Blaugust Promptapalooza: Posting when there's nothing to post about

This year's Blaugust is taking the form of a more relaxed drop-in style with a daily prompt, after the main annual blogging festival was brought forward to April. I haven't really been engaging in the whole thing, but today's the day that my name came out of the hat, so I guess I'd better give it the good old college try. Luckily, my prompt isn't something I feel like I'm going to struggle to talk about:

With the pandemic, we are going through an unprecedented time. In what ways has this shared global event impacted your content creation?

A quick glance over at the sidebar makes the short answer to this one painfully obvious. With a whole nine posts with April, including four Civ VI session reports, it's pretty clear that the whole pandemic situation hasn't exactly done wonders for my creative output here at the Leaflocker. But I have quiet months at the Leaflocker all the time, nine posts in months without blogging festivals isn't that far off the usual.

When I zoom out a little and start to look at other creative engagement, though, things become a little clearer. It's one thing to not actually be putting to many words to paper, but to even get to that stage, one needs to be engaging with new and interesting ideas. For me, creative input is the thing that drives creative output, and at the moment I'm just struggling to engage with anything much.

The seemingly eternal librarystack of doom

Take reading, for example. I borrowed five diverse and interesting books from my local library back in March. I have successfully read one and and half-way through another two. Let's call it two books in five months, for someone who reads a book in a day or two when in the right mood, that's a clear indication that something isn't quite right. Somehow, scrolling the old social media feeds has become a significant proportion of my reading, and that just ain't right either! Is it really a surprise that there's not a lot of inspiration for writing happening?

Or gaming. The blog is often full of thoughts I've had about new experiences, but for the last few months I've been on a steady diet of old reliables, spending all of my ludicrous amounts of gaming time on CounterStrike and Mahjong and reinstalling and murdering my way through Hitman again. I feel like I'm getting a lot better at all of these things as I play about with some of the nuances, but incremental improvements in better crosshair placement don't make for good fodder for blog posts, and it hasn't translated into making any progress in my long-planned Battle for Wesnoth campaigns, either.

I think something is very wrong at 24-across

Or crosswords. I've been enjoying doing crosswords each and every day since the beginning of the lockdown, really getting in the swing of them and noticing my solving times considerably improve (in no small part due to having the help of smarter and better-informed friends, but still), but this feels like a little bit of a rut, too, and it certainly isn't driving crossword creation, which has been completely stagnant despite the hours spent staring at blank pages.

Thankfully, I'm only employed for a casual ten hours a week at the moment, as with work just as with everything else, actually engaging on a deep enough level to make meaningful progress has been a real challenge. If I was still trying to do a full-time job I'm pretty sure I'd have had a meltdown by now.

So there you have it, this global event isn't doing a whole lot for me and I can't say I really know what to do to get out of this funk just at the moment. But for now there's a gap in the rain so I'm going to go for a walk and see if I can't find some inspiration somewhere out there.

On deck for tomorrow's prompt is Telwyn over at GamingSF, do drop on by and find out what some of those whose creativity has been less adversely affected by this whole thing have been up to.

My Blapril Is Over

We did it! We've reached the end of Blapril 2020! (Well, due to a technicality it actually runs to May 9th, but just to keep things consistent year by year I'm calling this the end for me.)

Within the month I posted twenty times  (if I count a few extra warm-up days on the start), and I even like quite a few of the things I wrote, so we're counting the whole thing as a resounding success. I've spent a lot of this month thinking about what to write about and looking forward to writing, and while that has mostly resulted in an over-large ideas folder rather than a whole bunch of posts, that also bodes well for the possibility of continuing to write into May and potentially on into the future (even if my track-record of keeping the place running outside of blog festivals leaves a little to be desired...come back in a week and see how that turns out?).

As we complete the month and the posts of appreciation, relief, and thanks roll in, it has left our noble leader Belghast pondering about the value of the challenge aspect of our little annual blogging festival; whether driving ourselves past our comfort zone to post more than we would normally in order to get special shinies to hang on our blogs is really worth the sense of burn-out that so often follows. I didn't think I really had a horse in this race, as I don't think I've ever displayed one of the Blaugust badges that I've won over the years. I am enough of a geek to appreciate gamifying any and every aspect of life that you can, but I take part for the sense of community and encouragement, not for the prizes. 

But perhaps that's the point, because it's clear that despite never going in for the shinies, Blaugust is undoubtedly the thing that gets me back to blogging. Let's take a look at the numbers:

2011: posted 38 times, 27 of them were in Blaugust, with the rest spread throughout the year.

2012: posted 29 times, 24 of them in Blarch, Blaugust and Blogtober.

2013: posted 3 times, all in Blaugust.

2014: posted 40 times, 34 in Blaugust, 1 in prep in July, 4 immediately afterwards in September.

2015: posted 35 times, 31 in Blaugust, 1 in prep in July, 3 immediately afterwards in September.

2016: posted 44 times, 40 in Blarch and Blaugust.

2017: posted 14 times, 3 in the lead-up in July, and 9 times in Blaugust.

2018: posted 18 times, 15 were Blaugust, with another 1 directly before and after

2019: posted 24 times, 18 were Blaugust, with another 1 directly before and after

2020: posted 24 times so far (if I count this one), and 20 of them are for Blapril.

In many ways, this is just a Blaugust site. 88% of my posts are a direct result of Blaugust! I return here every year to write and to rejoin the community, and then I disappear again to hibernate for the winter. I guess you could look at those numbers and say that blogging festivals obviously burn me out, and that if I didn't try to sprint I could jog for longer, but I think it's pretty clear that it's the exact opposite, every year the festival helps relight the spark. Perhaps Blaugust hasn't worked for me to develop a regular blogging habit as I continue to vainly hope, but the mere fact that for a month a year I am encouraged to come out of my shell and doff my writing cap again is a big deal. Thanks to this blog, I have a record, in my own words, of my life over the last decade that I just wouldn't have otherwise. Sure, it's mostly about the videogame bits, but it's a darn sight better than nothing.

