Blaugust Prompts, Week 3

Another week gone by! It’s been a busy one, and while compiling a few other posts and thoughts, I wanted to get these prompts out the text-editor, so to speak.

As provided in this post, here are week 3’s prompts:

• Top five (or 10 or 20) bloggers.
• Top five (or 10 or 20) musical artists.
• Top five (or 10 or 20) YouTubers/ Twitch streamers.
• Top five (or 10 or 20) authors / book series.
• Top five (or 10 or 20) game developers / modders.
• Top five (or 10 or 20) actors / directors / screenwriters.
• Do you have friends who are creatives? Tell us why they’re fantastic and plug their online presences.
• Group Project: What creative endeavor have you always wanted to try, and who do you admire in that field?

Lots of tops! I’m gonna skip over the actors/directors/screenwriters questions, since I can barely think of 5 names, let alone a list of favorites!

Top Bloggers

For a long while, I’ve had Hacker News and Lobsters as RSS feeds in my aggregator. Easily, these two feeds alone give me 200-300 entries per day. Of those, I’d probably look at 5-10 on average. That’s not a very good “signal-to-noise ratio”, and so I’m giving Hacker News the ol’ “get ratio’d” (as the kids say (What? What do you mean it’s different now?)) and disabling it for a bit. Instead, I want to find more individual sites to subscribe to. This means digging through comments, blogrolls, meta-posts and such to find more reading sources. It’s been a while coming, but Blaugust is a perfect excuse for change, and this week specifically was the week I wanted to do so! Anyway, preamble complete, here are some of the top sites I watch for updates (via RSS, of course!):

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux, is a blog about history, often specifically ancient warfare and related topics, though sometimes dipping into pop-culture and fantasy topics. Each post (or series of posts) always teach me something, the writing is enjoyable and accessible, and the topics are always interesting.

Barking Up The Wrong Tree, by Eric Barker, is a bi-weekly blog generally about self-help and psychology. I’ve gone through the self-help House of Mirrors already, and I’m not generally excited or interested in the topic, but I enjoy Eric’s coverage of a wide range of sources, and I enjoy his writing style!

Drew DeVault’s Blog, by Drew DeVault, covers mostly technology topics, and especially recently a number of discussions about AI. I admire Drew’s creations and ambition, and think he is a strong and positive force in the technology space these days. I always learn something from his posts.

fyr.io, by Matt, is a personal blog about tech and indieweb stuff, and is one which often provides me with many links to check out, sometimes through the Scraps series.

Lazybears, by Hyde, is a personal blog talking about life and tech and stuff, with some wonderful pictures tossed in, and the series “Over/Under.” I forget where I first learned of the blog (I think it was either Scrolls or Scraps), and I’ve loved every update since!

Low <- Tech Magazine, founded by Kris De Decker and now supported by a full team, covers low-tech solutions to modern-day problems. Always fascinating.

Scrolls, by Mike Sass, is actually only a small part of Shellsharks, and I’ve only just realized that while reviewing this list! Scrolls is a great update about the indieweb, and another infection vector of more blogs for me to read.

Smashing Frames, by Jürgen Geuter/tante, covers technology with a rather heavy anti-AI lean. Self-described as a Luddite, tante actually inspired me to properly learn about the Luddites.

Where’s Your Ed At?, by Ed Zitron, is a recent addition to my list. He was recommended by Cory Doctorow during his recent Weekly Show with John Stewart appearance. From what I can tell, the blog focuses a lot on AI and finance. I’ve only read 3 of the recent posts, but they have been thoroughly enjoyable and informative.

Top Musicians

There are a number of musicians that I watch on YouTube, who are more music education and discussion focused. For this section, I want to list some of the artists that I listen to regularly. I scrobble most of my listens to Listenbrainz, if you’re extra curious about my listening habits.

young scrolls makes music using the voice lines from various Elder Scrolls games. It’s legit some of my favorite music. Recommended Tracks: Amulet of Kings, Aura Merchant, Secret Service

Gygax plays Dungeons and Dragons themed rock-and-roll. Recommended Tracks: Light Bender, Second Wind

The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets makes music generally focused around Lovecraftian horror, but, like, up-beat and a bit cheeky. Recommended Tracks: The Great Molassas Disaster, Welcome to the Island

Westkust was an indierock/shoegaze group, that I first heard on a stream. Just good stuff. Recommended Tracks: All of them, on repeat and shuffle, while driving through a field of wild flowers.

The Protomen have created a three-part Mega Man rock opera. They are incredible live. Recommended Tracks: The three parts of the rock opera, in order, start to finish. Light it up!

toe is a Japanese group, playing indie/jam rock stuff. Love throwing it on and reading to it. Recommended Tracks: Song Silly, tremolo + delay, NOW I SEE THE LIGHT

I’m also a fan of some more well-known artists, such as Blue Oyster Cult, Yes, Above & Beyond, Iron Maiden, and the usual charcuterie of video game soundtracks.

