The Recommend One Website thread is going so well, I was hoping we could get some good blog recommendations. Only guidelines for recommending a blog would be you can’t just recommend your own (although feel free to link it) and try to refrain from recommending politically-dedicated blogs.
My recommendation is James Randi’s blog, where every week he cantankerously debunks mysticism, UFOs, magic and pseudoscience of all forms.
I’ve been reading through the archives of Where the Hell is Matt? lately; it’s a pretty decent travelblog. Also features his goofy-spastic dance video as, I guess, a bonus.
Just an old guy going on about all sorts of crap, but he makes it all interesting.
Heck, I’ll recommend several. I just had a kid (well, a year ago …wow) so I got into reading several blogs from people in the same situation. These are mostly about new parents, though some of them also interject other kinds of stuff:
http://www.dooce.com/
http://www.trixieupdate.com/
http://www.poweredbysteam.com/
http://www.defectiveyeti.com/
http://www.jmadigan.net/ (I’m cheating; this one is mine)
When you feel the need to be updated on lesbians in anime.
(it’s not mine)
My kid is about a year and a half now (we totally have that same Giraffe, by the way), so even though Lileks is often at least partly political, I generally find his observations of his daughter of equal or more interest. He also talks alot about music, architecture, and noir films.
For developers: If you have ever programmed a Microsoft Windows operating system, you must read Raymond Chen’s blog.
Yeah, because that’s not political at all.
Imagine Paris Hilton (except smart) forced to marry against her will, taking the money and running instead, then being pursued by goons and thugs hired by her daddy.
When it started it was really good. Haven’t read it in a couple of months.
Oh, and it might all be fiction.
Almost certainly is. I showed this to a couple smart friends and between the three of us and our three radically different areas of expertise we came up with three independent lines of solid reasoning as to why that story can’t possibly fit into reality.
High points: nobody with “isabella”'s background could possibly have the depth of computer knowledge she does (particularly the security specifics); the bodyguard talking about his Bushmaster in the Esquire story had our gun nut laughing out loud at his ignorance, and the journalistic sources are in no way reliable - the guy behind agonist.org, the source for the cease-and-desist, had a rather large plagiarism and dishonesty scandal explode all over him at the height of the Iraq war, and the Esquire story … well, if it was not intended as fiction, it’s full of some really abominable holes.
dp
A blog about customer experience. Amusing, and interesting. I stumbled across it during the time I was in charge of e-business application development.
this isn’t so much a blog as a bi-monthly column, but it’s definitely worth reading:
http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_column/war_nerd.html
Read the top 3 entries to get an idea of his writing and what he writes about.
And, of course, the first sentence on that last blog:
“The War Nerd returns with a feature length preview of the Blood Bowl that Bush seems eager to start!”
Not political at all, of course.
There’s a blog I remember reading by some conservative gay guy who lives on the East Coast whose writing was pretty evenly divided between political causes and really awesome movie reviews. He did a series of essays on the Matrix films that just ripped them apart and put them back together brilliantly.
I can’t for the life of me remember who or where it was, though. Sound familiar to anyone?
It’s not and you would be able to tell that if you had actually bothered to read any of the articles.
The guy has a hard-on for wars is all. He likes to write about them and throws in some really good history lessons at the same time.
I also think, pro-war or anti-war, there is no denying that a war in Iran, wait wait, let me rephrase that, a war anytime, anywhere in all of history could be considered a blood bath so I really don’t think that statement was too far off the mark.
Right, and a black person anytime, anywhere in all of history could be considered a nigger. That doesn’t mean the term doesn’t have certain connotations. But sorry if you’re upset that after a specific “No overt politics” mission statement, a blog with a first sentence that accused Bush of being “eager” to initiate a bloodbath was frowned upon as a political statement.
FASCIST