It's Week Four of Blaugust and we're into Staying Motivated Week. Krikket was kind enough to post a list of questions back when all this started and I think I'm just going to answer them. Sounds like that'll just take a lowish level of motivation, which is about as much as I can summon up today. Here they are in bullet point format: What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible? What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be? What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals? What drives you to blog? Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not? How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall? Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them! You know what? I'm going to replace those bullet points with numbers. What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible? What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be? What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals? What drives you to blog? Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not? How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall? Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them! Is that better? I think it makes the whole thing look more official, don't you? 1. What tricks do you use to keep yourself motivated when something feels impossible? Well, one thing I do is mess around with the form to keep myself amused. Like, I might take a set of questions, copy them, paste them, look at them and think "Those would be easier to answer if they were numbered." Which, obviously, they wouldn't, so that's an affectation. Then I'd cut and paste them a second time and change the bullet points to numbers. And then I'd write something about how that's what I'd done, as if it mattered. It's completely pointless but it's fun. Doing things like Sidebars, Footnotes and Edits, having an imaginary conversation with myself or the imagined reader, interrupting the flow, using tenses that don't seem to sit well together and figuring out how to make them work grammatically, getting all meta and self-referential and generally arsing about. All those keep me motivated. Also, ignoring the question I've been asked and answering the one I thought I'd been asked or that I wished I'd been asked. That's a good one. And writing the post that wants to be written instead of the post I thought I wanted to write. Never be afraid to take a hard turn into something you hadn't planned to post about. That's actually a serious point, that last one. Look, I've highlighted it to make it stand out, so it must be. Also, playing around with the fonts and the colors is another good one. I don't do that often enough. As for tricks, when something other than writing a post feels impossible, I don't know! What d'you think this is? Therapy? 2. What are your blogging goals? Do you think participating in Blaugust is getting you closer to where you want be? Hmm. Do I have blogging goals? I'm not at all sure that I do. I think I had some, once. I probably started out hoping that someone would read what I posted and leave a comment. And then that happened and for a while I hoped more people would read and comment. And that happened. And then I kind of stopped caring so much about al of that and instead what I mostly hoped was that the same people who were already reading and commenting wouldn't stop. Which has mostly happened although if I go back and look at comments of years past, it's unsettling how many regulars just disappear. Luckily, new ones appear to take their place. Sometimes. As far as all of that goes, Blaugust is, if anything, counterproductive to my goals. I've said before that while I don't trust any of the stats I get from Google and Blogger, they can at least be compared against themselves for consistency and what they tell me every year is that fewer people seem to look at this blog during Blaugust than at almost any other time. I'm not saying it's my participation that causes it so much as that, when Blaugust comes around, there are more posts for everyone to read and attention gets stretched thin. I find myself reading more widely but less deeply. I'm skim-reading posts on blogs I normally read in full and slipping posts on blogs I usually skim. I bet a lot of other people are, too. You might think that any loss of attention from regular readers would be more than made up for by the influx of new ones from all those extra Blaugust blogs but I get the strong feeling almost none of those bloggers pay attention to this blog at all. Certainly few of them leave comments, this year or any year. And I suspect, from things they say one their own blogs, that they don't much care for the more traditional, long-form, comment-enabled gaming blogs. Why should they? It's just a bunch of old people, posting about old-people stuff, in an old-people sort of way. So, no, I don't think participating in Blaugust is getting me much closer to where I want to be but it would be a lot easier to tell for sure if I had any idea where that was. Which I don't. Not really. I guess I mostly just want to stay where I am and not go anywhere in particular. 3. What do you think you’ll get out of completing your Blaugust goals? Didn't we just cover that in the last question? I haven't got any... oh, wait! Blaugust goals. Not blogging goals. Geez. Good thing this isn't an exam. Remember how the teachers always used to say the most important thing is to read the question? Okay then. Blaugust goals. Well, I started out saying I wasn't going to aim for 31 posts, which is exactly what I said last year, and then, again just like last year, I ended up doing precisely that. I've posted every day so far and I've made some considerable efforts to do do it, too. Apparently I can give advice about taking it easy and not getting wrapped up in hitting the numbers but I'm completely incapable of following it. As if that's news. If we accept that 31 posts is a goal, even though I said it wasn't, (And we should because by their actions, not by their words, shall ye know them (Which sounds like a quote because of the archaic way I phrased it, with a "ye" even, but in fact I just made it up...)) then I guess I'll get the knowledge that, once again, I've proved I can stick at a pointless task for as long as it takes to finish it, even if I've said I wasn't going to do it in the first place. Go me! If I'd said up front that I was going to post 31 times, I guess it would be a data point towards my being able to keep a promise, stick to a plan and generally do what I say I'll do.All of which would be good things. But since I specifically said I wasn't going to do that, I guess it suggests I can't be trusted. In fact, if I was going to complete my Blaugust goal, (I still have a week to go so let's not tally the hens just yet.) I'd need to make sure there's at least one day in what's left of August when I don't post anything. Then I' really would have completed my only goal. But what would I get out of that? I bet I'd be really annoyed with myself. