Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2024-03-15 12:17 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2024-03-15 12:17 pm
This Page Is Under Construction.
I was recently looking at Neglected Pokémon Lovers Unite!, zarla's Pokémon website, which she's kept online since the late 1990s. This was my favourite place on the Internet when I was twelve years old, and it's the website that first inspired me to write fanfiction of my own. I'm glad it's still around, a little piece of a different time. (There's an essay on the NPLU itself about the time the website was born into, and how things have changed.)
Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
- Personal websites! This is the most obvious change. Back at the turn of the millennium, there were countless little websites people of all ages had created about whatever they were passionate about. (Remember character shrines?) When I first discovered fanfiction, it was on the author's personal Pokémon website.
In the present day, it's rare to find a personal space someone's carved out on the Internet; people only have some sort of personal existence on a handful of social media websites, and any individual website you might find probably belongs to a company. Neocities is a present-day option for personal website hosting, though, and I know a handful of you have websites of your own, which is pretty cool!
- In the first few years of the 2000s, one of the biggest forms of online social interaction was through forums. The first place I interacted with others online was on a fan forum for Pokémorphs, a series of Pokémon/Animorphs crossover fics by rache01, and later I moderated an EZBoard called Final Fantasy Fanatics. In a way, Reddit is a relic of this era. I suppose Discord has its similarities - here are a bunch of small spaces for interaction with a group of specific people; pick your favourite - but the instant messaging and the way servers are closed off from the outside world means it has a very different feel.
- There was a time when every website had its own guestbook for people to leave messages. As a kid, I used to go onto anti-Pokémon websites, seek out the guestbook and write stories about the website owner being attacked by Pokémon. I was very cool.
And, if you entered your email address with your guestbook message, your email address was just publicly available? I remember mentioning in a guestbook message that I didn't like Eiko of Final Fantasy IX, and months later I got an email from a stranger that just said, 'If you hate Eiko, I hate YOU!' (If I recall correctly, I emailed back going 'sorry, maybe I was unfair to her' and got a response saying 'Apology accepted ^_^', so that particular online conflict resolved surprisingly well.)
- For a while, a lot of websites had their own chatrooms as well, if you wanted to talk to a total stranger who just happened to be looking at this Pokémon website at the same time as you.
- One particular website style I was fond of was 'weird little mazelike websites that you explore as if you're exploring a physical space'. Harry Potter websites were often set up as 'you're exploring Hogwarts', sometimes complete with 'common room' pages you had to give a password to enter. (Sometimes you could cheat and find the password in the page source. I always felt very smart when I managed this.)
The Nameless Forest was a choose-your-own-adventure-style website I used to wander around all the time; it's no longer online, sadly, but at least some of it is preserved by the Internet Archive. There were riddles you could solve to reach secret pages; there were hidden paths you could only find if you scrolled down far enough or clicked on the correct image; sometimes you'd encounter weird fantasy creatures, and you could 'adopt' them, which basically just meant putting their image on your own website. Adoptables, come to think of it, are another relic of the old web.
- Do you remember how people's websites used to have placeholder sections labelled 'under construction', with little GIFs of construction workers? It seemed like a weird tradition - you could just put the page up once it's done! - but I suppose it was a way to convey 'hey, there might be more on this website later; come back at some point!' when there was no easy way to announce updates to a wide audience.
Holy shit, I just went looking and found a page full of 'under construction' images from the old web! This is so nostalgic.
- A lot of sites used the same little GIFs, come to think of it. If you were into Pokémon, you'd see the same tiny animated Pokémon sprites recurring across countless different websites. If you liked Final Fantasy VIII, there were some adorable little pixel animations of the cast that kept cropping up here and there. Where did they all come from? Did all the websites just steal them from each other? Someone must have made them in the first place.
If you have any recollections of your own from the earlier days of the Internet, go ahead and share them in the comments! I think it's worth trying to preserve this history, and there are undoubtedly things I'm forgetting.
(For example, I just remembered Newgrounds! I didn't mention Newgrounds or Flash videos at all! It really felt like the end of an era when Flash support was dropped.)
I think a lot of you started using the Internet around the time I did, but, if you're a later arrival, you can still share your own memories; I'd be interested to hear them! Someone who came to the Internet in the 2010s could probably identify the differences between that Internet and the one of the present day more clearly than I could.
