This was one of the awesomest sites on the internet. The format was sort of a superforum where anyone could post anything they wanted, including Anarchist Cookbook style how-to's of illegal stuff. Just some of the topics discussed were: guns, homemade bombs, poison, hacking, locks and security, drugs, music and art, online zines, online transcriptions of famous books and texts, jokes, science fiction, self improvement, erotica, the supernatural, conspiracy theories, law, the media, politics, religion, and technology. It was a great place to waste time and learn something new. The day I figured out it went down, I was sad. Shortly thereafter it seemed some people tried to compensate with some other similar sites, like 'totsepedia', which were paltry shadows of their predecessor. This was quite a while ago.
Today, I have seen out of the ashes something I could truly call the resurrection of totse. There are still imitation sites, though now some have become as large as the original (it seems) - and with the same look and all the bells and trimmings. The most notable children of totse are: http://www.totse.info/, http://www.zoklet.net/totse/ , and http://www.totse2.com/totse. Indeed, it is hard to tell if these three are not pretty much identical twins, sharing a very strong resemblance to their mother.
It's not just any old forum site, or what you could easily find through Google or Wikipedia. Totse has a character entirely different. Wikipedia won't easily show you how to make ninja horseshit poisons, or start your own bed & breakfast. Google may be an avenue, but a long one at that.
One of the coolest things about totse is that it started before the internet itself, it started as a BBS (Bulletin Board System). For those of you too young to know what a BBS was, it was probably the type of thing paving the road for the internet well ahead of its time. Back in the era where PCs were just getting trendy, you'd take your shitty home computer and use a modem to dial up a certain number almost like dialing a fax machine. It'd dial into another modem on a host remote computer, and you'd have access to some public files on that computer. They could be little tidbit word files, small games, picture files. There would be a sort of graphical interface or personalized 'look' on the computer screen as you did your stuff on there. There was even the first chat and eventually head to head gaming. But we're talking real ghetto. Like the first Atari graphics and beeps and blips.
So in 1989, this one dude named Jeff Hunter started his own BBS apparently with a PC with only 20MB on the hard drive (that was actually pretty big then!) Mostly the BBS had a buncha text files, and Jeff wanted to have a place where people could be free to post just about anything they wanted. By the mid 90's, the internet became a household name and the totse BBS was eventually transferred to website form. For just over a decade, totse.com graced the waves and warps of the world wide web. By January 17th, 2009, Jeff decided to take the site down, as it was a lot of maintenance and high bandwidth, and anyone who hosts a large site knows bandwidth doesn't come free or even necessarily cheap. It seems somehow some others got a hold of a lot of the original DNA of the site (perhaps Jeff kindly gave them access) and made new babies from it. That's a win for everybody.
