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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
> 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).
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.
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".
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
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
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.
Probably the top OSINT source on Twitter. Interesting to hear he just doesn't feel like it any more.
> 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.
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).
> 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
In the post he mentions that he was already getting bored before Ukraine, and that war actually kept him going a bit further
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...
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?
I was trying to find a ‘donate’ button. How come there was not such an option, does anyone know how to donate to him?
They have a Patreon, but they donate everything to charities.
heyyy! how did you know Nazım HİKMET?
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
[2] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culturele_en_kunstzinnige_vorm...
OH! I m turkish and love Nazım Hikmet's books, poets etc. I'm very proud of it. Thanks for response!
"the act of writing feels repetitive, almost as if I've written every sentence before." - does this feel inevitable for most people writing online?
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 :-)
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.
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.
>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"?
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.
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?
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.
It seems that the National Endowment for Democracy support for Bellingcat ended in 2021: https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2023/06/Bellingcat-An...
>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.
Yeah. He quit (or they didn't want him any more, I don't know) the Atlantic Council job too.
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.
Not a surprise you did not want to answer the rest of the questions.
I'm not interviewing for a position at your think tank.
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.
> "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...