We're Going To Need A Smaller Bag

It's Friday! The traditional day of the Grab Bag. Or the music post. 

As it so happens, though, I don't have much in the bag to grab right now. Or in the music archives.

I would have loved to do a What I've been Listening To but I haven't really listened to anything much other than myself. I had a look at what I've bookmarked and it would be thin gruel so I'll have to leave it to thicken up a little. 

Still, I imagine I'll come up with something if I just keep writing...

Every Month Starts On A Thursday 

I was moaning the other day about Prime Gaming not sending out blog posts/emails/press releases about the new free games for the month and then this morning I woke up this morning and there it was.

It transpires there's a very simple reason for Prime not informing members of the new games at the start of the month. For them, the month always begins on Thursday. 

One thing I seem never to have taken on board since Prime stopped dropping the entire slate on the first of the month is that now things change weekly, the new tranche always drops on Thursdays. That means the whole thing is disconnected from the monthly calendar, so why they even bother bringing  the name of the month into it at all beats me.

Anyway, there's a schedule of new games for the next four weeks and when I've had time to go through it I imagine I'll cobble together some kind of post about them. It's always an easy one to put together and I enjoy doing it, not least because it gives me one of the few opportunities I'm happy to take to snark about games. Mostly I stick to writing about games I like these days but I think Amazon is big enough to take a few pokes.

Gamify Everything!

I'm very much enjoying playing in Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic league, currently in its inaugural year. The game gamifies game development or rather game production and one of the games I picked was Date Everything!, a game which gamifies dating apps. 

It did quite well for me but I  haven't played Date Everything and I have no intention of ever playing it. You don't, fortunately, have to play the games you pick for the league. That would be an entirely different game, gamified in an entirely different way. 

I also haven't tried the new app I read about at Gameindustry.biz recently but that isn't going to stop me writing about it, either. It's called Ludocene and it describes itself as a "dating app for games".  

What it does is gamify the process of choosing new games to play by aping the tropes of dating apps, which themselves gamify the process of finding a partner, which was what Date Everything was parodying. Is this getting self-referential enough for you yet?  

Apparently, Ludocene specifically uses the conventions of deck-builders to build a deck of recommended games based on game cards you choose or reject. I'm not entirely sure who needs all of that to choose a new game to play but now it's there if you want it. I'm kinda-sorta tempted to try it but maybe I'll wait until Blaugust is over and I have some time on my hands, not just to mess around with the app but to play whatever it suggests I've bonded with .

Looking Good, Reading Fine

Ah, Blaugust! The one-hundred-and-fifty-headed hydra of our times! Seriously, did you realise there are now just shy of 150 blogs signed up to Blaugust 2025? I didn't. I hadn't checked since the day after the event began, at which point there were 114.

Naithin (Yes, him again!) posted a full list of them today and the count at that time was 146. I'm betting on it topping the 150 mark by the end of August. [Edit: I just went to get the link for the full list and it's already up to 159 so I just won that bet...]

I left a long comment on that thread, which I do not intend to rehash here, except to ask again whether there's anyone out there who would genuinely like to read more than four and a half thousand blog posts this August, which is what would happen if everyone on the list successfully met the 31 posts in a month challenge on which the event was originally conceived. 

I am instead going to do what I said I was going to do yesteday, namely respond to another of Naithin's posts, specifically the one on making a blog look really good without using pictures. 

It ties in to something I have in mind to write about, which is the way blogs tend to fail in comparison with the photocopied zines they have arguably replaced. I had reason to look at a load of my old apa-zines from the nineties this week and I was almost embarassed by how much more effort had clearly gone into producing them than ever goes into one of my blog posts now.

See Footnote

I used to mess about with typography and layout all the time. I certainly did use a lot of illustrations, mostly cut out from magazines and cinema programs, photocopied from books and comics or just found in the street. Other people went further and attached physical objects to their zines or pasted their photocopied text onto pieces of wood.

This blog is one of the more heavily-illustrated in this quadrant of the blogosphere and I do take a lot of time and trouble over the pictures and their placement but it's absolutely trivial compared to the effort I used to make when everything was analog and tactile. And one thing I hardly ever do here is mess with the typography.

As Naithin points out, doing that can make a big difference to readability but I have to say that when I was doing it with a photocopier back in the nineties, making things more readable was the last thing on my mind. I used to deliberately make things hard to read, not so much in terms of literary style, although there was plenty of that, too, but literally difficult to make out the words.

And I wasn't the only one at it, either. Looking back at the zines we all round-robined to each other, it's plain a lot of people didn't have accessibility or user-friendliness at the top of their agenda. Or on the agenda at all.

I don't propose to go back to making everything I write as awkward to read as possible but I do think Naithin is right in that some extra thought and imagination when laying out a post wouldn't be such a bad idea. And in the spirit of Blaugust, here are a few links to blogs I read this morning that do just that:

ribo zone - font that looks like typescript, no capitalization, halftone images 

axxuy - actual typescript from an actual typewriter

Small Good Things - very well laid-out, wide, clear, excellent sub-headings, really inviting the reader in 

I also note that all of the above use a soft, pastel background color that feels really... comfortable. Color is another tool I rarely take out of the box.

At this point I was going to go on to discuss syntax, grammar and language in general but I think that's a topic for another post. I'm going to leave it there for now because I have other things to do. Those one hundred and fifty Blaugust blogs aren't going to read themselves! 

In Keeping With Tradition

We'll end with a song. I said I didn't have many bookmarked but I didn't say I didn't have any.

Motel 6 - Tiger la Flor

I'll see your Motel 6 and raise you Super8. I need to get an album by Tiger... Nothing on CD yet, sadly.

Probably no post tomorrow because work but it's Blaugust so who knows?

 

Footnote: That's a photo taken with my phone of the first page of a zine I did for the apa back in the mid-nineties. It's a fragment of a story, the full text of which you can read, clearly, here, along with the other fragment that makes up the whole thing. I also have a seven song sequence now that goes with the pair of them, which I will make public at some point because I'm very pleased with it and I would like people to be able to read the story and listen to the music together.

Back then, though, I really didn't care about an audience. In fact, I wanted to make people work for it if they were going to engage with anything I did at all. My attitude was neatly summed up in a reply I made in print to someone who'd not been appreciative of something I'd written: "Don't do me any favors. I couldn't care less whether you read any of my zines, to be honest. If you don't enjoy them, don't bother." We told it like it was, back then!

It's hard to see in the picture but the whole zine consists of the full text, white on very faded grey, blown up to the width of the A4 page and laid out with no line breaks, capitalization or punctuation, overlaid in the center with the same text in a tiny point size in a narrow, double line-spaced column. 

I was plainly more interested in what the text looked like than what it said - and I was really proud of what it said. Proud enough to want to share but not too bothered about being understood, apparently...

 

Notes on AI used in this post: Just the header image, which is from a series I'm doing that will appear here one day. It was generated at NightCafe using Ideogram V3 Turbo, from the prompt "Walking through corn fields Covered in dust Lost in this dustbowl young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism", which is partially taken from the Port Silo story.