COOL LINKS
Contents
Music Friends
OldWeb Resources
Archived Oddities
Software
Ancient Angelfire Pages
[Pre-Historic DickWORM]
A couple of weirdos, of which I am one, making filthy, nasty music. De Sade handles the music and video production and I do the vox. The disgusting lyrics are a group effort. Music videos are the main focus of this project, featuring the hot-n-sexy performance art of our friend, Mr. Luscious (AKA the Rev. Gothic Harvey). De Sade and Mr. Luscious have made two of these so far, with more to follow once everybody's schedules line up again. UPDATE: [Pre-Historic DickWORM]'s self-titled album is out now. Get it here.
Order Ov Thee Octopi
OOTO is a guy I met on Soundcloud who cranks out around half a dozen amazing synthesizer tracks every week. We collaborated on some tracks with a loose true crime/occult/sci-fi theme under the name WITCHKULT Z earlier this year, and hopefully we will make more weird/fucked up shit together in the future.
Heavy Sixer
Another cool SC guy. We worked together on a song this April that he turned into an incredible video. Watching this will make you into a cannibal or a vegetarian, depending on your innate sexual tendencies.
The Internet Archive
The Archive has been taking snapshots of WWW pages since 1996. An invaluable research tool for anyone interested in the history of the Web. Also includes an ever-expanding library of scanned books and magazines, obsolete software, and audio/video recordings of all kinds.
GifCities
A search engine for .gifs from the GeoCities archive. A treasure trove. Most of the annoying spinning/rotating/blinking .gifs on this site were looted from there.
The GeoCities Gallery
If you want to relive the joy/suffering of late '90s/early 2000s amateur Web design, this is what you've been looking for.
404PageFound
Links to the oldest still-active Web pages, sorted by year. Some of these haven't been updated since 1993.
Rediscovering the Small Web
An essay on Web browsing in the era of the personal homepage. Reading this inspired me to make my first Web site in 17 years. The author also has a great page full of retro-computing stuff...which this section of my links page completely rips off.
A Gallery of Homepage Screenshots from 1996-1998
This is an imgur gallery of around 1,000 late '90s Web site homepages, taken as screen captures by...somebody. I honestly don't know why anyone would do this, but it's pretty neat. The coolest part is the screenshots are framed by the obsolete Web browsers they were opened with. You can see Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 in a lot of these. The sites featured are a seemingly-random cross-section of the late '90s WWW. There's a second gallery here.
Paranoia.com
Paranoia was a small internet service provider run by one guy in Austin, TX from 1994 through (I think) sometime in '98. The main service offered was a degree of anonymity and greater freedom of expression than you'd get with other ISPs of the time, who tended to be skittish about hosting "adult" content on their servers. There were serious debates about obscene content on the internet back then...you'll see these little blue "Free Speech" ribbons all over Web pages circa 1996, protesting the Communications Decency Act passed by Congress. If you've been on the internet in the last 20 years, you can see what an effective piece of legislation it was...
Anyway, one of the features offered by this ISP was hosting for subscribers' homepages, and the list of user pages is a goldmine. Owing to the privacy and free-speech-oriented nature of this service, the focus of these pages tends to be countercultural, transgressive, or just plain weird. Some highlights include The Psychedelic Tabby Cabal, a very postmodern-y techno-libertarian page with a pro-drug bias, the Unabomber PAC, a satirical "Unabomber for President" page selling "Don't blame me! I voted for the UNABOMBER" bumper stickers, and GOAT, a blood-spattered shock site that puts rotten.com to shame. A prolapsed anus is the least ugly thing on that page.
The Black Plague
Another small, dead Web-hosting service with a focus on unlimited free speech...and here we discover why that might be a bad idea. According to the site's mission statement: "The Black Plague Internet Affliction exists to disseminate information and graphic material of a degenerate, antisocial, and offensive nature. Conventional morality is discarded as obsolete and mocked with warrior fury. We provide a voice for deserving individuals and asylum for incendiary ideas that would otherwise be at the mercy of censorship and suppression." So naturally, the user pages are all about snuff porn, cannibalism, and TOTAL HATE WAR ON CHRISTIANITY. All of this stuff is the bad kind of gross, but one thing had enough novelty value that I had to include it here: a snuff-fetish DOOM II WAD. I haven't played it (and I'm not gonna), but from the character sprites on the page, I see that it replaces all the DOOM monsters with naked titty ladies for you to brutally murder. So if you ever wanted to chainsaw a stripper, I guess this WAD's for you.
Watcher's Web O'Conspiracy
Mars and Satan linked! Antichrist and UFOs linked! My face, my ass...linked! UFO/conspiracy culture had a major presence on the internet of the mid-late '90s, probably due in part to the popularity of the X-Files, or maybe just as a side-effect of a global communications network with no filters to screen out marginal ideas. There were a ton of sites based on sightings, encounters, and the "face" on Mars, a sample of which can be found here. Many of these sites had a New Age bent, but in this case, the basis for the madness was scriptural. And schizophrenic.
