Get Thee Behind Me, Blaugust!

It's the last day of Blaugust so I guess I'd better scrape together some kind of summary of how my Blaugust has been. I just checked Krikket's invaluable calendar and I see it's also the last day of "Lessons Learned" week, which I thought didn't start until the event was over, so you can see how much attention I've been paying.

I can say for certain that I enjoyed it more than last year but that's not necessarily the ringing endorsement it could be, since at this time last year I was wondering whether I might be done with Blaugust for good.

Or at least that's how I remembered it. When I look back at the post I wrote on this same day last year, though, it doesn't immediately appear that I was feeling that way at all. 

I opened that post with what, on the face of it, seems to be a pretty positive assessment: 

"Last day! Has it been fun? I'd say so." 

If you subject that statement to rigorous critical analysis, though, you'll notice the questioning tone is resolved with a conditional and that's a classic way to undercut certainty with doubt.

I think I was probably being more polite than truthful, although I certainly meant it when I said I'd enjoyed the dozen new blogs I went on to list, most of which I've carried on reading and several of which I've enjoyed seeing in Blaugust again this year.

I think my main problem last year was the sheer scale of the event. We had the largest ever slate of contributors in 2025. As Wilhelm records in his exhaustive history of the event, 162 blogs signed up. 

That record did not stand. This year, the total ran to 171. Statistically, Blaugust is more successful than ever.

One lesson I learned last year is that you can indeed have too much of a good thing. The main reason I remember not enjoying the month as much as I was expecting was that I started out trying to read every post from every blog. That lasted about a week but the burnout halo from that misguided attempt hung over the rest of the month, even as the torrent of posts slowed to a flood and the flood to a stream.

This year I didn't even try to keep up with everything. On the first of August I added every new blog to Feedly but I didn't go back again to add anyone who joined after the event started. I have a notion to go take a look at some or even all of them after Blaugust ends, when I can take my time but for August I felt I already had more than enough to read just with the ones that made the starting gun.

Irrelevant image, cynically employed to break up wall of text

With those, I did begin by sampling every blog at least once but I very quickly stopped looking at any that didn't immediately catch my interest. That still left a lot of blogs and a lot of posts every day. 

For the first half of Blaugust, I gamely clicked through to read each and every one on the blog itself but by the third week I was reading some in Feedly, something I almost never do during the rest of the year, and for quite a few I was pretty much just skimming the title, guessing if it would interest me and skipping it if I thought it wouldn't.

I'm not very happy about any of that. I preferred it when I could read all the posts every day. I don't like skimming or skipping. But this is Lessons Learned week and the lesson I learned last year was that Blaugust has become too big to be treated the way I used to treat it, as a banquet to be devoured. Now it's more like a buffet to be sampled.

The other lesson I learned last year, which has been reinforced in 2026, is that even if I was able to read all the posts, I wouldn't necessarily want to. 

The relative explosion of interest in Blaugust from outside the event's traditional hinterland of blogs largely or wholly related to gaming has introduced me to quite a few very enjoyable and informative writers who focus on all kinds of non-gaming topics. That's fertile ground for me. I love slice-of-life posts and odd digressions into abstruse hobbies. People writing about their pets or their collections or their holidays - all fun things to read about.

Conversely, there's been a significant influx of blogs that focus on quite specific topics that don't interest me at all. There are writers who can make anything sound interesting and we're very lucky to have several of those as regulars in Blaugust but other bloggers are clearly only writing for a very specific audience, one which doesn't include me. 

Some, I literally can't understand and I don't mean the welcome influx of blogs not written in English. Those I can translate, thanks to the magic of the internet. I mean the IT professional blogs, some of which might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the sense I can make of them.

I use the internet but I have no real interest in how it works, any more than I want to know how my refrigerator makes ice. I just want it to do what it does and not bother me with the details. At some point I may write a post about the disturbing trend towards finding Rube Goldberg solutions for problems that, from my perspective, have already been solved but for now I'll just say that, while I love reading bloggers writing about blogging, I'm not so keen on reading bloggers writing about how to build a blogging platform from scratch.

Another irrelevant image but hey! At least it's not AI, right?

And there's this year's lesson learned: I don't have to read a blog just because it's there. Not even in Blaugust.  I didn't figure it out last year, which was why I finished the event feeling so down on it, but reading, like writing, is always optional. 

Once I'd figured that out - and it took me a few days this year, even after last year's experience - I enjoyed Blaugust as much as ever. Which, again, is a nuanced affirmation. If I'm brutally honest, I've always found Blaugust slightly hard work. A whole month is a long time for an event like this. 

I have wondered in the past whether it wouldn't be more effective, as an incentive for bloggers to start and maintain a blog and enjoy doing it, which is the fundamental purpose of Blaugust, after all, if there were two or even three mini-Blaugusts every year instead of just one big one. We could have a week-long event in, say, December and April and a two-week event in August. Spread the load, spread the joy!

Somehow, I don't think that's going to happen. Blaugust has momentum now and it's growing. And, counter to what it may seem like I've been suggesting, I'd like to see it grow further. Only I'd like to see it grow in some new directions.

Blaugust has picked up quite a degree of traction in some non-gaming sectors but blogging, while it may not be the cultural force it was fifteen years ago, is still surprisingly strong among some interest groups we rarely see represented in the event. There are blogging enclaves in comics, music, cinema, sport, books...

It would be nice to see some of those bloggers signing up next year. As someone who doesn't really use social media at all, I'm not sure where they hang out but I bet there's some Discord or Bluesky or reddit or Mastodon channel that would get the word out. I'm just putting it out there now, twelve months ahead of time, in case anyone has any thoughts.

Other than that, I don't think I've learned anything new. I didn't do any prep for this year and that was fine. Next year, I might, though. Having done it both ways, it does make for a different experience, either having posts in hand or needing to wing it every day. I like both versions but winging it is definitely the easy option for me. Prepping is just extra work.

Also, next year I might not add every blog to Feedly at the start. I might just go through the spreadsheet and sample all the unfamiliar names on a taste-and-try basis. I think that would take a lot of the pressure off and make the whole event feel more spontaneous and fun. I might try to think of it more like a fairground or a market, full of stalls I can wander around, rather than a list of appointments I have to keep.

Unlike last year, though, I'm not entertaining any serious doubts about my own participation in 2027. If I'm still here and Blaugust is still here then we'll come together for a month in August, just like we usually do.

Thanks to Belghast, wherever he is, for inventing and building on Blaugust and thanks to Krikket and The Committee for keeping it going and growing now Bel's gone.  

Looking forward to next year!