Get off my lawn!
This is going to be one of those articles where I rant about how things used to be so much better. The old heads here will all nod along with me and the kidz will all wonder what the heck I am talking about.
In the days of Yore, the web was a wonderful and weird place. Anyone could throw up some basic html and have a site to fly their freak flag from in minutes. The sites were all pretty rudimentary because the web was still just a bunch of hypertext documents. Apps and interactivity were just a gleam in web developers’ eyes.
There were no behemoth gated gardens like Facebook to make sure that the sociopaths and weirdos were kept away from the paying customers. The sites being surfed were all unique (and sometimes included seizure inducing use of the <blink> tag).
In the late ‘90s and ‘00s, portals were just getting started. People would create a semi-dynamic site that linked to things that the site owner thought were cool. The word “curate” hadn’t even been invented by marketers yet. The first portals were all called “Cool Car Site of the Day” or just “Cool Site of the Day”.
Street cred back then was built by finding strange and disgusting sites and sharing them with your buddies via email (the Old Timers printed out sites and faxed them to their dinosaur friends). It took some time to find these sites.
Into this world came the wonderful Cruel.com site. Rogers Cadenhead, the site creator, gave an interview where he admitted that he started it as a poke in the eye to all the lame “Cool Site of the Day” portals. After bit, though, he was inundated by submissions and the site took on a life of its own.
When I was a working stiff, it was THE site I would visit during my morning cup of coffee. (There were no such things as corporate network filters back then. As long as you didn’t have pr0n displayed on your big 15” CRT monitor you were fine). Almost every day Cruel.com had a link to some site that was so silly, cynical or twisted that I just had to share it. People started adding “savant” to what they usually called me because I was finding and sharing these sites.
The site folded sometime in the early ‘10s. Probably because those corporate network filters started to get traction. I’m sure that the rise of Facebook and other corporate sites also ate into his site viewership.
I recently went to the Wayback Machine to find a cruel.com link from Yore and remembered how great it was. Since Glibs need content, I thought that a series of links from Cruel.com would be a great Blast from the Past. So without further ado, here are some great Old Timey Links:
You Always Hurt the One You Love
A bunch of user stories about self pleasure gone wrong. An example:
Brillo Boy
I am a 24/7 male sex slave for Mistress Linda. She does not allow me to have sex with her. My main duties are to allow her to inflict pain on me. She allows me to masturbate only when she is present and she is sitting on my face.
About a month ago, Mistress Linda was very mad with me, as I did not finish washing the dishes. She tied me up and really slapped and whipped my penis. She then got a brillo pad, lubricated my ass well, and inserted this wire thing up my ass. It was very painful.
Next, she got this injector thing and some Tabasco sauce. She sucked up some of it into this injector, and then proceeded to inject it into the tip of my penis. It was the most painful thing, I begged her to stop. She just laughed and then used a penis pump on me.
She then tried to pull out the brillo pad. But it was stuck.
Linda took me to the hospital, where they removed it. They called the police. I did not press any charges and told them it was mutual. The doctors told us to be careful
A very helpful site where Dr. Lazerus (who has started several successful cults) is kind enough to offer advice to up and coming cult leaders. Why re-invent the wheel?
What are some of the things that keep your people from achieving enlightenment quickly, easily and permanently? Sexual desire has to be right up there. This can be a touchy subject. I’ll be quite frank: sex can be very useful for binding people to your Revelations and Visions, but can also tear your subjects away from You and Your Inspiration.
How can you control these animal urges–not only in yourself, but in your followers as well?
The answer is surprisingly simple. Castrate everyone, except, perhaps, yourself.
Before you start thinking every link on Cruel.com goes to some twisted sex site, let me assure you that some of them also go to sites that expound on cultural things like French cuisine.
You can’t really do this at home. But the canard à la rouennaise or duck in blood sauce is an antique, spectacular, barbaric and sophisticated recipe you need to see at least once in your life.
I present it here because to me it’s the most spectacular recipe of the classical French repertoire. The reason you can’t do it at home is the Presse à Canard, a duck crusher that you would pay thousands of dollars if only you could find one for sale.
