Truth and Beauty Bombs

parents always blamed viruses on us kids
when they got their first virus after we stopped using their computer
felt so smug

I remember reading bad webcomics
with at least fifty Internet Explorer windows open in each session, so that images would load in time to comfortably cycle through reading them

first time filling a 3 1/2" floppy with downloaded stuff

first time filling a crowded disk safe thing with floppies full of downloads and overspilling to the one i kept my own stuff in

splitting an archived file into 20 different 1.44 MB parts so i could save it as a collection of floppy disks.

i think this was a little bit after CD-RWs were available, but my disk drive was broken.

getting a CD writer for the first time

by which point i already had a laptop with a DVD drive

I remember the first time I saw a CD-R disc. It didn't have any kind of label on the top (meaning the top looked like a normal CD) so the guy sent a note explaining that the ink side goes on the bottom.

I had a collection of MIDI songs.

mid 1995, last week or so of grade 8
finagled access to a computer with a net connection in the library @ school
somehow i had internet access before other people in the school - maybe computer teacher in school knew i was a nerd or something?
logged on
asked a girl i liked (ALSO NAMED SUZANNE!! WHAT THE FUUUCK?!) what i should search for (i was trying to use my elite skills to impress) (note i spelled it elite because 1337 was not yet even a twinkle in our collective networked eye)
she suggested green day and i distinctly remember using webcrawler or some shit to look up green day/gain precious time with the object of my affection

I recall listening to a late night show on the college radio station, must have been sometime 1994 - 1996, but the show was called 31337. A caller called in once and asked what it meant, and the hosts answered that the numbers added up to 17 which was the year before a girl became legal. Then they scoffed at the caller and hung up on him.

So it was probably a thing even back in 1995 but you were just not elite enough to know about it. By the way, I was pretty glad when years later I finally figured out what the name of that radio show actually meant.

iirc 31337 dates back to the 80s at the latest

31337 actually predates the romanization "elite" that is only a crude orthographic representation of the ancient 1nd0-3ur0p34n

And, as you can see in the popular animated gif that shows the evolution of the Elitian alphabet, those characters are flipped versions of the earlier 55378008 script

First thing I remember is my friend making a Pokemon fansite on Angelfire

Where people could email him their pokemon teams, and then challenge each other to pokemon battles

Then my friend would declare a winner basically based entirely on figuring out what weaknesses and resistances each guy had.

I think that like five people actually joined, and he got one guy to make some original pokemon art that seemed very good at the time. It included gradients.

Second thing I remember was my friend being into hentai, and trying to get me into it.

Always "accidentally" typing the wrong url and going to something Sailor Moon or DBZ related.

The main image I remember is Goku fingerbanging Sailor Moon with just an incredibly intense expression on his face.

I remember thinking, "Dang, I don't see why people like internet porn so much, this is terrible."

~so naive~

Then the next thing I remember is both of those friends I just talked about hanging out in an IRC roleplaying thing where one of them (the pokemon guy) actually roleplayed as a vampire named Alucard.

And then the other (hentai) guy roleplayed as I don't know what, but he had tons of alts that the first guy didn't know about.

The first guy's character had a girlfriend on there, and then this other guy named Gantros shows up, and he's like, "Hey, I'm the last of my race, and I need you to help me repopulate my species."

And then he cybered with her a bunch of times, and the first guy got really mad and hated Gantros.

Then obviously Gantros turned out to be the other guy.

And then they got in a fight that culminated in one of them ruining the other's pokemon card collection by putting all of his cards in a pile out in the yard and stabbing them repeatedly with a pitchfork.

Then me and the hentai guy decided to troll the roleplaying IRC thing by introducing a race called the Happy Bubblemen and roleplaying very annoyingly.

And we made a website for the happy bubblemen and everything, with lots of pictures, and some original music and poetry about the bubblemen.

Then one day that bro showed me his latest additions to the site.

One of them was some character from DBZ nude with smiley faces over her nipples and crotch

The other was Lara Croft nude with an arrow pointing to her vag labeled "happy!"

And I was like, "What is your deal man?"

"This does not fit with the happy bubblemen at all!"

and he was like,

"Well, if we're going to have a website, it can't JUST be about the happy bubblemen."

That site was also on angelfire, by the way.

http://www.angelfire.com/sk2/happybubbleman/

Music links are now broken

downloading some xxx WADs for Doom ][

straight from the ftp

re unwinder: llph

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

I remember discovering hentai as the first porn I ever found. I was reading on that Pokémon board I mentioned earlier and people kept talking about hentai, but I had no idea what it was. I looked it up and, much to my surprise, I saw Mewtwo fucking Misty something fierce. I think this explains my current view of pornography, namely that I can't take that shit seriously and it's all pretty much just comedy to me.

Carnivàle

You should work Happy Bubblemen into UTC imho.

Probably will.

~~~ MODEM DIALLING NOISE ~~~

Unwinder, you neglected to mention that the friend you were collaborating on the website with was Safety Man.

"if you wanna boycott those dang craps of pine, buy the brown colored butt shaped air fresheners!"

I liked that sentence too