Catzebo Carousel

A week ago, I posted something about one of the new, time-limited events in Neverness To Everness, an event that seems to be variously known as "Mews Flash", "Meow Express" or "Cat Dream", depending on the whim of whoever put the whole thing together or whoever happens to have translated the particular bit of text you're reading.

To recap, it's a gambling game where you buy scratch cards from a large, formally-dressed cat standing behind the counter of a booth known as a Midnight Catzebo. You obviously hope you're going to win big but I've been playing every day, or at least every day I remember, and I haven't exactly won big yet, although I also haven't lost big either. 

Most days I just about break even. I tend to stop if I either win or lose more than a couple of hundred thousand. I had a good run this morning with the biggest single win I've had so far, 300k, but I lost that much a couple of days ago so I'm pretty much back where I started.

Having scratched a lot of cards now, I'm certain the cheapest, the 10k ones, are a waste of time. About 90% of them have a single 10k win, so if you buy the full day's allotment of twenty you're going to end up very slightly out of pocket. I've given up bothering with those altogether, except for a little project I'm going to get to in a moment.

The 20k cards are slightly better in that you get quite a few 30k wins, putting you a little ahead, but the overall hit rate is lower, so it works out much the same. I'd barely call the 10k and 20k cards a gamble, they're so consistent in the results they give. It was fun for a while, scratching off all the imaginary foil, but the thrill of that wears off when you realize how predictable it is.

The three types of 50k cards are a lot more entertaining and also where the real money is, if you get lucky. Then again, there's a real chance of blowing more than you can afford before you've noticed if you aren't careful. 

There's no reliable return of your stake money here. Most times you either get nothing or a decent chunk of cash. There are frequently multiple winning slots on a single card. I've had four or five several times, adding up to 200k or so. Conversely, there are a lot of duds, where you don't win anything.

When I first discovered the event, I wondered how many Catzebos there were, scattered across Hethereau. And what the cats operating them were called. I'd seen a couple, so I knew it was a franchise of some kind with multiple outlets and both the cats had odd names (Catvioli and Cat Cake). I was curious (Appropriately enough, what with the cats....) to meet the rest and find out if there was some kind of theme to it all.

This morning I finally got around to doing something about it. I began with the map.

I was still figuring out how that worked. I always seem to take a long time figuring out the basic systems in games these days. I play everything in an ever more casual and laid-back, not to say soporific, fashion or so it sometimes seems. I only started taking a proper look at the map a week or two ago. 

It turns out that, like everything in NTE, it's extremely well-designed. The search function is versatile and powerful and you can set a tracker for anything you see on the map. All the icons are meaningful, too. You can see the Catzebos well enough just from the little cat-heads that weren't there before. 

Still, I didn't fancy poring over the whole thing trying to find them by sight. After a bit of fiddling about, I figured out that all the Midnight Catzebos are listed under the Recommended Locs tab. That was going to save me some time. 

Next, I discovered you can sort all the categories either by district or for the whole city. I got the list up for Hethereau first, to see how many Catzebos there were altogether. It's a nice, round number - ten. Then I selected Miguel District, where Flora happened to be, and started from there. 

Since I seemed to have made a pointless little project for myself, I thought I'd do it properly for a change. I used to do a lot of this sort of thing in MMORPGs back in the day but with the advent of narrative-driven games, quest helpers and never doing any damn thing if it doesn't come with an Achievement or a reward attached, I've fallen out of the habit.

I once spent several days going round all the vendors in Norrath I used regularly with characters of different races and varying charisma stats, making notes on how it affected sales prices. I kept the info in a book on my desk and referred to it when I wanted to sell anything valuable. That's the kind of entertainment I used to make for myself, back when we made our own entertainment. We were simple folk...

Luckily, this project didn't take me days. More like a little under three-quarters of an hour and even that included two trips, one each with Lacrimosa and Sakiri, on the Ferris Wheel that stands (Precariously, in my opinion...) on top of the Floe Cinema. I just happened to bump into them as I was passing. That might get its own post although it probably won't. 

In keeping with tradition, I dug out a notebook and made notes as I ported and trotted around the city. I'd usually take screenshots these days but it occurred to me that even though I was going to take a shot of every booth anyway, it would actually be more efficient to transcribe the details by hand as I saw them, rather than to go back through all the pictures afterwards, looking for the information I needed. 

I would have had to take screenshots of the map, too, if I wanted to give the precise locations. Easier just to write down the names of the streets while I had the map open. It would have been easier still if I'd taken the time to write them down neatly enough so I could read them afterwards but there you go...

Since I was going to be at the booths anyway, I thought I might as well buy a scratch card at each of them and keep a record of my wins and losses, just for the fun of it. I'd already spent my allocated limit for the day, so I chose to buy just one 10k card at each stall, which gave me a chance to test my consistency theory.

Out of ten cards, nine had a winning panel.Every one of them was worth 10k. House takes 10%. Just as I thought.

As I was going round, I found myself thinking about the post I was going to write but also, for some reason, about the ongoing controversy over AI that's raging around Blaugust and something Paeroka said stuck in my mind, about how Blaugust doesn't have any rules about what constitutes a "post", so you could legitimately post a single word every day and it would qualify.

That gave me an idea. What if I didn't use the screenshots of the ten Catzebos right away? What if I saved them and posted one every day in Blaugust when I didn't have time to write a proper post? I don't have a back-up plan for days like that this year and that would be a super-easy way of hitting the target. 

Would that be more creative than prompting an AI for a picture? It's arguable. It might be less creative. I didn't draw those cats myself. Or name them. I very much didn't come up with the idea of putting cats with funny names in booths. All I did was go to where they were and take a picture. Where's the creativity in that?

Take it a stage further. What if I prompted an AI to make a picture of a cat in a booth and then I got my phone and took a picture of my monitor showing the image and posted that? Would that count? How about if I did it on the laptop then carried the laptop around the house and garden and took pictures of the screen with the AI-generated image but with different real-world backdrops? How significant a part of the post is the AI image then? Where even are the lines? It's angels and pinheads all over again!

These are the kinds of things that go through your mind when you take on a repetitive project like this. 

