Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of Blaugust! Or is that too aggressive? How about Blaugust, come she will? No, I think I might have used that one before. After a while it gets hard to remember. But here we are again. And how many of us are there this time? Let me see if I can find the list. You'll have to excuse me a moment. Usually I'd have sorted all this out in advance but the weather's been so lovely and there's been so much else to do... Aha! that took a minute but here we go, courtesy of Wilhelm's trusty Formatted HTML List. If you'd like to add all of these blogs - there are ninety-six at time of writing - to your RSS feed, Owls has an OPML list too. Both of those invaluable resources will, I'm sure, be kept updated as the month rolls by. Last year we had quite a lot of latecomers so it's worth checking every so often to see who else has thrown themselves onboard. I don't plan on updating this post to reflect any further additions (Or subtractions...) and I am not going to add all the new blogs to my blog roll, mostly because it's insanely long already. If any of the newcomers turn out to be particularly to my taste, though, I'll be adding those at some stage. And that's a good opportunity to mention last year, when we had I think it was 178 people participating by the end. I haven't fact-checked that number but it's stuck in my memory for some reason. It was a lot, anyway. I wrote a post at the end of the event naming a round dozen of my favorite new discoveries from the Class of '25. Of those twelve, eight are still active in my feeds. A couple stopped posting and I dropped a couple more over this and that along the way. I think the only one that's returned for another round this year, though, is Axxuy. Quite a high bounce rate, that. (Notes by JC Probably just re-upped since I posted this so that's two!) I realize now (And only now...) that despite having enjoyed those eight blogs for a whole year, I never added any of them to my blog roll. I might have thought about it right at the start but I wouldn't dignify it by calling it a conscious choice. It was almost certainly laziness. Well, I'm going to correct that oversight now. Apologies to everyone who might have had the traffic for the last twelve months, such as it would have been. Talk among yourselves for a bit while I go add them all. It's a fiddly job. You've got time to make a coffee. And drink it. And wash up. There! All done. I think a year is altogether too long to decide on which blogs ought to have a permanent place in the sidebar but maybe it does no harm to allow a settling-in period. That is what Blaugust is for, though. Or it's one side of the coin. We talk a lot every year about the role the event plays in encouraging people to start a blog or dust off an old one or just find ways to enjoy posting more often but we don't always say as much about what a great opportunity it is to find new blogs to read. Blogs are like games in one very important way. It takes a lot more time and effort to create and maintain the content than it does to consume it. On average, every post here probably takes me about two or three hours. Sometimes I knock one off in an hour but sometimes it takes all day. Even the longest posts (Hi, Kaylriene! Hi, Jeromai!) probably only takes me ten or fifteen minutes to read. Most take more like two or three. As a writer, one post a day is enough. As a reader, I can get through a lot of blog posts in a day. Dozens. Easily. Blaugust is an opportunity to deepen your resource pool as a reader and also to expand your range. Most of the dozen blogs I stuck with after last year I would never have known about without Blaugust. And my reading year would have been poorer without all of them. That said, I would warn against trying to read everything. Again, veterans and mentors always make a point of warning newer bloggers not to try to do too much, not to over-extend themselves trying to blog every day if they're not feeling it, to pace themselves, allow for breaks and pauses, not to burn so hard and fast they burn out before the month is over. And the same applies to readers. I found last year's Blaugust exhausting. Not as a writer - as a reader. We had the biggest intake ever and at the start, as happens every time, nearly everyone was posting every day. I said I could get through dozens of posts a day. By that I meant maybe two or three dozen. Not a gross! Things had calmed down a lot by the middle of the month as people either dropped out or reduced their posting frequency as they realized they weren't going to make 31 posts after all. It always happens. But for me, and from what I read as people summed up after it was all over, for a few others too, by then the damage had been done. I ended up skipping a lot because I'd burned myself out as a reader, trying to read everything in the first week or two. This year I'll take my own advice and pace myself. I'll check everyone out, eventually, but there's no need to read every single post every day, let alone to comment on them all. All the older posts from any blog that really sings to me will still be there when I come to it. I'll go back and read those with pleasure. And maybe add them to the blog roll later still. These things you learn, over time. Over a long time, apparently, because I'm only figuring all this out now and I've been doing this a while now. Just don't try to do everything all at once, that's what I'm saying. And that's enough of a pre-amble. Let's have the list and then I'm done. The sun's out, it's another beautiful day and there are other things to do than write blog posts. I won't say better things... Contains Moderate Peril not all those who wander are lost hamatti.org Shadowz Abstract Gaming Blog Troy Press Gaudete Theology Words Under My Name Cubic Creativity Endgame Viable Inventory Full Varun Barad TAGN Through Wolfy's Eyes Gamers Esoteric Byte Vortex Chasing Dings! GamerLady P Blog owlblog Zelibeli Mar Qaroll's The Marrowing! Taylor film crit Aywren's Nook MMO Casual Mailvaltar Quail Creations An Archaeopteryx inconsistent.software Matt's Blog Nerdy Bookahs Dave Henry Blog Indiecator fluidline.neocities.org Lameazoid.com I Can't Think of a Name for this Website Why I Game Gridranger's blog MogBlog 世界のねじを巻くブログ MMO One Night Ubergeek Kelly's World Words of the AgingGamer Geek on a Harley Portrait of a.... Ben Ramsey Lucky Instar Knifesedge Blogs Many Welps coffee spills Kay Talks Games Kayriene The Ghastly Mirror Alex's Review Corner Kedara Ryan Patrick Randall Christopherhimes.com The Maker Dad Lyons in Beta WCRobinson keeroks space theTangentSpace BongoTwisty 82MHz Riel's Nest Aster's Asterisms Emma Juettner's Blog What the Fran Taxodium Quinn Daedal - Blog Academic Aesthetic bearblog NomadWarMachine Nerd Girl Thoughts Axxuy's Internet Notebook Pinkway 素生 Games and Geekery In An Age ThinkRoot Point, Click, Repeat もうすぐ33歳 note (large blog platform) The Friendly Necromancer Select * From Life Fragmentary 伏枥之间 ComradeNerdy Blog Brennan.day ChristiRichards.com fyr.io KVibber.com K-Squared Ramblings わくパンの思考のかけら Off the Top, Personal InfoCloud Medium clandestini michcia's notes Tabitha OrbitalMartian コーポ雪原 26g Kai Gulliksen 392ms re: nyman Noisy Deadlines BurgeonLab Beyond the Horizon Notes by JCProbably SweaterPockets