This has been posted as part of Blaugust 2026, but the question on everyones lips is y tho? It's early days in Blaugust, and I have a few posts building in the background but they're not ready yet so I am breaking the emergency glass and am going to take a swing at the first Blaugust Weekly Prompt. What made you decide to do Blaugust this year, and what are your personal goals? I mentioned Blaugust back in Scrap #7 last year but didn't participate. I had considered it at the time, I even had a rough plan, but before I knew it September had rolled around. I've seen some other events since but have convinced myself that I didn't have the time or energy to commit to anything consistent. This time around, though, a toot by @theTangentSpace fell in my face at the perfect time; I wanted to write something, I missed tinkering with this site, and I felt guilty about my recent lack of effort with this space and the non-corporate web at large. I had a little resurgence here earlier in the year, but that toot hit my eyeballs as I was contemplating things. I thought about it for a moment and decided it would be a great idea to take part, to build some momentum (again?) and return to this site, to tend to this web garden - something that brings me a strange sense of calm. I promptly joined the discord in preparation for a few evenings of talking with the community and planning the month out. Go me! Alas, reality met my plan and blew past it. Press F to pay respects. Before I knew it, it was the evening of the 31st of July and I hadn't planned anything. Time had slipped through my fingers, as it is wont to do, and left me at the last minute with no homework to hand in. I would have thrown my hands skyward and said Pah, fuck it. Maybe next year. but some inner kernel of need overrode my instinctive reaction and instead I found myself whipping out the laptop I use for this site and threw together the Blaugust post. I noticed I also had a draft post I have been thinking about a lot recently, which only needed a quick editing pass and some finishing touches, so I took the opportunity to do that and ended up with two posts on the same day. Thus begun my Blaugust endeavour. As for personal goals? I have two. The first, and most important, is to re-immerse myself back into the web. I read stuff, I check out a bunch of feeds, and I am hanging around the 32bit.cafe discord a whole bunch (though not enough!) BUT. My life is more consumed by work. I've let it take over. A lot. Too much. I'm spending more time reading books to try and compensate, but I am sacrificing energy from other things that aren't work to do that. This is ass-backwards. I hope to use Blaugust to stoke the fyr (heh) a little, bring this place back into focus, to return me to my path. Which brings me onto goal two. The second reason is dependant on the first succeeding, and work not being overbearing, which is in my control but I do struggle with. So, I read a bunch of web serials, like The Wandering Inn and Super Supportive, authors who pump out consistently (both quality and wordcount). I've also been reading some bloggers who post very frequently. People like Brennan and James and others (many of whom are the cool folk who hang out in the 32bit cafe discourse and/or discord!) and I am inspired by each of them. I may not have the language chops, the ability to weave words, like Brennan and James and countless others do, but I want to try. I want to be a blogger with a post cadence, like the Real Bloggers (tm) y'know? These authors and writers have a talent for wordsmithing, and I want to walk that path. I want to create works of fiction, weave wonderous worlds in peoples imaginations, take readers on journeys, or change their mind on topics important to me. I know that one month of posting won't get me there, it'll take a long time for habits to form. It'll also take time for me to construct those posts, with effort going into each, researching topics I know nothing about and adding my voice to whatever takes my fancy at the time. Energy I tell myself I don't have right now, except, fuck that, I can make the time. I can let something else slide a little and re-assert family and me as the dominant forces in my life, instead of... whatever else. I honestly don't expect this Blaugust to be The One Where I Break Through, but I'll keep trying. With every attempt I'll learn something, each post is one post closer to being a Real Blogger. It won't happen quickly, but I think it can happen eventually. I just have to allocate my energy appropriately and not let the chaos of work overflow my limited capacity and drain me before I've even gotten home in the evening. Did you start preparing for Blaugust before the August 1st start date? If so, what did you do ahead of time to make sure you'd stay on track? Whoops, I kinda answered this already! I had plans in my brain, but my brain is a little bit like a... not a sieve, imagine instead an open-ended tube. Put something in one side and it'll fall out the other side darn quick and boom I've forgotten whatever that thing was. Those little seeds of ideas or lightbulb moments that make a blog post, the inspiration you glean when you're AFK, they flit by me and end up unrecorded at best, and likely forgotten entirely, but I have been trying to find a way to fix this. I have an app to test out to help me with the noting ideas and drafting posts when I'm not at my laptop. I asked in the Blaugust discord the other day how people track their ideas and stuff. Hopefully next time around (or before then because posting frequently is going to work out this time, yeah?) I'll have a proper system in place, something tried and tested! For now, I am writing these things down using... discord. Yeah, yeah, I know. But it actually works pretty okay for short stuff? I have a private server, with a Forum. Each post into the forum is a blog post idea, which I'll make a quick note describing it, or I'll hash out some concepts, or even draft a whole post there. I can add files, use followup comments, and talk to future me (who I hear is super smart) and remind him about things. It even has a dark mode, I tried to do this with Proton Docs but it blinded me when I opened my Ideas file at night in bed. That was a shocker. Do you remember how you heard about Blaugust for the first time? Nope! It was a few years ago though. It would have either been on Mastodon before the event, or reading blog posts preparing for it or during it! This year, @theTangentSpace takes responsibility for reminding me that it was nearly Blaugst-o'clock, as mentioned previously. Thanks, Sam! If this isn't your first Blaugust, what keeps you coming back to do this year after year? This is my first, but I hope to return next year! Community Builder Bonus Prompt: Who are the Blaugust bloggers who you keep reading all year round? I'm following the discord pretty closely, and there's loads of gaming bloggers out there who I've never come across before. Gaming-oriented blog posts (or reviews) is something I would like to get in to, so after about a week or so I'll pluck out a bunch of random blogs that are participating and start trawling through their posts. If I remember, I'll update this answer then with any who make it to my feed reader! In closing Look, I've done another post! That's five in four days, not bad eh? Yes I am counting July 31st. Will the momentum continue? We'll see. I hope so. In the mean time, feel free to let me know what your blogging process looks like, in particular at the idea/concept stage - what tools do you use when AFK to not forget those genius insights? Perhaps write this stuff down next week though, as it's one of the writing prompts in Blaugust Week two! Maybe hit me up when you post it though. EOF