Tempted as I was, I decided not to save my cat pictures for Blaugust, not least because now I've had the idea I can recycle it easily enough if I need to, later. The "photos of AI images" thing is amusing me, too, and the main reason I have a blog is to keep myself amused, so...

Getting back to the ostensible point of this post, I can now tell you the names of all ten cats manning (Or should that be "Catting"?) the booths. They are all male, as far as I can tell, if that's relevant, or they present a male aspect, at least. They all look like 1930s gangsters, if we're going to be frank.

The Ten Cats, in the order I found them, are:

Miguel District 

Cat Ball - Flamingo Avenue

Catvioli - St. Torres Avenue

New Herland

Cat Pastry - In the square with the Wertheimer Tower

Cat Dice - Nutcracker Road

Cat Tart - Camelot Avenue

Cat Sugar -  Yuanmu Hill

Bridge Crossings

Cat Pancake - Bluebeard Road

Unheard Shores

Cat Puff - Just off Coastal Highway Z42

Illusion Town

Cat Cake - Fiscus Avenue

Cat Roll - Coastal Highway Z42 

It does very much look to me as thought these cats must have been named by someone thinking mainly about how hungry they were feeling. With a couple of "Things I Can See On My Desk" thrown in for the sake of variety. 

The outlier is Catvioli. He's the only cat with a single-word name and also the only one whose name isn't an easily recognizable object or foodstuff. I looked it up just in case it had some meaning I wasn't seeing but there doesn't seem to be any. I saw someone on some thread or other suggesting it might be a pun on ravioli but that seems like a stretch.

And of course we'll never know. This is a time-limited event and not a very significant or important one even in the context what might constitute importance in a free-to-play, gacha game. No-one cares what the bloody cats are called or why. 

And yet I've just spent about three hours of my life on it, and that's on top of the three hours I spent on much the same topic a week ago. 

It's nice to have a hobby, isn't it? Keeps us off the streets, anyway. If anyone's under the delusion what kind of pictures we use to illustrate our posts actually matters, maybe they should chew on that for a while.

Themes, Prompts And Footnotes: It's Blaugust All Over Again

 

 

Blaugust! 

Blaugust Blaugust Blaugust!

Blaugust! 

We should have a theme tune! Anyone want to write one? 

So, here we are again. Just a week to go. Are you excited? I'm excited!

So very, very sad that Belghast isn't here to jolly us along and yet the irony for me is that I was thinking of sitting this year out until the dreadful news arrived, after which I couldn't think of any better way to commemorate our friend than to join in once again with the amazing annual celebration of the written word he invented, curated and cheer-led for more than a decade.

Which isn't to say I have anything special planned. I very much don't. My own Blaugust journey goes roughly like this:

Never heard of it.

Knew the name, didn't know what it was. 

Knew what it was, didn't join in.

Shadowed-posted without signing up.

Joined and winged it.

Started preparing months in advance.

Went back to winging it.

Of all the approaches, I recommend winging it, but only if you aren't after the badge for posting 31 times in a month. That's the killer because you daren't miss a day and some days you just might not be feeling it or something might crop up to stop you. 

For those days, I recommend having maybe two or three posts pre-written or at least drafted. Life-savers, those are. I did that for two years and it really helped. Also helpful is having a feature or theme you can go back to several times during the event. Saves you having to come up with a brand new idea every day.

On the other hand, one year I ended up doing so much prep work it was like Blaugust lasted two months, not one, not least because on some days, having slotted in one of the pre-written posts, I got the urge to write another anyway. I definitely do not recommend doing that. We all feel burned out after a month of reading and posting like crazy people. Front-ending the whole thing with a prep month does not make it any less stressful.

This year my safety buffers are

Having no intention of posting 31 times in a month

Having a very vague backup feature I could drag out if absolutely necessary

This year, I've been posting slightly less often than my post-pandemic norm so I'm already feeling chill about not hitting the full 31. I know my post count for the year will be down on last year and the year before that so I'm already slacking. 

I plan on leaning into that for Blaugust by just sticking to my regular pattern of posting all the days I don't work. That should get me close to a couple of dozen posts. Of course, what tends to happen is I get all swept up in the frenzy of the event and end up wanting to post even on the days I normally wouldn't. So who knows?

Blaugust is also the easiest time to blog. There are so many things you can spark off or lean on for inspiration. The main reason I'm writing this post today, given that I've already done one promo post, is to plug the Theme Weeks and the Prompt Lists.

Those weren't available when I wrote my last post because I jumped the gun a bit due to the aforementioned excitement. They are now and here they are:

 

Those are the Theme Weeks. I stole that image from Wilhelm's much more comprehensive post, which I strongly suggest you go read, if you haven't already.

As for the prompts, I'm going to give the whole list rather than just the link because then I can refer back to my own blog when I need inspiration in a few weeks time:

How did you get started in content creation?

What are some key sources of media (games/movies/etc) that have shaped your worldview?

Tell us about some of your favorite protagonist/s and explain why.

Tell us about some of your favorite antagonist/s and explain why.

Tell us about some of your favorite creatives (writers/artists/bloggers/streamers/etc) and explain why/provide examples.

If you could meet any person you look up to, who would it be?

What piece of content would you most like to have a sequel or reboot?

What type of content do you feel is severely underrated?

What is your greatest fear, and how does it impact the type of content you create or consume?

What is your earliest memory related to one of your core fandoms?

If you had a mascot to represent you, what would it be?

What skill do you want to improve on the most?

Tell us 5 facts about yourself.

What are some of the things that get you excited in life?

What piece/s of technology would you have the hardest time living without?

What is your favorite thing to do in order to relax?

What are some things that you do in order to stay creative?

Tell us about some of your hobbies outside of the realm of your specific niche.

What are some of the things that you wish you knew before you started creating content?

What is something you have lost along the way that you would love to have back?  Can be serious or frivolous.

Tell us about your physical creative space, and how it influences your content creation.

Everyone has specific rituals that they follow, tell us about one of yours.

Share the process you go through in order to create content, both mental and mechanical.

What is a favorite Quote/s, and tell us why?

