Interesting People

Personal websites of interesting people who I used to follow on social media before I bailed. Now I’m adding new cool folks I find.

Also see: blogroll | cool artists | neat websites

Writers

  • Ursula Vernon – writes adult works as T. Kingfisher – was mostly self-pub but also now published through Tor – also a cartoonist – and a gardener – you should read her Saint of Steel series and comic Digger – also she won a Hugo – active on Tumblr
  • Courtney Milan – auto-buy romance author, former lawyer, has helped raise a ton of money for voting and abortion rights (also has a delightful newsletter about tea and writing)
  • Chuck Tingle – if you don’t know who Chuck Tingle is, spend five minutes reading his social media and you will be sold
  • Annalee Newitz – science, history and science fiction – I liked their book Four Lost Cities – they have a podcast with Charlie Jane Anders called Our Opinions Are Correct which I haven’t listened to but I love the name
  • Ed Yong – science – I started following him for his excellent COVID reporting – I’m digging his newsletter
  • Andrew Liptak – science fiction and cosplay (also has a newsletter that can be read online / via RSS, Transfer Orbit – a good source of SFF reading recommendations)
  • Sarra Cannon (Heart Breathings) – makes videos to help other fiction writers make progress on their books
  • Jay Owens – non-fiction – she wrote a cool newsletter about dust that has been transformed into a book
  • Xiran Jay Zhao – fiction – I’ve read Iron Widow
  • Karen Ho – I think she ran the doomscroll twitter account
  • Mary Emerick – I followed her blog when it was active – hiker and writer based in the PNW (Oregon?) — she’s written a couple memoirs about being a backcountry ranger and working fire seasons
  • Nova Falls — sci-fi romance author

Thinky creative types

  • Robin Sloan – novelist, also makes olive oil?, also is in a band?!, also has lots of interesting thoughts about technology, when does this guy have the time for anything 😂 great blog/ newsletter
  • Austin Kleon – writer / artist, has a neat, short newsletter – sometimes shares photos of the owls nesting in his yard
  • Yancey Strickler — heard him give a talk on his Bento Society
  • Buster Benson – has a cool “life in weeks” feature on site
  • Jocelyn K. Glei – my big takeaway from her work is “who are you without the doing?”

Design

Disability advocacy

  • Barry Lee – disabled nonbinary artist (Atlanta) – has an interesting newsletter
  • Sara Hendren – disability design (has a good newsletter)
  • KC Davis – living with disability – loved her book How to Keep House While Drowning
  • Blair Imani – disability and BIPOC education (mostly on Instagram) – wrote a book about Black American history
  • Steven Spohn – disabled gaming accessibility advocate (mostly on Twitter)
  • Rebekah Taussig – disabled writer and teacher who uses a wheelchair (mostly on Instagram) – I’ve read and enjoyed part of her book Sitting Pretty
  • Blind Archive – disability and health care – by one of the Death Panel podcast folks
  • Jodi Ettenberg – disabled writer who talks about her spinal issues (has a newsletter where she shares tons of random links)
  • Alana Saltz – disability activist (mostly on Twitter)
  • Dani Donovan – ADHD
  • Jaclyn Paul (ADHD Homestead)

Scientists & academics

  • Sarah Taber – ag commentary – she does awesome takedowns of the agriculture industry on Twitter / Mastodon / BlueSky
  • Jared Yates Sexton – fascism and history – has a good newsletter that I have to dip in and out of because it’s stressful for me
  • Alex Wild – insect photographer and entomologist
  • Sarah E. Bond – ancient and early medieval Mediterranean history
  • Dr. Jen Gunter – women’s health and feminism – has a newsletter about women’s health with great info!
  • Adam Harvey Studio – art + research + surveillance + privacy

Outdoors & travel

Conservation

Food people

Interior design

Miscellaneous

  • Durnell Studio — my sister! multi-faceted wellness
  • Gurdeep Pandher — Sikh dancer living in northern Canada, happy guy sending love around the world with dance
  • Meg Conley — cultural commentary with a feminist bent
  • Andy Matuschak — opinionated, discrete notes about note-taking

8 replies on “Interesting People”