So this time I'm going to celebrate the fabulous Blaugust shinies that I've gained over the years, and look forward to adding a third silver one for this year to my collection somewhere down the track.

PS. In the 2018 version of this post, I mentioned that going forward I was going to try to add more pictures of me wearing ties. Everything has changed so much since the start of the blog, ties aren't a part of my daily life any more, and haven't been for years. Heck, I haven't worn one since my friend's wedding back in August last year, but here's a good old fashioned blurry tiepic, just for the old time's sake.

Where's the Conversation?

This is my eighteenth post for Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. I am well behind schedule, but that's nothing new, and I'm still enjoying keeping more-or-less up to date with what others have been creating over the month. This has led me to sign up to a collaborative game of Civ VI being oranised by Naithin, so look out for more on that topic soon.

I've been appending some variation of this footer to the last few posts after being inspired by similar notices on other people's blogs. Back in the days when Blaugust was big on rules and you 'had' to have something like it I used to find it an imposition, but this time around I'm finding it a good addition, even if my blogger quote version isn't as attractive as the sort of thing that people are doing over on their wordpress sites.

As I alluded to earlier in the month, I'm a little bit too much of a rebel to enjoy being told that I have to do things a certain way, and that extends to little things like this, but now that I can include it as an optional extra if I want to without feeling like I'm going to lose internet points if I don't, I'm finding the footer a useful tool. Not only does it force me to stay up to date with what others are writing if I want to find someone else's post to link to, which is a handy reminder if I've slipped behind, but it also provides a nice jumping off point if my readers want to keep exploring Blaugust instead of being trapped at the Leaflocker, which has helped me to feel more of a sense of community about the whole thing.

Today, though, I stuck the footer in and realized that the footer and what I'd been planning to talk about were inextricably linked, and it didn't really make sense as a footer anymore. I guess it's a header this time. With that prelude out of the way, then, let's start the post...

Where's the Great Conversation Post?

Last week was a bit of a disaster on the creativity and productivity fronts. I'd say it was a bit rubbish on pretty much every front, but given that so many people that we know and hear about around the world are struggling so much, the fact that we've been having headaches or sleeping poorly or feeling lethargic but are still together and well fed and generally healthy seems to be taking the piss a little bit.

Nevertheless, I haven't had a good week for doing things in general and the blog in particular. No posts since last Tuesday, not even any slow progress on drafts, just a slowly mounting pile of potential topics, most of which are video game related, which is not exactly surprising given the way that games are definitely the way that I've been spending most of my time. When I go into shut-down mode like this I tend to retreat into old familiar games for extended binge periods, and this time has been no different.

Lately my go-to game has been Slay the Spire, a deck-builder that I only got into in the last few months and which I am distinctly terrible at. The battles often make for fun little puzzles, with the added advantage of them being randomly generated, meaning that there isn't necessarily a 'right' way to do them, and when I stumble across a deck that really works it makes me feel extremely smart. It also has the added advantage of being an easy game to play with one hand while lying in bed, which is a big plus when I'm just not feeling it.

Mahjong never stops being a distraction. Last weekend I played in the first week of the new ARMA league, a nine-week long online team competition being run by the Australian riichi scene, and then watched the other games and participated in the after-show analysis, which ate a significant portion of the weekend. Thankfully my game wasn't on the stream since it went terribly for me, but I still learnt a lot from talking about my games with good players and learnt more about some higher-level concepts to try and incorporate into my play.

Add into the mix reinstalling Civilisation VI in preparation for the co-op game, never a great idea for productivity (I've had it back on this machine for three days and it's been running almost constantly in that time) and it's a wonder I have time to get any work done at all.

My humble monthly just dropped for the month, so I was able to gift a friend with Optus Magnum, so I need to try and improve my scores so that she thinks I'm smart. I just picked up Chimera Squad, too, and XCOM games are famous time sinks. Honestly, I might have to give up eating and sleeping just to get all these games played. Blogging will just have to wait a little bit longer.

Image Problems

I don't tend to go near the blog on Sundays, but today I got a message from a friend who was reading my post about making acorn coffee that I posted earlier in the week who was asking what was wrong with the images on that post.

Sure enough, when I headed to the site myself, some (but not all) of the images on that post and a number of the other posts from the past few weeks had disappeared from the Leaflocker and been replaced with the dreaded missing image icon. I figured that it was just an internet issue or some kind of temporary problem with Blogspot, but as the hours passed and they pictures didn't come back, I figured that I'd better try and fix them.

Strangely enough, all of the images that are missing are Blogspot hosted images that are still visible when I look a the blog's image album, which at least means that they were all pretty easy to restore, but makes it even odder that they've all disappeared from the blog. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which images have been affected, either.

When things like this happen, it makes me think again about possibly looking into some more permanent or premium hosting for the Leaflocker than the ever-precarious-seeming Blogspot, as I'd miss it if it suddenly disappeared or a I lost some of the things that I've posted here over the last ten years, even if no-one else would. The idea that the blog has outlasted about 5 computers and numerous harddrives makes me think I really ought to put some thought into preserving it better than I have the rest of the places that I've kept my precious memories, which is so say, not at all.

Then I remember that this is only maybe the second time that I've actually lost content on blogger over the last ten years, and that for a service that I don't have to pay for it really is remarkably stable, and I figure I can risk hosting it here for a little bit longer. Blogspot's frustrating interface and limitations might annoy me every time I actually try to attempt consistent formatting or to do anything more than just shove some words and pictures down higgeldy-piggeldy, but it's been a good home to me for a long time now, and as long as this sort of thing doesn't become a regular occurrence, I'm not going to be rushing out to change it just yet.

Guess I'm spending the last little while going through the last little bit of the archive trying to restore what images I can, though. If you notice a file missing somewhere around here, do let me know.