Top YouTubes

I’m splitting YouTube channels and streamers, since these are two sizable lists already, and I’d rather dedicate space to each individually. That being said, I have 165 YouTube channels in my feeds. There are several which I don’t watch, or which haven’t updated in a while, but I watch the majority of those channels. Thus, I’m going to try and grab 1-2 from each of the categories that I setup in my aggregator, with perhaps gaming and music getting closer to 5 each. Also, I apologize in advance, I have named these categories poorly, and now you get to see that, too. Add it to the list of things to reorganize and clean-up a bit, I guess!

Artsy

• PBS Storied, a channel which includes Otherwords, a show about linguistics, and Monstrum, a show about monsters and spooky stuff.

Crafty

• Stuff Made Here features a dude making often absurd machines.

Cooking

• ANTI-CHEF is a weekly show, featuring a self-declared “non-chef” learning to cook better. Chill, humble, fun.
• B. Dylan Hollis posts mostly shorts about questionable mid-century recipes. A very charismatic lad.
• Ethan Chlebowski does deep-dives and recipes focused on making healthy and affordable meals.
• Glen And Friends has 3 channels, but I’ll include just 1 for my already too big list. This is his “main” channel, and covers cooking with a hint of cookbook history, and often focuses on affordable meals, and education.
• How To Drink features Greg making cocktails, telling wonderful stories, performing science experiments, and a bit of history and learning to boot!
• Tasting History with Max Miller is another “comfy” cooking show, where Max makes an historical recipe and discusses the history surrounding it! Another charismatic lad!
• Townsends covers 17th century cooking from the homestead, and includes lots of history and education.

Gaming

Oh gosh. There are 38 feeds in this category. Cooking had 13 and I struggled to exclude some. I’m limiting myself here to 5 of the lesser-known creators I watch.

• The Saner Gamer is a very new channel, and he covers lore topics generally around open-world (or open-world-ish) games.
• windowledge has some great challenge videos for the Hitman series.
• Kruggsmash makes incredible Dwarf Fortress stories, with hand-drawn illustrations! Super comfy.
• Onyx Leviathan does thorough explorations of various games, but I especially love their explorations of the Elder Scrolls games.
• Warlockracy does narrative reviews of various video games, with a focus on role-playing games (with a further focus on classic RPGs and the Fallout series). He also has some very fascinating videos about the Russian game development communities of the early 90s and 00s.

Music

40 feeds in this one. Stay strong, Bill - only 5!

• 8-Bit Music Theory makes videos about video game music and the associated music theory behind it.
• Adam Neely. Bass.
• Charles Cornell discusses music theory with a piano.
• Smooth McGroove creates a cappella versions of video game music. Incredible beard.
• Venjent makes dubstep music and radiates positive vibes. Love is the answer.

Take a Breath

It’s not a topic, just a need for me. The last couple topics, and in fact all of the above, all have a similar naming scheme of “Topic Bois”, because I guess why not, and these last topics are the least structured: “Smart Bois”, “Talky Bois”, and “Tech Bois”. There are channels in these topics that may belong in others, and there are channels I’ve already mentioned that might belong in one of these. Alas, reorganization calls yet again.

Smart

38 feeds again. This is the category for philosophy, science, mathematics, and similar. Each of these channels is certainly worth a share, but again I’ll highlight only a few.

• Atomic Frontier covers engineering topics, with surprisingly high production value for, what appears to be, mostly a solo endeavor.
• Farya Faraji talks about music history, haters, and also makes historically-accurate music. Of all my recommendations, this may be the most polarizing, but I do so enjoy his stuff.
• Technology Connections: Mid-West Man Talks Technology (TM)
• Travis McEnery talks about spiders. IF YOU HAVE ARACHNOPHOBIA, DO NOT CLICK. Because it is all spiders. But, also, do click and face those fears and learn and overcome! I believe in you.

Talky

Aren’t they all talky? 95% of the recommendations thus far have been “talky.” sigh

• Any Austin makes video essays about video games in a way that, really, only he can.
• Folding Ideas is the channel of Dan Olson, and he makes video essays about various topics, all of which tend to be rather eye-opening. “Line Goes Up” man.
• Rosencreutz makes video essays about games, history, philosophy, and the combinations of them.
• We’re In Hell is the collection of video essays “examining the sociological roots of trash culture phenomena.” Thorough, Canadian, and often provocative.

Tech

Now, of all the channels I’ve shared, of all the feeds I have, I’d expect this category to be the fullest. There are… drum roll 3! 3 feeds (ah ah ah) are in this category. Have them all:

• Greg Hurrell talks about Vim and terminal stuff.
• Jeff Geerling talks about self-hosting and Raspberry Pi’s. Seems like one of the most genuine and kind human beings.
• Matrixdotorg is the channel for the Matrix chat protocol.

