Haven’t done a blogroll-post in a while. This won’t be one either. Expect a lot of tech-related things instead.
I started 2024 with a nasty cold and Chris Coyier’s OPML file of Personal Developer Blogs. After importing it into my feedreader I had a nifty 17.000 unread posts, which kept me busy for a while. I purged most of the dead stuff, the ones about technology I have no clue of (i.e. ruby on rails, ai, and tailwind css), and those which became too political for my taste.
The start of a new year might be the best time to see whether a blog is subscribe-worthy or not. A lot (capital L lot) of folks summarize their previous 12 months, which makes it easy to see if what they are writing about is interesting.
The tech-blogosphere has sort of a midlife-crisis right now. There is talk about a “dark forestization” of the web, and you know it’s serious when they write a book about it (they actually rehashed some older blogposts; see Good Internet for further links). After the whole Twitter-spiel people – again – realized that it’s not good to rely on walled gardens. Personal blogs are up and coming. Google is thinking about digging up Reader from the dead. Capitalism is still bad. But at least we have a diagram of the web now (courtesy of Naive Weekly), to show us that the internet is indeed a net(work). Now all we need is a good search engine to find stuff. Or we could use links. I prefer links. Hence more links. I will also start updating my blogroll again. But first links (I haven’t actually checked most of those, just bookmarked them, but I need to clean my bookmark-bar to position it next to the address-bar, which one can do, which is a fact that blew my mind last week):
Finally, considering that I mentioned Naive Weekly and Good Internet, there is also webcurios for even more link curiosating. That is what you get when you try to mix curating with curios.
I just slapped together a mixtape. My first in a long time and it’s just a best-of of different tracks that I enjoyed listening to in the last couple of years glued together with some toilet-humour. It would have included Nat Baldwin’s “Wake Up It’s Time To Rise” but I couldn’t find it on the Tube.
Mixtape Garden will probably rot faster than the strawberries I bought last saturday and threw in the trash today. But they converted the tracks into an MP3 so I got that goin’ for me which is nice.
Once I hit that “Publish”-button, I will try my hand on another one. Expect an addendum post-haste!
PS: Here are TV themes I listened to a lot in the past 5 10 15 20 years.
It’s Karneval in Germany which means some fucker woke me yesterday at 8 am playing two god-awful tunes over his car-speaker in a volume that you might have heard them. It’s also a time of “suggested” humour. I don’t partake in any of that but I went to the local fair to get me some roasted almonds. They were 4,- Euros for 100 gram so I didn’t get me some roasted almonds.
Instead I walked to the nearest hill today listening to a new audio drama. It’s a funny one. Somewhere between “batshit” and “crazy” and Erie, Pennsylvania, and Paris, Texas. There is dolphin-on-mackerel brutality, talking cats & dogs and a zombie-demon-hybrid called Sam. Of course, I’m talking about “Ocean Dreams“. It reminds me of “Corked” done in a more cinematic style but with the same amount of wackiness.
Another item that made me smile recently was “A Man With One of Those Faces“. The first book in a series of crime novels by Caimh McDonnell. Comparatively speaking they read like Terry Pratchett writing a sphereworld, i.e. real-world, thriller. A bunch of tropes mushed together to create an entertaining whole.
Someone at the library of the university Duisburg-Essen must have a faible for those types of serieses. They have all the Wolf Haas books, an insane amount of novels by Friedrich Ani (I tried one, they are neither funny nor good), seemingly all the McDonnell ones (I just got the second book on my last visit) and perhaps many, many more. Unfortunately they only have a single Agatha Christie novel.