Just so you know, I’ve been staring at a blank screen for a few minutes now, trying to think of some kind of opening for this post, which is my opening for Blaugust 2024. That’s not a good look, but it’s a look all bloggers wear at some point in their online careers.

Blaugust is a “festival of blogging” started by the Esteemed Belghast some years ago and aims to celebrate the act of blogging. Each year participants sign up to contribute their efforts to the cause by doing what we do — writing posts — with a focus on the how and more importantly the why of sticking with the written word in this Age of Video. The hope is always that the initiative will inspire new bloggers to take up the keyboard, to bring lapsed writers back to the art, and to remind folks that blogging is not dead.

You can visit the official Blaugust information page for the official details.

It’s recommended that the first post of Blaugust on any site lean into an introduction, or re-introduction, of the writer and the site. I’ve been blogging in some capacity since the mid-1990s, mostly about video games, but lately more about hobbies and personal thoughts and experiences, so I thought that rather than publish the long-winded, narrative edition of this prompt that I had originally written, I would direct folks to read the posts I’ve already written.

In penning an earlier introduction, I got the idea to revisit some of my older posts via the Internet Wayback Machine, and then it hit me: I should resurrect those posts! The fact that no content ever really leaves the Internet is often considered a bad thing when people do stupid stuff, but in cases like this — as a weak means of disaster recovery — it’s not so bad! So in addition to my attempts to keep up with Blaugust 2024, I plan on using the WBM to travel back in time as far back as the archives and my interest and effort levels allow, to reconstitute the body of my old posts, focusing on posts made on the same day from 2010 — the earliest post I could find that I had written — through today. Hopefully this will shed some light on me, over time, and will provide some much needed content for the site.