FENLAND ANARCHY TEAM (F.A.T)

Anti Bully, which really should have ended in 1996 at the absolute latest, ran into 1999 because I'm an immature big kid, who was still playing at spies when I was 15 and due to enter my last year of secondary school.

Also when I was 15, we got our first PC, and I briefly considered "computerising" my Anti Bully spy files. Then we got the internet working, and my friend Tim told me about The Anarchists' Cookbook (aka the Jolly Roger Cookbook, not the published-on-paper one from the 1970's). I vaguely knew of Anarchy as an idea that there should be no leaders or rules (actually wrong on both counts, Anarchism rejects authority), and immediately decided to adopt it. My rationale for supporting Anarchism was that the Jolly Roger cookbook had numerous recipies for making cool home-made explosives (pro-tip: never make these if you like being alive), but you "couldn't get" the ingredients in the UK, "because they're illegal". Actually the guys who wrote the cookbook (as "Jolly Roger" actually just compiled a bunch of stuff, he didn't write much, if any, of "his" cookbook) were just referring to American brand names of common household chemicals (like Drano). It was pretty fortunate I didn't realise this, as I'd have probably tried out the recipies and blown up / poisoned myself.

My conversion to Anarchism was pretty abrupt and complete. I recall writing "I'll fight fanaticaly for it until im dead or anarchy is declared" in some nonsensical screed. Mind you, I also had no idea about it and breifly imagined that, after storming the British parliament, we'd create an (swallow your drink now) "Anarchist government", consisting of my friends and I, Jolly Roger (whom I still beleived had written the cookbook single-handedly, back then) and the members of SWAT, or South-West (of Scotland) Anarchy Team. This government would be different because it would let people get chemicals to make home-made explosives and would "actually LISTEN to people". Quite what it would do if two of those people had conflicting demands is anybody's guess. Oh, also there'd be a giant statue of me towering over London, too. Well, as a leading figure in the revolution, it'd only be fitting for my people to honour me in some modest fashion.

Anyway, that idea was chucked out pretty quick, and I instead wanted to create a society of "voluntary cooperation", which would raise the whole world to a first world status of abundance and safety (even with all those home-made pipe bombs going off) and somehow just work without any police, laws, money or real incentive to work beyond "if everybody keeps on doing their jobs, we'll still have all the stuff we're used to". Oh, and there'd be bisexual orgies going on, like, everywhere.

As well as the well-known Jolly Roger Cookbook, there was a bunch of other Anarchy cookbooks drifting around the internet, almost all relics from the old days of BBS systems, and usually containing ads at the end for Cult of the Dead Cow, the Temple of the Screaming Electron (which, I much later found out, survived into the internet age as a kind of proto-4chan hive of edgelordery) and such-like places. All accompanied with terms like "Sys0ps" with edgy names and proudly advertising that all modems from 100 baud up to 14.4(k!) were supported. Naturally I immediately had the idea to create a F.A.T version, Deathbringer's Cookbook! (oh, my long-lived online name came from the name of a terrible robot we were building for the TV show Robot Wars. It was basically a plastic tool rack box stuck on a remote-control car). I laid it out like the Jolly Roger's cookbook, every article was "By" me, and had "-Deathbringer" at the end too. At least, unlike Jolly Roger, I'd actually written them myself, not just appended my name to other people's work... sort of. Tim ("S0urc3rr0r", at this point) at school had found a file for some plastic explosive you could make from flour and oil paint which was supposed to be "10 times more powerful than dynamite!!!" Apparently flour contains a "chemical cousin" to Dynamite... but then again, the salt you put on your fish and chips is made of a poisonous gas and a metal that catches fire in water, so that doesn't mean much. This explosive would supposedly explode when hit violently, or spontaneously after 10 years. We nicknamed it "Geff", for some reason I can't remember... I do remember a pretty butch girl in our year was nicknamed Geffcop, for some reason I also can't remember. Anyway, Geff was the core of the Deathbringer's cookbook, as I basically re-wrote the recipe for it then added a load of devices I imagined you could make with it, model rockets with it stuffed in the nose as "cruise missiles", and so on.

