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What are the XKCDs and Admiral Cloudbergs that you follow?
There are many unique and noteworthy sites that post eclectic and insightful content but who can know them all? Share yours below.
There are many unique and noteworthy sites that post eclectic and insightful content but who can know them all? Share yours below.
Although I don't get any of her meme references, I like Contrapoints vids. I love how she deep-dive into humble topics like Envy, Cringe, Oppulence and Men, and her set design and costumes are awesome.
Innuendo Studios has some deep, non-nonsense analytics of the extreme right.
itch.io is my go-to place for experiental indie games. Some games really tickles my braincells, like Spacechem, Noita, A Mortician's Tale or Cell Tune.
I'm gonna second Spacechem. It's one of the better Zachtronics games. (For the uninitiated, all of the games that Zachtronics created are puzzles based around algorithmic thinking. They're like abstract programming puzzles and they're lovely)
It's not quite what your asking for but if you enjoy XKCD then you'll probably enjoy SMBC. The comic ranges from philosophical to technical to just plain dumb.
Going to jump on the comic train and recommend The Perry Bible Fellowship.
Who is Admiral Cloudberg?
Admiral Cloudberg is a very good indepth writer of mainly Aircraft accidents and incidents. Has a reddit, but also publishes on Medium (where I've linked to). A great read, and I follow on medium. Super in depth writing from him. He's been tidying up older ones, and doing newer ones.
Also there's Max S who does a train version on Medium. Another good writer of incidents and accidents. He was banned from Reddit, and had a person post his content on there for him, but also readable on Medium, again that's the link.
Everytime I'd see the Admiral's posts in the CatastrophicFailure subreddit, that was an instant, put everything down, I'm reading this, moment.
Minor, but I believe the Admiral is a she! Regardless, such good articles.
I thought he was a she too, til I posted that and someone else on that other site linked to a direct conversation with the Admiral where he confirmed that he is indeed a he. There was quite a bit about him and his background in a linked article.
I got her (sorry Admiral, I do apologise!) stories originally from CatFail too, but preferred the medium reading style, so would then check them on there. Then I saw Max's were popping up there too. I'd love to see more in depth stuff like that on medium.
I just read Max S’s post on the 1953 Pennsylvania Railroad Wreck and now I’ll be a regular reader. Thanks for the tip!
I’m not sure what their relationship is with Aircraft Crash Investigation, but the posts on Reddit seem to all be a summary of an episode. They seem to put a lot of effort in creating the posts, but it feels a little easy to just copy tv content.
Admiral Cloudberg
He does excellent analysis on plane crashes. Like watching Mayday but better! I was curious about the Malaysian Airlines flight 370 disappearance, and someone linked me to Admiral Cloudberg on Medium. I went through a phase where I would spend hours at work reading his blog. Good times.
Joe Nobody aka https://elan.school - it's about the Elan School, an extremely abusive "troubled teens" school, and how the author rallied people to finally put an end to it. It's still a work in progress and it is a wild ride. Highly recommend!
Just spent the last day reading this in my spare time. What a wild ride
SmarterEveryday has insightful dives in a broad range of content, feom creating a baseball cannon to touring (disclosable areas) of a US Navy submarine.
I love SmarterEveryDay! I'll tack on some of my favourite educational YouTube channels (mostly space/physics focused) here:
Veritasium
PBS SpaceTime
PBS Eons
Be Smart
SEA
Cool Worlds
History of the Universe
Fall of Civilizations
SMBC is an excellent XKCD.
For naval history I really like Drachinifel. I'd probably prefer it if he made more of his long videos instead of spending time on all the Q&As, but those can be interesting in their own right. If you're interested in giving him a shot I'd look at his series on the salvaging of the battleships damaged and destroyed at Pearl Harbor, that's a topic you normally don't hear anything about but it's actually quite interesting.
And I guess the other one is Perun, up until March 2022 he was a very small gaming youtuber covering some unofficial XCOM sequel called Phoenix Point. Now he makes weekly videos about defense economics, and usually about how it relates to the Ukraine war (although he also makes plenty of videos unrelated to the current war).
I would naturally be skeptical about a gaming youtuber trying to randomly start talking about defense economics, but Perun absolutely knows what he is talking about, and sources himself very well. Here is a member of the Australian Institue for International Affairs calling out Perun as a source he uses.
https://youtu.be/pqZFi0jNZdI?t=683
I guess these are both youtubers instead of text bloggers, so maybe not quite what you're looking for. I also follow the ISW who give daily updates on the current war in text form, although as a think-tank they aren't really in the same category as XKCD or Admiral Cloudberg either.
The CRPG Addict http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
They play a lot of old CRPG's and I dont always read it all, but find maybe fun games to play for myself through it. Lots of interesting games in there.
I find https://existentialcomics.com/ very funny.
Fun comics talking about different philosophers and their points of view.