Let's Go Round Again

This week is Welcome To Blaugust Week - and you're welcome to it! Badum-tish! Thank-you, I'll be here all month, don't forget to tip your waitperson.

I'm guessing that about now everyone's probably read a dozen or more "Hello, here we all are again" posts. And guess what? 

Hello! Here we all are again! Last year was weird, wasn't it? We did Blaugust in Blapril and then we did that other thing in August and now it's been a whole twelve months and aren't you glad the pandemic's over and everything's back to normal? Oh, wait... 

Those opening paragraphs contain a number of cliches, running jokes and sundry supposedly smart phrases that everyone's heard before. I really like that stuff. I like it when other people do it and it makes me feel good to do it myself. I'm pretty sure it's bad journalistic practice and a black mark against you in any creative writing class but I don't have to submit this to an editor for copy approval or a teacher for a grade so I'm going to keep on doing it for as long as it amuses me.

There's a bit of a theme developing regarding repetition and whether it's a good technique for blogging. SDWeasel has a whole post about it, Belghast alludes to it in his comments on keeping a series running successfully and I have a feeling it was under discussion on the Blaugust Discord too, although I'm really not the one to ask about that.

I can tell you where I stand on repetition. Here, check this out. My sixth post ever, all the way back in  September 2011. It's called "Again! Again" and it links to the Fall doing Repetition with Mark E. Smith intoning "We dig repetition" over and over and over and...

You get the picture. (Yes, we see.) Of course, if you actually bother to click through the link and read the post you'll realize I was saying something rather different back then but I know no-one's going to do that so I'm safe. Never hesitate to misrepresent yourself. You'll rarely get caught.

Getting back to repetition, which is the way it works, after all, if we didn't like repetition we wouldn't come back, summer after summer, to do this, would we? And come back we do. If Blaugust is good for one thing - and it's good for a lot more than one - it's bringing people back.

Who do we have returning this year? Let's see. There Pete (or Nimligimli as I see it is now) at Dragonchasers, Jaedia at Dragons and Whimsy, Easha and Poppy at Glittery Girly Gwent Gaming, all of whom I took from Wilhelm's complete list of 2021 Blaugustians. I'm not sure any of those people would count themselves as having been "gone", though. Maybe that's just me...

Watch out for old wine in new bottles and people flying under the radar, too. Aywren is participating in her new guise as Spot of Mummery and thanks to my never-culled blog roll I also spotted the return of Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky even though as yet he's not on the list. But then, neither was Mike Azariah of A Missioneer In Eve until suddenly he was.

Even though I don't play EVE, Mike's name is already familiar to me from many mentions and comments on Wilhelm's blog. That's the power of repetition. It drives things home. Makes you remember. We're not at the Advice week yet but I'm throwing this in for free right now - never be afraid to repeat yourself.

Never be afraid to repeat yourself. Assume no-one was listening the last time or the time before that. I mean, they may have been but they probably weren't. It's the safe bet. A lot safer than assuming the opposite, that's for sure.

Looking down the list I spot several people who've been fairly quiet of late (I won't call them out - you never know if people want to have attention drawn to their quietude or whether they'd hoped it would slip by unnoticed) and seven names I don't believe I've seen before. 

I could be wrong. I often am. I apologize in advance if any of the following turn out to be people on whose blogs I've left comments in the past. Wouldn't be the first time.

Adelle – Pixel Fairy

Ashgar – Ash's Adventures

Blockade85 – A Page Where My Brain Leaks Onto

jamesmcrosby –  MMO Folklorist 

Knifesedge Games – Knifesedge Blogs 

MMOJuggler – MMOJuggler 

Thyanel – Thyanel Plays  

As I do every year, I've now added the new blogs to my blog roll, whereupon I discovered a few things:

• Google have updated Blogger's Blog Roll widget and for once they've made it better! It's now a lot easier to add new blogs and to sort and order them.  

• They've also put a limit on how many show automatically. The most I can set it to is ten. That would be a problem except there's a tiny "Show All" button after the last entry so you just need to click that to get the ridiculously long list you're used to. It's probably better that way, to be honest. It was looking a tad bit crazy...

• Two of the supposedly new blogs this year (Ash's Adventures and Knifesedge Blogs) aren't new at all. They were already on my blog roll but the feeds weren't working. Now they are!
  

It might be an idea for anyone reading this who's been in previous Blaugusts to check the roll and see if their link is there. If it's not, just drop me a comment and I'll add it. 

In theory I add everyone every year and I rarely take anyone off. (Although people who don't allow comments on their blogs are in danger of finding themselves hurled into the void if  I try to leave a comment and find I can't. It's the one thing that drives me into a fury. Okay, not the one thing...).

I think that's about enough "Welcome to Blaugust" housekeeping. We can all only take so much.

Tomorrow I might actually post something about mmorpgs although I'm not promising anything.