I didn't know how to get Deathbringer's Cookbook online (even Geocities and Tripod were beyond me. I thought clicking the "view as web page" option in a folder "put it on the internet"), so I sent it to SWAT, who had an online magazine that was basically a monthly Jolly Roger cookbook with Hacking, Phreaking ("hacking" phones, usually by playing sounds at them to get free calls) and "Anarchy" (bomb-making, not politics) articles. Despite the fact I was clearly a barely-literate kid with no idea what I was doing (I was also convinced I had a website at www.fightwinhail.com, because I'd put that address in an FTP programme, waited for it "upload", then assumed "timed out" meant it had "finished" and my website was live. Also I couldn't visit the website myself because I was using the computer it'd been uploaded from, but no doubt it was out there!), they republished the Deathbringer's Cookbook, and my first contribution to the "UK Underground" was out there!

I started working on the Deathbringer's Cookbook volume 2 (mainly just a list of 101 things to do with Geff), but then decided to imitate SWAT, and put out a monthly F.A.T Magazine instead. This was a word document (early SWAT had word and text file versions) with a number of crude and stupid MSPaint illustrations and diagrams for improvised explosives and things I'd designed (but never built). Also an anecdote about the time Sourcerror broke off the tube then lit the jet from a huge aerosol can, which had flown in big circles in the sky for several minutes before crashing back to earth. Completely true and not made up, of course! Fortunately it didn't matter, because nobody would ever read it. I still had no idea how to make a website, so just wrote the magazine every month "for phun", assuming I'd know how to put it online one day. I think it "ran" from October - December 1999, then some sort of screwup caused us to have to format the hard drive. We could probably have backed-up files through DOS or something, but knew nothing about how to do it, so everything on the computer was lost, including the original F.A.T Magazine.

The next F.A.T Magazine had a black background, and various sections with MSPaint illustrations as their titles, as well as in-article diagrams and pictures. File sizes nudged a meg for each issue, though there was remarkably little content, badly-written articles (one was just a log of me trolling a chatroom on some "youth network" of several Cambridgeshire schools, which we all got given accounts on), stolen articles and ideas for things I'd never made. I intended F.A.T Magazine to be a collaborative effort between the members of F.A.T, but that was really only me and Sourcerror, plus a handful of friends at school who were considered 'unoffical' members. It was basically only written by me, though. Sourcerror contributed one article (an 0800 scan, of use to Phreakers somehow, which turned into an anecdote about him trying to steal a keg from his local pub), and a number of totally real anecdotes I typed up into the regular "stuff we done" column.

I'm not sure if the first F.A.T Magazine made it's way online immediately, or if it also sat unread for a while until I finally figured out how to make a website, but I eventually got one together on Tripod. At the time they had a thing that let you type some text in and upload a couple of pictures, and it would generate a one-page website for you. They, of course, had a policy against uploading stuff about making bombs and overthrowing the government, but I decided if I used the auto-generated website's text as a "this is for information only" disclaimer (a common thing seen in many anarchy files) I'd be safe. I promptly did that, turning one of the three links you could create on your auto-generated page into an "ENTER" link, which went into a second index page, and my actual website. It was up for about 48 hours before Tripod shut it down for violating policies. I was furious, angrily putting, in the "lamers" section of a future F.A.T Magazine, that it had "had a massive disclaimer, what more do you want? twats!".

