Suck.com, Gone for Good?
Suck.com, one of the most important and influential webzines, appears to be offline permanently, replaced by a porn search portal.
The strangest part is that the domain continues to belong to Lycos, with Hotwired acting as the nameservers. If you query ns1.hotwired.com for the suck.com domain, it returns 198.65.105.202, an IP address of a Verio server currently hosting over 36,000 domains. The server is owned by a company called ParkingDNS.net, which seems to be hosting nothing but Parkingdots.com affiliate search portals.
It also appears that there’s no complete archive of Suck.com remaining anywhere online. Because the new owners have blocked web crawlers, Archive.org has purged blocked access to the archived version of the site. (Last year, Suckarchives.com expired and was snatched up by a squatter.)
If permanent, this is a tragedy for anyone who cares about the web’s history. Does anyone at Lycos know what’s going on? Also, if anyone out there has a complete copy of the Suck archives, please get in touch. (If you need to submit it anonymously, that’s fine.)
Update: Interesting stuff in the comments below. Greg Knauss, himself a Suck.com contributor, is proxying requests to the old Suck.com server through his own server at suck.eod.com. Also, Mike at Injoke.com posted a 200MB torrent of the entire Suck.com archive. Update: Boy genius Aaron Swartz is mirroring the Suck.com snapshot from Mike’s torrent. Nice work!
This doesn’t change the fact that every link to a Suck.com article is still broken, but at least the articles aren’t lost.
January 2, 2006: Suck.com is back! Someone out there must have the inside story of what went on over the past few days.
Java: Falling Sand game
— try the effects of sand and water on the bouncing object; also: hell of sand with people #Flash: My Humps Christmas card
— I wonder if American Greetings is getting complaints about this one #Guardian UK on the grassroots UK music boom
— how the Internet and word of mouth is launching indie acts and singles into the top charts via wiredblogs.tripod.com #
Google to release feed reader API
— don’t like the Google Reader UI? roll your own with the underlying data via Todd Dominey #Regret the Error's year-end roundup of media mistakes
— most are funny, but several upsetting via deadparrots.net #Video: Pac-Man Puppet Show
— lovely viral ad for the Gametap emulation service via robotwisdom.com #Metafilter members on Google Earth
— nice screenshots; also, I updated the Mefi Stats through December #Million Dollar Homepage creator on verge of reaching goal
— at this rate, he’ll hit a million in a week; also, there are quite a few cheap imitators via Nelson Minar #Rex Sorgatz' 2006 predictions
— more predictions from Blake Ross, Tristan Lewis, Cameron Moll, John Battelle, Jason Calacanis #Do you get less wet if you run in the rain?
— the BBC does the math; reminds me of the shower curtain puzzle #Video: Pants Pants Pants, "Fabio Salsa"
— SF indie band recreates the opening sequence from Full House #Animal Crossing character promotes file sharing
— the story seems more suited to a blog post than an 1,100-word NYT article via Delicious #Wikipedia founder edits own bio
— and insists others stop editing it without contacting him via Delicious #Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2005
— some surprisingly accessible choices throughout; also: Rex’s growing list of year-end lists via Delicious #Federal judge rules intelligent design curriculum unconstitutional
— the court opinion (PDF) is an amazing read; read about the Wedge Document on page 28 #Ari Paparo on why Delicious succeeded where Blink failed
— design decisions prevented his social bookmarking service from getting popular via 37signals.com #Pokemon gene renamed following legal threat
— Nintendo didn’t like “Pokemon” being associated with “cancer” via Slashdot #Dogwelder's "My Humps"
When Luke Gattuso isn’t putting bananas on his head, he’s busy making wonderful things that make me smile.
His latest is a cover of Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps,” a song that represents a low point not only for popular music, but for humankind.
The only thing that could possibly be better than his MP3 version is syncing it with the original video. Download this now.
Quicktime: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.mov (11MB)
XviD: dog_eyed_welders_-_my_humps.avi (10MB)
(Thanks, Chrominance!)