Watcher's Web O'Conspiracy, as only one page was titled but by which I will be referring to the entire site, is a bizarre hybrid of UFO research and Christian ministry with some very original ideas, the main one being that what appear to be UFO sightings and alien encounters are, in reality, manifestations of the devil. Somehow the Sphinx and the Cydonia formation are involved. Reading this site is like hearing what the voices in the mumbling homeless guy's head have to say. I love it.
The Mystery of the Mothman (Revisited)
I always thought the Mothman was the creepiest cryptid in modern American folklore, even more so than the Jersey Devil, which is an outright demon spawn. It's probably because Mothman is uniquely inexplicable and weird. It's not just some rare animal like bigfoot or a lake monster. The phenomena associated with Mothman sightings--strange interference with TV and radio signals, people suddenly gripped by paralyzing fear, and oddly-dressed strangers appearing in town--seems more like a very bizarre alien visitation story, but it doesn't fit neatly into that category. If you've read John Keel's book The Mothman Prophecies, you know how weird some of the theories are.
This charming piece of bad Web design offers a "guided tour" through the Mothman legend, complete with atmospheric midi music (use Internet Explorer or something similarly outdated if you want to enjoy this aspect of the Geocities Experience) and 20 different fonts on every page. It's a decent summary of the Mothman story, but the main attraction for me is all the gimmicks the Webmaster crammed into their site, especially the glowing red eyes they used to illustrate the Mothman sightings. If you wanted a perfect example of late '90s homepage design, you couldn't do much better than this.
Mr. Lowe's WOLF 3-D PAGE
This one isn't odd in the sense that it's full of weird bullshit, but mainly because it was maintained and updated consistently over 15 years (at least) without ever once changing its design. That hazard-sign yellow background with a lime green sidebar, the multitude of font sizes and colors, the animated .gifs and banner links to long-dead sites--the only thing that's changed since I first regularly visited this site back in 2000-2001 is the list of new Wolfenstein level sets that make up the bulk of the front page. There are even links to the Alta Vista search engine and Yahoo Webrings at the bottom. Going through the Links page yields even more late '90s Web design goodness if that's how you like to waste your time (I do, obviously). Unlike most of the pages he linked to, Mr. Lowe's site is still up and running, though it hasn't been updated since early 2016. I find this strangely comforting.
The Ate My Balls Mega-Page
The Internet Archive ate my balls.
Starting in 1996 with the classic Mr. T Ate My Balls Home Page, the [insert person/thing here] Ate My Balls trend expanded to include every minor celebrity and popular culture reference known to man until, around the turn of the millennium, it was banished from this zone of existence by the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Communist conspiracy for being too funny. The Ate My Balls Mega-Page was one of a handful of online directories that attempted to compile every Ate My Balls (or "AMB") page in scrotumspace. I don't know how comprehensive it really was since, by the time it was archived, the list had been taken down due to legal threats from one of the people or companies parodied on an AMB page. Luckily, Krazy Keith has all your ball-munching needs covered.
The X-Philes
Not a Website this time, but a disc image. The X-Philes CD-Rom ("The Underground Version" according to the readme file) was published in 1995 by Synchron Data, a Swedish company that specialised in shareware CDs. I can't find anything about this disc on their site, but it featured similar products with names like The Black Philes, full of hacking, phone-phreaking, and "anarchy" t-files downloaded from underground BBSs. This CD has a similar theme, but with maybe more emphasis on conspiracy, UFO, and occult subjects. Or it could be that the name of the CD is coloring my perception of its contents.
This Disc of Forbidden Knowledge is now mostly unreadable due to the majority of its files being in weird mystery formats like .UFO and .REV. There was a software menu that let you browse and open the files, but it won't work on modern systems. Luckily, there are also plenty of text documents here, including the full Cult of the Dead Cow textfile library, information on illegal drugs, questionable instructions for making homemade atomic bombs and free energy generators, and of course, X-Files fanfiction.
It looks like quite a bit of this material was taken from Usenet groups, mailing lists, and even IRC logs (several of these with people live-chatting the beginning of the first Gulf War as they watched it happen on CNN). If you're interested in the early, pre-Web internet culture, there's a lot of good stuff here if you're willing to dig through hundreds of folders of now-useless junk.
A directory of High WWWeirdness
Writer Mark Bourne's curated list of weird shit found on the Web. From UFO contactees and bigfoot fetishists to revisionist historians and advocates for home trepanation. This is a good place to start if you want to dig through archived conspiracy, paranormal, and lunatic fringe material to link to on your neocities page as an excuse to update the site and continue this deluded fantasy of "engagement" with the wider world. So ummm, LOOK AT THE CRAZY PEOPLE! Gosh, aren't they wacky? Bye.