On a final note: oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
And, of course, a couple of those ubiquitous Pokémon sprites are still preserved in the beautiful 'home' button I created for my own Pokémon website when I was twelve, which seems an appropriate way to conclude this entry:
zarla's Pokémon website, which she's kept online since the late 1990s. This was my favourite place on the Internet when I was twelve years old, and it's the website that first inspired me to write fanfiction of my own. I'm glad it's still around, a little piece of a different time. (There's an essay on the NPLU itself about the time the website was born into, and how things have changed.)Looking back at this online part of my childhood has got me thinking about the old web. Like many people of my generation, I started using the Internet around the turn of the millennium; I think it was probably 1999 when I got online, at the age of eleven. It was a very different time!
In the twenty-five years since then, the Internet has gone through a lot of changes, from its overall structure to the ways people choose to communicate. There's still a lot of text on the Internet, of course, but I think there's been a broad shift in focus over time, particularly on social media, from text (LiveJournal, EZBoards) to images (Tumblr, Instagram) to video (TikTok).
Anyway, in the interests of online preservation, I thought I'd note down some of my recollections of what the Internet was like when I first started using it!
- Personal websites! This is the most obvious change. Back at the turn of the millennium, there were countless little websites people of all ages had created about whatever they were passionate about. (Remember character shrines?) When I first discovered fanfiction, it was on the author's personal Pokémon website.
In the present day, it's rare to find a personal space someone's carved out on the Internet; people only have some sort of personal existence on a handful of social media websites, and any individual website you might find probably belongs to a company. Neocities is a present-day option for personal website hosting, though, and I know a handful of you have websites of your own, which is pretty cool!
- In the first few years of the 2000s, one of the biggest forms of online social interaction was through forums. The first place I interacted with others online was on a fan forum for Pokémorphs, a series of Pokémon/Animorphs crossover fics by rache01, and later I moderated an EZBoard called Final Fantasy Fanatics. In a way, Reddit is a relic of this era. I suppose Discord has its similarities - here are a bunch of small spaces for interaction with a group of specific people; pick your favourite - but the instant messaging and the way servers are closed off from the outside world means it has a very different feel.
- There was a time when every website had its own guestbook for people to leave messages. As a kid, I used to go onto anti-Pokémon websites, seek out the guestbook and write stories about the website owner being attacked by Pokémon. I was very cool.
And, if you entered your email address with your guestbook message, your email address was just publicly available? I remember mentioning in a guestbook message that I didn't like Eiko of Final Fantasy IX, and months later I got an email from a stranger that just said, 'If you hate Eiko, I hate YOU!' (If I recall correctly, I emailed back going 'sorry, maybe I was unfair to her' and got a response saying 'Apology accepted ^_^', so that particular online conflict resolved surprisingly well.)
- For a while, a lot of websites had their own chatrooms as well, if you wanted to talk to a total stranger who just happened to be looking at this Pokémon website at the same time as you.
- One particular website style I was fond of was 'weird little mazelike websites that you explore as if you're exploring a physical space'. Harry Potter websites were often set up as 'you're exploring Hogwarts', sometimes complete with 'common room' pages you had to give a password to enter. (Sometimes you could cheat and find the password in the page source. I always felt very smart when I managed this.)
The Nameless Forest was a choose-your-own-adventure-style website I used to wander around all the time; it's no longer online, sadly, but at least some of it is preserved by the Internet Archive. There were riddles you could solve to reach secret pages; there were hidden paths you could only find if you scrolled down far enough or clicked on the correct image; sometimes you'd encounter weird fantasy creatures, and you could 'adopt' them, which basically just meant putting their image on your own website. Adoptables, come to think of it, are another relic of the old web.
- Do you remember how people's websites used to have placeholder sections labelled 'under construction', with little GIFs of construction workers? It seemed like a weird tradition - you could just put the page up once it's done! - but I suppose it was a way to convey 'hey, there might be more on this website later; come back at some point!' when there was no easy way to announce updates to a wide audience.
Holy shit, I just went looking and found a page full of 'under construction' images from the old web! This is so nostalgic.
- A lot of sites used the same little GIFs, come to think of it. If you were into Pokémon, you'd see the same tiny animated Pokémon sprites recurring across countless different websites. If you liked Final Fantasy VIII, there were some adorable little pixel animations of the cast that kept cropping up here and there. Where did they all come from? Did all the websites just steal them from each other? Someone must have made them in the first place.
