Blog Roll of Olde

Time Capsule: The Old Blogroll

Some of those sites are dormant. Some moved elsewhere. Some belong to a blogosphere that no longer really exists in the form it once did. But they remain part of the intellectual weather in which the C-Realm Podcast took shape, and part of the wider conversation that shaped KMO’s own path through the 2000s and 2010s.

This post preserves that old blogroll as a small time capsule.

These links were not there by accident. Every one of the authors listed there was also a repeat guest on the C-Realm Podcast. In that sense, the old blogroll was more than a reading list. It was a map of a recurring conversation.

Clusterfuck Nation
James Howard Kunstler’s blog was one of the central landmarks of collapse-aware commentary in the peak-oil era. Kunstler brought wit, contempt, prophecy, and a novelist’s gift for phrase-making to the unraveling of suburban America, cheap-energy assumptions, and national delusion. He was also one of the C-Realm Podcast’s most frequent and recurring guests. Along with Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer, he formed one of the three core thematic poles of the show.

The Great Change
This blog belongs to Albert Bates, whose voice represented a more practical and ecological current within the broader collapse conversation. Bates was not only a repeat guest on the C-Realm Podcast, but also the founder and guiding intelligence behind the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, where KMO lived for two years from early 2010 to early 2012. His presence in the blogroll reflected not just intellectual overlap, but lived connection.

Neil Kramer
Neil Kramer brought a more metaphysical and consciousness-oriented current into the mix. His writing lived closer to the spiritual and existential edges of the alternative web than to peak-oil analytics, but that overlap was real. He too was a repeat guest on the C-Realm Podcast. More than that, KMO went on a couchsurfing speaking tour with Neil beginning in December 2009 and continuing through January 2010, starting on the East Coast and later reconnecting in Los Angeles to work north along the Pacific coast doing talks. This was not merely a blog link. It marked a real human alliance from that strange period.

The Archdruid Report
John Michael Greer’s old blog was one of the defining sites of the long descent conversation. Greer offered a more historically grounded, cyclic, and disciplined frame than much of the panic-stricken collapseosphere. He was interested not only in what might fail, but in how civilizations actually decline, how people adapt, and what habits of thought survive contact with a less energy-rich world. He was also one of the most frequent recurring guests on the C-Realm Podcast, and one of the three central representatives of its core thematic concerns.

the Hipcrime Vocab
The Hipcrime Vocab belonged to the writer then known as Chad Hill. The site represented a sharp-edged, skeptical current within the broader collapse-era web, mixing social criticism, anti-civilizational suspicion, and a refusal to accept official narratives at face value. Like the other writers in this old blogroll, he was a repeat guest on the C-Realm Podcast. He now writes under the name Chad C. Mulligan, still using The Hipcrime Vocab.

ClubOrlov
Dmitry Orlov’s site was essential reading during the years when Americans were trying to imagine what Soviet-style or post-Soviet disintegration might teach about American decline. Orlov combined gallows humor, systems critique, and a kind of immigrant double vision that let him compare two failing worlds at once. He was not merely adjacent to the C-Realm conversation. He was one of its recurring poles. Along with Kunstler and Greer, he formed one of the three archetypal guest-presences that came to define the show’s core concerns.

Casaubon’s Book
Sharon Astyk’s blog represented the agrarian, practical, relocalization-oriented wing of the same broader world. Where some collapse writing leaned toward abstraction, prophecy, or spectacle, Astyk brought attention back to households, food, land, resilience, and the practical questions of how one actually lives through contraction. Her presence in the blogroll reflected that grounding influence, and she too was a repeat guest on the podcast.

The Ascent of Humanity
Charles Eisenstein’s old blog belonged to the more philosophical and civilizational side of the ecosystem. His work was less about immediate collapse mechanics than about the deeper stories modern people inhabit: separation, selfhood, economics, progress, and the possibility of cultural transformation. He was part of the long conversation around what was failing, but also around what new orientation might follow. Like the others listed here, he was a repeat guest on the C-Realm Podcast.

These links were there because they marked out a world of thought that mattered. They do not represent a fixed creed, a permanent canon, or a set of positions KMO would now endorse in every detail. They reflect an era, an online milieu, and a network of recurring relationships that fed directly into the C-Realm Podcast and the long run of questions that followed.

Some of these writers still matter. Some remain active elsewhere. Some belong mostly to internet prehistory now. But together they sketch the outline of a vanished web culture: looser, stranger, less centralized, often more personal, and sometimes far more intellectually alive than the algorithmic feed-world that followed.

As Getting Over Collapse takes shape, preserving this old blogroll makes sense. It is part of the path. Not the destination. Not the final answer. But part of the path.