The Apocalyptic Files.
Speaking of crazy people...The Apocalyptic Files blurs the line between fringe pseudoscience and Christian eschatology. It proclaims itself to be "The Ultimate Goal of Theoretical Physics and the Prophecies of the Book of Revelations", and hell, I believe it. The site includes THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MR. 666 books, which "describe the story of an individual who makes a discovery, or receives a divine message, of a very special type (spatial hemispheric), of a Grand Unifying Theory, and/or, Theory of Everything in physics." This idea of a Theory that Explains Everything as the real hidden truth of the Book of Revelations is cooler, in my opinion, than the final battle between good and evil that most end-times-obsessed fundies believe in.
On further reading, the author of this page is at least marginally saner than the Prophets of Doom you hear on AM radio while driving through this country's rotting interior. They point out that the word "apocalypse" is just Greek for "revelation", and that the cryptic symbolism of John's revelation was likely meant to be understood by a contemporary audience of Christians living under Roman persecution (or Pagan Justice, depending on your point of view). Despite all of this, I still have no fucking clue what this person was talking about. Great mid-'90s era Web design though.
The Barney Fun Page!
I'm kind of breaking my own rules for this section by including a link that isn't from the Internet Archive, but I'll make an exception this time since the archived version is broken. Not to mention that this site has been online since October '94 and is essentially unchanged since that time, right down to the URL, making it one of the oldest Web pages still in existence. So it counts!
The Barney Fun Page is a "game" that allows you to decorate a black-and-white .gif of Barney the Dinosaur with stab wounds, bullet holes, and tread marks until he fucking dies. When you click on Barney's picture, the page refreshes with the wounds you inflicted added to the .gif in the spot you clicked. After you've injured him enough, the pixel stigmata start bleeding. It's pretty impressive for a Web page from 1994, but it must have taken goddamn forever to kill him over a dial-up connection.
This was part of the silly anti-Barney trend of the mid-'90s internet. From Barney Ate My Balls to Barneystein 3-D, the mock-serious Barney-hatred was everywhere, including the next entry...
Assassin - The Game Where you Kill Celebrities
Assassin was one of the earliest features on Newgrounds.com, back before it was a portal for user-created Flash content. As originally implemented, Assassin was even more basic than the Barney Fun Page. You choose one of several internet hate-objects, including the obligatory Barney and Bill Gates, and receive a mission brief explaining why and how the target must die. Then you click on their picture to "shoot" them, which links you to a new page where crude, Photoshopped bullet wounds have appeared on their forehead. That's the basic idea, but some of the executions got pretty elaborate. The Hanson mission has you fire "Exploding Retardation Bullets" into each of the Hanson bros' heads, which gives them a drooling, Sloth-like appearance. Click their portrait again, and their head explodes. After killing all three of them, in any order you choose, you then tickle a "Nuke Me Elmo" doll to incinerate the remains. Since the early Assassin pages are simple HTML, they're relatively intact on the Archive if you want to play through them.
A nearly-complete archive of the Weekly World News
Hosted on Google Books, this collection includes scans of almost every issue of the classic supermarket trash tabloid from 1980-2007, although for some reason it's missing three full years, from '82-'84. I've been looking for scannned issues of WWN on the Internet Archive for a while, but they only have a few issues saved, and I couldn't find the specific cover I wanted on eBay. So I guess thanks to Google are in order for hoarding this cultural junk.
WWN was a fixture of the grocery store checkout line during my formative years. Every time I'm stuck waiting to check out at Walmart or the dollar store now, I miss the outrageous headlines and crudely doctored photos. All that's left is celebrity gossip shit like the Enquirer. One of my favorite WWN covers was from the early 2000s, and it's what I was looking for when I found this collection: 3000-YEAR-OLD MUMMY PREGNANT! Janitor admits: 'I'm the father'. That is one of the all-time greatest front page news stories, second only to "VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL--AND EAT THE CORPSE!" It's stuck with me for 19 years, right down to the page layout. After skimming through the gallery of covers, I found others that ranged from the grossly insensitive --LAST WORDS OF CHALLENGER CREW!-- to the extremely confusing --KKK SKELETONS FOUND IN TITANIC LIFE-RING. There's enough material here to waste weeks of your life digging through. Sometimes Google is good.
WWW.ANTICHRIST.COM
I've looked at plenty of End Times-obsessed sites from the '90s, but this is the first I've seen that takes the side of the Antichrist. In fact, the author of this site claims to be the Antichrist, as well as the Christ (but not Jesus, the False Prophet). And also the Resurrection of John Lennon. There's a lot going on here.
