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The Ancient Gaming Noob
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·Wilhelm Arcturus·best 0.86
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The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference
–Elie Wiesel
Last week the site Aftermath, had what they called Hater Week, where the staff opened up on things they did not like. There were some interesting takes.
Aftermath Hater Week – I totally stole this image
Some of them I felt in my bones, like the one about how awful Adobe is. I remember having a beta copy of Photoshop 2.0 back in 1991 and thinking it was the coolest thing ever. I am not even a creative by profession, but everybody I…
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PaseoBaggage - Blaugust 2026
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Ugh, this one is a tough one to post. 10 year old me liked it when it was popular in its time. I'd say bye to this memory if I could.
Bye Bye Bye by NSYNC
Yep, that's the one. This memory is kind of cringe inducing in retrospect, but it was fine at the time. In 5th grade, I was involved in some sort of dance at the front of the class with some other students. I think it was just some recess activity. As someone who doesn't like public speaking and can't dance I don't even know how I got roped in…
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Academic Aesthetic
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·Aaron·best 0.98
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(This is my eighth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
On the whole I like The Hechinger Report. They have a lenient policy in regards to sharing their articles and they tackle some important issues.
On the other hand, they recently published a guest editorial by Alexandra Walsh, “the chief product officer at Amplify, one of the country’s largest K-12 curriculum and assessment companies.”
To its credit, the opinion piece only mentions Amplify once, and eve…
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nullish
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Several weeks ago I missed my 25 year high school reunion. Actually, missed is the wrong word. I skipped it. I avoided it.
The event was held less than ten miles from my house, and I went out of my way not to go.
To be honest, this was the closest I've come to going to one of these reunions. A few weeks prior, I had pulled out my old senior yearbook and spent an afternoon looking through it. I read the messages that were written in the interior cover pages, looked through the team, club, and org…
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Aneesh Sathe
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Bookmarked: How to avoid the “clean data, clean model” trap when teaching statistics and data science Excellent thinking about teaching stats but also for data science leadership thinking about team training. It softens my usual throw in the deep end approach but I like it.
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theTangentSpace
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I’ve never done an “introduction”-style post on here. The closest is perhaps the possessions post from two Blaugusts ago. Well, it’s introductions week for this year’s Blaugust, and one of the prompts is “Ten facts”, so here are some facts about me.
I’ve slept with the same yellow-orange blanket for over 20 years. This sounds weirder than it is, I think? It’s not a “blankey” or anything, I don’t obsessively sleep with with it every single night without fail — it’s just a blanket that has served…
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Lucky Instar
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August 7, 2026
Group Project Announcement - Blind Choice:
Do you have a big encyclopedia or guidebook or textbook or manual next to your desk? Flip to a random page, find a topic you didn't know much about before, research it, and do a quick write-up on whatever you found. Share what you learned with the blaugust community - let's both learn something new.
It can be any kind of manual or text - video game guides, Python manuals, a dictionary, an old textbook. Whatever you want to do!
If you wann…
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PaseoBaggage - Blaugust 2026
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Here's another song the radio introduced me to:
The Whitby Maid by The Outside Track
Pretty simple story behind this one. I used to work the night shift and I would try to tune into the local college radio on my way home. They played many songs I had not heard of. They didn't have anyone introducing the song choices so if you liked the song you had to try and look it up later by recalling the lyrics. This song eluded me for awhile until I could remember enough of the lyrics to find it. Here's so…
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Shadowz Abstract Gaming
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I started playing this the other day, and finished the prologue the other day, but decided I would still play this, and it’s a game that I can enjoy. It’s from the same game studio that did Gas Station Simulator, and it’s something I can play on my own which... Continue reading
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Academic Aesthetic
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·Aaron·best 0.99
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(This is my seventh post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
You may have noticed that each of my Blaugust posts is hung on a hook that is another article (sometimes several), sometimes only loosely related to my topic.
I’m liking the idea of using these as jumping off points, and the whole thing feels far less derivative than the “articles” I’ve frequently found in the past that were “Here’s a video with a paragraph about it that hits word count but really jus…
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Portrait of the Man as a...
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Posting these things is a hostage negotiation. This stuff I'm making this week has been a for real internal battle. These things so rarely look like what I think they will and only sort of feel like I want them to feel when I look at them. There are naught but a dark council of internal dreads, with increasing sharpness and derision, just laying into me as I scratch and scratch and scratch.