If you have any recollections of your own from the earlier days of the Internet, go ahead and share them in the comments! I think it's worth trying to preserve this history, and there are undoubtedly things I'm forgetting.
(For example, I just remembered Newgrounds! I didn't mention Newgrounds or Flash videos at all! It really felt like the end of an era when Flash support was dropped.)
I think a lot of you started using the Internet around the time I did, but, if you're a later arrival, you can still share your own memories; I'd be interested to hear them! Someone who came to the Internet in the 2010s could probably identify the differences between that Internet and the one of the present day more clearly than I could.
On a final note: oh, wow, the cute little sprites that used to be on every Final Fantasy VIII website are archived over here!
And, of course, a couple of those ubiquitous Pokémon sprites are still preserved in the beautiful 'home' button I created for my own Pokémon website when I was twelve, which seems an appropriate way to conclude this entry:
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(Anonymous) 2024-03-15 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)Every website seemed to used to have a shoutbox! Remember those?
Yes, email addresses were prominently online back in the day, hiding them I don't think was really an option? I still use an email account from back then and get a bunch of spam that I've got for over a decade when my publically posted email has clearly been picked up by an email list. None of my later emails get much spam. My old one gets scams, viagra sales and weird SEE THIS GIRL emails. I just let them rot happily in the junk except to occasionally eye roll at the titles.
Game websites like Neopets, Horseland, Nationstates etc were lots of fun back in the day, and at the time they always felt primarily text based with maybe a few Flash style elements.
Pixel comics like 8-Bit Theatre, most famously. The FF forum I was on had a big fab of 8-Bit Theatre and he made his own forum version of it, where the characters represented different people on the forum. I had one, which was cool!
Newgrounds is definitely a product of its time. Do you remember that "If I were a spammer" song? There was also lots of web toons - Homestar Runner, Ill Will Press (Foamy the Squirrel) etc.
Lastly, travesties of website design. Why yes, putting bright pink text on a bright red background is a great idea. I like both colours, don't tell me it's unreadable!
-timydamonkey
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I don't remember shoutboxes, alas! Were they sort of... chatrooms where people don't talk to each other?
I should have mentioned Neopets! Loved that site. I suppose it's a more sophisticated variant on the 'intricate maze to explore' type of website I mentioned in my post.
I actually still have my account on there, full of starving pets. I used to get drawn back into actively playing it every few years, although it's easier to resist now that the demise of Flash has rendered large portions of the site unusable. My Neopets username is pokemorphblitz, as a reference to the Pokémorphs fic I mentioned in the entry; Blitz was a Mew in the fic!
There was also a lot of 'their magenta orbs wavered' on the Neopets roleplaying boards, come to think of it; I used to spend a fair bit of time there.
I remember 8-Bit Theatre and Homestar Runner, but not the 'If I were a spammer' song, alas! I remember this Final Fantasy Flash video by LegendaryFrog, though, set to a silly song based on the chocobo theme; did you ever see it? The song still gets stuck in my head occasionally.
Lastly, travesties of website design. Why yes, putting bright pink text on a bright red background is a great idea. I like both colours, don't tell me it's unreadable!
This made me smile. Absolutely!
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Everyone in that interaction was clearly very cool!
I was briefly on Neopets. I remember when I quit, I gave my pet up to the imaginary pound rather than just abandoning it, and that game was so guilt-inducing!
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This is a good point! A lot of modern social media just lets you rip a post out of context and drop it in front of a new audience, which can often lead to misconceptions.
I never gave a pet up to the pound, but the game really judged you if you even went anywhere near the pound. Some people are just here to adopt, Neopets! Some people have to give up their pets because they think it's better for the pet!
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I still run websites! I have for 20 years! I'm not going anywhere, haha. I have a bunch of Final Fantasy sites (big surprise) and some Pokémon sites and a few misc sites. I think I pruned my link list recently so a lot of the sites I link to should still be around as well. The character shrining community is much much smaller than it used to be (and dried up considerably in the move from forums to discord) but it's still hanging on.
I got my start way back in 2002 with a blog that I coded myself (I didn't have an LJ code at the time) and a geocities website for my (bad) art. Later I got into Pokémon sites, some of which are still around today.
A lot of the sites I run are fanlistings (which are simple joinable lists for a subject) but I also run a little old-school clique where you grab a sprite and put it on your website. Almost all of the recent joiners have been Neocities kids! It's really charming to me to see people making Neocities sites, they're all very old school and brim with personality.