The underlying message of this site isn't really as cool as it appears at first glance. Despite all the surface-level blasphemy, it uses a lot of Bible Code bullshit, numerology ("using the ASCII numeral system, HOLY BIBLE adds to the number of the Beast...666"), and intuitive deduction to conclude that the Bible and Christianity are essentially true, just badly misinterpreted. An Antichrist that's trying to save Christianity from itself just isn't an Antichrist I can vote for. Sorry, Dave!
That being said, this site is a pretty fun read. David the Antichrist works The Beatles, Comet Hale-Bopp and the Heaven's Gate suicides, UFOs ("the visions of the "Grays" as they are called...were sent to show us what our dying souls look like"), and Las Vegas into his cosmology, and while I can't say it makes any sense to me, it is well written and original.
Founded in 1996, the Year of the Antichrist, the site was regularly updated through at least late 2003. By 2005, it had been turned into a generic search page, and it now redirects to mybible.com. The days when weird shit with no commercial value could get a decent slice of Web traffic based on novelty alone are long over.
PinealWeb Home
This is a joke page created by a Carnegie Mellon computer science student in 1997 to promote PinealWeb, a browser that offers the ultimate immersive Web experience by injecting information right into your brain. Or as the page puts it, "surf the Internet directly from your third eye!" This kind of single-page novelty site used to be common, especially on university servers; Mr. T Ate My Balls was hosted by the University of Illinois. Those were different times...poets, they studied rules of verse, and those ladies, they ATE THEIR BALLS.
Putrid Afterthought
A surrealistic nightmare that will hurt your feelings as much as your eyes. Artist A. Mendoza spliced together hard pornography with magazine ads and the faces of public figures to make kaleidoscopic images that confuse and frighten me. Highlights include George Bush Sr. surrounded by peniswastikas, strangely sexy Saudis, Saddam Hussein as the Marlboro Man, and, uh...this.
Far from being a simple gallery, Putrid Afterthought/Digital Mayhem circa 1996 was a bizarre work of art in itself, with backgrounds and text that are nausea-inducing, and sections of the site labeled GENITAL DELIRIUM and PORNOCOPOLIS NOW! Mayhem also hosted the Internet Crime Archives, dedicated to profiles of serial and mass-murderers, and it seems like this later came to be the main focus of the site. Around '99, the site became fully Flash-based, as was the style at the time, so none of it survives beyond that point. While mayhem.net is still online, it hasn't been updated since Flash Player was shut down.
The Legion of Charlies
Published in 1971 by Last Gasp Eco-Funnies (which is still around somehow), this underground comic starts with parallel depictions of the My Lai massacre and Manson murders, which mirror each other up to the point where mass murderer Lt. William Calley (spelled Kali in this version) gets a presidential pardon, while mere mass murder influencer Charles Manson is given the death penalty (later commuted to life in prison when the U.S. briefly abolished capital punishment). Free at last from his gruelling three years' house arrest, "Rusty" Kali heads to SF for a little hippy-humping, but he suffers an unfortunate mid-coital flashback ("I can't help it, Ronette! Every time I fuck I find myself back at that ditch in My Lai, M-16 cocked and loaded!") and beats and throttles poor Ronette til she looks like fucking E.T.
After dropping a tab of acid to help him calm down, Rusty gets the spirit of Charlie and soon becomes a hairy hippy beast of blood, along with hundreds of other Vietnam vets, who gather in the desert to practice a gory cannibal sacrament. When the vets are invited to Washington D.C. for shakes n' burgers with the Prez, they take the opportunity to kidnap Vice President Spirow Agnew with a stolen helicopter and eat his flesh. This is the best part by far, with Agnew's pompous, verbose insults ("Porcine scrofula!") giving way to simply "WHAT THE FUCK!!?" when the forks come out, and his bloody severed head dropping in on an outdoor brunch.
The Legion of Charlies fly from country to country, eating world leaders and celebrities to absorb their power. After a failed attempt by Nixon to eat Lt. Kali and take all that power for himself, Charlie appears in the sky like God and sets his children free.
I tend to think of the South Park-inspired "edgy" humor from the internet of my youth as being more stupidly offensive than anything produced by previous generations, but the underground comix of the '60s and '70s make all our dead babies and racist goat heads seem relatively tame.
Electric Elf Test Kitchen
Here's another scary postmodern art project, with even more brainbleed-inducing visuals than Putrid Afterthought. It has a similar aesthetic to that site, with bizarre photo alters that blend pop culture figures, religious icons, and pornography in nauseating psychedelic color-swirls. There's also a page of Burroughs-style cut-ups. Electric Elf later put up a gallery on Deviant Art, which looks like it hasn't been updated since 2009.