How did you get the name that you regularly go by online, and what if anything does it mean?

If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?

What is some popular piece of content/media that seems to be universally loved that you have never been able to understand?

With the pandemic, we are going through an unprecedented time.  In what ways has this shared global event impacted your content creation?

Tell us about some community that you are part of and why it interests you or how it impacts you?

Tell us about a person/s or something/s that has greatly influenced you.

What are you looking forward to the most over the course of the next year?

There's got to be something in there that works for everyone, surely.

That's pretty much what I came here to do but since I have your attention, let me just give you all the important information all over again. It's the three Rs - repetition, repetition and repetition.

• Blaugust initial Announcement 
• Blaugust Sign-Up Page 
• Blaugust Discord Server 
• The Blaugust Prompt List 
• Blaugust Media Kit page 

Yes, I stole those from Wilhelm's post, too, but that's okay because Blaugust is a co-operative, collegial, community event and bouncing off other people's posts isn't merely allowed, it's actively encouraged. If anyone wants to take a chunk out of anything I write for the event and reformat, rephrase or just plain repeat it, be my guest! It's generally considered polite to include a link back to the source but other than that, free money! 

That said, I suppose there are limits. I see from Wilhelm's post that just shy of fifty bloggers have signed up so far. I'll restrain myself from just cutting and pasting the whole lot from TAGN to here. Well, not today. I'll very likely pinch the updated version when the event's about to start and slap it up here then. I usually do. 

In fact, I used to put my own link-lists together but that'd be duplication of labor now both Wilhelm and Owls are keeping the records so meticulously, not to mention so much better than I could. Stick to what you're good at, I say, and I'm good at waffling!

And that, I think, is about all I have to say on the matter. Today, that is. I might think of something else tomorrow. Who can say? I would apologize to any regular readers who aren't one hundred per cent on board with Blaugust yet and may already be thinking they've heard quite enough, only I'm not going to apologize! 

What's wrong with you? Start a blog, already! If you're waiting for an invitation, this is it!

Ahem. Sorry about that. Got a bit carried away there. But that's Blaugust for you. It kind of takes you over if you let it. 

I suggest you let it. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

I love writing these little notes. I'll let you into a secret. Sometimes I use a bit of AI just so I can write one at the end. Usually the AI in question is an image generator. Nearly always, in fact. But there aren't any AI-generated images in this post. 

Here's what happened this time. Blogger generates all the HTML for me when I write a post. That's one of the big attractions of the platform. As time goes on, though, it seems to be getting a bit pernickety. Google doesn't pay it much (Or any.) attention, which is how most Blogger-users probably like it, but I get the impression a few things may be starting to fray a little with age.

One thing that no longer works as reliably as it did is changing the colors of links. I have a format for links: websites are shocking pink and videos are green. I didn't say it was a complex format. 

For years, that worked 100% of the time. I'd add the link, change the color, move on. In the last year, though, the change of color frequently doesn't take. The links come out dark blue. I have to go into the HTML and move stuff around to get them the right color and it's a pain. 

After reading several bloggers going on about how great the AIs are at writing or fixing code, I thought maybe one of them would like to fix Blogger's mistakes and it seemed only fair to let Gemini have first crack. They're cousins, after all. 

So I cut and pasted the offending section, which was the five links towards the end of the post, into Gemini and asked it "The following html doesn't produce magenta-colored links correctly. Can you correct it so it does?" 

Gemini replied "The HTML doesn't color the links magenta because browser default link styles override parent element colors. To fix this, you must apply the color styling directly to the <a> tags (or use a CSS rule for links)." Then it gave me a revised version, which I cut and pasted into Blogger to replace Blogger's own version. 

And it worked perfectly. I did actually know what the problem was, having manually corrected it many times before, but I didn't want to bother doing it five times when an AI could do it in the time it would take me to do it once. If you want to consider that as AI taking my job, fair enough, but it was a job I never wanted in the first place and if Blogger was doing its job properly, it's a job I would never have had.

Hmmm. I guess Gemini is taking Blogger's job, then...

Going to be fun round Google's house at Christmas, with those two not speaking to each other.  

More Notes on AI used in this post.

I wrote the above before I started editing. During the edit I found the Theme Week image would not center on the page, despite Blogger having a function designed specifically to make it do just that. This is another annoying thing Blogger used to do perfectly and now can't seem to manage.

So I cut and pasted the code into Gemini and asked "Okay, any idea why the following HTML fails to center the image on a Blogger blog page? It's generated by Blogger itself and it used to work but now it doesn't." 

Gemini came back with a detailed explanation of the problem "The issue happens because an <img> tag is an inline element (or inline-block depending on the browser), meaning it generally ignores text-align: center; applied to a parent <p> tag unless forced. In the past, many browsers were forgiving of this, but modern browsers strictly adhere to standards where text-align only centers text or inline content, not block-level media unless specified. Furthermore, WordPress/Blogger migrated markup schemas where themes often force images to behave as display: block; without automatic margins, breaking the old centering behavior"

All of which basically amounts to "Blogger's starting to screw up because no-one's updating any more." 

Of course, Gemini was able to fix it. I just dropped the HTML it gave me into Blogger and it worked perfectly. Maybe Google should get Gemini to rewrite the whole of Blogger. That'd save us all some time. 

The Surprising Afterlife Of Blogs

I wasn't planning on writing two posts about blogging in a row. That would be gauche. But, oh well, what the heck. I guess it's the season for it, isn't it? So here we go...

It all started when I was idly pondering if, whether and how far, if at all, to add, link to or include the inevitable torrent (The Blaugust Firehose of Posts, as owls has it.) of new blogs, either here, in a post, or in the blog roll down the side, or in my Feedly feed. 

My current feeling is that I'm not going to bother. Just trying to keep up with the names was overwhelming last year. When I started participating in Blaugust, I got into the habit of putting up a post at the start with all the links and maybe updating it once as we went along. Some years I added them to the blog roll as well. A couple of times I gave them their own section there.

It's always been a bit of a chore but it was fun at the start and for a while the numbers made it very manageable. The last couple of years, though, the increasing popularity of the event has made it a challenge to keep up and as long-time readers will know, I am not one of those who reads "challenge" as a positive. More like a threat.

