And Off We Go!

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of Blaugust! Or is that too aggressive? How about Blaugust, come she will? No, I think I might have used that one before. After a while it gets hard to remember.

But here we are again. And how many of us are there this time? Let me see if I can find the list. You'll have to excuse me a moment. Usually I'd have sorted all this out in advance but the weather's been so lovely and there's been so much else to do... 

Aha! that took a minute but here we go, courtesy of Wilhelm's trusty Formatted HTML List. If you'd like to add all of these blogs - there are ninety-six at time of writing - to your RSS feed, Owls has an OPML list too.

Both of those invaluable resources will, I'm sure, be kept updated as the month rolls by. Last year we had quite a lot of latecomers so it's worth checking every so often to see who else has thrown themselves onboard. 

I don't plan on updating this post to reflect any further additions (Or subtractions...) and I am not going to add all the new blogs to my blog roll, mostly because it's insanely long already. If any of the newcomers turn out to be particularly to my taste, though, I'll be adding those at some stage.

And that's a good opportunity to mention last year, when we had I think it was 178 people participating by the end. I haven't fact-checked that number but it's stuck in my memory for some reason. It was a lot, anyway. 

I wrote a post at the end of the event naming a round dozen of my favorite new discoveries from the Class of '25. Of those twelve, eight are still active in my feeds. A couple stopped posting and I dropped a couple more over this and that along the way. I think the only one that's returned for another round this year, though, is Axxuy. Quite a high bounce rate, that.

I realize now (And only now...) that despite having enjoyed those eight blogs for a whole year, I never added any of them to my blog roll. I might have thought about it right at the start but I wouldn't dignify it by calling it a conscious choice. It was almost certainly laziness. 

Well, I'm going to correct that oversight now. Apologies to everyone who might have had the traffic for the last twelve months, such as it would have been. Talk among yourselves for a bit while I go add them all. It's a fiddly job. You've got time to make a coffee. 

And drink it. 

And wash up.

There! All done. I think a year is altogether too long to decide on which blogs ought to have a permanent place in the sidebar but maybe it does no harm to allow a settling-in period. 

That is what Blaugust is for, though. Or it's one side of the coin. We talk a lot every year about the role the event plays in encouraging people to start a blog or dust off an old one or just find ways to enjoy posting more often but we don't always say as much about what a great opportunity it is to find new blogs to read.

Blogs are like games in one very important way. It takes a lot more time and effort to create and maintain the content than it does to consume it. On average, every post here probably takes me about two or three hours. Sometimes I knock one off in an hour but sometimes it takes all day.

Even the longest posts (Hi, Kaylriene! Hi, Jeromai!) probably only takes me ten or fifteen minutes to read. Most take more like two or three. As a writer, one post a day is enough. As a reader, I can get through a lot of blog posts in a day. Dozens. Easily.

Blaugust is an opportunity to deepen your resource pool as a reader and also to expand your range. Most of the dozen blogs I stuck with after last year I would never have known about without Blaugust. And my reading year would have been poorer without all of them.

That said, I would warn against trying to read everything. Again, veterans and mentors always make a point of warning newer bloggers not to try to do too much, not to over-extend themselves trying to blog every day if they're not feeling it, to pace themselves, allow for breaks and pauses, not to burn so hard and fast they burn out before the month is over.

And the same applies to readers. I found last year's Blaugust exhausting. Not as a writer - as a reader. We had the biggest intake ever and at the start, as happens every time, nearly everyone was posting every day. I said I could get through dozens of posts a day. By that I meant maybe two or three dozen. Not a gross!

Things had calmed down a lot by the middle of the month as people either dropped out or reduced their posting frequency as they realized they weren't going to make 31 posts after all. It always happens. But for me, and from what I read as people summed up after it was all over, for a few others too, by then the damage had been done. I ended up skipping a lot because I'd burned myself out as a reader, trying to read everything in the first week or two.

This year I'll take my own advice and pace myself. I'll check everyone out, eventually, but there's no need to read every single post every day, let alone to comment on them all. All the older posts from any blog that really sings to me will still be there when I come to it. I'll go back and read those with pleasure. And maybe add them to the blog roll later still.

These things you learn, over time. Over a long time, apparently, because I'm only figuring all this out now and I've been doing this a while now. Just don't try to do everything all at once, that's what I'm saying.

And that's enough of a pre-amble. Let's have the list and then I'm done. The sun's out, it's another beautiful day and there are other things to do than write blog posts. 

I won't say better things...

1. Contains Moderate Peril
2. not all those who wander are lost
3. hamatti.org
4. Shadowz Abstract Gaming Blog
5. Troy Press
6. Gaudete Theology
7. Words Under My Name
8. Cubic Creativity
9. Endgame Viable
10. Inventory Full
11. Varun Barad
12. TAGN
13. Through Wolfy's Eyes
14. Gamers Esoteric
15. Byte Vortex
16. Chasing Dings!
17. GamerLady P Blog
18. owlblog
19. Zelibeli
20. Mar Qaroll's The Marrowing!
21. Taylor film crit
22. Aywren's Nook
23. MMO Casual
24. Mailvaltar
25. Quail Creations
26. An Archaeopteryx
27. inconsistent.software
28. Matt's Blog
29. Nerdy Bookahs
30. Dave Henry Blog
31. Indiecator
32. fluidline.neocities.org
33. Lameazoid.com
34. I Can't Think of a Name for this Website
35. Why I Game
36. Gridranger's blog
37. MogBlog
38. 世界のねじを巻くブログ
39. MMO One Night
40. Ubergeek Kelly's World
41. Words of the AgingGamer
42. Geek on a Harley
43. Portrait of a....
44. Ben Ramsey
45. Lucky Instar
46. Knifesedge Blogs
47. Many Welps
48. coffee spills
49. Kay Talks Games
50. Kayriene
51. The Ghastly Mirror
52. Alex's Review Corner
53. Kedara
54. Ryan Patrick Randall
55. Christopherhimes.com
56. The Maker Dad
57. Lyons in Beta
58. WCRobinson
59. keeroks space
60. theTangentSpace
61. BongoTwisty
62. 82MHz
63. Riel's Nest
64. Aster's Asterisms
65. Emma Juettner's Blog
66. What the Fran
67. Taxodium
68. Quinn Daedal - Blog
69. Academic Aesthetic
70. bearblog
71. NomadWarMachine
72. Nerd Girl Thoughts
73. Axxuy's Internet Notebook
74. Pinkway
75. 素生
76. Games and Geekery
77. In An Age
78. ThinkRoot
79. Point, Click, Repeat
80. もうすぐ33歳
81. note (large blog platform)
82. The Friendly Necromancer
83. Select * From Life
84. Fragmentary
85. 伏枥之间
86. ComradeNerdy Blog
87. Brennan.day
88. ChristiRichards.com
89. fyr.io
90. KVibber.com
91. K-Squared Ramblings
92. わくパンの思考のかけら
93. Off the Top,
94. Personal InfoCloud
95. Medium
96. clandestini