Blaugust 2024: It's Not You, It's Me. Okay, It's A Little Bit You, Too...

 

Blaugust is over. Did I enjoy it? Well, that's an interesting question and one with no easy answer.

I certainly enjoyed writing my thirty-one posts although it was a trick done with smoke and mirrors. I didn't change my normal writing pattern at all. I wrote a post every day I didn't work, just the same as always. 

The only difference was, on the days I would otherwise have kept silent, I slotted in one of the EverQuest 25th Anniversary posts I'd already written. I had eleven completed in draft form when Blaugust began and I still have a couple left. I did have to do some final edits and add all the pictures, so they were finished during Blaugust itself, but that took a fraction of the time it would have taken me to complete a whole post so it didn't add any stress to my day at all.

Anyway, the writing is never the problem for me. I see quite a few people making the point that, while they don't necessarily enjoying writing, they do enjoy having written. I love both. After more than half a century of obsessively putting pen to paper, the act of writing is as natural as breathing to me now. I rarely have to think about it. I just do it.

I also have an unhealthy appreciation of my own work. Having written, I love to read it back to see what I said, which sometimes comes as a surprise to me. I usually re-read each of my own posts two or three times before starting on the next, just for the fun of hearing my voice in my head and marveling over how clever I've been or how well I've expressed myself. It really is obnoxious behavior. Just as well I never tell anyone about it.

The collective spirit of Blaugust.

All things considered, for me the challenge of writing every day for Blaugust is purely a challenge of organization and only that because of other obligations. When I retire, which is likely to happen before next Blaugust comes around, I don't anticipate I'll need to prep at all. I'll just write the posts each day as they come.

So, the writing I enjoyed. I also very much enjoyed the interactions that took place in the comment threads, both on this blog and on the others where I left comments of my own. About the only real contribution I made to the collective spirit of Blaugust were the comments I left on various blogs, but at least I didn't stint on those. I would have left even more, but...

Okay, since I've mentioned it now, I'll take this chance to say something about the whole comment process. Luckily, I've been over this in my head a lot already and also left some comments about comments here and there, so I've had time to let the blood settle. At one point, about halfway through Blaugust, this would have been a full-blown rant.

Here's the way I see it. Comments are an integral and essential part of the blogging experience. Readers need to be able to respond to what they've read and because the blog is a public entity, those responses also need to be public. Of course there can be separate and disparate conversations around the content of the post on other platforms and in other media but those do not, cannot and should not replace the public discourse that takes place on the blog itself.

In the early days of this year's Blaugust I found myself increasingly infuriated by an inability to leave comments on blogs I was reading. Some had comment systems that I just could not get to accept a comment even after multiple attempts, something that's becoming increasingly and distressingly common, even among blogs where I used to have no problems. Others had no comment option at all.

The worst, in terms of raising my blood pressure, were the blogs that suggested all responses should be sent by email or to a social media platform. This seems to me to be worse than not offering any means to respond, which at least suggests that no discourse is welcome or wanted. I can understand that, even if it does leave me feeling silenced.

A personal correspondence by email.

A personal correspondence by email, however satisfying it may be to both parties, is not an acceptable alternative to leaving a public comment anyone can read. When I comment on a blog it is not only to talk directly to the person who wrote the post but also to anyone else who read it or may read it in future.

As for moving the discussion to Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever platform the person behind the blog favors, I can't but see that as exclusionary. It makes an assumption that everyone who reads blogs is also active on social media or happy to become so. I don't believe this is true.

It's certainly not true for me. I never used Twitter and I don't plan on using any of its less well-known alternatives. This year, I didn't even enter the Blaugust Discord channel, which I have used in previous years, other than to link each day's post, which I do all year round anyway. I can cope with Discord as a pretty poor distributor of static information but as a means of holding any kind of coherent conversation it's beyond me.

At one point I was all ready to declare that blogs without comment sections would no longer be included in my blog roll but of course sod's law dictates that one of the most enjoyable new blogs I discovered through Blaugust this year has no comment section so I eventually softened a little on that. It still will be a factor in blogs I follow, though. It's just too irritating to be itching to post a comment and then find there's no way to scratch that itch.

Other than not being able to comment where and when I wanted, the other aspect of Blaugust that made it less enjoyable an experience for me this year than it has been in the past was the sheer scale of the event and particularly the way in which the catchment area has expanded far beyond the local hinterland surrounding the blogs I've been reading for years. The event has become successful and we all know what Morrissey said about that.

By the end of the first week
I was so overwhelmed

By the end of the first week I was so overwhelmed I felt I might be done with Blaugust altogether. And at that point I hadn't even added the second tranche of new entrants to my RSS feed, something I did finally get around to about half way through the month. 

Of course, the first week is the flood-point of Blaugust. Everyone posts, many of them every day. Since even the first seventy sign-ups included about forty that were new to me and since I already have a lot of blogs in Feedly that have nothing to do with Blaugust at all, I found most of the time I wasn't writing my own posts going to reading the posts of others. 

And that would be great - it is the whole point of Blaugust, after all - if it wasn't also for the fact that so many of the new blogs I was being introduced to were dedicated to topics and themes and subjects and hobbies and practices in which I just am not and most probably never will be interested. 

The irony there is that, were I to come up against many of those blogs in different circumstances, here and there, now and then, there's every chance that the engaging style of the writer or their enthusiasm for the subject might open my eyes to new possibilities or explain to me why something I find of no interest is of great interest to others. 

