#my dream for almost a decade has been for my webcomic to be picked up as a show by either cn or netflix

[cottoncandysprite]

All in the same week. I'm going to set something on fire

[neoyi]

So there were new indie game directs (Day of the Dev and Wholesome Games) and I was basically Foaming Mouth Guy from Avatar because I’m hyped for indie games.

Since I can’t ill afford to shut up about my opinions, here’s a big, fat blog on what particular games I’m either looking forward to, has piqued my interest, or at least curious enough for me to comment on it even if it’s not within my wheelhouse.

Axiom Verge 2: I have no horse in this race, I just think it’s nice of them to let players skip boss fights if they want to for ease of gameplay.

Toem: A Photo Adventure: Some evil genius combined photo snapping and meandering sidequests together into one game, knowing I’d be putty in their hands. There’s actually a few photograph games in these directs, but this one grabbed me because the list of quests you do looks so specific that it scratches a particular itch for me.

Garden Story: Incredibly lovely Mother 3-like graphics aside, this game hits all my buttons: quest-based gameplay to help numerous NPCs, managing the layout of your town, exploration, and RPG-like elements make this one a dream indie game for me.

Vokabulants: For some reason, this game’s setting isn’t doing it for me, but I’m awestruck with their decision to use stopmotion for the entire thing. Rarely utilized, always cool to see.

Death’s Door: I don’t care about birds, but I DO like grim reaper stuff, so color me piqued.

Elec Head: I already knew about this game thanks to Game Maker’s Toolkit’s Game Jam, and I think I have it bookmarked on itch.io, so it’s nice to see this will get fleshed out into a full game.

I haven’t played the Game Jam version, but the minimum coloring (yellow = electricity which is what you need to trigger to progress) compliments the concept well.

Walk: I am a wimpy baby chicken bitch, so I can’t do horror games, but developing the entirety of Walk’s environment to look as if they’re seen from grainy cameras is such a brilliant way to convey the terrifying unknown your player character has to face. I won’t play this, but I am definitely going to watch a Let’s Play of it.

Moonglow Bay: I’ve been excited for this one for a while. All those hours playing the fishing minigame in Ocarina of Time (and eventually Majora’s Mask) and lamenting for the existence of an entire game with an excuse plot to fill out a fish compendium will soon be fulfilled. I’m so ecstatic.

Loot River: What the fuck? What the living shit? How did they animate the water like that? What the shit? What the goddamn hell? It just looks so good!

Recolit: This game has potential to be atmospheric. It also feels like the kind of game that can deliver a Surprise Spooky or two. For some reason, the main character walking through the barely lit museum really spoke to me.

A Little to the Left: A game where you arrange objects until they’re are properly organized and/or structured? Oh-no, who made this game for me?

Yokai Inn: Sold just for the adorably whimsical graphics alone.

Mythic Ocean: Undersea exploration and sea creatures are my jam. Hope this game will fill a hole in my heart that Abzu sadly did not.

Beast of Maraville Island: I see this game and Donkey Kong Country share a continuity through their banana birds.

We are OFK: Tell you the truth, I don't really care about Band Origin stories (I'm not really a music buff kinda person), but I've been waiting for Teddy Dief and co's game for a while. Whether or not I take anything from this game by end, I know I’ll never stop listening to “Follow/Unfollow”, which I have been obsessively playing in the background non-stop the past two days. If they ever bring out the inevitable bandcamp soundtrack, I hope they also include THIS version of the song that played on the Day of the Dev pre-show because it’s just so *chef’s kiss*

Dordogne: The game's premise isn't really doing it for me, but I dig the watercolor approach.

The Gecko Gods: I remember playing the Gex 2 demo decades ago and being mesmerized by the titular character’s ability to crawl on top of walls and ceilings, and being particularly disappointed at how underutilized it was. The Gecko Gods looks to fill in that gap and I'm intrigued.

Tasomachi: It’s about an airship. I gotta. I gotta!

Bear and Breakfast: I like the art style, kind of like a webcomic if it was picked up by Cartoon Network or Netflix.

Sally: MORE airships? Well, this is the indie direct that just keeps on giving, now isn’t it?

Rainbow Billy: Repaint a black-and-white world into color is becoming A Thing in indie games, but the animation and style is just bursting with charm.

Unpacking: I played the demo for this one and it did a decent job hitting my button. There wasn’t anything more to it other than unpacking and just putting stuff in its appropriate place (it didn’t feel like there was much wiggle room - books go on bookshelves and maybe on top of a drawer, shoes goes in closet and nothing but the closet, etc), but it beats real packing/unpacking any day.

Cloud Jumper: THREE games with or about airships? Now you’re just spoiling me.

Teacup: This one just looks delightful. It feels like playing through a children’s book.

Muttropolis: You take pictures of dogs!

Amber Isle: You know, I don’t think I see enough towns and villages in games inhabited by dinosaur folks.

Moonshell Island: Apparently I’m easy to please. I see indie games look this vibrant and colorful (almost pastel, but not quite) and I’m Phillip J. “Shut up and Take My Money” Fry. I don’t even know what this game is about, but I want it.

Lego Builder’s Journey: Okay, this looks nice and the graphics are mind-blowing, but does anything made and owned by the LEGO company actually count as an indie game?

Powerwash Simulator: who made this game for me?

Toodee and Topdee: Oh, this is clever. Perspective games in my head seem to have been relegated mostly to whatever Nintendo did with their 3DS games, but this looks like it captures the spirit of it without the 3D or the eye-strain that came with it.

Apico: I’m getting a 2D open world exploration vibe from this game and I’m down for that.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#1yrago My RSS feeds from a decade ago, a snapshot of gadget blogging when that was a thing

Rob Beschizza:

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.

What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same.

The "Main" folder, which contains 30 feeds, was the stuff I actually wanted (or needed) to read. This set would morph over time. I reckon it's easy to spot 2007's passing obsessions from the enduring interests.

↬ Arts and Letters Daily: a minimalist blog of links about smartypants subjects, a Drudge for those days when I sensed a third digit dimly glowing in my IQ. But for the death of founder Denis Dutton, it's exactly the same as it was in 2007! New items daily, but the RSS feed's dead.

↬ Boing Boing. Still around, I hear.

↬ Brass Goggles. A dead feed for a defunct steampunk blog (the last post was in 2013) though the forums seem well-stocked with new postings.

↬ The Consumerist. Dead feed, dead site. Founded in 2005 by Joel Johnson at Gawker, it was sold to Consumer Reports a few years later, lost its edge there, and was finally shuttered (or summarily executed) just a few weeks ago.

↬ Bibliodyssey. Quiescent. Updated until 2015 with wonderful public-domain book art scans and commentary. A twitter account and tumblr rolled on until just last year. There is a book to remember it by should the bits rot.

