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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

I remember writing a tool that blared a siren wav every time someone connected to your network share. It would be quiet at the start of a round, and then as people died you'd hear sirens going off left and right.

Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs. Speed mostly. You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed? It's fucking nuts.

The smells. Some LANs would go on for a week. Lots spanned several days, most lasted upwards of 12 hours.

People didn't game with laptops. You had to bring you whole case, your monitors, accessories. It was great when LCDs came about. Lots of people had intricate setups too, heavy Thermaltakes with watercooling shit.

ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger and that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP if you hadn't disabled the service.

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> It was great when LCDs came about.

Once upon a time, I owned a 19" CRT that weighed less than a typical 17" CRT. Such good fortune. Still, I never did have the courage to carry my tower on one hip and my monitor on the other (and everything else in a backpack), so I guess it didn't really benefit me that much after all.

> most lasted upwards of 12 hours.

You're damn right. Imagine carting a CRT around and then only staying for half a day. Ha!

I found these Coolermaster straps that enabled you to carry your CRT and tower with a handle. SO SO SO useful for lan parties.

These case straps were common too!: https://imgur.com/j41ZhIn

Pretty sure I still got that.

A lot of people also got into case modding and added physical LAN handles to their rigs (always called "The Beast"; along with Perspex and cathode tubes https://tinyurl.com/LANhandles ). Good times :')

The relatively poor man's version: the indestructable yellow or blue IKEA bag

I forget if they actually sold the blue ones back then. I remember taking a few yellow ones (that weren't supposed to leave the store)

We didn't have IKEA in Ireland until 2007 (and that was Belfast, I didn't have one near me for another 2 years)... LONG after my LAN days were done.

Ireland: land of the suspiciously (and accidentally) swole LAN partiers

Might as well get the metal trolley to go with that bag then. And their elastic band + hooks to hold stuff inside.

I use these regularly for big groceries, even the bag itself lasts years when the usual flimsy mostly plastic trolleys tend to break after half a year.

Ah... the dilemma of which CRT to bring?

- 'portable' old 14" for safety and ease of transport

- 'shiny' new 19" for showoff and ease of gaming

For years my monitor was a 22” Sony CRT which took two people to carry, which went with my to LAN parties. That thing was terrifying to carry down a flight of stairs.

> that annoying Windows service that let you send pop-up messages to any IP

Winpopup. I loved that tool, showed it to my entire class in school so we could comfortably cheat during exams. I was hailed as a super hacker with mad skills.

Same. I think it was the most impressive thing I did at school. I guess someone somewhere still uses it... http://winpopup-lan-messenger.com/

I thought it was called netsend or something. I recall somehow accidentally sending a message to everyone on our school network.

winpopup was a GUI interface, `net send` was the CLI command (with which you could indeed message an entire domain)

> You ever played Quake with a bunch of dudes on speed?

I don't think I've ever played Quake without a bunch of dudes on speed.

> Remains one of the few contexts where nerds would do drugs

Leaving aside the nitpicking of "umm actually, caffeine is a drug" (I infer from context that you mean "hard"/illegal drugs, which is reasonable), this one doesn't quite ring true for me. There's a particularly flavour of nerdery that views drugs as a means of hacking one's own body - "bio-hacking" is already a bit cringey and over-used, but it's not inaccurate. There's significant intersection between the nerdier people I know, and those who are interested in chemically expanding their experiences and perceptions. Maybe that's a more-recent development? (For context, I'm in my early 30's)

net send! I once accidentally messaged every computer in my high school "fck y" with that powerful little tool.

Novell had a similar messenger util. Each message popped up in it's own window. When you sent a message, the input box didn't clear automatically.

Net effect: Hold down enter and full your target's screen with a hundreds of windows faster than they could clear them.

We called it bombing, so we usually just wrote the word "bomb" when doing it.

The one time I was ever really disciplined in school was after I accidentally targeted a service account instead of my friend's account. Every screen in the school was filled with the word bomb and my username was on each window title.

net send

Love the story. Would also love the story of how normally non-druggie nerds get amphetamnines in the pre-adderal era.

I dunno, I think Adderall was pretty easily available back then

our crew never really did illegal or prescription drugs

But we'd drink booze and/or achieve Adderall-like effects with caffeinated energy drinks. None of us drank coffee so we had like... zero caffeine tolerance. If you have zero caffeine tolerance and you slam multiple energy drinks the effect is NOT subtle

of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol

> of course, TODAY, my ruined body is so immune to caffeine I can chug coffee directly before a satisfying REM nap lol

Going on a tangent: it takes a while for the caffeine you drink to make it through your digestive system, so even for someone without any tolerance at all, they could take a few shots of espresso on a full stomach and then have about a 30 minute window to have a nap, before the jitter starts.

that's actually what i use to take naps wihtout alarm bell.

Okay, I always read this. And my brother is a proponent of the nap technique you mention!

BUT: On an empty stomach, or even if I've had a little bit of food, it feels like caffeine works fairly instantly for me? I'm the stereotypical "can't function until I've had a little coffee in the morning" type of guy. Is this purely psychosomatic?

The speed that caffeine starts hitting your body depends very strongly on how full you are when you consume it and how much food/water you’ve already had throughout the day. The timing after a meal will be very different than an empty stomach, which is probably just minutes. People are more used to noticing the same effects with alcohol.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

We were young and would never even consider illegal drugs - I remember before a LAN we'd send someone, extremely nervous they'd be "caught"(?), going into a pharmacy to buy a pack of caffeine pills!

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