Weird Fantastic Toy Adventures

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

MAD Magazine to Cease Publication

Alfred E. Neuman

MAD Magazine will cease publication later this year, according to reports. Blogger Jedidiah Leland reportedly discovered the news after a MAD editor confessed to the magazine's doom in a Facebook group, and shortly thereafter, cartoonist Ruben Bolling seemed to confirm the report on Twitter. Of course, Bolling is not a MAD cartoonist (although he did have work published in it in 2005), so he may have been simply responding to the growing volume of responses to the Leland report.

Per the report, "I just heard from a friend of mine who is in a Facebook group with MAD writer Stan Stinberg that, after the next two issues, MAD will no longer be publishing original material. Instead, it’ll publish reprinted material until it’s subscription responsibilities are fulfilled and then the magazine will cease publication."

A little set back in life...

I haven't been posting lately since the three part GeoCities article because life decided to issue me another challenge. :/ On Friday May 31st my contract at work wasn't renewed. This means I am on a job search for the first time in nearly 20 years!

All isn't bad... I am nearly debt free! My house and all my vehicles are paid for. I have few bills other than utilities. My wife is still working and I am drawing unemployment. I am going to have sell parts of my collection though. Probably most of the good stuff will go on the "Big Auction Site" I already am selling my comic collection... Its been under the bed since we moved in this house back 1997!

Remembering Geocities Pt 3: Archival to Revival

On January 28, 1999, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was allegedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. In April 2009, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009. There were at least 38 million pages on GeoCities before it was shut down, most user-written.

Remembering GeoCities Pt2: The Internet Suburbanized

In the 1990s computing was very exciting. The World Wide Web had just been created and with the release of the first graphical web browsers Mosaic and Netscape, "surfing the web" was a new national past time.

At first web sites and web pages were only for the privileged few... academics and later big business. But in 1994, entrepreneurs David Bohnett and John Rezner founded a Web hosting service called Beverly Hills Internet, which would later be known as GeoCities. The service allowed anybody to create their own Web page for free!

Remembering GeoCities Pt 1: The 1990s and Web 1.0

Grab your keyboards and strap on your velcro sneakers, kiddies, its time to surf the Internet Super-Highway on the World Wide Web! Lets return to a time before social networking. Long before there was such a thing as Facebook or Twitter... or even Google, there was this little place called GeoCities. In order to understand how it became so popular, we must understand Web 1.0 in the 1990s...

The Internet was once actually a frontier, a brave new world ready to be explored. Every single day something fresh and new was waiting to be discovered. Everything could change depending on which browser was chosen! Speeds were confined to dial-up modems so it was imperative that pages load in a reasonable amount of time or a significant portion of the intended audience would be lost. It was the beginnings of what would become known as the World Wide Web!