↬ jwz. Jamie Zawinski's startling and often hilariously bleak reflections on culture, the internet and working at Netscape during the dotcom boom. This was probably the first blog that led me to visit twice, to see if there was more. And there still is, almost daily.

↬ Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Curios and weirdness emerging from the dust and foul fog of old books, forbidden history and the more speculative reaches of science. So dead the domain is squatted. Creator Josh Foer moved on to Atlas Obscura.

↬ The Tweney Review. Personal blog of my last supervisor at Wired, Dylan Tweney, now a communications executive. It's still going strong!

↬ Strange Maps. Dead feed, dead site, though it's still going as a category at Big Think. Similar projects proliferate now on social media; this was the wonderful original. There was a book.

↬ BLDGBLOG. Architecture blog, posting since 2004 with recent if rarer updates. A fine example of tasteful web brutalism, but I'm no longer a big fan of cement boxes and minimalism with a price tag.

↬ Dethroner. A men's self-care and fashion blog, founded by Joel Johnson, of the tweedy kind that became wildly and effortlessly successful not long after he gave up on it.

↬ MocoLoco. This long-running design blog morphed visually into a magazine in 2015. I have no idea why I liked it then, but indie photoblogs' golden age ended long ago and it's good to see some are thriving.

↬ SciFi Scanner. Long-dead AMC channel blog, very likely the work of one or two editors and likely lost to tidal corporate forces rather than any specific failure or event.

↬ Cult of Mac. Apple news site from another Wired News colleague of mine, Leander Kahney, and surely one of the longest-running at this point. Charlie Sorrel, who I hired at Wired to help me write the Gadget blog, still pens articles there.

↬ Ectoplasmosis. After Wired canned its bizarre, brilliant and unacceptably weird Table of Malcontents blog, its editor John Brownlee (who later joined Joel and I in editing Boing Boing Gadgets) and contributor Eliza Gauger founded Ectoplasmosis: the same thing but with no hysterical calls from Conde Nast wondering what the fuck is going on. It was glorious, too: a high-point of baroque indie blogging in the age before Facebook (and I made the original site design). Both editors later moved onto other projects (Magenta, Problem Glyphs); Gauger maintains the site's archives at tumblr. It was last updated in 2014.

↬ Penny Arcade. Then a webcomic; now a webcomic and a media and events empire.

↬ Paul Boutin. While working at Wired News, I'd heard a rumor that he was my supervisor. But I never spoke to him and only ever received a couple of odd emails, so I just got on with the job until Tweney was hired. His site and its feed are long-dead.

↬ Yanko Design. Classic blockquote chum for gadget bloggers.

↬ City Home News. A offbeat Pittburgh News blog, still online but lying fallow since 2009.

↬ Watchismo. Once a key site for wristwatch fans, Watchismo was folded into watches.com a few years ago. A couple of things were posted to the feed in 2017, but its time has obviously passed.

↬ Gizmodo. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Engadget. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Boing Boing Gadgets. Site's dead, though the feed is technically live as it redirects to our "gadgets" tag. Thousands of URLs there succumbed to bit-rot at some point, but we have plans to merge its database into Boing Boing's and revive them.

↬ Gear Factor. This was the gadget review column at Wired Magazine, separate from the gadget blog I edited because of the longtime corporate divorce between Wired's print and online divisions. This separation had just been resolved at the time I began working there, and the two "sides" -- literally facing offices in the same building -- were slowly being integrated. The feed's dead, but with an obvious successor, Gear.

↬ The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Required reading at the time, and very much a thing of its time. Now vaguely repulsive.

↬ i09. This brilliant sci-fi and culture blog deserved more than to end up a tag at Gizmodo.

↬ Science Daily: bland but exhaustive torrent of research news, still cranking along.

The "Essentials" Folder was material I wanted to stay on top of, but with work clearly in mind: the background material for systematically belching out content at a particular point in 2007.

↬ Still alive are The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica, UMPC Portal (the tiny laptop beat!), PC Watch, Techblog, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Coolest Gadgets, EFF Breaking News, Retro Thing, CNET Reviews, New Scientist, CNET Crave, and MAKE Magazine.

↬ Dead or quiescent: GigaOm (at least for news), Digg/Apple, Akihabara News, Tokyomango, Inside Comcast, Linux Devices (Update: reincarnated at linuxgizmos.com), and Uneasy Silence.

Of the 23 feeds in the "press releases" folder, 17 are dead. Most of the RSS no-shows are for companies like AMD and Intel, however, who surely still offer feeds at new addresses. Feeds for Palm, Nokia and pre-Dell Alienware are genuine dodos. These were interesting enough companies, 10 years ago.

PR Newswire functions as a veneering service so anyone can pretend to have a big PR department, but it is (was?) also legitimately used by the big players as a platform so I monitored the feeds there. They're still populated, but duplicate one another, and it's all complete garbage now. (It was mostly garbage then.)

My "Gadgets and Tech" folder contained the army of late-2000s blogs capitalizing on the success of Gizmodo, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, et al. Back in the day, these were mostly one (or two) young white men furiously extruding commentary on (or snarky rewrites of) press releases, with lots of duplication and an inchoate but seriously-honored unspoken language of mutual respect and first-mover credit. Those sites that survived oftentimes moved to listicles and such: notionally superior and more original content and certainly more sharable on Facebook, but unreadably boring. However, a few old-timey gadget bloggers are still cranking 'em out' in web 1.5 style. And a few were so specialized they actually had readers who loved them.

Still alive: DailyTech, technabob, CdrInfo.com, EverythingUSB, Extremetech, GearFuse, Gizmag, Gizmodiva, Hacked Gadgets, How to Spot A Psychopath/Dans' Data, MobileBurn, NewLaunches, OhGizmo!, ShinyShiny, Stuff.tv, TechDigest, TechDirt, Boy Genius Report, The Red Ferret Journal, Trusted Reviews, Xataca, DigiTimes, MedGadget, Geekologie, Tom's Hardware, Trendhunter, Japan Today, Digital Trends, All About Symbian (Yes, Symbian!), textually, cellular-news, TreeHugger, dezeen.

Dead: jkkmobile.com, Business Week Online, About PC (why), Afrigadget (unique blog about inventors in Africa, still active on FaceBook), DefenseTech, FosFor (died 2013), Gearlog, Mobile-Review.com (but apparently reborn as a Russian language tech blog!), Robot's Dreams, The Gadgets Weblog, Wireless Watch Japan, Accelerating Future, Techopolis, Mobile Magazine, eHome Upgrade, camcorderinfo.com (Update: it became http://Reviewed.com), Digital Home Thoughts (farewell), WiFi Network News (farewell), Salon: Machinist, Near Future Lab, BotJunkie (twitter), and CNN Gizmos.

I followed 18 categories at Free Patents Online, and the site's still alive, though the RSS feeds haven't had any new items since 2016.

