July 2007

I’m losing myself in the blogsphere. It wasn’t so bad when I just had bookmarks. It’s impossible to follow them all once you have over 20. As long as you’re content with the hassle, which of course I wasn’t. So now I’m collecting them all in google reader. Of course now that leaves me with a never ending supply of sometimes extremely interesting news. From blogs from weird intelligent gamers, political and activist sites, and enigmatic performance artists.

This is both a revelation and a problem in that I stay up real late surfing like I’ve never surfed before. When I first had my sudden hungering for blog-eye (late night blog reading), I was pissed with most of the feed readers and seriously considered writing my own. I made up a long list of all the things I’d want in one. When I started to realistically plan it, I culled it down a lot to the easiest bits. Then found that google reader satisfied most of them, with the added bonus that I wouldn’t have to do any work.

There is one major problem the shits me though. I can read endless amounts of posts, but what if I want to keep track of particularly good articles? Bookmarks completely suck. StumbleUpon (which I use for site discoveries) doesn’t seem suitable for individual posts.. Blogging about them myself takes too much work. I just need a new feed of good things. Oh the pain! Maybe something could be whipped up in Yahoo Pipes. But how the hell would I submit an article? Ideally it would be a single button on firefox that adds it to a feed, but I can’t be fucked figuring it out. I’m sure it could be done, just fetch the referrer or something within a pipe which will add it to the existing feed?

However it doesn’t really satisfy me, I’d want to be able to add tags too. Maybe I can work something out with wordpress here… It has some pretty groovy plugins, maybe add a new category that doesn’t show up, but is listed separately?

Anyway as an example of my dilemma I present a list of interesting articles I’ve been reading (that I could find again). The John Pilger ones are exceptional as always.

• How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole
  ~ by John Pilger / July 26th, 2007
• Rebellion in the British Army
  ~ by John Pilger / June 8th, 2007
• The History Of (Meier’s Own Brand Of) Civilization
  ~ Gamasutra
• Resident Evil: Promoting Tolerance
  ~ Leigh Alexander – Sexy Videogameland
• On Race in Resident Evil 5
  ~ Heroine Sheik
• The Aberrant Gamer – ‘Sundering the Mind’
  ~ Game Set Watch. Silent Hill 2.
• The Aberrant Gamer: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’
  ~ Game Set Watch. Silent Hill 4.
• Racism in Age of Conan’s Hyborian Age
  ~ Destructoid
• HGS 07: Clive Barker on fat people, Jericho, and videogames as escapism
  ~ Destructoid
• The Question I Hate the Most
  ~ Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen.
  This is about “video games as art?”