I scouted around for more hosting, but I had no credit / debit card, no money, and my parents were still terrified of "online fraud" and absolutely refused to buy anything online, so said hosting had to be free. I came across a site called Piratecity, which was an imitation of Fortunecity that allowed you to upload hacking, phreaking and anarchy stuff... perfect! I can still remember my address being www.piratecity.com/anarchy/deathbringer ...but the Wayback Machine doesn't have anything (useful) from it. At this time I was making my webpages in Microsoft Word 97, which could do the task in a rudimentary manner (far better than any other WYSIWYG webpage maker I've since tried, which were all universally shit), though would sometimes do strange things such as re-name an image you put in a page to "ImageXX" with increasing numbers, rather than just putting in a link to that image. Also it would occasionally make links you created link to where the file was on your hard drive, and not relative to where it would be on the internet (my frustrations with links "stopping working" once I'd uploaded a page caused me to make them all absolute for years afterwards. Even in the early days of this website!). For some reason, when F.A.T Magazine was first launched, I had the mag itself hosted on a different free "underground site" host. I suppose I considered the material in it "so hardcore" that even that host would delete it, so I preferred to have my main website in one place and to be able to move the "juicy stuff" around as it would get deleted. It duly went up, and was advertised around a few (internet) underground forums. Most of the members of the underground seem to have been still using Usenet back then, so it was largely ignored. I seem to recall a few "I'll check it out" replies, but nothing else. After 3-4 issues went up, I ONLY THEN discovered that all the images, the links to the magazine zip files, and the MIDI embed (yes, it was that bad) were linked to the ones on my hard drive. Anybody who went to the website would see a mess of broken images and non-working downloads. It only worked if you visited it on my computer (explained the "lighting fast" downloads, anyway). I was mouth-foamingly furious at Microsoft for fucking me over (far from the first time), and fixed the page. Still got no interest or replies, though. I was also quickly discovering that if you want to create a monthly magazine, you kinda need stuff to write about. After the Geff-based fun and "introductions to Anarchy" in the first issue, it devolved into inane ranting about political things going on in the world. The BBC were freaking out about a "far right" guy (probably just a Donald Trump) being elected in Austria. I wrote a stupid article about that, complete with swastikas, and got a reply from an Austrian who basically told me I had no idea what the fuck I was on about. He also blocked me from replying. Didn't stop me from pontificating on Robert Mugabe "being racist, but because he's black people don't think he is" in the next issue, though. I also started Jolly Roger-style ripping articles, I did leave them credited to their original names, though. One I stole had only been in SWAT 2-3 months prior. I think I ripped it because one line implied it had been written by a girl, and maybe if she found my awesome zine she'd want to date me. Mind you, I also wrote a furious article about stopping Echelon (an automated mobile phone conversation eavesdropper) which advocated raping the technicians. I recanted in the next issue and posted a feminist poem from the book we were using in English class at school.

Anyway, what with this being late 1999 - early 2000, more and more edgelord geeks like myself were getting online. They were all gravitating towards "those sites that tell you how to make bombs", and the "underground" was exploding. By the time I was into it, there was already a bunch of established UK underground E-Zines. I think the oldest one that was still commonly found (at the time) was PHUK, or Phreakers, Hackers UK, which I think began back in the 1980's BBS days. There was also a PLUK, or Phonelosers of the UK, an offshoot of Phonelosers of America, which is still going. Among the "current" ones in 1999, SWAT was the best. I'd spent many an hour reading through their old articles (early issues had some fascinating / hilarious anecdotes about their explosive experiments, drinking sessions and Random Senseless Destruction adventures). SWAT's rival was called Anti-Social, and seemed to have been written by this massive upper-middle-class prick. Where SWAT was a basic .txt file zine, Anti-Social had their own custom-coded (and Windows only) "reader", which I seem to recall clocked in at a huge 2 megabytes. The magazine itself, when opened in the reader, wasn't much more than text files with some colour changes in the font, and a sidebar that took you to different articles. SWAT reviewed Anti-Social, commenting on how this seemed like an unnessescary waste of time, and Anti-Social "responded" by arguing the toss on how an issue of SWAT would be 40k smaller (an irrelevant size even then) if it used Anti-Social's format. This spat blew up into a sort of "war" between the two zines that came to almost-blows when they met in person at a hacking conference in Blackpool. Well, ok, Anti-Social distributed flyers around the place and SWAT went around defacing as many as they could. Later they grabbed Anti-Social's editor and threw him in a dirty pool on the beach. There was actually photos of this at one point, though taken from quite a distance. Also Anti-Social had recorded audio at the event and were trying to sell CD's of it, advertising it by teasing a "hilarious joke" that had been told at a "Hacker Pub Quiz" session. I beleive this joke was "Small Scottish ISP - three letters...?" "AOL!", which SWAT just typed out in their own write up of the event (Anti-Social's write up curiously omitted their run-ins with SWAT, for some reason!). Anti-Social later created a new reader, which allowed for background images, slick title images and .mod music in the background of their zine. Then disappeared.