Instead, it turns out that getting a couple of dozen posts a day that drill down into the fine detail of unfamiliar topics, often very similar topics at that, is not the best way to engage my interest in any of them. It's counter-productive. And it's mostly my fault, although also partly the fault of the sheer success of this year's event itself, because having signed up to Blaugust I felt obligated to at least try to read everything anyone posted. 

And I could not. Which made me mad!

Luckily, before I really blew my stack in public on this one, Magi from Indiecator pointed out in a reply to a comment I left somewhere that it was, in fact, perfectly acceptable to pick and choose. You do not have to read every single post. You can pace yourself. Honestly, that had literally not occurred to me until then.

Having been given permission to stop, I did and things improved dramatically. From then on, I read all the blogs I knew I liked, including several excellent ones that were new to me this year. I won't list those for fear of upsetting anyone I leave out but some will be added to the blog roll and the rest will be staying in my Feedly.

I had time to play some games.

For the rest, I checked the post titles and maybe the first few lines to see if anything appealed. If nothing grabbed me immediately, I moved on. That way sanity was restored and I got enough of my day back that I had time to play some games so I'd have something to write about.

There was another thing that annoyed me this year, too. I am very much not on board with the whole Mainstream Bad/Indie Good narrative that seems to be developing. I already covered social media in that respect - I don't care if it's Musk or someone in a tin hut in Alaska behind it, I'm not interested, period. It's irksome to be constantly cajoled into signing up but I'm used to it and I can shake it off. 

What I am more concerned about is the demonisation of existing blogging platforms and the promoting of what seem to me to be significantly more exclusionary alternatives. I think I'm going to need to write a separate post on this some time but the tl:dr is that I am very firmly Team Blogger and for a specific reason: I do not want to be bothered with anything under the hood when I blog. 

To stretch the metaphor, I don't even want to have to change the oil and replace the bulbs. I want a super-easy platform that does absolutely as much as possible for me without me having to think about it at all. I want writing a blog to be as simple as putting pen to paper. 

I realize there exist those who enjoy making their own paper from trees they planted when they were but children, making their own ink from berries they gather in  the forest where they live and who breed their own geese for the purpose of whittling quills with which to set down their thoughts for posterity but I am not one of them.

To my mind, there are no blogging platforms that make the process as easy as it ought to be. They all already require considerably too much technical expertise and the last thing I believe we ought to be encouraging as a community are ways to make it even harder still. In my opinion, Blogger comes closest to being user-friendly for non-technical people but even it requires a lot more fiddling about with the settings and controls than it should. 

All the others are worse and doing it yourself from first principles is the worst of all. Or, of course, the best for all those people who are really interested in learning how the underlying code works, something I very much am not, although even on Blogger I sometimes find myself having to do more of it than I should.

I know I can do it if I have to.

I was interested once, back in the 'nineties, when I had to familiarize myself to a certain degree with HTML and other back-end processes just so I could put up a website about a band I liked because no-one else was doing it. Back then I did manage to code and maintain a website using that space every ISP used to give you to do what you wanted so I know I can do it if I have to. I just don't want to and at this distance in time I don't feel I should need to. If the existing blogging platforms are inadequate that should be the signal for other commercial providers to step in and serve the market effectively, not for the consumers to have to lean how to do it all for themselves.

Of course, as I said, a lot of people clearly enjoy it and welcome the chance to learn new skills or use those they already have. That's fine but if people are going to write about website design or coding, I'm unlikely to want to read about it unless they can also describe what they're doing as clearly and cogently and with such inclusiveness as Aywren or Tipa. Some of the posts I read at the beginning of Blaugust on the Indie Web phenomenon and related topics seemed quite the opposite of that and it got on my nerves.

Which, again, is fine. That's what nerves are for, to be got on. I bet my ramblings on obscure video games no-one plays got on their nerves, too, assuming they ever read any of them, something for which there is no evidence and which I find highly unlikely. 

We don't all have to like the same stuff and it can be good to be introduced to ideas and attitudes we don't share. Blaugust wasn't an exception there, either. I read things every day that get on my nerves but, as must be clear from the way my approach to gaming has changed, the older I get, the less sand I need in my joints. Where blogging is concerned, I prefer a nice, cosy chat around the fire with a few people who like some of the same things I do and if we all repeat ourselves and tell each other things we already know, so much the better.

All of that is my problem, not Blaugust's. And really I ought not to be surprised about feeling this way. I avoided joining in with Blaugust for a few years even after I knew it was there because I had an idea it would be a bit like this. Then I tried it and found it really wasn't, which was great.

But nothing stays the same forever, especially something as alive as Blaugust. The event has changed a great deal since I first engaged with it and that change will continue as it develops and grows. I'm not alone in having noticed something different this time, either.

From discussions I've already seen on comment threads here and there, quite a few people have had issues of their own , either with the structure of the event or their engagement with it this year. Plans are already being made for something different next time. I think that's both healthy and wise.

There was a moment this Blaugust when I thought I might not be back for next year's event but I'm happy to say that moment has passed. Instead, I'm going to rethink my own relationship with the event, what I want from it, what I expect from it, what I'm willing to give to it. Hopefully, that way I can come back in 2025 refreshed and ready for whatever next August brings.

*** Some notes on AI used in this post ***

This could seriously derail the whole thing but here goes anyway...

