Good Grief! It's Blaugust! Again!

 

Now there's an image we're going to be seeing a lot of over the coming month, with or without checkerboard squares behind it. Yes, it's August so it must be time for that long-running festival of the written word, hosted by Belghast and known to all as Blaugust - which, as one of this year's new Blaugustians, samjc, points out, is a pun that works best (Or possibly only.) when read in an American accent.

Speaking of new participants, this time around we have no fewer than thirty-four, out of a total starting line-up of seventy-four. Belghast has all the details, as always. 

Without wanting to come across as a Debbie Downer (I'd say that ages me but since I was already well into in my forties when the character first appeared on SNL, that really isn't saying much...) I do feel the need to point out that if we had a record one hundred and three participants in 2023 and in 2024 we have seventy-four, thirty-four of whom are new, that must mean well over half of the Blaugust Class of '24 has opted out of a return engagement.

It's not surprising. Blaugust does take its toll. I'm mentally preparing myself for the onslaught. It's not writing the thirty-one posts that takes it out of me each year - it's reading the other several thousand.

The high attrition rate is also the main reason I've decided not to add every single new entrant to the blog roll over there on the right. It's already unfeasibly long, with a downward-sweeping tail that droops far out of sight into a void where no-one's posted for years. 

Worse, if I'm brutal, I have to own it has quite a few entries even at the more active end that I have only ever visited during Blaugust itself, when I try to be as assiduous as I can in reading everything. I finally decided in the run-up to this year's extravaganza that I'd quite like my blog roll to reflect the blogs I do in fact read, so this time I'm going to wait to see which ones stick with me before I add any.

Instead, I updated the tab no-one ever notices, the one that's sat there for five years or more, unchanged. Back when I added all the entrants to the 2019 Blaugust I called it The Crew, a reference to the Whole Sick Crew from Thomas Pynchon's V that I don't imagine I ever bothered to explain. I have renamed it with a much more user-friendly title this time, so perhaps it will be of use to someone.

Dall-E 3's take on The Whole Sick Crew

I also added every last one of the new blogs to my Feedly feed, a process made infinitely more manageable by means of Belghast's marvelous OPML File. Thanks a mil, Bel! Saved me literally an hour or more of tedious googling, cutting and pasting. 

If, like me, you have no clue what an OPML file is or what to do with it, don't fret. As with everything on the internet ever, trial and error is your friend. (Really bad advice - do not take it!) I just copied the link and pasted it into Feedly's "Follow" tab then all I had to do then was click each entry to approve it and and boom! Every new blog added in seconds. 

That's my prep done. Now for the introductions.

This year, for reasons best known to himself, Bel has been quite insistent we all begin with something he's calling "The First Post of Blaugust". We already had "Getting To Know You"week but apparently that wasn't enough. Now we have to do that bit you dread at the start of every training course, where you go round the table and tell everyone two interesting facts about yourself. 

One of those facts about me, as you can plainly see, is that I can be unecessarily sarcastic at times. Might as well get that out in the open right away. Also, I think I'm funny even if no-one else does. There! That's two!

Bel introduces the idea in a post that also includes everything you need to know about the event, so if you haven't already checked it out, now would probably be a good time. The gist of the First Post is that "for your very first Blaugust post you take a bit of time and introduce yourself and your blog." As I imagine anyone who's visited Inventory Full before will not be surprised to hear, I don't need a lot of encouragement to talk about myself, so that's kind of like pushing at an open door.

Of course, that does also mean I've done this sort of things a few times already, so rather than repeat myself I thought I might just link to a few of those posts. 

Inventory Full started for real over a dozen years ago, back in 2011, but I think the very first time I gave myself any kind of formal introduction was for the much-missed New Blogger Initiative (Now itself incorporated into Blaugust, of course, lest we forget, which I had until I typed this.) In a post called How The Bhagpuss Came To Be. I summed things up like this:

"Inventory Full is my first and so far only blog, but I come from a very long background of writing for relatively small, obsessive, responsive audiences. I co-published my first fanzine back in the punk wars in the late '70s, moved to co-publishing a comics fanzine in the early '80s and went on to contribute to many more comiczines in the U.K. and U.S.A. throughout that decade. I was also heavily involved in the APAzine scene right through to the late 1990s.

Then I discovered Everquest and all that stopped, replaced by endless posting on countless forums, primarily EQ's long-gone but never-forgotten original TNZ. I used to post under a different name but sometime in the mid-noughties, for some reason I now forget I needed a new identity. I was sitting at work listening to the radio and two news items came on in quick succession, one about the Oliver Postgate children's TV character Bagpuss and another a report about something terrible going on in Bhagdad."

And conflated the two to get Bhagpuss, obviously. Which is all very well and quite true but doesn't really say much about who I am now. 

I fleshed things out a lot more in a series of posts that got published as part of Blaugust 2019. That was the year I was on chemo after having had bowel cancer (Way to go to lighten the mood... I'm fine now, touch wood, cross fingers.) so I had plenty of time on my hands, as can easily be seen from the forty-two posts that month, my all-time Blaugust record.

That series of posts, to which I naturally neglected to give a meaningful tag (Because why have one that might be useful when you can have eight hundred that aren't?) purports to cover my musical tastes but actually works quite well as a mini-bio. Perhaps not so mini, since it must run to at least ten thousand words...

