⚰️Coffin Juice, Fall Horror Games, and Wordpad's end

Ready for Fall Vibes?

Sep 04, 2023

Fall is finally HERE!

Yes - it’s still hot as blazes here in Tennessee, but that doesn’t change the fact that September has started.

It is now acceptable to eat pumpkin-flavored treats.

We’ve been spending a ton of cuddly time with our infant son - it’s hard to believe he’s already two weeks old!

Today is also the last day of my two weeks off from work - I didn’t plan it this way, but having off Labor Day made for a nice long weekend before returning to work.

I took my daughter out to the local bins store (Bin Hunt for those of you near Columbia, TN) and discovered some pretty good deals.

Two $50 water tables (on Amazon), a mechanical keyboard, an LED light-up tree, and a telescope - all for the low low price of around $30.

The trick was getting there 30 minutes before they opened - and there was still a line of around 12 people ahead of me.

Hoping to be “that guy” who finds an iPad or mini PC in the bottom of a bin - but I’m MORE THAN HAPPY to settle for getting $100 worth of water tables for around $10.

anyhow . . .

Remember that giant “web of links” that I mentioned working on earlier this year?

Well, I’ve switched over to building all the links in an easy-to-digest spreadsheet. It got a little too convoluted for my liking.

I’m hoping to be done by the end of the year so I can share it with you!

Here’s the link if you’d like to explore what I built - but as you can see, it’s a lot to take in.

It will likely slow down your computer too.

Let’s dive on in, shall we?

Own your very own second at 24 Hour Homepage! This delightful website features a different link/image every second - with MANY links to explore. Own a second, and share a link/pic with the world. (Sponsored Ad)

⚰️Coffin Juice

This is one of those articles that if you’re squeamish - you should skip.

Just skip on down to the next section you want to peruse and banish the word “Coffin Juice” from your mind.

You still here?

Ok - Don’t say I didn’t warn ye.

I watched this tiktok by lady_of_the_mercians and discovered that people used to sip the liquor from coffins back in Victorian England.

Sounds insane - but there was a Change petition a few years ago to drink the coffin juice from an Egyptian Mummy.

For all our sakes - it didn’t happen.

However Victorians did have mummy unwrapping parties where they’d “ooh” and “ahh” over Egyptian mummies.

Corpse medicine seems to have existed even into the early 1900’s - as I read in Richard Suggs “Mummies, Cannibals And Vampires The History Of Corpse Medicine From The Renaissance To The Victorians“

Writing around 1929, C.J.S. Thompson could state that ‘mummy is still sold in the drug-bazaars as a remedial agent in the Near East’. In Europe, we find that, ‘in Upper Bavaria, “mumie” or “wild human flesh” was sold in pharmacies as late as the nineteenth century, as a remedy against consumption’.® Camporesi states that in Italy the medical virtues of human fat were still being praised in print at the start of the nineteenth century.’ In 1899 the London Standard could note with some warmth how, ‘so late as 1852 a bottle was found on the shelves of a chemist at Leamington, labelled “Moss from a dead man’s skull”’.® In 1862 one doctor near Liverpool was allegedly ‘very fond of giving’ his patients ‘earthworms and toads, vipers and their excreta, precipitate of human blood (page 393 - source)

Yeah . . . . . things were strange back then.

Continuing down the rabbit hole - there’s also the saga of the “Kings Drops” - which was a 17th-century remedy made from ground skulls and famously used on King Charles III.

By the end of his life, doctors were pouring 40 drops of this gruesome elixir down the king’s throat daily. Needless to say, the potion didn’t have its desired effect. King’s Drops and other bogus medical treatments may have sped up his demise on February 6, 1685. Yet the fact that the drops failed to save Charles II didn’t deter many other English people from making and drinking the concoction. In 1686, an Englishwoman named Anne Dormer wrote to her sister about the positive impact a little bit of skull juice had on her mental health. “I take the king’s drops and drink chocolate,” she wrote, “and when my soul is sad to death I run and play with the children.” (source)

Horrified?

Yes. Yes I am too.

I think we’re gonna close things out there on this little macabre topic.

On a funnier note - here’s a replica of a “Kings Drops” bottle you can buy - no Kings Drops within of course.

Most of the articles around these topics tend to be rather surface level - if you want to dig deep, I think it’s worth checking out Richard Sugg’s book “Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires.”

You sure you wanna read it?

👻Fall Horror Games

There are a few intriguing horror games coming out soon - so I wanted to highlight them in a main topic, rather than relegate them to “The Land of Random” section.

Holstin

Set in a Polish town, this 8-bit style horror game may appear to be “just another top-down” horror mystery game (thinking of Darkwood or the upcoming Dead Static Drive) BUT it has a first-person mode, and the camera rotates during the top-down view. Toss in the grim soundtrack, Polish music, and Polish voice acting - and you have a really intriguing game

Decimate Drive

A wretched nightmare where the cars are alive. It would be intriguing to see how terrifying this game truly is.

Dreamcore

THE BACKROOMS - but in a game. I get deeply unsettled just watching the trailer. From what I can tell, there’s no music - just the first-person bodycam perspective as you explore the 80’s themed nightmare.

Lost Fragment

It’s ANOTHA photorealistic FPS, but this time - it’s a horror game. It feels unsettlingly real - like I’m watching some sort of found footage movie. Even the screenshot below stretches virtual reality to its limits.

💀Wordpad is Dead

When was the last time you booted up ole Wordpad on your PC?

I personally can’t think of a time that I’ve used Wordpad.

Maybe when I was trying to write up a draft of something when there was an internet outage.

or opening up a docx natively on my computer, rather than in Google docs.

Microsoft is killing it off - after a 28 year run.

Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the basic word processor that’s been included with Windows since 1995, is being retired.
“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” the Deprecated features for Windows client page on Microsoft Learn notes in a September 1, 2023 addition. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.” (source)

Most people won’t even realize that Wordpad is gone - but just like any obscure old program - a dedicated base will miss it.

A lot of comments across Hacker News, Reddit, and this article by Paul Thurrott all mention how useful Wordpad was as a “bare bones” file editor.

I imagine ole’ Libre Office will start getting downloads again!

🐙The Land of Random

Randomness! Chaos! The Strange reaches of the internet!

The Last of the Internet Cafes

A long and nostalgic deep-dive into some of the surviving internet cafes from around the world. After reading many of the articles - I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re all gone by 2030. Definitely 2035.

RIP to Internet Cafes

HIT IT JOE

LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Gfycat Archive

Do you remember me mentioning that Gfycat has gone offline? Yeah. It’s dead. They don’t even have a goodbye page. Fortunately, an Archive team has completely backed up their collection. :)

Gfycat Archive

Spork.org

The official website of all sporks. The website was last updated in 1996, LOL.

spork.org

I Type NY

A very experimental type experiment - you have to click to experience for yourself - I don’t know how to explain it other than “Fly to New York, but in words.”

I Type NY