Do you remember where you were the first time your snickering friend directed you to goatse.cx? I sure do. The memory is burned into my brain – the first in a long line of introductions to disgusting internet memes like lemon party, tubgirl, and blue waffles that serve as a warning: The internet is great because of its vastness/The internet is terrible because of its vastness.

By the way, don’t Google any of those things I just mentioned. You’re going to have a bad time.

If you’re unfamiliar with the cult of goatse, let me carefully explain. It’s a roughly 13-year-old shock image that features a man, his private regions, and a lot of spreading. The goatse.cx Wikipedia page has a pretty clinical description of the image, if you’re interested. Goatse.cx (Goat sex) became ubiquitous in the early period of internet curiosity.

Why would such an image become so popular on the internet? It was the late nineties, mind you. Something had to fill the gaping, cavernous void of the early interwebs. Think of it as the original Rick-Roll, or something like that.

Goatse.cx has been inactive since 2004 when the owners of the TLD, the government of the Christmas Islands, suspended it based on violations to acceptable use policy. This was all spurred by a complaint by a Christmas Island resident. The image is not gone from the internet, of course – nothing can be. You can find it with pretty minimal efforts, if you’re feeling masochistic.

Now, the guy who bought the infamous domain is attempting to repurpose it as a vanity email location.

From it’s shut down in 2004 to 2008, the goatse.cx domain was at the center of a pretty strange bidding war that involved fake bids and threats of legal action. At one point, the asking price rose to $500,000. According to Gawker, our unnamed buyer claims to have purchased the domain in 2008 for around $10,200 on a “late night whim.” That’s one hell of a whim.

In order to recoup his losses, he plans on charging people for their brand new @goatse.cx email address. It won’t be much – maybe $5 a year. But it will cut in to the ten grand that he threw down four years ago, considering people actually want to receive email at such a loaded location.

Our anonymous goatse purveyor claims that he’s already fielded 4,000 signup requests for the new email, and also plans to create a goatse link shortener which would serve the purpose of making people think twice about following any link they see floating around Facebook and Twitter. Risky click, indeed.

You can signup for the email address at signup.goatse.cx today(SFW).

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