Blaugust Prompts, Week 2

While working on that TMUX post I mentioned, I figured I could pump out another prompt post! Here’s week two, as provided in this post:

• Tell us ten random facts about the human behind the blog.
• Tell us about your absolutely favorite entertainment media.
• Tell the story behind the creation and name of your blog.
• What other hobbies do you have besides blogging / the topic of your blog?
• Tell us about the part of the world you live in like you’re trying to attract someone to visit.
• Tell us about your blogging workflow and / or show us your creative space.
• Group Project: If you could have one magical or super power, what would you choose and what would you use it for?

10 Random Facts About Me

1. I make video games! You can find them on my Itch.io page
2. I play piano, bass, and mandolin. I also have an accordion, tin whistle, trombone, bodhrán, and violin that I can make noises with, but would hesitate to say I can “play” them.
3. My favorite color is purple. I like color schemes that mix purples, greys, and dark-yellows/golds.
4. My preferred beer is Guinness. I think it tastes heavenly.
5. I like shoveling snow.
6. My favorite Blue Öyster Cult album is “Secret Treaties”. It also likely ranks in my Top 10 albums, though I don’t know I can make a consistent list.
7. I once played a table-top RPG in a castle.
8. My favorite BATTLEMECH is the Centurion CN9-AH.
9. I really like LISP programming languages. Possibly my favorite “language” (though, specifically, it’d be either Fennel or Common Lisp), though likely tied with Ruby.
10. My current favorite Studio Ghibli film is Porco Rosso.

Absolutely Favorite Entertainment Media

I’m going to say Twitch/gaming live-streams. I really like watching folks play games. Especially games which are fascinating to me, but I may not want to play, or don’t feel that I can dedicate the time to play. For example, The X-COM Files, or Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

I would like to regularly stream gameplay and development work myself, but I haven’t committed to a schedule yet.

How did The Internet Vagabond come about?

I’ve always enjoyed the notion of a vagabond. A wanderer for work, someone not really ever at home in one place for too long. That’s how the Internet has always felt to me: a place you wander, you explore, maybe with a home-base, but often without. It’s what I like about the Internet. And so, “The Internet Vagabond” was born. I do wish, and perhaps I’ll change this eventually, that the blog/URL was instead “An Internet Vagabond.”

After college, I moved back home to look for a job, and my mom bought me 10 years of registration for this domain as a birthday gift. That really solidified it, and I’ve used it on-and-off since then. Checking into it, I believe it was first registered in 2010!

I’ll also throw a little bonus fact in here: my online handle for a while has been “Azulien”, which is the name of a D&D character I came up with when I was younger. I eventually modified it to “Vagabond Azulien”.

Non-blogging Hobbies

The phrasing of this question amuses me, because I don’t consider blogging to be a hobby. My biggest hobby is probably gaming, of all varieties: I regularly play video games; I’ve been playing table-top RPGs for over 25 years now, and specifically have been in the same Pathfinder campaign for 15 years; and I love hosting board-game nights! I also enjoy programming, and technology in general. I enjoy building my own computers, configuring and choosing the software I use, and generally understanding how things work. I try to golf on average once a week during the warmer times. I like cooking, especially baking, and I consider it one of the best life skills one can develop.

About Buffalo

I live in Buffalo, NY, and I consider it one of the best cities to live in. I am a bit biased.

Buffalo has amazing food, punching well above its weight in terms of quality and variety. We have incredible art, music, and theatre scenes. We’re located on the Great Lakes, with easy access to lakes Erie and Ontario, and, of course, Niagara Falls. Despite being known, in part, for our rough winters, our weather tends to be mild. We get all the seasons (False August, August, Pre-Winter, August 2, Maybe Winter, August 3: The Return of August, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Winter, Potholes, Surprise 70-degree Day in January, Winter, Pre-Spring, Still Winter, Spring, Nope! Still Winter, Spring For Realzies, and Summer). Generally speaking, costs in this region are a bit lower than average.

Buffalo is a friendly place, with passionate folks. Blue-collar, mid-Western (U.S.A) in spirit, but by no means posers. We are the City of Good Neighbors, and we try to uphold that naming. Heck, we literally sang the Canadian National Anthem once at a hockey game when the mic cut out. Because that’s what a good neighbor does, they help you out. (Fun fact: Buffalo hockey games always include the Canadian National Anthem, regardless of teams.)

Come to Buffalo, get some surprisingly phenomenal food, enjoy the weather and friendly faces, and do so all on a resonable budget. And if you like to party, then rejoice! Our bars stay open until 4 A.M.!

TIV Workflow

I write all my posts in Vim, as Markdown files. My blog lives in a repository, which leverages a Forgejo runner workflow to build the site using Jekyll and update the pages branch of the repository. Then a webhook pushes that branch to a self-hosted git-pages instance.

While writing, I will often run Jekyll locally to verify things look good.

Spoiler: I’ll have more to write about this workflow in a future Blaugust post.

Magical/Super Powers

As antithetical as it is, I think there are actually a number of mundane skills that are basically magical/super powers. Cooking is one. Programming is another. I think learning some of these skills enable so much enjoyment, opportunity, and reward that it’s crazy everyone doesn’t pursue them.

As for a more typical answer, I think super intelligence is probably the super power I’d choose. Tony Stark and The Engineer (from Stormwatch/The Authority) both exemplify the possibilities of being just gosh-darned smart. You can augment your reality to facilitate your continued growth and success. Super intelligence provides alternatives for almost every other super power. Some of the easy ones: flight, super strength, invisibility, any sort of social manipulation, fabrication, super agility, disease immunity, regeneration.

I like to think I would use my super intelligence for good. Ideally, leveraging it to “play the game” of modern day capitalism, generating wealth and jobs for folks, while helping to reinvest and distribute the wealth I generate for myself to those who need it. I’d create, fund, and deploy solutions for disease, climate change, mental health, food and water, and sustainability. Granted, I would likely do so in whichever way would actually be impactful, which means sometimes underhaded, and sometimes fully known.

This is a post in the 2026 Blaugust Series. You can find more details here. If I get my act together, I’ll include a link to an index, or a list of other posts related to Blaugust 2026 right here. Thanks for reading this ramble. Be good, do good, stay hydrated, go Bills.