"With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself."
Coming us soon!
Second: On April 21 at 6:30 PT I'll be talking about some of my research on LGBTQ BBSes in Washington State, sponsored by the King County Library System (also free on Zoom).
I don't often toot my own horn here, but I'll be doing two things next week! First off: I'll be doing a free book talk on Zoom at Noon ET sponsored by the Open Digital Literacy and Access Network.
It's about a GB in total unzipped, so I'm not surprised! Also, I did actually do some archiving of YGs, but that would be one I didn't scrape due to the ethical issues. I wrote about it here.
Hearing Siobahn mention gjetost had me wondering if she'd ever had cajeta, which I love but my spouse finds far too goat-y.
Fun: Your sparkling personality, clearly! Real answer: BSky's AI tool Attie uses Starter Packs to make suggestions for who to follow, so if you're in a few then you get recommended.
Sure! Email me at avery DOT dame at gmail, and I can share a link to it so you can download it.
Do you want the fun answer or what I think is the real answer?
No problem at all! I just saw someone quote reply the original, started reading responses, and realized I could assist.
Popping in - If you want the raw data for the TUA, let me know and I can share a copy! One thing about the Google archive is that its search is very inconsistent in what it shows, I've found.
Yeah, it's the same kind of honor code verification a lot of adult-adjacent sites use. So not likely legally binding, but it says something about the overall climate that it's on a collection that's probably at least 30% shitposts from the early 1990s.
Screenshot of the UsenetArchives.com landing page, which requires users to verify their age to access the site.
Doing research for an article and just found that UsenetArchives.com now requires Age Verification to access. IMO, this points to a secondary consequence of the current moral panic and associated age verification legislation: Restricting access to born-digital history for those under 18.
I'll throw my hat in for Internet/digital.
Screenshot of email of 404Media story about ICE phishing emails that Gmail has flagged as suspicious phishing Spam.
Forgot the alt text!
Great reporting as always, though I didn't expect it to hit my inbox with this choice bit of environmental storytelling from Gmail.
Last summer I was the Rose Library’s LGBTQ Collections Fellowship at Emory University. The blog for the archive just posted my write up as part of the fellowship. It is part of a bigger project of mine, but here is a sneak peak of some of what I am exploring:
scholarblogs.emory.edu/marbl/2026/0...
Yeah, I have similar concerns, as several regional queer support groups rely on Discord to keep youth connected when they can't be physically present. Unfortunately, history also tells us migrating services is hard when there's no newbie-friendly alternative.
I don't have much to add that other folks haven't said, but as a historian of the queer internet, this doesn't surprise me at all. LGBTQ users are convenient corporate props...until they're not worth protecting.
a nice thing about when the internet was a bunch of little sites and servers was that it was a lot harder for governments to pressure "the chat provider everyone uses" to implement age verification.
you wanna pressure 300 separate IRC servers? good luck with that. but one company? easy
Original Sega Genesis case for RPG Shining in the Darkness
Photo of inside of the case. No cartridge is included, but on the left is a sheaf of folded graph paper. It's yellowed with age, and there's...math?
Photo of all 9 hand-drawn maps included in the case
Close-up for one map for the Cave of Courage.
Found this at a Free Book Fair held by great local used bookstore Page 42 (www.page42bookstore.com). It was in a box of random media and I grabbed it because, why not? No cartridge, but it did have the original owner's painstakingly hand-drawn level maps, including coffee (?) stains.
Sure! I've followed you, but since it doesn't appear open to message on my end, I've opened mine up.
Oh, great! Thanks for considering it. Would you prefer to chat though Bluesky or Substack? Also, you can feel free to email me at admin AT queerdigital.com too.
*piece, not price - oh, for an edit button.
Sorry to pop in, but having a community historian moment: if you do find them and ever had the interest, I would be thrilled to preserve them as part of the Queer Digital History Project (queerdigital.com), including holding them as a request-only collection.
So good to see this price and all the folks and stories in it! Also, a self-plug: the Queer Digital History Project (queerdigital.com) is always open for donations, if folks have physical ephemera or digital records to be preserved (but not made accessible publicly online)!
Illustration of Santa typing up his list on classic daisy wheel printer paper.
It's late in the day to share, but a Happy Holidays wish from me and Santa's daisy wheel printer. (From Sandra Boynton's book Christmastime (1987))
There is a certain carefully crafted historical amnesia these fantasies require to sustain an reproduce themselves, imo. Easier than admitting that every time, the core problems of the Internet really are just white dudes all the way down.
