I was thinking of a response to FSF, and remembered a rather nice clip from Big Brother USA that’s on freewam.net, so I headed on over there to find it, and was greeted with…
This domain name expired on 03/21/2013 and is pending renewal or deletion.
Ok course, the 21st was only a few days ago, so maybe the webmaster is just late with the renewal. Also, it wouldn’t be the first time that the site has gone offline for a period and then returned. But what if this really is the end?
I know that there weren’t any updates for years and the vast majority of clips are widely available elsewhere, but even so I’m a little sad to see the site go. I discovered freewam.net during my tentative summer of online discovery back in 2005, shortly after coming across WamMonkey and shortly before finding EC Gunge, and spent many eager hours hogging the family telephone line to download the goodies on offers. Clips over 1 megabyte (considered big clips back then) were helpfully split up into RAR archives of a megabyte apiece. Although that seems fairly pointless nowadays, it was actually incredibly useful back then, because whenever the connection was broken (i.e. when my folks wanted to use the phone), I would only have to restart downloading the current RAR file and not the entire clip from scratch.
Perhaps less well known, the site also had an extensive selection of civilian photos, and a long list of links (especially Yahoo Groups) that really kicked-started my journey through the wamosphere.
So Mr Freewam, if you’re reading this, let me express my gratitude. Maybe let us know your plans for the site?
