You may or may not have noticed the two sets of blog links in the right-hand margin of the page. If you have, you may be wondering what the hell they are since I haven't really made mention of them or why they're there. So... how about I do that right now:
Blogs of people I know:
1. Here She Be -- The Battlements: The blog of a friend from college who's an aspiring writer and current English major. He's also something of an aspiring artist and will link to stuff on his Deviant Art page from time to time. His postings will range from anything from poetry, to sections of a novel he's working on, to philosophy essays. If at any point you're tired of the myriad spelling and grammatical errors that most certainly litter all of my posts, you can check out his blog, as he's a much better writer.
2. Fortune Cookie Muse: Another writing blog from another college acquaintance. Admittedly, I don't read it regularly, but she was nice enough to link to this blog, so I figure I should return the favor.
3. We Built Another World: The blog of another friend who went to work for a consulting firm in Washington D.C. First and foremost, his blog gets like 80 awesome points for being named after a Wolf Parade song. Secondly, he stumbles upon a lot of cool grassroots initiative stuff like this: http://depave.org/blog/.
4. Screaming Lemur: Another blog of a friend who shares a lot of common interests like movies and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. As you can tell, he also reads a helluva lot more than I do. This blog may be on a bit of a hiatus right now, as he just joined the Navy as an officer, and is going through whatever the hell their equivalent of boot camp is called. I can't remember.
Blogs I read but have no affiliation with:
1. Balloon Juice: A political blog run by a guy named John Cole, who is a self-described "recovering Republican." Its written with the perfect combination of informed analysis and soul-crushing cynicism. If you ever want to simultaneously laugh while feeling like your brain going to explode, read his posts labeled "Clown Shoes," which are examples of far right-wingers being completely insane.
2. Calculated Risk: This is a financial blog. Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn't be caught dead reading a financial blog, as I never found the world of high finance or really any subject in the realm of economics the least bit interesting. These, however, are not normal times, and I like to keep myself informed as to exactly how close we are as to being completely and utterly screwed. Reading Calculated Risk makes that pretty easy to do. Some of the commenters that post there regularly are also absolutely hilarious and give themselves usernames like "The Notorious A.I.G" and "Market Call of Cthulu." That's just inspired.
3. Glenn Greenwald: Another political blog and, I think, a very important one. His writing is much dryer than the "we're all screwed anyway, so lets make fun of everyone on the way down" sort of style of Balloon Juice, but I think everyone could learn a lot from reading his blog on any given day. There are a lot of tremendously important stories that, for one reason or another, a lot of people in traditional media completely ignore. Greenwald pursues these stories relentlessly, and explains in easy to understand terms why they're important and what the consequences of them being ignored are. Two examples that are clear immediately if you dig through his old posts a little bit are the wiretapping of U.S. citizens as authorized by the FISA bill under the Bush Administration, and the detaining of people without trial at Guantanamo Bay. The only downside to reading his blog is that it'll make you way angrier at pretty much everyone holding public office than you ever would be otherwise. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
4. Polite Dissent: I just love the concept of this guy's blog. He's a real-life licensed doctor, but most of what he posts about is comic books and episodes of House. If you're reading a comic that just came out and there's a long narration by some character with a bunch of medical terminology and you're wondering if what they're talking about has any bearing whatsoever on real life, chances are its discussed here. He also publishes a medical review of every House episode that examines in depth the entire process the cast uses to arrive at a diagnosis. His reviews are up and down from episode-to-episode, but in general he likes the show a lot and considers it to be the most accurate medical show on television (which is still pretty far from being totally accurate).
5. Funnybook Bablyon: A comic book-centered blog that I stumbled upon at some point. I liked it first and foremost because it provided excellent annotations for the recent Batman R.I.P and Final Crisis series, which were both incredibly dense and pretty damn confusing for someone who doesn't have everything there is to know about the DC Universe committed to memory.
6. Todd Alcott: The blog of a professional screenwriter who's been lucky enough to have worked in Hollywood a few times in the past. His devotes most of his blog to analyzing movies that he's recently watched, either because he just felt like watching them, or because he's doing some sort of a broader analysis on a particular set of movies. Recently he just did a big series of posts on various superhero movies. He also personally knows James Urbaniak, also known as the voice of Dr. Thaddius Venture, and he posts ridiculously in-depth analysis of episodes of The Venture Brothers, which he clearly has a great fondness for, outside of the fact that he's acquainted with one of the voice talents.
That's all I've got for now. I'm sure I'll add more in the future, at which point I'll update this.
No comments:
Post a Comment