Uber-Blogwar! - Heaven Nose Destroys Fells an Empire at Trainwrecks

UPDATED BELOW with links and ** My email interview with Heaven Nose.**

This is an interesting story, at least what I can piece together from the ashes.

For several years, a blog called Trainwrecks posted smart-assed, 'snark blog' content based on other people's blogs, pictures, their gerneral misery, personal writings, and/or individuals personal 'trainwrecks.'

This went on, much to the delight of its readers, uninhibited. Trainwrecks touched off fueds between other bloggers, as well as between itself and other bloggers, and basically appeared to give some weird and frankly sadistically insensitive people a guilty pleasure for a long time. Some of the things posted there apparently pertained to still-born babies, pregnant mothers, and other strange topics. This information is only provided to give you a sense of what kind of passions may have been flowing around the blogwars between Trainwrecks and others.

And then, there came Heaven Nose.

"The man who is constantly in fear is every day condemned. (Syrus)"

Heaven Nose is the monicker of another blog that (from what I can gather) essentially was set up as a "review blog" that found obscure blogs and reviewed them. Heaven Nose was was supposedly run by a pair of bloggers reportedly living in Greece, and they had been wise to and unkeen on Trainwreck's antics for some time (one blog reported that a victim of Trainwrecks set up the blog - I have no way to verify, but that seems plausible).

Well, Heaven Nose made it their sole mission to strap on the sword of righteous bloggy vengance and take Trainwrecks down - permanently. And they apparently succeeded sometime within the past two weeks:

Two months ago, we had never heard of attention sluts like Sweetney, Dooce, Amalah or fucking Zero what's his name. Dear Lord, sometimes we wish we could regain that blissful ignorance.

We actually liked Trainwrecks better than any one of you. They were right about one thing: the majority of bloggers are trainwrecks.

Yet these are the women who made fun of infertiles, of women who gave birth to dead and premature babies, of people with psychological disorders, etc. Where are all of you victim whiners now? Still scared? Cowards.

We were never contacted by google or an attorney for we have violated no laws. The ip addresses that were published in the comment section of our blog were not put there by us. However, the information is definitely correct. FYI: We never contacted these women or their employers at home or at work. We never crossed the line into their "real lives" in any way but apparently, some of you did. As far as what exactly went on between Heaven Nose and Trainwrecks: none of you know jack shit and none of you ever will.

Eeek! You can read the cryptic message that remains at the Trainwrecks site for yourself:

Sorry, folks, but Trainwrecks is gone and it's not coming back. Some deeply disturbed people with an irrational fixation on this site decided that stupid photo montages, libel, and obscene anonymous comments just weren't enough, so they decided to take their little hate campaign into the real world. And since their information came from gossip and bad detective work, they didn't exactly hit the right targets. As anyone might have expected, the people who suffered the most were not even involved with this site.

Once it became clear that the people posting at Heaven Nose were willing to cross the line between a one-sided flame war and real-life harassment, our web host decided enough was enough, and we agreed. This site wasn't important enough to us to be worth having innocent people harassed at home and work. We're done.

I've done some searching and have come up with a few bloggers who apprear to either know more about this than I do, or are as intrigued as I am. Read through them (lots of them are lefty blogs, BTW).

One site I read surmised that perhaps a blogger at HN did an information grab and got hold of some of the personal information of one or all of the Trainwrecks bloggers (a group of 4 women). Somebody posted peronal information ("outed") in a flamewar. This information included real names, addresses, and even work phone numbers. With that, HN spammed a great many of Trainwreck's victims' blogs with this information - presumably for them to do with as they would. And they did.

As for these people at Trainwrecks, I'm with Ultrablogger:

Say someone is absolutely horrible to others, making an online "career" out of mockery and nastiness, and encouraging others to do the same. This person's sole contribution to the blogosphere is to find mock-worthy sites and send her disciples to sneer. Then they all gleefully trash and (sometimes) libel the mockee. (But note that they are not using any info other than that which was voluntarily shared publicly.) As get-a-lifey as that is, it's my opinion that the same standards apply: no outing of the assholes. If you can't tolerate the idea that something you wrote will be laughed at, fisked, trashed, or simply disagreed with, get the hell out of the public square. Make your site private. Chat with your friends in email only. Whatever.

That said, I have no sympathy whatever for the outees in the Trainwrecks saga. If the only reason TW continued being such assholes is because they falsely assumed they were wallowing in a "safe" cesspool of anonymity, tough turnips on 'em.

I can't find out too much more substantive information about this strange and creepy Internet uberbattle - perhaps even creepier than the (ongoing into leagaldom) Deb Frisch affair. Much of the commentary from TW and HN has been removed and scrubbed from Google's cache archives.

Moral of the story, if any? Be careful about picking fights, and don't count on anonymity to stop the wheel of karma from catching up with you.

More from these posts:

The Zero Boss: Trainwrecks.net crashes (the comment thread here is helpful, too).
Plonc: Trainwrecks dies
Question Authority with Dr. Peter Rost: Trainwrecks.net- Blog Suicide?
Spaghetti Harvest: Sucks to be Famous
Ultrablog: The Real Deal
HAH!: The Politics of the Avatar
Puddlejumper's Bipolar World: Trainwrecks - Why did it crash?

A Trainwrecks reader laments at Holy Buck, Fatman!, with "Fighting on the Internet is Like Competeing in the Special Olympics - Even If You Win, You're Still Retarded."

And here's someone not sad to see Trainwrecks take a dive.

One more thing - Heaven Nose manages to elevate the meaning of "endzone dance" someplace else entirely! (Content Warning):

Blog Wars:


This one is called "Bye-Bye TrainWrecks." The background music is "Everything Dies" by Type O Negative.


ht: Ragnar

UPDATE: Here's the interview I posted at Jawa Report. I decided to make it an exclusive there, where more people could read it.

