to me. I am not sure how many folks we will get from those anyways.
I think my hope in running it out of Mastodon, is that it will introduce us to an entirely new community of folks. We already have several sign-ups from folks who had no connection to our core group before we started talking about it on the fediverse. That is EXTREMELY exciting for me. My hope has always been for this thing to spread to different communities and spider out so that we have LOTS of blogs active and happily posting away throughout the year. In this year of internet bonfires… and the if not death of Twitter… the mutation of it into something I no longer want to be associated with… having a place to call your own is way more important than it ever was before. I had the realization that because of my blog… I am exceptionally easy to find. If I lost touch with someone along the way, they can always find me here. For most folks… the tapestry of connections that we have woven between each other is relatively tenuous. If you put your faith in corporate social media as your digital sense of place… then when you lose one of them you also lose your foundation. While self-hosted bloggers have gone out of fashion… we represent a sense of permanency and stability that is hard to remove.
Anyways… did not mean to ramble off in the direction of techno-religiosity… but there you have it. I feel like we need to take back control of more of our internet presence. Gamepad for example is run by folks that I trust and I believe in… and if something needs to happen to it, the portability of Mastodon allows me to migrate elsewhere. Worse comes to worse I can fire up my own private instance just for me, and continue to truck along with the same social connections. My blog is my digital front step, and anyone can find me here along with any of the other connections that I might be active on. That is a weird peace of mind in this time of digital uncertainty.
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.
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.
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.
Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos.
In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too.
When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.
So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.
However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.
In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.
Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them.
Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own.
This morning I am trying to knock a post out quickly before “Rainmageddon” gets here. While I don’t really believe it the neighbor across the street said we are likely to get “ten inches” of rain during the course of the day. That would be absolutely insane. My wife’s theory however is that she just misheard and the news actually said “two inches”. In any case starting at noon today we are likely not going to want to be out in the world. This is awesome because it means I can binge on video games. What is not so awesome is the fact that I need to get a post out quickly rather than my normal lazy Saturday and Sunday posting schedule. So I have a video game soundtrack on to block out the world, and am in beast mode! Sadly my beast mode is more like a sleepy kitten, but in any case… I am making things happen! For those curious I am listening to the State of Decay soundtrack that is available on Google Play.
Normally Storytime Saturday is the day when I tell you some tale about myself, and I try really hard to make it one I have not already told. The problem there is that I have shared so many intimate details of my life with you all, and that I have zero recollection of what I say on any given day. Hell there are days I get to work and I will see entire sections of a post that I don’t remember writing. In the spirit of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this mornings “Storytime” is more than likely going to be a free form rambling mess as I share indiscriminant tips and tricks I have learned over the years. The key to thriving as a blog is to be predictable in your posting schedule, and in order to make this happen it means you need to set aside specific blocks of time to write. How big of a block of time depends entirely on the style of post you make. When I write a post that requires lots of research those are usually done over the course of several days, with me keeping notes in a Google drive document. My “normal” style of posting however takes anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour of me sitting down at the keyboard and physically writing it out.
Finding Your Time
When I launched this blog in 2009 I spent a lot of my lunch hours writing posts. For the most part this worked great because it was a fixed block of time when I was not really doing anything else. The problem is as work got busier, and I started actually going out for lunch… my noon writing block evaporated. There were more than a few days when I was working on a problem that I could not set down long enough to write a post, and by the time whatever had been fixed… I was usually too drained mentally to produce something worth reading. I wont say this was the reason behind some of my larger lapses but it was certainly a contributing factor. When I started on my “Grand Experiment” I knew I was going to have to figure out something else to do. I had gotten in the habit of going upstairs with my morning coffee and piddling around in a video game for thirty minutes to an hour before actually going into work. This “boot up” time greatly improved my cognitive ability by the time I got to work, so it was actually something that turned out to be pretty beneficial.
When finding your own block of time you have to evaluate your own schedule. Where is a block that you are doing something every single day, or every few days… that you could tweak a bit to turn that into a time to write your blog posts? For me I happily sacrificed my morning game time in an effort to give myself a regular place to write words and things. This however has been a double edged sword. I literally cannot start my day without writing a blog post, and the days when I have to do something differently and stage the post the night before… I feel like something is off the entire day. I have incorporated this writing phase into my morning boot up routine and when it is missing, I am just not fully functional. Additionally the problem of writing while you are not entirely awake means sometimes entire blocks of text don’t really make much sense. Thankfully the frequency of my posting makes up for some of this. When you are posting every single day, your readers cut you a lot more slack for having an “off day”.
Keep a Contract
The other nice fringe benefit of morning writing is that you feel like you have accomplished some thing. No matter how south the rest of the day turns, you will have at least had a tiny victory that morning. For years my wife has done something that I just did not understand until I looked at my own blogging. When we clean the house we usually divide and conquer, meaning I take certain rooms and she takes certain rooms. One of the rooms she always wants to do is the Bathroom and I have never understood why she tackles it first thing. She has always said it made her feel like she had accomplished something, and I guess in a way gets those good vibe endorphins flowing making the rooms that are more painful a little easier to do. I can definitely see this whole process working because I absolutely see these same kind of benefits with my own blog posts. No matter how frustrating the rest of the day is… I at least accomplished writing another post and I continued the chain of daily postings by one more day.
Whatever your block or your schedule I think the absolute most important thing is to treat it like a contract. It becomes extremely easy to give yourself an excuse for not writing one day, that turns into not writing for an entire month. Before I ventured down the path of daily writing there were so many times when I told myself “I just am not feeling it” and let myself off the hook without writing a post. Then as months went by of “not feeling it” it became harder to actually start the process again. In order to keep a schedule you need a certain amount of rigor in your life, and a willingness to sacrifice other things to make sure the ball keeps moving forward. I know this might sound like an odd statement, especially for something that we all consider a hobby. The problem is you can’t really treat it like a hobby and achieve the predictable regularity that your readers will want. In many was blogging is a second job, admittedly one you do out of love… but there still needs to be some constraints on your time. At this point I have blogged every single day for over two years… so I have this pressure built up in NOT missing a single day. I have motivation to keep going, and keep writing… and I think it is this motivation that you have to find for yourself.
