I can't say I had any plans to do the Community Builder thing for Blaugust this year. The very fact that I'm calling it "the Community Builder thing" suggests a distinct lack of empathy with the concept. I'm not a great one for achievements or badges or titles, although I do quite like a title in a game. I'm not that struck on socializing either although I'd say I was social enough. Emphasis on "enough". Just enough. Not more. One thing I do like, though, is talking about myself. And another is talking about blogging. One of the biggest attractions of Blaugust for me is that it offers an opportunity to do both. Or perhaps not so much an opportunity as a license. Of course, I shouldn't really need a license to blog about whatever I want. The longer I blog and the more Blaugusts I endure - Enjoy! I meant enjoy! - the more I lean into the mantra: your blog is your blog. When you're there, no-one can tell you what to write or how to write it. Your blog: your rules. If that's how it works, though, I could blog about blogging every time I get the fancy, couldn't I? I could write about AI, a topic that fascinates me more, the more difficult it becomes to talk about without getting blocked or unfollowed. I could put up a music post every day for a month or write about nothing but the single game I was playing, every day, even if it was a game no-one else was ever going to find remotely interesting. Okay, that last one I have done. More than a few times. But you have an audience, don't you? And a responsibility to the readers. I suspect almost every blogger with a publicly visible blog feels that, at least a little. Even if they're not convinced anyone is reading. But they might be... As the blogging years drift by, though, I feel more and more keenly that the person I'm writing for is me. I love comments and I love interactions between blogs, bouncing off other bloggers, echoing or riposting their posts, leaving comments scattered everywhere, the way Beryl leaves her toys around the house. But if all that went away, I'd most likely still write a post most days, even if I knew the only one reading it was going to be me. Even if it was offline, although then I guess it would just be a journal and I'm damned if I'm going start journaling. A small fraction of the whole. As time goes on, I find I have less and less interest in attracting new readers or sending my words out to be found by the world. Instead, I have fantasies about taking the blog private; sending invitations to everyone who's ever left a comment and an email address so they can carry on reading if they want to, letting it be known to the select readership that gets me that I'm open to referrals, should they know of anyone that might like to join the private club. Then closing the doors. I guess it's a fantasy. But Blogger does, in fact, offer that as an option. Or it did when I started this blog sixteen years ago. And I considered taking that option, very seriously, before finally opting to let my words be seen by anyone who cared to look. OMG! He's got to the point! And after less than a dozen paragraphs! That might be some kind of record. Inventory Full is my first blog. It's my only blog. So far, anyway. I thought about starting a blog maybe as early as 2009. By then I'd been reading other people's blogs for two or three years and I'd reached the point where the comments I left on some of them were so frequent and so lengthy it was starting to get awkward. I wasn't the only one. I remember Tobold tetchily suggesting to Nils, who seemed to write more in the comments some days than Tobold wrote in his posts, that perhaps Nils might think of starting a blog of his own. Nils did and his blog became quite popular for a while. It certainly used to send me a lot of traffic in the early days. It's gone now. But Tobold's blog is still here. Tobold's like the weather. He's always here. After a few months thinking about it, I looked into the options, which at that time seemed to be Blogger or WordPress. There were others but I forget the names. I only seriously considered the big two. I made accounts with both. I still have the WP account, which is very handy for commenting on WP blogs, but I've never used it for blogging. I set up a test blog on Blogger and published a Proof of Concept post on February 5 2010. Then I did nothing with it for a year and a half. I'm fairly sure the main reason I prevaricated so long was the usual newbie blogger's fear of Bad Things Happening if I did. Actually, you don't hear it mentioned so much these days but back then and certainly into the days of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, one of the more commonly expressed reasons for not starting a blog was that the internet was full of horrible people who would come to your comments section and kick virtual sand in your face. And it does happen. Probably quite often if you post things that are likely to annoy unpleasant people. I get the odd snarky comment and a few extremely odd ones, now and then. One or two people have felt it necessary to flounce out and make