The first two years of my online life didn’t involve chatting or the web, but merely downloading all the shareware I could possibly find.
Out of the hundreds of games I downloaded, the shareware author who stood out the most was Robert Carr of Lamprey Systems. Robert was (and presumably still is) a member of the Church Of Subgenius. He produced some of the most fucked up software you could ever find, especially when you are the tender age of 15. Example: one of the games, Operation Rescue promised to “put the fun back in abortion”. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Robert once said in an interview that his philosophy was as follows:
1. Scare and offend normal people.
2. Subvert their children.
3. Provide comfort to the weird.
He pretty much succeeded on all fronts. #2 I can personally vouch for; Lamprey served a key role in my personal subversion and eventual cultural awakening, as it were.
Around 2000, Lamprey disappeared from the Internet. Third-party archives that housed the games dried up, as most of those sorts of sites tend to do. About once a year, I would search for anything relating to the company, and about all I found over the last six years was a single interview with Robert.
That is, until today, when I found that Lamprey had been reborn a few months ago. (If you can’t figure out that the site is NSFW given the above, the rest of the post is going to go over your head.) LS was not just reborn with the same Classic apps that were there before (although they are still there), but with two OS X apps.
The first, [**MacJesusX**](http://www.macjesusx.com/) (aka *MacJesus Gold Millenium Extreme*), is the third major revision of the originally offensive MacJesus. MacJesus is like [ELIZA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA), only deified. Now OS X native and with 102% more blastphemy, MacJesusX is the only savior you need.
The second, [**Transmaniacon**], is not much of an app, but: imagine the brain loading sequence from *The Matrix*. Now replace all the images with the bizarre. That’s the basic idea.
There’s plenty more to the Lamprey site if you’ve never been – the [collection of death threats and hate mail](http://www.lamprey-systems.com/death.shtml) is an endless pile of laughter and tears. I’ll let you explore the rest on your own.
While I was going through the site, I noticed that Robert’s goal was on the [FUQ page](http://www.lamprey-systems.com/carr.shtml): “I want to offend one portion of the population while making another laugh. I want to put a smile on the face of everybody’s who’s bored and horrified with this society.” I’m trying not to wax too philosophical about a software company that made a piece of software called “F*CK ‘EM!” (subtitle: *All That’s Missing Is U!*), but here goes:
The world right now is, for lack of a better term, pretty fucked. I will spare you a long linked list of political blunders, socioeconomic crises, and religious zealotry – let’s just agree that the world is not a wonderful place right now. We are ruled by terror and faith rather than sanity and thought. When the plot from *V For Vendetta* seems plausable, folks, we’re heading downhill fast.
Entities like Lamprey buck this trend. It’s not just Lamprey – there are plenty of other challenges to common perceptions, like Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt’s new film, or (to some extent) the entire body of the Colbert Report. Point is: we need independent minds to provide the means – be they shocking, controversial, or just outright funny – to open more minds.
With this in mind, I can firmly say I’ve never been so excited to see one web site return online in all my life.