The Electric Newspaper
…and we’re back. Spring Break went by without too much of a fuss; a trip to Ann Arbor, a LAN party, another trip to Ann Arbor for a concert on St. Patrick’s Day, a company banquet at the Glass Pavilion. I completed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and picked up God of War as a new game to indulge in for an hour or two every week. So far, I like it quite a bit.
Now that I’ve gotten all that out of the way, we can get to the meat of this post. I am an obsessive absorber of information – like a thirsty sponge, I seek reading material on whatever subjects I deem to be worthy. Toward this endeavor, I have amassed a mental list of sites that I typically find to be interesting, and that I find myself checking regularly (or semi-regularly). They are as follows:
News
Slashdot – Probably the site I invest the most time and energy into reading. I read all the summaries religiously, plus the comments for any articles that interest me enough. I even comment myself from time to time.
Yahoo! – More or less just a habit from the days of using web portals. I usually check the headlines here to see if there is anything interesting, which there occasionally is.
Electoral Vote – Owned and operated by computer science legend Andrew Tanenbaum, I’ve been using this site as my primary insight into politics since 2004. Fairly objective and profoundly insightful, the site’s major gadget is a graph which amalgamates polls to show you what states are leaning where, along with possible explanations for those trends.
Memory Alpha – Star Trek wiki; I check the news section for word on the new Star Trek film.
Blogs
Bruce Schneier – Probably my favorite pundit on matters of security, cryptography, and computer science. Great resource for links to new research and news stories with added commentary and occasional essays/editorials. After /., probably my most visited resource on the web.
John Scalzi – Sci-fi writer whose work I’ve never read, but I nonetheless enjoy his blog quite a bit. Lots of various and sundry bits that run the gamut of writing advice, amusing anecdotes, social/political commentary, interest pieces, and general geekery. What a blog should be.
William Bennett – Creator/frontman of Whitehouse. Lots of short but insightful essays, observations and opinions on culture, and movie reviews. Always throught-provoking.
Wil Wheaton – Honestly, most of his updates aren’t that interesting to me, and he updates it sporadically on top of that. I guess its just the novelty of reading Wesley Crusher’s blog that keeps me coming back.
Jhonen Vasquez – Creator of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, staple reading for my social group back in high school. Later went on to make Invader Zim. Only discovered last week, but it’s been very entertaining and will likely make it into the usual rotation.
Humor
Somethingawful – Everyone gives me a look when I tell them I don’t read the forums. Just the Front Page News and a couple other sections. Kinda hit or miss, but worth it for the occasional side-splitter.
Seanbaby – Another hit or miss comedy site with treasure trove of great archives that I’ve read on and off for over a decade. Updated every Thursday.
The Best Page In the Universe – Maddox’s page. Hardly updated anymore, but I still dig the content.
GaijinSmash – A site containing interesting tales and observations of Japan from the point of view of a young black man who moved there as a JET student and stuck around after his contract was up. Done now in the form of a seldom-updated-blog, it started as a series of “editorials” that my friends and I read religiously back in 2005/2006.
XKCD – Nerdy webcomic, good for the occasional laugh or interesting diagram. Updated Mon/Wed/Fri.
ToothpasteForDinner – Classic webcomic by Drew, read mostly for the nostalgia I get for the early ’00s when viewing. Updated daily.
MarriedToTheSea – Another webcomic by Drew whose premise relies on adding captions to old public domain images. Updated daily.
Superpoop – Another webcomic by Drew which uses the formula of adding text, other photographs, or both to pictures found on the net.
Now, the big question: what are YOUR daily must-read websites?
Interesting. I left a comment here and it disappeared. Firefox seems to be a less-reliable browser by the day. Anyhow, I spend a lot of time on Fark. How could I not love a site with headlines like “Man ends his electrician career to become a conductor.” I used to read Ars Technica a lot, but IMO they’ve sold their ‘cred’ to become respectable. When I feel the need for real news I check english.aljazeera.net, BBC, NPR, or search Google. I browse Slashdot, The Daily Grail, Cringeley.com, 538, and sometimes The Truth About Cars. I try to read whatever’s latest at The Straight Dope once a week. XKCD is also awesome. Particularly the patently absurd and unexpectedly melancholy. Every couple of months I check at kuro5hin.org, but usually become irritated in about three seconds. Afterwards I feel like I need to ‘surf’ on over to segfault.org and read the latest.One site I still miss is Suck.com. It’s not been updated in almost 10 years.I guess I’ll fess up to Facebook, also.
^—note that you left out Make Magazine and Roger Ebert’s site from your original spam-filtered post. I went with the one that had more content.
