Today sees the start of Creator Appreciation Week in Blaugust. This used to be a separate event, back when it was known as Developer Appreciation Week, a name that clearly reflects Blaugust's origins in the gaming community.
Now the net is cast wide to catch... well, anything. And anyone. Artists, musicians, writers, coders, streamers, social media gurus, the company that makes those cute shoes you really, really like...
And bloggers, I guess. Why not?
One notable thing for me about this year's Blaugust, compared to previous events, has been the number of posts I've bookmarked because they contained factual information or links I thought might come in handy later. We seem to have attracted an above average number of people who make web resources or collect and distribute information about those who do.
Among this year's Blaugustinians whose posts have caught my attention in this way are a couple I've already mentioned in previous posts - Nick Simson, who put me onto an excellent overview of the current and potential future state of AI/LLM usage posted by Ben Werdmuller and Tara Calishain of Calishat, who created both Attention Junction and MiniGladys, which I immediately bookmarked and then, of course, haven't used. But they look really useful!
I also bookmarked my Favorite Radio Stations, a post by The Virtual Moose.
There was a time when I listened to the radio a lot while playing MMORPGs. As I've always said, I find the in-game sounds and music an integral part of almost all games (The exceptions being the handful where I find it literally unlistenable but those are vanishingly rare, thankfully.) so I always have both on and turned up loud enough to hear clearly.
I've always been quite comfortable having two or three sound sources playing simultaneously and though I'm very poor at paying attention to more than one of them at a time, I'm quite good at shifting my attention from one to another as appropriate, whenever something interesting or important crops up.
They do need to be different kinds of sounds - two pieces of music playing at the same time is a cacophony - but ambient and combat sounds from a video game, music and speech all seem to use different processing channels in my brain so they barely clash at all.
In the olden days, when few MMORPGs used much in the way of voice acting, I was able to have speech radio on while I played but that ceased to be a viable option a long time ago, now almost everything is voiced.
As game developers leaned into voice acting, so website developers pulled back from it. Remember the days when you'd go to a website and tinny machine music would start playing immediately? No-one wanted that and now you hardly ever hear it. Which means web-browsing and blog-reading is perfect for having music on in the background.
I used to listen to Canadian and Australian and American ultra-local stations, mostly on Sundays, as they interviewed local "celebrities" , people unknown to anyone fifty miles outside of town, or went through the local events calendar in excruciating detail. I found it very relaxing.
Well, unless you live where I do. It seems that for the last couple of years the UK has become a Radio Walled Garden, with anything from outside the borders of the four nations being blocked for "licensing reasons" related to "copyright and neighboring rights-related matters". Another good reason to use a VPN, I'm sure.
I also used to pick on college radio stations to hear the eclectic and peculiar mix of music they'd program. The Virtual Moose post reminded me how much fun that used to be and made me think of doing it again, and I'm happy to say all their links work just fine, so how that figures with the supposed copyright issues is anyone's guess.
My appreciation to all the actors involved, from the blogger who reconnected me with my previous self, the creators and maintainers of the app that makes listening to radio from all over the world not just possible but simple, provided you don't happen to live in the UK of course, and to the people at the radio stations themselves, who keep the medium itself alive.
When I was thinking about what I'd do for CAW, I considered making it an all-AI edition, with links to the numerous sources I now rely on to do pretty much anything here. I might still do that but if I do I'll probably get side-tracked by trying to decide what is and isn't "AI". The label gets slapped onto anything and everything now and I'm pretty sure half the apps I'm using would just have been called "algorithms" five years ago.
I'll leave that for another post as I stick to my theme of shouting out Blaugustinians, in which context I particularly want to mention ribo.zone, where today's post is all about dithering. I potter and I ramble but I don't often dither but it turns out not being able to make your mind up isn't what the post is about.
Dithering is the term for the pointillist visuals used throughout the Ribo Zone. It's one of the more attractive aesthetics on display in this year's Blaugust and I absolutely will steal some of that look if I can. Luckily, I don't need to resort to burglary because Loren, the person behind the blog, is happy to give it away.
They linked to an app called Dithermark, which I immediately bookmarked and then started playing around with. You can see some examples in the post and I feel certain there will be more, so my appreciation to both Loren and whoever 's behind the app.
And finally, some music. This Blaugust has been notable for being the first I can remember in which several of the blogs are mainly or wholly about music. I'm not sure whose social media outreach brought them in but they're a very welcome addition.
I've learned a couple of things from following the various musical bloggers these past couple of weeks. Firstly, my fantasy of having a blog where I post a new tune every day is probably viable. One song a day, I mean. More than that is too much. And secondly, if you're going to make your blog a discovery-point for music, you probably ought to supply links to a variety of platforms where readers can hear it.
I am 100% guilty of not doing this myself and I'm probably not going to change but if you only link to, say, YouTube, as I do, you're making an assumption that everyone uses that platform. And they do, don't they? Just like everyone uses Spotify. Except I don't use Spotify, so I never click links that go there. And Spotify is most definitely not being appreciated by me, not today or any at other time.
Soundcloud I very much do appreciate but unfortunately, whenever I click on links to songs hosted there, the volume is earsplitting and there never seems to be any way to change it, so I've learned through operant conditioning not to do it. Bandcamp, which I also appreciate, is fine but fiddly, which means I tend not to bother with them, either.
Because of all that, most of which is entirely my own fault, the musical blog this Blaugust that I've spent most time on has been the African Music Forum. I know next to nothing about African music. I saw Prince Nico Mbarga play live at the first ever WOMAD festival and later I saw Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba at the Ashton Court Free Festival but that's about the extent of my experience.
It's been fun to be exposed to what feels like a random sampling of a vast warehouse of musical treasure every day. I don't listen to all of the selections but the ones I've cherry-picked have been great. Favorites so far have been Dr. Footswitch and Black Disco.
AMF is exemplary in including multiple options for listening but it also always leads with a video from YouTube, which is why I've had so much fun with it. I'm so lazy!
And finally, since we're being musical, I just want to shout out a final Blaugust contributor, Wavelengths. I don't generally listen to podcasts and I haven't been listening to this one but I do read podcast blogs and this is a good one.
I enjoyed the post on the PSP, a device I always wished I'd owned when it was in vogue and which, having read this, I still would like to try, but mostly I would like to thank them for bringing to my attention the existence of a full-length album by Ninajirachi. She turned up on one of my What I've Been Listening To Lately posts not that long ago but I don't believe I'm currently subscribed to her YouTube channel, so the release of her album "I Love My Computer" had passed me by.
I'm sure I'd have caught up with it sooner or later but thanks to Wavelengths
it was sooner. I listened to the whole thing yesterday and it's great. It
almost fills that gap left by the unexplained disappearance of
Superorganism. Whatever did happen to them, anyway?
That's my round of applause for Blaugust bloggers done for now but it might only be round one. This has been a very good Blaugust for me in terms of finding new voices to listen to, by no means all of which have I mentioned here today. I'm saving that for the final "Lessons Learned" week.
Normally I find lists of which blogs people liked best in Blaugust a little uncomfortable - you just know everyone who reads them is looking for their own name and feeling at least a little disappointed when they don't find it - but this time I do have several clear favorites, who I will definitely be continuing to follow after the event ends, so it seems a bit ingenuous not to admit it.
I may also do another CAW post on a few non-blogging favorites, too, if only to prove there is a world outside Blaugust.
Sometimes it's hard to remember.
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