Those links are all from a single day that I randomly picked!
We’ve lost our way when it comes to the web. We shouldn’t be confined to the safe, homogenic sites that we see today. It should go back to the Strange coding for the Twisted. Let’s go back to being cruel to each other.
Pretty sure I could make a duck crusher.
A relevant first!
*Thrusts hips to imaginary music
Are the thrusting hips an integral part of your duck crusher?
I could make that part of it.
They killed the internet to make normie women or AWFL’s comfortable.
We must protect our white women was supplanted by won’t you think of the children? as the rallying cry of the midwits.
White women are (mostly) children.
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/matfer-bourgeat-612205-brass-duck-lobster-press/980612205.html
Can you imagine the tariff on that bad boy?
I could make that with stuff from the hardware store and Harbor Freight. Drill powered!
ZWEEEEEEEE!
*Sound of duck crushing
You’d better put some reduction gearing in there.
I figure a big threaded rod would turn slow enough to crush down with a lot of force. And leave the cordless drill on low setting.
I have a fruit press that has a 1/2 hp motor on it, can’t be that different.
We’ve lost our way when it comes to the web. We shouldn’t be confined to the safe, homogenic sites that we see today. It should go back to the Strange coding for the Twisted. Let’s go back to being cruel to each other.
Forget the web. Go back to BBSs.
using TCP by Carrier Pigeon.
I thought this was a BBS
Big Beautiful Site.
RJ:
Eider do it or don’t. There is no try
Doh! This was supposed to be a reply to RJ’s duck squashing machine above.
If I do, it will become a post.
I’m not so nostalgic for the old web.
Are there problems with the current web? Yes.
Are these problems worse than the loss in functionality by rolling back? No.
We should move forward to a new-new web with more functionality and less censorship.
Let’s be honest – the web sucked back then.
Rose-colored glasses for one or two sites one might have liked in one’s youth doesn’t change that.
Slow loading and terrible design. At the time I went to a class and they taught that an entire web page should be under 76k.
In College Web Design class the rule was “If a page doesn’t load in four seconds, you lose the user.”
I wish that standard stuck around… 😒
Yes, 4 seconds! I think the 76k came from the typical download speed at the time. Same thing really.
Slow loading and terrible design
But enough about today’s dynamic page loading sites.
The web is like everything else. In the beginning everything has to be crafted/built by hand.
As things progress, people start building basic components that remove a lot of the drudgery. That is both good and bad. Good because no more drudgery. Bad because it starts locking you into things.
Another drawback is that new comers don’t understand the basics anymore. The frameworks, the components and the tooling all are black holes of knowledge. Sure they can focus more on the content of the site, but they can also miss things because they don’t understand the basics.
For example, I actually bought this book: Web Client Programming With Perl
At the time it was pretty interesting in describing how the http protocol worked. I didn’t use it to build my own browser, but it did help me understand a lot of how things could be built using the http protocol.
The web really took off because a) the http protocol was flexible enough that it could be used in a lot of ways that no one ever envisioned and b) pr0n.
I was annoyed when I became a Sysadmin because the developers had no concept of resource management and churned out slop code to meat unrealistic demands and deadlines that ran like shit then whined at us because they overtaxed the servers.
UCS:
At one job, I moved from writing tools for developers to a role where I did a lot of application support in production.
One of my clients was a massive utility billing application. I had to monitor all the batch jobs and make sure the system was always up and running.
That job had a major impact on my coding habits. Like you said, it opened my eyes to things like resource management that I had never really thought about before. I also became a zealot about commenting in code and meaningful logging.
Being forced to troubleshoot at 3 am will do that to a guy.
On the topic of comments, I’ve run into plenty of work from consultants who went to the same school of unnecessary obfuscation where their scripts were built in an insane way to try to ensure that they would be hired back for maintenance and updates.
I took great pride in re-writing these scripts in clear, concise, and well-commented formats because I knew I would have to go back to it later and future me would be grateful for the in-script documentation.