These magazines inspired F.A.T, and a bunch of other newcomers to the "Scene", to start their own magazine. I warned about this in F.A.T Magazine, of a "rush of mags that will fill up hard drives everywhere". Actually F.A.T was the fat that should have been trimmed, as it was stupid and useless. Four magazines teamed up with SWAT in an "Underground Alliance". I tried to get F.A.T into this but, obviously, they were having none of it. One of the other magazines was in .html format and even had photos! Digital cameras and scanners existed then, of course, but were expensive and not too common. Having photos in your zine was impressive. That one started out as a hacking zine, but they started making bombs out of model rocket engines later. They also strapped one to a remote control car and took a picture of it blasting off. I don't remember much about the other two, but later found a "Phone Losers of England", or PLE, who appeared to be based in Cambridge! They seemed to be around our age too, though were going to a different school, Sourcerror and I wanted to meet them, but never actually emailed and arranged a meet up. They even had a joke "convention", in a phone box on Mill Road. Their site also had some bizarre pictures they'd drawn in paint that I saved. I might still even have them kicking around somewhere... After them came another wave of new zines. One I remember was called Anti Zine, which contained articles mocking a fat girl they didn't like at their school, a guide to necrophilia which went "dress the body in a suit and top hat, give it shades and a cigar and hang a note round it's neck saying "I've been fucked by the fuck bandit"", as well as an implication that homosexuality between live adult males was worse than necrophilia. There was another one too, which was a parody of underground e-zines with things like "blue boxing means if you paint the phone box blue, and also yourself, you can get free calls". They also had a couple of hilarious stories about a phreaker being thwarted at every turn by the police / well-meaning relatives, and one about a huge battle against BT, including "the brain of Mr B.Telecom" in a robot body bristling with weapons.

At this point I was getting more into the "serious politics" of Anarchism, sticking quotes from Emma Goldman on my school locker (I didn't understand her writings, but collected them because she was a woman who'd been writing about politics in the 19th century, and was thus feminist, and was thus good). This was also causing me to have a serious sense of humour bypass. Homophobic and sexist language, and what I considered racism (mocking the French, Germans and Russians) abounded in underground zines, so I started dropping them as they were obviously "not really about" Anarchism (ya think??). Mind you, even before then, the spectre of Environment Freedom remained, and when I passed on one cookbook I found to Sourcerror, I deleted an article about drowning cats from it first, as he'd no doubt joke about that at school and twigger my sensitive feewings. SWAT was deteriorating too, at that point, becoming write ups of experiences they'd had on drugs, logs from chatrooms with lines like "you're gay? do u want to fuck my dog?" and even a cybersex log. F.A.T was already pretty dead, I took all of our "stuff we done" anecdotes, compiled them into one file, and sent it to them to put in their zine.

