Blaugust 2024: It's Not You, It's Me. Okay, It's A Little Bit You, Too...

 

Blaugust is over. Did I enjoy it? Well, that's an interesting question and one with no easy answer.

I certainly enjoyed writing my thirty-one posts although it was a trick done with smoke and mirrors. I didn't change my normal writing pattern at all. I wrote a post every day I didn't work, just the same as always. 

The only difference was, on the days I would otherwise have kept silent, I slotted in one of the EverQuest 25th Anniversary posts I'd already written. I had eleven completed in draft form when Blaugust began and I still have a couple left. I did have to do some final edits and add all the pictures, so they were finished during Blaugust itself, but that took a fraction of the time it would have taken me to complete a whole post so it didn't add any stress to my day at all.

Anyway, the writing is never the problem for me. I see quite a few people making the point that, while they don't necessarily enjoying writing, they do enjoy having written. I love both. After more than half a century of obsessively putting pen to paper, the act of writing is as natural as breathing to me now. I rarely have to think about it. I just do it.

I also have an unhealthy appreciation of my own work. Having written, I love to read it back to see what I said, which sometimes comes as a surprise to me. I usually re-read each of my own posts two or three times before starting on the next, just for the fun of hearing my voice in my head and marveling over how clever I've been or how well I've expressed myself. It really is obnoxious behavior. Just as well I never tell anyone about it.

The collective spirit of Blaugust.

All things considered, for me the challenge of writing every day for Blaugust is purely a challenge of organization and only that because of other obligations. When I retire, which is likely to happen before next Blaugust comes around, I don't anticipate I'll need to prep at all. I'll just write the posts each day as they come.

So, the writing I enjoyed. I also very much enjoyed the interactions that took place in the comment threads, both on this blog and on the others where I left comments of my own. About the only real contribution I made to the collective spirit of Blaugust were the comments I left on various blogs, but at least I didn't stint on those. I would have left even more, but...

Okay, since I've mentioned it now, I'll take this chance to say something about the whole comment process. Luckily, I've been over this in my head a lot already and also left some comments about comments here and there, so I've had time to let the blood settle. At one point, about halfway through Blaugust, this would have been a full-blown rant.

Here's the way I see it. Comments are an integral and essential part of the blogging experience. Readers need to be able to respond to what they've read and because the blog is a public entity, those responses also need to be public. Of course there can be separate and disparate conversations around the content of the post on other platforms and in other media but those do not, cannot and should not replace the public discourse that takes place on the blog itself.

In the early days of this year's Blaugust I found myself increasingly infuriated by an inability to leave comments on blogs I was reading. Some had comment systems that I just could not get to accept a comment even after multiple attempts, something that's becoming increasingly and distressingly common, even among blogs where I used to have no problems. Others had no comment option at all.

The worst, in terms of raising my blood pressure, were the blogs that suggested all responses should be sent by email or to a social media platform. This seems to me to be worse than not offering any means to respond, which at least suggests that no discourse is welcome or wanted. I can understand that, even if it does leave me feeling silenced.

A personal correspondence by email.

A personal correspondence by email, however satisfying it may be to both parties, is not an acceptable alternative to leaving a public comment anyone can read. When I comment on a blog it is not only to talk directly to the person who wrote the post but also to anyone else who read it or may read it in future.

As for moving the discussion to Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever platform the person behind the blog favors, I can't but see that as exclusionary. It makes an assumption that everyone who reads blogs is also active on social media or happy to become so. I don't believe this is true.

It's certainly not true for me. I never used Twitter and I don't plan on using any of its less well-known alternatives. This year, I didn't even enter the Blaugust Discord channel, which I have used in previous years, other than to link each day's post, which I do all year round anyway. I can cope with Discord as a pretty poor distributor of static information but as a means of holding any kind of coherent conversation it's beyond me.

At one point I was all ready to declare that blogs without comment sections would no longer be included in my blog roll but of course sod's law dictates that one of the most enjoyable new blogs I discovered through Blaugust this year has no comment section so I eventually softened a little on that. It still will be a factor in blogs I follow, though. It's just too irritating to be itching to post a comment and then find there's no way to scratch that itch.

