I have thought about what I learned from my very first participation in the Blaugust event. And I’ve tried to understand the stats related to my blog during the month. But I haven’t listed the Blaugust achievements I ‘earned’.
Achievements are not something I pursue in computer games, and I’ve carried that attitude to Blaugust as well. But it is perhaps a bit fun to at least spend a moment to consider them, so here goes.
The achievements I… achieved
This one is easy: I read the “Introduction to Blaugust” and a few other related pages. I also read the ‘Blaugust is coming’- type posts on a few regular participants pages like “The Herald of Blaugust 2024 has appeared” on TAGN. That post was what really made me decide I actually could participate.
Well, d’uh. I signed up using the sign-up form. This is like the achievements in games that ‘reward’ you for logging in for the first time.
This achievement is for ‘promoting’ the event on your blog. I counted my first post on my Blaugust participation as counting for this one.
I like the title of this one 😉 Earning this achievement comes from joining the event’s Discord channel, and I am very glad I did so. I feel like the vast majority of what I gained from the event came from interacting with other bloggers in this forum.
This became one of my routines during Blaugust: sharing a link to my blog posts in the Discord channel dedicated for that purpose. This was followed by then checking out the links to everyone else’s posts.
I tried to remember to put a “thumbs up” emoji on each post-link I had followed so the blogger in question would know it was being looked at.
Another achievement that I think forms a core part of Blaugust: participating in Discord post discussions. I found that these often led to some really great insights about both blogging as an activity and the people participating.
Post a picture of a pet in the appropriate channel of the Discord. I didn’t realize this was an achievement for this, but noticed activity in the ‘#stuff-and-things’ channel with critter pictures and couldn’t resist adding a photo of Pie to the conversation.
Did I really help anyone in the Discord channels? That’s a tough one for me to judge, but I did participate in some discussions around particular questions people raised.
This achievement is earned by commenting on another blogger’s post. Again, I didn’t realize there was an achievement for this, but the quality and breadth of posts prompted me to add my thoughts in the form of a comment fairly frequently.
I was occasionally disappointed to find that some folks had gone ‘full retro’ with their blogs and didn’t have a comment mechanism available. This perplexed me a bit, but each blogger has their own rationale for the features they do or do not support on their site.
Get on the Fediverse and follow the the official Blaugust account @[email protected]. For folks who don’t know, the Fediverse is a name for the loose collection of social media services that are connected by an ‘open’ standard. Think of it as Twitter but without the Musk. I was already on Mastodon so this was pretty straight forward for me.
Read another Blaugust participants post and have too many thoughts to fit comfortably in a comment? Then write your own post!
I did this a couple of times during the event, but the one that comes to mind immediately is my post about my Star Wars fandom experience. This was inspired by a post from Monsterlady (Emily) about her Pokemon experiences, which I think was in turn inspired by a Blaugust writing prompt.
These six achievements are all about writing posts from the prompt list or weekly topics. I covered all of these while writing during the month. Generally, when I was in doubt I picked from one of the blog prompts or weekly topics to get myself writing.
My Awards
By my accounting, I earned two awards in addition to the achievements noted above.
Blauginner / Newbie Blogger Award
This is my first time participating in Blaugust- that makes me a Newbie. I’ve been blogging for 20+ years, though, so I’m a greybeard Newbie 😉
Silver Award (15-24 posts)
I wrote 22 24* posts during the month. I actually made a conscious decision during the last few days of the event to stop posting so I didn’t feel compelled to post 25 times to get the Gold award. I wanted a couple of days off to think rather than write.
* Apparently I can’t count; when I enabled post counts in my monthly archives I realized I’d actually posted to my two blogs 24 times in August
Blaugust is a good event to do yearly, sadly though I don’t chat much, fairly quiet, and doesn’t feel comfortable interacting on a large scale a lot of the time. But I do read every post that comes in my email, or across my reader. Glad you joined and enjoyed it.
I think chatting or not chatting is a lot like other aspects of Blaugust like posting daily: participate as your energy levels and preferences define.
I read many if not all of your posts, Shadowz: you shared a lot about the challenges you’ve dealt with in your life, and that by itself is very energy-intense- at least for someone like myself. Regardless- it was a great event with lots of different ways to be involved!
It was, and it literally has me drained still at the moment, but I get up each day with a new challenge of whatever I set out to do. Half the time I don’t know what I’m doing.
I am glad my post about core fandom memories could be of inspiration to you.