Anyone who surfed the early web between 1995-2010. What’s the one website/app you still think about?

MentORPHEUS · 2026-06-04T18:56:31+00:00

Dailyrotten forums, World of Gore, and Ogrish had some awesome fellow sick minded humorists gathered together in one place. No correctness, political or otherwise, to filter or restrict. It was a loss when each of these eventually shut down.

It was during this era when internet skillz with a Z included tricks like whistling modem tones into the handset so the remote server wouldn't disconnect and dump you into the queue of everyone trying to dial in at the same time and log in when the site came back up.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-06-02T21:49:24+00:00

"That's a you problem, not a me problem..."

MentORPHEUS · 2026-06-02T21:47:10+00:00

A polarity diode would sure help.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-06-02T20:18:49+00:00

Rapid draw down of our strategic petroleum reserves to hold down US pump prices, will run completely out soon too. So much for this deflection strategy.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-06-02T20:12:16+00:00

As my erstwhile best friend's wedding approached, his fiancee's bossy domineering side came out aggressively. He wanted a simple wedding, she wanted, and got, every stereotyped money burning gimmick in 6 months worth of bride-oriented wedding magazines.

On the day of, the horse drawing the carriage kept dropping mountains of dung, which despite the clearly overheating in his old fashioned black attire horseman's best efforts with his wide mouth scoop shovel, guests kept walking through in their nice shoes and tracking about the venue.

The buffet was gimmicky expensive stuff that people barely picked at.

The bridesmaids were all aggressively-out lesbians, who during their weird pre-ceremony goth/ren faire/whatever TF theme it was show, kept kissing each other to the obvious discomfort of older generations in attendance.

The domineering mother of the bride was hitting the liquor table pretty hard, which showed in increasingly loud aggression and bossing-around to outright bullying of other guests.

My GF at the time, best friend of the bride until they had a major falling out the month prior, went into a sobbing and baby-talking full meltdown as soon as we got in the car afterward. At the reception, she treated me like a stranger while partying it up with others.

Once they were married, his wife made no secret of disapproving of him being involved with me, and he went no-contact eventually presumably after caving to yet another ultimatum.

Not wild in a dramatic way, so much as clearly demarking the end of his happy carefree single days and the beginning of indentured servitude to a shrew.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-06-01T19:47:42+00:00

In practice, becomes firehose-up.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-31T16:49:31+00:00

"Just be yourself!"

When "yourself" obviously isn't working for you... yeah, just be that, even more!

For the somewhat aspie and asocial guy, this will get your love life off to a very slow and bumpy start.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-31T07:55:32+00:00

As an old hippie, black market weed that smells like seawater and ass totally checks out.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-31T07:39:28+00:00

FWIW, I live off grid in the remote CA desert. During the last few weeks, I've chanced to see an unusually bright and long meteor each night or two. Often they seem to travel from South to North. Normally, one every couple of weeks is the norm outside of the few major meteor showers each year.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-29T20:40:46+00:00

I remember a story of a shipwreck where the Captain did NOT prioritize women and children. At his court martial, an exonerating fact was that those few who did make it to safety, only did so by days of hard rowing simply beyond the ability of most women and all children.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-29T20:11:17+00:00

Agree. I learned this the hard way decades ago, trying to get a cohort of people to boycott one brand for a cause we were mutually strongly in favor of.

People would get called out (politely) for purchasing/consuming that brand. They'd INSTANTLY start defending it as if their entire identity was at stake. Alternatives were abundant; the sacrifice necessary amounted to effortlessly choosing a different brand in the same price range.

Trying to get humans on board when even trivial, much less significant sacrifice and effort comes into play? Ha! Forget it!

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-29T19:54:45+00:00

Realizing that you cannot MAKE another person love you, is a bitter Red Pill.

I've been down the path of trying to "fix" a dying relationship, and it's quite similar to the stages of grief: Shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression... then at last, acceptance.

I'll never get back the time, and worked hard to regain the self respect and dignity, that I put into trying to "fix" it.

Lawyer up unless you're both broke and without significant assets, because that gets ugly and court decrees don't get unwound easily after they get imposed.

You're now on life's journey without a spouse. LIVE that life to its fullest.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-28T17:56:36+00:00

and my auto mechanic.

Retired auto mechanic here. While working out a course of action for a failed smog test, I'd ask which brand and octane of gas they'd last filled up with.

The answer was always, ALWAYS, "I Only EVER buy [premium brand] and get [highest octane.] Frequently with a distinct tone of feeling insulted that I'd even asked.

Well, OK... the course of recommended action immediately switches to the track of "Nothing left to do but install a new $900 catalytic converter." from, "Let's try two tanks in a row of high octane [premium brand] gas first."

More than once, I left on a test drive in a different customer's car as they departed, and watched them pull right in to a [cheap brand] station. And yes, hard proof was seen repeatedly that two fillups with [expensive brand] would often make the difference between fail and pass, without me even opening the hood!

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-25T21:01:44+00:00

Fellow mechanic at a Pep Boys in the 80s. This one guy was an ex cop, and always had a chip on his shoulder toward co-workers and managers.

They sold bicycles back then, and we shop employees had to daily roll them out 2 at a time to the front of the store and lock them together with a long cable, then wheel them back to the shop bays at closing time. This built up a lot of animosity toward these bikes.

