blogroll – On the Quiet Side of a Red Moon

I’m a bit late to the party, and I only made it at all because I recently stumbled onto a new blog that referenced it, but apparently Roger over Rantings from Under The Wargames Table has thrown down the “Community Blogging Challenge“

He posted an excellent list of blogs, many of which I hadn’t previously found (really, only Azazel’s Bits Box and Wargames Terrain Workshop were already known to me. The rest have been an excellent discovery and I’ve already added them to the blogroll for people to peruse.

But now I suppose it’s time for me to give a shout out to some other cool hobby blogs I’ve encountered.

Carmen’s Fun Painty Time deserves a follow – they are infrequent posters (last post roughly June 2025) but have been at it for awhile now. Their latest few posts journal their process of scratch-building ship figurines to use on the table and make for an excellent read.

Lonely Gamer’s Blog focus on historical war-gaming (the website is also attached to their store, where they stock a lot of books and historical minis). Their content is mostly battle reports.

Wicked Paintah regularly posts their latest completed minis, and they’re always well done. They seem to favour a lot of Infinity and other scifi stuff.

Wyrd Fish – A newer blogger, he started out discussing the hobby community happenings over on the Fediverse¹. His newer posts discuss building and painting a Mordheim warband.

Lead ‘n’ Paint – Just a guy tackling his mountain of metal / plastic and blogging about the journey.

I Am Gerard Thomas – A very game-design focused blog. No minis here, but Gerard posts about his process concocting new rulesets to play with.

Big Geordie Geek – Regularly shares their completed minis and his hobby journey. Tends to be very 40k focused.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to the hobby community over on the Fediverse – while it is technically not blogging, there are a lot of wonderful people there I get to interact with on the regular.

The Fediverse is the name given to the conglomeration of Mastodon, Pixelfed and other ActivityPub based servers that forms the decentralized social web. ↩︎

You’ve probably seen this icon before – let’s discuss what it’s for.

In the olden days, before the internet devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”¹, the web was full of blogs, news sites and other content. And while you could just visit each page to find out if there were any updates, there was enough of them to make it a bit cumbersome to check every site. This was solved through a wonderful old web-standard called Really Simple Syndication (RSS)² which provided a way for websites to publish feeds that could be pulled together by a feed reader to show users what’s new across all of their favourite websites at once.

In its day it was one of the key ways people kept up with blogs and news across the web, long before we all became accustomed to simply browsing our social feeds to find things. Our social media feeds were a decent upgrade for a while, but as the years went by those feeds began to show us less of what we’d subscribed to, replacing it with ads, sponsored content and engagement traps.

Thankfully, RSS never really went away. Most blogs still support it, as do many news sites. It’s even possible to subscribe to someones Mastodon, Bluesky or Youtube account using it³. All you need is a feed reader – these come in multiple formats, you can have an app, a web based aggregator or a browser extension. All of these do the same thing – add the sites feed to your reader and it’ll handle letting you know about new content as it gets posted. It’s a powerful tool for taking back control of how you consume information⁴.

Many modern feed readers are smart enough that you can point them at the homepage of a blog and they’ll find the RSS feed automatically for you. For those that aren’t, you may need to look for the RSS icon to get the feed URL directly.

To help people get started, here’s some resources that might help people find blogs that suit their interests.

Blog Lists by Topic

Tabletop Miniatures & Wargaming – I maintain a list of tabletop mini related blogs on this website, you can find it here.

Tabletop RPGs – Mike Shea maintains a wonderful directory of RPG related blogs covering a wide variety of games (from D&D to Traveller and beyond)

Blog Directories

ooh.directory maintains a wonderful catalogue, organized by subject.

blogroll.org has another great searchable catalogue

blogroll.club has an alphabetic list containing hundreds of blogs. They can also be browsed by category.

SearchMySite is a searchable database of user-submitted personal websites.

RawWeb is another search tool that lets you find posts across multiple personal websites.

Jamie’s Indie Web Search – Another search tool for finding sites on the indieweb.

Discovery Tools

Smallweb by Kagi provides a fun discovery tool that allows you to randomly sample blogs until you find something interesting.

Sortition Social compiles a feed from multiple blogs, with each being included for about 7 days before being replaced with another randomly chosen blog. Cool if you want a bit of serendipity in your feed.

If you know of any other useful resources that belong on this page, please go ahead and post them as comments below.

Credit to Tom Eastman, however the original tweet is no longer accessible ↩︎
What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds provides a really good rundown on RSS and how to get started with it. ↩︎
Here’s the instructions for Mastodon, BlueSky and Youtube ↩︎
On this, I firmly find myself agreeing with Cory Doctorow ↩︎