Saturday Musing About Blaugust Systems

I find myself in an odd place this morning. I actually have time and motivation to sit down and write a blog post. Blame Blaugust I guess.

It usually takes me at least an hour to get a full blog post done, and that’s a long time for me to sit and write these days, and there’s usually a physical cost for it. I haven’t quite worked out how to write comfortably for long periods of time at my advancing age without hurting my back, neck, and/or shoulders.

It’s strange because I work as a programmer most days so I’m at a computer literally all day every day. But it’s one thing to work at programming for an hour, which is often short bursts of typing in between thinking, and much more manageable for me. But writing words is usually just a constant stream of sitting frozen in one position and typing.

To make matters worse, I typically have my best ideas and am at my most mentally acute soon after I wake up in the morning. So morning is the best time for me to write by far. But unfortunately my physical body is a shambles after I get out of bed in the morning, so writing in the morning very quickly starts to hurt.

To make matters even worser, all my writing is done on a laptop, and I inevitably hunch over when I’m working on a laptop and trying to read the laptop screen.

The point is, while I could sit here and think up thousands of words to write in an hour fairly easily, getting them into a document is becoming increasing painful in my old age. Don’t neglect your posture, kids.

Anyway, I had not planned on writing random non-sequitor posts for Blaugust. I was just going to stick to my regular once-a-week digest post and my twice-a-month newsletter post, and the experimental Reading Old Writing thing, which should in theory reach well over 31 entries in the ol’ RSS feed for the month.

However, I’m finding that recording a 10-minute audio clip of some old writing and shoving it out the door every day is a bit more work than I anticipated. It’s fortunate that the beginning of Blaugust happens to coincide with taking a week off of work, so I can afford to spend the time to get everything right. But after next week it might be a different story.

The thing I find interesting about Blaugust is not so much the end result of 31 pieces of content, but creating a system with which it’s very easy to produce 31 pieces of content. A system that takes just a little bit of time every day. I’m still using the system I came up with last year for Blaugust to archive my microblogging posts.

But my recording system is still a bit cumbersome. I setup a REAPER template, but I continue to tweak it every day. It’s not as easy as you might think to get a voice track to -16 LUFS without smashing and distorting the hell out of it with compression. (LUFS is the trendy term audio engineering folk use to describe loudness. I’m led to believe that -16 LUFS is the unofficial standard for podcasts, and it generally comports with my observations of other podcasts.)

Also, it’s a bit more tedious to actually read my old writing to find the bits to highlight. More than I anticipated. I hadn’t accounted for that part of the process in my system.

The point is, at this point, I seriously doubt if I’m going to make it to 30 different readings. I think I’ll be lucky to get to a dozen.

So I may have to fall back on ye olde standard blogging system: Bring up an empty Markdown file and start typing.

I don’t really like to blog this way anymore. With a whole open-ended document like this, it turns into a long rambling missive that bounces around to different topics and is prone to long run-on sentences about nothing just because it’s fairly easy to keep my fingers moving across the screen once I get them moving. The essence of writing, for me, is not so much adding words, but removing words. Taking verbose carbon and compressing it into pithy diamonds. Writing is quite a lot like sculpting for me. I throw a lot of clay at the page and then start removing the cruft.

So for these stream-of-conscious “just type what I’m thinking” sorts of things, I prefer to keep them in the domain of “microblogging.” It’s free-form but there is still some structure to it, in the sense that you have to keep it fairly brief, so you have to keep it to one self-contained thought. What I end up doing is sitting and thinking my random thought for a while in my head, and only after turning it around a few times will I then commit it to my GoToSocial instance. And since it’s a short paragraph, it’s easy to sculpt and remove the cruft.

I’ve just noticed I forgot to update that GoToSocial page to indicate it’s been weekly instead of daily for the last year. Whoopsie.

And now we come to another reason I don’t write blog posts like this much anymore. I’ve come to the end, and there is no way to end this post. Not only that, but I will now have to find an image to put on this post before I can publish it. I lost count of the number of complete posts I’ve written that have remained forever in Drafts because I couldn’t be bothered to find an image. Off to DALL-E I guess.

Okay done. I went to DALL-E 3 and typed in “Make me an image to go with the following blog post: " and then pasted the entire contents of the text above here, and picked the second of the two images generated. And that’s pretty much why generative AI is impossible to ignore for creating things that are needed but don’t matter that much.

According to DALL-E, the image captures “the essence of a cozy but cluttered home office with a person experiencing the struggle and determination of writing.” My home office is very cluttered (I’m actually typing in my living room, which is also cluttered), but I wouldn’t describe it as cozy.

And now I need to stretch my back and walk around for a while or I’m going to be useless for the rest of the day. Total time from typing hugo new content to commiting the post for publishing: 1 hour and 15 minutes.