August 09, 2004

• MeFi membership.
• Sooooz wins.
• @HELL.COM= an email address that people will not forget! $25/year what you get is PRIVACY, an address that is unforgetable and a system that enables you to access and control all of your email, without advertising and viruses from any computer that is connected to the web stealth mail system: virus resistant web based interface browser access from anywhere in the world no advertising customized spam blocking configurable filters customizable auto response spell check +web access to all of your POP3 accounts you can configure your @HELL.COM mail to forward invisibly and securely to multiple accounts. including pagers, cell phones, or even to a group of friends.
• So is this even close to a worthwhile concept?
• This is: 1. A dumb scheme to make money selling something not especially useful. 2. A really annoying user interface.
• I remember hell.com from several years ago. It used to just go on for page after page after page, with increasingly elaborate and threatening warnings of dire consequences if you clicked through. If I remember correctly, it ended with an offered to submit an application for "membership" although to what wasn't clear. I don't remember a fee being involved, but I do think it had some connection to the cDc.
• Yeah, it's like '97, when having your own server + hostname was like, k3wl or something. So people with sucky adresses like user@isp.com paid others with more m4d sk1llZ/money/connections to have emails addresses like user@hell.com or user@agentz.org. Now I'm off to party like it's 1999.
• Is it worth unblocking popups for?
• no.
• The thing is that it used to be super cool. It was originally a loose webdesigners collaborative. You could sign up for email updates and every six months to a year or so they'd send you the URL to an awesome website. The thing was that this was back in the wayback before Flash, so they were one of the prime demonstrators of mad hacked html being forced to do things nobody had ever dreamed of. Some of it was bland, but a lot of it was insanely cool in a useless, but awesome way. But now Flash has been around and there is not much artistry left. You can have it do whatever you want and though a lot of it is cool none has the anarchic excitement of the old hell.com stuff. Basically, you can put it on your list, just below (or above if you prefer) Mondo 2000 of ideas that were simultaneously cool, stupid, flaky, interesting and a few years ahead of the curve. But both of those things kind of make you wax nostalgic for a time when the internet was possibility rather than commerce or collaborative worksharing. /end eulogy for internet idealism
• Ah, you Monkeys just keep churning them out. Monkeyfilter: So is this even close to a worthwhile concept? Bananas for forks.
• hey hey don't be dissin' the M2k - such a rag won't fly by again anytime soon. Or, alternately, WIRED sucks.
• If you are thinking of shelling out for a joke email account, I'd go with this one
• pete_best: I'm not really dissing Mondo at all, I read it as regularly as they saw fit to print it back in the day. But you can't deny its flaky side. It was a strange compromise of a magazine, suggesting this total futurism while at the same time touting bands and cultural meme's well past prime. Whatever vision it can be said to have had was messy and impure. I happen to like things that are messy and impure and the questions and contradictions the magazine brought up in my still developing mind were sometimes of greater value than the text itself. And yeah, Wired always sucked.
• My favorite part of Mondo 2k was either the bizarre copy protection in the images (try and scan one and you got anarchic text) or the letters column where one guy said that the could control the number of times Dan Rather blinked (more on Tuesdays!). And c'mon, they predicted we'd all have grey goop bioware by '05. (Echo Wired sucks comment).
• they were way less on predictions than WIRED. And that image copy protection was late in the game and also not a big hit to say the least. Besides at least they were trying better than anyone ever had before or since. "Pricey Salad - who's paying for this thing?"