Yesterday was a dark day.

Yesterday, Tamara's readers checked in at The View From the Porch and found this:

It's not an error. Tamara is finally fed up, and at the moment there's no guarantee she's ever coming back. I don't like it, but I've personally quit blogging several times, deeply annoying both my readers, and so I don't have a stone handy to throw at her house. Besides, if you've been paying attention for the last few years, you've watched Tamara's personal baseline of frustration mount ever higher, with no end in sight. Derpes is constantly breaking out all over the internet, and it seems to be the only reliably viral thing on the networks, flashing from computer to phone to tablet.  It's easy to forget that Tamara's been doing this--fighting a desperate rear guard against people saying dumb things electronically--since the last century. 1996 feels like yesterday to me, but it was 16 goddamned years ago. Tam might go back further than that; that was the year I created my first Geocities website, "The Magic TimeWaster," and it quickly evolved into a naming-and-shaming site featuring neo-nazis, a guy who wanted to become Governor of Georgia so he could undo Roe v. Wade by seizing nuclear weapons to hold D.C. hostage. Even then, some of us just couldn't look at this giant communications network without finding ourselves transfixed by The Dumb-Dumbs. It can be exhausting.

I used to get death threats with that dumb little Geocities vanity site, but I've never had to spend years--literally, years--dealing with obsessive misfits who thought we would be best friends (or maybe more!) if only I would wake up and realize that we were meant to be. Tamara gets that kind of a lot.
Of course, there's one thing we can all hold for certain and true: that difference has nothing to do with any silly liberal-arts-major notions of "privilege" or any other made-up goofiness such as that. Right?

Anyway, that's the bad news. The good news is that Tamara is not going away. If you've been paying attention for the last few years, you've seen her evolving into more of a "gun writer" and less of a social commentator. I look for that to continue in better-paying venues even if the blog doesn't return, starting with her cool new "Good Guys Win" column in SWAT Magazine and a whole mess of articles on this gun or that ammunition--the kind of work with deadlines, editors, and paychecks. Eventually, I expect to see the Tamara Keel byline on one of those "back page" columns that gun magazines reserve for the people you just know you want to hear from in every issue. It may not be in a paper magazine by that time, but as long as the implanted hyper-node uplink can handle advertising, there should be a way to work it out.