Blaugust Prompts, Week 5

Welp, I made it to the end. Here are the final prompts, as provided in this post:

• If you could go back in time to August 1st (or whenever you signed up for Blaugust), what would you do differently to prepare?
• What are your top 3 or 5 takeaways from your Blaugust experience?
• Were there any posts your read during Blaugust that changed how you felt about the experience as a whole? Share them!
• What were your favorite and least favorite parts of participating in Blaugust 2025?
• Community Builder Bonus Prompt: If you decided to shoot for the Community Builder Award this year, which options did you choose? Do you feel like it added to the experience for you, or did it detract from your personal goals for the event?
• Group Project: What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given? What’s the best advice you’ve ever given to someone else?

Blaugust Retrospective

I’d say the biggest takeaway from this experience is that I’m not especially drawn to blogging. That might sound like a disappointment, but it’s really just a discovery, and one which helps me shape how I move forward. I’ve had the wonder, this romanticized spark, that perhaps I’ll fall in love with blogging once I start it. Maybe I’ll grow obsessed, find purpose and drive, and leap into a new passion. Nope! Just another neat thing I can do, as my interest grows and shrinks through the seasons. Despite this, I still feel that I haven’t explored all there is to blogging, to my site, to the Indie/Small/Smol web, and to the communities which thrive in these spaces. A few other takeaways: in my current system, blogging is very straight-forward and easy, though lacking in some small features which I can easily account for with CSS; boy howdy can I ramble on about just about anything; and while I do rather enjoy Jekyll (and I do really love Ruby), I’m interested in creating my own site builder.

Going back, is there anything I would do differently to prepare? Not from my side. August turned out to have the usual gamut of surprises and stresses, and my focus was inevitably draw elsewhere. I’m applying for a new job, I’ve got some potential new clients for my own business, I have wasps nesting in my wall, plus my current part-time day job, and all the gaming, videos, articles, music, etc. to consume. Blogging simply fell down the list, though not to the bottom of the list, which perhaps counts for something. I realize I’ve rambled right past the answer - no, I wouldn’t do anything different in preparation.

Perhaps something I’ll do differently next time is join the community spaces focused on Blaugust. Join the Discord, or find an IRC channel somewhere, and try to take part in those communities as well. Or at least follow some specific tags on Fedi related to it. I can’t say I’ve read any specific Blaugust posts, aside from the few that Fyr posted, but I follow his feed anyway, so I’d catch them regardless of my participation.

I’m slightly disappointed I wasn’t able to capitalize on the event to post some more non-prompt articles. I still have that TMUX article in the works, honest! But as with everything I write here, I do so for my own enjoyment and benefit first, and my needs recently have not focused much at all on TMUX, and thus it gets pushed back. I was really glad to get that Scion post done, though.

Overall, I can’t say I had any favorite or least favorite experiences from my first Blaugust experience. It was all good, no exceptional highs or lows. I learned some stuff, I wrote a bunch of stuff, and I feel like I’ve made good use of this little slice of the Internet I call mine.

Advice

I’m almost 40 at the time of writing. That’s a long time, full of much advice both received and given. I couldn’t tell you the best of either, but a few do stand out.

First and foremost: this too shall pass. What challenges you face, you will either overcome them, or they will overcome you, but in the end, all is ephemeral. Some see this as demoralizing, I consider it comforting. The world exists without my permission or effort, and will continue to exist without me, as it existed before me. I am here to partake, and I should remember that and enjoy it. Related, Momento Mori (roughly, “remember that you will die”).

Much of the advice I find most helpful comes from the ancient Stoics. The “Broicism” of tech has tarnished the philosophy, no doubt, but the wisdom of the ancient Stoics is one of resilience in the face of reality: we control nothing except our perceptions, our reactions, and even then only through great challenge and effort. We are faulty, imperfect, ephemeral, but also we are potential. Potential for joy, potential to improve our selves and to help those around us. Stoicism, actual Stoicism, is a pursuit of community, to build up ourselves in order to build up others.

I’ve mentioned before that I am rather easily inspired by heroism, but not just the Marvel-Hollywood-Popcorn types. In fact it is mostly by the mundane acts of heroism that I am grounded, and forced to reflect on my own actions and ask if I am pursuing the life of virtue I seek to.

Two last notes: I remember fondly a piece of advice I gave in a roleplaying game. I was playing as a ranger, I think in a HackMaster game (can’t quite remember - this was 20 years ago…), and we came upon an angry nature spirit of sorts. It was hell-bent on murdering the encroachment of civilization upon the land. I approached the creature with no hostile intent, and we spoke. I reminded it that civilization is fleeting, and while it may temporarily blemish the landscape, it won’t last forever, and that the world will continue, and heal, and forget the civilization ever happened. I then reminded the spirit: there is no strength in rigidity. Even the mightiest tree must learn to bend with a storm, else it will break. I think about that advice often, because I believe it to be true in everything.

And I’ll leave you with this, When You Grow Up, Your Heart Dies, by GUNSHIP

Blaugust 2026, Done.

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.