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Blaugust Plan 2022

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My Blaugust is going to be an experiment.

I’ve created a step-by-step plan for each of my Blaugust days:

  • Before Blaugust, I prepared 31 days of empty post template files with metadata and a header image created with Deep Dream Generator, an unused example of which can be seen at the top of this post.
  • In the morning of each day, roll 1d4 and 1d100 to find a random prompt from this web site of 400 philosophy questions. (I choose that site mainly because each question is numbered 1-400, a very convenient thing for rolling dice.)
  • Post it on Twitter or something.
  • Think about the prompt throughout the day, which will be a work day roughly 71% of the time.
  • Sometime later, most likely after work 71% of the time, open up the template file for that day and write a made-up dream where the subject of the AI-generated image in that template file tells me the answer to the random philosophy question of the day. (All the images have some kind of anthropomorphic object in them that can answer questions.)
  • Easy peasy. Commit and publish. Profit.

    • The idea all started with a need to create 31 header images for the posts so I didn’t have to do that during Blaugust. In previous years I picked random photos out of my collection, so I wanted to do something different: I turned to Deep Dream Generator, one of seemingly hundreds of AI art-generating web sites out there now which lets you upload pictures or even describe pictures with text and make them look cool so you never have to hire an actual artist anymore. Progress!

    Ahem. Biting commentary on needless technology overreach aside, I’m sure I’ve said this before, but adding pictures to blog posts is my least-favorite part, and now happens to be the most labor-intensive because of my uniquely quirky blogging platform. I can’t just drag-and-drop images, I have to pre-upload them to a repository somewhere and insert the links into my blog text, just like the good old days. Not fun.

    The point is, I made 31 template files each containing a unique Deep Dream Generator-generated image and all the required metadata for the 31 days of Blaugust and have them sitting on my drive waiting for me to fill in the text each day.

    Pictures taken care of, all that’s left is writing some text each day. But what to write?

    I said before I don’t really want to just write “something” every day. These days, I see the task of writing out whatever I’m thinking or feeling on any given day as more in the Twitter or micro-blogging domain than the long-form blogging domain. It’s just so much easier. Direct from brain to publication (within reasonable social norms). Boom, done, move on with your day.

    That leaves specific, directed prompts. Hopefully within the boundaries of some kind of a central theme, so the whole 31-day project can be viewed as a whole, so I can look back on the event from the future and say, “Ah, 2022 was the year I did ___ in Blaugust.”

    I previously had the idea of rolling some dice to find random question prompts from various web sites each day and write to that. But I was trying to find a way to incorporate the images I’d generated into the text somehow so they make some sense. Then it hit me: Dreams!

    And that’s how I came up with this project idea, which I managed to commit into a blog post of some description with a picture just in time before Blaugust actually starts.

    Good luck everyone!

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