Last year, it wasn't just the initial rush that was the issue. We kept picking up blogs all the way through, like a stone somehow magically managing to gather moss, so keeping up to date would have meant an ongoing process, not a just couple of isolated posts. 

Adding blogs to the roll would avoid having to write whole posts but my blog roll is already unfeasibly long and Blaugust has spread its net so wide now, most of the new blogs each year aren't really in my sphere of interest. The blog roll is broadly supposed to nudge readers towards other blogs I read and enjoy and I can't pretend that applies to the majority of the intake, these past two or three years. 

On that topic, I wrote a post at the end of last year's event where I listed all the new blogs I proposed to keep following. There were only a dozen and a year later I'm still reading seven of them. A couple just stopped, either during or at the end of Blaugust 25: the others three I got fed up with for some reason during the year and dropped from my feeds. 

Even the ones I still read, though, I mostly follow through Feedly. They tend not to make the blog roll because they don't really have much to do with anything I write about here. Not that I pretend to be consistent about that. It's a mood thing, mostly.

And so, I was looking at Feedly this morning, wondering if I'd even have room to add this year's crop. I'm on the free plan (Of course.) and I think there must be some limit to how many feeds you can follow for free. (There is.  I just checked. It's a hundred. And I'm up already up to eighty-five, not counting the nineteen at the bottom marked "Unreachable". I guess those don't figure in the tally.)

If I want to add another tranche this time, I'm going to have to make a cull. But as I've said many times, I don't remove old blogs from the blog roll when they go silent because you never know when one will sputter back to life. Only this month, for example, Domino, the ex-EverQuest II tradeskill dev, posted on her blog, The Domino Effect, for the first time in nearly a decade.That's exactly the sort of moment I don't want to miss.

That's great for blogs that have gone dormant but some blogs are fully dead. The links go nowhere. They're not coming back. If I was going to start clearing the deadwood, that would be where I'd begin. And as I said, Feedly flags the ones it can't reach any more as "unreachable" and dumps them into a holding pen at the end. So I thought I'd check if those really were dead or if Feedly just wasn't looking in the right place.

Oh boy. Did that open up a can of fresh fish... 

The first dead blog I tried was Killed In A Smiling Accident. I used to like that one. I clicked on the link in Feedly and got a page flagged Unreachable in red at the top. But it also had the usual, big green View All Articles button at the bottom. So I pressed it. 

That gave me the familiar list of post headings, just the same as any current blog would show. I clicked the first on the list and it opened the text of that post, still in Feedly. It was a post from March 27, 2024 in which Zoso informed his readers he was giving up his self-hosted site and moving back to Blogger. 

The text on Feedly included a link to that new blog, which worked, although presumably some internet magic was at work, because as far as I could see, even though it shows the Blogger symbol on the tab, the url is still kiasa.org just as it was before. 

How it was deemed "unreachable" by Feedly isn't clear (I'm guessing the rss feed data doesn't migrate automatically? Not really my field.) but there were newer posts, going up to March of this year, so I added the "new" blog to Feedly and now I have a link to KIASA in both the Live and Dead sections. 

That got me thinking. Again.

Another blog I used to enjoy was We Fly Spitfires. That hasn't seen action for at least a decade and a half but it's still there in the Live section of Feedly. I have checked on it in the past but not for a while. I clicked on the link and got a completely normal-looking Feedly page, exactly as you'd see for any operant blog. 

Only, when I clicked on the the name, all it got me was Server Not Found. A google search gets "The domain weflyspitfires.com, formerly home to an EVE Online gaming blog, is currently inactive and listed for sale." along with a link to someone that can sell it to you. I guess that's why Feedly still thinks it exists even though, in any meaningful way, it doesn't. 

So far, so very confusing. But one thing I'd noticed as I was wading through the swamp was how all these sites, dead, alive or something in-between, still showed lists of posts on Feedly, just like any other blog. And now I came to think about it, the two I'd clicked on had both opened full texts of those posts with working hyperlinks. Intriguing.

For my next experiment I chose Fluff Factor, a blog I barely remember. Fluff Factor is rated "Unreachable" by Feedly and the last post was in.August 2017. I clicked on that and got "flufffactor.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site." which was, at least, unequivocal.

So all the content from that blog is lost, I guess, unless it got picked up by the Internet Archive?  Nope! Not at all. It's still on Feedly!

Well, actually, Fluff Factor's a bad example because it was one of those annoying "Here's a taste, now come read the rest at the blog" ones, so all Feedly still has it whatever crumbs the blogger chose to throw it. Any blogs like that, you can write off for good. By confining their audience to their own specific websites they've effectively written themselves out of history. Don't make that mistake, would-be bloggers!

For those of us willing to risk our fine words being seen through an rss feed, darkly though, a faint glimmer of immortality beckons. Or if not exactly immortality, then at least life after death. Depending on how they were embedded, even some of the images still remain.

At this point I imagine all the rss experts, of whom there will undoubtedly be many in this part of the blogosphere, are probably going "Well, duh! Of course! That's the whole point!" And maybe it is but it was news to me, which is why I thought I'd share it. Maybe someone would like to go back to an old blog they remember, that they thought was gone forever, and have a pore through the back pages.

Take, for example, West Karana.  That's the blog Tipa used to have, then lost, and now has back again. Only that's the new West Karana. The old West Karana is still there in my Feedly, down in the Unreachable Zone. And if I click on it, I can read nearly three hundred posts, going all the way back to May 2013.

It even includes the five posts from whoever stole the site in 2019, although no-one in their right mind would ever want to revisit those. But the rest... that's a treasure trove! 

In fact, the whole of my Feedly Index must be like a dragon's hoard of blogging gold by now. I'm not sure if there's a limit how far back you can go but for me it goes all the way to when I first started using Feedly, right after Google announced they were shuttering Google Reader in 2013. (Actually, I  found some posts going back to 2012 so who knows?) 

I only started blogging a couple of years before that, so for me it's not far off the whole time I've been active in the hobby. I did read a lot of blogs before, but that's blogging pre-history now.

