Assigned Entry #1

Blogs are wonderful little things that can either be helpful as well as useful or they can be entirely mind numbingly wasteful in eating up our time. It allows for an entire community of people to connect while inviting people that wouldn’t be privy to such chances normally, but it also offers the exact opposite of this by giving users the ability to be entirely anonymous if you really wish to do so. Personally I do spend a great deal of time online and have enjoyed when the Webby Awards come around because it gives me a chance to see a lot of sites that I have never really heard of from the year before. With it comes a collective of new writers or webcomic to follow and grow to love. Some of the 2012 Webby nominees and winners that I in particular enjoyed are:

Hyperbole and a Half:
This site won the first place title for both Most Humorous Weblog and for Best Writing on a Weblog. Part of the reason can be found in the fact that she writes and draws her comics about things that have happened in her life. When I first came across a comic of hers I remembered just laughing throughout it entirely. Upon rereading through it nothing has changed from that level of hilariousness. I actually had to make myself stop from reading her stuff when I was left sitting with tears streaming down my eyes from laughing so much and waking my sibling up as well. If you want to laugh for a while you should look through some of her stories.

I give this blog a rating of: ♥♥♥♥

The Bloggess:
Jennifer Lawson was one of the nominees who were in the Best Writing Weblog category. It’s very easy to see why she is here upon giving it more than just a precursory read through. Additionally this isn’t entirely surprising considering that she is actually not just a blogger and has written a book called ‘Let’s Pretend This Never Happened”. It’s a memoir of sorts that she has written over the last eleven years of her life. She is kind of similar to the writer for Hyperbole and a Half just without the webcomics attached to showcase the story, leaving that to the reader with the way that she paints a situation to make them laugh out loud to themselves all the while. If you want to stroll through her hilarious accounts, give her a little gander and amuse yourself for a while. The good thing is that I’m not the only one to feel likes this though. She has amassed quite a collection of fans, some including other amazing writers like Neil Gaiman, who said:

“The Bloggess writes about stuff that actually is laugh-out-loud, but you know that you shouldn’t be laughing and probably you’ll go to hell for laughing, so maybe you shouldn’t read it. That would be safer and wiser.”

I personally give this blog a rating of: ♥♥♥♥

XKCD:
This is purely a webcomic that makes use of a science background along with math and other satirical situations. It was nominated for the Most Humorous Weblog category which is definitely well placed considering all the comedic value that can be found just going through the day to day doodles put up. Now if you are one of those people that wind up feeling like Penny from Big Bang Theory you might not enjoy this collection of drawings as much as others.

That being said it is definitely worth checking out since it does carry quite a few gems in it about things that are outside of the science field entirely. Dipping into other nerdy behaviors like gaming, computers, and politics, as well as insights for dating among the science community at times. The writer also has a thing for charts and graphs that are both accurate and hilarious once you actually pay attention to how things change over time.

I give this blog a rating of: ♥♥♥ (since I know that it is a niche comic and not all will enjoy)