In the "news" folder, my picks were fairly standard stuff: BBC, CNET, digg/technology, PC World, Reuters, International Herald Tribune, and a bunch of Yahoo News feeds. The Digg feed's dead; they died and were reborn.

The "Wired" feed folder comprised all the Wired News blogs of the mid-2000s. All are dead. 27B Stroke 6, Autopia, Danger Room, Epicenter, Gadget Lab, Game|Life, Geekdad, Listening Post, Monkey Bites, Table of Malcontents, Underwire, Wired Science.

These were each basically one writer or two and were generally folded into the established mazagine-side arrangements as the Age of Everyone Emulating Gawker came to an end. The feed for former EIC Chris Anderson's personal blog survives, but hasn't been updated since his era. Still going strong is Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, albeit rigged as a CMS tag rather than a bona fide site of its own.

Still alive from my 2007 "Science" folder are Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait), Bad Science (Ben Goldacre), Pharyngula (PZ Myers) New Urban Legends, NASA Breaking News, and The Panda's Thumb.

Finally, there's a dedicated "iPhone" folder. This was not just the hottest toy of 2007. It was all that was holy in consumer electronics for half a decade. Gadget blogging never really had a golden age, but the iPhone ended any pretense that there were numerous horses in a race of equal potential. Apple won.

Still alive are 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors, MacSlash, AppleInsider and Daring Fireball. Dead are TUAW, iPhoneCentral, and the iPhone Dev Wiki.

Of all the sites listed here, I couldn't now be paid but to read a few. So long, 2007.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/my-rss-feeds-from-a-decade-ago.html

[narcisbolgor-blog]

Who on Earth Would Dox Dril, the Only Good Anonymous Person on the Internet?

For years the internet has speculated about the identity of Dril, the iconic Twitter user known for his absurdist humor and prescient tweets. No one would have guessed, however, that it would be fans of an 8,000-page comic who would get to the bottom of this notorious internet mystery.

Dril is not just another anonymous Twitter joke account. He is the public face of Weird Twitter, whos become famous for his insane non sequiturs that speak to the core of humanity. His account has amassed nearly 900,000 followers and was declared the single most worthwhile account on Twitter by College Humor.

Drils tweets regularly amass thousands of retweets and his work has been aggregated on any mainstream viral media site you can think of.

Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of Hell that I was banished to upon death in my previous life, he joked to BuzzFeed in 2013.

And since tweets by Drils often account served as a respite to the sort of Hell Twitter can often serve up to users, the reveal of his identity caused instant uproar among many of his fans on the web when it went viral on Friday.

The fear that a beloved account would be exposed and shut down reminded many users of the famous @Horse_ebooks disclosure in 2013, when it was revealed that a perceived Twitter spambot known for its accidentally timely tweets was actually run by humans.

Dril has provided nothing but joy to his legion of followers for over a decade, only asking for anonymity in return. To many on Twitter, it seemed wildly unfair that he should be doxxed and shamed off the internet by an obscure webcomic fan community.

So why did a comic with an insular, sometimes incomprehensible fanbase reveal the secret of Dril that nobody wanted to know?

Because they believe Dril may have been one of them.

***

Homestuck is a webcomic born out of another webcomic called MS Paint Adventures. The comic centers around a group of kids who potentially bring about the end of the world by installing a beta copy of a computer game. This is an overly simplistic description and doesnt completely get what the comic is about, but there are so many nuances and plot variances that trying to untangle them in any coherent fashion is almost impossible.

A 2012 Kickstarter described the comic as, A story about some kids who are friends over the internet. They decide to play a game together. There are major consequences. Saying anything more about the plot would probably be getting in too deep. It gets fairly complicated.

You can get about as far as the kids get stuck in a game before it becomes incredibly difficult to describe what is happening to them, Kotaku writer Gita Jackson wrote in a 2017 Homestuck retrospective. They discover dream worlds, fight villains who can stop time, meet gray-skinned alien trolls, discover theyre all related kinda, die and are resurrected. As the comic goes on it becomes exponentially more complex, to the point that even a lot of fans dont really understand all of it.

The most important thing to understand about the comic is that it has a rabid online fandom. There are over 44,000 Homestuck fanfics on fanfiction website Archive of our Own and a thriving community of hundreds of blogs dedicated to the comic on Tumblr.

Because of the fact that the comic is so complex and generally inaccessible to the even novice internet lurkers, Homestuck fans are frequently mocked. A lot of characters in the Homestuck universe have various sexual identities and the comic is popular with people who like shipping, or hypothetically pairing up different characters. The whole thing is sort of set up just for people to ship and is all about polyamory, one Twitter user said.

That said, Homestuck fans really love Homestuck. So much so, that they were really excited when Hiveswap, a game that takes place in the Homestuck universe, was partially released in September 2017. Fans picked apart every aspect of the game on sites like Reddit and Tumblr when one particular Homestuck fan noticed a name the user believed to be Drils on the Hiveswap game credits screen.

The connection between that name in the credits and Dril is tenuous, but there are a few clues that Homestuck fans found telling.

***

According to Tumblr user not-terezi-pyrope, a 2014 Tumblr reblog from someone claiming to know Dril offline referred to him as Paul, the first name of the person in the credits.

Jacob Bakkila, a writer behind the wildly popular @Horse_ebooks Twitter account, also claimed to know Dril offline. He said Dril had hired him for a project once and the two had become friends. Bakkila also said that Dril had contributed to the Horse_ebooks sequel, an adventure game called Bear Stearns Bravo.

Sometime between 2014 and 2017 a Tumblr user unearthed the LinkedIn account of the Paul named in the credits who claimed to have contributed to Bear Stearns Bravopresumably the same Paul who was listed on the Hiveswap credits screen.

And, according to the Homestuck fan sites, theres more.

One of the only 205 accounts Dril follows on Twitter is Cohen Edenfield, Hiveswaps lead writer.

And there are further connections, as well, to do with old accounts and comparisons of artwork, etc. Im not up to scratch on the precise details of that, user not-terezi-pyrope wrote on Tumblr. Also, I spoke to somebody who did audio effects work for Hiveswap shortly after the Act 1 release, and while they seemed to not be entirely privy to the details they also brought up a connection.

News of the Dril-Homestuck connection spread like wildfire through the fandom community back in September and theres an entire Reddit thread dedicated to discussing Drils identity and role in the game.

But since the Homestuck fandom is relatively closed off from average internet and Twitter users, Drils doxxing failed to reach the wider internet until a few subtweets on Thursday afternoon followed by Twitter user @thrdplanet tweeting about the outing Friday morning.

I cannot believe the homestuck fandom cracked the identity of dril 2017 is truly a cursed timeline.