The time spent ripping out the needlessly convoluted version was worth it in future effort savings.
One of my closer coworkers who departed a few weeks ago was a master of that shit.
Now it’s all on me & I don’t have a fucking clue about most of it.
*arranges dart board and darts for Rhywun*
“…(new developers) churned out slop code to *meat* unrealistic demands…”
— Not sure if intended pun, or just gorgeously delivered. (Both!)
@Evan – I’m afraid it was a typo.
I don’t even come close to y’all’s level of expertise, but I do feel your pain when I am asked to fix an ebook shat out by Adobe InDesign.
“I don’t fix. I start from scratch. Send me your text doc.”
“I don’t have it. I just have the PDF the printer made.”
“Send me that, then.”
COULD I unzip an EPUB and extract the text? Sure. Do I want to wade through an that disgusting markup? No, I do not.
*brushes fingertips on collar*
I wrote the first website for Norf Dakoda State University.
There wasn’t much to but there was a small link in one corner to the porn archives at Delft University in Holland.
Delft?
Dutch Elder Likely to Fuck in Tulips?
https://www.tudelft.nl/en/
🤢🤮
It was wild, wild west back then, UCS. I still maintain that Pamala Andersen did more to propagate the internet than Tim Berners-Lee.
/the people want tits
I’m no scientician but that sounds right to me.
The famous Delft Blue (balls)
You, sir, have earned the Order of the Q.
Having seen a clip on one of the late Tony Bourdain’s shows, I made a point to go to Otto’s the last time I was in London to give it a try.
I made two (well, three) mistakes:
1) The duck, from some specialty French farm, is huge. Easily the size of a typical goose
2) I was on my last day of a cruise — with the drinks package — the night before, and was still hungover and had little appetite
2a) My London hotel didn’t have a refrigerator in the room, so the pieces I took home went to waste
I’d like to give it another try, only sober and with lobster instead of duck this time, but the wife won’t agree, and it *is* shockingly expensive now.
I originally thought the web was a fad, like Rubic’s Cube and it would go away. Rubic’s Cube is not seen much these days, see?. It’s leading the way and one day we’ll wake up and the internet will be history, overcome by events.
I was born in ’87, bro in ’81, and got to experience the internet’s ‘mainstream use’ as a 1st Gen yute. We got our first computer in ’95, Windows 3.1, as more affluent folk got a pretty-big upgrade to Windows 95. Hand-me-down computing win.
My first good porn site was, no joke, openvaginas.net (coulda been .com, don’t remember). God, it was gold. Fakes (reals?) of Gillian Anderson were present, but much much more. I did get in semi-trouble when Matt stayed the night, when I was 11 or so, and cuz the office (w computer) was ‘master’ bedroom adjacent, I took him to see some openvaginas, and while we didn’t get caught-caught, we were caught. I think we were just told to get out and go to bed. I wasn’t actively punished for it, otherwise. (They remember, tho only rarely mention it with poking humor.)
I grew up *with* the internet. I obviously wasn’t one of the scrappers out finding their zones and learning, talking, and creating their own. I’m glad they, and esp the Glibs PTB, for growing up with it in *that* way.
Oddities of my generation: I’d say we’re the first to grow up *knowing* every system was going to change and adapt into itself again. Growing up in the exponential curve of growth, knowing *that’s* how she goes. Change used to be a monumental, generational thing. Change has evolved into seasonal cycles of change. Come Spring there’ll be another iPhone. *shrug*
Colin had a Commodore in the late 80s, methinks. He’s been programming since high school. He once sincerely told me that he sometimes dreams in code, like a problem he had and couldn’t figure out – and in his dream he ‘worked’ it out – and in the morning he found his subliminal was correct.
Fascinating, odd creature, he.
Lots and lots of programming problems have been solved in a developer’s dreams.
Happened to me several times.
Lots of acquaintances have had similar stories.
I have also repaired cars using this method.
That is absolutely fascinating.
I hardly ever dream, so that’s a truth, but I never ‘write’ in my dreams come up with a great lede the next day. I’m also a drummer, but I’ve never dreamed up grooves, or such.
