My AuguStory isn't anything new around here
You need to be a certain kind of beast to tackle the likes of NaNoRenO, Art Fight, game jams, even the 1 (sometimes themed) song of the day Instagram stories, and actually have a consistent portfolio to show for it-- I AM NOT that kind of beast. God knows I want it so bad. That routine. AH. DAMMIT. But hey, yeah, that's fine. I actually am just going to keep joining these repetitive challenges until it sticks because if there's something I love irregardless of the result, it's answering to a prompt. LLM's don't thirst the way I do when it comes to prompts; God forbid I come up with an original idea.
To that end, I've decided I'm participating in Blaugust this year. If this challenge is news to you, the gist of it is to post as much as you can within a month, get a corresponding medal, find other Blauggers and hug (the crowd says 'awww').
There aren't any exact day-by-day prompts by the event hosts but they've got a lot of general ideas you can pull from. A quick Pinterest search sates the nerves too but I like sourcing my topics from not-Pinterest. Do what you like. What I like about this challenge is that it isn't a typical daily challenge, so you can stack multiple posts within one day or take breaks between posts, really appeals to the not-beast that I am.
I digress. Robert put out a post recently, AuguStory, the story of your blog featuring some prompts not directly related to Blaugust but I think make sense to answer within that context. Thus I take you through the history of my blog, the blogs before it, and just my general history with the medium.
Preconceptions, then Discovery
Blogging didn't come to me naturally the way it did others, much like journaling, which is something I talked about with great angst in my last post. From a young age, I knew that it was a thing but I immediately saw it through the lens of online branding, fame and visual aesthetics. Social media had a role in that, but I think YouTube was the ultimate culprit. There, a vlogger always became a business venture to some capacity. The more authentic aspect of blogging/vlogging just didn't look as appealing. Fanta v orange juice, only one of them is real oranges but God knows I love a Fanta.
Aside from that, blogs didn't occupy a significant part of my brain for a while. I engaged in online communities and fandom spaces but never a blog, the sole love child of a person keen to put their interests forward. I was quite satisfied to read very few words.
Fast-forward to my Indieweb discovery of 2023 and I was suddenly thrown into this space where everyone was on equal footing. You don't shape your online presence to sell an e-course or generate ad-sense, you build sites and write blogs because it's just a fucking good time. Even if HTML/CSS doesn't interest you, you're not too far away from a micro-platform that gives you the room to say something and toss it in the void with everyone else.
Places like these could've healed the younger me who would benefit from having a malleable online identity separate from the ones their acquaintances knew. In any case, it's been three years now and I just get a kick out of writing for the void and finding things to read from it.
Putting aside insecurity-based reasons for viewing online identity as inherently entrepreneurial, I think I just admired the uniformity of it all... Which probably links back to insecurity anyway because I'm not uniform. But spend enough time on this side of the internet and eventually you realise that if something doesn't come naturally to you after long enough, there's probably another direction a part of you is really itching to go instead. By extension, loving something doesn't always mean you want to or should be it. I love a themed blog, I find people who have a very niche blog so adorable in their unwavering interest, but I don't have to be that.
"I don't want to pretend that only certain words are good enough to be here - it's my blog, and any of my words and thoughts should be able to have a place here!"
- A really sweet line from Desi's (Stitching) AuguStory
I think the one experience I missed out on as a result of both my youth and delayed interest is the compulsion to start a new blog based on specific themes. It's not something I feel I've really missed out on, like I said I don't care to make this blog specific, though it'd certainly make this AuguStory a lot more interesting. Imagine if I had a history of blogs about Attack on Titan or Dan and Phil or Free! or Club Penguin or what-e-ver, it would've been cringe but at least I'd have tangible proof that I'm more than just an everlasting vent piece!
That said, I actually have bounced between platforms, just not the hotspots like Eleventy, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Bloggr, Wordpress, etc. The history here showcases my stylistic changes as opposed to my blogging style or patterns but take what you can get from me, I am actually very shy and bashful showing off the old iterations of myself to you.
Memory Lane
Dreamwidth As far as I'm aware, this was my first blog. I think I chose this specific platform because my early Indieweb inspiration, Cinni, had a Dreamwidth blog herself. I didn't know if I wanted this to be a place to discuss meta things like my Neocities page or just a private place to discuss life updates, though I veered more towards the latter.
I think the main reason I left was because I found the text editor unintuitive, I didn't like how that top bar looked, and struggled to integrate into the communities there. Not that it was necessary, but I felt like I wasn't utilising the platform to its fullest by not engaging with others. Ah well, I really like what I did with the sidebar, SpaceHey taught me so much about pseudo-elements.
