Putting Down the Pen: Reflecting on Oryx’s Journey
oryxspioenkop.com
oryxspioenkop.com
There was definitely lots of errors accumulated with things like T72s being marked as Russian vs Ukrainian losses. There was corrections to this but when you are relying on Telegram, Twitter and other social media sources they aren't going to be reliable. Trawling data and sanitising it... no thank you
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Oryx considered stopping:
> Since late 2021, the act of writing feels repetitive, almost as if I've written every sentence before. For me, this realization serves as a clear sign that it's time to move on. In fact, I had already contemplated ending Oryx by the spring of 2022
Also, the ongoing war brought him lots of support from other OSINT folks (Jakub Janovky, acknowledged in the blog post, being the most prominent one) and it probably contributed a lot to giving him the energy to continue for one more year (and what a year).
> “There's a website that actually tracks absolutely confirmed destruction of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles etc. It is called Oryx. I think it's a Dutch firm. As a Dutch-American I'm very proud of that.”
https://youtu.be/L3qCYIPaPqU?t=2447
Call that a recognition.
But Oryx's favorite acknowledgement came from John Mc Cain, in 2014 after just one year of running the Oryx blog:
> Shocking revelation of secret #Russian base in #Syria shows how much Putin is helping Assad’s war machine
As an aside, seeing Sukiyaki at the end was definitely unexpected, but put a smile on my face.
Influencer burnout is real. Especially if you started at a very different stage in your life.
One of the toughest things that happens (speaking from experience) is that you grow an audience and that audience starts having ideas and expectations. The audience starts to feel like an insatiable beast that just wants wants wants. What used to be the joy of sharing interesting stuff turns into an obligation.
What’s worse, you may have new ideas, new directions you want to explore, but your audience doesn’t care. They’ve come to expect certain topics from you and they care about nowt else. Some may even share mean words if you dare go off topic.
At that point you have to make a choice. Feed the beast, do your own thing and ignore the haters, stop and reclaim a bunch of time and mindspace.
An unexpected explosion in scope creep combined with a similar explosion in the pissing contest that your losses numbers are having on thousands of conversations across Twitter, Telegram, and Reddit daily.
That sort of commitment needs to be a very well paid job with a team of helpers. Monetizing and professionalizing comes with its own downsides and not everyone is cut out for it.
Regardless plenty of people care about OSINT and many young autist-type tank nerds are capable of taking up this helm if they so choose. Oryx will be sadly missed and the demand is only growing. Maybe someone will take its place. Possibly an organization that accepts donations (Oryx never wanted to AFAIK).
Especially if you’ve already been doing it for 10 years. There’s very few projects I’ve kept up for 10+ years regardless of external interest.
Sure I’ve been blogging on the same domain since 2005 or so, but it really hasn’t been the same blog this whole time. My interests have changed and so has my blog. I can’t even imagine staying on topic this long
I'm just not sure about Joost Oliemans though. What is his story?
Translated to English (Stan is Dutch), that means that there's a Dutch consensus that this is seen worldwide as one of the biggest international poets of the 20th century. It should come to no surprise that a Dutch citizen who went to high school knows about such. It really sounds like something I'd have learned during CKV [2]
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naz%C4%B1m_Hikmet
[2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturele_en_kunstzinnige_vorm...
Higgins, even though he took that bait of think tank jobs/intelligence money that Oryx proudly (and rightly) refuses, was at least genuinely disgusted with Nazis, even if they were Ukrainians ones. For what it's worth. I still think Oryx will be happier for having held on to his independence to the end.
What do you mean by this exactly? Do you have any other sources than Elon Musk tweets that Eliot Higgins has taken "intelligence money"?
He also took a think tank job at Atlantic Council for many years. I guess you can also pretend that it isn't part of the military-intelligence complex.
Are you saying that this support has somehow affected the investigations conducted by Bellingcat? How that is visible exactly?
Also, I don't know too much about National Endowment For Democracy so could you provide some reading about how it's affiliated with intelligence agencies?
As I tried to suggest, if you want to contest such very basic things, go ahead, but like Oryx, I get tired too, so I might just leave it at that.
People who honestly want to get a picture of what the NED is, can read up a bit on it. Nothing I've said should be controversial.
>Last year marked the final year of project funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) that provided funding for Russian-language workshops at no cost to journalists and human rights researchers based in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus.
I think he has an ambivalent relationship to these organisations, though he gets very mad at anyone who brings it up. He publicly supported Corbyn, which is absolutely not something you expect an Atlantic Council fellow to do. And as I said, he refused to defend a certain political movement in Ukraine (I seemed to get flagged for calling them what they are, and what Higgins has called them too...), right when most of the press got busy "nuancing" what they'd written earlier on then. He has also written negatively about UK arms deals with Saudi Arabia.
All this is things I respect Higgins for. He was never a simple warblogger, of the kind we saw plenty of at the run-up to the Iraq war.
Oryx though, was. On the other hand he didn't try to court the mil-int crowd. And I'm glad he ultimately doesn't want to go down the path of the war-honking NAFO trolls.
I'm aware that this is his hobby, but still, this choice of words when writing about wars that cause a lot of death and suffering seems a bit odd...