This might be a silly one, but I was reading one of the blogs I follow this morning and it struck my just how much better this site was than most of the ones I follow. So, we’re going to pretend like RSS is now limited to no more than five feeds. Who do I follow? Read on!
1. The Dish by Keith Law – Law is best known as “the only reason baseball fans maintain a paid subscription to the ESPN web site,” but his range of interests is impressive and match mine almost perfectly. He doesn’t write about baseball on his blog; instead, he writes about food (both cooking and dining), board games, music*, movies, and books. He’s a prolific reader so there are are book reviews a-plenty. Most every Saturday, he adds a list of links to important and interesting stories from the previous week. If I had to stick to one blog, this would be it.
2. Morning.Computer by Warren Ellis – Following Ellis can be a bit of an adventure as he moves around a lot. He has some sort of presence on most platforms, but his activity varies widely. Wherever he is, he’s worth following. He’s best known as a comic book writer (possibly the best comic book writer), but he’s written novels and he does an odd bit of lecturing on The Future as well. All of this is fascinating, but he’s also the best book reviewer I’ve ever encountered. He writes about books in a way that makes you want to read them. The frustrating thing is that he often writes about books that haven’t yet been released in the U.S. (and sometimes never are), but that’s part of the fun.
3. jwz by James Zawinski – Computer programmer (Mozilla, Netscape, etc.), and owner of the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco. The subject matter ranges from music, current events, and questions regarding technical issues he doesn’t want to spend too much more time trying to solve himself. His takes are invariably interesting, well-considered, and extremely direct.
4. Charlie’s Diary by Charlie Stross – This blog is all about the longreads, and, unusually, the comment section. Stross will post an extremely detailed hypothetical and ask for reactions and for people to poke holes in it and it makes for fascinating reading. He doesn’t half-ass anything, so by the time he posts, it’s well worth reading, and his readership is up to the task. He gets political from time to time, with some of the best takes on Brexit I’ve read.
5. Whatever by John Scalzi – Considerably breezier than Stross, Scalzi treats his blog more as a diary so there are many shorter, personal posts on it. It’s very much like following a personal friend, albeit one who is the target of some weirdly obsessed white supremacists. Not the best blog for information, but always an enjoyable read and goodness knows we need some of those.
I’d love to put Bree Newsome on here, but she doesn’t blog. Twitter seems to be her primary outlet and I have a column in my Tweetdeck devoted to her just to make sure I don’t miss anything. Gail Simone is another who is an absolute gold mine on Twitter, but she doesn’t seem to have an outlet elsewhere.
This makes me think that blogging and RSS feeds are increasingly the province of the last generation and I’m dating myself by maintaining one. Ah well, I can live with that. Based on the recent protests against gun violence, I get the sense the next group of adults have their shit together better than my contemporaries.
* Bonus points for his list of top singles from the 2000s featuring Gorillaz “19-2000” (Soulchild Remix) which was also my selection.