Blaugust 2014
Back on July 17, 2014, Belghast introduced Blaugust, to encourage people to post a blog post each day of August. He wanted to grow the gaming blogosphere, and he wanted to encourage people to share more of themselves:
As an additional effort I challenge you all to start being more personal. If something happens of note in your life, even if it is not gaming related… share it in blog post form. This really serves two purposes. Firstly you are letting your readers behind the scenes into your life, and showing that you have the same struggles everyone has. Secondly writing from your own life is a good way to solve the whole writers block issue that will hit you around the second week. Each of us leads a far more interesting life than we think, but I admit I was scared to share too much of myself. I thought I would see everyone that was reading my blog run screaming into the night. Turns out that apparently folks actually liked it, and I have noticed a slow and steady increase in my readership since I started trying to share more of myself in each days post.
I started following Belghast on Mastodon mainly because of his personal sharing. When his 48-year-old wife died unexpectedly on July 2, 2025, he blogged about the grieving process, about the struggle to keep going, about the need to build a new kind of life. When he was diagnosed with colon cancer at 49, he blogged about the rigors of chemotherapy, to share the experience so that others might draw strength from it. On July 1, he wrote:
I apologize for not blogging, but this seventh round of chemotherapy has pretty well debilitated me in both mind and body, and I am honestly barely holding in there. I got them to add an extra week to recover, so I am hoping that will make the final round doable. The main problem is that I am never fully recovering from one round before the next one starts. Anyways since I have been stuck on the couch most of this time, I have been playing a lot of both Path of Exile II due to the new 0.5 league, and more recently a lot of Path of Exile 1 due to the Phrecia event.
He died the next day, exactly a year to the day after his wife died.
My Blaugust 2026
I had a completely parasocial relationship with Belghast, reading his blog and Mastodon posts, with him not reading mine. Yet his sudden departure from my reading hit me surprisingly hard. I’ve read most of the tributes I could find (scroll down on this post for a list).
I’ve never participated in Blaugust before, despite being aware of it for years. First, because I once blogged for work every day of the year (before 2014), so I’ve been there, done that. Second, I don’t tend to just write a piece and post. I gestate. I write down an idea, a headline, a concept. Eventually I might write a few paragraphs. Then one week I might develop it each day of the week over my coffee breaks: reading, revising, re-reading. My top-10ish lists of TV shows take a long time, as I try to watch all the shows, and I don’t typically binge.
When I saw a reference to Blaugust coming up, I noped out, hard. Last year there were times I had 12 blog posts written and scheduled in advance. This year the most I’ve had scheduled was 5 blog posts and for the first time in years a few times I had nothing scheduled, and I ended up finishing something and publishing on a Sunday instead of a Saturday. Unlike Belghast, I’ve never been about writing that day.
But after his death, I reconsidered. Participating is a modest way to pay tribute to him.
And I realized that my “Blog Posts” notes document had grown to a bloated 261 pages and 44,527 words. Many of them have languished here for years. Sometimes during the New Year break, I review and delete, but I’d not done that this year. So, instead, of treating every single seed like it has to blossom into 1,000 to 2,000 words of hobbydom, I’m going to write shorter posts. (Ironically, Talking Points Memo is moving back to shorter articles, too.)
I’ve also wanted to rescue some things from older social networks and defunct sites and put them on this blog. So I’ll be posting some things from the 1990s and early 2000s here, as well. I might even start Blaugust with that, to ease into this.
I’m going to post each day of August until I run out of steam. However far I get is fine. I’m not going to fail with abandon. If I miss a few days, or a week, I’ll get back to it.
Your Blaugust 2026
If you have a blog or if you’ve ever wanted to start a blog, I encourage you to do it in August, to celebrate this parasocial, old-school activity of humans writing for humans.
While Blaugust 2014 was pretty hard core (write 31 blog posts—and bonus points if you don’t write any in advance!), Bel mellowed his approach in subsequent years. When the reins were passed over for Blaugust 2025, just starting a blog earned you recognition; blogging 5 times in the month (once a week) was the next tier. The original hard-mode is now just for a few diehards—post 5-14 times: Bronze; 15-24: Silver; 25-30: Gold; 31: Rainbow Diamond.
If you need some ideas and weekly prompts, check out the list from Blaugust 2025. Here is the official 2026 announcement: Blaugust 2026.
So blog. Do it for yourself. Do it for all of us who want to read what you write. Do it for Belghast.
