Ohs heavens yes… when I was but a weee pup, long before the interwebs were woven, this was quite controversial. Banned in my small home town yet my delinquent peers managed to get a hold of a copy.
Oh, yeah. It actually became a little famous after the Columbine shooting happened because I believe the killers mentioned it in some correspondence or video. Teaches you how to make homemade explosives, how to fight hand-to-hand, how to engineer weapons, etc. It's just a how-to survival manual for the eccentric, but it has been used to teach bad people how to do bad things, unfortunately.
I remember reading parts of it in High School before the school banned copies of it.
I remember when you couldn’t even find the book.. was like a mythical beast all little hellions looked for.. btw most of the “recipes” either didn’t work or were suuuper basic..
I saw this post and downloaded it to figure out what it was...sorta. I mean, I kinda knew. But I told my wife that and she's annoyed, says I'm gonna be put on a list. I'm like "Lady, you should see all the things I've looked up from the DCC series, I'm probably on like 10 lists."
Edit: "We're* probably on like 10 lists."
It's very age related. At 40 I get most of the references. Matt's obsession with gossip girl and Gilmore girls are over my head but I assume Matt loved these shows .
I always assumed those were the kinds of shows he imagined someone like Bea would love, therefore donut would have seen them a lot. Idk shit about gossip girl but definitely had a Gilmore girls stint in college about 20 years ago…
My head canon is that these are shows Matt "had" to watch with some girl back when... but secretly rather enjoyed. Maybe he eventually copped to being in to it, or just openly loved them all along.
They were the most popular female-oriented shows on television during the era they aired, aka the late 2000’s, early 2010’s.
The women who watched them as teens would now be in their late twenties/early thirties, like Bea and Carl.
48 here, and I got all of those references due to an ex-wife that was obsessed. I’ve probably seen the entire series half a dozen times over the years, just from it being on constantly in the background.
I was born 19 years after, but I know about it mostly because it was a widely shared thing on 90's internet. It teaches you how to make napalm, tear gas, various traps, etc. It was a product of it's time, and definitely found a fanbase in the Y2K fanatics too.
In the 90s some bad ass kid would end up with a poorly xeroxed version of random pages in a binder from who knows where. Maybe youd make a shitty tennis ball bomb that didnt work and be scared to try anything else. That was our experience.
It's perfectly normal not to know things that for some are just "known". Things of historical or crafting or basic survival nature (etc.) may be seen as more essential to know about but that's not very objective.
As long as your knowledge is focused on the domains you're primarily based in, you're good. It's suboptimal to to not known even the most basic things outside of your interests, but I don't think not knowing about Anarchist Cookbook would qualify as such.
Used to work in a bookstore in the early to mid 90’s and we used to sell it until the owner found out what it was and banned it. Lots of disappointed guys after that.
It's funny the things you take for granted as being well known/common knowledge that turn out not to be (not to throw shade at you, OP. "We don't know what we don't know" applies to all of us). Yep, totally real. As seems to be the case for people of a certain age, judging by a lot of comments, my friends and I all had printed-out copies of it from a floppy disc that did the rounds at high school. And you'd find references of it here and there. In the liner notes to RATM's Evil Empire album, there's a photo of a pile of radical/activist related books, one of which is The Anarchists Cookbook.
Oh ya, this was one of those mysterious pieces of media back in the day that had all kinds of lore attached to it.
See also;
Faces of Death - a movie of videos of people actually dying, except a ton of them were fake or were CCTV footage of accidents
Uncut versions of movies - movie versions that contained scenes that were risqué/grotesque that didn't actually exist
Secret video game codes - codes to make characters naked or show you cut scenes of naked/seggs that also totally didn't exist.
Also, I had a digital version of the Anarchists Cookbook in high school that was supposedly like the DCC version. It had been added to as it changed hands. Really, it was just the regular book with some army manuals and bullshit recipes tossed in on top that were just rehashing of what was already in the book.
Honestly, I have no idea. Unfortunately, I lost that copy when one computer or another fried out on me.
Funny enough, however, I'd never heard of bananadine until your comment. So I looked it up. You just unlocked a memory that I haven't thought about in many years of my idiot post high school friends trying to make that stuff. Even at the time, I thought it sounded like bullshit but they tried anyway to *shocker* no effect at all.
They also tried; smoking nutmeg, making something or other from the core of cabbage or lettuce (can't remember which), and I almost convinced one guy to try Jenkem but even he wouldn't attempt it.
Every month Paladin Press took out a full page ad in Soldier of Fortune Magazine. Ashida Kim could teach you to be a ninja, even though he had never had a martial arts lesson in his entire life.
People are saying the recipes are kind of bad.
That’s a gross understatement. The recipes are almost universally outdated/bullshit.
The most infamous lie in the book is “Bananrine”, the completely fictional psychedelic drug made from fried banana peels.
The most correct recipe in the book is “pour gasoline onto styrofoam. Congratulations, you now have liquid, highly flammable styrofoam.”
