Discovered the site in fall 1998, specifically I remember stumbling across it from a wetlook webring. I didn't bother making a profile until years later and even then was too shy to do much anything with it for years after that.
I also remember downloading a 4MB trailer off a 33.6K modem in the early 2000s and it took the better part of an hour!
SlapstickStuff said: Also been around since the beginning.... Even before the UMD existed?!? Definitely assumed I was the "only one" until stumbling onto Rob's MessyFun site in 1995.
Snap! Went on-line in 1995, and in a kink subforum of the system I was using stumbled upon someone asking abouit "dunking" which he defined as watching, or participating with, women going into the water fully clothed. Some guy called Rob Blaine popped up and mentioned his business, and the rest as they say is history.
And yeah, I remember saying to Rob that I'd always thought I was the only one into this, and he said that was the most common reaction from everyone he spoke to.
We used to have long email chats on all things fully clothed and messy.
SlapstickStuff said: Anyone else remember the alt.sex.fetish.wet-and-messy newsgroup? It was the first "messy forum" long before the UMD. I remember a guy who'd shown up at one of Mark & Lenny's Florida shoots to help and taken some pics, which he uploaded to the newsgroup. I have to assume these were like 240x240 resolution.... And took approximately 22 minutes to download.
When I first met Rob that had only just been created and wasn't yet available everywhere, though it propagated reasonably within a few months. That was a text group though, there was a companion "binaries" one that people could post binary data like images to. Posting binary data to a text group would incur wrath, because it annoyed the server administrators and ate disk space.
I remember Rob recommending a specific piece of newsreader software partly because it could automatically fetch and reassemble binary files that had been split up into multiple fragments for posting.
SlapstickStuff said: After that, we all went down to the corner store to play jacks!
Hope, I really hope you will start doing some more messy videos. I am sure I'm not the only one who would love to watch them. You really WOWed me with that messy chocolate scene you did. I would love to see a lot more like that.
Late 90s as well, seen a lot here, I remember finding this place and others. Ive built a truly massive collection of vids due to the decades of collecting.
Had to login and check, but, yep, in the 26 club as well! Even my screen name is a relic, comes from a time when AOL only allowed 8 characters Chat rooms were fun back then, hanging on every word, wondering if it was your modem or theirs that was dropping the connection..until the whole rickety structure masquerading as an internet connection would fail and you would never see that person again! And we though it was great, almost as great as leaded gasoline! Newsgroups too, like Craig's List but without the element of being abducted, full of grossly mislabeled images that took a hour to download (each). And to think I found Rob Blaine's Messy Fun videos in a tiny black and white advert in the back of Easy Rider magazine (which I had no interest in, but had found that occasionally, sometimes, infrequently you could find grainy home photos of biker chicks mud wrestling). Hope sprang eternal.
Ok, then. Gather around the vacuum tubes, children.
Using our CS department's new VAX system to connect to the University of North Carolina's LaUNChpad in order to set up a free account circa ~1993, I used Archie and Gopher to search for literally anything wam-related. In text only.
A few of the hits that came back were rare mentions of quicksand on TV, but the other 99.5% linked to some asshole's coffee recipe for "Mississippi Mud".
Usenet sites like a.s.f.w-a-m and the binary sites mercifully came along shortly after, the news of their existence piggybacking via emerging porn message boards, and that eventually led me to places like VideoVortex's dial-in BBS which had some *great* stuff for it's time. That led to Blaine & the Xensei corp, blah blah blah, and the rest is history, although, ironcally, Splosh beat most of them to the punch in 95 when I saw my first print ad for Pretty Messy Woman. Fun fact: My current handle is a callback to alt.alien.vampire.plonk.plonk.plonk, if anyone else has a memory of constantly, obsessively scanning the alt. lists for new sites.
TL,DR: All y'all newcomers are Spoiled Fucking Rotten.
I, too, have been here since the infancy of the site. I remember when it was just a collection of various links. And downloading a 10 second video with grainy quality took 40 minutes on my parents' old computer running windows 95. Man, time really marches on. I can appreciate my lengthy perspective, but really all this means is I'm getting old. I'll be a Wammer until the end, though! Bless all you beautiful souls. It's been fun.
