I'm Doing Blaugust! And Why Writing is Often Hard for Me.

August 02, 2025

Tags: Journal

I've decided to go ahead and give Blaugust 2025 a shot. I have a few ideas written down for posts, I just need to... You know, write them up. I guess I'll also do that thing where I post links to my posts on fediverse but I don't think many people follow me there, so I'm not sure what that's supposed to do haha.

For those not in the know, Blaugust is a month long blog challenge. Try and see how many posts you can write in a month (my goal is maybe one a week), and also engage with other challenge-goers' posts.

This year, the Blaugust ruleset and announcement is hosted on Nerd Girl Thoughts as the usual host is taking a break. Or you can just write your little heart out all month. Do whatever. If this sounds interesting, but you're finding you're at a loss for ideas, then I found this blog prompt generator through one of the old Blaugust announcement posts. It'll probably be added to the link hoard, once I'm done overhauling that.

Okay, that's enough Blaugust talk. Onto the actually interesting part of this post.

Why Writing is Often Hard for Me

Did you know that depression is a little bitch.

Shocking, I know.

It'll just take something you like and make it hard to do for no reason at all. Just thought it'd be funny. Oh? You like writing? You like coding websites? I'll just take that :3

My main way to combat this was always routine. I had to get up at 7am every morning to catch the 8am bus to get to campus. I'd always take one of two busses back home from campus. Even if I finished my homework for the day early, I'd end up choosing to stay on campus to do my fanfic writing and coding and blog writing and such because it was a better environment for it. Even when I was home, though, it was easier to play videogames and do all of that other fun stuff because I knew I would start cooking dinner at around 5-6pm and would be in bed by 11.

Routine helps me. It won't help everyone. Please don't go pressuring yourself if it doesn't work for you. But it helped me. And then I graduated university back in December. I've been job hunting sense.

YEAH. IT'S NOW AUGUST. Won't vent too much about that because the news covers it plenty, but needless to say just one little consequence of it is a lack of a routine. I've been left completely to my own devices and it left me to flounder for a while.

If you're starting to worry or Kitty, please don't. I've gotten better, at least in the routine department (every CEO ever still owes me stress compensation thaaaaaanks <3). I've gotten a more solid goal beyond just "get job get paid" to work towards, one that has a lot more emotional motivation behind it.

Also, a friend got me back into physical/traditional art recently. Ink to be percice. My routine has been overwhelming "breakfast, job application, wild card, dinner, art, sleep" LMAO. The amount of stuff I've been able to make is shocking to me. Once I can get some actually good photos of the art, I should start putting the pieces on my site. In fact... A blog post about my art would be a good idea... Checking notes – already written down, cool. Uh, the point. Point is, art good for the soul or some sappy crap like that.

So, despite my long hiatus from blogging, I do think I can pull this challenge off. Just... So long as I can keep slipping writing into my schedule alongside drawing.

End of Post Website Checklist

• First, finish Pikmin shrine. It's actually almost done this time guys I promise. I just have to retake some photos and put them in the site, give them alt text, and make the shrine mobile responsive. And send it to some friends for QA. Should not take long I prommy I prommy.
• Overhaul of the link hoard. I want to cut out a lot of links I feel are unnecessary – before I just added anything I thought could be useful to anyone, but now I want to limit it to stuff I either actually use or I actually find super important. I then want to make it filterable using pure CSS, following Solaria's Tutorial. That or just use drop down menus to make it more readable, but I'm worried the extra button press could be more cumbersome for disabled users... Idk, keep getting mixed feedback on what would be best, so we'll see.
• Play with the 11ty transforms function, specifically for minifying my HTML/CSS. My site is not big enough to be worrying about storage space or load speeds, but I like the thought of it being efficient. Got that Dandori brain. Please don't look at my horribly inefficient code please.
• Make gallery for artwork. May come before transforms if the transforms are mean to me :(