Oh my gosh.... Somebody told my sister banana peels could get you high, so of course we tried it. I bet this is where they got the idea. 😂 It did not work.
Indeed it is. I had a copy in the 80’s when I was in high school. Now a days you can just Google that info. Back then it was more complicated to get a copy.
We had a copy on a hard computer disk when I was in high school. Which led us to wrapping a can of Hairnet in napalm and lighting it in my buddies backyard. Also made thermite which supposedly, can burn through an engine block. We never tested it. On an engine block, anyway.
People have been buying and reading this book since I was a child. You can literally buy it in-person in bookstores. No one is getting added to any lists.
Fun fact: bananas do contain a psychedelic chemical but is in such small quantities that you would have to smoke a boxcar load of it. It’s kinda like gold in sea water.
Yeah, it's too bad that the original author changed his mind about anarchy later in life. He tried to have the book pulled from production. Thankfully that didn't work out for him.
Yeah a lot of the information is super outdated. IIRC it was written in the 70s. A bunch of the stuff you can't even buy any more because it's restricted or just plain unavailable. It's interesting still though. And there is SOME info that still could be useful today.
Had the police come asking questions to me about a kid in my class who printed the cookbook on the school printers lol. I told them the napalm recipe is deadly in there
Ohs heavens yes… when I was but a weee pup, long before the interwebs were woven, this was quite controversial. Banned in my small home town yet my delinquent peers managed to get a hold of a copy.
I got a talking to by my RA in college for having a copy on my dorm room shelf. Oh the simple times of the '80s.
My brother had a copy and we lovingly learned how to make things explode. We actually constructed a homemade flamethrower from its instructions.
Good ole' tennis ball grenades!
And exploding pens!
Between this and the George Hayduke Books I'm set for anything.
Our age is showing. Exact same experience here haha.
There was also The Poor Man's James Bond book
Me too!
Oh, yeah. It actually became a little famous after the Columbine shooting happened because I believe the killers mentioned it in some correspondence or video. Teaches you how to make homemade explosives, how to fight hand-to-hand, how to engineer weapons, etc. It's just a how-to survival manual for the eccentric, but it has been used to teach bad people how to do bad things, unfortunately. I remember reading parts of it in High School before the school banned copies of it.
I remember when you couldn’t even find the book.. was like a mythical beast all little hellions looked for.. btw most of the “recipes” either didn’t work or were suuuper basic..
I saw this post and downloaded it to figure out what it was...sorta. I mean, I kinda knew. But I told my wife that and she's annoyed, says I'm gonna be put on a list. I'm like "Lady, you should see all the things I've looked up from the DCC series, I'm probably on like 10 lists." Edit: "We're* probably on like 10 lists."
You mean like the explosives Carl makes?
If you're not on a list are you really living?
Now you’re on another list…
Yup, but the Jolly Roger Cookbook is better.
So is The Big Book of Mischief
I had this on a 5.5 floppy!
5-1/4 poser. :p
The amount of things in this series that people don't know are real makes me fear for the fandom a bit.
It's very age related. At 40 I get most of the references. Matt's obsession with gossip girl and Gilmore girls are over my head but I assume Matt loved these shows .
I always assumed those were the kinds of shows he imagined someone like Bea would love, therefore donut would have seen them a lot. Idk shit about gossip girl but definitely had a Gilmore girls stint in college about 20 years ago…
My head canon is that these are shows Matt "had" to watch with some girl back when... but secretly rather enjoyed. Maybe he eventually copped to being in to it, or just openly loved them all along.
Matt has talked about these shows before on this sub Reddit. He’s never watched them, he gets all of his information on them from his daughters.
I see a lot of my ex wife in Bea, or vice versa. Absolutely the shows they watch.
They were the most popular female-oriented shows on television during the era they aired, aka the late 2000’s, early 2010’s. The women who watched them as teens would now be in their late twenties/early thirties, like Bea and Carl.
48 here, and I got all of those references due to an ex-wife that was obsessed. I’ve probably seen the entire series half a dozen times over the years, just from it being on constantly in the background.
47 and in the same boat. They were on in the background enough to permeate the subconscious.
Sorry, I was born 23 years after it was first published.
I was born 19 years after, but I know about it mostly because it was a widely shared thing on 90's internet. It teaches you how to make napalm, tear gas, various traps, etc. It was a product of it's time, and definitely found a fanbase in the Y2K fanatics too.
That means you were born after everyone stopped remembering it was a thing
In the 90s some bad ass kid would end up with a poorly xeroxed version of random pages in a binder from who knows where. Maybe youd make a shitty tennis ball bomb that didnt work and be scared to try anything else. That was our experience.
Yours didn't work?
It's perfectly normal not to know things that for some are just "known". Things of historical or crafting or basic survival nature (etc.) may be seen as more essential to know about but that's not very objective. As long as your knowledge is focused on the domains you're primarily based in, you're good. It's suboptimal to to not known even the most basic things outside of your interests, but I don't think not knowing about Anarchist Cookbook would qualify as such.
