#newsgroup

[vim-flam]

[stuffedcrocodile]

The Oldest TTRPG Forum on the Net

Did you know there is an online forum for tabletop role-playing games that has been around since the late 70s, and which still is active and operating? Admittedly in a much diminished state than at it’s heyday. I don’t know if you ever heard the term Usenet before, and even if you did, if you don’t just connect it with data piracy. Because that’s what it is mostly used for nowadays. What it…

[cybercultnzicd]

SPECTRO-SCREEN, THE COMPUTERIZED PSYCHIC Computer technology using spectrum analysis to read, monitor and control subtle energy can now achieve more consistent results than the best psychic. Currently Spectro-Screen is offering specific services to screen prospective employees during the hiring process as well as to screen lease applicants for residential rental properties. The results are almost totally accurate, the only failure being that some questionable yet acceptable applicants are screened out. The program works equally well for use in all areas of business and personal environments, ranging from making money to gaining fame, winning recognition and improving one's love life. It works basically the same way as a prayer chain, psychic healer or magic spell, except that the results are more precise and consistent. Finally a machine has replaced human error in the arena of psychic phenomena. And naturally the cost is reduced as well. Spectro-Screen is open for business, but the owners are very selective about their clientele. They say they have all they can handle with their own personal programs, but they do take on additional clients. Reply for more information. jpgossett

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.paranormal/c/98KJZ2-aApk/m/63PIWoHTM4QJ

[oldwindowsicons]

Netscape - Newsgroups

[telesilla]

So something came up on Bluesky, a question:

legitimately why are you here (on social media)? i am asking myself the same (other than because of addiction).

And it’s kind of wild, because when I did the math, it is literally 30 years since a very cold night in January of ‘95 when I figured out how to venture from the safe and tame world of AOL out into the wilds of USENET. I spent several hours on a newsgroup dedicated to the works of one of my favorite fantasy authors from my teen years, having a discussion about magic and Christianity with a software engineer in Rotterdam and it was like, oh this is a new thing. I was seriously struggling in those days, figuring out my identity and also the mental illness was coming to the surface more and more, but I knew I’d found a new and important place.

In the last 30 years, I’ve experienced the best and worst of the Internet. I’ve started two relationships online that led to marriage—one disastrous and one happy—and I’ve been through countless flame wars and endless wanks. I have met some amazing people and, to paraphrase, some insufferable people who also met me. And I’ve written. 3m+ words of fiction and who knows how many words of just me talking to people and, sometimes, just yelling into the void. Before February of ‘95 I had never finished a story, because why bother? Writing on paper is hard for me and I only got my PC that Christmas and anyway, I’d told myself stories my whole life. But now…now, I had someone to share them with.

The Internet is younger than I am, but it fits into a long line of brilliant human inventions, from the spoken word, to writing, to printing, to instant communications like telegraphs and telephones, each one seemingly requiring faster and faster adoption. We’re still dealing with the ramifications of instantaneous communication and that was over 100 years ago. No one reading this will be alive when we are able to look back and see how the Internet and social media shaped us as a species.

It’s so easy to look at Elon throwing a Nazi salute and think, “the Internet was a mistake” but tbh, it’s too late for that. I’m sure at least one person looked at the violence and chaos of the Reformation and thought, goddam Gutenberg, this is all your fault. And idk, man, maybe I’m just a naive optimist, but right now, on a cold January night, when the world feels dark, Mongolian horse ranchers are bonding with USAmerican horse girls, and people are watching videos of snowball fights in New Orleans, and someone somewhere is coming out to their online friends using words they might not have had when I was born, and all around the world conversations are happening between people who would never meet face to face—so many flickers of light. Maybe, just maybe, the real Internet is the friends we made along the way.

Happy Internet Anniversary to me.

