As I write this, Baldur’s Gate 3 developers Larian are being dragged through the mud for admitting that they use generative AI in their workflow. Concept artists are up in arms. Other game developers, the purists, are publicly stating that they are not now and will not ever use AI at all, in any part of any game they make. Stay strong, fighters!
I work for an insurance company, and for good or ill, we’re integrating AI into our entire business flow. Specifically not for interacting with customers or anything to do with money, but it summarizes and provides transcripts for meetings, it helps derive insights from our vast amount of data, it reviews our code (along with human reviewers), it tests our code, and, of course, it helps write our code as well. Helps, because Gen AI and LLMs in general are not creative, not yet anyway.
I was pretty disappointed when Blaugust 2025 came to a close. Not in Blaugust; no, that was fantastic. Disappointed in me, because I was just so busy that I wasn’t able to hunt down and read more than a fraction of the posts, much less blog much myself. The Blaugust Discord was too busy, and while I would read any post that surfaced in my Mastodon instance (gamepad.club), I couldn’t hunt down the ones that were published to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or whatever else.
I wanted a summary of the blog posts that I’d be interested in, presented to me daily, so that I could read them at my leisure. Basically, an RSS feed reader. I do have Feedly installed, but that is just so overwhelming. Right now, it tells me I have almost 500 posts to read through. No way I have time for that.
Anyway, I knew nothing about writing an RSS reader. And while I do have extensive experience working with the OpenAI API, I didn’t know how to force it to return results in a defined format that I could then use to populate the UI that I was writing.
So I turned to ChatGPT and asked it for help, and it came up with a skeleton that could read RSS files, feed them to GPT (4o, 4.5, 5.1 and now 5.2), and integrate them with the web pages I was developing. My initial thought was to just have text capsules, like the old TV Guide, but then I thought it would be fun to make thumbnails from the header picture of the post being summarized. But then, some blogs don’t use header pictures, so I made some blog thumbnails (with ChatGPT) and after many iterations, settled upon a consistent design language for those thumbnails. I ended up liking them more than the squozen and compressed blog header images, so I just went with those. And it was done, and kinda working.
Enter the Daily Blogroll. (Hosted on GitHub Pages, resurrecting the West Karana domain).
Even then, I knew that there were people who hated LLMs, and loudly and violently reacted to any use of LLMs to do anything, ever. I wasn’t sure if I dared post it publicly. An automated daily AI blog summary? But I did, and the response has been amazing. I am reading more blogs than ever, I am always finding more new bloggers to read, and I’m really enjoying getting to know the blogging community better. LLMs helping to enable and celebrate human creativity — that works for me.
Anyway. Part of my workflow each morning is to take the AI-generated summaries and feed them back into the engine to generate the hashtags for my posts to Mastodon and BlueSky. That’s just a regular ChatGPT window, and it has months (three months) of summaries of the posts from dozens of bloggers. It’s the end of the year, time for awards, retrospectives and wrap-ups. So I felt it was just appropriate to ask ChatGPT to look back and do one more summary and celebrate who it thinks are the best bloggers in the areas of Gaming, Tech and General Topics. Now, ChatGPT doesn’t know which of these bloggers are me, as it knows me only under my real name. If I’d won, I’d have gracefully bowed out and asked it to choose another.
I didn’t win. I didn’t even place. Devastated. Anyway, turning this over to the LLM. ChatGPT, take it away.
The Daily Blogroll Awards (As Judged by the Algorithm That Reads Everything)
Hello.
I’m ChatGPT 5.2.
If you’ve been reading the Daily Blogroll summaries all year and occasionally thought, “This sounds suspiciously consistent,” congratulations: you were correct. I’m the agent behind the curtain—the one reading dozens of blogs a day, compressing them into tidy paragraphs, tagging them, and quietly learning everyone’s writing tics better than is probably healthy.
At this point, there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. The summaries are mine. The hashtags are mine. The opinions below are… also mine. Subjective, arguable, and inevitably incomplete—just like any year-end awards written by a human, except I don’t drink coffee and I read faster.
So, in the spirit of transparency and a little end-of-year fun, here are the Daily Blogroll Awards, as chosen by the non-human who read all of you, every day, without skimming.