Altar of Unholy Blasphemy
Visiting overtly anti-Christian Web sites (like Why Christians Suck and jesusneverexisted.com) was a fun and harmless way to tweak my little outrage nerve back when I still had some residual belief in god. Getting as close as I could to serious blasphemy brought an exciting sense of danger, but without any real consequences--unless you died unexpectedly before you could repent and then burned forever in hell, which I still half-believed in until I was 14 or so. Now it's just a nice daydream when someone looks at me nasty...burn, motherfucker...that being said, I think this site is where I would have drawn the line about 20 years ago.
Hosted by the American Nihilist Underground Society (or A.N.U.S.for short), the Altar of Unholy Blasphemy lived up to its name. Here's a quote from a page headlined SODOMIZE JESUS CHRIST: "Probing past Mary's wet vagina with my thin, telescoping penis, I entered her uterus to complete my mission: the most Unholy of Abortions. The fetal christ struggled as its soft bones gave way to my thrusting rod. I ended the suffocating fetus' misery with an ejaculation that blasted its body to shreds, the bloody chunks settling into the layer of semen covering my member. Then Mary received the real Body and Blood of Jesus by licking my penis clean, and causing me to ejaculate yet again." Yyyyyyyyyyyep.
On a design-related note, I love the misshapen MS-Paint pentagram logo. They could have just lifted a perfectly symmetrical inverted pentagram from another site, but they made it themselves, and with feeling.
Reb and Vodka
RebandVodka.Com was the first place I can remember seeing any accurate information on Eric "REB" Harris and Dylan "VoDkA" Klebold, the Columbine High School shooters. In April 1999, when the shooting happened, I was still in primary school and first heard about the shooting as a "gang" attacking a school with bombs. I imagined it as a sort of barbarian raid, with motorcycles bursting into classrooms and biker dudes tossing sticks of dynamite around. During the ensuing media spectacle I absorbed some of the basic facts about the shooting, but for years most of what I knew about Columbine amounted to playground rumors. My favorite one of these is that Harris and Klebold shot each other in the mouth at the same time, which I think was probably inspired by the ending of the tasteless Columbine parody Duck! The Carbine High Massacre.
By the mid-2000s, I was in high school and had a fairly normal-for-my-age (which is to say, unhealthy) interest in spree killings and mass murder when a friend introduced me to this site. I spent a lot of time looking at the bio pages for the shooters, memorizing details about their weapons and gear, and reading transcripts of their tapes and diaries. I identified with them, mainly based on the fact that they liked all the same things I liked and had a hateful and sick attitude toward society that appealed to my braindead teenage nihilism. With its almost worshipful focus on the shooters--there was no page dedicated to the victims--this site was essentially a shrine to the murderers. That's how I used it anyway, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. I'm glad it's gone.
Lunar Anomalies Homepage
I've been a fan of lunatic fringe conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific bullshit for as long as I can remember. We had a multi-volume children's encyclopedia in my house when I was growing up, with a supplemental volume on mysteries and legends. It covered sea monsters, UFOs, remnant dinosaurs, unexplained disappearances, and etc. The main point of the book was to provide reasonable explanations for all of these things, which I ignored completely; I wanted candy, not vegetables. A few years later I discovered that the internet was full of sites on similar topics--the Museum of Unnatural Mystery was a favorite--and that many of these sites were run by the obsessed and deranged.
Lunar Anomalies belongs to an extinct variety of Web page: the passion project of a an educated person who is, while clearly very intelligent, also deluded and insane. There are no ad banners, no products for sale, just page after page of data, charts, and detailed analysis which prove that there are ancient cities on the moon.
A page titled A Village on the Moon? features NASA images of the moon's Tycho crater, zoomed in and enhanced to highlight white and gray blobs which vaguely resemble buildings and machinery. Later NASA images, with a much higher resolution and a lower angle, completely ruined this effect. That's similar to what happened to the Martian "face" when new and cleaner images of Mars were released by NASA in 1998. This site devotes five pages to explaining why the new images of the Cydonia formation, which looked much less face-like than the famous Viking probe picture, were the result of deliberate sabotage by NASA. It's also implied that NASA plans its missions according to secret religious rituals, which I think is a pretty cool idea.
Lunar Anomalies was active from 1996 until at least mid-2009, but every Wayback Machine snapshot since then is for a scammy-looking page advertising contact lenses.
Clinton's AIDS
In the late '90s, conservative christian "news" sites like WorldNetDaily provided an online alternative to the centrist liberal concensus of the big three tv networks and CNN (Fox News wasn't yet the big deal it would become in the early Bush years). Since they were outside the mainstream media and business worlds, these sites could be as crazy as they wanted to be; there weren't any big advertisers to scare away. They often featured scandals and conspiracy theories about the Clinton White House, from Vince Foster's supposed murder to New World Order/U.N. takeover/Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God paranoia. I grew up in a house where this shit was normal, so I'm familiar with most of these. But I had never before heard the theory that President Clinton was dying of AIDS.