[vimbry-moved]

does bluesky have a slightly cheesy but harmless atmosphere in a way that makes it feel like a more liberal-leaning facebook in general, or am I just getting older and made this my sphere

[opendirectories]

[prospitianescapee]

Converting UTZOO-Wiseman Usenet Tapes to Website with PostgreSQL backend using Python 3.8

October 7, 2020 by joe0

Recently, I came across a resource that allowed me to download the entire collection of UTZOO NetNews Archive of the earliest USENET posts. These were essentially the earliest available discussions posted to the Internet by people working at various Universities who were already connected to the Internet. There were approximately 2.1 million posts in these archives created between Feb 1981 and June of 1991. This article describes the journey of converting those tapes into fully searchable PostgreSQL database and later also into the usenetarchives.com website.

[daemonhxckergrrl]

you want federated media ? a distributed network that's versatile and pseudo-anonymous and doesn't tie you down to a single experience ?

Usenet !!

[dreamy-conceit]

There's ALWAYS a means to revenge yourself if you have foresight and imagination.

— legume@subgenius.com, 'What I Learned In Boot Camp', posted to alt.slack on 30 April, 2000

[vim-flam]

[wolfie180g]

Newsgroups on yahoo. A kind of chatroom?? In like 1999 -2004 years or so.we make posts for others in the newsgroup for our fandoms. Its hard to describe. Chatrooms were also popular hangouts back then , around the time of myspace and livejournal

*for our purposes, a youtube account only counts if you’ve used it to post videos.

reblog for reach/bigger sample size!!

[vimbry-moved]

going through that artist's dA and giggling at how no one's online speech patterns have really changed that much in 21 years

[madlori]

On being an older fangirl

I was probably 10 years old when I first conceived of what was, looking back, fanfiction. Me and my best friend would lie in bed together on sleepovers and I'd make up stories about what happened after the end of our favorite book, "The Westing Game." She'd ask me for more stories, and I'd tell her more, inventing them as I went along. "Then what?" she'd say.

I was 14 when I went to my first convention. I had discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was 1987, and my youth pastor was a huge Trekkie. He took me to a one-day crappy Creation con, but it was amazing to me. I met Nichelle Nichols. My dad showed me the Trek movies. He and I watched TNG together.

When I went to college in 1991, my dad used to videotape TNG episodes onto VHS tapes and mail them to me, so I could keep watching (I didn't have TV in my dorm room).

By the time I was a senior, we had Trek watching parties in the dorm lounge, where the TV had cable. Star Trek: Voyager had started up, and I wrote a column about it for the college newspaper. I joined a mailing list about it, with people in it that I still know today.

I got my first computer that could go online in 1995. I was on newsgroups. I discovered Doctor Who. I went to Trek conventions where we still passed around fanzines containing fic and art and smutty K/S fan creations.

Then it was Harry Potter. Then there were websites. Then there was Geocities, where we could all make our own little spots. We organized them into webrings. We talked on newsgroups and mailing lists. There were fanfic archives. Then there was fanfiction.net.

Then...there was LiveJournal. And we could interact in entirely new ways. We could form communities, and debate things, and fight over canon, and get into ship wars. On LiveJournal, I met my best friend of 22 years. I was in her wedding. She's my sister of the heart (which is what she calls me).

Then there was Tumblr. And Twitter. And now there's Discord. But it's all the same.

I am the same.

I am still that little girl who made up fanfiction in her head to entertain her best friend. I am still the one who was amazed to find communities on the internet - which was so new, so raw, so uncommodified - where others like me could meet. I found there people to meet in real life.

I am still that twentysomething going to her first major convention, being told that someone loved my fic, being asked about my writing process.

I am still that thirtysomething watching something I wrote blow up. Seeing friends from other fandoms find me in new ones, finding them there, too. Forgetting which fandom I know someone from, because I've known them for twenty years.

I still know some of the people who created those early websites, those mailing lists, those archives. I still meet people in new fandoms who say "Oh, I read your fic in [fandom] fifteen years ago!" There's no feeling quite like having someone remember something you wrote for that long. Or meeting someone whose fic meant a lot to YOU, or who you talked with on rec.arts.drwho.creative in 1997.

Aging in fandom is a gift. Being middle-aged in fandom is a joy. Having people who still read what I write and ask "Then what?" is a blessing.

It breaks my heart that so many people see it as something to be ashamed of, when it is one of my life's greatest gifts.

[ramavoite]

Okay but this all makes so much sense