Net.Weirdness: Music to my gears, er pipes ..?

We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of the dreams.

IUMA, 1996

Chaos Control: Electronic Music E-zine
"Really cool e-zine about the latest in electronic music (industrial, techno, ambient). Runs the gamut."
FTP
Still online? No longer a Well-hosted FTP resource, the Chaos Control Digizine lives on!

Delta Snake Blues News
"Down and dirty, lost and lonely. Blue news you can use."
Still online? No, but here's an archive from two decades ago.
Still remembered? Yes, helpfully included in this [dated] list of Blues Links.

Girl Band Guide
E-mail
"Grrrrrllll bands galore. The latest scoop on your fave female bands."
Still online? No, the email address is lost to time, beyond the handbook. Fortunately, the internet is a pretty big place. And depending on what type or style of girl/ grrl band you want to know about, there's probably a website or forum for them. Wikipedia has a few starting points, on girl groups and riot grrls, for starters. And another snapshot in time, Billboard's 20 All-Female Bands You Need To Know from 2015.

HardC.O.R.E. Rap/Hip-Hop List
Mailing List
"Down with dwarner at the HardC.O.R.E hip hop list. Send a message and ask to subscribe."
Still online? No, but ...
Still remembered? Yes, in A blast from the past: HardC.O.R.E. 1994, a Google Groups mirror or archive of a lengthy post in 1998.

Punk-rock!
Mailing List
"Arrghhhhh! Punk's Not Dead! (it's only an animated corpse). Anyway, angst and anger are still spoken here and you can be sure that this list isn't gonna be coopted by the media, you arsehole!"
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Yes, briefly on this messy GEN Wiki page, which notes that there were "crosspostings from there on anarchy-list." It's also mentioned a few times in Maximum Rocknroll No. 140 from 1995. Update: MRR ceased its print publications in 2019, but lives on as a web-only publication, now explicitly fighting white supremacy in punk, because it's 2020 and this is the present fight we face.

Internet Underground Music Archive
Web
"A new darling of the media and a really cool way to wow your unwired friends, the Internet Underground Music Archive features audio clips bios, and pictures from about a zillion underground bands. Keep close to the edge."
Still online? Not the way it used to be, but thanks to a few partnered archiving efforts, IUMA is back online.

Net.Weirdness: MOOs and MUDs and MUSH, oh my!

"MOOs and MUDs bill themselves as 'text based virtual realities.' Whatever they are, they're great places to kill time."

Cleaned up cover of the book by Andrew Busey

First, some definitions: MUD: Multi-User Dungeon; MOO: MUD, object-oriented; MUSH: Muti-User Shared Hallucination, though the H is also spelled out as Hack, Habitat, and Holodeck. They started as text-based only, then things advanced and it got graphical.

LambdaMoo
Still online? No, this former Xerox-hosted service isn't still available to telnet into.
Still remembered? Yes, in the Virtual Community Center!

MediaMoo
Still online? No, don't try telnetting into MIT's service.
Still remembered? Yes! MIT still hosts this article from 1995!

TrippyMUSH
Still online? No, another dead end.
Still remembered? Yes, we're 3 for 3! High Weirdness by E-Mail circa 1995 is archived, with a couple other links

MUD/MOO/MUSH lists and links
Still online? It's dead and gone.
Still remembered? Maybe? This list of links, last updated May 1, 1998, includes an even then-dead Actlab UTexas link. But good news! 9 of the 11 links STILL WORK! MUD isn't dead!

Net.Weirdness: IRC, Life Assistance, and Mind Expansion

Log on, check in, and drop out. In other words, it's Internet Relay Chat, a question-and-answer email service, and mind-bending ... stuff!

Source: WikiHow -- How to Chat Online

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

"You wanna chat: you yearn to chat. If strangers keep turning down your talk requests, maybe what you need is a ride on the IRC (Internet Relay Chat). But what if your stiff-o weenie systems
administrator doesn't have an IRC client installed? Bummer. Here's some public clients you can telnet to..."
Telnet
Those servers may not still be online, but there are some browser-based IRC clients (Duck Duck Go search), if you want to see what's the fuss. Also, there are thousands of users on hundreds of servers to this day. IRC ain't dead!


Life Assistance

The Oracle
E-mail
"All of your questions answered—for a price. In return for your problems being solved, you must answer someone else's question in return. If you don't return the favor, you'll still probably get your answer, but you'll be plagued by horrible facial boils and hourly hard drive crashes until you submit."
Still online? YES! YES IT IS! Well, you can't email that old address, but The (Internet, or Usenet) Oracle lives on! If you aren't sure about groveling before The Oracle in hopes of an answer to your question, you can browse past digests.


Mind Expansion

Psychology software
FTP
"Mucho software written by real doctors with real scientific applications. A good place to start looking for software to mess with your wetware."
Still online? Nope.
Still remembered? Yes, and then some! Check out this list of 68 [dated] resources and [dead] links to Psychology Software Sites! I'll dig into those links later, and see if I can actually dig up some retro psych software.

MindVirus
Email and FTP
"An INCREDIBLE multimedia extravaganza. Part toy, part interactive movie, part game, part digital brain wrecker. MindVirus is well worth the time to track down and download."
Still online? No, and it looks like it's faded from the internet! It might have become Mindflux, "Australia's premiere virtual-reality distributor," or maybe something by the same folks. Or maybe there's just some key word overlap.

FNORD-L
Mailing list
"They might not tell you what fnord means, but if you have to ask, you don't belong here. Warped discussions by equally warped minds."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Somewhat, in this summary of the listserv. It's a pretty short summary, though.

Homebrewing List
Mailing list and FTP
"Sometimes mind expansion and smart drugs need to be tempered by some good or fashioned dumb drugs, like beer. Do it yourself!"
Still online? No, but yes. The FTP is no more, but the Home Brew Digest lives on as a website, which has an extensive archive, and you can still sign up for daily emails.

Weirdness
FTP
"Strange and wonderful stuff on everything from the Net to DMT elves, Extropians to quantum physics."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Sort of, in this [old] list of FTPs, and here in an archive of The High Weirdness.