so not gonna happen

the plot thickens

haha jk

jaymc is correct, when the waynescrew610 posts showed up in january of last year, i told a few ppl who no longer post to ilx regularly but whom i still communicated with and knew would appreciate the development, s1ocki included. s1ocki had been the subject of a story on the reply all guys' previous venture (a show called TLDR) and sent them the story idea. at this point Reply All was a nascent but solid podcast that i was listening to regularly and i agreed with s1ocki that this was a story they could tell the way it deserved to be told.

PJ emailed me and i agreed to a taped interview under the condition that i would not be the only ilxor they interviewed and that they wouldn't air the story without participation from tommy's friends. i didn't want to participate in a story that was just about an ilx thread and/or my obsession with it.

with their permission, i put Sruthi in touch with roxy & jaymc. i also sent a facebook message to pplains asking if he'd be interested, but sadly he never replied.

in april of last year i did a pair of interviews with PJ that combined lasted more than two hours. the 2nd of which was done in a public radio studio here in chicago with a hired engineer manning the recording while i listened to PJ in my headphones from NYC. at one point about 45 minutes in, we had to take a break for some technical reason on PJ's end as soon as we did the engineer was like "LET ME SEE THAT PHOTO I AM DYING TO SEE WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE" (i really hoped that would make it on the final edit.)

Over the last 18 months i've heard very little from PJ or Sruthi, just an email here and there, assuring me that while the show was on the back-burner, they weren't giving up on it. up until a few weeks ago, the last i heard was that they weren't having much luck emailing tommy's friends and that PJ had family near Upper Darby and was going to head down there to see if he could track anyone down. i’d pretty much given up on it ever happening.

then late last month Sruthi emailed and said they were almost done with the episode and asked me to answer a few clarifying questions. another week later, i had a fact-checking call with her and another staffer that lasted almost an hour where they laid out the way they were framing the ilx side of the story. she told me that "researching your life" had become an inside joke among their staff. at one point i was like "hey but what about the church bulletin that unregistered found? are you going to mention that?" and sruthi said something like "grady... i have called every catholic church within a 15 mile radius of upper darby, but the current edit of the story does not mention it." that was the point when i knew they had really spent some time on the story and while obviously in editing it all down a load of details were going to be cast aside, but they weren't going to present it haphazardly. they assured me that they did speak with tommy's friends but weren't given permission to record them. aside from that she remained very tight-lipped about what they found out or how the story would be told.

so i hit play on the podcast yesterday morning thinking that tommy loftus was dead. i was almost as in the dark as the general audience and enjoyed every minute of it. i really love how it ended up being way less about ilx or even this thread and more about PJ falling under the same spell many of us did a decade ago and getting to the end that none of us could find.

its funny, the last year and a half has been a time when i've finally sort of semi-permanently stopped engaging with ilx on a regular basis, and i think that talking to a non-ilxor at great depth about a facet of ilx that i really let consume me at times might have been the beginning of that disengagement.

i've really enjoyed seeing the varying responses here, ... just like ::antonio banderas gif:: "ah, some things never change". i felt a wistful tear come to my eye reading the last few posts from tuomas.

it looks like based on the reddit thread already linked itt and the replies on twitter, their listeners really loved the story too.

most of all, it was such a delight to hear tommy himself. I’m glad he’s alive and well and I hope this isn’t the last we hear of him, but would be totally at peace if it were.

Is ILX even real

We still don't know if it did or didn't happen though.

they have 2 more eps planned for megan and laurel

lieutenant tuomas is on it

love gr80's voice itp

investigate hen fap

l0u15 j@gger can't melt steel beams

i almost requested they slip a "ban l0u15 j@gger" in to the credits but decided it was best not to

i seem to remember you giving me an incredulous "no" when i asked to be listed that way in your photo zine credits

i stand by that decision.

it was the right decision

also, i researched PJ's life and today is his birthday.

happy birthday, PJ!

listening to freewheelin' cuts by famed author bob dylan as i read through gr8080's recap and then the injokes afterward from the last hour, i got a weird wave of nostalgia

like it feels like the morning after the last party, and now half the crew is going off to college and it's pretty far away. or, gandalf and friends are sailing away across the sea to the West

i probably just need to get outside for a minute

for real though, it's nice to get some verified, real closure on wayne.

not until the carter V drops

i am surprised, amazed and heart-warmed. i love that tommy didn't care about the internet :)

I can add that gr8080's voice is not only simply great but that based on the Chicago trip I did last week he is also an excellent docent for tours at the Robie House, which I encourage you all to do.

^^ he has a wonderful voice

that was good. its funny when some perceived big ilx event happens and you can be reading the borad casually and have no clue.

also never fell for the "prank". guess i'm a cool skeptic.

