Rotten Dot Com
By Clive Python | 14jammar
I must have been 14 when I found out about Rotten, I always loved horror, some of my
favour movies are in the horror genre like The Thing, 28 Days Later, Night of the
Living Dead, Häxan and... well you get the point. The movies were okay, but
you needed something more, something sicker.
I would often look around the Web for "creepy websites", most of the sites were
okay, but one day I found a post on
Rotten.com was started in 1997 by, uh... The Rotten Staff...
Well, we don't really know who ran the site, as they never gave out their name(s). The only
person who we know who worked for Rotten was Jason Scott (pictured), of Textfiles.com,
as on his blog he wrote;
If this is indeed true and Scott did indeed work for Rotten, then he would have also
worked for Soylent Communications this company of sorts seems to own Rotten and their sister
sites, the sites being...
Rotten Dot Com stands as an important part of history, not only was it one of the first shock sites, it
was also one of the first archives for horror and gore. Because gore was a new thing to the net, Rotten had the honour of being bent
over by the US Government and being censored, such as The Fuck of The Month that had
"been made retroactively illegal by the US government, in a side-handed attack on the pornography industry" and from Dilbert
because of The Dilbert Hole.
Rotten is seen as a site for just gore, this is not fully true. It is overlooked that it has 1000's of wellmade
articles over on The Rotten Library. From Doctor Who to
The Elephant Man, Rotten had it all. On a side not, I would more than recommend reading Rotten's article on Abu Ghraib, one of the best reads in a long time.
Rotten has an important part in the history of the Web, whether that's good or bad is up to you to decide.
I.
The Rotten Staff - Dead link 06/10/17
http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-23/rotten-dot-com-crew.html [Internet Archive, archive.is]
II.
Soylent Communications
http://www.thefullwiki.org/Soylent_Communications [Internet Archive, archive.is]
III.
The legacy of Rotten.com
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/10700/rotten-history-shock-site/ [Internet Archive, archive.is]
IV.
The reddit post
https://www.reddit.com/r/creepy/comments/2lr970/list_of_creepyunsettling_websites_and_youtube/ [Internet Archive, archive.is]
Also see:
I.
Breaking on the Wheel - About the Old Rotten Logo
http://www.gapingmaw.com/59619/ [Internet Archive, archive.is]
II.
Rotten Investigated by the FBI
http://www.gapingmaw.com/59701/ [Internet Archive, archive.is]
III.
The Gaping Maw Archive
https://web.archive.org/web/20070419172523/http://www.gapingmaw.com/archives/
And this is your face when you go on rotten.com for the first time
Written by Clive "James" Python, 24/01/17.
https://owlman.neocities.org/library/rotten.html
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://owlman.neocities.org/library/rotten.html
.jpg)
reddit
of a list of creepy/unsettling website. Talk about a jackpot. A lot of the
sites were meh, but some stuck with me, like yyyyyyy.info,
serpentis666,
Plane Crash Info and the main
subject of today, Rotten Dot Com.
The value system regarding "shock" photographs is worth noting too.
For some people, Goatse is the most mundane, uninteresting of that
family of images. There are much worse, people rise to say, and then
they link to them and yes, they're quite worse. I've done work on and
off for a few years at rotten.com. I can assure you, there are things
much worse, stuff that makes your left eyeball shout "take the controls"
to your right eyeball and run back into the john to throw up.
References
