Link rot is the tendency of all hyperlinks to eventually go bad. Sometimes the site moves (usually when Blogspot gets to be too much), sometimes the article goes into archives, and sometimes the site just vanishes. This seems to be the case with the Gweilo Diaries, in which a lawyer known only as Conrad detailed his misbehavior in the Far East, mainly in Hong Kong, mixed in with reliably irreverent commentary. Every Friday, he featured a cheesecake of an Asian actress. The site appears to have been taken down, and now the URL registration has lapsed. He has even closed the Hotmail account for the site. My guess is that his employer found out and made him shut down.
This is after Steven den Beste stopped opining. Sigh. A lot of the time, the stuff you read on weblogs is the same stuff that, rendered audible, leads you to finish your coffee quickly and flee the donut shop. These sites didn’t fall into that category.
And now this. The Belgravia Dispatch, by Gregory Djerejian, is giving me a teal screen of death:
You are seeing this page because there is nothing configured for the site you have requested. If you think you are seeing this page in error, please contact the site administrator or datacenter responsible for this site.
Guys, come on. Don’t make me go back to the real world.
This guy may be able to satisfy your cheesecake needs.
(By the way, I can access Belgravia Dispatch just fine.)
Belgravia works OK, Mitch.
Still, the fact is that good writers get tired, go away, get fired, get burned out. ChicagoBoyz has had contributors wax and wane (Ralf disappears for months at a time — and where the Hell is Sylvain when we need his bracing Gallic cynicism?), but survives because Jonathan cleverly diversified early.
And forget about blogs. Links to articles, photos and other stuff rot pretty badly. I was looking up something on a post of mine that was a little over a year old. It had a lot of links and half of them don’t work anymore.
Steven, I’m even older than you. “Needs” is probably overstating the case.
OK, I got to BD myself. Clearing cache didn’t do the trick. I had to go through another link to it. Maybe Firefox has a couple of issues still, like when it rendered Da Goddess as a jumble of question marks and random alpha-numerics, but showed the site’s archives clearly.
This alludes the law of information impermanency. The more recently developed a storage media is, the shorter will be the life span of any information committed to that media alone.
Well, being a middle-aged woman my cheesecake needs are small*, but I was sorry to see Conrad disappear. A very amusing young man.
*’cept for Jonathan’s gator cheesecake.
Did someone say gator?
It turns out BD was having server issues, which have now been resolved. Little Green Footballs is not responding today, but that site is often a DOS attack target.