For some blogs, it's a mountain of content I couldn't even bring myself to scroll through but fortunately those are exactly the blogs that are still up and running so I don't need to. For the ones that were prolific once but no longer, it's manageable. And for all those that shone brightly but briefly, it's everything. 

At the moment, most of the blogs I've added to Feedly over the years are still in the main section, alive and available even if they haven't posted for a very long time, although as the We Fly Spitfires example shows, just because Feedly knows how to find them doesn't mean there's anything there. 

And anyway, as time passes, more will inevitably slip below the line to become "unreachable". Until today, I thought that was the end. Now it seems it's just the start of a new half-life, lurking in the shadows of the rss feed.

All of which raises some difficult questions. Presumably this invaluable historical record is only going to exist as long as a) Feedly itself and b) the people who run Feedly choose to allow it. Should I attempt to construct a local archive of any thought-to-have-vanished blogs I have a particular fondness for, before they really do slip away into the night? 

Now that I've discovered the inconsistencies in the records, should I check every silent blog, just to see if it's still there or if there's nothing left but the shell? Is it worth the effort? (I imagine UltrViolet or Tipa would just get an AI to do the grunt work for them but my LLM-whispering skills aren't quite up to that, yet.)

And finally, what am I going to do with all the new Blaugust blogs, when they come flooding in? That's how all this started and I still don't have an answer. 

On this evidence, I can't be deleting any blogs just to make space... although I guess I could clear out the ones that only give you a paragraph before you need to leave the feed. At this rate, I might even have to subscribe to Feedly to get more blogs on board, which really would be a last resort.

Then again, this blog post suggests older users of the Feedly free plan may have unlimited feeds grandfathered in. I think I might just keep adding them and see when Feedly balks. Blaugust is certain to give me enough ammunition for a test run.

Kick the can down the road, then. Always works for me. 

Blaugust Is Back, Baby! Or It Will Be In A Couple Of Weeks...

Roll up! Roll up! Roll up! The circus is in town! For one month only, the amazing Festival of Blogging returns to amaze, delight and entertain! Get your tickets now!

Erm... or next month, actually. It doesn't start until August. And there aren't any tickets. Other than that everything I just said was totally accurate...

Every year I do this and every year I think to myself  "But surely everyone knows all this already?" It's hard to imagine many people reading this blog and not having previously participated in, or at least heard about, the traditional summer event. I mean, it's been going for thirteen years. (Actually fourteen but it lay fallow for one.) 

For the few who don't know all about it already, let me direct you to Contains Moderate Peril, where  Roger "Mr. Peril" Edwards engages in conversation with himself to explain what Blaugust is all about and how it came to be. For the rest, I'll do my best to keep things entertaining.

And now I see that, since I added that link, Krikket has posted the official version. Well, as official as we're going to get now Belghast isn't here to set the tone, pace and agenda.

As most people reading this will likely know, Belghast was both the instigator and the inspiration for the whole thing. Very sadly, Bel's no longer with us following his sudden, unexpected and tragic death at the beginning of July but his spirit remains and sustains us in making sure the event he created continues in both his absence and in his memory. 

Krikket took point last year, when Bel was also unable to take charge through personal circumstances, and she and some of the other Mentors are stepping up once again to make sure this year's event goes ahead as Bel would certainly have wanted. Between her post and Roger's, I imagine most questions should be answered but if not, you're always welcome to drop into the Blaugust Discord and ask.

In fact, why not just go there and hang out? It's fun! And friendly! And free! 

Let me also show you where to go to sign up. That's probably the most important part. Maybe I should have led with that...

But Bhagpuss! Didn't you say I wouldn't need a ticket? Yes, Victoria, I did! And indeed you won't, if all you want to do is enjoy the show. But if you'd like to win some of the many, many prizes on offer you will need to leave your name at the door. 

Ah, yes, the prizes. What are they? Well, these are the ones we've been using for years. Belghast invented them and tweaked them as the event developed:

Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You joined Blaugust for the very first time and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result, we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.

Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2026.

Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2026.

Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2026.

Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the original challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2026. 

This year, The Committee (Please don't call us that! - Everyone.) has come up with a lovely, inclusive, attainable, set of goals intended to drive community engagement:

Make a post on your blog on or before August 1st, 2026 inviting other bloggers to participate in Blaugust. Make sure you link the signup form.

Make at least 5 posts directly inspired by a post by another Blaugust participant. Make sure you provide a link back to the post in question.

Engage with other Blaugust participants at least once per week.  Read posts, leave comments, join discussions in the Blaugust Discord and share posts written by others on social media. 

Guest post on another Blaugust participant’s blog – or have someone else guest post on yours!

Create or join in a group project – choose a topic, find some other bloggers, and each post your own take on that topic on the same day.

You don't have to do all of them. Okay, since they're entirely voluntary, technically you don't have to do any of them. But if you do decide to join in and you want a badge at the end, you need to do at least three of them. That will entitle you to the Community Builder Badge which I'm really, really hoping looks something like this:

Ah... That reminds me.

One thing that's worth mentioning is the room-elephant known as AI. Funny name for an elephant. Although, what would be a normal name for an elephant? Blessed if I know. They can't all be called Jumbo or Dumbo, surely?

Anyway, we have some rules about AI this time. (I imagine we had some last time, too. I just can't remember what they were.) This year, though, they're very simple. Roger summed it up as "AI may assist your creative work, but it should not replace your creative contribution." and I'm going to gloss that as "Make AI your servant, not your master." It's a tool, much like spell-checkers or image editing software. 

Here's an example, from this very post, of a totally legit use of AI no-one is likely to have problems with. (And even as I type, I know someone is taking umbrage with at least two words in that last sentence...) 

In the earlier paragraph, I was going to say "...and Paint.net"  because that's the app I use but then I thought I really ought to use a generic description rather than a brand name. Only I didn't know what people generally called programs like Paint.net.

So I googled it and an AI, presumably Gemini although it didn't introduce itself (Rude!), told me "These programs are called raster graphics editors or image editing software." I didn't like the sound of "raster graphics editors", which didn't seem like anything a lay-person would say, so I picked "image editing software", which sounded vaguely familiar and not so much like something an AI would have made up.