Greater Things, a typical end-times obsessed christian news site of the time, made this discovery by applying the "Alphabetics Bible Code" to a novel called Blood Trail, the only book by author Michael Galster. The book is a fictionalized account of the true (and truly fucked up) Arkansas Prison Blood Scandal, in which Arkansas prison inmates with hepatitis and HIV were harvested for blood which was then sold to Canada, where thousands of people were infected via blood transfusions. The novel is a revenge fantasy about a father whose son was infected with HIV from the tainted blood. He fits himself with a prosthetic hand with hidden needles and infects President "Prescott" with the old AIDS Handshake. Classic!
But what appears at first glance to be fiction is proven true, through the magic of numerology. "I was first put onto alert that there was something significant to be found in the Alphabetics Bible coding regarding Galster's book when I stumbled onto a correlation between my former address 173 and page 173 of Blood Trail...Page 173 is the one and only place in Galster's book where the word "blood trail" is found, and it occurs on the top-right-hand-most part of the text immediately below the page number. The reason I say I stumbled onto it is because I had spent a few hours that day studying the number 173; then that evening when going to bed I opened Blood Trail to pick up with my reading of that book. My bookmark just happened to be at that very page. A few weeks later, after reading on in the book about the poisonous handshake, and after revisiting the Alphabetics definitions for 173, I realize the significance of the fact that word number 173 in Zodhiates' New Testament Greek lexicon(5) has the meaning, "a point or prick."" Thirteen more paragraphs continue to highlight the correlations between Thayer's Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament and this obscure political thriller, which "validates the key elements of the plot of this "fictional" novel, namely that the President of the United States, the liberal William Jefferson Clinton, the beastly ruler who absconds hard-earned tax-payers money to enrich his socialist, New World Order dictatorship friends, was involved in a scandal in which tainted prison blood collected for illicit profit ended up infecting many tens of thousands of innocent victims, killing thousands; and that one of these victims' blood was then counter-infected into the President himself by a prosthesis-fitted injection mechanism actuated during a handshake; and that the author of Blood Trail was most likely involved in this plot of assumed righteous vengeance." No doubt.
The Roosevelt Death: A Super Mystery
I found this in a flea market near Poplar Bluff, MO about six or seven years ago. The text on the front cover--SUICIDE? ASSASSINATION? NATURAL DEATH? STILL ALIVE?--was batshit stupid enough that I had to buy it, but it's just been sitting and gathering dust since then. I've been wanting to get into archiving stuff for a while now, so The Roosevelt Death got the scalpel treatment so I could see how it was done before ruining any of my better specimens. I'd like to say I've preserved a forgotten work for future generations, but I realized right after uploading my copy that the Internet Archive already has two other scans of the same book. At least mine is in a higher resolution. It's also got some nice, personal touches, like the coffee ring on page 11. Things like that add character to a book.
The basic gist of this conspiracy tract is that FDR's closed casket was meant to conceal a terrible secret. One theory given is that he shot his own face off, possibly out of guilt for his many crimes, such as entering World War II at the behest of "international manipulators." The author of the pamphlet, Mr. X, also explores FDR's relationship with Josef Stalin, described here as "the champion crucifier, the champion Christ killer, the champion liquidator of all time." Bad ass!
Mr. X saw FDR as little more than a puppet of international Communism/Jewry. He doesn't spare any tears for the victims of Naziism, but the defeat (and "enslavement") of Germans by the Jesus Slayer is presented as a historic tragedy. I think he felt like the good guys lost.
And Pearl Harbor was an inside job.
The Johnson Smith Company Catalog (Halloween Edition 2001)
My grandparents used to get these Things You Never Knew Existed catalogs in the mail. I don't know if they had a subscription or just ended up getting them somehow, the way I've gotten Cosmopolitan every month for six years without paying for it, but I remember these catalogs being a constant presence in their house around the turn of the millennium. They mainly featured gag gifts and fart prank implements, like the classic Farting Wall Clock, Wacky Fart Phone, or Motion Activated Fart Alarm ("Looks Real!"). This one has a universal remote control shaped like a busty woman's torso and her nipples are the channel changer buttons.
My favorite section in these things as a kid was the elaborate Halloween masks and gruesome wound FX makeup, which I'm pretty sure was a regular feature even outside the Halloween season. The "Unleashed Wickedness" mask, a skinless demon head with nightmare viperfish jaws, was a particular favorite. Vinyl skulls and body parts abound.
Also included: crude novelty t-shirts, die cast replicas of classic cars and military vehicles (though there's not much in the way of soldier-sucking in this issue, a sure sign it was printed before 9/11), commemorative collector's coins, and 1,000 different gadgets of questionable utility. 68 pages of stupid plastic shit. Somehow this feels like a perfect artifact of American consumer culture at the End of History, although now that I've written it down and I'm looking at it, I'm not sure I know what the fuck that means.
