I know, I’m already doing 100 Days To Offload. And I’m on track! I’ve written 24 posts in the last two months, so I’m actually ahead! But a few days ago I found out about Blaugust, a challenge to publish daily and/or write 31 posts in the month of August.

I can’t resist the wordplay in the name!

100 Days doesn’t have any set themes, and Blaugust’s themes are optional. And apparently it’s a fairly laid-back challenge, so if I miss a day I don’t need to drop out.

So what the heck: I’ll aim for 31 posts this month and see how far I get.

Besides, it’ll help motivate me to catch up on book reviews.

As with 100 Days, for Blaugust I intend to include any new or substantially rewritten page on my site, not just the ones that show up here in the reverse-chronological feed. The way I see it, what matters is less the specifics of what counts as a blog, and more that I’m writing new stuff on a regular basis and putting it out there on my own website, not on corporate social media.

Time to start my Blaugust post list:

1. This post.
2. Legends of Amberland (game review)
3. First the Migraine, Then the Headache
4. FairEmail (app review)
5. Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence
6. Where to Put Your Permalink
7. What is rel="bookmark"?
8. TIL about Hybrid MBR/GUID Partitions
9. Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?
10. The Prestige
11. Eulogy for the Pixel 5
12. Canon Camera Connect
13. To Each This World (book review)
14. Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn
15. The Confidence Game (Maria Konnikova) (book review)
16. Regarding Empathy
17. Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom
18. Sometimes Reality is Unrealistic
19. A Month With The Fairphone 4
20. A Month With /e/OS

September 1 Update

Well, I didn’t manage daily blogging past day 12, didn’t manage 31 posts in the month, and didn’t manage to kickstart my book review backlog as I’d hoped. I did manage to review two books I’d just read and a game I’d just finished, and I did finish a few older drafts.

But the bulk of what I wrote ended up being about tech troubles: 6 posts about my dying phone and replacing it, and another about an invisible disk partition, make up fully a third of this month’s posts. More if you include the rabbit-hole investigating a stock image that looked like AI but wasn’t.

I wanted to write about something else. And I got partway through some drafts. And then offline complications got in the way. And I never quite got back on track. Apparently even with a blogging challenge, I still don’t feel like posting filler just to post something.

On the last day I decided I didn’t have time to write about the busy weekend, but I could at least polish up the drafts I’d been working on all month about the new phone and its OS. I still want to write more about its camera, and include some photos, but that’ll have to wait for an update. And yes, this update probably could have been post 21 if I’d written it last night, but having missed the deadline, it felt more appropriate to include it here, so all my writing about this year’s Blaugust would be in one place.