Also here from the beginning, but I've deleted old profiles for various reasons. I recall MM also had ABC which was "Anything But Clean". I met Rob Blaine when he came to L.A. to shoot some mud scenes with Shawn and Daisy (and some others). We used to talk on the phone fairly regularly. I also helped on on several pie shoots with Neil and Lenny back in the day. When they were looking for "crew" and were shooting with Asian models, they'd usually give me a call.
Fwiw - Dave Lodoski began the Mpv bbs in '94 and it was a little more than just mud then as well. Pretty sure that was the world's first online "Wam" archive.
DuncanEdwards said: Fwiw - Dave Lodoski began the Mpv bbs in '94 and it was a little more than just mud then as well. Pretty sure that was the world's first online "Wam" archive.
Ah, yes, god bless the MPV ....and I'm pretty sure I have the entire archive on a crate full of 3 1/2" disks somewhere in one of the attics/basements/sheds/lockers. Maybe our true fetish is data hoarding...
26 years as well! I remember having to borrow friends' computers to check in here, then learning how to selectively delete my browsing history enough not to get busted ha ha.
Before this I was in Yahoo! groups and followed some of the OG sites like Bill's Pie Page, Aqua Entertainment, MessyFun, Shokolada's Mess, Piefightgirls, Phoebe, Hurley Coward, Clown Julie, Messygirl Leah, and probably a bunch of others I've forgotten about.
I believe the person behind the name passed away a while back.
Wow, this might hit me as hard as hearing about Phoebe.... Did anyone officially mention it here?
TBH Hurley was an interesting dude, and basically the polar opposite of Rob Blaine. He did not want ANYONE to know who he really was & kept up a level of privacy that was fairly extreme, even in those days. Anyone else remember how you had to send him a money order for videos in the mail to a PO Box, with the recipient portion left blank?
Of course I heard rumors that he was in hiding from the law, or shady characters, or.... Whatever. Doubt any of that was true. He definitely became less engaged as everything shifted online, he was always a real "photocopied newsletter, VHS in the mail" kind of guy.
Anyone else give him $$ to keep the Pie Mafia going at one point? I think he took donations to actually buy a real computer, in return you got all his future volumes for free. That turned out to not be ENTIRELY true (ahem) but it was pretty good while it lasted. Some of his pie clips STILL haven't shown up anywhere online. (Not counting me reposting old bits from his cliptapes on YouTube so the next gen can actually see this stuff!)
Anyone else give him $$ to keep the Pie Mafia going at one point? I think he took donations to actually buy a real computer, in return you got all his future volumes for free. That turned out to not be ENTIRELY true (ahem) but it was pretty good while it lasted. Some of his pie clips STILL haven't shown up anywhere online. (Not counting me reposting old bits from his cliptapes on YouTube so the next gen can actually see this stuff!)
I never gave him money to keep the Pie Mafia going but I do remember the blank money orders.
Around the time I bought these tapes I was new to the Army and lived in the barracks. Nothing worse than one of these tapes arriving and me having to let it sit in my wall locker unwatched until my roommates got their lazy asses out of the barracks long enough for me to run the risk of popping it into the VCR (our rooms didn't have locks).
I came across a bunch of his old VHS tapes recently, gotta find the time to digitize them.
SlapstickStuff said: Also been around since the beginning.... Even before the UMD existed?!? Definitely assumed I was the "only one" until stumbling onto Rob's MessyFun site in 1995.
Anyone else remember the alt.sex.fetish.wet-and-messy newsgroup?
Yes indeed. Things were very sloooow in those days. Lots of text in the alt newsgroups - about as much as could conveniently be managed in the early days!
Couldn't believe it when I first found the alt.sex.fetish.wet-and-messy newsgroup. (I wonder if it still exists?)
Like so many others, I thought it was just me that got turned on by all this ... and by kinky cross-dressing... and especially so when combining the two. (I've now reached the age where I don't seem to get turned on much by anything, any more! <sigh> ) </sigh>