All the images in the body of the post were generated at NightCafe using Flux Schnell, the smaller, faster and, most importantly, cheaper version of Flux. I didn't change any of the settings other than the frame size so they're whatever the defaults might be. I didn't even look.

The prompts were phrases taken directly from the post as shown in the captions. The first result gave me the almost psychedelic image of all those people on laptops but the next gave me a photo-realistic image of a woman, which I didn't use. 

The 1960s one I didn't use.

After that I specified "line drawing" and "magazine illustration" for the rest, plus a decade. In order of appearance, the decades are 1950s, 1950s again, 1970s and 1940s. I think they look about right. I did generate one for the 1960s but although it was a really nice picture, it was just a head and shoulders drawing and it didn't really convey very much.

Whether the others do is a fascinating question. All the prompts are either abstract or very non-specific. I wanted to see what the AI would make of such limited information. I was very impressed with the results.

I think they all fit the brief to some degree, even for the most abstract of the prompts. The last one is the very embodiment of Ayn Rand's objectivist self-confidence. That said, certain key aspects have just been completely ignored, most notably any suggestion of "email" in the second picture. I suspect the "1950s" condition is responsible for that. If I'd left the date unspecified, I'm sure the woman would have been using a laptop or a PC.

While the general outcomes are impressively close to what I asked for, some of the details are troubling. I'd like to know why the woman with the typewriter has three clocks, two of which show the same time while the third shows something else. 

The details on the dice in the 1970s picture are off-kilter. One has two fours, the other a pattern of dots I have never seen on a die. The shag-pile carpet, playsuit and stereo system are all extremely seventies, though.

I did find it very interesting that every result, including the one I didn't use, features a single, white female. None of that was in the prompt but the consistency is hard to miss as are the implications. I suspect that might be mainly because the corpus of line drawn magazine illustrations from the 1940s through to the 1970s on which the model was originally trained would have been very heavily over-supplied with that exact demographic.

The Last Blaugust Post Of The Summer

Blaugust is over and along with it the summer, if you follow metereological convention. If you're an astronomer, you have another three weeks. In the Northern hemisphere, that is. For everyone else, I guess Spring's on the way!

Where I live, we're getting what passes for a heatwave in this country, starting tomorrow, although you certainly wouldn't guess it looking out of the window right now. I think I'll stick with calling it "Summer" at least until that's over, although I may already have jumped the gun a bit. I really should have brought my washing in this morning. Oh, well.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Blaugust. It was fun, wasn't it? Belghast posted the official wrap-up yesterday. There were a record-breaking 104 sign-ups, although since four of them didn't post anything, I guess we had a delightfully round number of actual participants at one hundred . More than half of those had never done a Blaugust before, which is the really amazing statistic.

I won't rehash any more of the stats. They're all there in Bel's post. I'm just going to thank him yet again for organizing what must be an increasingly time-consuming event and also say thanks to the people who gave him some practical assistance. In recent years Blaugust has become more of a community effort, which is great.

Personally, I feel like I was less involved than in previous years and I don't feel like I ever do all that much beyond knocking out a bunch of posts. I was in Discord but all I did was link my posts. I don't think I even read more than a couple of conversations and I didn't join in any of them. 

As for Mastodon, which seems to be taking over as a primary communication channel, it kind of gives me the creeps, if I'm honest. Not exactly sure why - it just feels a bit... culty? I'm not a great one for these kinds of para-social networks in general but the Fediverse seems particularly ominous; even reading about how it works makes me feel claustrophobic.

So I was never going to join in there, which is fine, we don't all have to do everything, but I also didn't even do the things I said I'd do, which is not fine at all. I'd like to apologize to the late-joiners, people who arrived after the first two times I updated my blog roll to add all the newcomers. It looks like I never did add you to my blog roll like I said I would.

I did say I was going to keep on doing it until either I got everyone on or Blogger balked and told me to stop but in the end neither of those things happened. I knew I'd missed the last handful of entries. I never went back to add anyone else after the event began. 

I felt a bit guilty about that (It was just laziness. I'd updated the thing three times by then and I couldn't face doing it again.) but not too guilty. Looking at Bel's post, though, either a lot of people joined when Blaugust was already in progress or I clearly can't read a spreadsheet.

In a post on 1 August I said "As of the first of the month, it appears we have seventy-seven participating blogs, up seventeen from just a few days ago..." There's a big difference between seventy-seven and one hundred and four. It looks like I just missed a bunch.

Not to make any more promises I won't keep but I will try to sort that out, belatedly. Bel's post is a lot easier to read than a spreadsheet (For me, anyway.) so I'll use that to ferret out the missing blogs and add them. 

I'm not sure it matters much nowadays, anyway. Adding new blogs to the blog roll used to seem like it might be helpful. I used to hear from people quite often that they used it as a kind of quick stop when they were looking for something to read. 

I don't know how much that happens any more. It seems to me that most of the newer additions to this ever-expanding blogosphere are getting their updates from either Discord or Mastodon. I'm getting the feeling going to blog rolls to see what's new is a bit like buying a local paper to see what movies are playing. I mean, you could... but why would you?

From my personal perspective, I'd have to say that it's something of a moot point. I already can't keep up with the number of blogs that update regularly on my own blog roll. Adding more is just going to compound that problem. 

