Welcome to Blaugust 2023

August 1st has arrived and the event has begun.  Blaugust is here.

Blaugust – 2023 Edition

According to the loose schedule of events, this is Welcome to Blaugust week, so I think I have ticked that box already with the title of the post.

The Blaugust Calendar

Also, I know those weeks seem to include the end of July and the start of September, but I am a purist and only acknowledge the event as being in the month of August.

While the event is off and running, it is still not too late to join in.  Five blogs slipped in while I slept last night and I had to update the back half of this post!

As always, here are the relevant links if you are interested.

• Blaugust 2023 Announcement
• Blaugust 2023 Sign Up Form (Google Doc)
• Blaugust 2023 Participant List (Google Sheet)
• Blaugust Discord Server Link
• Blaugust Prompt List
• Blaugust Media Kit Page
• Blaugust Blogchievements

I always feel like I should impart some advice about blogging as part of the event.  Surely, having done this for nearly 17 years and having pressed the “publish” button more than 6,700 times, I must have gained some wisdom.  I’ve no doubt spent by 10,000 hours doing this, I should be good at it by now, right?

My only solid bit of blogging advice is to write the blog you want to read.

If what you are doing is not for you first, then it isn’t going to be fulfilling.

Beyond that I only have my own standards, or lack thereof.  And that starts with me rather having written and hit the button than to have not written.  I start writing with a goal or a message or a destination in mind.  Sometimes I get there, often I do not… or the act of writing changes my mind on the topic as I write.

And, having written, I publish, often without very much of a read through of what I have assembled on the page.  Everything here is pretty much a first draft.

But that is the method that works for me.  I curse myself whenever I go back and read an old post, as I find no end of typos or subject verb mis-matches, or places where I clearly changed my mind on something mid-sentence, leaving something very awkward in my wake.  And sometimes I go back and fix those mistakes.  I am most likely to do so if my error changes the meaning from what I actually intended.  But often I forget or don’t bother.

The only thing I tend to regret, in the long term, is when I have not written about something, either through laziness or the fact that a bunch of other people wrote about it or that there was something else going on at the time.  I have on more than a few occasions wished I had gotten some words in on a topic, if only to measure my feelings at that moment versus how things look to me now.

But that is all blogging advice.  What about the event itself?

Well, it is what you want to make of it.  For some it will be an ongoing attempt to bang out 31 posts in 31 days.  I suspect I will be in that category, having managed it at every past Blaugust.  In fact, I am going to do double duty and have 31 posts here AND 31 posts at my other blog, EVE Online Pictures.

Granted, it is a blog, as the title suggests, dedicated to images, but I have my own internal set of standards as to what is worthy to post, and I don’t like to post similar images on consecutive days if I can avoid it, and all sorts of tiny details the bedevil my ability to simply post a screen shot there a few days a week.  And now I am going to do it 31 days in a row.

But that is my obsession and it need not be yours.

Otherwise, I might suggest that linking out to others and finding common topics to write about are always good ways to motivate yourself and become part of the community.  For example, I’ll just link out to Contains Moderate Peril for another perspective on getting into the event.  And Bhagpuss also has some ideas about the event, as well as the participants in his blogroll.  And Belghast is summing up the 2023 event launch and has his own tips.

It is as easy as that.

And, as I will do throughout the event, I am going to link out to other blogs that are joining in… though this time I am going to concentrate on just the blogs marked as new to the event this year, if not all new to blogging. (Heartless, for example, has been around off and on since forever.)  Take a moment to visit them if you can.

1. Indie Creator Hub
2. Regeneration
3. Ramble With(out) a Cause
4. The Video Game Obscura
5. Broximar
6. The Lesser Key of St. Byleth
7. Same Old Daph
8. Indie Dee
9. History Will Say This Was Just a Book Blog
10. Inconsistent Software
11. Gaming Diaries
12. Mobile MMO Review
13. Heartless Gamer
14. TIL by Isaac Wyatt
15. Calamity Jess
16. Juha-Matti Santala
17. Full Time Casual
18. KONMAI Zone
19. Lewis Luminos
20. Oh-no.ooo
21. Massack ~ Gaming, life, and misc.
22. McKenna Games
23. MDi of the M Disk Playlist
24. Welcome to Saltville
25. Raindrop Blue
26. Necoco loves stuff
27. Neurofrontiers
28. Off Fleek Geek
29. Bitterly Indifferent
30. Cynnis Blog
31. Blogging Intensifies
32. Midnight Reading
33. Of Bones and Tealeaves
34. Sigmatic
35. Quintessence of Dust
36. Tanking Mage
37. Tart, Darling
38. Third World Ecologist
39. Its The Bageler!
40. Random Access Memories

That is 35 40 blogs new to the event.  That is about 43% 45% of the 81 88 total blogs currently counted as participating according to the big list. [Which keeps growing!]

We’ll see who gets to the end of the month… not that it is a competition or anything.