Miscellaneous blogs worth reading
Obsidian Wings is the gold standard of hobbyist political blogging. Formed years ago by a conservative who was interested in building dialogue across ideological and party lines, it's evolved into a place where four or five regular posters from various areas of expertise discuss social, economic, and political issues with a depth and a thoughtfulness rarely witnessed in today's media environment. The founder ended up leaving for RedState.com, a more traditional partisan blog, and the commentariat skews leftward now. Still, several of the of the conservative posters remain and top-notch content from writers like Hilzoy, Publius, von, and others makes it a daily must-read.
Karen McGrane is an awesome information architect from Bond Art & Science, a web team in New York that's designed sweet stuff like the Fast Company and New York Times sites. I've had the pleasure of working with her on the Buzzr project: her blog's fascinating posts about content strategy and information management only scratch the surface of her talents.
Brand New is a fascinating design blog that covers brand/logo redesigns. If you've ever wanted to listen in as designers deconstruct the color scheme for Tropicana's new packaging, this is the place to do it. You'll learn a lot, and hear all kinds of fun inside-baseball rumors about different design firms and personalities in the world of high end identity/brand building.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of The Atlantic's house bloggers, and his writing is definitely worth a read. Comic book news? Check. Insightful, genuinely moving posts on racial and cultural issues? Check. A willingness to change his mind over time? Also, check. I've only been following him for a week or two based on a link from MeFi, but he's fast becoming one of my go-tos.
Agence eureka is a super-focused blog that firehoses cute French ephemera and papercraft. 1950s postcards, alphabet books, paper dolls... All there. Even better, the posts link through to high-resolution Flickr images for the obsessive readers.
Eunomia, the blog of Daniel Larison, is a voice in the wilderness at the moment. Larison, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, challenges liberal policy positions advanced by the Obama administration, and the intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy of the modern Republican/conservative movement. While I disagree with some of his fundamental positions, he never resorts to the destructive invective that has done so much damage to our culture. He's whip-smart: wonk-heads ignore him at their peril.
Whatever is the blog of John Scalzi, writer of numerous fun and semi-pulpy scifi novels. I've been reading his blog long enough that I forgot I read his books first: he's smart, entertaining, and rarely gets sucked into ugly flamewars about current events. Recently he's also been interviewing other authors and pointing out great stuff going on elsewhere in the fantasy/scifi world. Without Scalzi's blogging, I'd have never heard about Monster, and that would've been a tragedy.
Best things in the world
- FreakAngels, an episodic webcomic by Warren Ellis and artist Paul Duffield. It's free to read online. It's stupidly high-quality. It's in print on Amazon.com. If you like good graphic novels you owe it to yourself to read this, and the archives are now deep enough that you can sit down for a few hours and get up to speed.
- The 960.gs grid system. I'm fine with code and I can think in grids, but working out all the krunky stuff to make a complex layout work in IE, Firefox, and the rest? That feels like pain. The 960 grid sacrifices some semantics and locks you into a static layout, but it means you can work fast and focus on results. I'm hooked.
- Magic Hat. I've never seen it around before, but they've got it freakin' everywhere here in Providence. Yum.
- $99 iPhones. I guess that's the last of my excuses, once August rolls around and the end of my Sprint plan comes up.
- The MIT Museum. @mettamatt and I saw robots and sculptures and old hand-wired LISP machines, and it was crazy. I want to be a mechanical engineer when I grow up, and I have a new and profound respect for electrical engineers, the tribe my dad comes from. They had to make their 64K of RAM out of a washing machine full of copper wire, and they liked it.
- The glorious and gorgeous Catherine. I love traveling and hanging out with the Lullabots and the rest of the Drupal world, but coming home and seeing her after a week on the road is a wonderful thing. Hooray for home!
Thoughts on murder
Those who know me are familiar with what I like to call my storied past: I was conservative religious pro-life dude who published an ideological 'zine for a bit short of a decade, etc. Calling me an 'activist' might have been a bit of a stretch, but I did door-to-door pamphleteering, wrote rabble-rousing screeds, sent money to Focus on the Family, railed against activist judges, etc.
Over time, I've changed and my beliefs have changed. It's a complex and tangly story, with no easy summaries. Suffice to say, this week's news that Dr. George Tiller was assassinated fills me with a profound sense of sadness, regret, and some anger. Continue reading...
Oh look -- a free font!
After all the reminiscing that @emmajanedotnet and I were doing about typography the other day, I decided to hunt down an old novelty font I'd put together based on simple ballpoint pen block lettering. There's nothing particularly special about the font (I called it Verby Blocks) but some poking and prodding in FontForge ironed out some of the kinks. Why not post it for downloading?
I'm releasing it under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license; feel free to knock yourself out with it, embed it in web pages, fix problems, paint your dog funny colors, etc.