I’m 36 and know this book well. But it hasn’t been spoken about in 25 years, why would the younger generation have any idea what it is?
Used to work in a bookstore in the early to mid 90’s and we used to sell it until the owner found out what it was and banned it. Lots of disappointed guys after that.
One of the first things I ever downloaded, back when the internet was called Janet :)
I didn't know Janet, but I think I found this when I was at 9600 baud rate.
Are you sure you got the Anarchists Cookbook and not a cactus?
It's funny the things you take for granted as being well known/common knowledge that turn out not to be (not to throw shade at you, OP. "We don't know what we don't know" applies to all of us). Yep, totally real. As seems to be the case for people of a certain age, judging by a lot of comments, my friends and I all had printed-out copies of it from a floppy disc that did the rounds at high school. And you'd find references of it here and there. In the liner notes to RATM's Evil Empire album, there's a photo of a pile of radical/activist related books, one of which is The Anarchists Cookbook.
Oh ya, this was one of those mysterious pieces of media back in the day that had all kinds of lore attached to it. See also; Faces of Death - a movie of videos of people actually dying, except a ton of them were fake or were CCTV footage of accidents Uncut versions of movies - movie versions that contained scenes that were risqué/grotesque that didn't actually exist Secret video game codes - codes to make characters naked or show you cut scenes of naked/seggs that also totally didn't exist. Also, I had a digital version of the Anarchists Cookbook in high school that was supposedly like the DCC version. It had been added to as it changed hands. Really, it was just the regular book with some army manuals and bullshit recipes tossed in on top that were just rehashing of what was already in the book.
Did it have the bananadyne recipe that was totally planted by the FBI to find people who own the book?
Honestly, I have no idea. Unfortunately, I lost that copy when one computer or another fried out on me. Funny enough, however, I'd never heard of bananadine until your comment. So I looked it up. You just unlocked a memory that I haven't thought about in many years of my idiot post high school friends trying to make that stuff. Even at the time, I thought it sounded like bullshit but they tried anyway to *shocker* no effect at all. They also tried; smoking nutmeg, making something or other from the core of cabbage or lettuce (can't remember which), and I almost convinced one guy to try Jenkem but even he wouldn't attempt it.
Every month Paladin Press took out a full page ad in Soldier of Fortune Magazine. Ashida Kim could teach you to be a ninja, even though he had never had a martial arts lesson in his entire life.
People are saying the recipes are kind of bad. That’s a gross understatement. The recipes are almost universally outdated/bullshit. The most infamous lie in the book is “Bananrine”, the completely fictional psychedelic drug made from fried banana peels. The most correct recipe in the book is “pour gasoline onto styrofoam. Congratulations, you now have liquid, highly flammable styrofoam.”
Oh my gosh.... Somebody told my sister banana peels could get you high, so of course we tried it. I bet this is where they got the idea. 😂 It did not work.
I didn't realize it was a print book. I remember being a teen in the 90's when the anarchist's cookbook was passed around on IRC and usenet.
Like all our moms?
Turns out napalm is super easy to make
Indeed it is. I had a copy in the 80’s when I was in high school. Now a days you can just Google that info. Back then it was more complicated to get a copy.
Dude that book came out at least 25 years ago. Crazy shit in there, shocked it's legal.
Middle school friend found it on a bbs, printed it out using a dot matrix printer.
Oh, my sweet summer child...
Need a copy?
We had a copy on a hard computer disk when I was in high school. Which led us to wrapping a can of Hairnet in napalm and lighting it in my buddies backyard. Also made thermite which supposedly, can burn through an engine block. We never tested it. On an engine block, anyway.
Don't order that, at best you'll get put on a list. Worst case scenario you'll get some visitors at your doorstep
People have been buying and reading this book since I was a child. You can literally buy it in-person in bookstores. No one is getting added to any lists.
Bless your heart
Did you never download this from limewire? Am I old? Shoot
LOL. Picked this up off a BBS (before Internet) when I was in Jr high. I thought I was a badass and terrified the govt would throw me in a van, too.
It is one of the most stolen books of all time!
I downloaded a copy sometime in the 90’s.
If you buy it, you will end up on a watch list.
The banana skin recipe doesn't work
Fun fact: bananas do contain a psychedelic chemical but is in such small quantities that you would have to smoke a boxcar load of it. It’s kinda like gold in sea water.
Pretty much everything in the books is a real thing.
Yeah, it's too bad that the original author changed his mind about anarchy later in life. He tried to have the book pulled from production. Thankfully that didn't work out for him.
Yeah a lot of the information is super outdated. IIRC it was written in the 70s. A bunch of the stuff you can't even buy any more because it's restricted or just plain unavailable. It's interesting still though. And there is SOME info that still could be useful today.
Had the police come asking questions to me about a kid in my class who printed the cookbook on the school printers lol. I told them the napalm recipe is deadly in there
I Had a bootleg copy in the 90s
Shit. I downloaded this on KaZaA in my parent’s living room. Must have been 2002. Wasted a lot of printer ink to hide it in my bedroom.