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WAIT
LARISSA
I JUST POKED AROUND YOUR WEBSITE AND SAW YOU'RE PLANNING A LIGHT YAGAMI SHRINE
TELL ME MORE, TELL ME WHEN
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I love that XD
Very nostalgic to think about these things! I also came to the internet in the late 1990s (although I was in high school for my first encounter and uni when I started using it properly, at the school's computer lab, because while we had a computer at home, and eventually even a modem, it was much faster to do online things from a computer lab).
I remember forums, and Geocities pages, and guestbooks (OMG, I forgot your email was just posted there; this explains why my hotmail account eventually drowned in spam XD), and the little gifs (I had a flapping dragon that I used as a divider bar that I liked very much). Also, webrings! I was in LotR fandom at the time and there were a lot of amusing puns on "ring" :D Oh, and hit counters on personal pages.
Never encountered the maze websites, huh! And got into adoptables (Dragon Cave, which people are still playing) only years later, although I could tell the game was of similar vintage.
Also, I can't remember how much later this was -- I think it wouldn't have been that early because I don't think modem speeds would've allowed it at the time -- but I think my least favorite innovation of the early web was embedded midi files that would start playing music when you opened a page.
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This is delightful.
I should have mentioned webrings in this entry! I'm delighted to hear the Lord of the Rings fandom had fun with them.
Autoplaying embedded MIDI files were definitely around in my early days on the Internet; I should have mentioned those as well! MIDI files were surprisingly small. I collected a lot of Pokémon MIDIs back in the day. (Just tracked a few of them down; they're all under 20KB, and many of them are under 10KB, making these two-to-three-minute pieces of music equivalent in size to a small text file.)
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Now, when I was in middle school, my parents divorced and I ended up living primarily with my mom. She was not a tech savvy person, but she did have a computer with AOL, and she did let me use it unsupervised. At this point I had a friend who knew more about the internet than I did, and she showed me how to escape the AOL walled garden and access Usenet and IRC. (Discord is actually a lot like a multimedia version of IRC, which might be why it was easy for me to adapt to it.)
My friend also introduced me to online fandom and fanfiction. We were both into X-Files, which was a brand new show at the time, and it was the first major fandom that was kind of "native" to the internet. Obviously fandom itself wasn't new and had always had a presence online, but XF and the internet were both taking off in popularity at the same time, so it got really huge really fast in the early-mid '90s, much like how Harry Potter fandom and LiveJournal mutually accelerated each other's meteoric rise in the early-mid 2000s. In fact, XF was one of the first TV shows to actually have an official web site, which was advertised on the commercial breaks, so the producers definitely knew they were tapping into something big. (I remember the announcer very carefully reading out the URL... "Aitch tee tee pee... colon... slash slash...")
I also remember the waning days of the era when most people used their real names online because either their school or their ISP had assigned them an email address that was just their name, and in a lot of venues your email address was just how you were known (obviously on mailing lists, but also on Usenet). This kind of went away with the rise of AOL and web-based email services like Hotmail, since you could have as many email addresses as you wanted rather than just being stuck with whatever they gave you. Then of course real names came back around again with social media, which is a practice that always felt very retro to me.
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she showed me how to escape the AOL walled garden
Tell me more about the AOL walled garden! I saw a lot of Americans complaining non-specifically about AOL back in the day, but I didn't have a good sense of how it worked because, being in the UK, I didn't personally know anyone who used it. Did AOL only let you access certain websites?
I remember the announcer very carefully reading out the URL... "Aitch tee tee pee... colon... slash slash..."
I love this.
By the time I got online, it was definitely normal practice not to go by your real name! I remember seeing this online newsletter from 1989 (which caught my attention mainly because of the list of emoticons and acronyms on page 11, some of which are familiar to this day and some of which have fallen out of use or changed their meanings); I was struck by all the full names in it, and I wondered whether using real names was common practice at the time, so it's interesting to have that confirmed. It definitely felt strange to see people increasingly using their real names on sites like Twitter.
This was a really interesting comment! Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.
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Re: flash videos & animations. I understand that Adobe Flash was a cheese full of security holes, and that it becoming deprecated is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things. However I will forever be sad about the fact that now in the music video for the Vocaloid song Double Lariat, Luka doesn't keep on spinning even if the video's paused :(
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In honour of your tragic video loss, I am listening to 'Double Lariat' as I write this comment. I'm enjoying it!
