Sometimes, whether while waiting for my food while on lunch break at work, or while waiting for my coffee to brew in the morning, I have short bits of time to fill. Times where I’d like to read because I’m pretty much always reading, but where something like a novel doesn’t make sense.
Lately, I’ve been filling those bits of time with a posts from a list of blogs I’ve been following. I use Flym Reader on my phone to get posts. It’s a reader that you can still get on the Google Play Store, but it seems like development has reached all it’s going to do. The Github repository has been archived by the creator. But it’s fine, because it lets me point the reader at RSS feeds of sites, gets new posts, presents them to me either in a great big pile, or sorted by which blog the thing came from. Basically, it does exactly what I want and nothing that I don’t want. I’ll be sad when a future Android version deprecates it and I have to go looking for another RSS feed reader that just lets me subscribe without online subscriptions to things I don’t care about. Honestly, I just want something that lets my phone act more like the terminal that is a portal to the sum of all human knowledge I was promised, not just a myriad of ways to drain my wallet for things that I used to get better for free.
I was reminded of the trouble I originally had finding a good RSS reader for my phone by a blog post discussing the author’s efforts to follow blogs through their RSS Reader. Their efforts surrounding blogs have come up because of the impending closure of Cohost, my efforts to get back into reading blogs started with the implosion of X (née Twitter) and the resultant scattering of TTRPG folks and authors I’d followed to various different sites. Who’s on Bluesky? Who’s on Mastodon? Where are they on Mastodon? It gets hard to keep track of where I need to go to check things out from who.
The ones who actually maintain their own blogs (and people on Tumblr, which allows me to use RSS to download a user’s posts)? I can actually still find and follow what they put out.
I’ve liked the Indie Game roundup discussions and recommendations from Virtual Moose.
I love following the game design discussions and reminiscing about Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland from Chris McDowell.
Reading Sly Flourish is what got me back into DMing during the COVID lockdowns, reminding me what I loved about taking my seat behind the screen.
The campaign recaps from Githyanki Diaspora inspired me to use a portion of my own blog to keep track of what had gone on in my own campaigns.
I love the game recommendations that come from Mint Rabbit on There’s a TTRPG for That. Seriously, if you think of a genre, even a pretty niche subgenre, odds are that Mint has gotten a request for game recommendations in that genre and has talked about some indie games you might like.
Of course, the original reminder to follow stuff using open protocols instead of relying on the walled gardens that are so prone to enshittification came from Cory Doctorow. If you’re a fan of science fiction, you should definitely check his stuff out. Near future sci fi that’s pretty well grounded in modern tech and social trends. Occasionally depressingly accurate, but that’s sci fi for you. If you’re more into non-fiction, check out his books about things like how internet companies are recreating feudalism and forcing us away from the old good internet to a new bad internet by convincing us to chase things like the “pivot to video” or “web 3.0” or apps that just serve to wrap a website in copyrightable code.
Anyway, Virtual Moose discussing blog posts they’d seen and liked and their effort to better curate a list of blogs to keep track of people they wanted to continue hearing from inspired me to list some of my recent favorites and also rant about how much work it took to track down an Android RSS reader that was just an RSS Reader.
I hope you find your own inspiration to curate a list of blogs, or webcomics, or fanfics, or whatever web content brings you joy. You don’t have to just rely on The Algorithm to find fun things.
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