During Blaugust the thing was updating so frequently I found myself not just missing posts by the less-familiar names but even by the people from whom I'd normally expect to read everything they publish. More than once I found myself having to go back to find posts I'd missed because someone referred back to something I hadn't read. 

I'm starting to think there might be a functional limit to the blog roll that's smaller than its actual cap (Assuming it has a cap.) I'm even considering adding all the blogs I read regularly to Feedly, which I currently use mainly for stuff that's not on the blog roll. At least that way I can guarantee I won't miss anything. It does seem like that ought not to be necessary and until now it hasn't been but I guess this is what success looks like. The death of blogging has clearly been mis-reported.

Aside from the quantity, which was even more challenging than usual, Blaugust '23 was certainly a success in terms of quality. I'm not going to pick favorites but the event did introduce me to several new blogs that I came to look forward to reading each day. 

The most interesting aspect of the whole affair from my perpective was the way the blogs I enjoyed the most weren't really talking about gaming at all. People talking about themselves and their lives can be more interesting than people talking about games you've never played and probably never will play. Who knew, eh?

That said, I still broadly prefer being part of a blogosphere that coalesces around a shared interest in gaming. I think there has to be some kind of core to exert sufficient gravity to hold the whole thing together or else it just turns into... the internet. 

Even when people aren't writing about the games they play, they're often framing what they're saying in terms that refer to their self-identification as gamers and, while it's a definition against which I've been fighting for a long time, it does make for a sense of shared purpose that feels re-assuring, somehow.

If I was the kind of person who was comfortable with spreadsheets, which I think we have safely established I am not, I'd quite like to tabulate the percentage of posts here at Inventory Full in terms of their primary and background topics. 

For years, the main subject in almost every post here was games and gaming, with the huge majority of posts being very specicifcally focused on MMORPGs. I do use tags, albeit chaotically, and for the longest time it seemed like the first tag I added to every post was either "MMO" or "MMORPG". (I mostly stopped using "MMO" a few years back for the kind of reasons being discussed in the comment threads at Tipa's posts on the genre.) 

There have been something like 2700 posts here since I started this thing and about 2000 of them are tagged with one or other of those acronyms. I'd bet just about all the ones that aren't are from the last three or four years. Even so, I'd guess it's still running 50/50.

I plan on keeping it that way. I may not put in the hours I used to, playing MMORPGs, but I'm far from done with the genre. Today's post wasn't supposed to be about Blaugust or blogging at all. It was going to be yet another about how damn much there is going on in the MMORPG world right now, how many new games and expansions there are that I have more than a nominal interest in playing and how difficult it's becoming to find the time to fit them all in.

That post, had I written it, would have been inspired by opening my email this morning to find two new solicitations for my time and money from developers who have something to sell me right now, both of which I have half a mind to accept. It's really only the certain knowledge that I just can't keep up with all of this stuff happening at once that stops me from jumping every passing train.

From direct observation, then, I'd have to say that both blogging and the MMORPG genre, two concerns frequently described as moribund if not actually dead, are in such robust health I'm struggling to keep up. I dread to think what would happen if either of my main hobbies were to enjoy a genuine, popular revival.

It'd probably finish me off.

All illustrations generated at NightCafe using SDXL Beta. 

Prompt: "Late summer heatwave in the west of England" 

All illustrations use the modifier "golden hour".

Each also uses one additional modifier as follows: 

#1 "Storybook illustration"

#2 "Roger Dean"

#3 "1940s cartoon"

#4 "Pop art"

#2 looks nothing like Roger Dean, by the way, which I imagine would please him enormously.

The House On The hill

Something that happened to me very soon after I started playing Dawnlands that made me feel there was a lot more to the game than the bad reviews suggested was when I found an abandoned house not too far away from the starting settlement. There are a couple of spectacular geographical features in the area where you first spawn in that just demand to be explored and right at the top of one of them, a vast, rocky outcrop that looms over the countryside below, there's a house made of wood and stone that, from certain angles, looks not unlike a ship.

As the sunset shot above shows, I was still in my starter gear when I found it. I'd made myself the most basic hut down in the village but when I found this place I decided it was time to relocate. The whole place was empty. Whoever lived there had left a few bits of furniture, including a large storage chest, and there was a fire still burning in the hearth but of the previous inhabitants there was no sign at all. I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't move in.

I had a good look around and started to make myself at home. I dumped a load of wood and rock in the chest. I went outside and cleared all the goblins away. I found another chest half buried in the ground outside. Up in the attic I even found a magic spear that crackled with caged lightning. You can bet I helped myself to that.

I was all set to move in when a problem occured to me. The house was perfect. The location was stunning. The views were out of this world. The only downside was the commute.

At that point I hadn't even begun to figure out how the instant travel system worked. I didn't even know I could use the map to travel to the Shelter. About the only thing I did know was that if I died (When I died...) I'd either wake up in my bed or at the nearest Teleport Beacon. 

It seemed like it'd be a heck of a long walk back every time I wanted to sleep and at that stage I was far too nervous about being out after dark to contemplate it. I didn't even know at the time that you could teleport to your bed on demand but even if I had, the isolation of the spot would still have made settling down there seem like a bad idea.

I didn't abandon my ambitions to take over the abandoned mansion on the hill completely. In the above shot I'm wearing upgraded and distinctly more respectable armor, even if I do look like I've just finished my shift as a bike messenger, indicating a return a few days later to give the old place another look. 