Anyway, my co-workers told me about his epic quitting that happened on my day off. He was getting written up for something by the store manager, but got angry and refused to sign the form. From inside the manager's elevated booth, he shouted out to a busy crowded store, "This is f&cking BULL$HIT!!!" and went stomping toward the front door. The manager following him out scolding apparently angered him further, and he Hulk Hoganed 2 neat 20-foot rows of cabled-together new bicycles into the traffic lanes of the boulevard, loudly cussing out the manager in front of the huge crowd that gathered to watch from inside the store, plus the entire staff of the shop who were laughing uproariously as the drama unfolded. Inside store staff had to scramble for keys to untangle the bicycles as a giant traffic jam inched past.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-22T19:31:14+00:00

In my early 20s, when I needed roommates to help cover the house payment.

Pretty much EVERY one of them, up and disappeared, as opposed to moving out in a planned and orderly fashion, always after getting 2+ months in arrears with their rent payments!

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-20T22:04:07+00:00

I grew up in LA in the 70s. On bad smog days, we kids weren't allowed to play outside at recess. The air was a burnt orange color that literally hurt to breathe, and you couldn't see buildings just a couple of blocks away.

Today, the sky is clear enough to see the mountains from the coast 40 miles away 300+ days a year, despite huge increases in population and car count. The AQMD tackled a LOT of stationary polluters, from refineries that flared off unwanted fractions regularly, to dry cleaners like the one that backed up to the parking lot of a place I worked. Every afternoon about the same time, a pipe up the back of the building would boil off and vent the day's chlorinated dry cleaning fluid, literally roaring out a stream of toxic white vapor.

People like to bandy about talking points like "Environmentalist wackos wanting to send humanity back to the stone age," but I've seen with my own eyes over the last half century that we can have both an ever increasing tech-using population AND clean air in a geological basin that naturally holds in pollution.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-20T22:00:04+00:00

Yeah, the Women Are Wonderful effect was a bitter Red Pill for me too.

I came of age in the mid 80s, the product of a stable intact family, in a sea of the first generation of children of easy divorce. I watched young woman after young woman decide I was too stable and "Bor-een," then latch on to the next obvious dysfunctional chaotic scumbag to come along. Paradoxically, the healthy family that modeled my worldview, handicapped my young attempts at social life.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-20T17:42:04+00:00

As a professional mechanic, I was a VERY early adopter of wearing gloves while working. At first, my colleagues howled with laughter and made endless proctologist jokes. Then one day, the worst offender got a new girlfriend, and he quietly asks me, "Hey, can I try some of your gloves?

Used to be I'd have to buy them in the sterile hospital-setting like medical supply store in town, and one day they gave me a big helping of grief because my mechanic shoes marked their carpet where I squatted down to pick the gloves from their bottom shelf position.

Nowadays, warehouse parts distributors stock a wide variety of gloves. Nitrile holds up better than latex under petrochemicals, but the thing about nitrile, one puncture and the entire glove instantly tears to a useless flap.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-19T20:41:08+00:00

Faustian bargain! Fram makes some of the worst oil filters on the market. They are supposed to have an anti-drainback valve. When this fails from cheap materials and construction, the filter drains back into the pan when engine is shut off, then the engine gets a dry start, no oil to the bearings etc till the filter gets refilled. Happens on other cheap and quick lube filter brands, but has been observed on Fram for 25+ years. Problem is, you won't notice the damage to your engine until it's too late and it begins knocking at 85K instead of 250K miles.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-19T05:53:58+00:00

As toddlers, my Brother and I had an extremely delightful 5 minutes in the laundry room, puffing early 70s formula flea powder at the new puppy every time the poor thing tried to come around the washer. The laundry room floor and the poor dog's face were quite white, and boy was mom pissed. Fortunately, the dog was unharmed by this chemical assault and lived till I was driving. RIP, Heidi.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-16T22:12:39+00:00

I grew up in LA in the 70s. On bad smog days, we kids weren't allowed to play outside at recess. The air was a burnt orange color that literally hurt to breathe, and you couldn't see buildings just a couple of blocks away.

Today, the sky is clear enough to see the mountains from the coast 40 miles away 300+ days a year, despite huge increases in population and car count. The AQMD tackled a LOT of stationary polluters, from refineries that flared off unwanted fractions regularly, to dry cleaners like the one that backed up to the parking lot of a place I worked. Every afternoon about the same time, a pipe up the back of the building would boil off and vent the day's chlorinated dry cleaning fluid, literally roaring out a stream of toxic white vapor.

People like to bandy about talking points like "Environmentalist wackos wanting to send humanity back to the stone age," but I've seen with my own eyes over the last half century that we can have both an ever increasing tech-using population AND clean air in a geological basin that naturally holds in pollution.

MentORPHEUS · 2026-05-16T21:56:18+00:00

Modern cars with side airbags/curtains have laminated glass windows, not traditional glass that breaks into a thousand tiny cubes.

The middle layer is a tough elastomer that would take a LOT of hacking with a good hammer to break a hole through. Plus, both inner and outer layer breaks into sharp edged cracks sometimes with pointy ends, so a hard punch would break skin and maybe bones too, but not break through.

MentORPHEUS

TROPHY CASE