Pedestrian’s Guide To Essential Internet Time Wasters

This season Pedestrian is teaming up with your favourite fruity liqueur, MIDORI, to produce a bunch of guides to keep you well-dressed, well-fed, and in top dating form for beachside romancing. This week we’re covering the weird wild world of blogging with this list of top blogs, Tumblrs, and other random online forums you should be reading.

PHOTOS, PAINTINGS, AND OTHER PRETTY THINGS

It’s admittedly impossible to whittle the trillions of art and photography blogs out there into a concise must-follow list… but we’ll try because we love you guys. The visual blog from Britain’s Patternity is one reliable Tumblr portal for interesting, funny, and provocative photography celebrating the crazy geometry of daily life. Dezeen is an ongoing favourite among architecture and design fans, as is the sustainable design blog, Inhabitat, which features amazing things like energy generators powered by pee. Independent arts collective, Das Monk, continues to produce a blog full of good local news, inspiration and sourced images from around the web, as does Always Sometimes Anytime. And if that’s all a bit why so serious, then there’s the photography site Cabin Porn, edited by the aptly named folks over at Beaver Brook.

Cabin boner-worthy excerpt from Cabin Porn:

BLOGS TO MAKE YOU LEARNED

So you thought blogging was all about cat memes and selfies? Wrong. There’s a plethora of independent political and economic bloggers out there, many of them great if only because they offer a dissident view to the conservative mainstream media rhetoric. The economic blog, Debt Deflation, is interesting disregarding author Steve Keen’s totally dodgy graphics from the 1980s. US icon Greg Palast’s website is another good source of independent news, as is that of the home-grown media veteran, John Pilger. In terms of political LOLs, there’s simply no beating The Independent’s satire blog by Mark Steel or Australia’s ever-reverent Ben Pobjie’s Wonderful World of Objects.

BECOME A MASTER OF TIME SUCKAGE

It could be said that random stuff is the Internet. Meme regurgitation, puppies, bunnies and GIF farming. Nothing quite epitomises this like ThingX, Brown Cardigan, The Clearly Dope and, the vintage of its field, Hipster Runoff: all sites that will steal your brain, chew on it for hours, and then spit it out like a morning phlegm ball. Blogs and Tumblrs like Yay Everyday, Ultra Demon, and Bored Panda are some other good options: all of them feature enough crazy GIFs to give a Professor of Emerging Digital Medias an epileptic fit. Whichever blog you choose, procrastination is totally assured… unless becoming a master at the art of Time Suckage is your ambition, in which case look no further for your next day job.

Image sourced from Brown Cardigan:

INTELLIGENT CRAZZIES

Science blog authors can be separated into two similar yet discernable categories: crazzies and intelligent crazies. There’s a lot of the former out there, so it’s important to be informed about the origins of what you’re reading lest you end up brainwashed by an undercover CIA operative or something. British psychologist Richard Wiseman has a solid blog, Quirky Mind Stuff, full of aptly quirky facts and mind games to stretch your noodle. Wired magazine’s blog Wired Science is more current affairs orientated, as is Phil Plait from Slate’s Bad Astronomy; both are annoyingly know-it-all yet loveable in an earnest, dorky way. And then there’s debunking/conspiracy theorist site, Skepdic, which is brilliant all the way down to the advertisements asking readers to dob in Dr Phil for malpractice.

DAVID BOWIE SAYS YOU DO FASHION

The wonderfully pouty world of fashion blogging has been widely documented by the mainstream press in the last five years; with it often said that this group were the first to seriously embrace the self-publishing power of blogging. Chances are you’ll already have your favourites, with blogs like Susie Lau’s Style Bubble, Leandra Medine’s The Man Repeller, Jessie Bush’s We The People, Tavi’s Style Rookie, and Fuck Yeah Menswear some well-known (stylish) rags to riches success stories. Upscale Hype is still good for men’s trends, even though both have long progressed from crowd-sourced blogging entities into publishing platforms. For home-grown Australian fashion bloggers, there’s this Top 20 list from our very own 2012 Blogster Award, with bloggers like Oh Jamie, I Dig Your Sole Man, and Nadia and Cami from Di$count also worth mentioning. But if that all that sounds a bit too selfie-centred for your liking, there’s always the awesome Tumblr, Unknowlegdable Fashionista.

I KNOW WHAT YOU ATE LAST SUMMER

Food blogging is a bit like fashion blogging: it’s fun and escapist when written with an element of self-aware humour, but it can be totally wanky when taken too seriously. (You’re also only human if you find looking at endless pictures of food you didn’t eat both metaphorically and literally unfulfilling.) The Unbearable Lightness of Being Hungry by Lee Tran Lam and The Hungry Australian by Christina Soong-Kroeger are two fun yet informative local food blogs, with the latter notably featuring an Anne of Green Gables upside down cake. There’s also the beautifully presented and photographed DIY-focused food blog Stove Top Revolution by Australian home cooking enthusiast Sophie McComas. Internationally, there’s no surpassing the mindblowingly strange high-end fashion and food fusion blog, Luxirare. This amazing blogger publishes beautifully shot recipes for things like edible shot glasses, syringe parfait, and sea urchin foie gras. A little less highbrow is Sydney’s Hot Chips Blog, which is a winner for obvious reasons.

MUSIC FOR YOUR EARS

When it comes to emerging and independent artists, music bloggers have been shitting all over traditional journalists for quite some time now. Disco Naivete and Beat Pyramid are two portals boasting smugly-awesome forecasting abilities, with both blogs also producing solid podcasts and playlists. The long-running This Music Wins is still one of the best indie music blogs out there, courtesy of the British philosophy student, musician, writer, and all-round legend, Peter Lanceley. But if it’s fun trashy playlists you’re after (who isn’t?), then look no further than the blog of Melbourne-based online menswear store, Comeback Kid, whose mix tapes feature more Bowie, Depeche Mode, and Avalanches than you can throw a bucket of glitter at.

YES I GUESS YOU CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER

As if we were going to publish this article without mentioning animal blogs! It’s more than likely you already have your tried and tested favourites of this genre, but just in case you need some help attaining the online version of a cuddle, here’s some long-term favourites. Cats continue to dominate this field, with blogging stalwarts I Can Has Cheezburger and

Cute Overload still good for a LOLcat along with the marvelous Cats That Look Like Pinup Girls (see main image above), however, with Menswear Dog one newer blog growing in popularity due to its expert blend of urban fashion and drooling French Bulldogs. A little less well-known is the fine art-focused, Muybridge’s Horse, and this adorable blog from a sloth sanctuary in sunny Costa Rica: you simply haven’t experienced love until you’ve witnessed a sloth catching a few Zs in a cane basket.

Words by Emilia Terzon.

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