I’m a book lover, sci-fi writer, and native plant nerd. Learn more about me, and see what I’m up to now. This is my personal site — you may be looking for my professional sustainability consulting services. Explore my site Join me in pondering my big questions (my approach to organizing my learning and thinking…

Updated 12 April 2024 This is more of a “following” page than a curated blogroll, but I decided to go with the more is more approach 😄 I maintain this page manually so I don’t update it often — also that probably means I’ve missed some feeds I follow 🤷‍♀️ My websites | Personal blogs…

Over the years, I’ve followed hundreds of artists and interesting people on Instagram and Twitter. Social media platforms don’t make it very easy to see everyone you follow, even as they constantly change the way they show you information so you don’t know what updates you’re missing. They also reward frequency and recency. The idea of an algorithm is nice — ‘it’ll show me posts I missed from people I care about!’ — but in practice it’s more like ‘ok thanks for showing me that five people I follow liked a political meme’.
As I move away from regularly using Twitter and Instagram, I don’t want to lose track of everyone who I followed there. So, I made my own lists of people who I follow — their own websites, not their social media accounts or profiles on other platforms:
Cool Artists – artists and craftspeople of all varieties
Interesting People – people with interesting and helpful things to say, from a range of backgrounds (science, art, advocacy, interior design)
Some of these people may also have newsletters and blogs that I don’t know about or am not following, or may have no way to follow their activity at all outside of social media — but at least I’ll always be able to find them. (Presumably anyone who’s bothered to set up a personal website will keep it?)
And maybe a list is a way other people can find new folks to follow too. The main bummer is not having images to represent everyone’s art, but that sounded like a helluva lot of additional work 😉
How I collated these lists
I went through my Twitter and Instagram following lists — which were much longer than I had realized 😨 — and opened bio links to personal websites for everyone who had one. There was probably an easier way to do it, but I manually opened everyone’s profile to remind myself who they were. Instagram’s interface to see who you’re following is Terrible if you’re following any large number of users.
Because I’m into the IndieWeb and everyone having their own website, I decided to be a stickler and only include personal websites, not BigCartel shops or platform profiles or linktrees. That meant a number of artists did get excluded — but honestly the lists are plenty long anyway 🤷‍♀️
I also didn’t duplicate my blogroll, so the websites of people whose blogs and newsletters I’m following aren’t currently on this list… I may go back and add personal websites of people who write newsletters instead of blogs.
When we in the IndieWeb talk about owning our content, the focus is often on the things we have posted ourselves, or saving our likes and bookmarks — but keeping track of who we follow is also useful.
Also posted on IndieNews

Liked How to Weave the Artisan Web by John Scalzi (whatever.scalzi.com)

1. Create/reactivate your own site, owned by you, to hold your own work.
2. When you create that site, write or otherwise present work on your site at least once a week, every week.
3. Regularly visit the sites of other creators to read/see/experience the work they present there.
4. Promote/link the work of others, on your own site and also on your other social media channels where you have followers.

I’ve got 1 and 3 down — it’s 2 and 4 that are the hard part for me 😉
I post here multiple times a week, but don’t write something on my blog Cascadia Inspired every week, nor my pen name website.
Here I link to a lot of other people’s blogs and sites as I bookmark and comment on articles, but not so much on my blog. I post mostly original content there — photos and essays. For visitors to this site, I do have a blogroll plus my new pages of artists and interesting people.
Almost never do I remember to share work from any site — mine or others’ — on social media. Lately I’ve been trying to share my blog posts on micro.blog, though Twitter or LinkedIn would theoretically reach more people 🤷‍♀️
Note to self: offer on LinkedIn to help anyone who wants to set up a new website.

I have too many pages to fit in my nav! Here’s a sitemap of all the pages on this website. Blog Mind Garden Index Links to blog about Big Questions Big Questions Balanced Lifestyle Effective Creative Processes Writing Fiction Thinking Better Information Diet Future of the Internet Resisting Fascism Building Community Transforming Capitalism Collections Cool…

Also see: cool artists | interesting people | indie shops | blogroll Fun projects It’s Post Day! (Sarah Avenir) — email art project How Not to Make a Book (Robin Rendle) — documenting the process of creating a book about typography Werner’s Nomenclature of Colors (Nicholas Rougeux) — A recreation of the original 1821 color…