We’re a fascinating species. I’m legit envious of y’all, tho I do things others don’t.
Speaking of, I’ll try to paste a pic in here. It’s my second fave of all time, from Hanoi, 2018. Anyone can *snap* pics but ya gotta find yourself in the right place, and that takes hundreds of alleys before you end up in the right one.
(May not work. So it goes.)
I don’t think I’ve dreamt a solution, but that stage between sleep and wakefulness, especially on the way towards sleep, is especially effective at coming up with solutions that eluded me during the day. Much fewer distractions, and no pressure to actually do anything, so the brain finally just works.
I used to troll AOL chatrooms and get people to send me nudes and never send any back.
They’d get really mad. I’m sure some were fake, but some were real.
That was you? I showed you my little green grouch and you ghosted me!
If your grouch is green, I can’t blame anyone for ghosting you.
See a doctor!
My purported father, who never once Firsted in his life, found my stash and slapped me upside the head multiple times.
In these scenarios, you were never first.
A Firster stole your girlfriend and made you watch, didn’t he?
Your mom’s not my girlfriend.
Did you Send 2 Receive, Pioneer? Were you a S2R fool?
Pulllleeeeeeeeeaze!
You young heads need to check yourselves. I remember having to download multiple files from Usenet, then stitch them together with one program and finally view the pr0nographic image with yet another program.
Browser? Pffft. We didn’t need no stinking browser!
Partial credit will be given to anyone who had to sit patiently as the nudie pic filled in one line at a time as their modem whirred in the background.
For the All Time street cred, I can tell you that in Junior High we got a fancy new computer room with TWO Apple 2Es and a terminal that connected to a statewide time share main frame. There were files (Purge8.txt, Purge9.txt and Purge10.txt) that were on the main frame. Those files were ascii art of nude girls. Obviously we plotted and plotted how to get access to the computer room when there was no adult monitor so we could print those off.
Oh, look at who’s showing off his rich kid privilege.
You know how much that kind of hardware cost? We po kids could only dream of stealing ASCII Erotica.
UCS:
We weren’t poor, but all that hardware was part of the new Junior High that the town paid for. My parents definitely weren’t shelling out the $200 for the Tandy computer that was advertised in the back of Omni magazine.
Only the hoity suburbs got good school buildings. We city kids got run down prison blocks.
ASCII erotica :
8===D @#
UCS:
Our “suburb” was another town 6 miles down the road. They had their own school.
Yay! I get partial credit!
My introduction to the net was through WebTV.
Me trying to download a tig ol bitty picture: “Why do people love this thing? It takes forever.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
In the late 90’s we had a guy in our office who could somehow find the most disturbing porn sites. Horse-sex.com, Dog-sex.com, stuff like that. He was gifted in a very sick way.
Early 2000’s was when I had my consulting business. I built a lot of web sites, a lot by hand but I also liked Macromedia products like Dreamweaver. Their products were awesome until Adobe bought them. Then they sucked. I think I was self employed for 5 years, then I decided my wife and kids should probably have health insurance, so I got a full time job. And now I’m sad writing about that.
TOK:
At our start up in the ’00s we had a game where we would take any noun and add sex.com to it to see if a site would pop up. You got 100 points if one existed. You got 50 points if there was no site, but the domain was registered. There was always a lot of excitement if we ran across a word that wasn’t registered and there was no site.
* I hate Adobe for killing Macromedia products after buying them.
** I hate Macromedia for buying Cold Fusion from Allaire (which resulted in Adobe killing CF)
STEVE SMITH FIND CREDIT CARD. REGISTER SASQUATCHSEX.COM.
Jeebus I remember playing around with that stuff about a thousand years ago. My career wound up going in a completely different direction.
STEVE SMITH:
Your antics have set a bad example for impressionable forest youth
I know a company that was building Cold Fusion websites as recently as 5 years ago. For all I know they still are.