ThrdPlanets Tweet quickly went viral, and she experienced almost immediate backlash from Dril fans.

i dont want to know who he is i dont want to know what he looks like i will not let you guys ruin the last good thing on this website protect dril, respect dril, leave dril alone thank you, one fan tweeted. look just because we might have found the corporeal manifestation of dril at this point in history doesnt mean we know who dril is also anyone trying to find out drils identity is a fucking cop, another user said.

@thrdplanet deleted her tweets, and after being bombarded with criticism tweeted again, Yall realize this isnt a confirmed solid legit info on who he is right. Yall also realize if he really never wanted to be found out he could have been credited under a pseudonym right. He wouldnt have his work dril has been named as writing for on his LinkedIn right?

***

The very process of doxxing someones personal identity online is fraught. At the end of the day, the connections between Dril and whoever Paul is are tenuous at best. And even if Dril is a graphic designer in the New York City metro area, as has been previously speculated, does any of that take away from his work?

Its understandable that fans would feel a protective rage that Homestuck fandom sleuths were coming for what so many consider the last pure Twitter account on the internet. Dril himself has not acknowledged the controversy today or two months ago when it was revealed on Tumblr.

Its worth noting that his doxxing didnt appear to be malicious.

Im posting this here, Reddit user Fraven wrote after revealing Drils identity on the platform, with the benign purpose of getting some special appreciation for the games (Hiveswap) great staff of writers and the talent within it.

Other Twitter users remained resilient in the face of potentially losing one of their most beloved comrades.

One user suggested that over the weekend all Dril supporters change their Twitter name to I am dril in solidarity. Another said, its the weekend baby. You know what that means. its time to drink precisely one beer and not dox dril.

Who is john dril? joked someone else.

Im about to dox dril, another tweeted, okay here goes: the real dril is all the friends we made along the way.

More From this publisher : HERE

=> *********************************************** Read More Here: Who on Earth Would Dox Dril, the Only Good Anonymous Person on the Internet? ************************************ =>

Who on Earth Would Dox Dril, the Only Good Anonymous Person on the Internet? was originally posted by 11 VA Viral News

[adambstingus]

Who on Earth Would Dox Dril, the Only Good Anonymous Person on the Internet?

For years the internet has speculated about the identity of Dril, the iconic Twitter user known for his absurdist humor and prescient tweets. No one would have guessed, however, that it would be fans of an 8,000-page comic who would get to the bottom of this notorious internet mystery.

Dril is not just another anonymous Twitter joke account. He is the public face of Weird Twitter, who’s become famous for his insane non sequiturs that speak to the core of humanity. His account has amassed nearly 900,000 followers and was declared “the single most worthwhile account on Twitter” by College Humor.

Dril’s tweets regularly amass thousands of retweets and his work has been aggregated on any mainstream viral media site you can think of.

“Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of ‘Hell’ that I was banished to upon death in my previous life,” he joked to BuzzFeed in 2013.

And since tweets by Dril’s often account served as a respite to the “sort of Hell” Twitter can often serve up to users, the reveal of his identity caused instant uproar among many of his fans on the web when it went viral on Friday.

The fear that a beloved account would be exposed and shut down reminded many users of the famous @Horse_ebooks disclosure in 2013, when it was revealed that a perceived Twitter spambot known for its accidentally timely tweets was actually run by humans.

Dril has provided nothing but joy to his legion of followers for over a decade, only asking for anonymity in return. To many on Twitter, it seemed wildly unfair that he should be doxxed and shamed off the internet by an obscure webcomic fan community.

So why did a comic with an insular, sometimes incomprehensible fanbase reveal the secret of Dril that nobody wanted to know?

Because they believe Dril may have been one of them.

***

Homestuck is a webcomic born out of another webcomic called MS Paint Adventures. The comic centers around a group of kids who potentially bring about the end of the world by installing a beta copy of a computer game. This is an overly simplistic description and doesn’t completely get what the comic is about, but there are so many nuances and plot variances that trying to untangle them in any coherent fashion is almost impossible.

A 2012 Kickstarter described the comic as, “A story about some kids who are friends over the internet. They decide to play a game together. There are major consequences. Saying anything more about the plot would probably be getting in too deep. It gets fairly complicated.”

“You can get about as far as ‘the kids get stuck in a game’ before it becomes incredibly difficult to describe what is happening to them,” Kotaku writer Gita Jackson wrote in a 2017 Homestuck retrospective. “They discover dream worlds, fight villains who can stop time, meet gray-skinned alien trolls, discover they’re all related kinda, die and are resurrected. As the comic goes on it becomes exponentially more complex, to the point that even a lot of fans don’t really understand all of it.”

The most important thing to understand about the comic is that it has a rabid online fandom. There are over 44,000 Homestuck fanfics on fanfiction website Archive of our Own and a thriving community of hundreds of blogs dedicated to the comic on Tumblr.

Because of the fact that the comic is so complex and generally inaccessible to the even novice internet lurkers, Homestuck fans are frequently mocked. A lot of characters in the Homestuck universe have various sexual identities and the comic is popular with people who like shipping, or hypothetically pairing up different characters. “The whole thing is sort of set up just for people to ship and is all about polyamory,” one Twitter user said.

That said, Homestuck fans really love Homestuck. So much so, that they were really excited when Hiveswap, a game that takes place in the Homestuck universe, was partially released in September 2017. Fans picked apart every aspect of the game on sites like Reddit and Tumblr when one particular Homestuck fan noticed a name the user believed to be Dril’s on the Hiveswap game credits screen.

The connection between that name in the credits and Dril is tenuous, but there are a few clues that Homestuck fans found telling.

***

According to Tumblr user not-terezi-pyrope, a 2014 Tumblr reblog from someone claiming to know Dril offline referred to him as “Paul,” the first name of the person in the credits.

Jacob Bakkila, a writer behind the wildly popular @Horse_ebooks Twitter account, also claimed to know Dril offline. He said Dril had hired him for a project once and the two had become friends. Bakkila also said that Dril had contributed to the Horse_ebooks sequel, an adventure game called Bear Stearns Bravo.

Sometime between 2014 and 2017 a Tumblr user unearthed the LinkedIn account of the Paul named in the credits who claimed to have contributed to Bear Stearns Bravo—presumably the same “Paul” who was listed on the Hiveswap credits screen.

And, according to the Homestuck fan sites, there’s more.

One of the only 205 accounts Dril follows on Twitter is Cohen Edenfield, Hiveswap’s lead writer.

And “there are further connections, as well, to do with old accounts and comparisons of artwork, etc. I’m not up to scratch on the precise details of that,” user not-terezi-pyrope wrote on Tumblr. “Also, I spoke to somebody who did audio effects work for Hiveswap shortly after the Act 1 release, and while they seemed to not be entirely privy to the details they also brought up a connection.”

News of the Dril-Homestuck connection spread like wildfire through the fandom community back in September and there’s an entire Reddit thread dedicated to discussing Dril’s identity and role in the game.