Jawa Report: How long did it take between the establishment of HN and the demise of TW?

Heaven Nose: It took us nearly 3 months. The true assault began on December 19th when their identities were posted on our blog comment section. We didn't expect them to fold so soon because we were not the first that tried to take Trainwrecks down. Those before us failed. Moreover, those before us were shut down by intimidation of the trainwreck administrators and the people they knew at Google. We know (and have proof) from a reliable source that they even used hacking as a means to unarm their critics.

Jawa Report: Some of the tactics that were employed in this instance are generally regarded in the blogosphere as unethical (although they often get results quickly and demonstrably, as they did here.) What is you response to those who accuse you of "hitting below the blog," so to speak?

Heaven Nose: Heaven Nose is a democracy. We had a poll up that gave our readers the choice between a passive approach or an aggressive Machiavellistic approach. They chose the latter which meant they were willing to fight fire with fire. The goal justified the means. It wouldn't be the first time in history that such a drastic deed was needed to make this world a better place.The trainwreck site claimed that they just posted information up about a blog and were not responsible nor did they condone it if their readers went to harass that blogger. So in turn,when someone posted their personal information in our comment section, we just left it there and are not responsible for what our readers may have done with it. A lot of people's confidence was undermined by Trainwrecks. We realize that TW is more a state of mind than a site. Taking the site down doesn't mean that TW will really be gone. But we see it as more of a symbolic gesture. We showed everyone that trainwrecks and all bullies for that matter, are fragile too and underneath those mean alteregos (one of them called themselves Beelzebub aka Satan) and fake powerful persona is just a bunch of women that have to deal with their own personal problems (like weight problems to give only one example). That makes the scorn of TW a whole lot easier to deal with and hopefully, we've given more courage to those out there that have been intimidated by them.

But we're talking about our tactics. Our tactics were based on ridiculing our adversary. We used war tactics and mind games on them. We made them believe that we were crazy and capable of anything by projecting this persona on our blog. The exposure of their identities wasn't our doing because they were already published on another site that was shut down by the trainwreckers. By the way, the information that was posted was very accurate and was collected from recources publically available to anyone on the internet. We were the ones that made sure people paid attention to their identities. Heaven Nose was merely a forum where Trainwreck victims or people that didn't like the site could have a laugh at the expense of the TW'ers. That's all. We're not psychopaths after all, although many will disagree. We never harrassed TW in their real life. Only online. A lot of our readers felt like they had to harrass them in real life. I wouldn't have done that, but I'm guessing that TW must have done something pretty bad for people to have those kind of reactions. Would you try to harrass somebody if you didn't feel like that person had been outta line? I don't think so.

The problem is that so many people were paranoid about TW going after them that they were scared to say anything. They were alone in the "shame" and vulnerability. That's why it looks like the majority of the bloggers are pro-TW. Our email inbox showed otherwise though. The people had spoken and we felt like we had to respect their wishes and stand up against the bullies of the internet. Even now, with TW gone, a lot of people are scared to speak up (even on our forum, where everybody's anonymity -except the Trainwreckers'- was guaranteed). But once again, our email inbox shows a another picture.

Jawa Report: We've seen some bitter blog and flamewars in the past, but this one seems to have little or no trail of existence. Is this HN's first kill? Last?

Heaven Nose: This was the blog war to end all blog wars. We took down Goliath. As far as we're concerned, this was our first and last campaign. Like we said, it was symbolic. TW will spawn again in another form. But their victims need to realize that the trainwreck people are pathetic and can be taken down. All they need is to fight back with perseverance.

Jawa Report: Have you been threatened with legal action? Death threats? Other weird stuff?

Heaven Nose: No. Never. TW just used sneaky tactics like searching our cache files continuously or staying on our blog all day long and monitoring the activity. There were four of them so they must've worked in shifts. We saw a pattern.

JR: What's next, if anything, for Heaven Nose?

HN: HeavHeaven Nose will stay up but will not be updated. Our main goal was achieved. We like to photoshop so we will post a new picture once in a while

JR: What kinds of people (w/o naming names or specifics) were behind TW?

HN: They were female academics. One works for a university administration and another is an actual attorney practising in California. This makes their behaviour even worse since they should know better. Yet another one of them is doing research on female fertility problems. TW was known to mock and torment infertile women... Spot the discrepancy.

JR: I flipped through your archives – has HN had this kind of thing happen before? Was the sole purpose of HN simply to serve as an outpost for waging the war against TW?

HN: This hasn't happened before and yes, that was our sole purpose. We knew that our predecessors were shut down by google because they focused solely on taking trainwrecks down. That's why we had to make it look like we were a blog reviewing site. We have to say, we had fun reviewing those blogs, but it was just a distraction. At first we approached TW in a friendly manner, trying to find out how they would react to us. They reacted like we expected. In an aggressive manner, they accused us of spamming and subsequently they loaded us with all the sins of Israel. That's when we knew we were going to have to act even more insane than they are if we wanted to bring them down. When that happened, they decided to ignore us. They shoudn't have.

JR: Are you really superheroes or just mere mortals?

HN: Batman was a superhero and mortal. The one doesn't exclude the other. So to answer your question, we are both.

JR: Did you make that YouTube film of the The Skywalker Squirrel and Darth Siobhan?

HN: Yes, we did. A lot of people (even people like Supersnark, who is a trainwreck lover) wrote that they found it hilarious. I think so too.

JR: What makes Heaven Nose tick?

HN: Vengeance. Justice. Democracy. The goal justifying the means. Absurd humor. Perseverance. Refusing to compromise.

JR: If TW comes back in another incarnation, will you be on it?

HN: Like we said, we will be watching.