You can read one of my earliest entries here, where I lament being the only person I know interested in this part of the internet.
SpaceHey Since I mentioned it, I might as well showcase the one blog post I made on SpaceHey that I'm still quite impressed with. It was a lot of work which is why I have no incentive to do it again, but SpaceHey was one of the places that really got me into the Indieweb so it's worth me sharing. You can see I was more concerned with aesthetics than writing, which definitely changes the further we progress down this timeline.
While you're at it, feel free to explore the rest of that profile since I did update it earlier this year. Due to UK regulations, however, it's a pain to visit regularly so I simply don't anymore.
Biggus Bloggus V1 Aha! Bearblog! Bearblog? That's Bearblog? Yeah. I tried to make this version match my Neocities theme at the time. I still maintain some of the same motifs in my current webpage (we don't talk about how I haven't touched this since Spring).
As an aside (I will NOT subject this to Footnote hell), I find it quite cute that I referred to my husband as 'husband' at the time, around three years prior to actually being married. Same vein as calling someone 'my wife', yeah I know, but I'm blushing. I love you, Fletcher, it's been wonderful having you follow my little Indieweb journey all these years. Here's to another millenia.
Read one of my earliest posts, magic empress rules the world, a tarot reading session plus diary entry I did. Tarot is a bit beyond me but this was a fun time.
Biggus Bloggus V2 This was the beginning of the end for maximalism in my blogs. I think it was around here I realised I had fun writing and didn't want to be distracted by the noise of presentation, with a few exceptions. Naturally.
A post I didn't even realise got archived was establishing premises of GTG:DX, about a project I never finished. The prototypes I show off here are really awesome, though, and I do owe an apology to that one person who emailed asking to see more of it and I... Ghosted them... Because I didn't have more to show...
Biggus Bloggus V3 I feel weirdly melancholic about this theme. It was... Beautiful. The soft green, serif fonts, readability. Even how I introduced myself as quite verbose and earnest about my mental health. I won't say this was all 'an act' but I was definitely trying to fit in with the crowd. I admired how simplistic (almost) every other blog I saw was, I felt quite immature actually. So I tried the sophisticated look on and liked it for a bit before realising I was betraying my character.
While I don't have any archives of posts with this theme applied, I will share one of my favourite posts from that time: The big oily belly of consumer grief. This encapsulates the struggles I was having post-graduation, particularly with anxieties towards spending money, hoarding, and losing control. Perhaps the mellow theme was a subconscious way to cool my nerves because I had a lot of them. Most of my posts from around this time are more emotional in nature, and a lot of them are still up. In a way, this blog supported me through that rough time.
Biggus Bloggus V4 Aha, now we're in 2026. Not much more to say here, I figured out what I liked. The only major difference between this snapshot and present day is the home page. I like meta descriptions, blog previews are cute, but my heart wasn't in it, you know? I couldn't write one for every blog. I also decided after this theme that I wanted my writing to speak for itself and tuck all the obligatory introductions away; my entries are my introduction.
I'll endlessly make visual tweaks, and I could talk about the choices I made in my current theme but what matters right now is how my current aesthetic now facilitates how I like to view and read blogs. I feel like an outlier here but I hate scrolling. It's an inevitable thing and I would choose scrolling over full-width text but the more I can read without scrolling then the better. This layout at least presents my writing in a way where I actually enjoy looking back on what I write. Yeah the text size is a bit small but it's cosy, it's fun-sized.
Origin of Symmetry
To wrap up this post, I'll actually directly answer one of Robert's prompts: What's kept you blogging this long (or what brought you back)?
My younger self would've given up ages ago, peeved that their hard work bore no fruit (the adoration of strangers). What a dumb little brat, but I'm happy to say they grew up to be someone who now returns to blogging because it's the ultimate affirmation of oneself.
When I write, I acknowledge a part of me in some way that can be immortalised as a part of my journey here (Earth), if someone finds me then it's a sweet treat, but now I write for myself. For future-me. I remind future-me that I'm hilarious, I'm vulnerable, I'm scared, I like videogames, I like scrapbooks, I like my husband, I like my husband a lot, I like cats but not as much as I liked them before and that's okay!
So that when I'm feeling lost or scared or the world feels beyond me, I have tangible evidence that I've felt that way before; it gets better.
"This blog is where I properly turn my thoughts into a coherent mini-thesis on my character, to figure out what the fuck to do with myself. If I don't get many eyes on me, good, I'm a bit embarrassing. If I'm found, good, I feel like the man-made carving on a tree or the £1 coin beneath your pillow. If I'm discovered by a real-world friend... You've got the wrong person."
- Me, literally yesterday
Alright, we're done here, go home!