Hey! There is lots of cool stuff on the web!

“The Battle” from Nerduo, via The Daily What

Hey! There is lots of cool stuff on the web! I've been looking at it today! And yesterday! And some other days! It is a good time to be a web reader. (Web reader reminds me of "web slinger" aka Spiderman but I can't think of how to make a clever joke out of the similarity. Perhaps I just did but I letting you in on my lack of cleverness? Hmm, perhaps not.) Anyways, everyone in like the media (journalism, television, ...) is going crazy about how much cool stuff there is on the web, and that it is pretty much all for free, and how now all the media institutions are losing money. The New York Review of Books has a good article about this, "The News About the Internet". I realize that the current status quo is completely unsustainable, but it is nice all the same. I hope that whatever solution comes out of all this keeps the affordable, (sometimes) world-view-enlightening information coming. Also, I wish that the guy going on all the talk shows advocating the information-wants-to-be-free position wasn't such a plagiarizing, snobby ass hat. (By the way, my greatest and only Flickr honor was having a photo invited to the group "Ass-hat".).

Here are some sites that regularly post cool stuff to look at. None of them are terribly outre, but lists are funs. I like lists. Also, this list is now either relevant or uncool, as the AV club posted their "Favorite time-wasting websites" today. But I started writing this yesterday!! Man, I hate it when people go into the future and steal my ideas! And it was such an original idea!! Anyways, here's my list, I say in an utterly dejected, soulless manner.

• The Daily Dish. I read pretty much every post. Andrew Sullivan is my hero amongst all the British-Catholic-gay-bloggers in the world. He and his team read lots of stuff from lots of points of view, condense it into short summaries, excise the "money quotes", provide thoughtful commentary and analysis from multiple viewpoints (some of which agree with mine), and link me to the full article if I'm still interested. Here are a few posts I liked today:
  
• "40 Days after Neda": Link to a video of Al Jazeera coverage of yesterday's demonstrations.
  
• "The Fox-Base": I was speculating yesterday that the whole Birther movement consisted of just a few crazy people yelling loudly, but this poll suggests that I was wrong, and that in fact it was a lot of crazy people. Yay America!
• "There Be Monsters in the Deep": Russians catch alien-looking sea creature, decide to eat it, report that it was tasty. Yay Russia!
• "Is Obama's Stimulus Working?": Some numbers about the decline in shrinkage of the economy.
  
from Keep Your Eye on the Cash

• The Gawker. The Gawker is great cuz it compiles all the stupid, funny news from the day, and also adds amusing, snarky commentary to make the stupid, funny news even more enjoyable. I am a sucker for snarky commentary. I'm sure this will be evident by the time I finish this list. Also, I hear the Gawker is actually making money thanks to snarky commentary being both popular and relatively cheap to produce. Here is some recent snark (snark snark snarky, look how many times I can repeat the word!):
• "New York Times Rhapsodizes the Child Rapist Living Down by the River": Pretty brutal pan of an article in today's NYT about a romantic little Hooverville in Rhode Island.
• "No You Cannot Be BMW (Or Any Other Big Corporation) on Facebook": The title says it all.
• "Latest Fringe Conservative Theory on Obama: He's the Antichrist. No, Really.": Description of how various transformations to a Bible verse result in Barack Obama = Satan.
  from God and Satan Square Off As Episcopal Church Blesses Gay Unions
  
• The AV Club. News and features about all things pop and/or culture. The AV club seems to be written for people with almost exactly the same life experience as me. Definitely the same pop-culture makeup as Kyle. All the comments on the site consist of semi-relevant Simpsons quotes. It is disturbing. I actually really like the comments. It is weird that there are people who must spend a reasonable fraction of their time writing comments on every article published on the site, but I appreciate it all the same. Here's possibly my favorite article ever from the site, consisting mainly of an interview with a commenter: "Taste Test: Death Rain Habanero Chips and Thomas Kemper Sugar Cane Sodas" ("BOTTOM LINE IS NOBODY SHOULD BE SCARED OF A FUCKING POTATO CHIP").
• The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Smart standbys that makes me feel smart and smug. Really, though, I may be the only web reader out there who appreciates the long features these magazines provide. Oh, by the way, Slate is officially off my list. They made me annoyed with their pointless, sucky articles, and now I never visit the site. It's like they're just writing vapid articles to cushion headlines full of catchy words, like "Green Vampires will Facebook the Planet with their New iPhone App". I dislike Farhad Manjoo's shill articles about how the combined forces of the iPhone and Kindle will save my soul. And I really hate Ron Rosenbaum's articles. His are the worst of them all. Harper's magazine is not on my list either, but I do not scorn them with my passion for Slate, cuz they charge for most of their content and I just haven't read much of it. Same with Salon. They used to charge, and I never really got into reading them. I'll visit Time or Newsweek on occasion, but they're fairly inconsistent. I do like that Indian Willem Dafoe, though. I'll also visit Talking Points Memo and The Economist a few times a week.
  
• The Daily What, Cynical-C Blog, boingboing, Cracked.com: Good lists of weird, sometimes viral links. Here are some recent gems:
• "How to Avoid Ads in Gmail": If you add tragedy-ish words to your email, Gmail does not show ads on the side. It's true! I tried it!
• "6 Things that Shouldn't Explode but Did Anyway". I'm partial to the tree and the frog, myself.
• "Advances in Ash Storage". Urns shaped like 3-D reconstructions of your loved one or a celebrity's bald head.
  
• "Shatner Does Sarah Palin": the resignation speech as beat poetry.
  
• Everything Is Terrible: Weird old videos. Here's one from yesterday: "YOGI OGI DOGI!". Another themed blog of weird stuff: FAIL Blog.
  


• The New Scientist, Ars Technica, Slashdot, ScienceDaily, The Register: Nerd stuff with cheese. Particularly the New Scientist. A lot of their stories seem to come from PLOS One, which has questionable credibility, but I enjoy it all the same.
• A Journey Around My Skull, Bibliodyssey. Eclectic old art, drawings, paintings, illustrations, other stuff. Here's one from today:
  
  Kveta Pacovska (Czech), 1973, illus. for Pohadky Pro Vsedni Dny I Pro Svatky, via A Journey Around My Skull
• Dinosaur Comics, xkcd. Some good nerd comix.
  xkcb: The Cartoon Lounge, a brie-and-cheese-nerd parody of the geek-nerd xkcd

Okay! So I'm tired of making my list now! But now you know what I waste time reading! And you know what they say! You know, knowing is half the battle! That is a good quote with which to end every everything you could think of writing! Same with exclamation points with regard to sentences! Toodle-oo!

P.S. I usually hit the "Note in Reader" button when I likes stuff, so you can see articles I liked in my Google Reader feed, which is on the right somewhere. Or here. Ta ta ta!