One of my favorite things in the universe of the Harry Potter books is the way they consume media and communicate. Photographs taken with wizarding cameras actully move. The Daily Prophet, their newspaper features lots of photos like this. It's also delivered by owls to the reader, whenever and wherever they happen to be.
This appeals to me for a number of reasons. For one, I'm insanely busy. I'm always on the go. For another, I am rather selective about what I consume, and when and where I can consume it. I don't generally watch the evening news. I'm not on facebook, and I have some rather exotic interests.
I have my own sort of digital version of this owl/magic newspaper combination. I use an iOS app called Flipboard to collect info I care about. It makes the various twitter feeds, webpages, blogs, and other things I like into a magazine.
This magazine.
So, what's in there? Well, I've got a source for information on Grails & Groovy, the java framework I work with, a link to Zen Pencils, a cartoon I enjoy, a news feed, a twitter feed about taoism, some tech news, and A Voice in the Corner, which is a tumblr blog all about spanking.
Yep.
That's just on the first of three pages. I actually have more stuff in my flipboard than will fit on the three pages it alots me. (About 10 more sources I only look at occasionally.) Before I talk about any of this stuff, you'll notice that I haven't made them into clickable links. That's so you don't go accidentally clicking some very NSFW content by accident. I suppose if you really want to, you can follow my flipboard, which is tied to my twitter account, @makoallen.
Some of my more exotic stuff includes a female dominant's blog about her relationship with her submissive husband, Strict Julie Spanks, a hysterically funny and equally filthy webcomic called Oglaf, and a tumblr blog about age play. I had to spend a good twenty minutes just now thumbing through that last one to find a summary page that wasn't too filthy for me to post on the blog.
I'll admit, there's something of a racy thrill to having a spanking on the same page next to articles about paragliding, or validating domain objects. Just like in the Daily Prophet, sometimes my pictures move too (animated gifs, or even embedded video).
The thing I find the most satisfying about it though is that having this content all in the same place sort of levels the playing field for me. I'm just as concerned with taoism and tech as I am with domination and diapers. There's something really refreshing about having a source for all the information that fulfills me.