This is the 300th blog post I have made. When I started this back in August 2006 I had no idea that I would still be maintaining it 6 years later. My original plan was to average one post a week – it has been 323 weeks since I started so I am slipping behind.
I am celebrating the 300th post by making a list of blogs I read regularly, not including the technical blogs I try to keep on top of.
People I know who regularly update their blogs:
Simon is an arch-tinkerer, and the only person I know who is Internet Famous for various projects, most notably the Star Wars Ascii Animation.
Stu is runs a tabletop gaming website, and his blog is a font of information on modelling and painting. I never had the patience for these types of games but I find reading about them fascinating.
Nigel hasn’t updated for a long while, but his posts are great and he is pretty much the only person who will spontaneously mention that he reads my blog so he gets included here.
David does a lot of tramping and takes some great photos.
TV and Cinema:
Matt Shot – I love single-topic blogs where someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge in a narrow field talks at length about what they love. I have also always been fascinated with old-time cinema tricks so this is right up my alley.
Strange Shapes – Long, thoughtful articles about the alien series.
TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue – Long, scholarly articles on Doctor Who, one for each episode, in sequence, with occasional diversions, written by someone with a PhD in English. At the moment he is up to the gap years where Doctor Who was not in production so he is covering the (fairly terrible in my opinion) spin-off novels. New readers should start at the beginning or just jump to one of the “People Seem To Like These Posts” in the sidebar.
Gavin J. Rothery is a visual effects director, his blog is filled with all sorts of entertaining rubbish.
History:
History Geek – Various titbits of New Zealand history, which some great scanned pictures from yore.
Beachcombing’s Bizarre History – short essays on historical weirdness.
Bad Archaeology – sadly, it turns out almost nothing was built by aliens.
Executed Today – I like to read this first thing in the morning. No matter how bad my day is going this helps me realise some people had it worse.
Futility Closet – A gallimaufry of highest quality.
General Rubbish:
YOU CHOOSE WRONG – a daily scan of a notably grim ending in one of the old “choose your own adventure” type books that were popular when I was growing up. Speaking of which…
Fighting Dantasy is written by a man with a mission. And that mission is to attempt every Fighting Fantasy book ever written. It is not a good mission but an entertaining one.
Finally, if you don’t care about any of the previous links you may like this music video made from clips from the IMDB Top 250.
Part of the problem is an interesting difference between the design of G+ and Facebook. On Facebook it has become common for people to use a Facebook app to post a large picture to containing a (usually inane) slogan to their wall for anyone to see. These are hard to ignore in your news feed, but since they are posted by a third party app you can easily block them and all future posts from the same source without un-friending the sender. Almost nobody manually posts these pictures since the app is easier and doesn’t pollute your own photo albums.
Facebook is just a simple company trying to make its way in the universe. By all means, use and enjoy Facebook without concern (perhaps even “like” this page). But Facebook is not your friend, and they have their own interests to look after. And besides, they take nothing that you don’t give them.