> This isn’t how things are done these days

The old locality domains still exist, and in many localities you can still register them today by the same "email a request to some sysadmin" process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122635

Your beach.santa-cruz.ca.us domain is still in DNS, just with a broken delegation chain. You could reclaim it right now by setting up a nameserver at reality.samiam.org.