April Winchell is shutting down Regretsy, the site where she has tirelessly cataloged the most horrible things on Etsy, from “an oil painting of a couple copulating inside a burger bun, called Sex Burger; a vulva-faced zombie ornament; a custom unicorn hoodie and a cat hairball necklace.” She explains to Wired UK what it was like to run the site:
You would think that a joke and a photo wouldn’t take that long to crap out, but this site was a time suck like you would not believe. There would be days when I would be on the couch with my laptop for 16 hours, just exhausted and in tears.
First, you have to find the stuff. And you have find great stuff. And that gets harder because the shock needle keeps moving. After a year or two you’re like, “Eh, another teddy bear with a vagina, who cares.” Bad crafts are like drugs; you have to keep upping the dose to feel anything.
Then you have to write the joke or do the Photoshop or come up with the contest. You do the coding and resize the images and read hundreds of emails every day. We mailed thousands of books and packages, we fulfilled hundreds of charity requests, we did sales and fundraising and fan meet-ups and Secret Santa for underprivileged kids, and at one point I was writing four posts a day. I loved every second of it. But you can’t do that forever.
Regretsy closes, the world mourns the end of DIY meets WTF [Wired/Olivia Solon]
(via Beyond the Beyond)