This was my sixteenth post for Blapril 2020, the latest incarnation of the annual Blaugust blogging festival that the Leaflocker has been a proud member of the last few years. Do check out some of the posts that others have been creating over the month. One of the things I enjoy about Blaugust is vicariously experiencing people's adventures in games I'm never likely to pick up myself, and my favourite post for today was this one by Kluwes over on I'm not Squishy, which managed to make a game that I have always been utterly uninterested in sound like the kind of thing that I just might want to try out, with the right group.

Off to the Blaces

Now that April proper has begun, accompanied with the usual practical joke hullabaloo (don't get me started on the NYT crossword today) it feels like a good time to give a little bit of a run-down of the sort of thing that I'm planning for the next month on the Leaflocker. Not that things are likely to change from the usual nonsense all that much, but I'm hoping that by clearly announcing my goals I have maybe half a chance of meeting them. After all, this is the first blogging festival for a while which hasn't been interrupted by moving house or being on holiday, so I actually have half a chance of getting some things done around here. Not a big chance, but a chance nonetheless.

Maybe this is the year we
finally beat 2016's postcount.

Firstly, I'm planning on spending a solid block of time of about one cup of tea writing here on the blog (People measure days in teacups, right?). That time might not actually see any post come out of the end of it, but hopefully things will move in a generally publishable direction. I haven't got the discipline to set aside a specifically allotted consistent time each day, but I get the feeling I'll be able to fit it in if I try. I'm sort of hoping for 31 posts out of these five weeks, which would leave me with four cheat days, but as long as I manage a post for each weekday I'll be happy (a boy's gotta rest some time, after all). 

Mondays will continue to feature our Great Conversation, a process that I continue to enjoy as much as I ever have, even though it continues to attract absolutely no interest from the readership. They do say that one should blog for themselves, though, so it's staying. If my track record is anything to go by I won't actually be able to get one of those posts up each week, so hopefully on the off-weeks I'll be able to talk a little about some of the non-classic stuff that I've been able to read during the week when I was actively avoiding Mr. Plato.

Tuesdays will be board games content, a run down of the weekly games night as well as any other thoughts on the topic that I might have. This last week was a bit of a bumper issue and I doubt I'll be able to go on that long each time, but hopefully we'll be able to dive a little deeper into one particular game or aspect of games instead of just skimming over the surface.

Wednesdays should see the return of the Monday History quiz, the feature that I most wish that I had the willpower to pump out every week, as it seems to be a hit with a small but vocal contingent of the readership and could really benefit from actually appearing on a regular basis. As evidenced by the fact that this post is here instead of a quiz I don't always find it an easy one to get out on a schedule, though, so we're likely to need a backup option to fill in the gaps when the creative juices run slow.

Thursdays will be to day for my video games stuff, pandering to the Blaugust crowd a little and generally spending some time trying to think a little more critically about the medium that I seem to spend a truly ridiculous amount of my time on lately. I'm still picking up new games on a pretty regular basis, and hopefully having to plan something weekly will help me to branch out into something new instead of loading up yet another round of CounterStrike.

[Here I took a slight break to play Counterstrike. My team won 16-14, coming through on the CT side of Mirage despite my best efforts to lose it with some very erratic sniper play in the critical moments]

Fridays are currently earmarked for Special Features, which never bodes well, but thankfully I have a couple of relatively timeless posts on the backburner from last Blaugust that I should be able to serve up relatively easily if nothing new comes to mind. I'm hoping this slot will allow an outlet for a little more creative expression in some form, but like many folks I'm finding that creative spark pretty difficult to come across at the moment, so we'll see how we go.

Saturdays are Crossword days. I'm vaguely intending to have a new cryptic up every now and then, but the idea of one each week seems improbable verging on impossible, so it might be a recap of a crossword that I particularly enjoyed during the week. Or it might be a day off. I'm pretty happy with the idea of having weekends off of anything approaching work, so if I'm not enjoying the process Saturdays will just be empty.

Same goes for Sundays. If I have something to get off my chest about either the quarantine situation or about church or prayer stuff I'll put them here (so if you're not interested if hearing more aobut either of those two potential triggers, consider this a free pass to just not drop by a day each week), but I think Sundays will probably be dormant except in the unlikely event of us actually working up some kind of backlog here at Leaflocker HQ. Stranger things have happened, but not that many.

So that's a wrap of the sort of nonsense you're likely to find around these parts this Blapril. Any given day's scheduled programming might be either supplmented with or completely thrown out in favour of some kind of blog response post like I mentioned a couple of days ago, but at least I've stuck down my general plans. Now all I have to do is keep to them.

Now what was tomorrow, again? Video games? Guess I'd better get ready for that with a little CounterStrike...

Leaflocker Origins

What's this? Two posts in one day? What's going on?

Two of my not-yet-clearly-ennumerated aims for this Blapril are to interact a little more with the other Blaugustines and to try to have a little more variety in my posts, without abandoning too many of the 'regular' features. Thus I hope to add the occasional short discussion posts in response to other folks' blogs here and there where the mood takes me. This has the additional benefit of covering me in terms of numbers if I miss a day here and there, just in case I decide that I want to shoot for the shiny rainbow badge.

Today, Belghast talked a little about naming his blog, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share the origin story of the blog here.

The name Leaflocker dates the origin of the blog to the height of my crossword puzzling days around 2009/2010. It's traditional in cryptic crossword circles, at least in the UK, to pick a nickname for yourself as a crossword creator, presumably so people are unsure where to send the hate mail. The name that I picked was Linnaea Leaflock. The name is made up of two plants, since I, like every crossword puzzle fanboy, was a bit of a fan of the grandaddy of the cryptic puzzle, Araucaria, who took his name from the monkey puzzle tree.

Linnaea is the scientific name of the Twinflower, being vaguely reminiscent of the Terry Pratchett character Twoflower and also reflecting the fact that my first name is Thomas. Also, it sounds like a girl's name, and keeping with my general theme of playing female characters when I can that seemed appropriate.

Leaflock is the name of the Ent also known as Finglas, who along with Fangorn and Fladrif are the oldest of the Ents living in Tolkien's middle Earth. Finglas is described as being so sleepy as to be nearly tree-ish, and is thus is a bit of a slow and 'dim ent'.

