If you’re a fan of Plastic.com—that is, a polymer—you’ve probably been wondering where the hell your favorite snarky news trolling discussion board the past three or four months.

If you’re not a polymer, here’s a quick and dirty intro. One of the guys from Suck.com (Carl) bought some Slashdot code and hacked together a news and culture site, sort of Slashdot meets Atlantic Monthly. Enter snark and trolling and the quickest firest ironicest wits on the web. Including some guy calling himself “Anonymous Idiot.” Lots of posts by “MAYORBOB.”

Thanks to the blog Waiting for Plastic, I have learned two important things tonight . (1) Plastic owner Carl has relaunched the site, with very little explanation of what the fuck happened. (2) In the meantime, several polymers have launched a Plastic substitute called Trees and Things. Your regularly scheduled flame wars and trolling should resume shortly.

Though god knows where. Trees and Things promises to be transparent and democratic. A more stark contrast with the silent watchmaker god Carl could scarcely be imagined. To boot: I was allowed to vote on a story submission immediately after registering!

I was on Plastic since the beginning, posting some of the first stories there. Mostly, though, I lurked, accumulating a grand karma total of 42. (No, really.) Which means I still can’t vote on submissions. Meh. Plastic commenting is just too rapid fire for me. I don’t have much to do, but I have too much to do to wait for new stories to go up so I can get a comment in early enough to earn karma. (Comments downthread get little attention.) Which is just as well. I’d rather browse than comment anyway. Still, it would have been nice to have been able to moderate posts.

And yet: Plastic has thousands of users. Or had them, anyway. Carl’s “let’s shut the damn thing down while I have a bad mood and not tell anyone” server outages aside, Plastic may get those users back.

A polymer civil war will be raging on both Plastic and Trees and Things over the next few days—one to watch, to be sure. The flaming has already started, of course, just four hours after Carl’s announcement. Anything less would be inauthentically plastic.