I'd call that an acceptable use of AI. It's very definitely acceptable under the rules. Asking AIs for advice, guidance, clarification or even suggestions is okay. I mean, asking is okay. I'm not saying the answers they give you will be. It's a crap-shoot still.

More likely to get me some side-eye but still well within the rules is the picture of a badger I used up there to make my little joke. I had the highly amusing idea of adding an "r" to the phrase "Community Builder Badge", a bit like the old "Lost Consonants" feature that used to run in The Guardian back when I was working somewhere that provided free newspapers for the staff to read at lunchtime, only in reverse. (Yes, Victoria. Free papers. It was the '90s. A different world...)

The joke really needed a picture but if I tried to draw a badger it'd be more likely to come out looking like a bagel, so I asked an AI to draw one for me. And I think it did a pretty good job. Probably nicked it from somewhere but then I've been "borrowing" images and fucking them up in Paint.net here for years and no-one's ever said anything. 

It's a tradition that long pre-dates blogging. I was doing it with found images, SprayMount, a scalpel and a photocopier nearly fifty years ago. In that respect, AI's just another photocopier to me.

Under the new rules, AI Community Builder Badger is permissible, although I'll lay good money a few people will be hissing and booing just at the thought. (And now I want to go generate an "AI Community Builder Badger" too. For all the angst over AI, it's still fair game for a cheap laugh in my book.)

Not all blogs are literary, though. In the past we have had several that featured almost no writing at all, relying instead on nothing but images. For a blog like that, AI images are not allowed. (I'm not sure if an image-focused blog would be entitled to have AI write the captions or the linking text. It would only seem fair...)

But let's not get bogged down in pettifogging, nit-picking detail, hugely entertaining though some of us (Well, me, at least.) may find it. The whole point of Blaugust is that it's a celebration of blogging and an encouragement for people to start a blog, dust off an old blog, get some extra use out of the blog they already have or just generally carry on blogging as usual but in company.

The event is all about inclusion and encouragement. No-one's going to be policing any of these rules beyond the minimum necessary to keep the whole thing on the rails. The badges rely on self-certification and trust. 

The absolute bottom line for all of it is "Don't be a dick", to which I'd add the other golden rule - "If you feel uncomfortable posting something, don't." 

In other words, we all know where the boundaries are, both our own and the community's. And we know they're there to keep us safe. Stick within them and you'll find there's more than enough space to play.

And play is what you should do. Have fun. Try new things. Experiment.

 Blaugust is a safe space. And it only comes around once a year. Make the most of it!

 

AI used in this post. Community Builder Badger! I love him already. I might get Gemini to knock up one of those picture books with him in it. 

But for the single image in this post I used a freebie I had for GPT Image 2 Low at NightCafe.  The prompt was "Community Builder badger. A socially-minded badger in overalls, wearing a hard hat and possibly carrying a hammer. 1930s childrens' book illustration." All settings, weights etc left on default.

Farewell Bel

A couple of hours ago, I had a post almost finished. I stopped so we could take Beryl for a walk. When I came back, I checked my feeds before finishing the post and saw on MassivelyOP that Belghast had died.

I'm sure I don't need to clarify to anyone reading this who Belghast was. I probably don't need to explain how he'd been undergoing a difficult course of chemotherapy following a cancer diagnosis. Reportedly, it was complications with that course of treatment that led to his extremely untimely death.

Everyone who's likely to be reading this most likely followed Bel's blog, just like I do. We all learned about everything in his life, good and bad, through his conversational, very open posts. We all know he'd had the worst of years, with his wife dying suddenly and unexpectedly and then his own illness appearing.

But I imagine most of us were confident he'd get through all these very bad times and come out the other side, still Bel. Still himself. Still positive, forward-looking, optimistic, ready to give life the benefit even if it didn't seem to want to cut him much slack.

I knew from his posts that he was struggling with his chemo routine. I know from experience how difficult chemo can be like although my own experience was a lot milder than his. But I also know how unpredictable it can be, filling yourself with poisons week after week. Sometimes very bad things happen.

I had my own brush with death thanks to complications with chemo, as documented here on this blog. It's such a terrible shame Bel didn't survive his own to tell us all about the experience on his blog, too.

He would have, of course. He was a fearless examiner of his own life. He talked about all kinds of issues, practical, medical, emotional and personal on what was supposed to be a gaming blog. He was a core influence on my own move to make this blog about more than just games, although his willingness to share far exceeded my own.

But then Bel was ever the sharer. He tried to help wherever he could and he led always by example. His influence has been both deep and wide.

I knew Bel from his blog and also from Blaugust, of course, but he was very active in all kinds of social media and in gaming communities. He was always willing to talk to new people and turn them into friends, even though he didn't always find socializing easy, something he often mentioned on his blog. 

A lot of people knew Bel. A lot of people are going to miss him. No-one's going to forget him easily, not least because his legacy will live on.

According to Roger, Blaugust is going ahead. I'm absolutely certain that's how Bel would have wanted it. I'm sure everyone will have plenty to say about the inspirational figure who started the whole thing when it rolls around again next month. 

For now, though, I'll leave it at that. There's only so much you can say when something like this happens. I just hope someone's looking after Bel's cats. He really loved those cats. 

Page Counts, Clicks, X-Cetra

Who's up for some blogging about blogging? Yes, I know it's not Blaugust any more but always remember, a blog is not just for August.

It all started when I replied to Tipa's comment on Wednesday's post. Not the one about Wednesday the show. The one I put up two days ago. The one that none of you have read. 

Oh, you did read it, did you? Congratulations! That puts you in quite the elite club. Want to know how to get into the club's super-secret, cool kids only treehouse? Click on the embedded video in that post. If you're quick you could be the fifth person ever to see it!

I expect people not to watch the videos. Hardly anyone ever does. I can see how many times they've been viewed on YouTube (And yes, I checked, and watching it on the blog does increment the YouTube counter.). The last one I did before this, for the post Some Puppy Walking,  has been watched sixteen times. The post itself has over three hundred views so you do the math...

