An Autopsy of Roguesci: the coolest way to lose an eye in 2005
If you've been online since the 2000s, you'll have noticed a shift from a web of many independent forums and websites to everything being concentrated on a few social media networks. The content grab started long ago, so many storied subcultures are being lost to digital decay. It's with this in mind that I want to tell the story of the Explosives and Weapons Forum.
Many websites served to dispense advice on gray area or outright illegal activity. There were the pyro forums, specialized toward both legal and illegal fireworks. Beyond fireworks forums there were sketchier places that dealt in more weaponized explosives, drugs and petty crime: Totse, Rorta, Bombshock. They attracted many a fan, but few a practitioner - everyone knew that the information was not the best. Try anything and it would be a dice roll between making something that can go pop, making a dud and blowing your fingers off in an accident in the midst of a felony.
In 1998, megalomania established Roguesci: The Explosives and Weapons Forum, a site to rule above all of these trash boards...or at least that was the expectation.
Roguesci, like others, grew from the mid 90s BBS subcultures and seemed to have been inspired by the writings of an Aussie who went by the name of "Lowry". Lowry was an Aussie pyro who made a little how-to file of various improvised weapons and fireworks (very dangerous to mess with, for chemistry reasons, so just don't). He resurfaced at some point with an obscure partial reup of his site, not knowing that a more complete PDF was going around and that there was another pyro forum with his old contacts.
But these BBS and Usenet lists had a problem that would carry on through the years: Low quality posters and files spread dangerous misinformation. Even widely published and famous books were full of information.
Roguesci would be the site with standards and the go-to for conversations about explosives, chemical warfare, improvised firearms and collection of historical chemistry texts.
So mega brought in his friend nbk2000, a lifetime hobbyist weaponeer, who self-identified as a psychopath and a Nazi to deliver HED, "hot electrion death" (bans) to all "kewls": Kids and young men who spread "cool" dodgy instructions for making dangerous chemicals. Advice was to be peer reviewed and unskilled members expected to lurk and study before posting. Using "crapbooks" like the Anarchist Cookbook was also a quick route to a ban.
(the joke "NBK likes to give HED" was prohibited on the forum)
Under their rule, the site thrived. It hopped from free hosting to its own dedicated domain with official explosives guide to explosives and their synthesis, written by mega himself.
The site thrived throughout the mid-2000s but ran into some scandals with an early user killing several people with a bomb, and whispers of users getting injured in lab accidents (I can't tell who but one user was said to have lost some fingers).
Dangerous content was its draw and vague connection to murders weren't going to slow it down. But its weakness was in a cult of personality around the vice admin, NBK.
To roguesci users, NBK was a mysterious, charismatic drifter who held the highest subject knowledge. Sometimes hated for his debates about the worthiness of non-white people. Usually respected because he had the most entertaining posts. His famous work was a pdf file and website of his name that mixed his own advice with reprints of a few books and contained "rules to profit by" for criminals. NBK had spent most of a decade writing what he said would be an encyclopedia of improvised weapons and advice for criminals.
NBK maintained one of the most popular non-technical threads, "Why I Hate Rent (rant)" detailing his beliefs that paying rent or property tax was slavery. He escaped this slavery by squatting at abandoned houses, and he blogged about his experiences in the thread.
One of his actually brilliant ideas came in handy when a guy robbed his squat: he kept his money in a safe made with a pipe and padlock. It was mistaken for a pipe bomb and dropped by the burglar.
Then one day, mega announced that NBK had died. There was no elaborating. Users poured out performative mourning (sentiments of respect and resentment were mixed, but the latter not shown as much).
Later on it turned out that NBK was alive but needed legal help: he was being charged with the murder of a guy who he was living with, and had fled to Canada where he tried to stay with another forum member (who promptly turned him in).
NBK2000, or Arthur Charles Carnes, was later convicted after using his history in weaponry to argue that he would have done a far better job of murdering the guy than whoever did (most likely nbk in a less composed, dumber incarnation of himself than he presented online).
According to a forumite's investigation, NBK's friend (the victim) had falsely converted to Judaism so that he could sell kosher meat to the local Jewish community. NBK had decided that this was race treason.
The forum went down and reopened, with some in-house web crawling to preserve the information for the final shutdown that we knew was inevitable, and the inevitable came in 2009 with the site disappearing forever. Rumors of a reopening circulated but it seemed like there was too much heat on mega, and its heyday was long past.
A few users and mods tried to open successor sites and bring the community back together. They also disappeared.
Another of the old Roguesci mods, fierce opponent of seatbelts after a few near miss accidents, died after being thrown through his windshield in a car crash.
Another one lost an eye in an explosives accident.
Roguesci prided itself on having higher standards of accuracy than all the other pyro and weapon freak boards. But it fell short of its own self image and its prided top dog that the user base looked up to (in public at least), NBK, was actually a bit of a dumbass. Many forumites were dumbasses posting things they'd regret, but at their high point, they also distributed information on how to produce illegal weapons that could have killed thousands of innocent civilians if the wrong readers took interest.
In its wake, I've found nothing that is even similar in scope. The condensation of the internet to big social platforms and the ruining of search engines makes it almost impossible, and ironically with less conspiracy-riddled eyes it's obvious that if you wanted to engage in such hobbies, you could just get an ATF license and use explosives legally without resorting to hardware store chemicals that will blow your hands clean off your body as your skin melts off. That's right: explosives and munitions are legal if you fill out ATF forms and pay a fee.
