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Blogroll Keepers #4

It’s been a couple of months since I last mentioned some blogs and newsletters I’m moving from my “Tryout” tag in Feedbin to a more permanent location (and listing on my increasingly-unwieldy blogroll). Here are some more.

§ Blogs

  • James Bennet (RSS). I thought I was already reading this, which is mostly about python and Django, but I wasn’t, but now I am. His recent post about testing Django apps was full of useful tips on setting things up.

  • Tom Stuart (RSS). Weeknotes are feeling like a friendly informal club, or lots of overlapping clubs, with friends and strangers updating each other on their lives every weekend, and it’s lovely to read Tom’s.

§ Newsletters

(Although, because I get newsletter emails piped straight into Feedbin alongside all those RSS feeds, to me they just seem like poorly-formatted blog posts, with unnecessary cruft at the start and end.)

  • The Imperica newsletter is a very long newsletter containing many, many links to interesting things every Friday, written by Matt Muir. I must confess, for several weeks I thought each section was written by a different person, before realising the bylines referred to the creator of the image heading the section. Anyway, while it seems aimed at people who work in marketing/advertising/PR and wish they didn’t, it’s also a great round-up of “stuff that’s appeared online” for people who don’t work in marketing/advertising/PR and are glad they don’t.

  • I mentioned Ben Brown’s newsletter about William Gibson’s Agency in weeknotes but adding it here for my own sense of clarity. After Agency-related stuff it might move on to something else, but it’s still Ben, so it’s a keeper.

  • Please Like Me is from Buzzfeed and is all about influencers and is fascinating; I only wish it was longer. These days there are so many shards of life that huge numbers of people know loads about, and are emotionally invested in, but which only surface in the mainstream media when some massive scandal hits. The world of influencers is one of those and I love having a high-level insight into some aspects of it without having to experience any of its unpleasantness first hand. I feel there must be blogs/newsletters like this about the worlds of video games (not that they’re unpleasant). Suggestions appreciated!

  • Utopian Drivel by Huw Lemmey, commentary on UK culture, politics etc. I liked this comparison, for example, in his recent email about a culture war in English media:

    In the BBC television comedy The Office the tragic figure of David Brent, a relentlessly unfunny and unlovable boss who has “confused respect with popularity” is given a moment of bathos through comparison with his friend Chris Finch, an ignorant bully and practical joker, who, unlike Brent, doesn’t even mean well. The English press operates with the same logic; the people it mercilessly hounds are expected to suck it up and laugh along, or take it for granted. If they reject the culture as cruel or an infringement of their privacy, they’re subjected not only to the original abuse, but to an even worse charge — of not being able to take it.

§ That’s enough for now. I hadn’t realised how skewed towards newsletters this would be. They’re obviously A Thing these days aren’t they.