When the time came to make a blog, Leaflocker seemed like a natural fit, as the blog was meant to be a place to put my pages of nonsense, a locker for the leaves, as it were, and here we are. Since then a company has started to use the name to sell mesh designed to keep leaves out of gutters, but I maintain that I had the name first and refuse to change it. I've never really been one to try and keep a consistent brand anyway, as evidenced by the range of different names that I go by, online as in real life, so I don't mind too much.

The tyranny of the backlog

As has become a familiar Blaugust story, I have once again let the backlog get ahead of me. In the first week, I managed eight posts, in the second, I only managed five. In this third week, which at this point is more than half-way done already, I've only squeaked out two posts. Last years effort looks remarkably similar, with seven, followed by five, followed by two, and only one post in the final week. 2017 was even worse, with seven, then four, then nothing else for a year. I guess I am nothing if not consistent in my inconsistency. Honestly the remarkable thing is that there were ever years like my golden age of blogging from 2014 to 2016 in which I managed to keep the pump primed all month.

While I hadn't intended to keep up daily posting when planning for this blogging festival, there's a reason that I start out each Blaugust that way, as I do tend to find that it makes writing a much easier hobby.  Keeping up the daily routine keeps me honest, and for the most part once I've actually brought myself to start a post they've been coming out relatively easily, even though if I was being paid by the word I'd probably go hungry. Once I've had a day without posting at all then finding the time and motivation to write quickly becomes extremely haphazard and I'm much more likely to just let it slide again once there's no chance of winning Belghast's shiny trophy for that Blaugustines that manage 31 posts for the month.

Blogging in the comfort of the common room, with a cup of coffee close to hand.

So for the rest of the month I'm going to try writing first thing in the morning -when I wake up, anyways, sometimes that's still morning- instead of leaving it until later on as has been by habit so far. I'll have to put a time limit on my writing time so that it doesn't take up the whole day, which will hopefully enforce a little more structure on what has otherwise been a pretty free-form activity. Hopefully that will leave me time each afternoon to do the actually important stuff like packing up our house while I'm properly awake, as well as leaving more time in the evenings for catching up with all of the Oxfordians that we need to say goodbye to before we clear out of here. If I have free evenings, I am going to try to catch up a little bit of this backlog by posting a second time here and there, but looking at the schedule I'm thinking those days are going to be few and far between. 

Wish me luck!

7 Little Questions

If, like me, you've been trying to keep up with the Blaugust posts this week, then you'll have noticed a few iterations of this little 'seven questions' LiveJournal-style meme floating about. I never had a LiveJournal, but I absorbed the content of quite a few of them back in the day, and when I gt around to making a blog I tried to keep a lot of the personal day-to-day nature that seemed to ooze out of them, as I remember how much I enjoyed seeing those little glimpses into people's day-to-days, and the ups and downs of real life. 

Remember when we called these viral things that travelled from blog to blog memes? I must have sent the answers to hundreds of these questions to various friends over the years. I hate to think what dirt sort of them must have on me, should I ever lose my marbles enough to attempt to run for public office.

These questions appeared on Naithin's Time to Loot blog earlier in the week, and I thought it would be a good topic, both for my weekly response to Blaugust post and also for 'Getting to Know You' week. I hope that you get a little peek into my life through it and that you find a little enjoyment in getting to know me a little better. Feel free to ask more questions if you feel it drags any up, too, there's few things I enjoy more than talking about myself, after all.

What hobbies or interests do you have that you might not regularly include on your blog?

The part of my life that takes up the most time but goes mostly under the radar here on the Leaflocker is probably my faith. From the blog I imagine that people would get an idea that I spend all of my time playing games and generally lounging about, and while that's not a completely inaccurate assessment, I also spend a significant amount -though never as much as I'd like- of my time reading and praying, and for most of the life of the blog I've been working in churches too.

The beautiful College Chapel has been an important place of meditations and reflection for me in recent years.

I've tried to share some Christian stuff on the blog here and there -last Blaugust one of my weekly topics was going to be the homilies that I've planned or preached for our college chapel- I've generally found that I have to work very hard to make it work. Somehow the tone and flow that I have here doesn't work for it. Maybe it's just that I do take my faith seriously and the blog is a casual pursuit with a pretty high level of irreverence that doesn't suit it. The same can be said for my daily life, though, I'm not a very committed evangelist because I struggle to make room for my faith in my daily conversations unless I'm really working at it, so it's not just a blog thing!

Are you learning any skills at the moment? If not, what would you like to learn?

I've done a little bit of self-taught book-binding here and there, and that's something that I'd really like to spend a bit more effort committing to on a larger scale. It's a relatively easy way to make something beautiful and personal, and as someone who is terrible at giving gifts but likes to keep busy it seems like a perfect hobby to get me out of the constant bind of wondering what to get people for birthdays and weddings.

Ultimately by the end of the Great Conversation Project I'd like to be able to make my own hard-bound versions of the books that make my own personal canon and have a whole shelf of matching books that I've printed and bound myself, but that's a pretty long-term goal, and not just because the Great Conversation is currently looking like running for about 70 years.

If you were invited on a one-way trip to Mars to establish a new colony, would you go?

I think so. Living away from home for a while has shown me that while I do suffer from homesickness, often pretty severely, it's a feeling that can be mostly mitigated by the occasional long-distance call passes and that doesn't get in the way of getting on with life. I'd be more likely to go if I could take, oh...a couple of hundred of my favourite people with me, but I suppose if you're selected for a one-way Mars mission bringing that sort of luggage isn't really an option.

You also have to wonder what kind of Mars mission would consider me as a candidate. Presumably you need people with specialised skills, a high level of fitness and a single-minded passion to see things through, and I am not remotely qualified in any of those areas. If their screening process lets me in, I'm not entirely confident that I'd feel comfortable trusting that the mission leadership are qualified for the position and I wouldn't expect our new colony to last very long.

