7 ms·

Putting Down the Pen: Reflecting on Oryx’s Journey

173 points by awnird 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago
Probably the top OSINT source on Twitter. Interesting to hear he just doesn't feel like it any more.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > Interesting to hear he just doesn't feel like it any more 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.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Or you know, you start a blog documenting a couple T72s in Syria then the first modern war happens involving thousands of tanks and suddenly Russia and Ukraine are losing hundreds of every variety of vehicle 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).
    - Swizec 3y ago
      > That sort of commitment needs to be a very well paid job with a team of helpers 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
    - ricardolopes 3y ago
      In the post he mentions that he was already getting bored before Ukraine, and that war actually kept him going a bit further
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    That can happen with any creative endeavor, and if it happens, it's better to move on than to phone it in. Cartoonists are a good example; Watterman and Larson did the right thing by retiring rather than letting their strips go stale. Groening, on the other hand...
kitanata 3y ago
[flagged]
irtefa 3y ago
"the act of writing feels repetitive, almost as if I've written every sentence before." - does this feel inevitable for most people writing online?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- roughly 3y ago
  I’m not sure it’s the same for every topic, and I can’t say I’m anywhere near the author’s level, but I wrote about foreign affairs for a few years, and one does start to notice an awful lot of repetition over time.
- xyzal 3y ago
  I think it happens if you write because you must/are obliged to, instead of writing just when you want to. Like, when you transform programming from a hobby to a job :-)
paganel 3y ago
[flagged]
- merpkz 3y ago
  > It's been a whole decade of watching videos of people's bodies having been torn apart by bombs or parents holding their lifeless newborns who died as a result of armed conflict – it really gets to you. No. Not really that.
  - paganel 3y ago
    [flagged]
rainworld 3y ago
[flagged]
- iammjm 3y ago
  Are you implying oryx was purposefully undercounting Ukrainian losses to create a particular image of this war? I imagine you'd have strong arguments to back these claims
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
vintermann 3y ago
Respect to this guy for this. I followed him for a while, but compared to Higgins he seemed way more enthusiastic about high-tech weapons and comfortable with channy war memery. 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.
- mikosty 3y ago
  >Higgins, even though he took that bait of think tank jobs/intelligence money What do you mean by this exactly? Do you have any other sources than Elon Musk tweets that Eliot Higgins has taken "intelligence money"?
  - vintermann 3y ago
    He took National Endowment for Democracy money. I guess you can pretend that isn't intelligence money. Would you like to? 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.
    - mikosty 3y ago
      By "he took" you probably mean that Bellingcat has received support from National Endowment For Democracy? 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?
      - vintermann 3y ago
        I'm not going to argue the very basic notion that people who fund you and can decide to change their mind, have power over you and influence you. Higgins has complained that he had to fire people for lack of funding in the past. 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.
tomaytotomato 3y ago
Oryx definitely did a great job, before he was documenting small conflicts but with the Ukraine/Russia war its not a surprise being burned out recording data for that. 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
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > Oryx definitely did a great job, before he was documenting small conflicts but with the Ukraine/Russia war its not a surprise being burned out recording data for that. 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).
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  Remarkably even the Australian OSINT person who focused entirely on finding errors in Oryx's dataset still praised it and said it was by far still the best approximation of Russian vs. Ukrainian losses.
ancris 3y ago
[flagged]
- tazjin 3y ago
  [flagged]
rob74 3y ago
> "The journey has been a source of pleasure" 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...
Domdomkusu 3y ago
heyyy! how did you know Nazım HİKMET?
- Fnoord 3y ago
  On Wikipedia it mentions "en wordt wereldwijd gezien als een van de grootste internationale dichters van de 20e eeuw." [1] 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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naz%C4%B1m_Hikmet [2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturele_en_kunstzinnige_vorming https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturele_en_kunstzinnige_vorm...
  - Domdomkusu 3y ago
    OH! I m turkish and love Nazım Hikmet's books, poets etc. I'm very proud of it. Thanks for response!
greendesk 3y ago
I was trying to find a ‘donate’ button. How come there was not such an option, does anyone know how to donate to him?
- MikusR 3y ago
  They have a Patreon, but they donate everything to charities.
Fnoord 3y ago
Oryx is dead, long live Oryx! As they say: thank you for your service. Because you served the Dutch as well as the international society. I'm just not sure about Joost Oliemans though. What is his story?
morkalork 3y ago
Crazy to see how much he blew up, there was a video from last year where one soldier tells another (the one filming) to get a good shot of a wrecked Russian tank "for Oryx".
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Former Director of the CIA David Petraeus: > “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 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 https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/519153233303207936 https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/519153233303207936
siver_john 3y ago
I respect anyone who can keep up a job with as much diligence as this definitely required over the years. I do not begrudge him wanting to live a life well lived and hope his future is filled with joy. As an aside, seeing Sukiyaki at the end was definitely unexpected, but put a smile on my face.

