August is coming up, which means Blaugust, a challenge in which bloggers try to post 31 times in August, is also coming up. I participated last year and won the gold award, meaning I posted 25-30 times. I was two away from the rainbow diamond award. I also burned out hard at the end of the challenge and didn't post anything for a month and a half. I don't think doing Blaugust is fully to blame, I was having a rough month in general and overburdened myself, but it does make me wonder if trying again is the best idea.
I think it was overall a positive experience for me. I didn't write anything groundbreaking, but I was more creative than I otherwise would've been. I wrote things that wouldn't have been written if I hadn't been doing Blaugust. That's a win.
On the other hand, the kinds of posts I make when I'm trying to write every day aren't my favorite. I feel a lot more proud of my work when take my time, adding polish and making sure it's ready before I send it out into the world. I had a few of those posts this month, and I think they're much better than my output during a challenge like Blaugust or #100DaysToOffload when I'm focused on quantity over quality.
On the other other hand, those posts didn't exactly set the world on fire. Nobody shared them or emailed me or responded on the Fediverse to tell me they like them. In my more despairing moments (more frequent during winter and summer) it makes me wonder what the point of it all is. I never worried that my stuff isn't marketable, because I always thought that if I put my heart into my work and made things I like, other people would see the good in it too. I figured any attempt to make myself more marketable would be inauthentic, and authenticity is everything. No, it turns out.
So maybe Blaugust is exactly what I need right now, so I can mentally switch gears. Stop worrying about meeting a self-imposed bar for awhile and just focus on consistency. Theoretically, it should be a lot easier to make one post every day than to make a few meaningful posts: in practice, all I have to do is withhold the throwaway posts I make on the Fediverse and save them for my blog instead.
The obvious questions, then, are "what's the difference between Blaugust and just posting on the Fediverse" and "what would be the point". Which is a dangerous path to go down when my mental health isn't great, because if I'm not careful this can easily spiral into "what's the point of anything?"
But at the risk of rumination, I think the main benefit would be to give my thoughts more breathing room. If I have more than 500 characters' worth of stuff to say about a subject, I don't need to limit myself. I won't feel anxious about making multiple chained posts and spamming people's timelines. It can sometimes help throwaway thoughts become more considered thoughts. Which could result in work that I'm proud of down the line. It gives me more threads to pull at. Planting seeds. Butterfly effect. Other metaphors.
I've gotten better at using the notes app on my phone as a draft space: I have multiple stubs that could become blog posts, and I'm better at going back and finishing them. Sometimes the stub of a thought is all I have, and during Blaugust it would be okay to share them unfinished. The only goal would be consistency.
Another genAI spiel, sorry
One reason Blaugust isn't as appealing for me this year is the wishy-washy genAI guidelines. If I were running an event like this, it would be comprehensively banned. It goes completely against the spirit of a creativity-focused challenge. You can read the full rules on the announcement page, but in a nutshell: the substantial portion of each Blaugust entry needs to be human-written, but using genAI for "research" is permitted, people are allowed to include AI-generated passages provided it's not the bulk of the entry (and such passages are labeled) and people can decorate their posts with regurgitated illustrations.
The last one is my big sticking point, since genAI images in a blog post are like a "Do Not Read" sticker and I don't think I want to be a part of that. If a person cares about their work in one medium, I don't know why they'd use the plagiarism machine for a different medium. If you think every blog post needs an image (which I contest) and you don't have any visual artistic talent (which I don't), you can do what bloggers in this position have done since time immemorial: include a photo you took. Or go to flickr.com, search for photos with creative commons licenses, and use one of those (with attribution.) Or find a piece of public domain art in Art Institute Chicago's open access collection. Or, if you have the resources, pay to commission or license some art that you like. I'm broke and I have no knack for visual art or design, but just because a craft doesn't overlap with my skill set doesn't mean it's fine to disrespect the people who practice it. Why should I then expect others to respect my work? Or believe that I respect my own work? Use art with consent or not at all. That's what my moral compass says, and it's a pretty straight path. You don't need a map to get there.
To be fair, I don't think these rules are drastically different from last year's, but one additional year of AI destroying what's left of the consumer electronics market, the economy, trust in institutions and people's ability to think has made me a lot more angry about it! I don't talk about it much because, rather than dwelling on the negative, I try to be the change I want to see in the world and make things. There are plenty of people talking about why it's bad, adding my voice to the mix won't accomplish much. I want to be a positive human counter-example. I don't want to be a hater; I don't want to spend any time thinking or talking about "AI" at all. We all know it sucks. I want to harness that anger and channel it into making cool things. But the whole world keeps trying to make me drink the kool-aid, and I feel more and more like the only alternative is haterade. I think I need to find a different party.
le gasp! the return of the comments form!
LLMs are kinda crappy. Any intelligence they have is that they regress to the mean, and were first made of the internet when there were still more true things posted than false, or attempts at truth at least. They're helping change that though!
Besides, if someone doesn't care on a moral or quality level, it would make more sense for them to prompt for their own personalized page of empty words than to go looking at blogs.
Yep, I'm testing the waters. It seems like leaving them disabled for a couple months might've trained the spam bots to leave me alone, at least for awhile.
I'm glad the rules forbid straight-up LLM-generated posts. If that was allowed I definitely wouldn't be interested. But the rules are juuust squishy enough that I need to have an internal debate I just don't wanna spend the energy 😴