Currently Reading 4

Okay, where were we…

February 30th is [Dan Black]‘s blog, one of the UK comics fandom types I’m chummy with. He recently left London after living there all his life. He sometimes posts up useful geeky stuff.

Assistant Blog is a nice example of a blog that was intended to do one thing but does lots of other things instead. Ostensibly it’s to promote Jonathan’s band, Assistant, but in actuality he just blogs about everything else, which naturally makes Assistant seem like a much more interesting band than they would have seemed otherwise.

Ghostwritten is by Andy, one of my old bookselling colleagues. When I set this up for him the idea was he’d write about books but of course that’s not how it’s panned out.

Smoking Women Are Sexy I stumbled across and linked to for a laugh, and then got all caught up in. Our man is a non-smoking teenager obsessed with women who smoke and he’s a little puzzled by this so he’s trying to figure it out while detailing his adventures in meeting girls who smoke. And, of course, taking photos of them without their knowledge. It’s all very odd and yet incredibly human.

Blogjam is another old-school blog of consistent quality thanks to Fraser’s wit born out through his brevity. Or something. Pretty much every post is a gem. Go read.

BeaucoupKevin is probably better known for his HULK’S DIARY THAT IS ON THE INTERNET which is always good but his own blog has caught me too. He’s an unashamed mainstream comics geek but without the paranoid screamy arseness one often finds in that area. The kind of blogger you’d like to have a drink with sometime, only he’s on the other side of the planet.

Billyworld. When you first encounter Billy’s writing it’s a bit overwhelming thanks to his verbosity and strange use of punctuation but stick with it, it’s worth it. In-amongst the rambling stream of consciousness there’s a lot of honest truth that never slips into mawkishness. And he posts, at length, every single day.

Pete The Trucker. I set Pete up with a blog after he left a couple of interesting comments here and it was a somewhat inspired notion if I say so myself. A self-identifying Middle Class Trucker, Pete drives around Europe delivering stuff. If you don’t know why this can make for a good blog then you need to get out more.

Sparkwood and 21. I’d come across Britney before on FiPi and was surprised when I followed a random link and discovered her blog. Good writing from a 20-something waitress who is so much more than that.

Have You Been Out Today? is Dave Shelton’s blog, yet another cartoonist chum of mine. What I really like about Dave’s blog is not just the nice sketches and drawings he posts up but how he’s really mastered that art of talking about the utterly mundane and effortlessly making it really interesting.

Fidget is by Matt Abbiss. Can you guess what Matt does? Yup, he’s a cartoonist. I set him up with a blog a few years back and while it went a bit quiet last year he’s been putting up some nice stuff in the last month.

73 Bus was part of some sociological study into the use of public transport, specifically busses, but has morphed into a more wide-focussed blog since the study ended. (I think that’s right.) Public transport is always good blog fodder.

And that ends my four part selection of blogs I’m currently reading. If you’re not on there, don’t feel bad. If you are and I’ve managed to utterly misrepresent you in 20 words then my apologies.

But it’s not over yet. You see, that was just the blogs I like where I consider the writers in some vague way to be peers or somesuch. Tomorrow I’ll be running through some of the blogs where I get my links from. I’ll try and articulate the difference a little less clumsily as well.