That said, I'm generally alright at giving unfamiliar things a good solid try, I don't mind a bit of hard work and have a can-do attitude and a sense of prioritising the communal good that could be useful on a Mars mission. I also don't really own very many things and aren't that attached to the things that I do, and don't really need creature comforts that aren't caffeine-based, so there's no worry about that. I try to be generally likable and am pretty confident that I am at least a lot less annoying than I was in my youth. So they could do worse. Pick me, pick me!

What is the one thing that you most want readers to come away from your blog with? 

I'd like folks to go away glad they'd visited and a desire to learn more. Whether it's a book post or a game post or a bit of nonsense, I want people to have wanted to keep reading when I reach the conclusion, to have found a line here or there to have brought a smile to their face, and to have an overwhelming desire to open a wikipedia tab and look into something fun that I mentioned in passing. Basically, I try to convey the idea of a comfortable friendly late-night conversation with a dear friend, with laughter, a little bit of off-topic rambling, and the sort of atmosphere where you could bring up something important to you if you needed to, knowing that I'd listen and care. I'm not sure the blog goes there most of time, but that's the sort of vibe that I shoot for.

What excites you most about having a blog?

The most exciting part is when you've run with an idea and managed to turn a blank page into something that someone might actually want to read. There's a moment when you're about half-way through when it suddenly just clicks, you can envision a potential reader being carried along with what you're writing and just nodding as they scroll. That's a good feeling. It's usually followed by the recognition that actually, on second though, this is utter nonsense, but every now and then it's not, and even when it is the original feeling is intoxicating enough to keep me coming back for more.

If you could make one thing from a book, TV show or movie real, and in your possession, what would it be?

If I owned a sonic screwdriver, I wouldn't need to remember my house keys, and I'd be employable in any number of services, identifying and fixing mechanical problems. I think it'd be a pretty good excuse to get to look around interesting places and a fun toy to just play with when I have a quiet moment. Also, I could make that really annoying woowoowoo noise and drive any dogs in the area completely nuts, so that'd be a big win, I reckon.

They say everyone has at least one book in them — if you were to write a book, what would it be about?

I still want to write that comic-book about time travelling popes. I still can't draw, or write, and don't have any really solid ideas for it, but I am still 150% committed to the idea of being a person that is one day going to write a time travelling pope book.

Usually one ends this sort of post by tagging other people that should answer some questions, but I've always found that sort of thing the least attractive part of the whole process. I like talking about myself, but I also like throwing these words out into the ether to the nameless internet rather than to any particular individual. If you've read this and you feel the need to respond, that makes my day. Take that energy and turn into a blog post that leaves people with an insatiable urge to open a wikipedia tab.

NYTC: Friday on my mind

Through a combination of poor memory and poor planning, I left myself without a whole lot of time or inclination to blog tonight. The schedule over on my trello has this little queue of titles for the next few days, but somehow none of them were ever going to work out this time around.

 I have the 'Week in Gaming' post that I was planning to do on Tuesday, but after a big board gaming afternoon following by an intense badminton evening I'm finding myself too gamed out to think about games in any meaningful way, and I'd really like to get that series rolling on a positive note.

I have a somewhat nostalgic and emotional post about saying goodbye to Oxford in the works, but it's not finished, and besides, while trying to write it keeps making me cry, the post itself just doesn't have a lot of soul. I'll take another swing at it soon, but for now I think it might be condemned to sit in the unfinished drafts box until I can make it pack a little bit more of a punch. No point making a post about emotional goodbye's if it's not emotion-inducing, after all.

There's the World Diplomacy Championships after-action report that I meant to do last Blaugust but never quite got around to. I hope that can still be salvaged, but if it's going to be any good it's going to be the sort of post that takes all day to put together, so it's no good for tonight either. The fact that it's a big post is one of the reasons that I keep putting it off, but I really would like to get around to it, which is why it's sat in the ideas pile for so long.

Then there's the black and pick tags that are helpfully marked 'Blaugust' and '?'. When I was putting together my schedule, the Blaugust posts were supposed to be riffing off of someone else's post from the last week and the ? ones were inserted into the schedule to give me a little bit of creative freedom to just do something a little bit out of left-field. Sadly, these are the sorts of posts that need a serious dose of inspiration just to get started on, and after a bit of mindless scrolling through the social media and the blogroll I realised that I just don't feel like I've got anything to add tonight.

I guess the moral of the story is that having a schedule is all well and good, it can be a great prompt to get you rolling with the whole blogging thing and a little structure can go a long way, but sometimes the best laid plans just don't survive contact with the enemy that is your own lack of focus and motivation.

I was going to just leave the Leaflocker fallow and turn in early, but I have a bit of a bad habit of biting off more than I can't chew to start off with and then giving up on Blaugusts just after the first week is done that I'm determined to break. Which is why I pointed a webcam at my face and sat down to relax by doing the crossword. Grab a cup of tea and join me if that seems like your sort of thing.

Just not managable

One of my aims for this Blaugust is to spend the time to read and interact with my fellow Blaugustine's blogs, so I've set aside each Sunday post to respond to something that has interested me from other people's posts in the previous week.

One such post was the Rambling Redshirt's one on Thursday about using Trello to manage his blog. Whenever I drop past Tannhauser Gate and check out the site, there's always something interesting going on, so I guess the tools that Redshirt uses much work relatively well, so I thought I'd give it a try this Blaugust for the blog and see how it goes. I'm a sucker for the visual representation that Trello provides, after all.

I've used Trello a lot in the past, in teams and also for my own personal to-do lists. Some of my Trello boards have worked well for a short time. Some never really took off. A couple have done their job here and there. I've generally find that the ones that work are one with just one user, or a very small team in which everyone agrees how to use the tools, but that the format isn't robust enough to stand up as a task management tool for anything on a decent scale. Possibly that's just endemic of trying to task manage teams of volunteers that really don't want to be managed, though, so it's not necessarily the fault of any particular tool so much as the manager himself.