I recently was reading through some of Ebert’s blog for some reason or another and was quite pleasantly surprised to see he is a lot more insightful than I previously took him for. Surprised how well-spoken he is on things outside of films, too.
My exposure to Ars, kuro5hin, Cringley, and Segfault is limited to the filtering through that /. provides me. I’m guessing there is a reason you’ve never taken to being a slashdotter?
Slashdot is definitely a useful resource, but there are so many people there that it seems hard to add anything that isn’t already there. And I kind of miss ‘hot grits’ trolls. I thought they added greatly to the charm of the site.
Here’s another site I check occasionally, with an interesting article.
it seems you have listed before pages you frequent maybe im mistaken
i have been just staying to boingboing and fark alot these days but majority of the times i look up more info about the subjects that catch my eye and ends up on information hunt all over the place. been addicted to lamebook for humor and postsecert for touchy mushy stuff . a handful of pages you mention i check up on -maddox was old favorite -SA as much as i give it sh– all of drews projects
As far as listing sites I frequent, I think I might have done that on the Gibbon, but not here.
I thought you said you weren’t reading BoingBoing as much these days?
i picked back up to it. when sites change layouts im slightly upset by it. even if it is minor changes so when BB did i was kinda pissy with them but they cover many things that appeal to me so its hard not to go there and sift through.
This is odd. I posted here with Firefox 3.5 a couple of days ago, but my post never showed up. I tried again and the “Submit” button wouldn’t work. I installed Opera and saw no posts, so I posted again. After the successful post using Opera the page reloaded and BOTH of my posts showed up. Now only Amanda’s post shows up in Firefox, but I can see my two posts and Amanda’s in Opera. In Konqueror only Amanda’s post is visible.
It appears as though your posts were caught as spam for some reason, and had to await for my approval. Odd how your third post went through.
In any event, sorry for the technical issues. WordPress -1.
Not a problem. Interesting that Opera still shows the old post you didn’t go with but Mozilla doesn’t.
Upgrade to Firefox 3.6!
Congrats on the return and completion of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Arguably, the greatest Zelda yet. Hope you enjoyed roaming the land of Hyrule again.
You don’t use Yahoo for search do you? I’ve used Google for my searching needs for years now. And it works like a charm.
Electoral-vote had the best coverage/statistics during the 2008 election–by far.
I don’t use Yahoo for search, especially now that they’ve inked a deal to use Bing behind the scenes. I think the last time I used Yahoo in a genuine search was in the very early ’00s.
And yes, Zelda was a pleasant revival of times past.
check your gmail sean.
I’ve become such an internet meandered as of late. I don’t have a daily ‘staple’ that I visit, but more of a collection that I generally visit once a week or a few times a week. They include the Craigslist pages for generally anything in a 100 mile radius, Digg (don’t be a hater, I know it’s gone to shit,) the Toledo Area Humane Society to see if anything amazing is there that I have to go check out. (I can’t wait for the day that I come in and find a llama in the agility yard for temporary holding.) A few specific journals of various people, the smrealms site, facebook, and a select few webcomics. (xkcd, amazingsuperpowers, nedroid.) Every once in a great while, normally whilst excessively bored or trying to distract myself from life, I will indulge in some of the LOLsites (mostly failblog, thereifixedit, and engrish.)
For the record, I don’t dislike Digg – I just never got into it. I’ve only compared it to /. for lack of anything better to compare /. to, and I’ve done so knowing that they have a few fundamental differences that define how they run.
Let’s pray for llamas at the humane society.
Hey Jiro. Hitting up the console games now? I loved God of War 1 and 2. 3 just came out, so I want to try to get a copy of it soon. Resident Evil is also a great series!
Benri-san! Nice to see you here. How is Japan treating you? :)
Yes, I’ve worked through most of GoW and I’m enjoying it well enough. It seems everyone loves that game.
If you want to play a much darker Zelda, and the first Zelda rated T (for Teen), look no further than Zelda: Twilight Princess. I own and have played the Gamecube version. It is a very good game, almost as good as OOT, but not quite. It’s the best Zelda since OOT in my view. It’s storyline is much darker than even Majora’s Mask. Unfortunately, the bosses in most of the dungeons are far too easy. It just doesn’t have the same magical feeling that OOT has. Having said all this, TP does feature using your sword while riding on horseback. TP is also a very, very large game. Walking from Faron Woods to Hyrule Castle will take a while on foot.
I haven’t played a Resident Evil game first-hand, but know of it and remember seeing screenshots and reading a review for the one on the N64 I think it was. Appears to be fun and somewhat scary.