<3 gr80

also never fell for the "prank". guess i'm a cool skeptic.

yeah this always seemed really transparently false to me too

honestly, when Thomas/Wayne finally got on the phone, I had trouble believing his initial confusion

Listened to the episode and really enjoyed it, it was such a weird sense of worlds colliding (although I do wish I had listened on the way to work before seeing jaymc mention on Twitter & this thread revival, just for the dawning realization of what they were talking about).

Also I was a little surprised that I never posted on this thread, as I definitely remember following it at the time and whenever it popped up.

honestly, when Thomas/Wayne finally got on the phone, I had trouble believing his initial confusion

Yeah, my first reaction was that his friends must have told him to play along and avoid the reporters.

also never fell for the "prank". guess i'm a cool skeptic.

yeah this always seemed really transparently false to me too

― Οὖτις, Friday, October 14, 2016 5:10 PM (six minutes ago)

I didn't think it was transparently false, but nor did I think that it was definitely true. Kind of thought that trutherism without evidence was very insensitive *if* he had actually died, but now it is clear that they were gathering evidence, they were just waiting to unleash it. Also I love a story and I love ambiguity, so the truth values of the story being told are always slightly less important to me.

ILX: Ha, look at this poor dude and his asshole friends!

AHF: WTF? Who are these conts? Let's fuck with them and tell them dude's dead!

RA: Omg, these internet kids and the jocks who hate them. Let's drive to their bar and podcast 'em.

LOFTUS: Haha, whatever to all of you.

I expressed my condolences on the thread and was genuinely crestfallen at the report, but had inner doubts.

xp: perfect.

Idk why Reply All is getting so much hate. They solved the damn mystery.

i'm a little dubious about Tommy's professed indifference to the whole thing

A lot of people loved the podcast, me included. I think most of the people who didn't weren't actually involved in the initial obsession so just find the whole thing gross, from the ilx beginnings to the podcast ending. Oh, and Whiney, who just has a superiority complex.

xp

I don't really mind that they explored this or whatever but the tone/style of it is just not for me. I just don't like the whole sub-NPR cadences (for ex. stating a thing and then following it up immediately with a pseudo-incredulous leading question, ie, "but wait... what if [thing I just said] was totally wrong?! WHAT IF...") arggh just get me out of here I think that's shitty storytelling, the faux naif narrator leading the listener by the hand. It's not for me. Give me Paul Harvey's bizarre pauses and clipped delivery any day.

Maybe it's just because I'm an "outsider". I didn't know about this until I heard it from reply all. So many layers.

I guess I do agree w whiney that applying that tone to a relatively insignificant catfishing sorta story was off-putting

xp

Hey guys. We knew the whole time.....well at least after the first week. More fun to come. Also....R.I.P. Wayne

http://i.imgur.com/IKgaWgM.png

― WaynesCrew610, Saturday, January 24, 2015 3:26 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wayne never existed, just a legend of Wayne, which being false = that's what "R.I.P. Wayne" meant.

Or ILX got punk'd.

But I listened self-reflectively. As a on-and-off again ilxor, I've embarrassed myself by obsessing over trolls (Wagemannnnn, etc.) and harassment (hi dere bela fleck), so the a lot of my cringe effect was me looking at younger version of myself and "what if a small group of ilxors I've annoyed over the years took aim at my life."

Web 1.0 analysis = self analysis, for me. Anything to become less of a dick, and if Thomas is happy being in the limelight, then :-)

<3 Wayne/Tommy, good to get an update

hope the podcast bringing the mystery to a new audience doesn't cause any problems though; although I spent this thread's original appearance F5ing and Googling (even if not posting) I have felt a bit bad about that over the years

(though I suppose in its current state it's not all that enticing for anyone new to hit the internet detective trail on and there are many podcasts and blog posts and news stories every day with just as much information about people in)

everyone's focused on proving Ken Bone is an edgelord now, I think Tommy will be okay

shakey mo, good day.

id just like to say id contribute to a kickstarter if some web reporter wants to track down and interview luriqua

lol gr8080

Thanks for elaborating gr8080! I think y'all did really well on the podcast. (Good to hear they thoroughly researched it w/ fact checks and follow up interviews too)

It is strange, seeing something so quintessentially ilx outside of the board and in the ~real world~ like this. I would probably have had the same epiphany gr8080 had when he was contacted by the show, or so I'd like to believe. That, mixed with quite some embarrassment. Which is not a bad thing. Rather a mirror being held up that could not possibly have happened within the ilx universe.

Thomas being ok and well is teh raddest.

Just to give everybody a heads up here, we have a Pending Registration from a user with a Display Name of Waynescrew610 with a lowercase C. It should be noted that we already have a user WaynesCrew610 with a capital C. I don't know if they forgot their password or if this is the same user or what. I'm going to go ahead and let them in though.

Waynescrew1 through Waynescrew609 sadly already taken

Welcome, WayneScrew610 !

610 obviously their area code

i would like a podcast about de subjectivisten

^^ consider it done brb

podcast about the history of epic jay-z vs. nas throwdown threads