Webcomics, Blogs, Forums, and Thyme

I posted the other day about the webcomic "W.o.G.". Finding it reminded me just of how many webcomics are out there that I'd like to read and how many I realistically have time for. Sure, there's a lot of garbage out there (not just with webcomics but websites, blogs, etc.); "Sturgeon's Law" or whatever the commonly-used bastardization says is very true - 99% of everything is crap. But given the sheer volume of material out on the Net, that 1% of good stuff - even once you discount what is good but you have no interest in - is staggering.

Currently, the webcomics I follow include: W.o.G., PVP Online, Penny Arcade, xkcd, Atland, Order of the Stick, and Something Positive. I could follow more, and I'd like to, such as Looking for Group, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, User Friendly, and Least I Could Do (and maybe Sluggy Freelance, which I gave up on some years ago), not to mention ones that I can't recall.

Doesn't seem like much, but then there's the blogs (or "blog-like" news sites). In my current "Daily Sites" folder in Firefox or RSS feed I have Slashdot, Techland, RPG Blog II, Robot Viking, io9, Lifehacker, Tabletop Gaming News, and some others. Blogs like Gnome Stew, Grognardia, Chatty DM, Dungeon Mastering, and others await in my "Review" folder for me to determine if I should add them to my regular rotation.

And then there's the forums. Really, the only one I regularly visit is ENWorld and there I mostly lurk. If I had time to post more, I'd probably stick with commenting on blogs since the noise-to-signal ratio tends to be lower (which is why I rarely step foot into the WotC forums). But there are some I wouldn't mind spending more time at - the forums at Goodman Games, Necromancer Games, or RPGSite come to mind. Though I can safely say that won't be happening.

Mailing lists ("listservs" and the like) I gave up on years ago. Well, except for the TableSmith Yahoo group. And a couple others than one of my alternate accounts are subscribed to. As for Usenet, that one I can safely say I'm done with. The same old tired arguments reverberating around the same echo chambers fostered by the same stagnating participants - yeah, I don't need that any more.

One thing I don't get (from the gaming parts of the Web) - I see some folks out there prolifically posting on their own blogs, posting in forums, commenting on other blogs...where do these people find the time? With some of these folks, I have to wonder how much time they spend talking about gaming and how much time they actually spend gaming. Theory versus practice, and all that.

Oh, well. Not sure what my point was here, other than pointing out that while there's orders of magnitude of crap on the Internet, there's a ton of good stuff out there. And I lament not being able to absorb it all :)