But, to rewind a bit, what "anarchy" did F.A.T actually do? Not a hell of a lot. Most of it early in the organisation(??)'s existence. SWAT Magazine had discovered that a certain type of weedkiller could be made into a basic explosive. You had to put it in boiling water, then suspend string in it to grow crystals from. One crystal was the fire-suppressing chemical normally in it, and the other was the highly-flammable active ingredient. We bought some of this weedkiller and decided to try making explosives round my house. Sourcerror told me to "just go downstairs and boil the kettle". But I was worried if I did that, my dad would come strolling into the kitchen and go "Yurr makin' uh cupper tea?" and then I'd have to use all the water making tea, and have none left for the bomb. So I decided to just use water from the upstairs hot tap, which steamed if you ran it long enough, so must be "nearly boiling", right? The weedkiller was duly mixed up and a string suspended in it. After several days, no crystals appeared. I just poured it out, filtering the sediment in several sheets of kitchen roll. Crystals then emerged on the sheets. I lit one in the back door of the house, and threw it out. It burned up extremely rapidly, in a huge orange flash, and produced an immense amount of smoke. Luckily my parents were out at the time. When Sourcerror visited again (we lived far apart), we lit the other sheet on fire and threw it out onto the conservatory roof. It burned very slowly and produced a ton of smoke. My dad came in the room asking if we could "smell that", because the "neighbours" were burning something. At that point in my life, my reaction to any form of "curtain twitching" was absolute fury (and had hardly been kind even before that - other people's business is other people's business), so my angry denial looked entirely in-character.

From then on, we'd produce weedkiller bombs just by grinding down the weedkiller and mixing it with sugar (I did this in a metal biscuit tin! I was bloody lucky). One time we tried making a pipe bomb with a thick cardboard tube, with 2p coins stuffed in each end, wrapped in tape with an indoor sparkler for the fuse. We lit the fuse on a bridge over a railway in Cambridge and ran like hell... into the path of a cyclist coming the other way. The bridge was on a curve in the path and had blind corners going off in both directions. I thought it was going to explode right next to her, but actually the mixture inside just blazed up like a small, very smoky, flare. We knocked it off onto the railway line and watched it fizzle out. Later Sourcerror stuffed some in a can, crimped the end down, and put it on a fire made of twigs and more weedkiller / sugar mix. This could have exploded, but just flared up suddenly. We did this round an abandoned, flooded quarry behind our school, some distant fishermen were taking an interest in these kids they could see lighting things on fire and running away, so we got out of there. We also experimented with "solidox", a thing used for welding and mentioned in the Jolly Roger's Cookbook. I scraped a load off the metal sticks it comes on (my mum inevitably asking what the noise had been when I went downstairs afterwards. She always "WUNDAHD WOT DA NOIZE WUZ" if I was anything other than absolutely silent. She even said it one of the first times I used an electric shaver, knowing FULL WELL things like that embarrased me), mixed it with sugar and lit up a pile in the garden. It just burned slowly.

Other pyrotechnic experiments didn't come to much. A wealthy elderly aunt we barely knew we had died, and we spent some holidays in her house, preparing to sell it. She'd smoked like a chimney and there were multi-packs of matches everywhere. My mum found one in the wardrobe of the room I was sleeping in and got furiously angry about me wanting to "steal" them to start fires with (she'd seen Sourcerror and me lighting up some experiments in the garden). She got even more angry when she found another box elsewhere in that room, with "a loighter 'n all", as my dad had helpfully added when he saw it. Really? Matches and a lighter? In a smoker's house? Well I never, eh? As we were loading stuff up into the car to take to the tip, I saw and pocketed one of these multi-packs of matches, more out of spite that anything. I did know it was possible to make explosives by grinding up "strike anywhere" match heads. These weren't that kind, but I tried it anyway, putting the resulting powder into small paper triangles, then lighting and throwing them. I threw one in the shed, the smoke smelled lovely. I'd also seen a recipie for smoke bombs which used Epsom Salts, which has some medical uses. When out with Sourcerror in Peterborough, I'd bought some, and also a Silverchair tape (the guy who ran SWAT Magazine liked them). On the way back (with 3 of us on the back bench seat of the car) my brother started wanting to "see what I'd bought". He was opening up the fold-down arm-rest, to get access to the boot, and saying he could "feel something". I was in the middle seat, scared absolutely rigid, and trying to lean back and crush his arm. Our mum unwittingly came to my rescue that day, telling him to stop making me have to lean forward uncomfortably. When I tried to make the smoke bomb, I was melting the ingredients (which included sugar) in foil over a candle when mum and dad came back unexpectedly. I put the foil down, which led to a sooty stain on the lino. They could smell the melted sugar and I had to tell them what I was doing, that time. They then went ridiculosly over the top, using at least 3 different strong cleaners to remove the tiny bit of soot (a damp kitchen roll would have done it). I still think they thought I'd actually just lit a bonfire on the floor in there. I never used that smoke bomb, it might still be kicking around somewhere. Sourcerror also made some thermite, and wrapped that up in a little paper package saying "burn me". I've still got that somewhere, too.

