Death of a blog

Every now and then I check the links in the row of blogs going down the side of the Tearoom of Despair over there - the ones that play the beats I like - and I discover that another one has vanished, with just the oblivion of the 'Page Not Found' message left behind.

I lost all faith in any corporate website ever having a proper archive after just a few years, and feel this is a major contributor to the cultural black hole of the early 21st century. That hole has been fed by the failure of ambitious web businesses, and now personal sites are also fading away. 

I don't blame the people who created the great comic blogs of the 2000s and 2010s for shutting up shop. It's their shop to shut, and they're well within their rights to close things down, when they realise they can't be bothered to paying the hosting fees for another year, and are happy to let their efforts evaporate into the ether.

But I still feel a notable pang of grief when I see another has disappeared. There was, for example, a tonne of great writing and some terrific podcasts on The Factual Opinion that isn't there anymore, (although you can still thankfully find old episodes of Travis Bickle on the Riveria here, and there was even a truly unexpected episode of Comic Books Are Burning in Hell the other week).

The latest one to disappear was one my of my all-time favourites from the golden age of comic blogging - Dorian Wright's postmodernbarney. I went looking for one of Wright's old FCBD write-ups, because they were truly exhaustive in the best possible way, but it's all gone. I still follow Wright on Bluesky and never tell him how much I have loved his stuff, because he does not suffer fools (and foolish nerds in particular), and I find it hard to lavish people with praise without sounding a bit foolish.

There are still some glorious personal archives out there, and I regularly read up old reviews on places like the Savage Critics. There are still some lunatics who still blog on a regular basis, and I never, ever miss a post by blogging royalty Mike Sterling, deadset legend J Caleb Mozzocco and my pal Nik. None of them seem to be going away any time soon.

I regularly back up the Tearoom, because I don't trust blogger.com, although I've been here since 2009 and it's been okay so far. But I'll also always try to keep some kind of record of all of the nonsense that I post here, for as long as I'm able, because the embarssing early stuff is part of the whole picture. I'm not letting that fade away.