DPReview.com New Lease on Life

One of the oldest websites in my bookmarks list, a site I've been reading regularly for twenty-three years, has survived nearly being shut down. Earlier this year, DPReview.com, aka Digital Photography Review, announced its imminent closure. Amazon, its parent company since 2007, chose to close it as part of strategic reduction initiative begun late last year. Just recently it found a buyer to keep it going.



Reaction from the photography community to news in March of Amazon shuttering the site was immense. DPReview is an enormously popular website among photographers, a hub for both information about photography gear as well as lively discussion in dozens of forums it hosts. Nothing else in the space is as comprehensive.

Three Months in Zombie Mode

Amazon promised to keep DPReview.com up for a little while so contributors could archive their own writings. The thing was, how? And where? There is simply no alternative to the comprehensive site that DPReview.com built itself into years ago. Other sites in the space do only small bits of what DPReview did.

DPReview.com surprisingly continued on over the past few months. Even the site's news-and-reviews editorial content kept on. There was about a one week stop in news-and-reviews editorial content, then surprisingly it crept back to life. First there were best-of type articles, then new product reviews again. Meanwhile the forums, which we were warned would go read-only imminently and then disappear entirely, kept on going, too. What was happening?

A New Lease on Life

What I surmise was happening— since Amazon and DPReview are not telling us— is two-fold. One, Amazon realized that with the huge number of page views the site draws it's a money-maker. Maybe not as much of a moneymaker as Amazon wants but potentially enough for someone. Two, Amazon realized it would thus be better to sell it to someone rather than shut it down and write it off as a total loss, so they kept it going the few months it took to find a buyer and complete a sale.

DPReview.com is now owned by Gear Patrol. If you're like, "WTF is Gear Patrol?" I don't blame you. I've been reading DPReview.com for twenty-three years and even I don't know who they are. But I'm glad they stepped up to buy this great property and I look forward to continuing to visit it a few times a week.

Anxiety Dreams - Most People Have Them

I had a weird dream the other night. I was back in graduate school. Except it wasn't, "Hey, I'm 22 again and working toward my degree," it was, "Hey, I'm today years old and I've gone back to grad school to earn another degree." Today-me in grad school was miserable. I hated it. And I didn't even know why I was there! I even poured out my heart in a phone call to my wife, "I don't know why I ever chose to go back to graduate school. It's ridiculous. I had a successful career and could have retired early in a few more years. Now I've thrown that away and am spending money instead of earning it!"

Dreams like this are called anxiety dreams. I've had them occasionally since high school. Common themes in them are being late, being unprepared, not knowing where you are, and not knowing what/why you're doing something or being forced against your will to do it. For years nobody I talked to about them told me they're normal— not my parents, not my close friends. "You're just an anxious person," people I trusted told me. Then I learned a year or so ago I'm normal.

I learned that in a radio interview on NPR. They were interviewing a psychologist who specializes in dreams. She acknowledged, with the authority of her broad research, what I'd suspected all along: that having anxiety dreams, on occasion, is normal. And she noted that for people who attended college and especially graduate school, the dreams frequently revolve around being unprepared for classes. That's been a theme of several of my anxiety dreams. I'm in school, there's a class with a major assignment due or an exam today, and I haven't attended the class in so long that I don't even remember where the classroom is. 😱

BTW it's not just college stress that haunts highly educated people years later. In another interview on NPR, neuroscientist Robert Strickgold explained that Olympic athletes have anxiety dreams about being unprepared for their sport. They're getting into a crouch at the starting line when they realize they've forgotten to put on their uniform or forgotten to bring their equipment.

Unfortunately I don't have a link for the interview I heard months ago. I've searched several times but can't find a transcript or even the name of the scientist interviewed. I know it's not Strickgold as given in the second example above (transcripts of a few of his NPR interviews came up in the search) because he's a dude and the other person I heard is a gal. Maybe struggling to find that citation so I don't fail a class will be the subject of a future anxiety dream. 😂