I mean, who wouldn't want to look out on a sunset like that from their balcony? It's not the kind of prospect to be abandoned without a fight. Regardless, there was still one other consideration to take into account. Even imagining I was willing to deal with the long ride up and down that hill every day, if I did set up shop there in no time all the peace and tranquility of the setting would be shattered.

This is my makeshift camp back at the Grasslands Shelter. The picture was taken a few days ago . It's a lot worse now. I have two charcoal kilns set up, belching smoke into the sky. I have two smelters, ditto, only the smoke is even worse. There's a stone grinder, an anvil, a cooking pot and a roasting frame (each over an open fire), an oven, a loom...

I even have a windmill and a field of cotton. The whole place is a zoning disaster. And it's only going to get worse as time goes on. To set something like this up in the unspoilt beauty of the highlands would be a crime against both art and nature.

And then today (Edit: a week ago by the time this got published.) I made a most welcome discovery. There's a device you can make called an Echo Stone. It's one of the most basic items there is, the first piece of "furniture" in the list. I hadn't even noticed it before. I don't believe it gets a mention in the tutorial. The fanciful description doesn't make its function precisely clear but since I hadn't read it anyway I can't claim that's why I hadn't bothered to make one until now.

What the echo stone does is allow you to recall to it at will. It's your "bind", in EverQuest parlance or your Hearthstone, if that's more your era. I experimented a little and it seems you can have just one of these up at a time, so it's not the equivalent of Valheim's portals, but one is plenty for what I have planned.

Meet Karrid. She's my new best friend. Actually, she's my follower. I was looking through the store last night, something I haven't really bothered with before, when I noticed the diamond price to hire her had fallen to a very reasonable amount. More accurately, I'd saved up enough diamonds that just under a thousand didn't seem as wildly out of reach as it had a couple of weeks ago.

So I bought her. Or hired her. The exact relationship is unclear. I gave her all my best cast-offs and read to her from several books of instruction I happened to have lying around and now she's Level 4. I'm Level 28 so there's a bit of a gap but I'm sure she'll soon catch up.

Karrid and I have moved into the house on the hill together. The plan is to keep all our manufactury down at the Shelter and just move the personal stuff up to the mansion. We're going to try and stick with a minimalist theme, while still making the place feel cosy.

Finding a really nice place all ready and waiting to move into like this really sets Dawnlands apart from Valheim. I'm sure at some point Karrid and I will want to work on something we've designed ourselves but until then this rental is going to do us very nicely. Especially at the low, low monthly rent of nothing at all.

Karrid and I will have many adventures together, no doubt. I'm almost ready to build our first sailing ship. We're going to see what lies across the water. But when we're done adventuring, we'll be very happy to head back home. Just a click of fingers and there we'll be. Back in our mansion on the hill.

Situation Normal

Back at the beginning of Blaugust I posted a list of TV shows I was in the middle of watching. To recap, the shows were:

• Good Omens 2
• Two Broke Girls
• Edens Zero
• Young Sheldon
• The Owl House

I have now finished all of them except for Young Sheldon, although in this context "finishing" Edens Zero meant getting to the end of Season One. I want to watch Season Two but I clearly don't want to watch it that much because the very low bar of swapping over to Crunchyroll has so far proven too high for me.

 

As for The Owl House, until someone green-lights another series, which will happen one day, I think I've probably said all I want to say about show for now. There are four Owl House episodes of the Disney series Chibi Tiny Tales I haven't yet seen, though... 

 

  Two Broke Girls

I do have something more to add to my earlier observations on Two Broke Girls. The show remained admirably consistent  throughout. It started with a ridiculous premise and a complete abnegation of any kind of logic or reason and kept up those stellar standards for the whole six seasons. Every time anything threatened the "sit", like the girls actually making enough money to stop being broke, the "com" asserted its authority and reset things to where they needed to be. I found that adhesion to the ur-concept in the face of all attempts to insert the least element of realism into the show to be one of its greatest strengths.

It's also a show that relies to the heaviest degree on repetition. Most of the humor comes from internal references and running gags. One of the tropes of the show that I particularly liked is the cash register that pops up at the end of every episode to show exactly how much money the girls have saved. 

 

In Season One, Caroline sets a target of $250k as the sum required to turn Max's Homemade Cupcakes into a viable business. At the time it seems like an unlikely goal but thanks to the sale of Caroline's backstory to Hollywood (Probably the most realistic and believable plot in the entire six seasons.) there is a point at which the cash register dings up a quarter of a million dollars. Which, of course, disappears as fast as it arrived. 

 

The girls both have significant relationships, the show being sporadically and in some small part a romcom, all of which are, inevitably and for sound plot reasons, doomed to failure. Perhaps the one fortuitous outcome of the unexpected cancellation of the series is that the final episode closes with Max engaged to be married to her wealthy lawyer lover and Caroline in a firmly committed relationship with her working-class, Italian-American boyfriend.

 

It's absolutely guaranteed that, had the series continued, neither of those relationships would have neatly folded away into happy-ever-after but because the series ends where it does it's entirely possible to imagine that's what happened next. It makes for an oddly satisfying ending. I came away content.

 

Good Omens 2

This is an interesting one. I should probably issue a trigger warning for fans of the show before I get started.

 

That does make it sound like I must have hated it but that's far from the case. I enjoyed it quite a bit. I just didn't think it came anywhere close to being either as funny or as compelling as the first season.

