Ten Glorious Years! Give Or Take A Year. Or Two.

 

And so it begins. Did I say that last year? Let me just check... Nope. But I bet I said it some year, on the First of Blaugust, because if keeping a long-running blog tells you anything about yourself, it's how predictable you can be and how many of your supposedly original thoughts and ideas are just ones you had many times before and then immediately forgot.

Or maybe that's just me. I quite like it, actually, It does at least denote some welcome element of constancy of character, which I was brought up to think of as a good thing. 

So, anyway, Blaugust. As I was saying yesterday, it's even more welcome this year than usual because I'm low on the ideas front just now, at least for things to post about that aren't alienating to some and of no interest to most. It means I'm more than averagely grateful for the leaning-posts of Blaugust's special-interest weeks and topic suggestions. 

Let's see what we have for Week One... hang on a moment, I think Krikket has a list...

 

 

There we go! That's the Themes nailed down. And what topic suggestions do we have within those headings? Just Week One will do for now, I think...

Week One – Welcome to Blaugust Week
August 1st – August 6th

• What made you decide to do Blaugust this year, and what are your personal goals?
• Did you start preparing for Blaugust before the August 1st start date? If so, what did you do ahead of time to make sure you’d stay on track?
• Do you remember how you heard about Blaugust for the first time?
• If this isn’t your first Blaugust, what keeps you coming back to do this year after year?
• Community Builder Bonus Prompt: Who are the Blaugust bloggers who you keep reading all year round?

Let's have a bash at those, why not?

Why did I decide to do Blaugust this year?  

Not quite as simple an answer as it might be. Most years the reason would be "Because I always do it" or "Because it's fun". Last year, though, it wasn't as much fun as all that, especially towards the end, by when I was feeling quite burned out, trying to keep up with the immense volume of posts from a record number of contributors while also hitting my 31 posts in a month target. 

By September, I was very much of a mind not to do Blaugust in 2026, by which I really meant I wouldn't formally sign up for it. Every year a few people shadow the event without filling in the registration form. I did it myself before I took the wafer back in... ooh, look! 2015!

That was unexpected! It appears this is my tenth anniversary Blaugust. My first was in 2015. Which of course makes this the eleventh time I've participated. Except there was that one year we did it twice with Blapril as well and wasn't there one year when it didn't happen at all, or am I imagining that?

Of course, another benefit of having a long-running blog is you can go back and check things like that. Give me a moment...

Okay, now that's weird. So, it seems that after making my 31 posts back in 2015, I didn't do another Blaugust for two years. 2016 and 2017 are just normal posting months with no mention of the event. 

Doing a little primary research, it seems that 2017 was the year the event lay fallow, so that fits with my memory of how things went. But what about 2016? Did I have such a bad time in my first Blaugust I didn't care to repeat it? Let me check...

Don't burn out. Enjoy it. Keep it casual.

And here we go! On the last day of Blaugust I posted a full account of my experience, in which it transpires that I hadn't signed up after all, only shadowed the event, all the while acting as if I was part of it. And it seems the reason I opted out of the opt-in was a requirement that you had to also sign up to some service by the name of "Anook", which I didn't want to do. 

What the hell was Anook? Why was it deemed necessary? I don't recall ever hearing of it again. 

Interestingly, it seems from my review that I didn't enjoy my first Blaugust all that much and for almost exactly the same reasons I found it a bit stressful last year - too many posts by others to keep up with, too much effort posting every day myself. Blimey, Charlie! If I'd known what was to come...

I concluded by saying "If Belghast runs Blaugust again next year I'll think very carefully before deciding whether to join in" and clearly what I thought, when I got to thinking, was that I wouldn't. Then Bel skipped a year and in 2018 I signed up all official like nothing had happened and I haven't missed a Blaugust since.

All of which means that, if we count Blapril, this really is my tenth Blaugust! Yay! Didn't miss it after all!

What are your goals?

Don't burn out. Enjoy it. Keep it casual.

Every year I've taken part I've hit the 31 posts. Sometimes that's been very easy. Other times it's been a struggle. This year I'm going to let it be what it will be. I do think that using the topics and suggestions will make it a lot easier if I do decide to go all in. I mean, look at this post. It's writing itself.

