Reprocties Materis Peek. Who Among Us Would Argue With That?

Well, I do believe it's the final week of Blaugust. Technically, that would be the final half a week, since it's the twenty-eighth today and August only has thirty-one days, but according to the schedule this is Lessons Learned Week so who am I to quibble?

Have I learned any lessons? Y'know, I think I have. I've learned that not taking the whole thing too seriously makes it more enjoyable, for a start.

This is, I think, the first year I've done Blaugust where I haven't started out with the express intention of posting every day. Also the first in a while where I didn't make any special preparations. 

I didn't come up with any themes to give me something to fall back on on days when I couldn't come up with anything to write about. I didn't draft a bunch of posts ahead of time to give me a cushion for when life inevitably made it difficult to find time to write something on the day. I didn't really do anything very much different to what I'd have been doing anyway. I just sat down each day and started vamping until something emerged.

I even skipped a day, early on. I was so pleased with myself! My original intention had been to skip the very first day, so as to make it quite clear I was driving this thing for once. I was still planning on doing that, almost right up to the moment Blaugust began. And then I got over-excited, as usual, and just had to post on Day One.

Later on, I ended up posting twice in one day, so as of now I'm back on track for the full thirty-one posts during Blaugust which, as we should all keep reminding ourselves, does not mean posting something every day. I guess now I'm this close I'll feel honor-bound to complete but if I do, at least I'll know it was my choice, this time.

Blaugust is supposed to be fun even if doesn't always feel like it. That's a lesson I have to re-learn every year, which is a bit of a disappointment, but I feel this time it might finally have sunk in. 

Last year I didn't entirely enjoy the event. If I look at it objectively, I guess I never wholly enjoy it, given how stressful it can get, but last year was a stand-out for not feeling like it was as much fun as it should have been. I was quite pissed off by the end. 

In 2024, sometimes Blaugust felt like the whole focus had shifted and in a direction that I wouldn't have chosen to go. At times I found myself wondering whether, had it been a new event for me, if I'd have had any interest in joining in at all.

This year was much better. Things seemed less shrill. People seemed more chilled. The whole thing felt warmer and less brittle. And yet, the underlying issues that made me so uncomfortable last time around still remained. 

For a start, there were far - far - too many blogs to keep up with. And lots of them seemed not to be about anything that interests me very much while others were very keen indeed on things that don't interest me at all. 

There was an inordinate amount of blogging-about-blogging, something I usually lap up, but which at times seemed to be going into great detail about aspects of the hobby I barely recognized as having anything to do with blogging at all. I got the impression that figuring out the technicalities of getting a blog up and running, then tweaking it to perfection, was of considerably more interest to some than using the finished result to talk about anything much other than how it was done.

Only this year none of that seemed to matter very much. The overall vibe just felt much friendlier and open. There was more of a sense of the event being a convention, where a whole bunch of people come and hang out in the same space without necessarily needing to interact directly. It was fine for different cliques to hang with their friends, maybe waving at each other from different tables in the bar once in a while or nod good-humoredly at each other as they wandered through the halls, on the way to see something that interested them more.

A lot of that had to do with the widely-voiced and accepted idea that no-one has to try and read everything. There were one hundred and sixty-eight participating blogs in Blaugust 2025. I know most of those won't have posted every day but if they had, it would have been over five thousand blog posts we'd all have had to read in a month! 

Even with most people not even coming close to a daily posting schedule, I'd bet the final total will still be well into four figures. How many blog posts does anyone really want to be reading? Even fifty a day seems like a lot.

So it was great that for once - and probably for the fist time - I didn't feel like I was doing something wrong or letting anyone down by not trying to keep up with everything. I made sure I'd added every new blog to my feeds when the event started and I gave it one more pass a few days in but after that I just didn't bother any more and that felt fine. 

Well, that's not strictly true. I mean, it's true that it felt fine but I did do one final pass-through when Wilhelm mentioned the total had gone up to more than a hundred and fifty blogs. I was intending to add the rest to my feed but in the end I just glanced at an example post from each of the new ones and left it at that. As for the dozen or so more than arrived even later, I haven't seen those at all. 

And the lesson I've learned is that that's okay. It's like everyone has their stall out and we all wander around and stop when something catches our attention. It's not a class. There's not going to be a test.

In fact, it reminded me that back when I used to do the offline, analog version of blogging, receiving and reading thirty photocopied 'zines every couple of months, quite a few of those were by people I really didn't even like much, let alone want to read what they wrote. And yet we all rubbed along well enough. I'll be doing a post on that at some point because I think it has a lot of instructive parallels with the way things are in blogging now. 

That thought feeds directly into the Big Comment Debate, something I'll swing back around to in that post, if I ever get around to writing it. It could have been a divisive moment but it turned to be out the exact opposite. 

I found many of the arguments persuasive and the whole tenor of the debate was encouraging. In the end, it was all very instructive. And helpful. The same issues came up last year but I didn't feel there was any resolution then. This time, there most definitely was. Lessons absolutely were learned. By me, anyway. 

