Sucked into the void

January 26, 2005 12:02 PM

Is it gone now? The Suck archive seems to have disappeared. For me Suck.com was and still is best of the web, nothing else comes close. Co-founder Carl Steadman’s site, with depressed, cryptic, brilliant and Plastic-hating notes, seems to be fading away as well (Google cache). Well, at least we’ve still got his suicide note.
posted by Termite (30 comments total)

He right-justified his suicide note. I wish he'd managed to off himself.
posted by u.n. owen at 12:04 PM on January 26, 2005

... Carl was already tired in 1996. (Wired archive: Carl and Joey talk about it).

On preview: He right-justified his suicide note. I wish he'd managed to off himself.
posted by u.n. owen

He he...
posted by Termite at 12:11 PM on January 26, 2005

Suck was the best thing ever on the internet, with all due respect to Metafilter.
posted by Keith Talent at 12:12 PM on January 26, 2005

Good thing I still have my copy of their archive on CD.

How long have they been gone? Five years now? Even recently, I'd still head back there every month or two and read an article.

I really wish Terry Colon had a more visible presence on the web, though it is kind of cool to see his stuff in print every once in a while.
posted by Gimpson at 12:12 PM on January 26, 2005

Dang, and Terry's site is gone too...
posted by Gimpson at 12:13 PM on January 26, 2005

I miss Suck terribly.
Thankfully, there's still a little Polly Esther around, and isn't Wonkette an ex-Sucker?
posted by dougunderscorenelso at 12:16 PM on January 26, 2005

I miss Greg Knauss' wit
posted by riffola at 12:23 PM on January 26, 2005

Thankfully, there's still a little Polly Esther around, and isn't Wonkette an ex-Sucker?

the editor of wonkette is ana marie cox, i believe a former editor of suck.
posted by moz at 12:29 PM on January 26, 2005

Tim Cavanaugh is web editor over at Reason. As a matter of fact, it seems that there was a lot of cross-pollination between Reason and Suck.

Ambrose Beers was the fellow that joined the military while he was writing for Suck, and he's since written articles for Reason on the military.
posted by Gimpson at 12:32 PM on January 26, 2005

Suck and its corporate sibling Feed gave up the ghost in the summer of 2001, but it does seem like longer ago.

It seemed to me at the time that Suck would have survived had it been a little less good. There was no appetite for continuing it on a shoestring when all of the movers had personally better options.
posted by MattD at 12:57 PM on January 26, 2005

Well, I just sent an email to Heather Havrilesky of rabbitblog.com. Who knows, she might actually write back to shed some light on this minor but still tragic disappearance.

On a side note, us former Filler junkies can wax nostalgic over at Salon.com, where she's the resident TV critic.
posted by killdevil at 1:08 PM on January 26, 2005

Gone but not forgotten./
posted by aws17576 at 1:30 PM on January 26, 2005

I'm sure gonna miss those Canadian crack-smoking squirrels. Luckily I was smart enough to buy the book several years back.

However without the impenetrable feedback letters of Alan S Kornheiser in The Fish, it's not quite as fun.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 1:34 PM on January 26, 2005

It's not quite right to call the late lamented Suck a "corporate sibling" of the much missed Feed. Suck was a subversive offshoot of the once-glorious HotWired (the current pathetic shell of which I will not dignify with a hyperlink), born during the nights when Carl and Joey were sleeping and showering at the office (they had the shower installed as per their request), and Feed was the brainchild of the marvelous Steven Johnson, who later teamed up with Carl and Joey to make Plastic.

I used to work a desk away from Terry Colon at HotWired. You really had to hear him say on the phone, "Yes that's 'Colon,' c-o-l-o-n," a dozen times a day. The "yes" always killed me.

And yes, Ana Marie Cox was also a desk away.

