Net.Weirdness: Games/Hints/Cheats/Cracks and Generally Weird Stuff

Time for some wicked thrills! That's right, it's 1995 and you can read about video games online! Even get hints and cheats for free! But beware, they'll probably turn you into a cold-blooded killer.

Games/Hints/Cheats/Cracks

FTP sites
"Why beat your head against the screen in your quest to find out how to get past that next level? The answers are here, homey! Hints, cheats, cracks, you name it."
Still online? Ho-leey shee-it, YES! ftp://nic.funet.fi/pub/doc/games/solutions/ is STILL THERE! BUT ... the directories and files won't open there. OK, looks like a dead end. But, wait ...
Still remembered? YES! That site might be a no-go, but the University of Wisconsin Parkside FTP is offline, but the MSDOS/PC Games directory is archived!
Still needed? Depends on what you want. Cracking games isn't like it used to be, where you could do a little hexediting and break the copy protections, but Game FAQs is keeping up and current, saving you from having to call up 1-900-HOT-HINTS. My favorite part is that the ASCII art and layouts live on in 2020.

Apogee Game Site
FTP
"Shareware PC game extravaganza."
Still online? Nope.
Still remembered? Yes, fondly. Well, the games are. The old FTP? Not so much.


Generally Weird Stuff

The Site Which Must Not Be Named
FTP
"Underworld Industries FTP site o' weirdness. Too strange to even get a domain name, this site is only spoken of by its cryptic IP number. Check it out."
Still online? No. I think someone else had the IP in 1996, when I checked it out. Definitely not weirdness, either.
Still remembered? Yes, seen here in High Weirdness by Email from 1992 (?!) and it seems that Underworld Industries expanded into separate "nodes" (archived) in later years.

High Weirdness by E-mail List
FTP
"One of the masterpieces of Net publishing. If you like the list you're reading now, you'll love High Weirdness by E-mail."
Still online? No, sadly.
Still remembered? Yes! I previously linked version 1.1, and here's a copy of version 2.1, 38 pages of oddities that isn't dated. Well, the links are dated, but there's no date. You dig it, right? Anyway, this grew from High Weirdness by Mail, and later evolved into Hyper-Weirdness by Web, but that faded away before being archived. Luckily, the makers of Hyper-Weirdness re-posted some of that weirdness. Also, Rev. Stang shared more/ different/ other High Weirdness by Web.

More Weirdness 
FTP
"Truly demented. From Kibo to the Carbonist Manifesto, this is the site for some of the most mind-warping stuff you'll ever open up in your text editor."
Still online? No.
Still remembered? Somewhat. Here's the story behind Spies.com, "one of the first vanity domains in the world" (archived). If this seems familiar, it's because covered some of this before, under Alternative Media.

Net.Bozo Field Guide

Who's out there, poking away at devices, connected across and around the world via The Information Mine? Gareth Branwyn helpfully categorized 10 key categories of Net Bozos, with their attributes on handy front-and-back cards, so you could clip and review these, should you wish.

Three of card illustrations, over a hastily made vintage pattern,
sourced from a 1950's Franciscan Atomic Starburst Patterned plate

Are these bozos still found online? More or less:

• newbie: no longer needs AOL, and probably doesn't buy The official America Online Internet Guide, but they're still online, still falling for get rich quick scams, and this tag is still understood. "Still has a life offline. Can answer daily e-mail in one sitting." This kinda stings ;)
• knowbot: yeah, still prevalent, but definitely not by that name. "Internet expert" is probably a fitting tag/ put-down as anything. Instead of writing "read the fucking manual!" it's "do your own research!" or linking to LMGTFY.
• t.m.n.h. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Hacker): still around, and this tag would be understood, but the term "hacker" has been sullied by so many surly youth who download "hack packs" of pre-packaged tools that "hacker" is generally agreed to be someone who breaks into a system. Before this, the exploratory hackers of old tried to coin cracker for those who would maliciously break into systems.
• floodgater: this sounds more like sad, lonely people who thought the internet would be a connection to other people that they couldn't find offline. They still exist, still seeking someone to listen.
• crotch potato (AKA the erotic neurotic): less than a decade after the Handbook was published, the joke that the internet is for porn was set to music, with puppets. The need to have special software to decode images is so far behind us, but this isn't the only really dated bozo category. Yes, crotch potato is a fantastic tag and could be used much more, but it's so much easier to be access porn now than in 1995.
• techno shaman: I feel like Gareth was more tuned into or focused on certain corners of the internet, giving them greater representation than perhaps justifies a tag. Check out the old index to archive of alt.* newsgroups for an idea of what some people valued and stored. Still, this is another sign that the Happy Mutant Handbook was right up my alley.
• .sig the destroyer: Another reference that died shortly after the publication of this book. Signature blocks haven't completely gone away, and live on both in some forums, and emails. To be honest, I'm surprised that Kibo wasn't mentioned here.
• bitraker: like a muckraker, but on the internet, and they still exist. But instead of browsing through Usenet, The Well and AOL, they probably use Google Alerts to have new information about whatever beat they cover.
• techno hippie: "First colonists of cyberspace. Been around since the Homebrew days, when Whole Earth Review the bleeding-edge of cyberculture mags. Likes to listen the Dead while navigating c-space." This is another part of the history of the internet, with another focus on The WELL, and it references Hackers. But it also circles back to virtual conferences, which are a hot topic in 2020, for very different reasons that there were virtual conferences in 1995.
• net.spider: "takes pride in being everywhere on the Net at once." That's a lot harder now, but there are definitely sources for original content that gets spread elsewhere, and being the first to know is something some still take pride in now. It feels a bit like trying to be a Renaissance person now, when the are so many more topics to know, let alone master, than there 25 years ago. But the thing that irks me is the tag. One of the first internet indexers, or web crawlers, was renamed Spidey in 1995. In other words, human "net spiders" were already being replaced by bots by then. In 2019, 37.2% of all traffic on the internet last year wasn't human.

Updating this list of internet characters is on my to-do list, once I finish my review of the Happy Mutant Handbook. But up next, I'll look at the tech of these ten net bozos, and how you can block a bozo in 1995.