Death and rebirth

The Original Cyberpunk shutters The Ranting Room:

This, friends, is the final week of The Ranting Room. Come Saturday, January 31, this site will be going dark. The content will remain online for some unspecified time to come, but after four years of doing this blog, it’s time for me to hang the ‘Closed’ sign in the window and move on to other things….

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to making The Ranting Room the sort of underground cult-classic semi-success it is today; it’s you, the community, who really make this thing work. I especially want to thank everyone who has contributed a guest column in the past year. I did give a lot of thought to the idea of changing the rules, opening up the posting permissions, and expanding The Ranting Room to be more like an online magazine. But in the end, I came to the conclusion that this blog is just too personal and idiosyncratic to be opened up in that way, and it would be better to bring it to an end and begin something new.

So, the news is not all bad – indeed, for fans of the OC’s fiction, it’s downright good news – and denizens of The Ranting Room will no doubt be pleased to know that their community will live on, in an even more open and flexible form, at its appointed successor site. I congratulate the OC for The Ranting Room’s successful run of four years, and I hope to see many familiar Ranting Roomers at the new blog in the future.