Do you start preparing beforehand?

I have done in previous years. I've planned my own series of posts a month or two ahead of time. I've written things in advance so I had completed posts in the bag, all ready to drop in on days when I didn't have time to put anything new together.

Last year I had the bright idea of saving up the idea I had to celebrate EverQuest's 25th Anniversary until August, so I could get the benefit of all those extra posts during Blaugust. That worked really well, although in the end I only used eight of the proposed twenty-five posts during the event. I'm still working my way through the list even now, so I guess I could roll out the remaining seven EQ25 posts this Blaugust...

Othe than that, this year I have made no preperations whatsoever.

Do you remember how you heard about Blaugust for the first time? 

Not exactly. I mean, I know vaguely how it happened - bloggers I followed mentioned it or were participating in it so I came to it organically. Precisely where my first sighting of the word "Blaugust" itself occurred, though, I can't be sure but I said in that 2016 post linked above that I first became aware of Blaugust the year before, 2015, which I believe would have been a couple of years after Belghast came up with the original concept.

So I wasn't there at the beginning but I arrived at the party not too long after it started.  

What keeps you coming back to do this year after year?

I think many of us feel the duality each year
when Blaugust heaves its mighty bulk into view.

It's so, so tempting to say "masochism", isn't it? I think many of us feel the duality each year when Blaugust heaves its mighty bulk into view. It's one of those things you both look forward to and dread at the same time. It's fun but often it can be too much fun and too much fun is enervating. 

I personally have no interest in all the awards and challenges, as can be seen by the complete absence of any of the badges on the blog. If I'm brutally honest, I don't just not care for them, I dislike them. Reminds me of being in the Boy Scouts, something I never once in my life, even as a small boy, thought was something I'd want to be associated with. Not my kind of thing at all.

Conversely, though, it certainly is the community that brings me back every year. It's a club, isn't it? And this is the Annual General Meeting.

When I was in the British Amateur Press Association (BAPA), which for anyone who hasn't heard me bang on about it before was a kind of analog version of blogging from back when the cutting edge of technology was a photocopier, we used to have an AGM, usuallly held at the Central Mailer's home and often involving an overnight or weekend stay. 

It was a big party, basically, to which many of the people who contributed zines to the bi-monthly APA came from all over the country and even from other countries, since we had a few members from outside the UK at times. 

Blaugust is basically that, only for a month and without the drunkenness and fist-fights. It's when many of the people whose posts I read every week and with whom I swap comments all year get together for a big party. Who wouldn't want to come back for that every year?

And here we all are! Happy Blaugust everyone. Let's get the party started! 

(As for the "Community Builder Bonus Prompt: Who are the Blaugust bloggers who you keep reading all year round?" I'm not touching that! It's "Who's your favorite child?", isn't it? Let's just say "All of them" and leave it at that. I mean, obviously we all know it's actually "some of them" but this way everyone gets to feel they're included. And of course everyone is!) 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

For new readers, if I use any AI images or other artifacts or services in a post, I'll always annotate it in a footnote. My view on AI is that it's a creative tool like any other but in the current climate I feel it's polite to mention when it's being used so anyone with strong objections can, like, erm... I dunno... unsee it or something? At least not be fooled into thinking they liked it and then find out later they really didn't.

I like to use a lot of illustrations on the blog and abstract posts like this are notoriously difficult to break up with images so these are the posts where you're most likely to see AI. I use NightCafe almost exclusively, where I have a huge bank of free credits waiting to be burned and that's where both of these were done.

For images in these kinds of posts I like to pull out a phrase from the body of the text and throw it to an AI image generator to see what it comes up with. It's a game. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In this case I got an image I was willing to use first time, both times, which is rare.

The specific model I used for both was something called Virtual Utopia XL. It happened to be the last one I'd used for reasons I may get to in another post and I just left it as it was when I ran the new prompts. 

As for the prompts, you can see them in the captions to the illustrations. Both had the same style instructions appended, namely "line art, color, retro-futurism". Again, those were already set, for reasons I may get to later in the month. Runtime was "Short" and all the weights were 50%.