The other problem that I tend to come across with my personal kanban boards is that they inevitably end up looking like my Blaugust one is already starting to:

There's a whole lot on the far-left ,'Ideas' card, and a couple in the far-right 'Done' card -which I'm keeping for now instead of archiving just for the encouragement factor that it supplies to see things ticked off on the list-, but the two operative 'Planning' and 'Drafting' cards generally end up being entirely or almost-entirely empty -I've just added a 'Scheduled' card in the vain hope of working up a backlog, but it's empty too-.

I think this is an insight into the way that I work. I tend to pick a task and then follow it through to conclusion, especially when we're talking about small tasks that are generally achievable in one session like writing a blog post. I value the ideas list and the forward planning that using a process like this allows -I'm using labels for different themes for each day of the week, so even if the card is untitled I still have a vague idea what the post is going to be about-, but the theoretically useful advantage of this sort of work-flow, being able to track tasks over time, just doesn't work with the way that I blog at the moment: I essentially just keep a binary checklist of done/not done tasks.

So maybe the secret to blog longevity is that I need to try to develop a better workflow. Or use a different tool to keep me focused. Or just go back to a checklist. I think I'll keep using the Trello for now, though, so if you have any suggestions for how to use it more effectively or what I ought to be doing differently, drop me a line.

No Rest for the Bottom of her Foot

I barely survived writing my own blog this week, so naturally the time and dedication that I was able to put into reading and commenting on other people's was a lot more limited than I'd been hoping. I still did a little, though, so this here's my weekly highlight reel, followed by the usual Sunday shenanigans.

Here's my highlights from the second week of Blaugust 2016:

Blaugust Prime: Luvapuzzle

Unbenownst to me, my darling mother has been posting daily on the internal workings of cryptic crosswords, explaining all the tools in the crossword compilers kit and giving us all hints on how to solve them. If any of you have ever wanted to give them a try some time, this is as good a beginner's guide as I've ever seen, and now that we're getting into some good stuff listing abbreviations, even people with a few cryptics under their belt like myself are wont to learn something.

I'm mostly just chuffed that my dear old mum has got in on the Blaugust act. Reading her blog is one of my great pleasures in life, as she writes just like she talks, and it's almost like being there sharing a cup of tea and a crossword. Bliss. Presumably it won't have exactly the same effect on those of you not crippled by homelessness, but I'm sure that you can get something out of it.

Blaugust East: The Ancient Gaming Noob

Wilhelm is one of the Blaugust stalwarts, and has posted daily in each interation of Blaugust East as well as an awful lot besides. He's one of those stalwart types that just irritate you with how damn reliable they are. Prolific, that's the word.

Each time I read one of his posts about EVE online I get urges to install the game, even though I am certain without a shadow of a doubt that it's not the sort of game I'd enjoy. He writes excellent propaganda and I love allowing myself to be carried off in the flow of it. I also love the screenshots, but know that if I could ever get the thing to run on my machine it wouldn't look quite that nice.

Blaugust MTBOS: Kelly O'Shea

My MTBoS blog for this week isn't actually from someone who's participating in Blaugust, and it's from quite a while ago, but this post from 2012 is still inspiring those maths teacher folks to try out different teaching methods in the classroom, and I've seen it linked a couple of times in MTBoS discussions this week.

I have to say this mistake game seems fascinating, I want to be back at school just to participate! Once again I find myself just wishing that many of my teachers had the dedication to their craft that these twitter maths peeps do. I liked many of my teachers and appreciated their effort, but I am certain that my peers and I would have been more engaged in learning back at school if some of these more elaborate methods had been at least tried on us.

And then on to the main event. The Up-Goer God Book is my nemesis Dan's project to translate the King James Bible into onto the ten hundred most common English words. I help by making graphics based on public domain art of randomly selected verses:

Beginnings 8

1 And God remembered the man who made the water car, and every living thing, and all the food animals that were with him in the water car: and God made a wind to pass over the world, and the waters went down; 2 The water ways also of the deep and the windows of the place where God lives were stopped, and the rain from the sky was stopped;

 3 And the waters returned from off the land again: and after the end of a number of days as many and animals you used to be able keep in a ball the waters were gone. 4 And the water car rested in month seven, on day ten and seven of the month, upon the large rock place called "Are are at". 5 And the waters went down again until month ten: in the month ten, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the large rock places you can climb seen. 6 And it came to pass at the end of four tens of days, that the man who made the water car opened the window of the water car which he had made: 7 And he sent out a black flying animal, which went forward here and there, until the waters were dried up from off the land. 8 Also he sent out a white flying animal from him, to see if the waters were gone from off the face of the ground; 9 But the white flying animal found no rest for the bottom of her foot, and she returned to him into the water car, for the waters were on the face of the whole world: then he put out his hand, and took her, and pulled her in to him into the water car.  10 And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent out the white flying animal out of the water car; 11 And the white flying animal came in to him in the night; and, check it out, in her mouth was one of the leaves of a tree that grows food which is also a colour sometimes used to talk about skin, which it had picked: so the man who made the water car knew that the waters were gone from off the world. 12 And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent out the white flying animal; which returned not again to him any more. 13 And it came to pass in the year six hundred and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the land: and the man who made the water car took off the covering of the water car, and looked, and, check it out, the face of the ground was dry. 14 And in the second month, on the day seven and two tens of the month, was the land dried. 15 And God spoke to the man who made the water car, saying, 16 Go out of the water car, you, and your wife, and your sons, and your sons wives with you. 17 Bring out with you every living thing that is with you, of all kinds, both of flying animal, and of food animal, and of every quietly moving thing that moves quietly upon the land; that they may have children lots in the world, and be full of babies, and have children upon the land.

 18 And the man who made the water car went out, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons wives with him: 19 Every animal, every quietly moving animal, and every flying animal, and what so ever moves quietly upon the land, after their kinds, went out out of the water car. 20 And the man who made the water car made a table to the god; and took of every clean animal, and of every clean flying animal, and offered burnt bodies on the table. 21 And the god smelled a sweet smell of burning bodies; and the god said in his heart, I will not again throw down the ground any more for man's reason; for the thoughts of man's heart is bad from his child time; also not again will I again kill any more every thing living, as I have done. 22 While the world remains, the time to put trees in the ground and the time to take the food from the trees, and cold and hot, and summer and not summer, and day and night will not stop.