I remember Season One as being quite complex. It had a lot of characters and a number of sub-plots, all of which were fairly coherently coaxed together into a finale that made some kind of sense of and brought some kind of resolution to all of them. It felt quite novelistic, with its long-form heritage making itself evident throughout. If anything, it might have been a bit baggy. It certainly never felt like it was in any kind of a hurry.

Season Two, by comparison, felt short, rushed and incomplete. I found it quite unsatisfying at times, particularly during the zombie episode, which made some sense emotionally but just seemed to be quite badly done. I don't like zombies at the best of times but comedy nazi zombies are really too much to take for a whole episode.

The core of the show is, of course, the relationship between the two central characters, the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley, as portrayed so deliciously by Michael Sheen and David Tennant. In the first season the performances of the two stars are exemplary but in the follow-up I never felt quite the same chemistry between them. In narrative terms, the relationship only becomes more complex but on the screen it seemed just very slightly flat. 

 

The cast as a whole is very good, with Jon Hamm appearing to enjoy himself perhaps even more than he should as the memory-wiped archangel, Gabriel. All the newly-introduced characters are interesting and/or endearing, my particular favorite being Muriel, a somewhat naive, not to say dim, angel played to perfection by Quelin Sepulveda. 

The problem from my perspective wasn't really with the quality, for once, but the quantity. As I started watching the fifth and final episode I literally had to pause the stream and check it was the last one. It seemed the whole thing had barely gotten started before it was over. 

And yet, rushed as it felt, it also seemed as though too few ideas had been stretched too thin. It was a very odd sensation, to be left wanting more but not being able to say more of what. 

 

I have a suspicion Good Omens 2 is one of those shows that might make a stronger impression on a second watch than a first. I suspect much of my dissatisfaction stems from expectations created by my fuzzy recollections of Season One. I don't think the two seasons are as consistent in tone as I would have anticipated. Season Two would probably benefit from being judged separately rather than in comparison. 

Whether I will ever watch it again is another matter. I can readily imagine re-visiting Season One but I think it's going to be a good while before I regenerate any enthusiasm for another sit-down with the sequel.

 

Which just leaves...

 

 

Young Sheldon

Young Sheldon is, of course, a sitcom based on the character played by Jim Parsons in The Big Bang Theory. There's a lot I could say about the show already but I'll hold back on most of it until I've finished the run. I do have a few notes, though...

I'm going to say up front that I really like The Big Bang Theory. I know that's a controversial stance to take in many quarters. I've read a number of blog posts and web articles about why and how the show is disrespectful to the various communities who see themselves stereotyped and ridiculed by its characters and storylines and I don't fundementally disagree with some of those interpretations and reactions.

The thing, I think, that almost all of those analyses omit to recognize is that most sitcoms are reliant on stereotypes, which they ridicule. It underpins the whole genre to some considerable degree. 

 

I suspect the issues some have with this particular sitcom stem from an unfamiliarity with the form as a whole. As I was reading some of the commentary, it was noticeable how often the alalysis was prefaced by an assertion that the writer didn't usually watch sitcoms, or not sitcoms like this, successful, popular, mainstream, network half-hour shows. I also suspect that being confronted with a stereotype someone feels might be applied to themself makes that person less amenable to finding said stereotype amusing.  Few people appreciate being seen as the butt of a joke. 

 

What good sitcoms do, however -  and I would argue The Big Bang Theory is a good sitcom - is to make stereotypes feel more nuanced over time. Good writing and especially sympathetic or complex performance can cause a general audience to warm to personalities they would otherwise shun, simply by allowing viewers to get to know the characters as individuals, not just as representatives of a type. 

 

I'm considerably more inclined to listen to the arguments of those who seek to explain why the writing or acting in TBBT fails to open up the stereotypes it plays upon, thereby revealing the human beings inside, rather than those of the faction that thinks the show fails out of the gate just by trading in stereotypes in the first place. There's a very supportable case to be made that the writing and acting across the long run of the show is inconsistent, self-indulgent and sometimes lazy. Not every episode is good, let alone great.

 

Even though I very much enjoyed the parent show, however, I did not immediately warm to the idea of a spin-off featuring its most obviously annoying character as a ten-year old. It seemed to me that the kind of manic self-absorption exhibited by the adult Sheldon Cooper, manifesting primarily as it often does as a collection of tics and tropes, while it might be humourous in an adult character, would most likely be just disturbing and uncomfortable in a child.

For that and other reasons I didn't rush to find out if the writers managed somehow to avoid the very obvious pitfalls of the concept. It was only a combination of a gap in my sitcom dance card and a news item that said the show was - astonishingly - starting its sixth season that got me take it out of my watchlist and actually start watching it.

Honestly, it was the six seasons thing that did it. I just couldn't believe it had lasted that long. We all know how mercilessly fast shows get canned these days. For any show to get that far had to mean there was something there worth checking out.

There is and it's very simple. Like Two Broke Girls, Young Sheldon is just a plain, old-fashioned classic sitcom. There's nothing remotely fancy or clever about it. It relies wholly on sound charecterisation, consistent writing and some very solid acting by a strong, ensemble cast.

As with many of the best sitcoms, there's an extended family at the center. The set-up is instantly recognizeable no matter that most of the viewers will never have set foot in East Texas. All the storylines revolve around the usual quotidian concerns of growing up, going to school, making friends, working and getting along with the neighbors. 

