Six Blogs You Need To Bookmark

It’s lunch time. (Somewhere.) You’re eating alone, with a phone or computer for company. And you don’t want to go full social-media. You need a nice blog with frequent updates, ideally one that links to fun (and sometimes educational) stuff around the web. Here are the best.

Sad Lunch Break

Sad Lunch Break is a simple one-man link blog. Some links are videos, like Lizzo’s tiny desk concert or the gestation of a tadpole. Some are articles, like the oral history of Hampsterdance or a deep dive on why every state’s official beverage is milk.

Some are pictorial, like photoshopped cats or a journalistic comic about plastic waste. Some are audio links, like a playable scatterplot of every musical genre. Some are interactive, like a really hard game where you try to be random.

The blog is updated sporadically, but lately there’s been a new post every day.

Coudal Partners

The front page for the interactive studio Coudal Partners includes a skinny link blog down the middle. Recent links include “Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer,” the trailer for the movie Parasite, and temporary tattoos that look like embroidery.

There’s a new post every couple of days. Go to page two for more links and the archives, which are sorted by category on the right.

Boing Boing

Boing Boing, the grandaddy of blogs, posts multiple times a day. It’s a little more like a “normal” blog with full-length posts, which cover the history of Tetris piece randomisers, great video game soundtracks, a recommendation of a specific pencil, and the app that Hong Kong protestors are using to avoid data interception.

Waxy.org

Andy Baio, co-founder of the XOXO Festival, posts occasional links on Waxy.org, with an emphasis on tech nerd interests. Recent links include a satirical Silicon Valley glossary, a profile of the founder of 8chan, and an ever-evolving crowd-sourced music video.

Ryan Broderick’s Cool Time Fun Blog

Ryan Broderick’s Tumblr is an outlier here, a “best of Tumblr” that mostly reblogs funny Tumblr posts and threads. The upside is that it’s almost all fun shit, with no downers or hard news, and unless you’re extremely online, you haven’t seen most of it elsewhere.

Posts include a TikTok mindbender soundtracked by Philip Glass, a Tumblr conversation that accidentally reinvents one of Wittgenstein’s theories, Bugs Bunny vs. Thanos fanfic, a furious debate over metatextual VeggieTales representations of Christ, and the worst gaming setup of all time.

MetaFilter

The 20-year-old forum MetaFilter is kind of social media, but you could also call it a group blog with a very big posting group. There are about a dozen posts a day from different users, with a liberal-arts skew.

Recent posts link to photos of a 19th-century hippo, the Alex Trebek affirmation soundboard, a mashup of Timberlake and Tame Impala, a blog full of fake video game screencaps, a list of rock legends who will probably die in the next few years. There are also many links to the news.

You might notice a lot of overlap in what these blogs cover, as certain stories, memes, and time-wasters sweep across the internet. So you can pick the blog that puts your favourite spin on it, or that has the fewest links that put you off your lunch.

This story has been updated since its original; publication.