Blender No More

Yesterday morning, upon retrieving the mail, I found a Maxim in my mailbox. On it was this sticker, which read:

Welcome to Maxim!
This note is to inform you that Blender has ceased publishing with the April 2009 issue. The balance of your paid subscription will be fulfilled with Maxim. If you are already a subscriber of Maxim, the balance of your Blender subscription will be added to your Maxim subscription.

I had missed this when it hit the news this spring; it wasn't a surprise. Blender had noticeably succumbed to magazine anorexia, the shrinking page-count of a publication on its way out. I'm a subscriber to both Blender and Maxim thanks to FreeBizMag.com, so there would have been no real loss if Blender stopped arriving (in fact, I hadn't noticed that the May through July issues were even missing), which is probably a further clue to Blender's relevance. Maxim isn't a great magazine either, but I tend to find something worth reading in it more than I did in Blender. I shouldn't get too attached, though: others have noticed symptoms of magazine anorexia in Maxim, too, so the clues are leading to an internet-only Maxim in the near future. Stuff magazine was the first casualty in 2007, but it was repeated content with Maxim for the most part; they, too, were rolled over into the Maxim subscriber's list (frankly, I liked Stuff better). If the magazines are being condensed into one better-quality publication, it might help...but, flipping through this new erstaz-Blender issue of Maxim, it doesn't look like the loss of one title resulted in extra effort in the sister publication.