173 points by awnird 3y ago

renewiltord 3y ago

Probably the top OSINT source on Twitter. Interesting to hear he just doesn't feel like it any more.

Swizec 3y ago
> Interesting to hear he just doesn't feel like it any more 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.
- dmix 3y ago
  Or you know, you start a blog documenting a couple T72s in Syria then the first modern war happens involving thousands of tanks and suddenly Russia and Ukraine are losing hundreds of every variety of vehicle 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).
  - Swizec 3y ago
    > That sort of commitment needs to be a very well paid job with a team of helpers 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
  - ricardolopes 3y ago
    In the post he mentions that he was already getting bored before Ukraine, and that war actually kept him going a bit further
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  That can happen with any creative endeavor, and if it happens, it's better to move on than to phone it in. Cartoonists are a good example; Watterman and Larson did the right thing by retiring rather than letting their strips go stale. Groening, on the other hand...

kitanata 3y ago

[flagged]

irtefa 3y ago

"the act of writing feels repetitive, almost as if I've written every sentence before." - does this feel inevitable for most people writing online?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
roughly 3y ago
I’m not sure it’s the same for every topic, and I can’t say I’m anywhere near the author’s level, but I wrote about foreign affairs for a few years, and one does start to notice an awful lot of repetition over time.
xyzal 3y ago
I think it happens if you write because you must/are obliged to, instead of writing just when you want to. Like, when you transform programming from a hobby to a job :-)

paganel 3y ago

[flagged]

merpkz 3y ago
> It's been a whole decade of watching videos of people's bodies having been torn apart by bombs or parents holding their lifeless newborns who died as a result of armed conflict – it really gets to you. No. Not really that.
- paganel 3y ago
  [flagged]

rainworld 3y ago

[flagged]

iammjm 3y ago
Are you implying oryx was purposefully undercounting Ukrainian losses to create a particular image of this war? I imagine you'd have strong arguments to back these claims
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

vintermann 3y ago

Respect to this guy for this. I followed him for a while, but compared to Higgins he seemed way more enthusiastic about high-tech weapons and comfortable with channy war memery. 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.

mikosty 3y ago
>Higgins, even though he took that bait of think tank jobs/intelligence money What do you mean by this exactly? Do you have any other sources than Elon Musk tweets that Eliot Higgins has taken "intelligence money"?
- vintermann 3y ago
  He took National Endowment for Democracy money. I guess you can pretend that isn't intelligence money. Would you like to? 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.
  - mikosty 3y ago
    By "he took" you probably mean that Bellingcat has received support from National Endowment For Democracy? 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?
    - vintermann 3y ago
      I'm not going to argue the very basic notion that people who fund you and can decide to change their mind, have power over you and influence you. Higgins has complained that he had to fire people for lack of funding in the past. 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.

tomaytotomato 3y ago

Oryx definitely did a great job, before he was documenting small conflicts but with the Ukraine/Russia war its not a surprise being burned out recording data for that. 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

littlestymaar 3y ago
> Oryx definitely did a great job, before he was documenting small conflicts but with the Ukraine/Russia war its not a surprise being burned out recording data for that. 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).
0xDEF 3y ago
Remarkably even the Australian OSINT person who focused entirely on finding errors in Oryx's dataset still praised it and said it was by far still the best approximation of Russian vs. Ukrainian losses.

ancris 3y ago

[flagged]

tazjin 3y ago
[flagged]

rob74 3y ago

> "The journey has been a source of pleasure" 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...

Domdomkusu 3y ago

heyyy! how did you know Nazım HİKMET?

Fnoord 3y ago
On Wikipedia it mentions "en wordt wereldwijd gezien als een van de grootste internationale dichters van de 20e eeuw." [1] 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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naz%C4%B1m_Hikmet [2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturele_en_kunstzinnige_vorming https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturele_en_kunstzinnige_vorm...
- Domdomkusu 3y ago
  OH! I m turkish and love Nazım Hikmet's books, poets etc. I'm very proud of it. Thanks for response!

greendesk 3y ago

I was trying to find a ‘donate’ button. How come there was not such an option, does anyone know how to donate to him?

MikusR 3y ago
They have a Patreon, but they donate everything to charities.

Fnoord 3y ago

Oryx is dead, long live Oryx! As they say: thank you for your service. Because you served the Dutch as well as the international society. I'm just not sure about Joost Oliemans though. What is his story?

morkalork 3y ago

Crazy to see how much he blew up, there was a video from last year where one soldier tells another (the one filming) to get a good shot of a wrecked Russian tank "for Oryx".

littlestymaar 3y ago
Former Director of the CIA David Petraeus: > “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 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 https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/519153233303207936 https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/519153233303207936

siver_john 3y ago

I respect anyone who can keep up a job with as much diligence as this definitely required over the years. I do not begrudge him wanting to live a life well lived and hope his future is filled with joy. As an aside, seeing Sukiyaki at the end was definitely unexpected, but put a smile on my face.