your daily 90s internet reading list

remember when you could read the whole internet? But why would you want to. Here is what I read almost every day. I would go back to these sites multiple times to see if there were updates. Refresh. Nothing. Fuck.

- suck.com
- slashdot
- The Onion
- The New Times York /Washington Pissed

jeez I don't even remember

the guy who wrote New Times York also wrote this book called "Most Fucked Up Person Alive" which he "published" on "The Internet" - http://www.c3f.com/mostfh01.html

My old lap was mp3.com / b3ta.com / yahoo chat / sample ‘webring’ sites to find breakbeats and stuff.

I used to love StumbleUpon when that first popped up, may have been early 00’s rather than ‘90’s though. The internet before it was all funnelled through the same 4 sites was such an interesting place, and I miss being randomly taken to peoples obsessive little personal websites or flash oddities.

By the mid 00’s I’m pretty sure every 3rd ‘stumble’ was installing more malware, quite a risky way of browsing looking back!

i didn't really look at the internet until i think '99 or '00. my earliest impressions of it (from a few years earlier, the green text on a black screen days) were of corny dweebs talking about science fiction novels & blue oyster cult lyrics, my friend mick was trying to get me interested in it but it seemed terminally boring

links.net - Justin's links just popped into my mind from the 90s. A quick click shows that - almost inevitably - Justin is now running bud.com and is into 'recreational cannabis delivery'.

Thank to his very detailed autobio summary I can track that I started looking at that site in 1996, reading it regularly between 1997- 2000 until it got very dull indeed. I have a specific memory of reading it in what must have been the early 2000s in a very orange EasyInternet cafe off Trafalgar Square (in itself a strange brief passing internet age phenomenon).

Mr Showbiz dot com
Salon
Roger Ebert’s reviews on the sun times site
Yahoo for cinema listings
Counterpunch
The Sussex University library intranet

I remember dating someone in 1999, I was 21, she was 19, and she told me I was old because I didn’t use Yahoo Messenger to chat to my friends

I enjoyed ntk, a weekly, geeky news sheet in ASCII - http://www.ntk.net/

Addicted to Noise! At least from 1994-1997.

Oh, TV Go Home which I think started as part of ntk maybe?

Hmmm. All my answers were wrong & didn't even exist in the 90s or were only started in '99 (fark, cracked, something awful, worth1000)

I used to regularly check the list of weird-ass fringy web pages collected on Portal of Evil. That's an archive.org link that will give you an extensive peek into the old weird web which is now largely extinct. Best viewed in Netscape obvs.

memepool.com for awesome links about everything

brainwashed.com for great music newsletters every Monday (it's still going but the newsletters are long past, sadly)

I do remember Dan Rhatigan's Ultrasparky blog in the 90s - though I'm not sure if I would have called it a 'blog' at that time (when did blogging come in?)

Memepool and ntk were favourites of mine, the only other I can remember from that era is perfect.com which was just links to good looking websites. Metafilter and kottke.org scrape in (99 and 98) but I don't know if I was reading them then.

Might have been perfect.co.uk not .com

I used to regularly check the list of weird-ass fringy web pages collected on Portal of Evil.

The Portal of Evil news page was a daily read for me back then.

Mirsky's Worst of the Web was a joy to my cold black heart.

in the 90s i was <17 years old, and honestly i spent a LOT of time on yahoo! chat, always in the exact channel (15 years old, and then a year later, 16 years old!) that i was supposed to be in

i remember happening upon jonathan rosenbaum’s movie reviews on the chicago reader website and feeling like i’d just stumbled over a treasure chest