Introduce Yourself Week
A-ha, I have found the official Blaugust 2026 prompts! This week's topic is "Introduce Yourself," so I'll go ahead and do just that. I'm only covering some of the questions in this post. I'm thinking about doing the others in posts of their own.
Tell us ten random facts about the human behind the blog.
I already halfway did this in my second Blaugust post, and you can find 38 more facts about me on this page.
Tell the story behind the creation and name of your blog.
"Syl's Blog" is probably the simplest name I could come up with, but I feel it suits this blog well because it's about as personal of a blog as you can get. Syl is my nickname, mainly online but also a bit in real life. I wanted to use something unique to me that kind of represents my online persona.
As for why I created this blog, I just missed the old days of slice-of-life blogging. I went through several iterations of a blog over the years, including Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Blogspot, and Wordpress before finally settling on Bear. I wanted some freedom to customize and play around with CSS as well, which Bear's theme editor gives me. This isn't just a blog to me, it's my "room" on the internet. It's heavily personalized and allows me to scratch my creative and decorative itches.
What other hobbies do you have besides blogging / the topic of your blog?
My blog is kind of all over the place, so my hobbies are well-showcased here. I'm obviously big into gaming. Maybe I should mention some of the hobbies I don't talk about much?
I try to go swimming as often as I can, which sadly isn't that often. I love being in the water, whether it's a pool or lake or ocean.
I enjoy being creative in whatever ways I can. I'm not the best artist, but I love drawing and painting with watercolors. It's one of my most relaxing and meditative hobbies.
I've loved baking for a long time, and lately I've been getting more into cooking as well.
One of my favorite things to do is simply exploring, whether in my own city or somewhere entirely new. I love finding new art museums, coffee shops, parks, and hiking trails.
I cover books sometimes here, but I still want to mention reading because I think it's my most worthwhile hobby. I mostly read horror and fantasy, but I also like reading nonfiction, especially if it's about nature, animals, or public transit.
I'm very amateur when it comes to photography, but I adore my Panasonic Lumix digicam and I want try to get back into using it regularly.
Tell us about your blogging workflow and / or show us your creative space.
I don't have one single creative space. I write on my laptop, either at my work desk or on my bed. I used to write at the dining room table sometimes, but that's been taken over by my old-school PC project and Magic the Gathering.
I honestly don't really have a solid workflow either. If I'm not blogging daily for Blaugust, I tend to only write when I feel like I have something to write about. I treat this blog like a personal journal, where I write about happenings in my life that I want to remember or thoughts I want to keep hold of, and that includes some of the entertainment media I enjoy.
I used to use Obsidian, but lately I just write directly in the Bear editor and use the Preview feature quite heavily. I usually go into a post knowing what I want to write about, so I choose a fitting title and then go from there. I write freely and then go back and edit for typos and clarity.
Since I've started using Komments, my final step is always adding the post link into the template. I have the "Reply via Email" button and Komments iframe added to my post template, so they always auto-populate and I just add in the individual post link for comments.