Blogger Beware
Blogger Beware (formerly located at twistending.blogspot.com and eventually bloggerbeware.com) was a humor-blog that sought to review every Goosebumps book ever written. Troy Steele, the blog's sole writer, made it his goal to power through every single novel in the original series, Goosebumps Series 2000, and Tales to Give You Goosebumps.
History[edit | edit source]
- Some of this section is based on contributions from the Goosebumps Wiki.
Brief Synopsis:[edit | edit source]
Running for roughly 7 years, Troy's quest to review as many Goosebumps books as possible turned into a full-fledged journey
The first review posted on Blogger Beware was for Egg Monsters from Mars on January 19, 2006. Throughout the next two years, Steele would go on to review every book in the original Goosebumps series. Each blog entry detailed a specific book and contained thorough recaps, all the while providing jokes and obscure pop culture references (hence the need for a reference guide like this). While the earlier entries were rather bland, things took a turn for the better as the books took a turn for the worse. Troy's seething anger was the source of highly comedic entries. Need an example? See Chicken Chicken...
While trekking through the original series, the blog started to gain momentum, enough to warrant Steele to issue a line of pin-back buttons, with each button referencing a running gag from Blogger Beware. Steele's final review for the original series was of Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes on June 30, 2008. After this review, Steele went on to start reviewing the Goosebumps Series 2000 books. (At one point, Steele stated that he was planning on reviewing Goosebumps HorrorLand and Ghosts of Fear Street, a spin off of Fear Street for the Goosebumps audience.)
Blogger Beware posts started to become more sporadic towards the end of the Goosebumps Series 2000 reviews. These pitstops and hiccups took the form of infamously long hiatuses. However, Troy would continuously return (much to the delight of everybody with eyes).
After May 9, 2011, the blog would go an entire year without a proper update. On June 5, 2012, Steele posted a review for Revenge of the Living Dummy, marking the first time that a Goosebumps HorrorLand book had been reviewed on Blogger Beware. The blog was updated once in 2015 with a post entitled, "Exciting New Poster For Everyone's Most Anticipated Movie Debuts!"; the title of the post is supposed to seem like it is alluding to the film Goosebumps, but — in actuality — the post is about an obscure film called Jenny's Wedding.
But the Twist is:[edit | edit source]
Though it was never officially terminated, the blog was put on "indefinite hiatus" in 2013, with Troy leaving open the possibility that Blogger Beware may someday be revived.
Troy continued commenting until roughly 2017 and made small revisions to posts up until 2018. However, he shuttered his Twitter in 2021, setting the account to private and ceasing activity. Perhaps this was an omen of things to come, because in early 2022 (late March or early April), the domain for Blogger Beware evidently lapsed; the bloggerbeware.com link began redirecting to a GoDaddy page (a service likely used to purchase the domain in the first place). Unfortunately, the original twistending.blogspot.com link still tries to redirect to the bloggerbeware.com domain. In other words, the original site was made completely inaccessible. The blog's ultimate fate went unaddressed by Steele, signalling a quiet finality for Blogger Beware.
Other posts[edit | edit source]
In Troy's own words[edit | edit source]
From the now-dead blog description:
Blogger Beware provides summaries of Goosebumps books and jokes. The blog is not really intended to be read by kids, but that's never stopped anyone before. The site has apparently helped a lot of children cheat on their book reports, which is wonderful. The blog's continued success is 100% due to Word-Of-Mouth. Please tell a friend or stranger about the blog! If you can't remember the URL in conversation, remember that the site is the FIRST result when Google searching "Goosebumps blog."
Troy's other blogs[edit | edit source]
- VCR-U-SRS: A joke blog made for the Cry of the Cat review in July 2008. It parodies similar nostalgia bait blogs and is riddled with spelling errors and garish design.
- Shuelogy: A blog devoted to the lessons from movies starring Elizabeth Shue. Started in November 2011 and petered out in December.
Some other links[edit | edit source]
- Troy's Twitter. It was originally promoted with the line, "Updates even less than Blogger Beware." This status flipped around for a time, as Steele would tweet throughout the first few years of Blogger Beware's indefinite hiatus. In the end, things evened out: Troy stopped posting in 2020 — before setting the account to private in 2021 and ceasing all activity. Eventually, in 2024, he unprivated his account and began sporadically posting again (albeit still refusing to address anything BB-related, responding to a user who asked him about about the blog by hiding their reply and then disabling replies on all his posts).
Gallery[edit | edit source]
The blog's former header, showing some young people discussing books by Stine.
The blog's header (compressed).