Blaugust Writing Prompts
1) Have you discovered anything new and exciting this Blaugust?
2) Seen any good motivation posters lately?
3) Hypothetically speaking, if you could 'accidentally' not save a species from extinction if it were your job to save them all, which would you pick?

The High Ground Places You Climb Were Covered

It's been a big first week...

I feel like Blaugust has taken a lot of effort for me this week, but I also feel like I really got into the swing of it a couple of times and produced some writing that I'm actually pretty pleased with. I've been able to spread my writing a little bit more widely outside of the small group of people that I normally share my online rantings, something that I don't always feel comfortable doing, and have been really encouraged by some of those responses. More importantly, I feel full of enthusiasm to tackle the second week of the challenge that is Blaugust, and enthusiasm is definitely a currency that I'll need to make it through.

As much as I've enjoyed challenging myself and pushing my own boundaries in Blaugust, with some limited success, it's by not means the only or even the best thing about the festival. The best part is undoubtedly being able to enjoy all the good stuff being created by the other Blagustines. As always I've loved getting inside of the heads of some of my friends from home, participating in what I've always thought of as 'Blaugust Prime', but I've also really enjoyed getting alongside some participants in the 'other' two Blaugusts (we're all one big happy family, really), both the MMO gaming community that I think of as 'Blaugust East' and the twitter-based maths teaching group that is #MTBoSBlaugust.

Here's my highlights from the first week of Blaugust 2016:

Blaugust Prime: Conntent

I've followed Connell's art for a long time. When we first met he was 'the Club', the heart and substance of the AUVGA club that I joined at the end of high school. It's a community that I've always valued, and people I met through the club have been partners in some of the most important times in my life, but apart from a few moments here and there, it's always been a group that generally meets on a pretty superficial level, to play games and to forget about the world.

Connell opened our Blaugust with a bang, with a heartfelt post about some of his struggles with depression and how he has to work to keep that particular enemy on the back foot. I'm grateful that from day 1 he set that sort of tone, to help set a standard that we can all be honest, open, and supportive of one another and not be afraid of posting important stuff, both because my Blaugust family are some of my greatest friends and I love hearing about the aspects of their lives that I wouldn't normally have cause to think about in a regular conversation. My own posts have been a little impersonal, but the call to be open is something I hope to come a little closer to answering over the month.

That, and his posts are interspersed with the daily cartoons that are childishly beautiful. I love them, that's all I have to say about that.

Blaugust East: Aywren

What's attracted me to the whole #blaugust scene is the impressive sense of community that the MMO guys have managed to produce. I think there's probably something about the dedication of the kind of people that are attracted to MMOs that causes them to write detailed posts, the take beautiful screenshots and just think more deeply about their games of choice than most other bloggers you see out there.

Two of Aywren's posts have stood out for me this week. The one I've linked about, in which she describes the sense of listlessness that can arise when you've played a game out almost completely, is a good post in and of itself, but what makes it great is the conversation in the comments and the willingness of all the participants to engage and help each other through tight scrapes. The other standout was this one about a little not-so-friendly meta-gaming vendetta, which was just made me giggle.

Blaugust MTBOS: Prime Factorisation

One of the pleasant surprises this year was finding out that the Maths teaching twitter guys are in on the action this Blaugust too. While I mostly find their enthusiasm for laminating slips of brightly-coloured paper a little bewildering, it's great to see a community that are keen to pool resources, help and encourage one another, and more importantly are doing something really important, teaching kids maths (they'd say math, but...no), which puts me typing all these words about board games to shame.

It helps that this particular maths teacher happens to be one of my cousins and another one of the kindred spirits that I've been thinking about so much this week, now off living his new life in the US. I sometimes wonder if my life would be like his if I were just a little bit smarter and had gone into teaching, but it's just nice to see what he's up to and to feel another little thing in common with him with the distance between us.

I leave you today with the traditional weekly passage from the Up Goer God book, an experimental attempt to rewrite the King James Bible using only the most common ten hundred words in the English language.

Beginnings 7

1 And the god said to the man who made the water car, Come you and all your house into the water car; for you have I seen good before me in this age of people.

2 Of every clean animal you will take to you by sevens, the boy and his girl: and of animals that are not clean by two, the boy and his girl.

3 Of flying animals also of the air by sevens, the boy and the girl; to keep babies living upon the face of all the world.

4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the world four tens of days and four tens of nights; and every living thing that I have made will I take from off the face of the world.

5 And the man who made the water car followed all that the god told him.

Photo from Thomas Leuthard used under Creative Commons 2.0

6 And he was six hundred years old when the lots of water was upon the world.

7 And he went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons wives with him, into the water car, because of the lots of water.

8 Of clean animals, and of animals that are not clean, and of flying animals, and of every thing that moves quietly upon the world,

9 There went in two and two to him into the water car, the boy and the girl, as God had told the man who made the water car.

10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the lots of water were upon the world.

11 In the year six hundred of the man who made the water car's life, in the second month, day seven and ten day of the month, the same day were all the water ways of the great deep broken up, and the windows of the place where God lives were opened.

12 And the rain was upon the world four tens of days and four tens of nights.

13 In the same day entered the man who made the water car, and his first son, and his second son, and his third son, the sons of him, and his wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the water car;

14 They, and every animal after his kind, and all the food animals after their kind, and every quietly moving thing that moves quietly upon the world after his kind, and every flying animal after his kind, every flying animal of every sort.

15 And they went in to him into the water car, two and two of all kinds, where in is the breath of life.

16 And they that went in, went in boy and girl of all kinds, as God had told him: and the god shut him in.

17 And the lots of water was four tens of days upon the world; and the waters went up, and carried up the water car, and it was lift up above the world.

