Blogrolling across the ages

Know any old-style bloggers who are still doing it?

© 2010 Harsh Agrawal used under a Creative Commons license

We’ve been doing Fun Fridays for about a year and a half now. Some weeks, I confess, the prompts are more original than others. In fact, sometimes, I can’t think of anything super-fresh, so I smush together a couple of old Fun Friday ideas to make a new one, as I did last week. Nothing wrong with that — we all got a lot of pleasure out of that First Consumer Pleasure prompt, Frankensteined though it was out of the Life Events and Possessions prompts. Originality isn’t everything! Shit, it’s been 45 years since “Rapper’s Delight” and we’re now in an age of “AI-generated sampling,” so I guess I can have a little slack.

But I gotta say this week’s edition, despite my best efforts, is a little more derivative than most. Also, be warned: It presumes at least a little awareness of the Weblog Phenomenon of the Early Oughts. So for some of you this’ll be like getting stuck at the seniors’ table at your cousin’s wedding and having to listen to their reminiscences. But even so you might pick up some nuggets.

This week’s FF is very close to the 11/10/23 edition, in which we talked about old-tyme websites we usedta love like Something Awful, LOL President, Fucked Company, et alia, most of which had bitten the dust. I focused on mangy quasi-commercial sites but many of commenters brought up what we called in olden times “blogs”: Tbogg, The Poor Man, Sadly, No!, et alia.

If you were around the internet in those days, you may have been directed to one of those blogs by hipster friends or alternative press papers (ha, boy, now there’s an antique subject for future reference!) or by leftwing activists who hoped blogs would hasten the revolution (there were of course many rightwing blogs, which became feeder streams for the rightwing and Prestige Press, because conservatives, unlike liberals, found propaganda a sound financial investment, more’s the pity). Then you may have followed the sidebar “blogroll” to others. Or you may have run such a blog yourself! (I know there are a few of you out there.)

Heady days they were, but they passed quickly. A lot of the people who made those Golden Age blogs got out of the game; some, like Jim Capozzola and Doghouse Riley and Steve Galliard and Lance Mannion, died; some moved on to Twitter/Bluesky feeds or (like Tbogg and S,N!’s Brad Reed) other, bigger sites.

But a lot of those first-wave blogs have hung in. And here’s my ask: Have any of you guys got an old-school blogger that you still follow? And if not – would you like on? Because I know a few.

You may know that I keep up alicublog, though mostly as a weekly showpiece and promo for REBID. Other old-timers, you may be surprised to learn, are still going at it full-on. Driftglass, for example, is still manning the bridge and steering true — though he also has a podcast with Blue Gal, which is even more modern/legit than having a Substack. And former West Wing character Duncan Black yet pushes the pith at Eschaton.

It’s always a good idea to look in on Batocchio’s Vagabond Scholar, not just for his excellent commentary but also for his annual Jon Swift (RIP) Roundup, where you will see names and links to site that you may have forgotten, but which will reward your returned attention.

There’s a blog, though, that I recently stumbled on — or rather, re-stumbled on — that isn’t in Batocchio’s list, and isn’t mentioned in many places, but is a genuine treasure trove: The Sheila Variations. It’s the work of culture writer Sheila O’Malley, who not only also maintains a Substack, but also files with Film Comment, the Criterion Collection, and many others, yet still fills her blog on a practically daily basis and no, she doesn’t double-dip at her Substack so far as I can tell.

And it’s never tossed-off. She brings it like Cal Ripken. Take this thing on Shelley Duvall. It starts with some borrowed reportage (well-curated, fluid) on Duvall’s first meeting with and subsequent long association with Robert Altman, and then flips to a riff about how Sam Phillips wasn’t the guy who “discovered” Elvis, it was his associate Marion Keisker who “recognized — instantly — pimples and Ink Spots [songs] and all — that there was something about this kid.” Then she talks about the rawness Duvall managed to maintain as a film professional, using as an example the way she keeps getting her dress caught in a car door in 3 Women:

One of the most challenging things to do as an actor is to repeat what was at first an accident. Because the first time you did it you had no idea what you were doing, it was an accident. So to then have to add a layer of consciousness to it and CHOOSE to do it, while still making it LOOK like it’s an accident …

If you don’t get what I’m saying, then try it yourself at home.

2,000-plus words of this, then, boom, something else the next day. It’s that driven quality that, more than the persistence of a byline, reminds me of the old blog energy.

You got an old-schooler who’s still hanging in that you’d like to tell us about?