But since the Homestuck fandom is relatively closed off from average internet and Twitter users, Dril’s “doxxing” failed to reach the wider internet until a few subtweets on Thursday afternoon followed by Twitter user @thrdplanet tweeting about the outing Friday morning.

“I cannot believe the homestuck fandom cracked the identity of dril 2017 is truly a cursed timeline.”

ThrdPlanet’s Tweet quickly went viral, and she experienced almost immediate backlash from Dril fans.

“i dont want to know who he is i dont want to know what he looks like i will not let you guys ruin the last good thing on this website protect dril, respect dril, leave dril alone thank you,” one fan tweeted. “look just because we might have found the corporeal manifestation of dril at this point in history doesn’t mean we know who dril is… also anyone trying to find out dril’s identity is a fucking cop,” another user said.

@thrdplanet deleted her tweets, and after being bombarded with criticism tweeted again, “Y’all realize this isn’t a confirmed solid legit info on who he is right. Y’all also realize if he really never wanted to be found out he could have been credited under a pseudonym right. He wouldn’t have his work dril has been named as writing for on his LinkedIn right?”

***

The very process of “doxxing” someone’s personal identity online is fraught. At the end of the day, the connections between Dril and whoever “Paul” is are tenuous at best. And even if Dril is a graphic designer in the New York City metro area, as has been previously speculated, does any of that take away from his work?

It’s understandable that fans would feel a protective rage that Homestuck fandom sleuths were coming for what so many consider the last pure Twitter account on the internet. Dril himself has not acknowledged the controversy today or two months ago when it was revealed on Tumblr.

It’s worth noting that his “doxxing” didn’t appear to be malicious.

“I’m posting this here,” Reddit user Fraven wrote after “revealing” Dril’s identity on the platform, “with the benign purpose of getting some special appreciation for the game’s (Hiveswap) great staff of writers and the talent within it.”

Other Twitter users remained resilient in the face of potentially losing one of their most beloved comrades.

One user suggested that over the weekend all Dril supporters change their Twitter name to “I am dril” in solidarity. Another said, “its the weekend baby. You know what that means. its time to drink precisely one beer and not dox dril.”

“Who is john dril?” joked someone else.

“I’m about to dox dril,” another tweeted, “okay here goes: the real dril is all the friends we made along the way.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/who-on-earth-would-dox-dril-the-only-good-anonymous-person-on-the-internet/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/184070098192

[samanthasroberts]

Who on Earth Would Dox Dril, the Only Good Anonymous Person on the Internet?

For years the internet has speculated about the identity of Dril, the iconic Twitter user known for his absurdist humor and prescient tweets. No one would have guessed, however, that it would be fans of an 8,000-page comic who would get to the bottom of this notorious internet mystery.

Dril is not just another anonymous Twitter joke account. He is the public face of Weird Twitter, who’s become famous for his insane non sequiturs that speak to the core of humanity. His account has amassed nearly 900,000 followers and was declared “the single most worthwhile account on Twitter” by College Humor.

Dril’s tweets regularly amass thousands of retweets and his work has been aggregated on any mainstream viral media site you can think of.

“Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of ‘Hell’ that I was banished to upon death in my previous life,” he joked to BuzzFeed in 2013.

And since tweets by Dril’s often account served as a respite to the “sort of Hell” Twitter can often serve up to users, the reveal of his identity caused instant uproar among many of his fans on the web when it went viral on Friday.

The fear that a beloved account would be exposed and shut down reminded many users of the famous @Horse_ebooks disclosure in 2013, when it was revealed that a perceived Twitter spambot known for its accidentally timely tweets was actually run by humans.

Dril has provided nothing but joy to his legion of followers for over a decade, only asking for anonymity in return. To many on Twitter, it seemed wildly unfair that he should be doxxed and shamed off the internet by an obscure webcomic fan community.

So why did a comic with an insular, sometimes incomprehensible fanbase reveal the secret of Dril that nobody wanted to know?

Because they believe Dril may have been one of them.

***

Homestuck is a webcomic born out of another webcomic called MS Paint Adventures. The comic centers around a group of kids who potentially bring about the end of the world by installing a beta copy of a computer game. This is an overly simplistic description and doesn’t completely get what the comic is about, but there are so many nuances and plot variances that trying to untangle them in any coherent fashion is almost impossible.

A 2012 Kickstarter described the comic as, “A story about some kids who are friends over the internet. They decide to play a game together. There are major consequences. Saying anything more about the plot would probably be getting in too deep. It gets fairly complicated.”

“You can get about as far as ‘the kids get stuck in a game’ before it becomes incredibly difficult to describe what is happening to them,” Kotaku writer Gita Jackson wrote in a 2017 Homestuck retrospective. “They discover dream worlds, fight villains who can stop time, meet gray-skinned alien trolls, discover they’re all related kinda, die and are resurrected. As the comic goes on it becomes exponentially more complex, to the point that even a lot of fans don’t really understand all of it.”

The most important thing to understand about the comic is that it has a rabid online fandom. There are over 44,000 Homestuck fanfics on fanfiction website Archive of our Own and a thriving community of hundreds of blogs dedicated to the comic on Tumblr.

Because of the fact that the comic is so complex and generally inaccessible to the even novice internet lurkers, Homestuck fans are frequently mocked. A lot of characters in the Homestuck universe have various sexual identities and the comic is popular with people who like shipping, or hypothetically pairing up different characters. “The whole thing is sort of set up just for people to ship and is all about polyamory,” one Twitter user said.

That said, Homestuck fans really love Homestuck. So much so, that they were really excited when Hiveswap, a game that takes place in the Homestuck universe, was partially released in September 2017. Fans picked apart every aspect of the game on sites like Reddit and Tumblr when one particular Homestuck fan noticed a name the user believed to be Dril’s on the Hiveswap game credits screen.

The connection between that name in the credits and Dril is tenuous, but there are a few clues that Homestuck fans found telling.

***

According to Tumblr user not-terezi-pyrope, a 2014 Tumblr reblog from someone claiming to know Dril offline referred to him as “Paul,” the first name of the person in the credits.

Jacob Bakkila, a writer behind the wildly popular @Horse_ebooks Twitter account, also claimed to know Dril offline. He said Dril had hired him for a project once and the two had become friends. Bakkila also said that Dril had contributed to the Horse_ebooks sequel, an adventure game called Bear Stearns Bravo.

Sometime between 2014 and 2017 a Tumblr user unearthed the LinkedIn account of the Paul named in the credits who claimed to have contributed to Bear Stearns Bravo—presumably the same “Paul” who was listed on the Hiveswap credits screen.

And, according to the Homestuck fan sites, there’s more.

One of the only 205 accounts Dril follows on Twitter is Cohen Edenfield, Hiveswap’s lead writer.

