Blogs and articles I liked in 2019

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It’s the end of the year, so I figured I’d kick this blog off by highlighting the excellent work of other authors’ blogs, articles and long-reads which I enjoyed through the year. This is by no means a comprehensive list - I’m just going through things in my Instapaper account, which is largely just stuff I thought to archive rather than delete once I’d read it. And, there’s an obvious technology bias towards the content. And not all of them were all written in 2019 either. Nevertheless, it is presented below in a loosely categorised form.

Programming

Security, Reverse Engineering

Arts

I apparently do like my movie longform articles:

  • The Making of The Exorcist: In a few years The Exorcist will be fifty years old; this article explains why it’s lost none of its power to terrify.
  • They Came. They Sawed. is a similar article about the making of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
  • My favourite movie reviewer (AYCYAS) recently wrote an excellent piece on the Australian classic Wake In Fright.
  • The Mortgaging of Sierra Online: Picking a single Digital Antiquarian article as a “favourite” is a nigh-impossible task, but this entry - which covers Sierra during the peak of mid-90s era CD-ROM multimedia frenzy - triggers the most nostalgia in me.

Miscellaneous

  • Ghoulish Acts and Dastardly Deeds: A captivating longform piece about the hunt for a pipebomb terrorist in New York City during the 1950s.
  • I watched the excellent documentary Three Identical Strangers this year. Double Mystery, by the New Yorker, covers some related ground and is an excellent accompaniment. (in order to avoid spoiling its impact, I would strongly recommend watching the documentary first though)
  • 27 Questions to Ask Instead of “What Do You Do?”. Asking someone how they feel their life has gone so far is a bit heavy, though.

Video

Noah Gervais’ longform commentaries on games are so good that it finally pushed me over the edge to begin supporting creators on Patreon rather than just blithely consuming content. His series of travelogue videos covering a journey across the American west in a VW Van are so stupendously good, they became a major influence on me doing my own trek through Yosemite this past winter. As one commenter in the videos writes,

“If aliens find Earth abandoned and dead, I want this video to be the last surviving human recording.”

and I couldn’t agree more. If you have 90 minutes to kill, watch/listen to The Desert Bus: A Southwestern Ramble. If you have six hours more, then you should really watch the rest.