And So It Begins

Well, there's a masthead you'll be seeing a lot of this month. I must have spotted it atop half a dozen blogs this morning already and it's not even half past nine. 

Unless you've arrived here randomly from Google (In which case Hi! Nice to see you!) you'll already know today is the first day of Blaugust, festival of the supposedly moribund yet actually still surpisingly lively pastime known as blogging. 

I'm not going to go over what Blaugust is yet again. As Jeremy Paxman seemed to get a peculiar pleasure out of saying at the start of every episode of University Challenge until he retired last year, we all know the rules, let's just get on with it.

As of the first of the month, it appears we have seventy-seven participating blogs, up seventeen from just a few days ago, when I posted what I never thought was going to be the definitive list. I'm not going to attempt to keep that thing updated but I have at least tried to add all of the newcomers to my Blog Roll. 

Despite my concerns as expressed last time, they all seem to have been accepted, so I guess three hundred isn't Blogger's high-water mark for these things after all. I must be over that by now although I'm blessed if I'm going to go through and count them all again.

As always, if anyone's participating and doesn't see their blog in the list to the right, drop me a comment and I'll add it. Ditto if the name isn't as you'd prefer or you spot any other infelicity. If you see your blog right down at the very bottom, just lying there like a mafia victim at the bottom of the harbor, it means Blogger can't find your RSS feed. Even Belghast's spreadsheet doesn't have a working one for everybody.

As I was adding the new ones this morning, I noticed several were hosted by NeoCities, the retro-revivalist version of the much-missed GeoCities platform. I take this as a sign of good things to come.

One of our new participants this year, Bitterly Indifferent, has a post up about how the current state of the WorldWide Web and associated services points towards a return to Internet Family Values. There's a link in the post to a piece in The Verge which is itself stuffed with links to corroborative evidence for the argument, some of which are quite interesting. I lost three-quarters of an hour last night sifting through them and some of what I read gave me ideas. If you like ideas you might want to have a look. 

Not everyone likes ideas, of course. Ideas can be scary. If you're going to get through thirty-one days of Blaugust posting every day, though, you're going to need at least a few. 

Fortunately, Blaugust comes with a set of ideas of its own as well as some weekly themes, for which there's a handy illustration I might just slot in here...

I'll probably try to include at least one semi-relevant post for each named week. This one definitely counts as a "Welcome To Blaugust" post. I made a list of fallback ideas of my own a while back and I might drop in a few of those if inspration doesn't strike, as it sometimes fails to do during Blaugust.

It's always as well to have a backup plan. Two years ago I riffed off the Pitchfork People's List and that carried me through the month very comfortably.

 Last year, though, I decided I'd just wing it and honestly it did not go well. I made my thirty-one posts but on a few occasions I felt stressed and overall I enjoyed the event less than usual. 

This time I've done some prep. Not only do I have my fallback ideas, I've already finished three posts that aren't particularly timelocked. I can slot those in whenever I need them. I'm also technically on holiday this week but I'm not going anywhere and the weather forecast is poor so I'll most likely knock out at least a couple more extra posts to stick in the Blaugust bank. That alone should see me through.

Added to that, the timing for the event is excellent this year. There are a whole bunch of big games and expansions launching or going into some kind of open access during August - Palia, Wayfinder, Baldur's Gate 3 and Guild Wars 2's Secrets of the Obscure - so that should give the gamers amongst us plenty to write about.

It's notable that I had to qualify that last paragraph. Time was when I'd have been safe in assuming every Blaugustian was going to be writing mostly about games. Those days are long gone. 

It's probably for the best although I'm not wholly convinced that a community can coalesce purely around a shared interest in blogging. I've worked in a book store for a quarter of a century and I've had ample opportunity to observe book-buyers in their natural environment. While a love of books will get them all through the door, once inside they quickly split into cliques and clades that at best want nothing to do with each other and are not infrequently actively hostile.

That said, it was ever thus. (Geez. "Ever thus"? Who talks that way?) Even when we all wrote about MMORPGs there were lines drawn between game-specific blogs, general blogs, PvE blogs, PvP blogs, casual blogs and hardcore blogs. People just like to put themselves in boxes, I guess.

I know I do but that's one pecadillo I won't be posting about here...

Anyway, for one long month we're all bloggers together, whatever our tastes, topics, predilections or platforms. Longform, shortform, video, audio; Blaugust opens its arms wide to all.

Welcome to Blaugust 2023. You'll fit right in!