And “there are further connections, as well, to do with old accounts and comparisons of artwork, etc. I’m not up to scratch on the precise details of that,” user not-terezi-pyrope wrote on Tumblr. “Also, I spoke to somebody who did audio effects work for Hiveswap shortly after the Act 1 release, and while they seemed to not be entirely privy to the details they also brought up a connection.”

News of the Dril-Homestuck connection spread like wildfire through the fandom community back in September and there’s an entire Reddit thread dedicated to discussing Dril’s identity and role in the game.

But since the Homestuck fandom is relatively closed off from average internet and Twitter users, Dril’s “doxxing” failed to reach the wider internet until a few subtweets on Thursday afternoon followed by Twitter user @thrdplanet tweeting about the outing Friday morning.

“I cannot believe the homestuck fandom cracked the identity of dril 2017 is truly a cursed timeline.”

ThrdPlanet’s Tweet quickly went viral, and she experienced almost immediate backlash from Dril fans.

“i dont want to know who he is i dont want to know what he looks like i will not let you guys ruin the last good thing on this website protect dril, respect dril, leave dril alone thank you,” one fan tweeted. “look just because we might have found the corporeal manifestation of dril at this point in history doesn’t mean we know who dril is… also anyone trying to find out dril’s identity is a fucking cop,” another user said.

@thrdplanet deleted her tweets, and after being bombarded with criticism tweeted again, “Y’all realize this isn’t a confirmed solid legit info on who he is right. Y’all also realize if he really never wanted to be found out he could have been credited under a pseudonym right. He wouldn’t have his work dril has been named as writing for on his LinkedIn right?”

***

The very process of “doxxing” someone’s personal identity online is fraught. At the end of the day, the connections between Dril and whoever “Paul” is are tenuous at best. And even if Dril is a graphic designer in the New York City metro area, as has been previously speculated, does any of that take away from his work?

It’s understandable that fans would feel a protective rage that Homestuck fandom sleuths were coming for what so many consider the last pure Twitter account on the internet. Dril himself has not acknowledged the controversy today or two months ago when it was revealed on Tumblr.

It’s worth noting that his “doxxing” didn’t appear to be malicious.

“I’m posting this here,” Reddit user Fraven wrote after “revealing” Dril’s identity on the platform, “with the benign purpose of getting some special appreciation for the game’s (Hiveswap) great staff of writers and the talent within it.”

Other Twitter users remained resilient in the face of potentially losing one of their most beloved comrades.

One user suggested that over the weekend all Dril supporters change their Twitter name to “I am dril” in solidarity. Another said, “its the weekend baby. You know what that means. its time to drink precisely one beer and not dox dril.”

“Who is john dril?” joked someone else.

“I’m about to dox dril,” another tweeted, “okay here goes: the real dril is all the friends we made along the way.”

Source: http://allofbeer.com/who-on-earth-would-dox-dril-the-only-good-anonymous-person-on-the-internet/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/who-on-earth-would-dox-dril-the-only-good-anonymous-person-on-the-internet/

[allofbeercom]

Who on Earth Would Dox Dril, the Only Good Anonymous Person on the Internet?

For years the internet has speculated about the identity of Dril, the iconic Twitter user known for his absurdist humor and prescient tweets. No one would have guessed, however, that it would be fans of an 8,000-page comic who would get to the bottom of this notorious internet mystery.

Dril is not just another anonymous Twitter joke account. He is the public face of Weird Twitter, who’s become famous for his insane non sequiturs that speak to the core of humanity. His account has amassed nearly 900,000 followers and was declared “the single most worthwhile account on Twitter” by College Humor.

Dril’s tweets regularly amass thousands of retweets and his work has been aggregated on any mainstream viral media site you can think of.

“Twitter, as I understand it, is a sort of ‘Hell’ that I was banished to upon death in my previous life,” he joked to BuzzFeed in 2013.

And since tweets by Dril’s often account served as a respite to the “sort of Hell” Twitter can often serve up to users, the reveal of his identity caused instant uproar among many of his fans on the web when it went viral on Friday.

The fear that a beloved account would be exposed and shut down reminded many users of the famous @Horse_ebooks disclosure in 2013, when it was revealed that a perceived Twitter spambot known for its accidentally timely tweets was actually run by humans.

Dril has provided nothing but joy to his legion of followers for over a decade, only asking for anonymity in return. To many on Twitter, it seemed wildly unfair that he should be doxxed and shamed off the internet by an obscure webcomic fan community.

So why did a comic with an insular, sometimes incomprehensible fanbase reveal the secret of Dril that nobody wanted to know?

Because they believe Dril may have been one of them.

***

Homestuck is a webcomic born out of another webcomic called MS Paint Adventures. The comic centers around a group of kids who potentially bring about the end of the world by installing a beta copy of a computer game. This is an overly simplistic description and doesn’t completely get what the comic is about, but there are so many nuances and plot variances that trying to untangle them in any coherent fashion is almost impossible.

A 2012 Kickstarter described the comic as, “A story about some kids who are friends over the internet. They decide to play a game together. There are major consequences. Saying anything more about the plot would probably be getting in too deep. It gets fairly complicated.”

“You can get about as far as ‘the kids get stuck in a game’ before it becomes incredibly difficult to describe what is happening to them,” Kotaku writer Gita Jackson wrote in a 2017 Homestuck retrospective. “They discover dream worlds, fight villains who can stop time, meet gray-skinned alien trolls, discover they’re all related kinda, die and are resurrected. As the comic goes on it becomes exponentially more complex, to the point that even a lot of fans don’t really understand all of it.”

The most important thing to understand about the comic is that it has a rabid online fandom. There are over 44,000 Homestuck fanfics on fanfiction website Archive of our Own and a thriving community of hundreds of blogs dedicated to the comic on Tumblr.

Because of the fact that the comic is so complex and generally inaccessible to the even novice internet lurkers, Homestuck fans are frequently mocked. A lot of characters in the Homestuck universe have various sexual identities and the comic is popular with people who like shipping, or hypothetically pairing up different characters. “The whole thing is sort of set up just for people to ship and is all about polyamory,” one Twitter user said.

That said, Homestuck fans really love Homestuck. So much so, that they were really excited when Hiveswap, a game that takes place in the Homestuck universe, was partially released in September 2017. Fans picked apart every aspect of the game on sites like Reddit and Tumblr when one particular Homestuck fan noticed a name the user believed to be Dril’s on the Hiveswap game credits screen.

The connection between that name in the credits and Dril is tenuous, but there are a few clues that Homestuck fans found telling.

***

According to Tumblr user not-terezi-pyrope, a 2014 Tumblr reblog from someone claiming to know Dril offline referred to him as “Paul,” the first name of the person in the credits.

Jacob Bakkila, a writer behind the wildly popular @Horse_ebooks Twitter account, also claimed to know Dril offline. He said Dril had hired him for a project once and the two had become friends. Bakkila also said that Dril had contributed to the Horse_ebooks sequel, an adventure game called Bear Stearns Bravo.

