There are several outlets for extremely obsessive fans to vent their creativity, including fan fiction, fan art, and slash. Or you can follow the lead of these fans of the Dark Shadows series, and start re-enacting roles and episodes online in real-time chat.

Meeting regularly in an AOL chat room, they pick an episode or a setting, take on the roles of the show’s characters, and improv the dialogue. If that’s too mainstream for you, try combining two TV universes… Like, say, Dark Shadows meets Scooby Doo, Where Are You?

Continue reading “Dark Shadows Online Role-Playing” →

Congratulations to my good friend, Crazy Uncle Joe Utsler, for successfully impregnating his wife. Nice work, stud!

Courtesy of Matt Haughey, the best bootleg remix I’ve ever heard: Eminem goes ragtime (2.6 MB MP3).

Continue reading “The Eminem Rag” →

I updated my Dictionary Domain page, a list of all available com/org/net domains that are words in the English dictionary. As domain squatters slowly shrivel up and die, these domains are finally getting released back into the wild. The good .com domains are still scarce, but there’s plenty of great .org and .nets available. Some of my favorites from this round are below. (turd.org!)

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NetControl, some sort of old Greek magazine, cached thousands of random homepages between 1994 and 1997 and never took them offline. The result is a strange surfing experience, like randomly browsing the Wayback Archive for homepages.

If you like, you can skip their obfuscated navigation entirely and go straight to lists of the cached homepages (1, 2, 3, 4).

Like the Wayback Archive, it’s a great way to see old and ugly versions of popular sites. It’s also a great reminder of dead design trends, like “adjust your browser” notices, full-color backgrounds, rendered animations, giant imagemaps and splash screens, pages enhanced for Netscape Navigator 2.0 or optimized for 640×480.

Also, a CNNfn capture from July 1996, with the Dow up and Nasdaq at just over 1000. And graduate student Philip Greenspun and First Lady Hillary Clinton.

I went through and pulled out some of the best, so you won’t have to.

Continue reading “NetControl Archive” →