/bookmarks

I believe in good curation and this page is meant to have a limited amount of recommended links that don't change too often. The postroll is for more transient post recommendations.

Jump to blog discovery, personal blogs, selected blog posts, story reviews, movie reviews

Blogs

Blogs, blogs everywhere...

Blog discovery

These are the my main sources for finding interesting posts across many different blogs

• Bear Blog Discover: That is a given. I frequently scroll through newest post as I think Trending has a tendency to overlook some good stuff
• Minifeed: Minifeed is a curated blog aggregation service that is a consistent source for quality blogposts, mostly tech related
• Postroll by JCProbably: A frequently updated list of interesting blogposts that inspired me to make my own postroll
• Scour: This is a new service that sources thousands of blogs and news sites, and use some AI to categorize things based on your interests. It is still early stages and the content is very hit and miss for, but worth checking out
• Indieblog: The tagline "Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time" is apt here. The random function is fun and they also provide RSS feeds to get a number of random post each day
• Kagi Small Web: A random recent blog posts from a vast number of blogs. This seems to mostly give me more "old-school" blogs from Wordpress and Blogger, but that also means different type of content than the above sources

Personal blogs

Various personal blogs I follow

• Auxiliary Memory by James Wallace Harris is someone I know from a science fiction short story reading group on Facebook and he describes himself as "a retired programmer who now writes essays". His posts are well written, reflective and ponders questions that are relevant for most people. He also has a blog called Classics of Science Fiction with long reviews of classic science fiction stories
• ava's blog by Ava probably needs little introduction for anyone familiar with Bear Blog. She says she "usually identify more deeply with alien or robot characters" and her posts are always well written, personal, insightful and often long
• Sean Goedecke works for GitHub and lives in Australia, and writes thought provoking posts about AI and software engineering
• From the keyboard of by Michał M. Sapka is a "a computer geek from Kraków, Poland" and writes about books, games, BSD, movies, old tech and many more things
• iDiallo by Ibrahim Diallo writes about "programming from the human perspective" and I find his writing really inspiring for my own line of work
• Ruslan Osipov is an engineer at Google, is a Vim expert, and writes about various topics such as personal finance, technology and the indieweb

Own content

This is stuff I have written with a selection of some favorites of mine.

Selected blog posts

Posts from this blog that aren't necessarily the most popular, but ones I feel are representative of what topics I tend to cover

• Frustrations with star rating systems
• Parenting dilemma: screen time
• Having the right intention when going online
• What art means to me in this era of AI tools

Short story reviews

I have my review site of science fiction short stories and some reviews I like more than others, which doesn't necessarily mean that the story itself is great. Look at top rated stories for inspiration for some great science fiction short stories.

• Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer
• Up and Out by Norman Spinrad
• Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo
• Solidity by Greg Egan

Movie reviews

Some movies make a bigger impression on me than others

• Contact is my favorite movie of all time and I have of course seen it many times. Why it is special to me is expressed in this review but seeing it in the theater in a 35mm print was also special
• The Three Colors Trilogy by Krzysztof Kieślowski has been hugely influential in how my taste and interest in film have changed in recent years. My favorite is Blue and it became even more so when I watched it again
• Michael Haneke is an Austrian director that makes a very special kind of films that somehow really speak to me, even though they are very uncomfortable to watch. Practically all his films are masterpieces, but The Piano Teacher, Funny Games, Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf would be my top choices
• I can also appreciate a good Arnold Schwarzenegger movie with The Terminator
• The most interesting movies are usually not those that most people agree on, but those that foster very divisive opinions. Verhoeven's Showgirls is one of those
• Sometimes you watch something that breaks all rules and expectations of what a movie can be, and it is perfect. Computer Chess was one of those movies for me