Sometime between 2014 and 2017 a Tumblr user unearthed the LinkedIn account of the Paul named in the credits who claimed to have contributed to Bear Stearns Bravo—presumably the same “Paul” who was listed on the Hiveswap credits screen.

And, according to the Homestuck fan sites, there’s more.

One of the only 205 accounts Dril follows on Twitter is Cohen Edenfield, Hiveswap’s lead writer.

And “there are further connections, as well, to do with old accounts and comparisons of artwork, etc. I’m not up to scratch on the precise details of that,” user not-terezi-pyrope wrote on Tumblr. “Also, I spoke to somebody who did audio effects work for Hiveswap shortly after the Act 1 release, and while they seemed to not be entirely privy to the details they also brought up a connection.”

News of the Dril-Homestuck connection spread like wildfire through the fandom community back in September and there’s an entire Reddit thread dedicated to discussing Dril’s identity and role in the game.

But since the Homestuck fandom is relatively closed off from average internet and Twitter users, Dril’s “doxxing” failed to reach the wider internet until a few subtweets on Thursday afternoon followed by Twitter user @thrdplanet tweeting about the outing Friday morning.

“I cannot believe the homestuck fandom cracked the identity of dril 2017 is truly a cursed timeline.”

ThrdPlanet’s Tweet quickly went viral, and she experienced almost immediate backlash from Dril fans.

“i dont want to know who he is i dont want to know what he looks like i will not let you guys ruin the last good thing on this website protect dril, respect dril, leave dril alone thank you,” one fan tweeted. “look just because we might have found the corporeal manifestation of dril at this point in history doesn’t mean we know who dril is… also anyone trying to find out dril’s identity is a fucking cop,” another user said.

@thrdplanet deleted her tweets, and after being bombarded with criticism tweeted again, “Y’all realize this isn’t a confirmed solid legit info on who he is right. Y’all also realize if he really never wanted to be found out he could have been credited under a pseudonym right. He wouldn’t have his work dril has been named as writing for on his LinkedIn right?”

***

The very process of “doxxing” someone’s personal identity online is fraught. At the end of the day, the connections between Dril and whoever “Paul” is are tenuous at best. And even if Dril is a graphic designer in the New York City metro area, as has been previously speculated, does any of that take away from his work?

It’s understandable that fans would feel a protective rage that Homestuck fandom sleuths were coming for what so many consider the last pure Twitter account on the internet. Dril himself has not acknowledged the controversy today or two months ago when it was revealed on Tumblr.

It’s worth noting that his “doxxing” didn’t appear to be malicious.

“I’m posting this here,” Reddit user Fraven wrote after “revealing” Dril’s identity on the platform, “with the benign purpose of getting some special appreciation for the game’s (Hiveswap) great staff of writers and the talent within it.”

Other Twitter users remained resilient in the face of potentially losing one of their most beloved comrades.

One user suggested that over the weekend all Dril supporters change their Twitter name to “I am dril” in solidarity. Another said, “its the weekend baby. You know what that means. its time to drink precisely one beer and not dox dril.”

“Who is john dril?” joked someone else.

“I’m about to dox dril,” another tweeted, “okay here goes: the real dril is all the friends we made along the way.”

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/who-on-earth-would-dox-dril-the-only-good-anonymous-person-on-the-internet/

[mostlysignssomeportents]

By @Beschizza:  My RSS feeds from a decade ago, a snapshot of gadget blogging when that was a thing

I chanced upon an ancient backup of my RSS feed subscriptions, a cold hard stone of data from my time at Wired in the mid-2000s. The last-modified date on the file is December 2007. I wiped my feeds upon coming to Boing Boing thenabouts: a fresh start and a new perspective.

What I found, over 212 mostly-defunct sites, is a time capsule of web culture from a bygone age—albeit one tailored to the professional purpose of cranking out blog posts about consumer electronics a decade ago. It's not a picture of a wonderful time before all the horrors of Facebook and Twitter set in. This place is not a place of honor. No highly-esteemed deed is commemorated here. But perhaps some of you might like a quick tour, all the same.

The "Main" folder, which contains 30 feeds, was the stuff I actually wanted (or needed) to read. This set would morph over time. I reckon it's easy to spot 2007's passing obsessions from the enduring interests.

↬ Arts and Letters Daily: a minimalist blog of links about smartypants subjects, a Drudge for those days when I sensed a third digit dimly glowing in my IQ. But for the death of founder Denis Dutton, it's exactly the same as it was in 2007! New items daily, but the RSS feed's dead.

↬ Boing Boing. Still around, I hear.

↬ Brass Goggles. A dead feed for a defunct steampunk blog (the last post was in 2013) though the forums seem well-stocked with new postings.

↬ The Consumerist. Dead feed, dead site. Founded in 2005 by Joel Johnson at Gawker, it was sold to Consumer Reports a few years later, lost its edge there, and was finally shuttered (or summarily executed) just a few weeks ago.

↬ Bibliodyssey. Quiescent. Updated until 2015 with wonderful public-domain book art scans and commentary. A twitter account and tumblr rolled on until just last year. There is a book to remember it by should the bits rot.

↬ jwz. Jamie Zawinski's startling and often hilariously bleak reflections on culture, the internet and working at Netscape during the dotcom boom. This was probably the first blog that led me to visit twice, to see if there was more. And there still is, almost daily.

↬ Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. Curios and weirdness emerging from the dust and foul fog of old books, forbidden history and the more speculative reaches of science. So dead the domain is squatted. Creator Josh Foer moved on to Atlas Obscura.

↬ The Tweney Review. Personal blog of my last supervisor at Wired, Dylan Tweney, now a communications executive. It's still going strong!

↬ Strange Maps. Dead feed, dead site, though it's still going as a category at Big Think. Similar projects proliferate now on social media; this was the wonderful original. There was a book.

↬ BLDGBLOG. Architecture blog, posting since 2004 with recent if rarer updates. A fine example of tasteful web brutalism, but I'm no longer a big fan of cement boxes and minimalism with a price tag.

↬ Dethroner. A men's self-care and fashion blog, founded by Joel Johnson, of the tweedy kind that became wildly and effortlessly successful not long after he gave up on it.

↬ MocoLoco. This long-running design blog morphed visually into a magazine in 2015. I have no idea why I liked it then, but indie photoblogs' golden age ended long ago and it's good to see some are thriving.

↬ SciFi Scanner. Long-dead AMC channel blog, very likely the work of one or two editors and likely lost to tidal corporate forces rather than any specific failure or event.

↬ Cult of Mac. Apple news site from another Wired News colleague of mine, Leander Kahney, and surely one of the longest-running at this point. Charlie Sorrel, who I hired at Wired to help me write the Gadget blog, still pens articles there.

