Still Reading
Ten years ago German blogging was everywhere—loud, colorful, hundreds of voices. Now most of it’s gone. The good ones either sold out to magazines, switched to YouTube, or just quit. You notice it when you actually use a feed reader, which almost nobody does.
I do. Old habit. And between the dead feeds there are still a few worth keeping subscribed to.
Nerdcore’s been running since the beginning. René, crude and sharp, saying things that shouldn’t be said. The kind of writer people love and hate equally, sometimes both at the same time. The energy is still there.
I Heart Berlin started in 2007—Frank and Claudio watching their city obsessively, documenting change in real time. They don’t pretend to be above hipster clichés, which somehow makes the attention to detail matter more. The work is real.
I’ve switched what I write about constantly over the years—YouTube, Twitch, podcasts, back to writing. Lost readers every time, kept going anyway. There’s something freeing about not having to stay in one lane, even if nobody particularly cares where you’re going. Design, drawing, technology, pop culture, whatever’s in your head that week. No need to be serious about any of it.
Lost Levels is a crew of game writers doing actual criticism, not news. Still finding their voice, still small, but there’s real thinking happening. Von Gestern is just archives—BRAVO magazines from the 80s, LEGO manuals, old ads. You can spend a day in there and feel genuinely wrecked afterward. Urban Shit documents graffiti and street art before it trends. Kraftfuttermischwerk accumulates whatever’s funny or absurd—bad takes, good music, cat gifs, whatever. The internet as it should be.
The fashion blogs are still around too. Bekleidet mixing careful aesthetics with genuine darkness underneath. The Dandy Diary guys somehow made fashion blogging actually matter. Masha Sedgwick’s probably the gold standard for fashion writing—not because of the photos but because she clearly understands what it actually takes.
I’m not romantic about blogs. They were never the future. But the ones that kept going, that actually update regularly, that don’t care about metrics—those are singular. Someone just deciding what’s worth writing about. It’s a more genuine gesture than it looks like.