sure everyone sees them go. But mostly, for most bloggers, it's never an issue. In fact, as most bloggers would probably be only to quick to tell you, the real buzzkill of blogging isn't the snark and spite in the comment thread, it's the total silence. Comments of any kind, especially when you're starting out, are rare. Eventually, I managed to convince myself it was worth the risk. If it all went horribly wrong I could just stop, anyway, couldn't I? On July 30 2011 I published my first proper post. Looking back on it now, it's astonishing how much of a template it is for the 3,674 and counting that followed. That first post was called "My Bag", which is the title of a song by Lloyd Cole. I linked to the song in first line of the post. And now here I am, linking to it again. The next four posts, which was as many as I wrote in the whole of August back then, so that was something that didn't set a pattern, all used either the names of songs or song lyrics for their titles. At one point in the run, I think I went for several years using nothing else, to the point where I had to do quarterly posts explaining the references and linking the songs. It got entirely out of hand for a while... That first post was about the game I was mainly playing at the time, which happened to be Rift. It was about the inventory system, something with which I was obsessed. I named the blog Inventory Full and the first post was called My Bag. You do the psychological evaluation. The tone of that first post is conversational, not to say chatty. It links out to another blogger, who just happens to be Tobold, the very same blogger I mentioned earlier. Good old Tobold. As I said, he's always with us. And never with us because Tobold never leaves comments anywhere. He does, or did, link to other bloggers so he's not completely outside the social envelope of the blogosphere but he doesn't join in events like Blaugust or even mention them. Like the cheese, he stands alone. Tobold didn't leave a comment on my first post but someone did. I don't think I realized at the time how unlikely that was. I'd love to name-check whoever left it now, a decade and a half later, but I can't because whoever it was chose to be anonymous. Many blogs, possibly most blogs, don't allow anonymous commenting. I haven't always allowed it myself and I'm frequently on the verge of disabling it again. I only enabled it a few years back because commenting on Blogger had become so difficult people were complaining they couldn't get their comments to appear. Well, when they managed to get one to work, they were... That first post was just under 750 words long. Short by my current standards but already setting a marker. I do not write short posts. I wish I could. I have tried. I just love the sound of my own voice too much. Image for illustration purposes only. It was illustrated, of course. Badly illustrated, I'll give you that, but there were pictures. There have always been pictures on this blog and there always will be. In fact, the only time there ever haven't been pictures is when I wanted to make a point by leaving them out because to me, a post without pictures is thin gruel. Looking at that first post, the background is the same darkish blue I've always used. The banner is the same picture of my pet cat from the EverQuest II beta. The sidebar is the same as it is now, unchanged. Well, of course it is! When you change any of that, Blogger changes it for every post there ever was. All your old pages look like all your old new pages, outside of the posts themselves, which stay the same. Or I think they do. Hard to tell, because in my case nothing ever has changed. In the lifetime of the blog I've only ever changed the layout once. And that was only to get wider margins. A lot of bloggers fiddle with the settings and swap the themes every so often, just to keep things fresh or because they get bored. But here's the thing. I got my first blog just how I wanted it almost from the start. Other than a couple of tweaks, I've never felt the urge to change anything about how it looks. About the only major difference I can see between those early posts and the rest is that I used to think it was fine to jump straight to the text without a header image. It's not, of course. I was so callow, then! I wonder when I learned better? Over the years, the posts have gotten longer. Sometimes a lot longer. The range of topics has expanded. It was all MMORPGs around here once. Now it hardly ever is. There have been experiments in style and I've gone through fads and phases that would almost qualify as Eras if I was young enough to get away with using that buzzword unironically. But basically it's the same blog. I write long, rambling blog posts about gaming, music and popular culture and I do it more days than I don't. I've often thought about starting a second blog, most likely focusing on music, but in the end I always come back to the benefits of keeping everything in one place. Don't lets anyone mention eggs and baskets... This, then, is my first blog. My very first blog. For now...