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   Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴‍☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧 (jeffcliff@shitposter.world)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 07:23:41 JST Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴‍☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧
   > the episode of buffy the vampire slayer where the demon gets uploaded into the internet through a scanner
   
   one thing i found interesting about this clusterfuck of a half-tech literate plot is when buffy starts asking the computer science/AV nerds how to trace an email to its source
   
   and they didn't know about email metadata(fair but unlikely, given it's the early days when such data was more accessible, since they were supposed to be highscshool students) but their answer was the interesting part to me: that "you check their profile" -- makes me wonder if in 1996 email providers (like AOL) *did* have profiles that you could check, making mail/usenet groups acting more like the social media of today than I perhaps would have thought possible at the time.
   
   after all how do you check someone's "email profile"?? Was there some kind of finger-like tool to do this originally?? even on the early proprietary email pre-hotmail platforms?
   
   ( also i'm guessing #buffyverse is the tag for this stuff? )
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     Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴‍☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧 (jeffcliff@shitposter.world)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 07:23:39 JST Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴‍☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧

     in reply to

     • Vokainen
     @vokainen099 > Usenet access indeed had profiles, and those usually were sold bundled with email accounts
     
     this is the part i didn't know -- i've accessed newsgroups only through emacs and i don't remember ever finding a 'view usenet id profile' function there
     Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: likes this.
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     Vokainen (vokainen099@cawfee.club)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 07:23:40 JST Vokainen

     in reply to
     @jeffcliff Well, from what I read around, many people got newsfeeds, email, and Internet access from AOL, and they paid for that.
     Maybe the logic is to go "hack" the AOL database, and see to what payments that email address/AOL account is associated to. Usenet access indeed had profiles, and those usually were sold bundled with email accounts
     
     The writer probably assumed *anyone" could do that, although I heard that back in the day you could indeed append a /dir to a website name and get into their directory, so, maybe like that?
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     Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴‍☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧 (jeffcliff@shitposter.world)'s status on Thursday, 22-May-2025 07:23:41 JST Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴‍☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧

     in reply to
     i should clarify since that's a clumsy way to put it
     
     In 1996 i wasn't using email at all yet - i wouldn't even touch an email system until 1997. i had used a www browser exactly once and saw people using a freenet CLI terminal pretty much every week but i had *no idea* how this stuff worked myself in 1996. I mean looking back, I wouldn't think that there would be "email profiles" that early anywhere on the internet.