January Journal: Non DW blogs

[liv]

zhelana asked me about Non DW blogs I read. So let's see.

I am not at all systematic about blogs outside DW. There are some big missing categories; I basically don't read science blogs or Jewish blogs regularly at all, for example. The biggest category of off-DW reading is blogs by friends who have moved away from LJ/DW and set up real blogs, but that's also the least interesting category to people who aren't me.

Other than that, there's a couple of long-running group blogs I read mainly for the comment discussions. The kind where they regularly get a couple of hundred comments on a post, and there's effectively a community of regular commenters who have known eachother for years. Blog comments make a terrible technology for running that kind of online community, but I persevere because I like the discussions. One is Making Light; sometimes the Fluorosphere can annoy me a bit in that self-righteous American Liberal way, but they also have very cool discussions and are erudite and often compassionate. Most of the others in this category are pretty much defunct now; Shapely Prose I really miss. But I'm starting to pick up Captain Awkward which fills a similar niche.

I read a small amount of feminist stuff, though I've completely lost interest in the big name celebrity blogs like Feministing, Feministe and Jezebel. This category overlaps quite a bit with fat positive and sex positive blogging. So Body Impolitic, Pervocracy and The dirty normal are on regular rotation, and I occasionally dip in to things like The fat nutritionist and Laurie Penny's column and Whipping Girl by trans feminist Julia Serano.

Other than that, I have a huuuuuuge folder in my feed reader for what I generally think of as SF writer gossip. I started following various writer LJs in order to keep up with some of the big SF fandom controversies a few years back, and many of them are interesting to read in their own right, but the great majority have drifted away from LJ by now. I'm not going to list all of them, let me pick out some of my favourites:

• Jo Walton's column at Tor.com. I also her follow her LJ, papersky, but most of her really meaty interesting analysis of books is at Tor now.
• Athena Andreadis is beautifully biting, almost cynical, and she mixes in talking about SF with talking about science (she's a working molecular biologist as well as a writer).
• Kameron Hurley is a very sharp, thinky blogger; I was actually reading her blog in the early 2000s and then she popped up again when God's war was such a sensation.
• Abigail Nussbaum is a seriously brilliant reviewer, again, can be fairly acerbic, but amazingly insightful.
• NK Jemisin has some really good stuff both about books and more meta stuff about fandom itself.

But apart from a core few, I'm getting to the point where outside my d-roll, I no longer have "blogs I read"; I more often kind of wait for links to float up through Twitter or DW, and if I find I keep reading and enjoying articles from the same place I may start checking the blogs more regularly. This also means I'm not really distinguishing between blog posts and more journalistic columns, these days.

[January Journal masterlist]

Comments

[pretty_panther]

These are some really interesting blogs. I think I will go and check them out :D