19 Blogs Worth Binging

…19 times this one, of course! Obvious falsehoods aside, here’s a listicle (is that still what people call them?) of blogs I can wholly recommend¹ reading, if you’re so inclined, from beginning to end. My deeply immoral goal here is to gently knock you into blog-shaped rabbit holes you’ll spend hours reading your way through until you emerge, with a bunch of knowledge (or just having had a good time), at the other end. I’m not strict about what constitutes a “blog” here – not all of these sites have RSS feeds, the entries of some aren’t dated, and a couple aren’t even updated² anymore.

• There’s only a small chance you don’t know about Randall Munroe’s What if? series, but if you’ve been living under a rock (not throwing any shade – geology’s fascinating!), it’s where he’s been answering questions like “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?” with equal (large!) amounts of humor and scientific accuracy.

• If you’re into the whole Lord of the Rings thing, know that Ian McKellen wrote a series of blog posts (that’s three separate links!) on his experience portraying Gandalf during the LotR and Hobbit movie trilogies.

• Another series of blog posts discussing LotR, more specifically taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, has been published by Bret C. Devereaux, the rest of whose blog is also worthy of your consideration. Quoting from the last entry:

  Tolkien presents a world where it is often necessary to employ violence, but just as often necessary to restrain it. Jackson may miss some of the details and opportunities, but he captures this spirit – where most modern ‘war’ movies and certainly most adaptations (looking at you, Game of Thrones) miss it entirely. And that’s worth taking a deeper look at.

• It’s less of a blog and more of a digital garden, but on the website of Hundred Rabbits (i.e., Rek Bell and Devine Lu Linvega) you’ll find accounts of their travels on a sailboat (from Canada to Mexico to New Zealand to Japan and back again), permacomputing explorations, boat maintenance tips, solar cooking recipes, and a whole lot more. There’s an RSS feed with monthly updates.

• Craig Mod walks, walks, walks – mostly in Japan. And on these walks, he writes about octogenarian-run coffee shops and roads meandering past Pachinko parlors and stiflingly-cedar-covered mountain passes and what he calls his pizza toast obsession, occasionally weaving connections between Japan’s rapidly-depopulating countryside and his own past. Long pull quote from the introduction of his almost-book-y mini site “Ise-ji: Walk With Me”.

  Allow me to share what I love about a good walk in Japan: I love the small villages, coming across a rusted and worn down kissa, sipping a ¥200 cup of the dankest coffee around, listening to an 80 year old mama relay debauched stories of love lost over a slice of pizza toast. I love the Japan-walking clichés, those moments in the forest, alone, uguisu birdsong above, winds shifting the bamboo treetops like a Ghibli film loop, stopping to catch my breath next to a grave marking the spot where a loyal horse conked out two hundred years ago. I love coming across the remnants of teahouses at mountain passes, foundation stones blocking off volume for the mind to fill in. I love cutting through rice fields, greeting suspicious farmers in all their various stages of planting or prepping or harvesting depending on season, photographing their weather-gouged faces, dubious dentistry, the clockwork movements of steam-punk planters dropping seedlings into the shallow ponds of their fields. I love walking past an abandoned and roofless forest shrine in May, returning in December only to find it glowing with fresh hinoki wood – Whoa, someone still cares. And I love the plainness of life on display: The bedsheets and museum-grade underwear drying in the sun, cars washed before jagged mountain backdrops, the maintenance on homes, plaster walls, kayabuki thatched roofs, the squat pulling of weeds from moss gardens. I love all these seemingly insignificant details, but details that, en masse, form the fullness of a time and place, both in the historical aggregate and of that very moment in which you’re stepping. It’s a helluva thing, the gift of walking the world.

• On Here Dragons Abound, Scott Turner details his journey building a procedural fantasy map generator – he doesn’t show much code (most posts contain precisely none), instead exploring and illustrating the concepts involved. I especially recommend the series on city symbols.

• Bird photographs from a city here in southwestern Germany, not much more (and why would you want more), on: Longing for Rotkehlchen.

• Until 2020 (unrelated to the pandemic), pseudonymous trauma and general surgeon DocBastard maintained a blog where he shared stories from his workplace and regularly weighed in on healthcare-related happenings on the internet.

• Jimmy Maher’s writing not one, but two blogs worth reading from top to bottom, publishing a long-form article on one of them each week – if you’re into 80’s and 90’s video games (say, Myst), operating systems, or consumer technology in general, you’ll read your fill on The Digital Antiquarian. And if that’s all a bit too recent for your tastes, over on The Analog Antiquarian, he starts with the pyramids.

• There’s good architecture, there’s bad architecture, and then there’s McMansions. “By alternating comedy-oriented takedowns of individual houses with weekly informative essays about architecture, urbanism, sociology, and design, McMansionHell hopes to open readers’ eyes to the world around them, and inspire them to make it a better one. “

• Read a few articles by Admiral Cloudberg and you’ll feel safer flying – she writes 30-to-50-minute pieces on historic airplane crashes, describing what happened engagingly but without undue dramatization, outlining the engineering and piloting decisions that led to things unraveling (at just the right level of technical detail), and usually closing with what’s been done to make sure any particular crash won’t reoccur.