The two things that most suprised me about the show, of which I have now seen the first two seasons, were firstly how unfocused on the titular character it is and secondly on how quickly it foregrounds Sheldon's meemaw, superbly played by the wonderful Annie Potts. If I didn't know the provenance of the show, I might have assumed she was the well-known character from a previous success, around whom a spin-off had been built.

 

Two seasons in, no-one appears to have aged. I am curious to see how that changes. One of the big problems all successful sitcoms starring child actors face is how to keep the storylines cute as the actors grow less so.

 

It's a particularly pointed issue in this show because Sheldon is already running well ahead of the usual  developmental markers. He's a ten year-old in high school, being courted by Universities. There's already been a storyline concerning the difference between his intellectual and emotional maturity and how it predicates against him moving away from home to take up the opportunities already coming his way. That's not going to work so well when he's fourteen, which I assume he will be by Season Six. 

Or maybe the whole thing doesn't unfold in real time. I can't say I've been keeping track. Maybe he'll be ten until the show ends and we'll just have to look at him like we look at the adult actors playing high school kids in Grease; with wilful suspension of disbelief.

It's not something I need to think about just yet. I have four more seasons to watch before I get there. I'll keep whatever observations I may have on what I see along the way for another time. For now, I'll just say it's another good sitcom. I'm enjoying it.

 

Glancing ahead, my current viewing slate looks like this:

• Young Sheldon
• Arrested Development
• Carole and Tuesday
• Captain Fall
• Riverdale

Where last time everything was on Amazon Prime, this time it's all on Netflix. Again, I don't think that means anything, other than that obviously one streaming channel isn't enough any more.

I'll get to my thoughts on those shows when I get there. I also have a post I've been wanting to do for weeks now about Cannon Busters, a show I finished watching a good while back. I'm not sure I ever even mentioned it until now. 

So many shows; so much to say about them all; so little time to get it done.

Learning From Experience And Other Fantastic Tales

As Blaugust winds up for another year, we find ourselves in reflective mode with "Lessons Learned" week. Each year I come back to this event I find some new way of making it more difficult than it needs to be and 2023 has been no exception.

On the face of it, learning from your mistakes seems like a universal good. It can't possibly hurt to figure out where you went wrong, can it? And if you can spin that up into some way of avoiding the same mistakes next time, so much the better, right?

It's not always quite that straightforward. The problem with learning lessons is applying what you've learned. 

Something a lot of people probably find themselves doing is fighting the last battle not the current one. I do it all the time. You find something out about yourself or something you've done and swear to change it or do it differently next time, only next time is different to the first time so the solution doesn't quite match the problem any more.

Let me revisit my Blaugust record:

2015 - My first year although I didn't formally sign up. I was nervous about all the form-filling, apparently, which sounds like an excuse, and scared of Anook, which sounds like a joke. What the heck was Anook, anyway?

My goal was to post thirty-one times and I hit it. At the time I would have been working almost full-time, I think, so it was tough. My wrap-up "How did it all go?" post is hedged with doubts and uncertainties. I summed up with "If Belghast runs Blaugust again next year I'll think very carefully before deciding whether to join in". I also asked myself if I'd enjoyed it and answered "not really".

2016 - It seems I did learn my lesson that year. I did not sign up in 2016, nor did I "shadow" the event. I stuck to my regular posting schedule of the time, posting just twelve times in August. It doesn't look as though I bothered to mention the end of Blaugust at all that year. I just let it slip away.

2017 - And that, I guess, should have been the end of it. There was no Blaugust in 2017. Belghast explained the absence in his recent post about Blaugust's Tenth Anniversary, saying he'd "allowed the naysayers to convince me that I was doing more harm than good with this event". I don't think I was a naysayer per se - I wasn't really saying anything about Blaugust at all - but if asked I would certainly have been in the "I'm not sure this is such a great idea..." camp. Obviously, given Bel's comment, there was a lot of that going on at the time. 

2017 was also the year I published the lowest number of posts in the history of this blog. It seems a lot of people were feeling a bit flat on blogging around then.

2018 - Thankfully, it didn't last. Blaugust returned after its one-year hiatus and I signed up formally for the first time. Apparently I'd become a "mentor" somehow and I was throwing out advice like the Milky Bar Kid on a gold-top bender. Absolutely no explanation of how that happened.

Again, I aimed to post on all thirty-one days, even though I pointed out I didn't have to any more, since thirty-one posts across the whole month was "all" that was required. I made my target and added one for a total of thirty-two.... and I had a great time doing it! 

I don't really know what changed but apparently, despite having found it "slightly" stressful due to my dislike of having to post on work-days, I enjoyed the whole thing enough to finish my post-mortem with a cheery "...let's do it all over again...next year!"

2019 - "Next year", when Blaugust arrived, I was recovering from almost dying from complications with the chemotherapy I was on, following my surgery for colon cancer. Didn't see that coming.  My first post for Blaugust 2018 is a detailed account of my situation, which thankfully was resolved successfully. So successfully, in fact, that for Blaugust 2019 I posted a record forty-two times. I was at home with nothing much to do other than rest and recuperate and blogging was helped fill the time in a hugely satisfying and pleasurable way.I thoroughly recommend blogging as a hobby for shut-ins.