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get anything positive out of it. So I'm going to try not to do it. Hit my goal by missing a post, that is. Was that not clear? 4. What drives you to blog? Ooh! An easy one! A love of the sound of my own voice, obviously. That, plus an innate ability to sit in front of a keyboard and have words spew out of my fingertips without even thinking about it. If I found any of this hard, do you think I'd do it? Half the posts on this blog are about how much I hate a challenge. I like things that are easy and blogging is really, really easy. Not blogging would be a lot harder. As for why I blog rather than, say, keep a diary or write in a journal, it's much the same reason: it's easy. Blogger does most of the work for me. I just have to write the words and stick in the pictures and it's a lot easier to do in Blogger than it would be writing it all out longhand and pasting the pictures into a scrapbook. Plus I like getting comments and chatting to people about what I've written and what they've written. There's a social element. You don't get that with a diary or a journal. Also, a blog is a diary and a journal, so it's a threefer. 5. Are you happy with your Blaugust so far? If so, why? If not, why not? Hmm. Am I happy with my Blaugust? My Blaugust? I guess so, if by that we mean what I've done. I've lied to myself about not intending to post 31 times but I didn't believe my own lies so that's good. I've posted two dozen times in two dozen days, so that's good. I haven't posted anything I'd call desperate just to keep the streak going, so that's good. If we mean am I happy with my experience of Blaugust overall, then in Steam review terms I think I'd have to give it a "Mixed". It's certainly been better than last year, when I got quite pissed off with the whole thing for a while and finished thinking it might be the last time I bothered with it. I've also learned a few things, about Blaugust and myself, but I'd better keep those for Lessons Learned Week. I'd hate to talk out of turn. Blaugust, generally, has always been quite vexing, anyway. I'm not at all sure happiness is an emotional state I'd associate with it to begin with. Am I satisfied might be a more pertinent question. And yes, so far, I think I am. 6. How important is goal setting & reaching your goals to you overall? Back to that again? This is all getting a bit goal-oriented, isn't it? Not to say goal-obsessed. I feel I'm at risk of repeating myself, although when has that ever bothered me? I'd say in the most general terms I like to have some vague idea of what I'm trying to achieve but not much more than that. I don't do goals, in the sense of specific outcomes, other than for practical issues where it can't be avoided. For those, it's extremely important to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible because then they go away. In life, as a whole, I prioritize the completion of goals that either have to be done by a specific deadline (And I very, very rarely miss a deadline.) or by how much I don't want to do them. The more I don't want to do something that, for practical reasons, I can't get out of doing, the sooner and the faster I get it done. That's for unavoidable necessities, though. I'm very much not in the habit of inventing "personal goals". I have things I fancy doing and I do them if I remember and when I feel like it. If I don't do them, who cares? Not me, that's for sure. I'm very happy with giving up on any project at any stage if I've lost interest or if something more exciting comes along. Usually, if that happens, and it happens often, I'll never think about whatever it was again. If I do remember it at some point, I might go back and carry on or I might just think "Oh, yeah, that was a thing I was going to do. Oh, well..." and put it back in the forget-about-it box. That's a great box. If you don't have one, you should get one. 7. Did you read any posts during Blaugust (or before) that you found particularly inspirational? Share them! I do have one. I bookmarked it to use as the springboard for a post of my own and I may well write that post at some point but I'll throw in a link to it now. It's a post by Bongo Twisty, one of the few new blogs I've discovered this Blaugust that I've really enjoyed. It's called "How do you know if someone hates AI?" and it sums up my own feelings on the controversy very well indeed. Go read it. Better yet, go read the Substack post by Cedric that Bongo Twisty quotes. Cedric makes a number of excellent points about why the policing of AI in blog posts is likely to be more problematic than the AI usage itself. Worth bearing in mind for next year's Blaugust, I think. I particularly liked the bit at the end, where Cedric informs Substack of the numerous ways their side-step into the role of Internet Policeman violates his legal rights under the EU's extremely serious GDPR legislation. I have to comply with that at work and I can tell you it is not something you want to mess with. While we're on the subject, I'd suggest reading some Philip K Dick. Or Kazuo Ishiguro 's Klara and the Sun for a bit of perspective. Or maybe get one of those bags of flour you draw a face on and treat like a baby for a week. Only instead of a face, write the name of your most-hated AI on there instead. There we go. Questionnaire complete. Did I pass? Notes on AI used in this post. I had a bit of a problem with the part where I changed the bullet points to numbers. Blogger kept indenting the numbered list too much so I copy-pasted the html into Gemini and asked it to explain what was wrong, which it did. Then Gemini asked if I'd like it to re-write the html for me so it would work properly and i said I would, thanks. I copy-pasted Gemini's version into Blogger and that didn't work either so I reverted to the old version and hand-altered it according to what Gemini had said was wrong with it and that worked perfectly. Which means there's no actual AI-generated content in this post, not even in the html, but there is the faint trace of some AI advice still hanging around like a miasma. I wonder if there's an AI detector that can catch something like that? The lingering scent of an AI that passed through, leaving no digital trace? If not, maybe we'd better all just give up on the internet altogether. We're never going to be certain what's human ever again, are we? Also, I used Snapedit to remove a few bits of UI from a couple of the screenshots. But as I've said before, I'm not convinced that's real AI.