Good morning, and welcome to the first day of Blaugust! I will be attempting, this month, to write a blog post every day. I had this plan, about a week ago, that these post would be themed, that I would write something every day about whatever number we were on. So on Day 1, I'd write about 1; Day 2 about 2; and so on. In the draft of this post, I dropped the lyric, "one is the loneliest number."

But I think actually I'm just gonna write. I'm gonna get up, make my coffee, do some dishes while the kettle boils, and then sit down to write a blog post before I do anything else.

I've lost this habit. I think LiveJournal is still my favourite era of blogging. We just wrote about anything back then. I didn't even use capital letters. We wrote short little posts—about last night's West Wing, about the Harold Pinter play I was reading for school, about that song in that Olympics commercial (yes, this is how I discovered DCFC). And we wrote about all of it in one single post.

We weren't writing articles back then. Blogging wasn't journalism. It was just life.

This is why Twitter made so much sense to me when I discovered it back in 2006. Yes, I do want to publish sentences. This is why I make zines. Yes, I do want to print out paragraphs and trade them with friends.

But then I started writing a newsletter to ~promote myself, and suddenly, everything I wrote online had to feel like an essay. So I just stopped writing.

I want to get back to the sentences.

So that's what we're gonna do this month. We're gonna write a bunch of posts, we're gonna read! a bunch of posts, and we're gonna comment, too. That's another thing missing from the LiveJournal era. Let's start talking again. There's a reason the copy on my subscribe box here says, "let's be penpals."

We can't all be broadcasters. We can't build community if we're only talking to ourselves. Here's a list of Blaugust participants so far, and you can still sign up. I'm gonna go through my RSS reader faves and write some link posts this month. Maybe work my way through my itch.io game catalogue. Let's talk about the things we love!

I can't wait to read your blog this Blaugust.