About 20 years ago I was working for a data center, and we had one customer who leased a couple of managed servers from us for their porn business. We were running their DNS as well, and we didn’t have a web portal or anything where they could make their own updates, so they would have to open a ticket which would get manually processed by someone in the NOC.
So every couple of weeks they’d send in a ticket asking for about 30 or 40 new domains to be pointed to their servers, and they were pretty much all of the form “whatever-bizarre-sex-act-is-trending-on-urban-dictionary-xxx.com”. So, dirty-sanchez-xxx.com, angry-dragon-xxx.com, cleveland-steamer-xxx.com, etc.
J.
LOL that is hilarious
I had a cow-orker who tested every new projector/monitor/display we purchased with a Tiajuana donkey show.
Adobe needs to go get fucked in the ass by a thousand barbed penises without lube.
Javascript for Dinosaurs
A pretty good Get Off My Lawn screed.
Javascript is terrible and that is just the tip of an iceberg of the whole landscape of web programming that is a titanic garbage dump of suck.
I am *so* glad my interests led me in a different direction.
Javascript isn’t inherently bad. It is just abused in so many ways that it seems bad.
To be fair, it is much better than it used to be. The Bad Old Days had browsers all implementing JS differently so you had to hack your way around things based on browser type.
Now the major pain in the ass is the way so many things are packaged that you become a slave to down stream dependencies. You end up having to upgrade package A, but wait to do that you also need to update package B. None of the updates are actually germane to your code, but good luck trying to build your app without updating.
It is such a dumpster truck of suck that every year or so I see another framework coming out trying to make web programming not suck so hard but none of them gain any traction because IMHO the fundamentals from the top on down are completely broken.
If somebody had told me in 1990 that designing a successful website in the 21st century would require intimate knowledge of five or six different languages I would have laughed in their face at the ridiculous over-engineering.
Nice bit of shade thrown at AI
The damn spybot is costing them money? I hope they lose 10x as much when it’s an AI.
But what’s the scalable solution for the cloud compute power needed to drive the mystery device?
Nuclear. Maybe paired with optical neural networks. The jury is still out on the latter.
Remembering the original Darwin awards web site fondly.
Trying to code on a Commodore 64 and or an Apple II E and seeing hours or work result in a HDG picture was disappointing.
My last semester of high school, my physics teacher was all about computers and somehow got us a Commodore 64. He taught all 3-4 of us (I think) the if-then logic and set us to programming something.
My assignment was to program it to play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which I did gleefully and with much swearing. I got an A.
That August, I went to college and we were to write our papers on the IBMs in the common rooms in our dorm cafeteria building.
The girl who lived down the hall from me had an Apple IIe she let me use from time to time (mostly to write my cousin’s papers on).
That was in 1986. It was just such an easy slide right on down into the hedonism of if-then.
lol I was still typing college papers on an electric typewriter in 1993.
I didn’t have access to a computer until the tail end of the 90s.
I went to BYU and the church is nothing if not completely on board with cutting-edge technology.
Anything to get all those dead people baptized by proxy (not kidding and not poking fun) and disseminating information as fast as possible.
But you know, I used PCs and Macs interchangeably for years before I realized they were two different products. Apple, school. IBM, work. Since I worked all the way through college……
It was about 2000 when I started thinking about installing Linux. Obvs, never got around to it.
Lots wrong with Old Web. Lots right with it, too.
Lots pretty good about New Web. Lots awful about it, too.
I only used AOL if I forgot to pay my dial-up bill.
I FLUVED IRC and Usenet.
I loved the webrings and whatnot.
My son likes to shitpost. Well, hell, who doesn’t? Don’t blame the kid for that, but FUUUUUUCKKKKK don’t do it under your real name. How is it we who floated seamlessly between analog and digital knew this instinctively, but even when I pounded it into my newborns’ heads that you NEVER put your stats online, and I never said their names and I almost NEVER put their pictures online, they do not give two shits. Like, what don’t you get about this is dangerous to you personally and to your future livelihood????
Anyway, I HAD TO TELL XY to stop shitposting with his real name. Dude, get a moniker that can’t be tracked back to you and go troll 4Chan, FFS. 🙄
I thought the people who came after us were supposed to be s00per smart about computers and blow GenX out of the water.
