Earliest examples of internet lolcows

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There were definitely some on the ancient site Kuro5hin, but I was there more for the thinkpieces at the time, didn't pay much attention to drama or drama trends. Liable to be proto-Tumblr dramatics on Livejournal too, but again, wasn't my area of interest.
 
They were all over the usenet back in the 80s and 90s before the web caught on. Most of those cows are long forgotten and gone.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Schizocows posting pseudoscientific screeds about blowing up the moon. I watched middle-aged Unix admins descend into furrydom over a thousand newsgroups. All that lolcow milk is lost to time, like tears in the rain.
 
I always think of Randy Constan as one of the earliest lolcows I remember- he was mostly just a meme internet weirdo that people would gawk at. I don’t think he ever hurt anyone, but he did gain notoriety.

pixyland.org

The home page of the real, living Peter Pan

Intro Page. Why I became Peter Pan, and what it means for you
pixyland.org pixyland.org
 
Cleveland Mark Blakemore

Started making dozens of games for Commodore 64, became known on Usenet during 90s as "Texas Arcane" for insane and hilarious rants against Robert Sirotek and claims that Cleve worked on Wizardry 8: Stones of Arnhem, a game nobody knew or even heard of. His story was that Sir-Tech hired a team in Australia shortly after Wizardry 7, whose lead was Max Phipps, the actor from Mad Max 2, and that the project was such a disaster they hired Cleve to save it. Allegedly hundreds of thousands of the budget was spend on furry porn commisions from the lead artist and Duke Nukem Forever shenanigans like rewriting the 3D engine from scratch multiple times. Eventually Cleve resigned because the whole thing was hopeless and he was paid $200 a week for working 16 hour days, and told some outrageous stories like Robert's wife trying to seduce him, Max having a waist-high pile of dildos in his bathroom and getting commited to a mental asylum during the project, Sirotek brothers being totally incompetent and ignorant about producing games or Max hosting a teenage runaway pedophile ring in his house.

For the next 20~ years Cleve worked on a Wizardry 7 clone, the running joke was that it'd be shipped tomorrow after solving 643234 microissues. Everyone makes fun of Cleve about his delusional fantasy of working on some nonexistent Wizardry 8 in Australia. He also programmed VaultOS, supposedly an operating system designed for managing a nuclear holocaust vault straight out of Fallout. There's one 5-star review of it by Cleve himself and yes, Cleve did build a fallout bunker in middle of nowhere, Australia where he lives to this day.

There's a thread on rpgcodex titled "Why did Sirtech go bankrupt" in which Cleve posts about the supposed Wizardry 8 he worked on. He gets clowned on but what's really funny is that a few years ago SirTech liquidated all their inventory and some flea market salesman just so happens to google SirTech stuff and stumbled upon just that thread. He posts pictures of official SirTech documents, including Stones of Arnhem artwork, Max Phipps' contract and Cleve's resignation letter.
 
Usenet and BBS cows definitely have senority (does Kibo count?), but when I was in school in the 90s a couple friends made a page documenting a local schizo on the brand-new hosting platform Geocities. Guy was very similar to Tommy Tooter in behavior and the page itself was written in a very neutral tone with a lot of photos showing the dude's weird antics. It got quite a bit of traffic and hatemail and was definitely my first experience with http-based weirdo documentation.

> Cleveland Mark Blakemore / Max Phipps

This was one of the other ones I really remember from the geocities era. There's a very long and very funny writeup on this guy somewhere on the net but for the life of me can't remember where it was hosted, just that Something Awful had a thread on him and the dildo pile was a big hit there.
 
There were so many older cows featured on PoE, but it was before archiving and it's gone like the Library of Alexandria.

Alex Chiu is still around from then. Unicorn Jelly troon. Probably more people whose names have changed, or I don't remember, but if I could see their website it'd come flooding back.

For Usenet, I bet a lot of the "big names" on edgy groups would be seen as lolcows through a modern lens. Like Paul Ess, the fat guy who posted to alt.tasteless from a nursing home as his lifestyle caught up with him. I ran into my first t4t transbian in the 1990s on alt.slack, but at the time it was allowed for people to say "wtf that's a lot of effort if you're both transsexual, why" and the guy to have to answer with good humor and insight. I saw his username on a YouTube comment ~20 years later and he'd turned into a pod person troon posting just like someone half his age.

Further personal anecdote: Also in the mid-late 1990s I subscribed to the rec.music.dylan group. Not even an alt. group, just normal people talking about Bob Dylan. Still, there was one poster who was acknowledged to be completely batshit, AJ Weberman-style, who would sometimes latch onto a post and keep replying to you and to herself into a thread of self-referential delusions. She also wrote normal posts sometimes, and there are a couple of concert reports of hers archived (with everyone else's) on expectingrain.

They did not archive her posts about how specific Dylan songs were messages to her, that went on to rebut Dylan and await an answer. Nor the many posts where she reminded everyone that she was printing out any Usenet posts that mentioned her name and putting them in a physical filing cabinet, and then sat back like this was a great own.

When I was new to rec.music.dylan I made the mistake of replying to one of her saneposts with something innocuous, and got an absolute torrent of crazy posts that I didn't know to handle at that age. However, I also got personal emails from other newsgroup posters reassuring me and letting me know she was nuts, harmless, and this wasn't anything I did.

Roserut@aol.com, but the effort would far, far outweigh the funny. I think a lot of old-school lolcows are going to be like that, because the ability of a human to self-post and do so constantly and to a large audience is a new one, and photo capability is even newer than that.
 
Aunt Carol dijo:
Alex Chiu is still around from then.
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You beat me by five minutes. I came here to bring up Alex. His website from god knows how long ago is still online and seems to be recently updated. His own website is a sponsored result from Google if you search his name, so he is paying for AdSense to promote his website. Alex also has an old thread here on the Farms.

Gene Ray of "Time Cube" fame also comes to mind, however Gene passed away some years ago. If he were smart he would've bought Alex Chiu's immortality rings because if his Time Cube theory is right we're all living through four simultaneous days at the same time, every day. I'm no mathematician but that sounds like we're aging four times as fast.
 
demicolon dijo:
For the next 20~ years Cleve worked on a Wizardry 7 clone
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The best part is that he finally released it, the game is called Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar (for anyone curious)

I've not played it yet, I just knew it had an insane dev history. I didn't knoe about all the SirTech stuff at all!
 
I’m not sure about the internet, but I bet the Internet had some
 
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