News You Can Bruise for 2008 December 30

(6) Tue Dec 30 2008 09:54 Best Of Weblogs 2008: Keep looking back! This will probably be the last 2008 retrospective unless I decide to go through the books I read in 2008 or whatever. These are the syndication feeds I'm happiest I subscribed to in 2008. Caution: may contain nepotism.

A Symbol A Day: only exists as an RSS feed. Every day there is a new symbol.
Back of the Cereal Box: essays on obscure pop culture topics. But they're the obscure topics my age cohort cares about, so bite me.
Also cordially invited to bite me is Twitter. If it takes longer for me to context-switch than to read something, I'm not going to read it. The only Twitter feed I read is Rachel Chalmers's, and she protects her updates, so I can't link to them.
At the opposite end of the attention spectrum are podcasts, which I don't really listen to except while cleaning the kitchen. For such a task I prefer the harsh cleaning power of Retronauts and The Children's Hour of Knowledge.
Friend weblogs: Kirk, because the RSS feed finally kind of works and because I met him this year. Evan finally started his own weblog and now only comments on 60% of my entries.
Comics: chainsawsuit and Hark! A Vagrant!
The Brothers Brick aggregates cool LEGO pictures so I only have to skim one LEGO weblog.
Cinemassacre. James Rolfe is prolific and funny.
Susan McCarthy tells awesome stories about animal behavior, and sometimes about Soviet show trials.
Topic: video games. I unsubscribed from Gamasutra and subscribed to sister site GameSetWatch instead, because 1) when there's something I'd be interested in on Gamasutra, GSW usually links to it, 2) the columns are great, 3) they link to my weblog sometimes, and Gamasutra never did that.
I also subscribed to DS Fanboy and Nintendo Wii Fanboy and Tiny Cartridge so I wouldn't be wandering around in a haze with no knowledge of the games available for the game systems we got this year. I feel like I should get rid of one of those subscriptions, but if I had to choose I'd get rid of NWF, which would leave me without total platform coverage!
Finally, Auntie Pixelante is great all the time, like if Jake Berendes made video games about B&D.
Topic: science fiction. On the demand side, tor.com is much better than the fluffy Gawkeriffic io9. On the supply side, the specficmarkets Livejournal community.