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Top Streams

I basically watch all livestreams via Twitch. I’d love to find more fediverse/self-hosted streamers (a la Peertube or Owncast et al), and I’d love to become one of those streamers, but for now, you get a list of Twitch streamers. Twitch is probably the biggest source of entertainment for me these days, whether it be live or VODs. I almost always have a stream on in the background while I’m gaming, or writing, or reading, or really anything that otherwise doesn’t require dedicated visual and aural attention. I follow some very popular streamers, but again, here are my top lesser-known streamers:

• Enns is a variety streamer, generally sticking to older games like Final Fantasy XI, X-COM (the OG), and Sim City 2000. Shroom Cam.
• Drid is another variety streamer, playing many “janky” games, but also classics or cult-classics such as CDDA. Loves paw-paws.
• Davaeorn and Epickiwhy both play CRPGs at max difficulty, often with additional difficulty.
• Apple is my IRL friend who streams a variety of games.

Top Authors / Books

Behold, my section of shame. One of my goals is to read more actual books. That being said, I have a few recommendations:

• Cory Doctorow is a prolific writer about technology, privacy, and digital rights. He writes both fiction and non-fiction. He’s likely now most famous for his Enshittification book.
• Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Book of the Long Sun series are both great, as is his novel A Borrowed Man.
• John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything Is Tuberculosis are very good. I enjoyed The Fault In Our Stars, too.
• Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson is an incredibly relevant and offensive graphic novel series.
• Anything and everything by William Gibson.

Top Game Developers / Modders

My favorite hobby: modding Bethesda games playing video games. I just wrote a post about Vicn’s DAc0da, and that post includes quite a few other mods listed. There are a number of large-scale collaborative modding projects that I will have to dedicate another/several post(s) to: Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel are focused on rebuilding and exploring the world of Tamriel in Morrowind. OpenMW is an open-source engine you can use to play Morrowind on modern day hardware, and with some impressive functionality that greatly expands modding possibilities. Beyond Skyrim is focused on rebuilding and exploring the world of Tamriel in Skyrim.

As far as specific developers go, a few of the larger indie studios that I’m consistently impressed with are Hello Games, the relentless team behind No Man’s Sky; Supergiant Games, the studio behind Hades and Bastion (and Pyre and Transistor); and ArenaNet, the studio behind the Guild Wars MMOs.

I want to finally mention a few cool game or game-adjacent projects. First, I’ve had a blast developing games using the TIC-80, as well as the LÖVE game engine, and the DragonRuby game toolkit. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an absurdly comprehensive post-multi-apocalyptic game with an incredibly deep crafting system. The Kingdom of Loathing is a browser-based, text-based, meat-based adventure game that I’ve enjoyed for more than half of my life. Luanti is an open-source voxel game creation platform (most known as an alternative to Minecraft). And to wrap up the aforementioned modding talk, Amethyst Mod Manager is a Linux native mod manager for many games.

Creative Endeavor Pursuit

I’ve been telling many friends for many years now that I’d like to try streaming. I often stream to and with friends in Discord, and I’ve streamed a handfull of times on Twitch, but my true ambition is to stream to something like Peertube. Owning my channel, my content, and the distribution of it. It’s a lot to setup and manage, and requires administrative duties and such. And I can’t even say if I’d use it! I’ve decided a much smarter approach is to begin streaming on a schedule, keep consistent on that schedule, and, if after 3-4 months I still enjoy it, then I can consider moving to a self-hosted solution.

I would also like to pursue music more seriously. I enjoy playing bass and mandolin, and I’m growing more confident singing, and I think it’d be a lot of fun to play in a band with some friends. I have no interest in trying to make a career from it, but playing enough to put an album up on Bandcamp would be super cool.

Bonus: Web-Comics!

I didn’t want to include these in the blog section, but I’d feel remiss to not include them!

• Kill Six Billion Demons is very violent, somewhat NSFW, and full of incredible art, esoteric lore, and compelling characters. I think it’s nearing the finale!
• Poorly Drawn Lines features a crow that smokes, a turtle in a beret, and mouse.
• The Weekly Roll and The Pos’Thal Chronicles are both by CME_T. They’re on Webtoons, which is fine, but it is annoying that I have to zap some weird elements away to read them.
• Extra Fabulous is made by Zach, whom I love. I literally give him money, and you should too (and also he posts more comics on his Patreon, some of which are free, I’m not just shilling due to some weird, parasocial relationship with a guy that draws Garfield fucking Sephiroth).

Wrapping It All Up

Hopefully you find something in this ridiculous list that’s worth the time! It also makes sense to me to share my entire feed list, since that’s kind of what this is all about. You can find it here.

This is a post in the 2026 Blaugust Series. You can find more details here. If I get my act together, I’ll include a link to an index, or a list of other posts related to Blaugust 2026 right here. Thanks for reading this ramble. Be good, do good, stay hydrated, go Bills.