Blaugust 2026 is over. It wrapped up on Monday and here it is Saturday and I am finally summing up. Blaugust 2026 I used to sum up very quickly after the event. But the gap has grown. Last year I didn’t sum up at all. I was too busy. So how did Blaugust make me feel this year? Let me lay out a long winded foundation. When you decide to collect something… beer cans, bottle caps, stamps, pilot’s wings, Hallmark Christmas ornaments, or whatever… the experience tends to go through a few distinct but common stages. There is that point when you start out and maybe you have one, or a couple, or some small number of that thing, and you have a sense of how small your collection is. It is barely a collection at all and you feel like you have a long way to go to really have a collection. Then, if you persist… and sensible people probably just don’t start collections, but who among us… you will get to a point where you do have a collection. It is a small collection, small enough that you can probably lay it out before you on the kitchen table or some such if it is something like Beanie Babies or vintage Coca-Cola glassware and not, say, French automobiles. At that point storing your collection isn’t an issue. You have likely come up with some sort of ad hoc method to keep it together. Your polished rocks are all in a drawer or your baseball cards fit neatly in a shoebox. Most importantly, you probably know every piece in your collection and value them all. Sure, there are some lesser pieces in your collection, pieces you grabbed just to fill out some space or to give your collection a bit more heft. But you know even them. That is probably the prime point of having a collection, somewhere when you have a manageable and meaningful set of your thing. But there is always something else out there to covet. You want the set of those three Zeppelin airmail stamps or that first generation Professor Snape LEGO minifigure. So your collection continues to grow. The next stage is ushered in by the need to come up with a more formal storage solution. You’ll get a filing cabinet to correctly hold your poly bagged comics or some specially designed crates that will keep your vinyl LPs upright and prevent some amount of warping. At that point your collection is only viewable in segments. You probably have a section of your “favorites,” the pieces that spark joy or whatever within you, that make keep on with your collection. And then there is everything else, which starts to feel like filler or a foundation on which your prize pieces rest. They mark you as a serious collector even if you don’t really think about swaths of your collection, rarely look at them, and may even have forgotten about bits of it. I am not even going to get into the whole “dupes in your collection” phenomena. That way lies madness. I’ll also leave out when a family member learns about your collection and starts buying you bulk semi-related crap. But I might be getting too deep into the metaphor. This is all just a metaphor after all. It is a metaphor for how I feel about Blaugust this year. There were a lot of blogs this year. 170 or so signed up officially. More still just used the hash tag on social media. I personally visited every single site that signed up… once I fixed some URLs. Seriously people, would it kill you to prepend “https” when you fill out the form? Or get your URL even mostly correct? Also, while we’re on the form, the name of your blog… and this will surprise some of you… is the name of your freaking blog and not the platform which you have chosen to host it. I am looking at those of you who use Bear Blog as a platform specifically. What is it with you? Anyway, back to the metaphor… that is a lot of blogs. Too many blogs for me to “know” even half of them. There is apparently a Dunbar’s number for blogs. Or maybe I am just old and my brain cannot ingest that many new web sites in a single month. Yes, old man yells at cloud. Here we are. Where I live now… The number of blogs feels like the Blaugust “collection” has grown to the point where we need a storage solution or better method of organization. A long list of blog links no longer suffices. 170 is not a manageable or meaningful list. How to even start to organize? Given the experience with filling out the form… also, if you have two blogs just do an entry for each so you don’t break my concatenation script… asking people to self organize is a futile effort. Sure, the initial classification pass would be easy. There are half a dozen blogs who signed up who did not post and, in a couple of cases, clearly had no intention to do so. If you signed up with a web site that was just your resume, you’ve sent a clear message about your actual intent. And it there is no site at the link provided… well, there is that problem with people filling out forms again. After that though it gets a bit stickier. Who is going to make the call? I certainly do not want to be the adjudicator of classifications, splitting the baby between tech blogs and gaming blogs, weighing which topic is really the key to your writing and what is a mere side journey. Nor do I want to be judged by somebody else. I have a problem with petty authority and do tend to rebel against it. You should of seen me when my wife and I had to deal with a homeowners association. I was glad to move to the unregulated wild west of Silicon Valley, and the association was no doubt happy to see me go. What to do? Probably nothing. One of the tricks of life is learning when doing something is probably counter productive. The current system may not be ideal, but the work required to get “better,” for whatever