Other than not being able to comment where and when I wanted, the other aspect of Blaugust that made it less enjoyable an experience for me this year than it has been in the past was the sheer scale of the event and particularly the way in which the catchment area has expanded far beyond the local hinterland surrounding the blogs I've been reading for years. The event has become successful and we all know what Morrissey said about that.

By the end of the first week
I was so overwhelmed

By the end of the first week I was so overwhelmed I felt I might be done with Blaugust altogether. And at that point I hadn't even added the second tranche of new entrants to my RSS feed, something I did finally get around to about half way through the month. 

Of course, the first week is the flood-point of Blaugust. Everyone posts, many of them every day. Since even the first seventy sign-ups included about forty that were new to me and since I already have a lot of blogs in Feedly that have nothing to do with Blaugust at all, I found most of the time I wasn't writing my own posts going to reading the posts of others. 

And that would be great - it is the whole point of Blaugust, after all - if it wasn't also for the fact that so many of the new blogs I was being introduced to were dedicated to topics and themes and subjects and hobbies and practices in which I just am not and most probably never will be interested. 

The irony there is that, were I to come up against many of those blogs in different circumstances, here and there, now and then, there's every chance that the engaging style of the writer or their enthusiasm for the subject might open my eyes to new possibilities or explain to me why something I find of no interest is of great interest to others. 

Instead, it turns out that getting a couple of dozen posts a day that drill down into the fine detail of unfamiliar topics, often very similar topics at that, is not the best way to engage my interest in any of them. It's counter-productive. And it's mostly my fault, although also partly the fault of the sheer success of this year's event itself, because having signed up to Blaugust I felt obligated to at least try to read everything anyone posted. 

And I could not. Which made me mad!

Luckily, before I really blew my stack in public on this one, Magi from Indiecator pointed out in a reply to a comment I left somewhere that it was, in fact, perfectly acceptable to pick and choose. You do not have to read every single post. You can pace yourself. Honestly, that had literally not occurred to me until then.

Having been given permission to stop, I did and things improved dramatically. From then on, I read all the blogs I knew I liked, including several excellent ones that were new to me this year. I won't list those for fear of upsetting anyone I leave out but some will be added to the blog roll and the rest will be staying in my Feedly.

I had time to play some games.

For the rest, I checked the post titles and maybe the first few lines to see if anything appealed. If nothing grabbed me immediately, I moved on. That way sanity was restored and I got enough of my day back that I had time to play some games so I'd have something to write about.

There was another thing that annoyed me this year, too. I am very much not on board with the whole Mainstream Bad/Indie Good narrative that seems to be developing. I already covered social media in that respect - I don't care if it's Musk or someone in a tin hut in Alaska behind it, I'm not interested, period. It's irksome to be constantly cajoled into signing up but I'm used to it and I can shake it off. 

What I am more concerned about is the demonisation of existing blogging platforms and the promoting of what seem to me to be significantly more exclusionary alternatives. I think I'm going to need to write a separate post on this some time but the tl:dr is that I am very firmly Team Blogger and for a specific reason: I do not want to be bothered with anything under the hood when I blog. 

To stretch the metaphor, I don't even want to have to change the oil and replace the bulbs. I want a super-easy platform that does absolutely as much as possible for me without me having to think about it at all. I want writing a blog to be as simple as putting pen to paper. 

I realize there exist those who enjoy making their own paper from trees they planted when they were but children, making their own ink from berries they gather in  the forest where they live and who breed their own geese for the purpose of whittling quills with which to set down their thoughts for posterity but I am not one of them.

To my mind, there are no blogging platforms that make the process as easy as it ought to be. They all already require considerably too much technical expertise and the last thing I believe we ought to be encouraging as a community are ways to make it even harder still. In my opinion, Blogger comes closest to being user-friendly for non-technical people but even it requires a lot more fiddling about with the settings and controls than it should. 

All the others are worse and doing it yourself from first principles is the worst of all. Or, of course, the best for all those people who are really interested in learning how the underlying code works, something I very much am not, although even on Blogger I sometimes find myself having to do more of it than I should.

I know I can do it if I have to.

