the bblog

some blogs of note

Nowadays, I have subscribed to enough blogs as to completely absorb the time I am willing to spend Reading Crap On The Internet. Thus, I tend to place a premium on feeds that are interesting, but rarely updated; at the very most, once a day. Here's the few, the proud, the blogs that aren't updated all often.

In The Pipeline. The blog of a pharmaceutical research chemist. Full of wonderfully incomprehensible industry-talk and hair-rasing stories.

China Matters. Far East geopolitical analysis. Like the War Nerd, but with less Fresno-related bitching. Gary Brecher doesn't get an entry of his own here, since there's no way to just get a feed of his stuff, and skip the cesspool that is the rest of The Exiled.

FindLaw Writ. Legal analysis of current law-related news by actual lawyers. Excellent in all respects.

Earl Pomerantz: Just Thinking. The bloggiest of any of these, it's the heavily retrospective blog of a Hollywood writer. That previous sentence sounded pretty boring, so you should read this post he did on being a Harrods gift-wrapper circa 1967.

RepRap. The offical blog for the RepRap project. If you subscribe to this, you'll probably want to get the RepStrap blog as well.

NHS: Choices. The British National Health Service debunks those bullshit health stories that clog the newspapers. Depressing!

The Old New Thing. Raymond Chen reveals the horrifying tangled mess that is Windows, as a result of decades of compromises and half-made design decisions. Remarkable that it works at all, really.

Popsci.com: Theodore Gray. Theodore Gray apparently has a column with Popular Science, in which he is primarily employed in doing spectacular things.

Unqualified Reservations. UR is much like Overcoming Bias, (of which I have written previously) in that it is primarily employed in the production of stunningly huge blocks of text, but different in pretty much every other respect. It really is something. For something of an introduction, read this, then this.

On a lighter note,The Editing Room. A java programmer abridges movie scripts in a humorous manner. Pretty much what it says on the tin, yeah. Don't start reading the archives! They will suck you in. Resist their siren song!

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Mildly unrelated: Fanboys (the comic) Generic unfunny Penny Arcade clone turned actually humorous. Really! But all is not well.

For one, Scott censors swear words, which is complete fucking bullshit. This is the internet, your mom isn't watching you type over your shoulder. Grow a pair.

Secondly, the name is pretty stupid. Not as stupid as some, but still pretty stupid. Since changing the name is impossible without a full relaunch of the comic, he gets a pass here, but still. Stupid.

Thirdly, the comic image is displayed via javascript, which means that noscript will block it from displaying the actual comic. It doesn't enable seamless navigation, (which is profoundly stupid in general, and specifically stupid for a webcomic, where you want to link to individual pages) or some half ass content protection scheme. It pretty much just slows down the site and pointlessly annoys NoScript users. Javascript to display a bitmap? No. Fuck you.

Fourthly, the page commentary posts are part of a separate blog, and aren't tied to each page. Lame.

Fifthly, most imporantly, and tying into the theme of this post, Fanboys uses a limited content RSS feed, and pushes a new update for every update of the lame commentary pseudoblog.

No. Fuck you.

Limited-content RSS feeds are lame lame lame. If you want your RSS users to look at your ads, then put them in the feed, don't waste your bandwidth and mine by forcing me to come to your site. Either way, it doesn't matter, since I use Ad Block[*] and a web-based RSS reader.

And if that isn't bad enough, Scott follows it up with a bunch of useless blog posts that only serve to clog up my RSS reader. Unshelved does the same damn thing, and to pimp their merchandise at that. By all rights, that ought to be much worse than Fanboys' crimes, but Unshelved is a librarian comic, so I can't find it within myself to sustain a good lynching rage.

*: I use Ad Block and NoScript not because I'm an anti-corporation pirate dickbag, because I am, but because I do most of my internet browsing on a cheapbook connected to a broadband connection, where the vast majority of wasted time isn't spent downloading crap, but rendering crap. The eee's slow enough that big crap-encrusted Old Media sites are completely unusable on a stock firefox install.