18 And the waters continued, and were raised a lot upon the world; and the water car went upon the face of the waters.

19 And the waters continued a lot upon the world; and all the high ground places you climb, that were under the whole sky, were covered.

20 Five and ten fingers to arm joins up did the waters continue; and the high ground places you climb were covered.

21 And all bodies died that moved upon the world, both of flying animal, and of food animal, and of animal, and of every quietly moving thing that moves quietly upon the world, and every man:

22 All in all those who had in their noses the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

23 And every living thing was killed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and food animal, and the quietly moving things, and the flying animal of the sky; and they were taken from the world: and the man who made the water car only remained living, and they that were with him in the water car.

24 And the waters continued upon the world for as many days as there used to be animals that you could keep in balls in the small-computer game named after those animals and the color red or blue (if you ignore the one you could not find without breaking the game).

Blaugust Writing Prompts
1) What have been your favourite Blaugust posts so far?
2) What do you really want to write about but can't work out how to frame?
3) What subject do you love that seems to be reader poison?

Blaugust 2015

Well, it's not long at all until it will once again be Blaugust, the time of year that the Leaflocker editorial team leaps into action and actually tries to produce some interesting content each day, despite all historical evidence pointing to the distinct likelihood that this is impossible.

The idea of Blaugust (as imagined here in the A-town, anyway) is to set a goal of regular content for a month (the month of August, in case you're wondering) and see how close you can get to meeting that goal. It doesn't have to be every day, or even every week, just aim for what you're comfortable with doing (and let us know in the comments what you're up to, so that we can watch). We've been doing this here for a few years now, and it's consistently been a lot of good clean fun. We'd love you to join us on your own blog, too.

As you may be aware, the Leaflocker is in the process of relocating to the Green and Pleasant, and this Blaugust will be our last month in the Wide Bown. We're yet to decide if this is a boon to the blauging project in that it is providing content and a certain amount of sleeplessness that can be turned into productive writing time, or a bane that will mean we explode from the mounting stress, but we'll find out by the end of the month, so at least tune in now and then to find the answer.

At the moment, an approximate plan for the month here at the Leaflocker will follow a weekly schedule that looks like this:

Weekend Wesnoth

Inexplicably our most popular feature from Blaugust 2014, the Wesnoth videos (an item I expected to be the Leaflocker equivalent College Football post) will be returning each Saturday in Blaugust. I'll be reprising my role as the incapable gamer in the world of Orbivm, and we may even touch on a few other games if the fancy takes us.

Sunday Sermon

In the wake of the release of this video, Leaflocker Associate PsephologyKid has been hard at work on a little project he calls the Up Goer God Book. Since it's riotously funny and isn't really appropriate content for his own blog, he's graciously allowed us to host his ongoing progress here. As hardworking but kind of lazy editors, we hope this is the first of many instances of readers donating us content here at the Leaflocker.

Monday Cartoons

Since the original hosting has died a quiet death, we'll be re-posting and annotating our first webcomic and some of the rest of the collection of cartoons that have been collecting dust at Leaflocker HQ, and trying to excuse whatever apparently passed for humour in our adolescent years. If nothing else, it will be a reminder of how far we've come in the last decade or so.

The Great Conversation

Tuesdays will see the return of our plan to read the Great Books of the Western World. Prepare to be astounded and amazed by the lack of progress since we last visited the worlds of Lolita, Les Miserables and Hard Times in September...

Wednesday Quiz

If the Leaflocker can be said to be about anything, then it's about trivia, so of course we'll see the return of the Wednesday Quiz, our weekly exercise routine for the depths of our readers brains. The topics, as always, are secret for now, but we're pretty confident that Art History and Classical Music won't be coming up.

Thursday Braindump

We'll be leaving this one for whatever nonsense falls out of the air when we're groping around madly for content on Wednesday night. The state of International Cricket, whetever is currently outraging Twitter, partly-baked ideas for political reform...we'll wait and see, but the plan will be to practice putting together an informed and reasonable argument on whatever topic springs to mind.

Friday Ties and Stuff

The tie project has had a good run and will be quietly replaced, but in its place we'll be providing a running commentary on the process of packing a whole house into two suitcases and travelling across the world. Given our somewhat esoteric approach to packing, ties are still expected to feature heavily.

There you have it, dear reader. Time will tell if the plan survives contact with the enemy. If you'd care to join us in the Blaugust madness, (and how could you not?), do let us know in the comments so that we can read along.

If you can't wait until Blaugust to get a dose of Blaug or two, let me share a few of the things that I've been reading on the internet of late:

Pichy and Pals

Maybe the best thing to come out of Blaugust last year was the return of young Pichy to the world of blogging, something he's been able to keep up on a regular basis since. I'm not into fighting games that aren't exclusively about Mexican Wrestling Chefs, but Pichy is engaging and accessible, and his enthusiasm for beating people up digitally is catching. Well worth a read if you've got any interest in the mechanics of video-game design at all.

Infinite Art Tournament

Spiritual Blogmother of the Leaflocker, Michael5000 produces good stuff on a regular basis, and he's been doing it for years. I come and go from the readership of the Infinite Art Tournament, as art isn't really my thing, but now that the weekly Monday History Quiz is back on, I have been back visiting more regularly. I'm on a good run at the moment, so maybe we could do with some more competitors?

Luvapuzzle

The Other Mother is currently tripping around Europe, and when she gets a chance, she's dropping a thought or two to her blog (which she began last Blaugust) as well. I don't think she's quite got the hang on spellcheck on her tablet, but hey, I'm amazed she can find the time to post at all. Most of the photos appear to be of orienteering maps or terrain, for some reason, but I'll take what I can get.

Mountain Beautiful

The Mumderful uses her blog for somewhat more serious purposes, serving as it does as the launching pad for her long-awaited career as a "real" author. It's always good to drop by now and then and see what's on her mind, what she's been working on and what's been happening in the garden, something I'm sure that I'm going to appreciate even more when I'm on the other side of the world and the plants and seasons are all topsy-turvy.

There you go. That should keep you busy. Talk to you in Blaugust.