The Big List of Recommendations

No Escape

A gaming and music reviewer and essayist who takes an appealing socio-political perspective on games. The games played are not in the slightest limited by what is currently coming out or considered "big", allowing for a fresh variety of interesting writing.

https://noescapevg.com/feed/

Gamers' Nexus

Mainly a video publication on google's YouTube. But they also make all of their videos into free to access, no-advert blog posts on their website. Including their major investigative journalism pieces. As the name suggests, they focus on game-related hardware, but if you're in any kind of computer technology space, they're a great source to keep in your feed.

http://gamersnexus.net/rss.xml

Pluralistic

At this point, Cory Doctorow is a well known figure in tech politics and adjacent spaces. But for those unaware, Cory Doctorow is a fiction and non-fiction writer, analyst, and commentator with a particular skill for translating complicated situations and structures down to catchy phrases and words. If you've ever hear "Enshitification" or more recently, "Reverse centaur" (or even "Chickenised reverse centaur") the pluralistic blog is where that terminology was coined and developed. The writing is accessible, and at times very funny, so to keep up with the times, this blog is a good add to any tech-focused feed.

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Dread Ships

I know basically nothing about boats and ships beyond the very basic sailing camp I spent a week at as a kid. However Dread Ships manages to make nautical history both understandable and extremely funny. If you like stories of disaster like those shown on "Well There's Your Problem", it's absolutely worth reading through the backlog and adding to your feed.

https://dreadships.com/feed/

Not GDC

Any game developer that doesn't have the money to go to GDC (or even those that do) should consider adding NotGDC to your feed. It's talks on game development freely shared. No high entry fees, and no limited access to the useful information.

https://notgdc.io/feed.xml

Veronica Explains

Fun and informative. For anyone who would like to better understand linux and the various tools that surround it. In particular she's great at demistifying all of the "low-level" linuxy stuff you may encounter but not understand.

https://vkc.sh/feed/ and https://tinkerbetter.tube/feeds/videos.xml?videoChannelId=2

CJ the X

A blog of essays with interesting insights on social media and art in the age of the internet.

https://cjthex.com/feed/

Clockwork

A scientific newsletter with the coolest developments in the life sciences. A good feed to break up the "news" category with. Or an amazing feed for those who have a strong interest in evolutionary science, medicine development, and how natural process work.

https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/MLiKGv3Pzl.xml

404 Media

I think best described as an independent newspaper for the internet age. Reporting on technology, the internet, and the way they interact with the real political landscape (particularly in the US). A lot of their stuff is behind a paywall (I'm not a subscriber personally), but the free reporting is well worth keeping in your feed if my description sounds useful to you.

https://www.404media.co/rss/

Ludicity

Very funny, and insightful. In particular about the state of internet companies from the perspective of a data scientist.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/rss/

Bellingcat

OSINT reporting and investigative journalism, targeting powerful organisations like governments and corporations in particular. If you follow any other world news sources, you'll have seen their name pop by at least once. But they off course also have their own website.

https://www.bellingcat.com/feed

Godot Blog

If you use godot regularly, I definitely recommend keeping track of the newsletter. Mainly because it means you discover all kinds of cool new features godot has (for example, that you can press shift-g to snap an object to the surface under your cursor)

https://godotengine.org/rss.xml and https://godotengine.org/atom.xml

Game Programming Patterns

For any game developer, The place to go once you've learned the basics of your programming language of choice. I recommend you read the index and motivation section of each chapter, then go back when you think that "maybe this might fit a pattern". Basically a must read, which is why it's good it's free to read online.

Action Adventure Level Design

(gamedeveloper.com)
A really good breakdown of how to organize designing action/adventure levels.

A Practical Guide to Level Design

(ISBN 9781003275664)
An amazing book on the processes that go into making levels in teams. The particular notes on how to design from large to medium to specific levels of detail have massively helped me refine my ability to iterate on conceptsquickly.

Tiny Tiny RSS

Since I have all those feeds, I also need somewhere to organise them. Particularly, some way I can keep my feeds synced between the different devices I use to access the internet on, and would like to read articles on. Thanks to a friend who runs TTRSS for his community, I've got a fast and stable server to store and fetch my feeds from.

SwayWM

After using i3 for a year and wanting to switch to Wayland. Also how I found Drew DeVault's blog. Sway works, and offers the level of simple customisability I personally desire. Though I freely admit it's not for everyone.

Linux desktop

Right now Fedora. Having grown up with macbooks and ipads, and forced to use windows for school, my opinions on OS choice tend towards "whatever you can keep working". I recommend Mint or atomic fedora to anyone looking to start from the corporate OSes.

Wave

Blogging is simultaniously really easy and weirdly hard. It's easy to make a website like this one and throw raw html files at an nginx reverse proxy. The difficult part is allowing multiple users to write on the same website (without giving them all total access to edit eachother's files). It's difficult to add index pages for tags, and writers, and it's hard to then make that all work with an automatically updated RSS feed. Which is why I don't, and instead use Mia Rose Winter's Wave.

Nextcloud

I'm not a sysadmin, I'm lucky to have a friend in my life who's willing to go through the trouble of hosting this kinda stuff for his community. But if there's any chance you can get an account on a Nextcloud server, whether through your college, or through a friend, or hosting it yourself, I highly recommend it. It's fast and easy to connect to other services. I've got a specific folder on my laptop that syncs in the background, which means that it's as easy as choosing the right place to put my file and it's backed up and accessible from all my other devices.

Aurora

Pretty art, inspired worldbuilding, fun characters. A high-fantasy story at the scale of an entire mythology and the charm of a tabletop campaign, in comic form.

Clown Corps

What if clowns were cops, when they're actually supposed to be firefighters. A story about a woman at her lowest point given a second chance, and a well-intentioned public service being turned into a tool for control (and hopefully how that control is challenged and broken, the full story isn't done yet).

url.town

A general everything-directory of webpages for various kinds of things. Organised and categorised so it's fun to browse idly and quick to search through.