When I took over ToM, my primary inspiration wasn't Boing Boing, or Neatorama, or a lot of the other pop/fringe culture blogs out there. Rather, it was the blog of a chirpy little Brazilian girl named Bibi, who runs a couple of the best blogs on the planet.
Her "main" site, which goes depressingly unupdated lately, is Bibi's Box. It has no theme as such: it's about whatever catches Bibi's fancy. But Bibi's mind seems to be self-filtering: she'd rather post about eccentric old Italian pulp novel covers, or Nazi art, or bronze sculptures of imaginary animals, than the latest cute puppy video. Bibi's Box was such an inspiration to me that when I started ToM, I added every single blog from her blogroll into my feed reader, and a good chunk of those are used as my sources even now.
But Bibi hasn't stopped updating her Box out of laziness: she's been channeling all of her energy into a new blog, Videos with Bibi, which devotes itself to digging up the strangest, most wonderful and most esoteric public domain videos on the Internet. Old documentaries or noirs; wonderful Max Flesicher cartoons and sci-fi serials; 50s propaganda flicks about drug use and premarital sex. It's a wonderful site... in fact, the only criticism I can level against it is that you need hundreds of hours to sift through the content.
Bibi is one of those amateur bloggers that puts "pros" to me like shame and seriously calls into question why anyone would be stupid enough to pay me to do what she does every day out of sheer enthusiasm. Go by her site. Buy her a present. Bibi deserves your love.
Bibi's Box [Official Site]
Videos with Bibi [Official Site]