• On Tech Reflect, a former Apple employee shares stories from his time there alongside macOS tips and tricks.

• If you speak German and are interested in learning what it’s like to live on a sailboat slowly making your way around the world, read about the travels of Muktuk and her crew. There’s the time a racing pigeon became a stowaway, having turned up 250 nautical miles from the nearest island. At the time of writing, they’re traveling (sans pigeon) up and down the coast of Japan.

• Stretching the definition of “blog” to include “multiple novels available chapter-by-chapter plus a bunch of short stories and also an actual blog”, I’d be remiss not to recommend qntm’s site hosting works such as Ra…

  Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There’s magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It’s what’s next after electricity.

  …and his series of short stories originally written during NaNoWriMo. Don’t miss “I Don’t Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility”.

• If you’re into that particular flavor of semi-paranormal sci-fi, you might already know about the SCP Wiki – but if you don’t, you’re in for a deep dive into 7000+ articles cataloging strange creatures, places, and phenomena.

  Staircases that go on forever, mechanical gods from the beginning of time, otherwise regular humans who reshape reality with their mind: these are the kinds of things that, if known to the public, could cause mass hysteria and start wars on scales unprecedented. Due to that, there exists an organization called the SCP Foundation, whose job is to research paranormal activity, keep these creatures and objects concealed from the public, and protect humanity from the horrors of the dark.

  And that’s not to mention thousands of stories taking place in that same universe, for example the breathtakingly-high-quality “There Is No Antimemetics Division” by previous-entry-in-this-list qntm.

• As far as regular here’s-a-bunch-of-interesting-links newsletters go, Tom Scott’s is my favorite. Given my particular interests, there’s an unusually high signal-to-noise ratio here – then again, I don’t think I missed any of the weekly videos Tom published from 2014 until he was carried into the sunset by a helicopter earlier this year.

• Fancy reading about cool places from the comfort of your home? Like, cold cool places? The aptly-named brr.fyi is a recently-concluded blog written by an anonymous IT worker initially deployed to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station, where it was apparently too warm and cozy, so they switched to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station halfway through.

• Last but certainly not least, there’s the writings of Dave Bull, a woodblock printmaker who’s been living and working in Japan since the 1980s.

  His website is labyrinthine in the best possible way – apart from heaps and bounds of woodblock printmaking knowledge, you’ll find multiple collections of essays (that’s three links to three different pages) on various subjects: a visit to the Imperial Palace to meet the emperor, raising his daughters back in the 90s, his own upbringing as a British-born Canadian, building a woodblock printmaking studio in the sub-basement of his house (which, unlike most sub-basements, has a river view), busking in front of London’s Royal Festival Hall to make rent in his early 20s, reproducing a large scroll-mounted woodblock print, programming early computers, general observations on Japanese culture as an outsider, and so much more. Five quotes picked almost at random:

  As with most of us, my acquaintance with bats has been necessarily a rather distant one. That is, up until one day last spring, when I finally had a chance to meet one at close range. I nearly stepped on her (I’m quite sure it was a ‘her’) while coming in to our apartment. A small little brown ball, about two centimeters across, just at the edge of the concrete sidewalk. I thought it was a dead mouse at first, but when I looked closer, I saw that it was a tiny bat, and then when it moved slightly, realized that it was alive.

  Quite a number of people I meet seem to be interested in my eldest daughter’s name … at least I do get plenty of comments and questions about it. It is, as far as I can tell, unique, but unlike other unique ‘made-up’ names that I have heard, it has no ‘strange’ feeling. Her name is ‘Himi’, and how she got it is an interesting story … my computer did it!

  I suppose the students are happy in their clean, bright, not to say warm classrooms. I suppose the insurance company is happy, secure in the knowledge that this building will not catch fire one cold night. I suppose the village parents are happy, knowing that their children have a facility the equal of those in the big cities. But if everybody is so happy, then why are my eyes full of water?

  Case open on the ground in front of me, I started. I can still remember the first piece I played; a showy little etude full of cascading arpeggios and runs. A million notes packed into just a few bars. I was astonished at the sound that came out. Each note seemed to hang in the air, and travel for miles. Perhaps the water was acting as a sounding board, or perhaps there was some kind of echo from the buildings across the river … It was a magnificent location. No matter how opulent the concert hall at my back may have been inside, it couldn’t have sounded as good as this!

  Every summer I leave my apartment in the city and come and stand here in these fields. I look about me and note the changes; another tree blocking the path, a new hole in the roof of the farmhouse, another stone fallen from a wall …. And I ask myself, “Why am I allowing this to happen?”

  Now in his seventies, Dave doesn’t have much time to write lately, instead growing his printmaking company Mokuhankan, making YouTube videos and streaming thrice-weekly on Twitch.

The compilation of this post has benefited greatly from being able to crawl through the archives of ReAD, my homegrown³ read-it-later tool where I’ve logged over 44,000 articles read across the last decade or so. Somewhere in my drafts and raring to be finished, there’s an embryo of an article exploring what I’ve learned about my reading habits from this admittedly-obsessive level of record-keeping.