Three hundred views used to be bang on average for a post here, after it's been up for a week or more. So far, only forty-five people have viewed Wednesday's post, according to the little widget next to it in the post list in Blogger. 

That's about the only stat I ever pay any attention to these days. I got very fed up with the unnecessary complexity of Google Analytics, so when they revamped it and you had to jump through a load of technical hoops to have your website included in the new version, I opted not to bother.

I also stopped looking at Blogger's own stats ages ago because they don't seem to filter out bots so they're always ludicrously inflated. Even the page-view number that I do still look at, mostly because it's always right there in front of me, is just the same number from the main stats, so I don't take it too seriously either.

Still, even bad stats are useful if they're consistent in their badness. Any sudden change means something must have happened. And there has been one heck of a big change just recently.

Before Blaugust, that page view figure bobbled fairly consistently somewhere between 250 and 400 over the first seven days or so after the post published. Most posts stop picking up views after that although there can obviously be spikes at any time.

At this point, you're probably expecting me to say page views went up during Blaugust. That's always been the conventional wisdom and with this year having a record number of participants and with me consistently linking every post in the Blaugust Discord, it's more than reasonable to imagine it would hold true. 

It didn't, though, or not for me. Most years I see little or no uptick in views from Blaugust and this year was much the same. Until the last week, that is. 

From the 25th of August, page views almost doubled, averaging around seven or eight hundred. That bump carried on long after Blaugust ended and indeed became more pronounced as September went on, with quite a few posts hitting four figures, topping out at just over two thousand.

Why? No idea. I rarely have any clue why these things happen. And equally, I have no explanation for why they stop, which seems to be what's happened now. Only this time the drop is as spectacular as the rise was.

Generally, any post I put up gets most of its views in the first 24-48 hours, as you'd expect. I haven't been keeping track but I'm fairly sure back when they were finishing up with  three or four hundred views, they'd have seen half of those in the first two or three days.

The last two posts have so far managed 45 views in two days and 34 in 24 hours respectively. That doesn't seem normal to me, which is why this morning I started fiddling about in Google's stat cupboards to see if I could figure out what was going on.

I'll put you out of your suspense now. I did not figure out what was going on. I have no way of knowing whether regular readers have suddenly found better things to do or if Google has started tallying things differently. I'll just wait for it to change again, which it will.

I did, however, discover some other new and quite interesting things while I was rummaging and that's how this post came about.

Firstly, I'll say that Google Search Console is a huge improvement on Analytics for the casual user. If you have a Blogger blog, I'd recommend giving it a look. It's much clearer, far easier to understand, and best of all it explains what the stats mean. You can set filters and use them to dig out some quite useful detail without a great deal of trouble.

I particularly liked the new Insights Report, which gives you a very clear indication of which of your posts are trending up or down and enough granularity to take a shot at figuring out why. And that's where I noticed something very odd.

It wasn't that there'd been a big spike in search requests for my post on housing in Throne and Liberty, which I put up just under a year ago. T&L has just added housing so obviously people are googling for information on it, none of which they're going to find here.

It's harder to explain why there's been a surge of interest in Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt. If anything new is happening there, I've missed it. Two of my posts about it do turn up on the first page of Google Search results though, so I guess if anyone is still interested, they might well give me a look.

The one that really set me thinking, though, was the sudden interest in this post from just over a year ago. 

That's a "What I've Been Listening To Lately" post. No-one reads those. Okay, some people do, but clearly that series isn't going to come up in a general search very often. Yes, they do often have the names of famous people in the body of the post but hardly ever in the title and let's be realistic here - even putting Taylor Swift's name in the title of your blog post is not going to get you onto the first hundred pages on a search result, is it? I mean, there's a lot of competition there...

In the case of this particular post, I didn't mention Taylor Swift in the title (Although A$AP Rocky's Taylor Swif is one the featured tunes.) or anyone even close to being that famous. I did, as it happens, mention the name of a Woody Allen movie that doesn't even feature in the post at all, but that's not what people were searching for.

They were looking for a band called X-Cetra, a bunch of Californian tweenage girls who made a very odd album by the name of Stardust a couple of decades ago. I said in the post that X-Cetra didn't even have a Wikipedia page. I just checked and they still don't. I guess that explains why someone would bother to click through to a blog that mentioned them.

And they have. Not in the kind of numbers that click through to check on posts about clothes or housing in Once Human, which seem to be by far the biggest draw here over the last twelve months, but in numbers that feel statistically significant, especially since most of them appear to have happened not when I put the post up last year but in this last month.

 

In fact, my top search query for September is "X-cetra stardust" and two more variations of the phrase are also in the top ten. Altogether, there were 829 searches for X-Cetra Stardust in the last 28 days and twenty-nine people clicked through to look at the page in full. It may not sound like a great conversion rate but in comparison, of more than a thousand inquiries about housing in Throne & Liberty, only nine people clicked.

What's even more interesting is that, of the 39 clicks from search the post has ever received, 38 of them were in the last month. There was a huge spike (Seven clicks!) on 3 September and it's been ticking away ever since.

If there's been any general news about the album or the band, I'm not aware of it. Google Trends does confirm a huge spike of interest on 3 September but a general search finds nothing special.

Enter Blaugustian Calishat with their invaluable selection of search refinement tools. With the inestimable Back That Ask Up utility I was able to narrow my search down to the exact moment of the spike and find the reason for it - an article in Rolling Stone entitled "Four Best Friends Made an Album as Kids. 25 Years Later, It’s a Cult Classic"

It's a big article with lots of new information. It even links to a "Blogspot User", sadly not me. I bet they got some page views that day. I just got the spill-over. 

But wait. There's more. 

Unsurprisingly, given the paucity of information on the band, my post does appear on the first page of Google search results, but you have to scroll down a fair way. The thing that amazed me and led to this post, though, is what I saw at the top of the page. 

It's in the image up there at the head of this post. That's a screenshot of the top of a Google search page, the bit I rarely look at. I almost always scroll straight past all of the featured links and the AI summaries to the point where the old school listings start and go from there.

In the middle, with the eye-catching thumbnail of Teri Gender Bender from Le Butcherettes, is a link to my post. Why I'm getting that prime spot rather than, say, the Rolling Stone article, I have no idea but I'll happily take it. 

