Blaugust's Back, Baby! Better Get Ready!

It's that time of year again. Yesterday, Belghast took time out of his extremely busy schedule to post the details of this year's Blaugust Festival of Blogging. I'd been wondering if we were going to be doing it all again and now I know. We are. YAY!

If you'd like to sign up (You know you want to...) here's where to go. Other than that, everything you need to know is in Bel's post.

I really enjoy Blaugust for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's super-lively with dozens of bloggers generating more posts than anyone has time to read. Oversupply and reading exhaustion has been something of a theme these last couple of years but far better that way than the other.

Secondly, it give me a chance to do something I love to do, namely blog about blogging. I mean, I do it all year round anyway, but for a month I don't have to feel self-conscious about it. I do love talking about process.

On that note, last year I found myself struggling a little to keep up. I was determined to hit the full thirty-one posts but unlike previous years I hadn't prepared anything in advance for those days when I just wasn't feeling it or when I came back from work and was just too tired to write.

This year I've been thinking about what might make a useful fallback position for days like those. Here are a few ideas I came up with so far, with pros and cons:

My Favorite Bands (Then And Now) 

Making lists of favorites was a big thing back in my APA days. I thought I might dig out a couple of old lists and do a current version, too. Maybe compare and contrast. See how much my tastes have changed, if at all.

Pros: 

1. I love lists. 
2. Half the work's already been done.

Cons:   

1. Might be some stuff in those old lists I'd rather not own up to.
2. Making a new Favorites list is more work than you'd think.

 

 

My Favorite Bands (Lifetime Edition)

While my favorites change all the time, there's a static, historical list to be compiled of the bands or artists that make the Lifetime cut. Those are the ones that fire up some specific neural pathway every time I think of them, telling me they're "IMPORTANT". They're frequently not commercially or culturally successful, they just had some peculiarly personal, subjective impact on me that never really went away.

Pros:

1. I absolutely know what goes on that list so it would be very easy and quick to compile.
2. I have a ton to say about all of them so the posts would be easy to write.

Cons:

1. Because I have a ton to say about all of them, the posts might be easy, but they would not be quick.
2. I have written a ton about most of them here on the blog already. It's well-trodden ground.
   

 

 

RAM - Random Access Music

A couple of ways this could go. One, which I've used before, involves using Windows 10's "Select Random" option to pick from my vast reservoir of bookmarked tunes. Or I could go physical and pull random albums or singles from the several thousand in the front room. 

Pros: 

1. Very quick and easy to write the posts. It's just one embedded video and a paragraph.
2. Would be a lot of fun for me.

Cons:

1. Might not be a lot of fun for anyone else (Although if I start applying that criterion too rigorously, the entire blog is going to fall over...)
2. I know from experience that getting acceptable results "randomly" actually requires a good deal of editing and fact-checking. Could all too easily spiral out of control.

 

 

Tune of the Day  

Pretty much self explanatory.

Pros:

1. Just means converting a couple of posts I'd have done during Blaugust anyway, turning the popular (/irony) What I've Been Listening To Lately feature into a bunch of single-song posts.
2. Each post would take barely five minutes to put together.

 Cons:

1. Almost insultingly obvious.
2. Smacks of making no effort.

 

 

My Life In A Bag Of Buttons

Or badges, as we call them over here, although that doesn't make for such a snappy title, somehow. I have a literal bag of buttons/badges next to me right now, from when I used to wear them all the time. I stopped doing that in the eighties so they go back to my adolescence and college years. I thought I could stick my hand in, pull one out, photograph it and write a couple of paragraphs about why I would have worn it. 

Pros:

1. Probably the most unusual and potentially rewarding idea I've come up with.
2. Should result in some posts about stuff I otherwise wouldn't have thought to write about.

Cons:

1. Almost certainly going to be too much work for a bunch of fill-in posts.
2. Sticking my hand into a bag full of rusty old badges with sticky-out pins is potentially hazardous to my health.

 

 

My Life As A Parade (Of Characters)

Similar to the Lifetime Bands idea only this time it's characters I've played in MMORPGs. Once again, I can immediately tell you which have been the most significant of all my myriad characters and I have lots to say about them all. And I have pictures. Probably.

Pros:

1. It's game-related, for once.
2. It'd be a lot of fun revisiting them all.

Cons:

1. Seriously, dude? That's a fuckton of work!
2. Do I really want to put all those character names out there now, when I've made the effort to keep them private all this time?

 

 

Cute Dog Pic Of The Day

Pictures of Beryl. Simple as that. Maybe with some text. Probably with some text or it's not really a post, I guess.

Pros:

1. Everyone loves a picture of a cute dog!
2. Super quick and easy to put together.

Cons:

1. It's not always as easy as you might think to take a picture of a cute dog, especially when the dog isn't into it.
2. Might be quick and easy to put the post together but taking the photos and getting them off my phone and onto the computer could be time-consuming and annoying. 

 

 

An AI Writes

Stick a prompt into Bard or ChatGPT, cut and paste the result. Get NightCafe or StableDiffusion to illustrate it. Add a little commentary. Job done.

 Pros:

1. Someone (Something.) else would be doing almost all the work.
2. Would amuse the hell out of me.

Cons:

1. Kind of feels like cheating on the Spirit of Blaugust.
2. Some people really hate AI-generated content.

 

 

And that's all I've come up with so far. It's been very useful writing them all down like this. At the very least, now I have a list of options to choose from. If I just pulled one post from each category, that'd give me over a week's worth of posts.

I might end up running some of these as separate features outside of Blaugust, too. Maybe I should do this planning ahead thing more often.

Nah. Don't think so.