As a miserable old bastard who grew up before easy, ubiquitous internet access was a thing, I often pause and marvel at how incredible it is. If you want to know everything there is to know about, say, amphibious vehicles, you can do that, quickly and easily. Same goes for taking a moment to appreciate the joy of someone’s mother eagerly manipulating someone’s genitalia with their skilled, determined hands. Both of these things exist on this colossal global network. Or, at least they did. This is a story about AmphibiousVehicle.net, and the cold, horny cruelty of the internet.
On the remote possibility you’re somehow not very into or at least deeply curious about the rich world of amphibious vehicles, I’ll explain what AmphibiousVehicle.net was: a man, Hans Rosloot, and his attempt to build the most exhaustive resource of amphibious vehicles on the planet, which he called the Amphiclopedia.
This is how I remember the site, with all of its ridiculous Angelfire-era typography and clunky design. But it was a genuinely fantastic amphibious vehicle resource, and one that I had gone back to numerous times to get more information on an amphibian I knew or to figure out what an unknown one was.
Sometimes, it was the only resource online to have the information I sought, as in the case of this strange Soviet amphibian I wrote about in 2015.
The last archived instance of the site I found at the Internet Archive is from May 16, 2018. And some of the updates around that time are a little concerning, at least regarding Hans’ well-being.
You’ll notice Hans had mentioned he had to sell his Dutton amphibious vehicle for health reasons, and there are several other points on the site similar health issues are mentioned. So when the site archives just become a page saying the site isn’t there in later 2018, I’m afraid it seems likely that health reasons must have been a big factor.
Also, I attempted to reach Hans via his provided contact information, and everything just bounced back. I really hope he’s well and happy somewhere, but the evidence seems to suggest the site lapsed because Hans may no longer be with us.
By September of 2019, the site had taken on its current, very NSFW form:
Yes, the former home of the Amphiclopedia, once the best collection of information about vehicles that could drive on land or water, had become one of many, many collections of recorded acts of women who are alleged to have borne children manually stimulating engorged phalli of male actors pretending to be friend’s of the women’s sons or something.
When I recently clicked a link in an old story of ours thinking it would take me to the database of amphibious vehicles, I was very, very confused.
I have no problem with legal-age, consenting pornography, but this was about as far from what I was expecting as you can imagine. I looked at the URL again, retyped it over and over: a-m-p-h-i-b-i-o-u-s-v-e-h-i-c-l-e-.-n-e-t.
It was right. That was what you type into your browser to get to MILF Handjob.
But, why? Why would anyone want a porn site at the https://www.amphibiousvehicle.net/ address? This makes no sense!
Is it a mistake? Some erroneous re-direct? I looked at the footer of the website, and, no, it all seems to be intentional:
So, for some reason I cannot begin to understand, a company that runs porn sites decided this amphibious vehicle URL would be a good home for MILF Handjob?
None of this makes any sense, especially because the URL milfhandjob.com is available! Look:
Why didn’t they use that for the site that’s you know, all about MILF handjobs? I did a WHOIS search to see who registered and runs the site, in hopes of finding out just why the hell they did this. Unfortunately, the name was redacted:
The address was visible, though, and seemed a little familiar, so I looked it up:
Ohhh. That’s why it seemed familiar. Because that’s the address of the Icelandic Phallological Museum — the penis museum — in Reykjavik. I was there a couple years ago on a trip. I’m starting to suspect that address may not be entirely real.
I tried calling the number listed on the contact information, also an Icelandic number, but no one answered. A bit more digging found this same number and address associated with other porn sites, as well as some phishing and other types of domains less respectable than simple, honest porn:
With this in mind, I don’t think I’m going to get a good, honest answer from whoever took over the domain, even if I could get ahold of them.
But that still leaves the question: Why turn amphibiousvehicle.net into a porn site? What about that URL suggests in any way that whoever typed it in wanted to get off? Well, get off to humans, not an Amphicar or something. It just makes zero sense to me.
To help sort it out, I reached out to an expert: Lux Alptraum, author, smart person who writes about sex and related things, and the former editor of the old Gawker porn-enthusiast blog, Fleshbot. If anyone would understand the Byzantine way porn sites work, she would.
I asked her what she thought happened. She knew immediately.
“Oh almost definitely what happened is that the domain lapsed and some porn company just snapped it up.”
I asked why that domain, though, and didn’t it matter that it was so very much not a porn-type URL? It looks like, no, it doesn’t matter:
“I don’t think they’re picky, I think they’ll squat on any domain that gets some amount of traffic. Someone probably has a bot that just snaps up any lapsed domain.”
She mentioned that sometimes this is done to get the original owner to pay more to get it back, but usually it’s just as simple as seeing what lapsed domains have some traffic, and grabbing them.
So that seems to be what happened, and despite the wide eyes and eager smiles on all of those women of a certain age providing pleasure to those people in the videos on amphibiousvehicle.net, I have to say this makes me depressed.
Videos of handjobs — from MILFs (milves?) or anyone else — are as common as mosquitoes in summer on the internet. They’re everywhere. What’s not common, what’s not everywhere, is one person’s passion and dedication to creating an online resource for a peculiar kind of vehicle that they deeply love.
So, yes, perhaps the current amphibiousvehicle.net has some value to horny people who want to look at porn even though they have web content blockers at their home or work or school, or want to fool people looking at lists of URLs in a browser’s history, but I’d trade all of those people’s furtive wankings for that wonderful resource about cars that swim.
Luckily, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved most of the site, and I suggest changing your bookmarks accordingly. And that goes even if you’re feeling horny and want a wank, too, because I can’t forgive those MILF handjob people for this desecration of a once wonderful site, so I’ll be damned if I’m catching a beat to any of the pornography living at that URL now, and I suggest that all of you avoid it as well.
Maybe one day, when amphibiousvehcile.net lapses again, Hans Rosloot’s admirers will be able to snatch the URL back, and return it to what it once was. There’s enough porn on the internet, after all, and we can all do without this randy monument to the heartless avarice of how the internet works.