René Takes the Hammer Out Again

For months, René had been quietly rebuilding Nerdcore—new design, a Patreon campaign, automated scripts to better showcase music videos and trailers, a slow drift back toward what made the thing worth reading in the first place. Then one February morning in 2018, readers loaded the page and found a small memorial plaque where thirteen years of work used to be. "Game over. Nerdcore 2005–2018." The Twitter account gone too, vanished overnight.

Nerdcore was Germany’s best-known blog—René’s solo operation covering tech, internet weirdness, and culture with a speed and idiosyncratic taste that nobody else in the German blogosphere matched. Deep-cut anime recommendations sitting next to Pentagon drone footage sitting next to whatever strange corner of the internet René had been excavating that week, all held together by one voice and a genuinely odd curatorial instinct.

But René has always had this habit of picking up a hammer and bringing it down on his own work. It had happened before—the sudden silence, the wreckage, and then eventually the pieces reassembled into something new. Whether this was another tactical self-destruction or the actual end, nobody could say. His silence was total. Readers asked where he’d gone. No answer.

Just the plaque. Just the dates.