I lament that these kinds of rogue explorations are less and less available to kids these days. Sure in many senses there's much more in the space to engage with, powerful tools like scratch and now LLMs to answer every question but I suspect most kids today will be nostalgic for some mobile game they have no agency to explore outside the rails or some online game that will ban you for cheating.
Contrast that with experiences like the author and the taboo joys of rooting around in the files and "hacking" something to do the thing you want.
Same here with one of those CDs full of shareware in early 90s. Autorun.bat running an interface.exe when the disk was inserted into the family computer's drive. Navigating the flash interface, I found the adult section and instuctions to decrypt the pictures by calling a surcharged phone number. I browsed the CD and found the corresponding /folder full of lady01.ass or lady02.tits, can't remember the extension. Tried to rename files to .jpg. And it Worked.
I then made my very own .bat with "ren .tits .jpg" into that folder and had a great afternoon.
ticulatedspline · · focus · HN ↗
Contrast that with experiences like the author and the taboo joys of rooting around in the files and "hacking" something to do the thing you want.
brokenmachine · · focus · HN ↗
When I looked on the disk, I saw that the pictures were listed as, eg LADY01 up to LADY05.
11 year old me was pretty excited when I thought, "what would happen if I renamed the files?"...
10729287 · · focus · HN ↗
I then made my very own .bat with "ren .tits .jpg" into that folder and had a great afternoon.