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

The most surprising thing about those posts is that most of the links still work. I might go back and fix the ones that don't but then again I might not. As the final line of the fifth post has it, onward and upward!

I am for the past but I'm more for the present and the future. Looking back is fine but only in so far as it informs us about where we are and where we go next. It's a resource to be exploited, not a museum to be curated; an indication of where we come from, not a lost homeland to which we long to return.

Easy to say but I reach state pension age in a few months. I have a lot more past than I have future, that's a given. All the more reason to look forward, then, I'd say!

In keeping with that thought, I'm going to finish up with a short list of my current interests and obsessions, mostly related to various strands of popular culture, which after all is the bedrock of this blog. I strongly suspect that almost everyone reading this, assuming anyone still is, will know far more than they ever needed to about my past by now, or at least they will if they've followed those links and none of us can know the future so the present is all we have left to cover here.

This blog started as - and still mostly is - a blog about gaming, specifically MMORPGs. After twenty-five years I have cooled some on the genre but only to the point where I now play MMOs for maybe one or two hours every day rather than five or six. 

I'm nominally still playing one or two older titles, mostly EverQuest II, although I haven't logged in to that one for about a month. My current obsession, which I don't think is putting it too strongly, is Once Human. It's the kind of game that I would never even have considered playing back when I started this blog, when I would have reckoned it would be too fast and action-oriented for me to cope with. Weird how getting older has made stuff like that seem less scary and more enjoyable. Probably a post in there, somewhere...

I'm also playing a lot more non-MMO games these days and writing about them here. I was playing Solasta when Once Human arrived, at which point I dropped it like those friends you make in Fresher's Week. I will get back to it when the frenzy fades. I'm also playing Wuthering Waves, a gacha game I highly recommend. 

By the time Blaugust ends I'll probably be playing something else entirely. I'm fickle with games these days and I like it better that way.

Musically, I'm bouncing around the table in the usual fashion between the fading bleeps and trills of what's left of hyperpop, the autotuned majesty of the avant-garde that somehow passes for actual pop these days (Seriously need to write a post about that...) and the never-ending wonderland of YouTube's recommends algorithm, which is where I developed my growing appreciation for midwestern emo, Mexican trip-hop and Japanese noise-rock. Trust me, there will be examples during Blaugust and you'll wish you hadn't asked.

My album of the year at the halfway point, somewhat predictably, has to be Charli XCX's BRAT. It's likely to be my album of the year at the end of the year, too, unless Lana del Rey gets her country album, Lasso, done by then. Any year there's a Lana album, that album is album of the year. It's a given. it might even be a law.

BRAT, however, is much better to write to than any of Lana's albums, which make me stop and listen far too much to be productive. Half the posts I've written since BRAT came out were done with the YouTube playlist on LOUD. The others were done to Nouvelle Vague, who I also find very conducive to creativity.

For TV, I am somewhat stuck in the past. I'm still working my way through Roswell: New Mexico, which makes ever less sense and that's one of the many reasons I love it. Only a few episodes left and I have no clue how it's going to end. I hope it doesn't just stop in the middle like so many shows these days. (Waves fist at clouds...)

I had to take a break from The Flash after the end of Season Four because I realised I now strongly disliked almost every character in it. I was constantly rooting for the villains to win, which of course they are contractually obliged not to do, even though quite clearly they would, in almost every case, seeing how utterly incompetent the heroes are and how incapable of learning from experience they continue to be. Don't get me started, right?

I have Dead Boy Detectives lined up as soon as I finish R:NM, so at least that's relatively recent. Most of all, though, I'm looking forward to the fourth and final season of Umbrella Academy, which I had no idea was even going to be a thing. I thought it ended quite neatly with Season Three so it shows what I know.

For reading, as always it depends a lot on what freebies I picked up at work. I work in a very large bookshop and have done since the late 90s, which means I've barely had to pay for a book in a quarter of a century and yet my house is so full of the damn things I can hardly get through the door.  

It also means that much of what I read hasn't been published yet and I can't legally write about it, or at least review or quote from it - it says so right on the covers of some of them. Plus I'm contractually restrained from saying certain other things about the book trade on social media and I'm too paranoid about what is and isn't allowed to say pretty much anything, which is why, although I read all the time, there's very little about books on the blog. Just wait 'til I retire...

I will say that I've just finished the proof for a book called Small Bomb in Dimperly that will be published next month. Can't say anything about it although I doubt the publishers will sue me for saying I really enjoyed it. 

Before that I read my first-ever Korean novel, The Dallergut Dream Department Store, a million-copy best-seller in its country of origin, those sales figures being by far the most surprising thing about it. I really enjoyed that one, too, but I find it mind-boggling to imagine it as a mainstream best-seller, which it must have been to rack up numbers like that. It's out here now so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

I'm also slowly chugging through Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, my current bathroom book. I nearly did linguistics at college. Dodged a bullet there.

Other than all of that, I'd like to mention our dog, Beryl. She's two and a half and takes about that many hours out of each day to walk, which is time I used to use for playing games. If you want to know why I play less than I used to, that's the reason. 

She's actually Mrs. Bhagpuss's dog but I'm lucky enough to have unrestricted use of her. Beryl that is, not Mrs Bhagpuss. 

Although...

Probably time I stopped. I think I've said enough.