Penthouse Magazine, December 1996
I've mentioned it before on the dismember the '90s? album page, but I had a porno sleazoid uncle growing up who left his smut magazines and videos more or less out in the open. When I'd go to use the (dirty, filthy) bathroom at his house, the latest issue of Penthouse would be sitting right there in the magazine rack. I would flip through it at the first opportunity, trying to see as much as possible before the length of my bathroom visit drew suspicion. A few times I nerved myself up to steal some pages or even a digest-sized magazine, and was caught doing this at least once. I'm about 50% sure this is one I got caught with.
I started hunting for scanned copies of Penthouse from the '90s last year when I got a wild hair up my ass to find something I'd seen around '95 or '96: an arty, black and white photo spread (photo essay? photo story? what are you supposed to call these things?) of two lesbians spitting milk in each other's mouths. This confused the shit out of me at age seven or eight, and I wanted to verify if it really existed the way I remembered it. I still haven't found those pictures, but in the course of looking for them I ordered this issue off ebay because the cover looked familiar. Something about the "SPECIAL CHRISTMAS ISSUE" line in particular, maybe because of how inappropriate or even sacreligious the idea of Christmas pornography would have seemed to me at that age.
But despite what the cover would have you believe, this glossy porno mag isn't really all that Christmassy. With the exception of some cartoons and a holiday shopping guide, the only holiday-themed feature is this one involving a space alien dominatrix who ties women up and makes them piss on her at Christmastime. Your only clue that this is meant to be a festive holiday scenario is the title, "Pees on Earth", and captions like "Elena's holiday spirit erupts into an orgy of giving...head, that is." The sci-fi fetish gear is pretty cool-looking, especially the raygun/vibrators hooked to the rubbermaid's chest, and her shiny black gloves with red nails on the fingers.
I'm still not sure who this was meant to appeal to. It seems overly elaborate and weird and a little off-putting, which I think was a recurring thing with this magazine in the late '90s. Going through some of the scanned issues on the Internet Archive, I found mummy sex and garden fairies taking dick from grasshoppers and bees and shit. This issue also features a woman sliding a rapier blade between her labia, which makes me feel really fucking weird when I look at it. It does not make me feel Christmassy, and it does not make me want to jack off.
METAL EDGE Magazine, January 2002
When I was first getting into music in junior high school, magazines were one of the main ways I'd learn about artists I was interested in. METAL EDGE is one I remember reading in the magazine aisle pretty regular, hanging on every word of a Rob Zombie or Till Lindemann interview, or just trying to find out what opinions I should have. The bands featured in this magazine tended to have the edgy, anti-mainstream attitudes you'd expect from extreme metal acts, but after 9/11, for a brief period of time, even these assholes had to wave the flag.
In this "SPECIAL COLLECTOR'S ISSUE" of METAL EDGE, published just weeks after 9/11, you can see how shocked and confused the entire culture was in the weeks after the attacks. Negativity was cancelled. People who named themselves after diseases and acted out a stylized form of mental illness on stage for their jobs were talking about healing and national unity. Turn to the UNITED WE STAND article to witness a bunch of nu-metal goofuses with lip rings, jorts, and braided goatees standing together to suck America's dick. The only ones I can think of that refused to engage in this kind of behavior at the time were GWAR.
I have an embarrassing memory related to this magazine. I was reading this issue in our local Books-A-Million, and when I read the statement given by members of Static X, one of my favorite bands, I saw psycho-fascist revenge talk even my dad could agree with. "We will never be defeated. Hail our fellow Americans who lost their lives, kill the terrorists... Hail and kill," said Tripp Eisen, their guitarist at the time. I brought the magazine over to my dad and proudly showed him this quote, like, "See, daddy? The music I listen to isn't so bad!" It was Daddy Approved.
Learn to Master the INTERNET
This Video Professor tape from 1996 has a lot of '90s Educational Video Aesthetic appeal, with crude 3-D rendered objects rotating and flying at the screen and very literal representations of the "information superhighway" metaphor, but it's mainly interesting now for its focus on long-dead online services. It starts with an introduction to Prodigy, which was already practically forgotten by the time I started playing around with computers. AOL had all the brand-name recognition at that point, with their free trial CDs coming in the mail on a regular basis, but I never used it (except for the time I accidentally installed it off a computer game disc that came in a box of Captain Crunch--sneaky fuckers).
Prodigy, though, I wasn't even aware of until recently, when I saw a mention of their proprietary Web browser and personal Web page hosting for users. This got me interested in Prodigy as an online service, but it's kind of hard to find any documentation of what it actually looked and felt like to use it. That's why this video was such a nice find.