Specifically, I learned that the precise nature of communication between blogs and bloggers doesn't matter as much as I felt it did. I still personally prefer a good, solid, on-site comment thread that encourages asynchronous, long-form responses but I appreciate there are many reasons why that may not always be appropriate and I can honestly say that, as a direct consequence of the extended debate we had on the topic, it no longer bugs me when I get to the end of a really interesting or provocative post, only to find I can't chip in with my unwelcome and uninvited commentary.

And you know why? Because I have a blog. If I want right of reply I can just write a post of my own. Someone, who I really ought to be crediting if only I remembered who said it first, pointed that out and then several others re-iterated it and it really struck home. 

Anyone can decide not to have a comment thread and they absolutely should if that's what they want, because as once again many people made clear, it's your blog, your rules, but no-one who posts in public spaces, which all the Blaugust blogs by definition must be, can prevent anyone commenting on what they've posted. They'll just go somewhere else to do it.

So all that was good. Positive outcomes all round, I'd say, and definitely some lessons learned.

Finally, not so much a lesson as an observation: this has been a very enjoyable Blaugust. Not only for all the reasons I've already mentioned but because I discovered a whole lot of new blogs that I thoroughly enjoyed reading, ones whose posts I actively looked forward to each day.

That was not the case last year, when I added maybe twice as many blogs to my feeds and ended up removing almost all of them pretty quickly after the event was over. I can't foretell the future but it seems like a reasonable expectation that I'll be keeping at least half of this year's additions in my feeds indefinitely.

I'll probably do a wrap-up post at the end of Blaugust,where I'll call out the new blogs I enjoyed the most by name. I think about doing it every year but I've mostly avoided following through because it seems a bit rude to the ones I don't mention. This year, I feel that doesn't apply so much as it used to.

For one reasons, and this may seem counter-intuitive, but the large number of Blaugustinians this time around, along with the aforementioned tendency of cliques and clades to form, makes it feel quite unlikely most of the blogs I fail to mention will even be aware of my lack of interest. I'm pretty sure most of the bloggers I haven't been reading haven't been reading me either. There seem to be so few points of common interest between what we're doing it would be much more surprising if they had.

Someone must have been, though, because for the first time since the demise of Google Reader, when I moved my rss feeds to Feedly, I find myself with more than three hundred Feedly followers. As I've said repeatedly, I stopped paying much attention to my blogging stats years ago but one stat I can't really avoid is that one, since it appears beneath the name of every blog in the feed, including my own.

For years it's hovered in the 290s. The highest it had ever been until now was 298. The lowest since I first started paying attention was 292. 

At the start of Blaugust I'd just lost a couple of followers and it was down to 296. At some point in the middle of Blaugust I noticed, with considerable shock, that it had suddenly jumped to 306. As of this morning it's 307. Round numbers being a typically meaningless benchmark, I was unjustifiably delighted.

Whether it will immediately fall back to the 290s when Blaugust ends remains to be seen. I know I'll be shedding a few feeds when September begins so it seems likely. I just hope it doesn't end up lower than it was when it began.

And there we have it. A final lesson only partly learned,  at best . Stats don't matter. I keep saying it and I mostly believe it. And yet, who has the willpower to ignore them completely?

Maybe that'll be the lesson I finally learn next year.

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

All the images, unsurprisingly. They're weirdly consistent, considering they're from three different models. The models, in order as they appear, were HiDream I1 Fast, Ideogram 2a Turbo and Qwen Image SD. The prompt in all cases was the very simple "Lessons Learned. Line art. Color. retro magazine illustration." All settings were whatever the defaults are on NightCafe.

And I could have fiddled about with them for ages to try and get something objectively better because these are pretty poor but they also have a weirdly inauthentic feel that I find oddly pleasurable. I would be very willing to accept that's a minority taste.

I love the way they all three interpreted "retro magazine illustration" to mean four-color process printing. I mean, there's no earthly reason why it should so it's fascinating to see them acting like they come from some shared 1950s reality. All the aesthetics are solidly based in the 50s and 60s although I guess an argument could be made for the 70s on the middle picture.

If the models were, as is always alleged, trained on a scraping of the entire internet, are we to believe the vast bulk of uploaded images from magazines come from more than fifty years ago? Did no-one digitize and upload the 80s and 90s? Or is thirty years ago not yet far enough to be "retro"?

#1 and #3 also extremely American, which makes the vaguely Cyrillic lettering all the more sinister. Is this some Philip K Dick alternate reality where Soviet Russia dominated the post-war world the way Germany and Japan do in Man In The High Castle? Or am I just overthinking what is basically nonsense?

Except, if it is nonsense, why is it nonsense? And why this nonsense? Could AI not just use actual words? I mean, it uses them in the headlines. Why not in the background text? 

Probably for the same reason it insists on pencils having two sharpened ends and people writing with a pen in both hands. Because it has no fucking clue what it's doing, pretty though it is to pretend otherwise.