Narrator: They are not.
Increasingly I believe that this has always been a fantasy.
Best behave as if everything you say and do is being tracked in real time. Because it probably is.
Well, back then, Reddit didn’t exist. Now, everybody on Reddit thinks they’re Jessica Fletcher. And they’re right.
Yes and no. For the average internet user, they are too insignificant for anyone with real ability to dox them to do so. Or anyone with the ability to track them to care to do so.
So the basic precautions to remain anonymous aren’t pointless for most of us. But yea, if you get big enough, expecting to remain hidden behind a screen name becomes a pointless exercise.
Yep.
Which is why i shit post (or did) with my real name and face.
I never put my kids pics online when Injad social
Media. Never named them either. Likely part of why my father ignores his grandchildren. He spams FB with pics of his wife’s grandkids but has no authorization to share pics of my kids.
I see putting your kids’ lives on the internet, complete with faces and names, as egregious as using their SSNs to take loans out in their name.
I mean, yeah, every family’s got a pic of a naked little boy running around fresh out of the bathtub, but you didn’t SHOW it to anybody, FFS.
So glad I grew up in a time when all my worst moments weren’t immortalized in electrons for anybody to find.
The worst thing are women who post pictures of their kids on dating sites. Like what the fuck is wrong with you you dumb whore?
It’s so prevalent that we went to the pool last summer and ran into a guy my wife and I both knew from college. He stared at my daughter and I, ‘hey will, how’s it going?’
“I didn’t know you had a second kid?”
She was two at this time, “yeah pretty awesome, I dont put my kids on Facebook.”
Probably one of the reasons FB decided I was inauthentic. I did t feed their algorithm with pics of my kids.
Amateurs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Marriage_Market
Remember when Google would return what you searched for?
Amazon is as bad as they are now. Search with a specific part number and both Google and Amazon will return with something completely incorrect.
Well, they don’t make money selling you want you want. They make money selling you what their advertisers want. Especially if it’s got a better margin.
They lose money with returns for leading me away from the product I thought I was buying.
Enough people don’t.
Weird.
Daffy Duck has something to say about you and your duck crusher, your popeness.
Tonight’s music
https://youtu.be/kmmPFrkuPq0
We had a home cloud for a while. I’d put movies and music on it for everyone to download at will.
I don’t know how, when, why, where, but of the >10k songs on that fucker, XY tripped over the Moody Blues and STAYED THERE for a good year.
I do not want to hear the Moody Blues ever again in my life. I’m sad, because I loved them once.
Nice. A HS favorite.
Happy national pierogi day!
🤤✌🏼🌤️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4LdUQzCPPM
🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean, Ted’S., Teh Hype, Roat, and homey!
Morning.
Good morning, U! How are you today?
Still coughing up phlegm, it hurts, but my brain works.
*waves*
Good morning all.
https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/berks/glamping-is-coming-to-pennsylvania-s-state-parks/article_e48d51d5-d580-4e93-b04a-da59359bf692.html
No.
Agreed.
Other than the stupid portmanteau I see nothing wrong with it.
The idea of glamping makes me think of that NYT piece from a few weeks back about Disney parks turning into a plaything for the rich.
Not quite related, but I came across a thread on one of the Catskills forums which basically morphed into the theme, “how dare the locals speak ill of us enlightened city folk, but of course we get to keep shitting all over them and are virtuous for doing it”.
Class envy combined with a martyr complex isn’t a good look Teds’
So the NYC types should continue to get to be bigots unchallenged?
I get annoyed when city folk drive timid on our country roads. No shoulder is no reason to drive 20 under the speed limit. They’re not as annoying as people who cycle our country roads.
Kinda defeats the purpose but if people want to shell out dollars to stay in what amounts to a decent motel room, albeit in a tent, it’s no skin off my nose.
it’s a cheaper, less annoying version of RV camping.
suh’ fam
whats goody
TALL YOUNGSTOWN CANS!
Mornin’all!
Morning.