That big panel across the top of the results seems only to appear if you search for specific entity by name. It works for bands, albums, movies, actors, games... As soon as you add any detail to the query, though, it vanishes. Has it always been there? I guess I hardly ever search for anything purely by name so I would very rarely see it. 

I might have to  pay it more attention, now I discover that one of my posts has been featured that way. I guess it proves you don't have to pay to get featured on Google search, at least.

And after all that, I guess my extremely late for Blaugust advice on how to get more page views and clicks would have to be write about very obscure things no-one else is covering or clothes and housing in online games. That's what seems to be working for me, anyway.

For a given value of "working", that is. A very, very tiny one.

Day Two - Blaugust, Blog Rolls And Beryl

The second day of Blaugust and I'd like to assure everyone not every post here this month is going to be about the event. That really would be taking the metatextual high road, which I can't deny has its appeal, but no. There are more things in life than Blaugust.

This one is, though. It's in the nature of a set-up post and also a grab-bag of sorts, although it's a mighty small bag. You wouldn't get much shopping in this one.

Wilhelm opened the bidding yesterday with a complete list of all 98 runners in this 2025 Invitational but by this morning I see he's had to update that four times already. We're now up to 114.

I left a comment last night saying I wasn't sure how I'd keep up with all of them, not just in terms of time spent reading but, more pragmatically, how I was even go to know when anyone had posted anything new. In previous years, I'd been in the habit of adding every new blog to my Blog Roll but that was when almost all of them were at least somewhat related to the boroad theme and purpose of this blog, namely gaming and popular culture. 

Last year Blaugust made quite an effort to spread the net wider and draw in bloggers from all kinds of non-gaming sources as well as vloggers, podcasters and who knows what all else, which was great for me as a reader, viewer and listener but it no longer seemed to make quite as much sense for to include all of them in the sidebar. Instead, I just whacked them all into my Feedly and followed them in private.

At the time, as I recall, the free version of Feedly had a limit on how many RSS feeds you could add. I seem to remember it being a hundred but I may have made that up. I'm pretty sure there was a limit, though, and I think I was getting quite close to it. Consequently, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to follow all the dozens of new Blaugustinians. (Thanks to Gaudete Theology for the new collective noun - it rolls off the tongue a lot more sweetly than Blaugustians, which is what I'd been using until now.)

I was toying with the idea of making a separate category in the Blog Roll and adding them all there but I didn't relish all the cutting and pasting it  would take. By this morning I still hadn't done anything about it and just as well, too, because the very first Blaugust post I read after breakfast was from Owls at Owlblog, (Aka Owls Of The Godless Internet.) who'd solved most of my problem for me!

Owls has put together an OPML file (I say it like I know what one of those is...) with RSS links to all the current Blaugust blogs. You can import the whole lot into your RSS feeder of choice with one click. 

I cut and pasted the link into Feedly this morning and it worked perfectly. You do then have to go through them all and "Follow" them individually but that takes about 1% of the time it would take to add the whole lot the old-fashioned way. Thanks Owls!

I did also try the same trick with Blogger's Blog Roll widget but it wasn't having any of it. It didn't reject it but neither did it add anything at all. There may be some way of getting it to co-operate but although this year's new intake doesn't seem quite as wildly disparate as 2024's, I still think it's probably not going to be appropriate to add every one of them to the roll, so I'm not going to pursue it any further.

To give some idea of the challenges ahead, I read just the latest post from each of the new blogs I'd added, which was about a third of the total number of participants and it took me more than an hour. I know from experience that a lot of blogs will slow down their output as the event rolls on but this first week is going to be rough!

It's always fun to meet everyone for the first time, though. I was surprised to find several new Blaugustians posting in languages I don't read so those aren't going to be taking up much of my reading time. Nice to see the range of the event expanding, all the same.

Better yet from my perspective, there are a couple of blogs that seem to be primarily focused on images. I'm always happy to see more pictures in my feeds. And in that spirit I'm acceding to a request from Redbeard in the comments yesterday, when he asked for "more Beryl pics".

Here's she is, lounging in what used to be Mrs Bhagpuss's computer chair before it started to list to one side and rattle alarmingly. Mrs Bhagpuss bought a nice, new chair but Beryl had always liked to slip onto the old one whenever the opportunity arose, so I brought it into my study and now she sits on it behind me, keeping an eye on what I'm doing. She can also just about see out of the window from it so that's another attraction.

A few of the new blogs this year seem to be actual, old school web-logs or personal online diaries, which is very welcome. Takes me back to the old GeoCities days, when I used to randomly wander from homepage to homepage, reading about the small incidents in lives of people I'd never otherwise know. 

There are also several music blogs, something both very welcome and, I think, a first for Blaugust.  I
wonder what contact pulled those in? Unfortunately from my point of view, the preferred linkage among them seems to be to Spotify, which I don't use, but if nothing else the presence of nusic-based blogs will empower me to make more music posts of my own. Like I need any encouragement...

That's almost it for the round-up but I'd like to call attention to two particular posts I read this morning, both of which had some very helpful, practical advice to offer. (Three, of course, counting Owls.) 

The first was Calishat, who was talking about an app she's developed that goes by the name of Attention Junction. Or maybe it's a website she curates. I'm not sure on the naming conventions these days.

Anyway, whatever you call it, what Attention Junction does is "analyze the historical views of two Wikipedia pages, identify spans of public interest as expressed by unusually-high page views, find overlaps, and turn them into Google / Google News searches". It looks very interesting and I've bookmarked it to play around with later.

Finally, I'd very much like to highlight a post by Nick Simson in which he recommends an article by Ben Werdmuller called Evaluating AI. It's one of the most lucid, balanced and downright useful examinations of the ever-controversial topic I've read to date. What's more, it's not just of academic interest, it contains practical information and advice that I will certainly be referring back to as I explore, experiment with and make use of the various AI options and vendors in the future.

And that's my little trawl through the new stuff. Incomplete of course, since more blogs have joined since Owls compiled his list. I just hope I haven't missed anything amazing...  

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%.