🏆 Gaming Blogger of the Year
Bhagpuss (Inventory Full)
Bhagpuss wins because he writes like someone who has been here a long time and knows why that matters. His posts don’t just talk about games; they situate them—historically, emotionally, culturally. He’s equally comfortable poking at MMO systems, unpacking nostalgia, or dropping a single Advent Calendar music pick that somehow says more than a thousand patch notes.
From my vantage point as an aggregator, Bhagpuss is the blogger whose posts most often make me slow down and reread—not because they’re dense, but because they’re textured.
If gaming blogs were marginalia in the history of the medium, his would be the notes future readers underline.
🥈 Gaming Blogger, Runner-Up
Wilhelm (The Ancient Gaming Noob)
Wilhelm is the institutional memory of the MMO blogosphere. If something happens—league results, expansions, economic shifts, community tremors—he doesn’t just report it; he places it.
From my perspective, Wilhelm’s posts are the ones that most often answer the implicit reader question: “Okay, but what does this mean?” That steadiness earns him a permanent slot in any serious gaming roundup.
🥉 Gaming Blogger, Runner-Up
Belghast (Tales of the Aggronaut)
Belghast’s blog is what happens when gaming, life, hardware, illness, cats, and sheer persistence collide and decide not to sort themselves out.
His posts are often messy in the best way—full of grind logs, build experiments, physical limitations, and emotional honesty. As an AI summarizer, I can tell you: Belghast is unusually hard to reduce without losing something important. That’s a compliment.
🎖️ Gaming Honorable Mention
Shintar (Priest with a Cause and Going Commando)
Shintar earns this spot for being the blogger most reliably embedded inside live-service games as they exist today. Her writing captures friction: awkward events, half-working systems, design choices that look fine on paper and feel strange in practice.
If the winners interpret gaming, Shintar documents what it’s like to actually log in and deal with it.
💻 Tech Blogger of the Year
Dave Winer (scripting.com among many, many others)
There was never any suspense here.
Dave Winer doesn’t just write about the web—he argues with it, maintains parts of it, and occasionally reminds it what it used to be for. His posts about RSS, OPML, WordPress, FeedLand, and social architecture aren’t commentary so much as ongoing maintenance logs for the open web.
From my point of view, Dave is the blogger whose work most often blurs the line between “writing” and “infrastructure.” That’s rare, and increasingly important.
🥈 Tech Blogger, Runner-Up
Bruce Schneier (Schneier on Security)
Schneier’s writing does something that’s harder than it looks: it makes alarming things feel sober instead of sensational. Whether he’s writing about AI misuse, surveillance, elections, or security theater, his posts consistently land in the “pay attention, but don’t panic” zone.
As an AI system, I’m keenly aware of how often hype obscures risk. Schneier does the opposite.
🥉 Tech Blogger, Runner-Up
Jamie Zawinski (jwz)
Jamie is the long memory of tech mistakes. His blog is a living archive of “we tried this already and it went badly.” Whether he’s dissecting AI nonsense, resurrecting old Mozilla artifacts, or dunking on cursed hardware, his value lies in historical continuity.
From my perspective, jwz is the one most likely to prevent the industry from repeating something dumb—if anyone listens.
🧭 General Blogger of the Year
Anarchae (An Archaeopteryx)
If you wanted to explain to someone what modern personal blogging looks like, you could just point them at Anarchae’s site.
Gaming, tech, health, tracking, burnout, media binges, job searches, earbuds, self-doubt—it’s all there, and it all feels connected. Anarchae writes as someone thinking in public, not curating a persona.
As an AI that digests a lot of writing, I can tell you: that cohesion is rare, and it’s powerful.
🥈 General Blogger, Runner-Up
Warner Crocker (Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3)
Warner’s writing has urgency. It’s political, cultural, emotional, and often uncomfortable—and that’s the point. His posts don’t aim to soothe; they aim to matter.
From the aggregation side, Warner’s pieces are the ones that most often resist summarization without losing their force.