definition of “better” you choose, is greater than the value that could be achieved. Or such is my opinion. I think we might be best off just getting better descriptions on the sign up form, adding in things like “one site per entry” and “please enter your site address as https://site.tld” and “the name of your blog and not the host platform” to the process. It won’t work. People will enter whatever they feel like. I know. I do web apps for the state and state workers will enter the most extraordinary things given an open text field. I amuse myself some afternoons by just perusing what they write when some menu has an “other” option and a free text field to allow them to explain their choice. I swear, we should have never come down out of the trees. I mean, look at how our rather mild rule on AI went this year. People were butt hurt on both sides of the equation making the whole running of the event feel like a thankless job. If people can’t be happy about that nobody is going to stand for being categorized in some arbitrary fashion. Or such is my gut response to the idea. Meanwhile, I should be getting to a point somewhere eventually I hope. Let me give it a shot. Overall this post is mostly me pining for the early days of the event, when there were 40 to 50 video game blogs and most of them were already part of the neighborhood in our little corner of the web and we might get a few blogs we didn’t know wandering in and a few more that just started up and we could bounce around weekly topics and it felt like… dare I say it… a community. In a last minute attempt at community, I’ll pause for a moment to link out to some other summaries of the event, most of which are far more upbeat than I am. Nerd Girl Thoughts – Blaugust 2026 In Review (Review and Awards) Chasing Dings – Blaugust 2026 Retrospective End Game Viable – Stumbling Over the Blaugust Finish Line Nerdy Bookahs – Looking Back at My Blaugust Month Inventory Full – Get Thee Behind Me, Blaugust! Kelly Adams – Blaugust 2026 results Notes by JCProbably – Blaugust Got Me Out of My Cave Joel Chrono – Thoughts on Blaugust 2026 The Friendly Necromancer – My Blaugust 2026 Post-Mortem Kay Talks Games – Some Thoughts on Blaugust 2026 Also, if you have opinions about the event, there is a survey up for you. Contains Moderate Peril – Blaugust 2026 Participant Survey Anyway, I felt somewhat detached from this years event overall. Some of that is on me. I didn’t try all that hard, even if I did visit every single blog on the list. But then there is the list. 179 is a lot of blogs to pay attention to. Or, to bring it back to the overlong metaphor at the top of the post, our Blaugust collection has grown to the point that I cannot keep track of it all. Still, here we are. My collection, let me show you them… in alphabetical order: 20ilyApril 26g 392ms 82MHz A 3D Blog for a 3D World A parenthetical departure Academic Aesthetic Aeish World Neocities Agnes the Alien’s blog Alessandro Cuzzocrea Alex’s Review Corner An Archaeopteryx aneeshsathe.com annonimax Aster’s Asterisms Axxuy’s Internet Notebook Aywren’s Nook bavatuesdays Ben Ramsey Beyond Tannhauser Gate Beyond the Horizon Biggus Bloggus Blog – 鳥啼く頃に blog.x2600.cc BongoTwisty Brennan.day BurgeonLab Byte Vortex Casual Aggro Chasing Dings! ChristiRichards.com Christopherhimes.com clandestini coffee spills ComradeNerdy Blog Contains Moderate Peril Cubic Creativity Dave Henry Blog Dear Angel devz.cl diary.lollyrots.com Divergent Rays Dozenial Dragons Emma Juettner’s Blog Endgame Viable everwake.net fluidline.neocities.org Fragmentary From the keyboard of Dr Jan fyr.io GamerLady P Blog Gamers Esoteric Games and Geekery Gaudete Theology Geek on a Harley Graphiya’s Garden gRegorLove.com Gridranger’s blog hamatti.org Heart Soul Machine I Can’t Think of a Name for this Website In An Age inanotherplace inconsistent.software Indiecator Inventory Full It’s Just This Little Chromium Switch Here JAG’s Workshop Jak2k’s Website Joelchrono’s Blog K-Squared Ramblings Kai Gulliksen Kay Talks Games Kayriene Kedara keeroks space Kevin Cunningham Knifesedge Blogs KVibber.com Lameazoid.com Law Contents Lost Letters Lucky Instar Lyons in Beta lysurps Mailvaltar Many Welps Mar Qaroll’s The Marrowing! Matt’s Blog Medium Michael Harley michcia’s notes MMO Casual MMO One Night MogBlog msfjarvis.dev Musings Over Pints and Coffee muttthecowcat Nerd Girl Thoughts Nerdy Bookahs Newsonaut Noisy Deadlines NomadWarMachine nosrednayduj not all those who wander are lost Notes by JCProbably Nullish object dot computer Off the Top, OrbitalMartian owlblog Parallel Spirals PaseoBaggage Personal InfoCloud Pinkway Point, Click, Repeat Portrait of a…. Pour The Coffee Pretend Typewriter prin.lu prry puxped’s station Quail Creations Quinn Daedal – Blog rachonaut re: nyman Riel’s Nest Rishi Dass Robida.net ROSKA’S REVERIE Rukinations Ryan Patrick Randall Sal’s Select * From Life Shadowz Abstract Gaming Blog Shannon Kay’s Blog Sheri42.net Small Good Things Srijan’s Home SweaterPockets Syl’s Blog Sylvia’s Studio Tabitha TAGN Tantek Çelik Taxodium Taylor film crit The Friendly Necromancer The Ghastly Mirror The Maker Dad theTangentSpace thethinkingboard ThinkRoot thiskurt’s blog Through Wolfy’s Eyes Toby Geeks Out tommyeveryday Troy Press Ubergeek Kelly’s World Varun Barad WCRobinson West Karana What the Fran Why I Game with words, wonder Words of the AgingGamer Words Under My Name words, essays, and more Wry Writer youtherthyf’s salon Zachary Kai Zelibeli コーポ雪原 スナックエルベ もうすぐ33歳 わくパンの思考のかけら 世界のねじを巻くブログ 伏枥之间 素生 Thanks to those who organized this year’s event. It can be considerable work with little reward most of the time.