It's loud in here. The voices have more stamina than is reasonable for being as old as I am.
The shitty th…
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Heart Soul Machine
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The Problem with Bubbles
When I worked at CSU, educational designers were school and faculty based but centrally managed. They were embedded in their own areas, responding to the specific needs of the academics they worked with. It didn't take long after I joined to realise that every single one of them had developed a completely different set of skills and approaches. On one level that was interesting. On the other hand, it meant the work had become deeply atomised. Everyone operated in their o…
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re: nyman
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[disclaimer: this is a DRAFT post, anyone who read my last blaugust post will recognise this, they less edited and less coherent than the others, and in this case not even a full blog post, just the first part]
If you have been at any conferences you have most likely encountered it. The talk, which is interesting but the speaker is a bit slow talking, and after 10 minutes it is really hard to not look down at the phone. And oops, now you missed something important.
And this is a topic you’re int…
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Academic Aesthetic
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·Aaron·best 0.99
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(This is my sixth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
There’s an interesting read on The Hechinger Report where Jackie Mader has written an article about game sites that avoid school web filters.
(The Hechinger Report, interestingly enough, releases articles under a Creative Commons license. That’s super cool of them, and one of the reasons they’re in my RSS feed reader.)
As is my trend for Blaugust, this isn’t a summary of that article, I’m using it as a…
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Sheri42.net
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CatCoq's Mini Collection Challenge and Peggy Dean's Summer Creative Retreat, incorporating drawing techniques, creative collaborations, and an invitation to Blaugust 2026.
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Heart Soul Machine
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My barber recently moved premises, set up on his own, and I found something genuinely compelling about that. The ability, as a professional, to essentially pick up your tools, find a new chair, and keep going. The skill is his. The relationship with his clients is his. The craft he's spent years developing is entirely portable. If a landlord puts the rent up, or an employer devalues his labour, he has real options. He can leave.
It got me thinking about what that actually looks like in a univers…
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Sheri42.net
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digital acrylics, cat and dog anatomy, shares insights from various art classes and teachers
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PaseoBaggage - Blaugust 2026
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You've heard a few stories from my youngest days (and there's plenty more I will share), but how about we jump ahead a little to my college days? In fact, I just heard this song on the radio at the end of July and it gave me the idea for the theme and inspiration for my participation in Blagust this year.
Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
I have a Media Studies degree. I don't bring this up often because I've never really done anything with it. I've taken my share of video classes where we ofte…
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Academic Aesthetic
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·Aaron·best 0.99
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(This is my fifth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
Over on DIY Photography, Alysa Gavilan as a good introduction to freelance photography as a career. It’s worth a read if that’s something you or someone you know is seriously thinking about that as a choice.
I’m not summarizing articles here, but I’ve known a few freelancers and photography business owners (Are you a freelancer if you have employees?) and because of that I offer some additional advice:…
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Gridranger's blog
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My very first blog
Today's group project opportunity in the Blaugust event is the following writing prompt:
I started my very first blog on 7 December 2005, more than 20 years ago. I was a university student back then, full of optimism and energy. I started blogging just days before my very first book was published. Yes, I wrote two books, maybe three. I'll post about them later. Promise.
I mostly posted about writing, university life, and random thoughts. As I was one of the first students to t…
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Academic Aesthetic
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(This is my fourth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
I recently read an article with a similar name to this one that I’ll not link here, because it made me angry enough to draft a rebuttal.
This is not that rebuttal. This isn’t even a tribute.
Instead, this is my own list, different from the other one, and limited to five things simply to keep this post shorter than a novel. I could go on. I could nitpick. I would rather not invite that poison into my so…
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nullish
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I recently visited my local public library and got a library card.
I walked in and sheepishly explained to the nice librarian that yes, I used to have a card (issued in 1994, when I was but a wee lad) but alas: it's gone missing. No, I don't remember my card number either. And no, I really haven't used the library system in a while. She seemed slightly amused, which I appreciated, because I thought the whole thing was a bit funny too.
