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Blaugust 2024 Retrospective

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Today is post #31 for Blaugust 2024. I've been avoiding too much blog-meta, but today is an exception to mark the occasion of victory.

First and foremost: I didn't do blaugust for any real reason. Bel is cool and I have a blog that I should write more posts for -- blaugust was an excuse to do that. I've got plenty of post ideas, but that "post once a day" thing gives me a deadline. I'm forced to finish the post instead of dithering endlessly on whether it's too long and rambly1.

I ultimately don't care if anybody reads this site. It's mostly written for me, and now I've got a set of posts about some of the over-the-top moments that happened in The Spinach Inquisition. I can link those to people as the events come up in conversation. I think that's neat!

It's probably hard for other people to want to follow this blog. I'm not focused on one topic. I just write whatever catches my fancy -- I wrote a lot about TTRPGs, but not consistently enough for "people who wanna follow a TTRPG blog" to think I'm worth their time.

Into the Future

I'm not going to continue posting daily. Some posts are easy and write themselves in twenty minutes -- but others can take a couple hours of hemmin' and hawin'.

There's not much rhyme or reason to it. And, paradoxically, I think the quick posts are better quality. Yesterday's post was long and took ~2.5h to write. It ended up very different from what I had envisioned when I opened the editor.

I think if I switch to a weekly cadence, I've got a lot more time and space to workshop posts like that one. Insight happens when you go do something else and stop thinking about the problems with a post ... so if I can wander off for two days, it might result in more consistent quality.

Which isn't to say that I think any of my posts were bad. There have been a few days where I started something, realized it was totally unsalvagable, and started again. I'm not posting just for the sake of making the blaugust quota -- I have some standards.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

I've made an effort to read everything written for blaugust. There have been a few days where I've declared RSS Bankruptcy and marked my whole Blaugust folder as read, but largely, I've stayed on top of things. It's taken a lot of time -- turns out, collecting a ton of bloggers into one OPML and telling them to make one post a day results in a lot of posts.

I want to thank everybody for a fun month. Reading your posts was great, but I cannot stay on top of them forever. I'm gunna pare down my subscriptions on September 1 to maybe two dozen blogs -- so it'll be goodbye until August 1, 2025.

At the risk of giving Popularity Contest vibes, here's a (non-exhaustive) list of the blogs I enjoyed regularly. I'm not trying to say nobody else made any good posts. But these are the blogs that I ended up reading the most consistently, since they aligned with my interests2:

Overall, I had fun with blaugust -- both the readin' and writin' parts. So I will definitely see everybody again next year!

Parting Thought

Is the deer afraid of being the victim of a crime? Or is the deer a criminal, looking out for the long arm of the law?

  1. A lot of them were too long and rambly. But it's my blog and I can do that. ↩

  2. Or were just Really Damn Interesting. ↩