I was so gung-ho about blogging, I didn't even get around to writing my Blaugust postscript until the second of September. My main lesson to be learned seemed to be the ever-unobtainable gold-standard of blogging:  "more short, pithy, posts instead of 2000 word essays" but even as I typed, I acknowledged it was never going to happen. And it hasn't.

2020 - This year, everyone got to experience life as a shut-in, when Covid blew in and blasted Blaugust all the way back to Blapril. In April I posted thirty-five times, concluding "The last thing anyone wants is for people to find blogging turning into a duty, a burden or a chore." 

It hadn't for me. I loved it. Five years on from that tentative beginning, from which it seemed I'd learned Blaugust really wasn't for me, some nebulous ego-stroking, a series of medical emergencies and a global pandemic had somehow turned me into a convert. And you know how annoying they can be. 

2021 - Blaugust returned to its regular summer slot and I had a plan. The world was vaguely working again and so was I. Anticipating timing issues, I prepared the ground in advance, writing ahead on a theme I'd come up with, so I wouldn't have to post on work days. The plan came off splendidly, taking all the stress out of the event, which I enjoyed as much as the ones where I hadn't had to go to work. I posted thirty-three times and signed off in September with the relentlessly upbeat "See you all back here, Summer 2022. Let's make it a date!"

2022 - Last year I began by listing the first-time participants, while complaining about my own incompetence. I seemed to be in chaotic mood, claiming "Blogging is not for perfectionists, that's my take" but I managed to crash my way to thirty-one posts, somehow. Towards the end, a little early for once, I gave my thoughts on how it had all gone, quoting myself on lessons learned the previous year and snarling "Were those lessons learned? Were they hell!"

2023 - Guess what? This year I did learn those lessons and it still didn't make everything all right! 

Maybe I should clarify just what the lessons were. Looking back over all of this, it's apparent to me that I "learn" the same lessons every year. I could save myself some time and just have them printed on a card.

• Do some prep.
• Have some themes ready.
• Write ahead.
• Write for yourself.
  
• Don't burn out.
• Cut yourself some slack.
• Pace yourself.
• Accept you can't read everything everyone else writes.
• Accept people may be skipping your stuff too.
  
• Blaugust is a lot! Don't sweat it if it turns out to be too much.
• Above all, have fun. And if you're not having fun, stop.

Probably a few more I forgot. Most of those recur every year I write this post, but the one I want to pull out for special consideration this year is "Write Ahead".

Last year I didn't do that and I got stung. I was scrabbling to get a post out more often than I'd have liked. I didn't take my own advice to cut myself some slack and just have fun because I was stubbornly determined to hit my thirty-one posts. I have that dumb "If I say I'll do a thing..." mantra running in my head all the damn time...

This year, I was determined to avoid any Blaugust stress so I thought of a bunch of possible themes, none of which I used. What I did do was write at least two, sometimes three, posts ahead for the whole event. It worked pretty well except for two things I hadn't considered:

• If you write ahead you fall behind.
• Life has a way of blind-siding you.

The first was predictable and yet it still surprised me. With Palia and Dawnlands, I found myself with plenty to write about but because I was publishing my adventures a few days in arrears, I kept getting the time sequence screwed up. I had to learn not to use times and dates to avoid confusing people, except I never did learn to do that so I ended up confusing myself. Also, as I made very clear yesterday, I kept finding out new stuff between writing a post and publishing it, making some of what I did put up just plain wrong and leaving me scrabbling to correct my mistakes.

The second was more of a sod's law kind of situation although, given my recent timeline, I might have guessed it would happen. I was already in the system for a hernia repair operation before Blaugust started but I wasn't expecting to be called in for several months, it being considered a non-urgent procedure. Instead, I got a call in the middle of the month asking me if I wanted to take a cancellation and I ended up having the op last Tuesday. 

I was home the same day but now I'm staying home for two weeks to recover, so all that writing ahead turns out to have been superflous to requirements. I never have any trouble getting a post out in days when I don't work and when I'm mostly confined to the house it's even less of an issue. 

I'm actually pretty mobile, able to take Beryl for walks, although throwing a ball for her isn't such a great idea, but I can't do much gardening or general household labor for a couple of weeks, so I have ample time to sit at a keyboard and type whatever comes into my head, as you can plainly see.

After all of that, I think I might be going out of the "Lessons Learned" business, at least until I learn to predict the future. I think I'm going to stick with the "deal with it as it comes" method instead. That's generally served me pretty well up to now.

When we get to Blaugust 2024 - making some huge assumptions there that it, I and the world will still be around by then - I will try to write shorter posts, come up with a few themes, do some preparation and get a bit of a post cushion going. They are all helpful techniques. I still endorse them all.

What I won't do is expect doing any of it to make much of a difference. However well you prepare to fight last year's battles, every Blaugust is a new war. In the end, you do what you can and if that doesn't work you do something else. That's the lesson I've learned. 

This year, anyway...

*** A note on the illustrations ***

All images generated at NightCafe. 

The first four were all generated using Stable Diffusion v 1.5 with the modifiers "cel shaded" and "pop art". 

The first three were generated using the same prompt with just the year changed each time: "A big poster with "Blaugust 20xx" on it". The years were 2015, 2018 and 2021. They are used in the post in chronological order so the "2018" poster is the one with the number "21" on it. The only one with a number at all, in fact.

The fourth was generated using the prompt "Write Ahead".

The fifth image was generated using Stable Diffusion v. 2.1. and the same modifiers. The prompt used was "Staying Home".