I was interested once, back in the 'nineties, when I had to familiarize myself to a certain degree with HTML and other back-end processes just so I could put up a website about a band I liked because no-one else was doing it. Back then I did manage to code and maintain a website using that space every ISP used to give you to do what you wanted so I know I can do it if I have to. I just don't want to and at this distance in time I don't feel I should need to. If the existing blogging platforms are inadequate that should be the signal for other commercial providers to step in and serve the market effectively, not for the consumers to have to lean how to do it all for themselves.

Of course, as I said, a lot of people clearly enjoy it and welcome the chance to learn new skills or use those they already have. That's fine but if people are going to write about website design or coding, I'm unlikely to want to read about it unless they can also describe what they're doing as clearly and cogently and with such inclusiveness as Aywren or Tipa. Some of the posts I read at the beginning of Blaugust on the Indie Web phenomenon and related topics seemed quite the opposite of that and it got on my nerves.

Which, again, is fine. That's what nerves are for, to be got on. I bet my ramblings on obscure video games no-one plays got on their nerves, too, assuming they ever read any of them, something for which there is no evidence and which I find highly unlikely. 

We don't all have to like the same stuff and it can be good to be introduced to ideas and attitudes we don't share. Blaugust wasn't an exception there, either. I read things every day that get on my nerves but, as must be clear from the way my approach to gaming has changed, the older I get, the less sand I need in my joints. Where blogging is concerned, I prefer a nice, cosy chat around the fire with a few people who like some of the same things I do and if we all repeat ourselves and tell each other things we already know, so much the better.

All of that is my problem, not Blaugust's. And really I ought not to be surprised about feeling this way. I avoided joining in with Blaugust for a few years even after I knew it was there because I had an idea it would be a bit like this. Then I tried it and found it really wasn't, which was great.

But nothing stays the same forever, especially something as alive as Blaugust. The event has changed a great deal since I first engaged with it and that change will continue as it develops and grows. I'm not alone in having noticed something different this time, either.

From discussions I've already seen on comment threads here and there, quite a few people have had issues of their own , either with the structure of the event or their engagement with it this year. Plans are already being made for something different next time. I think that's both healthy and wise.

There was a moment this Blaugust when I thought I might not be back for next year's event but I'm happy to say that moment has passed. Instead, I'm going to rethink my own relationship with the event, what I want from it, what I expect from it, what I'm willing to give to it. Hopefully, that way I can come back in 2025 refreshed and ready for whatever next August brings.

*** Some notes on AI used in this post ***

This could seriously derail the whole thing but here goes anyway...

All the images in the body of the post were generated at NightCafe using Flux Schnell, the smaller, faster and, most importantly, cheaper version of Flux. I didn't change any of the settings other than the frame size so they're whatever the defaults might be. I didn't even look.

The prompts were phrases taken directly from the post as shown in the captions. The first result gave me the almost psychedelic image of all those people on laptops but the next gave me a photo-realistic image of a woman, which I didn't use. 

The 1960s one I didn't use.

After that I specified "line drawing" and "magazine illustration" for the rest, plus a decade. In order of appearance, the decades are 1950s, 1950s again, 1970s and 1940s. I think they look about right. I did generate one for the 1960s but although it was a really nice picture, it was just a head and shoulders drawing and it didn't really convey very much.

Whether the others do is a fascinating question. All the prompts are either abstract or very non-specific. I wanted to see what the AI would make of such limited information. I was very impressed with the results.

I think they all fit the brief to some degree, even for the most abstract of the prompts. The last one is the very embodiment of Ayn Rand's objectivist self-confidence. That said, certain key aspects have just been completely ignored, most notably any suggestion of "email" in the second picture. I suspect the "1950s" condition is responsible for that. If I'd left the date unspecified, I'm sure the woman would have been using a laptop or a PC.

While the general outcomes are impressively close to what I asked for, some of the details are troubling. I'd like to know why the woman with the typewriter has three clocks, two of which show the same time while the third shows something else. 

The details on the dice in the 1970s picture are off-kilter. One has two fours, the other a pattern of dots I have never seen on a die. The shag-pile carpet, playsuit and stereo system are all extremely seventies, though.

I did find it very interesting that every result, including the one I didn't use, features a single, white female. None of that was in the prompt but the consistency is hard to miss as are the implications. I suspect that might be mainly because the corpus of line drawn magazine illustrations from the 1940s through to the 1970s on which the model was originally trained would have been very heavily over-supplied with that exact demographic.