Seems like 30 years ago.
posted by digaman at 1:37 PM on January 26, 2005

That whole bloggeriffic idea of "daily changing content," by the way -- while it seems sooooooo obvious now -- was a revelation when the Sucksters invented it. Who knew?
posted by digaman at 1:41 PM on January 26, 2005

I also remember a piece of authentic junk mail that Joey had tacked up on his wall, addressed to "MR. AND MRS. SUCK."
posted by digaman at 1:43 PM on January 26, 2005

That whole bloggeriffic idea of "daily changing content," by the way -- while it seems sooooooo obvious now -- was a revelation when the Sucksters invented it. Who knew?

Amen. Suck was the first web site I made a point to visit regularly. Back then, I remember the NYT's version of "being online" was a daily 8-page PDF you could download.

Good times, good times. Thanks for the memory jolt!
posted by mkultra at 2:10 PM on January 26, 2005

Thankfully, there's still a little Polly Esther around ...

Oh, thank you so much for that link, dougunderscorenelso! You just made my day!

I've greatly missed Suck.com's presence as a whole, but I used to look the most forward to Polly Esther. For whatever reason, though, I never got around to tracking any of them down elsewhere on the web.
posted by abiku at 2:13 PM on January 26, 2005

I think the DNS outage for suck.com and freedonia.com is just server rejigging, but I've been as incommunicado as Carl, so I dunno. Btw, since we're doing the 'where are they now?' thing, the 'Ready Steadman Go!' tribute site was one of the first web production (c. 1996/7) of a certain Ben and Mena Trott (aka 'The Dramaqueens'), who apparently went on to slightly different things. (Yes, they were the Ben-and-Mena collective entity even then.)
posted by holgate at 3:07 PM on January 26, 2005

Yeah, Suck.com was the first website I was addicted to when I got online. For me it filled the void that Spy magazine left. I've kept the link in my active bookmarks ever since they went away partly to reminisce and also hoping that somehow it returned from the dead. And since I never thought the archives would go away I never saved anything, so thanks for the web.archive link aws17576.
posted by Slack-a-gogo at 3:23 PM on January 26, 2005

I got the same 404/outage message a week or so ago, but then it was back up the next day. I'd check back tomorrow before making any grave pronoucements.

Gimpson, where did you get a CD archive?
posted by uhnyuftz at 3:30 PM on January 26, 2005

Hey folks, here's what Heather Havrilesky (Polly Esther of Suck.com) has to say about the Suck.com archive disappearance:

Hi.

Thanks for asking. Sometimes it disappears and then it comes back up. It's the purvey of Carl Steadman. I've been trying to contact him for about two years with no luck, so the whole thing is difficult to predict, and slightly unsettling. I'd like to know that it'll always be there, but it's completely out of my hands.

Best, Heather

Just a thought, but Gimpson, since you have the whole thing on CD, maybe email and ask her if she'd like a copy? I get the sense she doesn't have one.
posted by killdevil at 3:33 PM on January 26, 2005

Just from some guy who spidered the whole site shortly after they announced they had "gone fishing". He grabbed a copy of the whole archive just in case it wasn't going to stay online.

I guess now that we have the Wayback Machine it's kind of redundant, but you never know when a copy of the complete Suck archives on CD might come in handy.
posted by Gimpson at 3:41 PM on January 26, 2005

Carl, Justin Hall... who's next?
posted by chaz at 3:43 PM on January 26, 2005

Suck was a great read, but I'd love to see a CD archive of word.com.

The wayback machine's archive is rather lacking.
posted by sleslie at 4:15 PM on January 26, 2005

For cool archives, there's always The Brunching Shuttlecocks.
posted by ODiV at 4:27 PM on January 26, 2005

I've still got a Suck condom!

(no geek jokes - it's treated as a curio)
posted by coolgeek at 8:23 PM on January 26, 2005

Oh, and Slack-a-gogo, The Nose and Might occupied some termporal (not to mention magazine rack) space between Spy and Suck.
posted by coolgeek at 8:26 PM on January 26, 2005

I hope Carl is ok.
posted by bshort at 9:40 PM on January 26, 2005

I do miss Word.com as well. I was never smart enough to archive the site, but I was always so enchanted with the Word TV animated gifs that I did manage to snag those.
posted by ernie at 11:10 PM on January 26, 2005