Flame-Breasted Fruit Dove & Guadalupe Junco
For days 2 and 3 of Avian August!
Month: August 2023
Blaugust Archeology
I was going to write the short version of this as another Mastodon reply to a thread that Belghast tagged me in a little while back but I realised, hey, it’s a free blog post for day 3. Let’s crank this out and be in bed before 2AM 😉
So I did the traditional walk down memory lane for the start of the month and it seems like we landed on “Blaugust” spontaneously during our group’s first blogging festival.
The original name, if it had any, was “blogfest”, which was already corrupted by the time I made my first post of the event.
While other participants also called it “Blagofest” on day 1, UnwiseOwl, the instigator of the challenge took a much classier approach to it, dubbing us the “Augustinians”. Yes, this ties into his occasional papal blog content. Despite this seeming to be a natural term for those who take on the Blaugust challenge, I haven’t seen it widely used. Maybe we can lay claim to a little bit of original etymology there 😉
In the replies to Owl’s post, you’ll see I made a comment about the “Baubloggers”. Perhaps this was the seed that planted the next corruption into “Blaugust”, which was quickly coined on a Day 2 blog post.
By Day 8, UnwiseOwl caves to “Blagofest”, but “Blaugust” is yet to take hold. It takes another week until he concedes to “blAugust“, but it’s almost as if he still disavows it, calling it “Ale’s blAugust adventure”.
Come August 31st and September 1st, “blAugust” appears to be the victorious moniker. UnwiseOwl is the first gold star member of our group of Blaugustines – having successfully posted every day of the month. One of the blogs died an honourable death, having been set to self-delete if no new fiction was published each day. Another blog appears to have been lost to the mists of time.
Come 2012, there’s no question of what we’ll call our now-annual blogging festival. It’s canonised as Blaugust.
Despite my earlier claims on Mastodon, I found during research for this post that we certainly can’t hold any claim to the name (there are blogs still alive from 2010 and perhaps earlier that called the “Blog Every Day in August” challenge “Blaugust” rather than “BEDA”). It’s possible that we were unaware of these earlier efforts because Twitter didn’t have a great text search, and the first hashtags don’t start appearing until later years.
That said, I still believe that it was because of Twitter that we did quickly discover Belghast’s Blaugust when it began, and it’s been inspiring to see that the stewardship he’s provided has made the event one with staying power.
Alright, it’s definitely past 2am. Day 3, out!
Slow progress, motivation, daily habits
Slow progress
This will be my second Blaugust 2023 entry, pretend I posted it before midnight.
Some days I can craft from nothing to some pretty complex shapes, and then there’s days like today, where I spent four hours to make what is a laughably simple shape. But it’s setting up things for further progress, and if I’d balked in advance at the time I would be spending to get this step done, then I’d never finish the project at all.
With any luck, I’ll have a new lamp design finalised this week, and this is the prototype of its socket.
Motivation
Oh no we’re jumping the shark really early this year if we’re talking about motivation on day 2.
There’s a lot going on this month, and I often find that having multiple interesting things on the go at once means I can bounce between them. I’m also aware that most of these challenges are self imposed so I’m not going to be stressing about missing any days. Still, it’s a fine balance between kindly letting myself off the hook once, and slipping out of the habits entirely.
Daily Habits
So, here’s something I’ve made no secret of – I cheat on some daily habits. I know that the sin of moving around the clock is worth it because losing a streak is demotivating, and the only person I’m cheating is myself (ok, maybe there’s people on the Duolingo leaderboards that would feel cheated but that’s really small change). And really, the accounting works out more favourably ultimately; by fudging the calendar a bit, I invest in the motivation for myself to get back on track the next day. This worked really effectively for my Ring Fit streak until two missed days in a row put a nail in its coffin. It’s extra hard to get back in the saddle after that… but I’m mostly sanguine about it now and about acknowledging that fitness isn’t a priority right now.
Anyhow, I’m backdating this blog post. And I’m going to be turning back the clock to do today’s Wordle. And hopefully I’ll return to both tomorrow with fresh enthusiasm.
Red Siskin
It is Avian August / Blaugust, the time of year when my blog rises briefly from the dead! Today I drew the first bird from Cookiedove’s prompt list; the Red Siskin.
It’s been a while since I’ve done digital art, partly because it was a bit of a pain to find a good groove to get into it. My laptop has only USB C ports so plugging in a tablet always ends up feeling like more trouble than it’s worth. There also wasn’t really a designated “tablet” space as such in the house, which would lead me to trying to draw from the couch in rather awkward ways.
I’ve recently had my PC repaired, and now have my large tablet permanently plugged into it. I had to pull out some old drivers to get it running but it works and I’m thinking that Avian August will be a great way to get back into some digital pieces without feeling any pressure about quality.
Not sure what my plans are going to be for the rest of the month, but like other years I figure I’ll start the month off on a good footing and if things take a hold from there we’ll continue, but if they don’t then again, no pressure.
Good luck to all the other artists and bloggers out there!
