®1996 
About The Strange
The Strange website began in early 1996 ( 28 years ago as of this writing ) It was one of four websites that I built on the AOL members servers. Back in 1996, America Online gave you four Unix shell accounts where you could place four websites. I used all four of those Unix shell accounts for my four websites. The first was a tshirt store called "tshirtsplus" the second was my political rant website called "Torn From Enchantment". The third was a rape and abuse counseling service which was ran by a woman that I knew, who had lived with a family of serial killers. She was their pet; they kept her in a cage by the swimming pool. ( long story ) That website was called "Survive 911", which ended up helping a lot of people. And finally, at members.aol.com/strange589 was...
THE STRANGE! You are viewing this website exactly how it was 28 years ago as of this writing. Same logo, same background, same fat tables, same letter styles. I have tried to preserve it the best I can for historical value. It is as it was. In 1997 I moved The Strange onto it's own domain ( the-strange.com ) The Strange existed for 6 years from February 1996 to February 2002. I lost the site because I had forgotten the exact date of the domain registration. Back then, there was no such thing as Godaddy; you had to deal directly with the internet government ( InterNIC ) through a series of certified emails. Nobody warned you when it was time to renew the domain name registration and I forgot the date. I missed it by ONE DAY and it fell into the hands of Russian domain pirates that wanted to sell it back to me for 20 thousand dollars. I didn't have the money so The Strange went onto ancient floppy disks and into a dusty old box; where it remained for 22 years. ( so sad ) Then, after I had left my show, ( The IRON SHOW ) I began in January 2024, to slowly restore The Strange back to it's former ancient web glory. It took me a month to rebuild all the pages. After 28 years, almost all of the links were dead, and a lot of the people were also dead. It was a very spooky feeling. Captain Nemo, Zencyn, Doug Higley, Bob from goodstuff Monstercards, all dead and gone. Pretty much all the links were dead except for the Chinese guy who sells his own home built immortality devices ( Alex Chiu ). That also gave me a spooky feeling. I mean, I don't think his devices actually give you immortality, but they apparently help you keep your website going strong for 28 years. Once The Strange was rebuilt, I began to add more pages. As of this writing there are four or five new pages and I will continue to add pages for as long as I am able. I will continue in the tradition of ancient, hand coded static HTML. I purchased the FRINGE RADIO NETWORK in October 2016. After years of having the Wordpress based website hacked over and over again by Chinese and Russian super hackers, I rebuilt the FRINGE RADIO NETWORK using the same ancient static HTML, locked down in a UNIX shell, which is almost hacker proof. The astute observer might take notice that https://fringeradionetwork.com looks very much like The Strange but in black and white. It's what I like, and it's very hard to hack. Hacking into a static HTML website that is sitting in an ancient UNIX shell is very difficult; you would have to brute force your way into the shell. There are no back doors into either The Strange or Fringe Radio Network.
Only a big front door with a big lock on it. ( I love that! ) If you are reading this in early 2024, you are one of the very few people who know about The Strange. A website is nothing unless others are putting up links to it. Just ask Google, that's how their algorithm works; it's what put them on the map.
The Strange needs to be on the map once again and I can't do it without your help!
So PLEASE... link to The Strange!
John McMahon,
webmaster@thestrangedotcom.com
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