Some fun diversions

Rather than just ramble on at you today, I thought I’d share some of my favourite bits of web.goodness — I’ll save blogs for another time, or else we’d be here all day, so these are the places I go for round-ups of what’s going on. I hope some of them might prove of interest to you!

My first stop on the web for mysterious news and odd events is The Anomalist. I reckon it’s the web’s best daily round-up of strangeness, and I’ve been a fan for ages. I get less weird news from The Register, an irreverent British look at what’s going on in politics, technology, other areas, and more technology. Publishing news comes from the Bookseller magazine, and whilst it’s rarely cheery at the moment, there’s a lot of good stuff there.

I also spend a fair amount of time flicking through Blue’s News. It’s the computer games equivalent of the Anomalist — a great, comprehensive, fair-minded daily review. Almost the opposite of Blue’s News in every sense, Zero Punctuation is a weekly game review webcast — very funny, bitterly savage, and always a joyful four minutes of entertainment.

For sf, real science, fantasy, horror and general geekdom, I normally turn to io9. They put out loads of great material. For random babble — and I do mean random — I like to hang out at Whitechapel, a message board run eccentrically by comics legend Warren ‘Transmetropolitan’ Ellis.

Finally, I can’t possibly do any round up of links without pimping author Charlie Stross’ truly amazing and web-accessible short story A Colder War. It’s a truly terrifying look at what would happen if the world’s governments ever got a bit of a handle on Lovecraft’s mythos, and a really great read besides.

Anything I’ve missed and should be checking out? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!