↬ Ectoplasmosis. After Wired canned its bizarre, brilliant and unacceptably weird Table of Malcontents blog, its editor John Brownlee (who later joined Joel and I in editing Boing Boing Gadgets) and contributor Eliza Gauger founded Ectoplasmosis: the same thing but with no hysterical calls from Conde Nast wondering what the fuck is going on. It was glorious, too: a high-point of baroque indie blogging in the age before Facebook (and I made the original site design). Both editors later moved onto other projects (Magenta, Problem Glyphs); Gauger maintains the site's archives at tumblr. It was last updated in 2014.

↬ Penny Arcade. Then a webcomic; now a webcomic and a media and events empire.

↬ Paul Boutin. While working at Wired News, I'd heard a rumor that he was my supervisor. But I never spoke to him and only ever received a couple of odd emails, so I just got on with the job until Tweney was hired. His site and its feed are long-dead.

↬ Yanko Design. Classic blockquote chum for gadget bloggers.

↬ City Home News. A offbeat Pittburgh News blog, still online but lying fallow since 2009.

↬ Watchismo. Once a key site for wristwatch fans, Watchismo was folded into watches.com a few years ago. A couple of things were posted to the feed in 2017, but its time has obviously passed.

↬ Gizmodo. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Engadget. Much has changed, but it's still one of the best tech blogs.

↬ Boing Boing Gadgets. Site's dead, though the feed is technically live as it redirects to our "gadgets" tag. Thousands of URLs there succumbed to bit-rot at some point, but we have plans to merge its database into Boing Boing's and revive them.

↬ Gear Factor. This was the gadget review column at Wired Magazine, separate from the gadget blog I edited because of the longtime corporate divorce between Wired's print and online divisions. This separation had just been resolved at the time I began working there, and the two "sides" -- literally facing offices in the same building -- were slowly being integrated. The feed's dead, but with an obvious successor, Gear.

↬ The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Required reading at the time, and very much a thing of its time. Now vaguely repulsive.

↬ i09. This brilliant sci-fi and culture blog deserved more than to end up a tag at Gizmodo.

↬ Science Daily: bland but exhaustive torrent of research news, still cranking along.

The "Essentials" Folder was material I wanted to stay on top of, but with work clearly in mind: the background material for systematically belching out content at a particular point in 2007.

↬ Still alive are The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica, UMPC Portal (the tiny laptop beat!), PC Watch, Techblog, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Coolest Gadgets, EFF Breaking News, Retro Thing, CNET Reviews, New Scientist, CNET Crave, and MAKE Magazine.

↬ Dead or quiescent: GigaOm (at least for news), Digg/Apple, Akihabara News, Tokyomango, Inside Comcast, Linux Devices, and Uneasy Silence.

Of the 23 feeds in the "press releases" folder, 17 are dead. Most of the RSS no-shows are for companies like AMD and Intel, however, who surely still offer feeds at new addresses. Feeds for Palm, Nokia and pre-Dell Alienware are genuine dodos. These were interesting enough companies, 10 years ago.

PR Newswire functions as a veneering service so anyone can pretend to have a big PR department, but it is (was?) also legitimately used by the big players as a platform so I monitored the feeds there. They're still populated, but duplicate one another, and it's all complete garbage now. (It was mostly garbage then.)

My "Gadgets and Tech" folder contained the army of late-2000s blogs capitalizing on the success of Gizmodo, Boing Boing, TechCrunch, et al. Back in the day, these were mostly one (or two) young white men furiously extruding commentary on (or snarky rewrites of) press releases, with lots of duplication and an inchoate but seriously-honored unspoken language of mutual respect and first-mover credit. Those sites that survived oftentimes moved to listicles and such: notionally superior and more original content and certainly more sharable on Facebook, but unreadably boring. However, a few old-timey gadget bloggers are still cranking 'em out' in web 1.5 style. And a few were so specialized they actually had readers who loved them.

Still alive: DailyTech, technabob, CdrInfo.com, EverythingUSB, Extremetech, GearFuse, Gizmag, Gizmodiva, Hacked Gadgets, How to Spot A Psychopath/Dans' Data, MobileBurn, NewLaunches, OhGizmo!, ShinyShiny, Stuff.tv, TechDigest, TechDirt, Boy Genius Report, The Red Ferret Journal, Trusted Reviews, Xataca, DigiTimes, MedGadget, Geekologie, Tom's Hardware, Trendhunter, Japan Today, Digital Trends, All About Symbian (Yes, Symbian!), textually, cellular-news, TreeHugger, dezeen.

Dead: jkkmobile.com, Business Week Online, About PC (why), Afrigadget (unique blog about inventors in Africa, still active on FaceBook), DefenseTech, FosFor (died 2013), Gearlog, Mobile-Review.com (but apparently reborn as a Russian language tech blog!), Robot's Dreams, The Gadgets Weblog, Wireless Watch Japan, Accelerating Future, Techopolis, Mobile Magazine, eHome Upgrade, camcorderinfo.com, Digital Home Thoughts (farewell), WiFi Network News (farewell), Salon: Machinist, Near Future Lab, BotJunkie (twitter), and CNN Gizmos.

I followed 18 categories at Free Patents Online, and the site's still alive, though the RSS feeds haven't had any new items since 2016.

In the "news" folder, my picks were fairly standard stuff: BBC, CNET, digg/technology, PC World, Reuters, International Herald Tribune, and a bunch of Yahoo News feeds. The Digg feed's dead; they died and were reborn.

The "Wired" feed folder comprised all the Wired News blogs of the mid-2000s. All are dead. 27B Stroke 6, Autopia, Danger Room, Epicenter, Gadget Lab, Game|Life, Geekdad, Listening Post, Monkey Bites, Table of Malcontents, Underwire, Wired Science.

These were each basically one writer or two and were generally folded into the established mazagine-side arrangements as the Age of Everyone Emulating Gawker came to an end. The feed for former EIC Chris Anderson's personal blog survives, but hasn't been updated since his era. Still going strong is Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, albeit rigged as a CMS tag rather than a bona fide site of its own.

Still alive from my 2007 "Science" folder are Bad Astronomy (Phil Plait), Bad Science (Ben Goldacre), Pharyngula (PZ Myers) New Urban Legends, NASA Breaking News, The Panda's Thumb, and James Randi's blog,

Finally, there's a dedicated "iPhone" folder. This was not just the hottest toy of 2007. It was all that was holy in consumer electronics for half a decade. Gadget blogging never really had a golden age, but the iPhone ended any pretense that there were numerous horses in a race of equal potential. Apple won.

Still alive are 9 to 5 Mac, MacRumors, MacSlash, AppleInsider and Daring Fireball. Dead are TUAW, iPhoneCentral, and the iPhone Dev Wiki.

Of all the sites listed here, I couldn't now be paid but to read a few. So long, 2007.

https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/my-rss-feeds-from-a-decade-ago.html