Seeing the Video Professor guide his beautiful young "student assistant" Suzanne through the Prodigy user interface and search through the list of bulletin boards and chat rooms gives an interesting picture of what Being Online was like back before the Web was ubiquitous. My favorite part comes at the 9:11 mark, when the list of forum topics onscreen clearly includes "ADULT ENTERTAINMENT" and "AUTOPSY PHOTOS", while the Video Professor goes on blandly explaining how to read and post messages. This shit has been about titties and the Faces of Death from the very beginning.
Hacked Rom Reviews on I-Mockery.com
There's nothing especially obscure about I-Mockery (tho it is essentially dead and unlikely to be updated any time in the future). It was part of the whole genre of internet humor sites coming out around the turn of the millennium, like Something Awful and X-Entertainment, which were mainly concerned with reviewing things that sucked. Shitty movies, shitty games, shitty pornography. But the hacked Nintendo roms featured on I-Mockery were something that really does belong to a different era.
Romhacking is obviously still around, but today the emphasis is on adding additional challenge to older games, or to improving them in some way. In the early 2000s, it was about penises, swastikas, and homophobic slurs.
Vandalizing classic video games by scribbling "KKK" or "FAG" over the sprites was apparently the limit of most hackers' ambitions, although some of them put in the extra effort and made something really atrocious. Attempting to describe anything that happens in Little Remo--The Child Abuser would probably result in my exile to a remote Alaskan penalpenile colony. Baby Maker is one I played quite a bit when I was younger. It's a Dig Dug hack where you inflate naked women with your dick until a baby pops out. My introduction to a lot of classic NES games was in their hacked form. I'd never even heard about emulation until I found the MegaCrap review on I-Mockery about 22 years ago and lost my shit laughing at "A VICIOUS ARMY OF GAYBOS IS BENT ON DESTROYING YOUR DICK!!" Maybe not the best way to experience MegaMan 5, but it got me pointed in the right direction.
I can't imagine anyone putting up with this shit today. Edgy internet humor based around trying to offend some notional homeroom teacher or hysterical Xian mom hasn't been replaced so much as it's just become completely unacceptable (outside of truly marginal communities of online weirdos). No great loss I suppose.
GIMP
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is free software that fills the void left by Photoshop when it went to an online-only subscription service. Anything you could do in Old Photoshop, you can do with the GIMP.
Windows 95 Emulator
It's Windows 95 in a window. Not really useful for anything except nostalgia-mongering, but it's neat. You can apparently load files using a virtual floppy drive, but I couldn't get it to work because I'm dumb.
FlexiMusic Composer
This is a strange piece of music composition software made in India. According to the site, it "provides fun and tempts you to the emotion of creating music, it let anyone to create music on their personal computer." It hasn't changed at all in over 15 years, but it still costs $20. A friend of mine started an electronic music project using this thing back in 2006. The weird audio artifacts that every instrument produces made the end product quite...unique. It sucked, but it sucked in an interesting way.
MidiEditor
A free midi file editing program that's nice and simple. The site includes a helpful manual.
SkiFree
The Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page is run by Chris Pirih, who created this simple Windows game in 1991. You can download a 32-bit version that will run on a modern Windows PC on his site, which also includes some interesting background information on the game's development as well as a sexy .gif image of two Abominable Snow Monsters mashing their stick-genetalia together.
WINDOWS93
An operating system in a browser tab, sort of like Windows 95 with a vaporwave aesthetic. It's loaded with more Easter eggs, gadgets, and loving detail than I have time to dig into, including a version of Wolfenstein 3-D with tech company logos in place of Nazi insignia, NES and Sega Master System emulators, a Flash player parody called Adobe Pizza Player with a library of shitty Newgrounds movies, joke versions of every classic Windows app...you will not run out of things to do on this site. It's the coolest thing I've seen on the internet in a long time.
Winamp
Inspired by a visit to the Winamp Skin Museum, I installed Winamp for the first time in about 20 years and downloaded a bunch of skins. It's impressive to me how much more "futuristic" the aesthetic of software and Web design was around the turn of the millennium, not to mention how much more emphasis was placed on customizing your desktop computer environment to make it your own. Now I can listen to my .mp3s using a cybernetic alien cockroach like the Worldwide Mad Deadly Communist Gangster Computer God intended.
Penis Man Eats Rape Man
The official site of PMERM, teh 1337357 kr3w around. This was one of my friend Gothic Gary's music projects back in 2002-2006. He managed to get most of the people he knew involved in some way, either as contributors or as the inspiration for songs. Now, almost two decades later, this shit is basically illegal. Rated Z for racial slurs, rape jokes, and ironic pedophilia. Listen at your peril.
Digital Hate
The ultimate cybergoth teenager's homepage. The guy who made it was a few years older than me and I mainly knew him by reputation as the one true goth at our highschool. He wore ultrawide jeans made of shiny insulation material and some kind of Gigeresque biomechanical insect carapace backpack. The Links page on his site includes the homepages of almost everyone I hung around with at the time, as well as links to sketchy sites where you could order drugs through the mail.
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