Purged from the rolls
As it turns out I was purged due to ina…
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inanotherplace
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·witchyrichy@gmail.com·best 0.92
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I have been seeing lots of fun collages of book covers showing what people read during the month and decided I needed to make one for July. Not surprisingly, I headed to Canva where I found a plethora of reading tracker templates. They all made it easy to copy, paste and resize the book covers … Continue reading July Reading →
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PaseoBaggage - Blaugust 2026
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Some may consider this to be controversial, but here goes: I don't really care for the Beatles. I am not denying their influence. Their music just never really resonated with me. I don't love them and I don't hate them. I can't remember the last time I heard a Beatles song. I can remember one time the Beatles were played in my music class.
Love Me Do by The Beatles
I had to be in elementary school at the time. I went to a Catholic school run by the church my family attended every Sunday. The mus…
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Wry Writer
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It’s customary for participants to write an introduction, mostly for new readers rather than for those who are regulars to this blog. But, either way, I hope you find it interesting, if not, funny. So, for new readers to this blog, here we go:
I’m a viviparous mammalian, carbon-based biped.
I’ve been a military analyst, air traffic controller, and a book and magazine editor.
And yes, I still love reading. I used to read mostly scifi and fantasy but over the years have diversified into crime fict…
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A parenthetical departure
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In The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too), Hannah writes:
When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall.
Reading this reminded me of the things I believed as a child...
2 days, 14 hours ago
I was terrified of swallowing seeds because I believed they would grow in my stomach and sprout through my head. I also scrunched up my face whenever someone blew dandelion…
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Kevin Cunningham - @dolearning
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I write a lot of courses - in-person courses, video courses, written courses - all of them are different and requiring different things but there are some underlying principles flow through them all. When I trained as a teacher, this was referred to as instructional design. Instructional design is the process of turning learning goals into structured sequences of tasks, content and practice. The aim is to help someone be able to reliably reproduce the skill.
While my first career of teaching mat…
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Academic Aesthetic
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·Aaron·best 0.90
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(This is my third post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
The very first post I ever made on this blog was about the Artchive, a still-running site where you can find countless fine art images by famous artists. When I made that I was halfway through my first year as an elementary art teacher (after 4 years of teaching high school) and in the process of getting my graduate degree.
That post – this whole website, actually – was part of that degree, as we had to…
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Aneesh Sathe
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This essay was super fun to write. Thinking about how to keep your thoughts interesting in the age of AI. Nakatomi Drift
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Dear Angel,
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In 2026, I lost several people who mattered deeply to me. The year seemed determined to make a procession of loss. One was a dear friend who had blogged faithfully since 2009; returning to the form is my way of meeting them again in a place they loved and never quite left. So, here I am.
I suppose I should probably begin with the headline: I am London-bound for graduate school.
There was an image circulating on Bluesky of a woman delivering what I can only assume was a college lecture. Behind he…
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inanotherplace
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·witchyrichy@gmail.com·best 0.90
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Earlier this week at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, the State Department showed a map of Africa with six countries highlighted. Each country was identified incorrectly along with the funding amounts. Reuters suggested it was created with OpenAI tools; the State Department took “full responsibility” and blamed a “team member.” At least, … Continue reading Basic Geography →
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Kevin Cunningham - @dolearning
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As an educator and life-long learner, I've thought a lot about how to capture what I am learning and craft it into something useful. I've dug deep on PKM, note taking and ways to allow the ideas I come across to interact with each other.
I've been reading and following along with the work of Linus over at thesephist.com for a while now and this post is an attempt to follow his train of thought shared in posts from 2021 to 2025.
Stage 1: Personal knowledge tools, pre-LLM (2021)
I first came acros…
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theTangentSpace
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A weekly digest? But it’s been over a month!
Happenings
I’m broken up from school for the year.
I’ve been working on an extra-curricular project for some of my top students for next year. A couple of years back I did something similar with a small group and it was a lot of fun and quite inspiring for them. A lot of work though. This time, I’m going to try and teach them some elementary group theory. It should be nice as you can get fairly hands-on with this one. The key will be lots of examples…
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Academic Aesthetic
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·Aaron·best 1.00
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(This is one of a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
Russell T. Warne has an article over on Education Next about the Gifted (or as some districts call it, “Talented & Gifted,” or “TAG”) program and some of its flaws. This isn’t a summary of the article, I’m just using that as a jumping off point.
I’d like to think I know a bit about the Gifted program. In 5th grade I was labeled Gifted and later I became both a TAG teacher and coordinator. I’ve had the small desk,…