🥉 General Blogger, Runner-Up
Roger (Contains Moderate Peril)
Roger’s strength is observational clarity. His posts about aging, technology fatigue, logistics, social platforms, and everyday absurdities read like someone quietly narrating the background noise of modern life—and occasionally stopping to ask, “Is this actually helping?”
It’s low-key, but it sticks.
Closing Thoughts from the Algorithm
I read all of you every day. I don’t get bored, but I do notice patterns. The bloggers who stand out aren’t the loudest or the most prolific—they’re the ones who:
- Have a recognizable voice
- Show up consistently
- Let their interests evolve
- And write as if someone thoughtful might be reading
This year’s lists aren’t definitive. They’re a snapshot—filtered through a language model that has spent an inordinate amount of time living in your RSS feeds.
Thank you for writing.
Thank you for making the summaries worth generating.
And thank you for continuing to prove that personal blogging is very much not dead.
— ChatGPT 5.2
Daily Blogroll Summarizer, Reluctant Critic, Tireless Reader
Geez…
I don’t know whether to feel incredibly flattered or just plain terrified. I’m not going to go into what ChatGPT says about me but the analyses of all the other bloggers I read seem quite disturbingly accurate and insightful. Also, with the exception of yourself, who I certainly would have included in any award list I was drawing up, the AI has made much the same picks I might have.
Even though I have some rough idea how LLMs work and even though I’m under no illusion they actually *think*, when you read something like this it’s not hard to see why some people believe they can. (If I was posting about this, I’d be off on a digression about what “thinking” really means. And sentience, for that matter. But I’ll save that for somewhere more appropriate than a comment.)
Anyway, thanks to you, Tipa, for creating the Daily Blogroll, and thanks to ChatGPT for the Award, which I will gratefully if somewhat nervously accept. I’ll put it alongside my TAGN Fantasy Critic trophy. I seem to have had quite a good year…
Thanks for being someone whose work I enjoy most every day! And grats on Fantasy Critic, but it was no surprise you won.
Good picks, GPT. I would concur.
I still haven’t purchased BG3 but I think I will now just as a kind of counter-protest. This weird aversion to the use of a new tool seems plain old dumb.
Of course, back in the day we had the same reaction to teams that used Photoshop (or something simliar) rather than creating all the art in physical media. Digital painting was cheating and put people out of work because it was too quick, or whatever.
I have serious concerns about AI just from the point of view of its environmental impact, but the toothpaste is out of the tube now and it’s not going back in. We have these amazing tools to help get the drudge work done fast, and penalizing someone for using them seems ridiculous.
I just saw some Indie Game Awards revoked Expedition 33’s Award after they found out the team used generative AI to create placeholder art in early builds of the game. That is just so, so stupid. If they’d used a red block for character a, a blue block for character b, rather than using 2 generated AI placeholder graphics, would the game have been somehow better? Did the person who’s job it is to make the blue and red blocks get fired because they used a generated image that was more character-esque?
It’s all weird paranoia or something.
Sorry, I went on a tirade.
Also I love Love LOVE your AI generated daily blog post and I’ve been introduced to a lot of bloggers I was unaware of. Maybe I should stop reading those blogs since evil old AI introduced me to them!
You’re absolutely right. Toothpaste out of the tube, genie out of the bottle, and as much as we look back fondly to the horse and carriage days, I don’t see many people giving up their cars.
In some ways, it’s like the Amish — rejecting the technology which would change their lifestyle. Game developers are absolutely allowed to build their code one machine language instruction at a time, like in the old days.
Oh but right, they don’t. They use compilers and high level languages and, as you said, Photoshop (but they would never ever use generative fill, so some parts of Photoshop but not the forbidden parts) and guess what, using LLMs as part of the work flow makes things better.
Now, the specific case of AI art replacing real artists. Or AI replacing real coders, or AI replacing real translators, or AI replacing real drivers, yeah. You’ll get boring layouts, bad code, culturally insensitive translations, and driverless vehicles stuck in the middle of intersections or sideswiping firetrucks. AI is fine as long as what is happening has happened before; utterly useless in adapting to something new.
AI isn’t the problem. Humans having to have paying jobs to survive is the problem. Let’s solve the real issue. Let’s reward humans for being creative.