Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library

Cool Things on the Open Web

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dubsartur:
In the tea, Jubal said that people have trouble finding good things and community on the open web.  Obviously a lot of that is people using the heavily censored and wacked internal search engines on closed social media rather than a real search engine on the open web.  So in this thread, lets post some cool things which are on the open web not a giant social media platform.

I don't have a good definition of the open web, but "findable on any search engine not just an internal search engine" is a good sign, and so is "creators can export their work in some simple standard format like bbcode, html, etc. and re-post it somewhere run by someone else."  If you have to enable scripts and log in to see it, that is a bad sign.

Today I will post three out of the United States.

Adventure Cartoonist Lucy Bellwood with comics about tall ships and jerk brains and how soap is a metaphor for breaking up with her ex https://lucybellwood.com/

Statistician Andrew Gelman of "Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State" fame has a very active blog https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/

Siderea in Boston was posting about the present emergency since January https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/

What about you?  What on the open web still brings you joy?  What do you wish more people knew about?

Jubal:
Thanks for these :)

I don't think I've got a lot of factual information things to add to this sort of list - possibly we should have a thread like this for arts/comics/etc and a separate one for factual stuff.

A few things from my RSS reader anyway:

Gwenfar's garden is quite a nice garden blog that I nose through now and again:
https://www.gwenfarsgarden.info/

A Book of Creatures is a wonderful modern bestiary with some very nice art and takes on particular folkloric beasts:
https://abookofcreatures.com/

Fantastical Logic is quite a nice blog too - often quite serious topic matter with a literary conceit of being translated wizards' notes:
https://fantasticallogic.wordpress.com/

A Viennese friend of mine occasionally blogs at My Moveable Feast - a lot of quite forthright discussions of feminism and other somewhat enraging things about the world:
https://mymoveablefeast.blog/

And because I'm vain I suppose my own politics blog can count here as something I wish more people knew about:
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/

I'll have a think, there are probably many more things I'm forgetting right now.

dubsartur:
I guess we could move Lucy Bellwood into a more 'artsy' thread.  Her comics tend to be educational or autobiographical but they are still webcomics.

Despite what some people would have us think, most visits to my site come from search engines not social media, and most users a year ago used larger screens.  I think if you create a 'smart phone' site (in terms of content and design philosophy not 'can you read it on a 6 cm wide screen') you get 'smart phone' traffic and vice versa.

dubsartur:
I guess I have always been more comfortable talking about facts than big ideas or art.  To me, art is more for enjoying than talking about, aside from some basic mechanical things.  And the things I like rarely seem to be in fashion with my communities, and I have trouble getting people I know to geek out about whatever they are in to right now.  So some of the folk songs and filk and early music groups I learned through random online links or browsing in libraries and stores, I never sat face to fact with someone else who thinks they are awesome except at one or two Ritterfest type events.

Its been a really really long time since my brain was in a state that let me be creative.  This month I can sometimes reproduce things, but that is more 'engineering' and 'problem solving.'

Big ideas are fun, but the more I learned about epistemology and the gap between some people's ability to sound convincing and back it up, the more I treat them as 'desert' to the main course of facts and side dish of mid-range theory.

Glaurung:
One thing I'd like to suggest here: a blog named A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. It's written by Bret Devereaux, an American military historian who is also a fantasy and SF fan. Much of the content is short series of posts on single topics: recent ones have included analyses of the battles of Helm's Deep and the Pelennor Fields as portrayed in The Lord of the Rings (both films and both), and an overview of food production in pre-industrial societies. The writing is accessible and informative for the non-specialist, and laced with a certain dry humour. Posting is weekly, and it looks as if there is some reasonably civil discussion in the post comments.

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