Around bonfire night, Sourcerror and another friend got a chunk of gunpowder out of a firework. They decided to try lighting it on the brazier in the metalwork room at school, creating a huge shower of sparks, and a ton of smoke. The teacher was a good sport (he told us he'd made pipe bombs himself as a kid) and laughed it off. Sourcerror also had a block of magnesium you could scrape some off from, then use a striker to light it and start fires. They were having a science class in a freezing cold mobile classroom, so he and another associate F.A.T member (he was a White African, but one who didn't seem to have been particularly well off, I got the impression he'd seen some shit) used that to light a bonfire of splints and scrap paper on one of the tables (on a heatproof mat for bunsen burners, of course). That teacher most certainly didn't laugh it off. Dunno how they got away with it as lightly as they did, actually. Sourcerror also told me that he and some other friends made a pipe bomb with an explosive made out of loads of ingredients listed in anarchy files all mixed together. They put it under the front bumper of some rich twat's BMW, when it went off it blew the front up in the air, which then crashed down, causing all the windows to break and the alarm to go off. I put that anecdote in the "stuff we done" column, but it was pretty obviously made up.

Aside from pyrotechnics, we also did a fair bit of petty vandalism and RSD. One day at school we had an RSD day, I unscrewed the cover of a light switch and took it. That was about it. The school also had a very crappy common room for Year 11's. Our responsible, very Christian, and always absent friend got the key. We had an ever-changing list of who was "allowed" in to it. But we also were very cautious of when and how we went inside. If the popular kids ever saw us going in there, they'd want to know why, then have the key off us in five seconds flat. There was some graffiti inside about Boris Yeltsin, with a hammer and sickle, too. I thought it was a cool and smart "political satire", though actually knew nothing about what it meant. It was in one of several rotting old portacabins, the ever-absent friend with the key either got fed up with the constantly-rotating list of "allowed" people the rest of us were pressuring him in to maintaining, or else was just absent for months with the key. Either way it ended up totally unused. One night Sourcerror and I went round there and kicked a hole in the rear of it. We wanted to uproot a small tree and "plant" it inside, but couldn't get it out of the ground, so I just pissed in the hole instead. Then drew an anarchy sign and "F.A.T" on it. We then went round the house of some of his other friends and told them, they went crazy at our amazing daring. I was absolutely bricking it the next day, though, as the anarchy sign would obviously be traced back to me (I had them all over my folder). For the next few days in assembly, the head or deputy head would announce they had been "VERY dissapointed to find...." then go on to talk about something totally unrelated to what we had done. It was never mentioned "officially" at all. After a couple of weeks I found a way to contrive walking round the back of that portacabin, taking a studied disinterest in it, otherwise. They'd just nailed a different bit of wood over the hole and left it at that.

There was also the time I stole a new whiteboard maker from one of the teacher's offices on the last day of a term (they "last for ages" so are "reserved for the government" and are not "allowed to be sold to us plebs", apparently). This little kid ended up with it somehow and scrawled graffiti everywhere, the teachers seperated out every year and interrogated us all one by one about who had been responsible, on what should have been the happy, pre-holiday occasion. I'd previously bragged to a few people about stealing the pen, and was bricking it over the thought of being ratted out, but nobody did. The teachers could tell from the style of writing that one of the young kids had done it, anyway, so didn't seriously suspect any of the top year.

