Brunching Shuttlecocks

» see brunching.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

brunching shuttlecocks did not reach me at the time. the site was an english-language humor outlet running on a 56k-friendly text-and-jpeg layout from 1997 to 2003. my online life through that whole window was dial-up turkish forums, donanimhaber threads, and the slow shift from icq into msn. the geek hierarchy chart eventually made its way to me years later as an out-of-context image with no attribution, the way most of the brunching artifacts traveled.

lore sjöberg and dave neilsen started the site in june 1997 out of their post-college apartment as a small joint humor project. the recurring features were the ratings, where sjöberg assigned letter grades to randomly-pulled topics with explanatory commentary, and the self-made critic, sjöberg's 0-to-5 film review column. lore brand comics ran three-panel strips drawn around sjöberg's cartoon persona. the complete and utter idiot's guide produced humorously literal instructions for ordinary tasks.

the biggest single artifact was the geek hierarchy, a chart organizing fandom subcultures into a vertical pecking order that traveled far beyond the original site. by the early 2000s it sat on countless personal pages, forum signatures, and early livejournal embeds with no link back. the time almanac gave brunching its 1999 cool humor site award. coverage in pcmag, newsweek, entertainment weekly, and the guardian followed across the run.

~ the dossier ~

~ the actual end ~

brunching wound down in june 2003 without a single shutdown event. sjöberg's farewell piece treated the closing as a slow drift, the site had run for six years, the founders had paying writing work elsewhere, and the format did not have any natural growth path under the rising weight of livejournal, somethingawful, and the early blog scene. brunching's update cadence was already irregular by 2002. the june 2003 announcement made the slowdown official.

sjöberg landed at wired magazine, where the alt text column ran for several years, and produced two books, the book of ratings and the geek hierarchy. dave neilsen kept a lower public profile. the brunching domain stayed parked for years as a static archive of the original feature set, then eventually went dark.

~ what it influenced ~

the format that brunching ran for six years became the shape of the early personal-publishing internet. short comedic features on a recurring weekly cadence, a single recognizable voice, a small recurring graphical motif, and a static archive that readers could read out of order. somethingawful, fark, the onion, and most of the late-90s humor-site cohort shared the same structural pattern.

the geek hierarchy chart specifically became the load-bearing meme of pre-2005 geek-culture internet. its lineage runs into xkcd, into the early livejournal fandom posts, into the way early-2000s geek culture explained itself to itself. lore brand comics seeded an aesthetic of low-fi web-comic that hung around through the mid-2000s.

~ the long tail ~

this part you had to be online in the english-speaking late nineties to feel directly. brunching has no successor site, no merged-into-something acquisition story, no foundation hosting the archive. internet archive snapshots carry most of the features. the wikipedia article preserves the canonical list of recurring columns.

the cultural memory of brunching shuttlecocks now sits in the loose bag of pre-blog humor sites that produced the comedic voice eventually monetized by gawker and college humor and the broader content-platform era. brunching itself was over before any of that scaled. it was a 1997-2003 artifact and it stayed inside its window.

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