The most serious thing we did was the time Sourcerror came to visit me for the night. We sneaked out after my parents had gone to bed and tried to set one of the bins in the local park on fire, as this would "cost the government money" and "eat into their profits". We poured in some Zippo fluid and / or weedkiller and sugar, but it didn't really burn. Also I insisted on wearing this terrorist balaclava thing I'd got off an army surplus stall at the East of England Show, which Sourcerror just found cringey. Oh and we were looking for some dry paper / sticks to add to the fire, when I thought I saw several other people running into the park behind us. Actually it was just broken up clouds of smoke. In the end we threw a lighter in the bin. Sourcerror was looking in at it, saying "you missed the fire". Then it exploded with a big puff of flame that nearly took his eyebrows off. We walked back to my house, but couldn't open the back door (it had a notoriously shit lock). We were going to go round and go in the noisier front door, but a bunch of people coming back from a pub walked past. I insisted we hide in the back garden for ages until they'd gone, the voices faded out but I could still apparently see people standing around under the street light. Actually it was leaf-clad branches on a hedge blowing in the wind. We got in and went to bed. Sourcerror said he'd stayed up and watched an awesome horror movie about satanic monks sticking a sword up somebody's arse on TV. I was annoyed I missed it. We planned to do the same around Cambridge, I was going to camp out with him in his garden, but my mum only remembered THAT MORNING that she'd already agreed the family was going to some wedding or funeral or pointless bollocks like that, so I had to get to school and tell him I couldn't come. He told me he camped out anyway, but it was absolutely freezing, and he burned all the weedkiller and sugar mix he had just to keep warm.

School ended and I went to college at Cambridge Regional College, or CRC. Sourcerror was there too, but by this time had a part-time job and an on-off girlfriend, so he wasn't really interested in bomb-making text files and vandalism any more. We drifted apart pretty quick. Also I started growing long hair, which he ripped the piss out of. One time I met him with some of his other friends, and asked if he'd seen the new SWAT. His other friends thought I was talking about the American gun collector's mag, and called me some very upper-middle-class "Cambridgey" name for a redneck, don't remember what it was, now.

Pretty soon after that I'd drifted into the sense of humour bypass phase, and was silently fuming at the racist, homophobic and sexist jokes told on the bus every day. F.A.T was pretty much over by then. Piratecity had also died (sued into oblivion by Fortunecity, I beleive. The first Piratecity site design was a straight lift of Fortunecity's), and I'd moved the F.A.T site to this other underground host called Hack-Net. Nothing much from that on the Wayback machine, either. I'd renounced vandalism, bomb-making, hacking etc by that time, anyway, and decided to start a "serious" Anarchy website, with politics and propaganda to convince people to join the revolution... through the medium of crappy .gif animations based on Final Fantasy games (actually, now that I think about it, the first one of these was made during my very last days of school). I even hosted that site on the "enemy", Fortunecity! These animations were replaced by the Insanity Please comic and, later, the first Felney. I think the very first days of Felney still claimed it was "Made by the Fenland Anarchy Team" (on the page, not the actual comics), though, by that time, it was basically just me. I wanted to make Felney into this kind of artistic collaboration with contributions from a bunch of my friends, though the most that ever happened there was one of them said I should "do a space story where they fight CCG". Before long Felney just became the name for all of my stuff. In 2004 I got my first job, and pretty soon drifted away from the far left entirely. I bought paid hosting and moved my site to a service that had no ads and was always online, with working FTP (imagine that, eh?). That incarnation of the site lasted right up to 2017. I tried to shut it down in 2016, but I did it too close to the payment for another year of hosting being taken from my account, so it was around for the extra year. In 2014 I began to (very slowly) work on a totally new design for my site, which is what you are reading right now! Or will be, whenever it's finished and put online again.

Bonus!!

I managed to digital-archaeology a post-FAT Magazine, pre-sense-of-humour-bypass 31337 Anarky Phile I made! "You can't go hosting stuff about making pipe bombs on a UK-based site these days!" you say... nah, this one's about...

U.F.O Spotting - The Anarchist Way!

Originally written July 21st, 2000!

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