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It was only when people posted things to Google Video and very early Youtube did I have the chance to watch episodes again. (I did know what limewire was, but made the choice to not torrent because I had enough self awareness that there was a real chance I could mess something up somewhere. XD) I never posted on any fourms but I certainly did a ton of lurking. Which is what I did for my time back then since I was so young.
I spent so much time on various flash game sites too. Either on pages dedicated to them by companies (Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Disney, etc) or on various sites centered around a game or hosting games. (Miniclip, Newgrounds, etc) I'm so glad the Flashpoint Archive is a thing so I can relive a bunch of these games that arent on Newgrounds, since NG did the work to keep all its flash games and animations alive post support being taken down.
As a kid who got introduced to the internet in the very early 2000s (Around 2001-2002 or so, yes I was absolutely given access at way too young an age XD) I remember a lot of kid-centric MMO's too. I played so much Club Penguin and Toontown online. As well as Neopets (even though that is a pet sim and not an MMO) With those sorts of games, there was a lot a kid could do back then.
That page with the under construction banners takes me back! I remember so many of those on countless Geocities sites I would frequent.
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I love that you used to make websites in Publisher but never actually put them online. My terrible childhood Pokémon website had an 'updates' page on which I diligently recorded every update I made, even though the site wasn't actually on the Internet yet. And then my dad actually put it online, and I immediately stopped updating; I didn't know how to make changes to my site when that didn't just entail 'changing things in Publisher and hitting the save button'!
I did know what limewire was, but made the choice to not torrent because I had enough self awareness that there was a real chance I could mess something up somewhere. XD
I was the same! I downloaded a fair amount of music - mainly Gackt, Ayumi Hamasaki, assorted tracks from videogames and anime - but I found torrenting too daunting to attempt.
This has just reminded me of MP3 rotation sites, which went, 'Here are a few tracks from my music collection! I only offer two or three tracks at a time, and I include a warning saying that anyone who downloads them should delete them after forty-eight hours, which means this is Totally Legal. Check back for different music next month!'
I also played a lot of online games! I loved the Cartoon Cartoon Summer Resort adventure games on the Cartoon Network website.
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I was heavily into the interactive fiction world in the late 90s/early 00s and that community was split between a MUD (effectively a chatroom with text-based rooms and objects), two usenet groups, one ftp site and a host of personal webpages. I was on that MUD when 9/11 happened, at the moment when someone in NYC on there said words to the equivalent of 'my god, a plane just hit the world trade centre' and then we spent all day trying to verify the survival of all the other NYC users. I remember telling my coworker that the world was never going to be the same, and him calling me melodramatic.
That community was a tech-savvy crowd of early adopters who linked everyone else into new things. A lot of us had things like livejournal, facebook, and gmail accounts very early on (which is why my email acc is 'my first name' @ gmail.com, to the vague surprise of people who have asked me for it). The internet has definitely changed a lot from those days.
I used to make lj icons, and tiny 25x100px icons for BPAL perfumes for people to put in their forum signatures. At one horribly exposing-feeling 'oh no, my SEO is better than theirs I guess, I have become too powerful' point my website's pages of BPAL reviews and icons ranked higher than the actual company website on google if you searched 'bpal'.
In fact, I used to code (mostly personal) websites for other people--back in the early to mid 00s, if you told strangers you were a website builder they would inevitably ask you to make one for them, so finding work was absurdly easy. I eventually quit because I hated using CSS, and went off to write chatbots for a living instead.
I still don't like that the internet is all photos and videos and that everything feels very ephemeral, but, well, that's the modern internet now.
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Trying to get around Internet restrictions was a fun little challenge! My family visited the London Wetland Centre when I was a kid, and there was a room with computers. There were no keyboards, to prevent users from navigating away from the centre's website of nature facts, but they hadn't considered the danger of allowing people to right-click. I just copied letters from the website and pasted them into the address bar in order to access fanfiction.net.
I've never actually used a MUD, but my dad had a book about hackers that mentioned them, and, as a kid, I thought they sounded really cool! (The book also made hackers sound pretty cool, to be honest.)
I was on that MUD when 9/11 happened, at the moment when someone in NYC on there said words to the equivalent of 'my god, a plane just hit the world trade centre' and then we spent all day trying to verify the survival of all the other NYC users.
Oh, wow, yeah. I remember confused and distressed messages on the Pokémorphs forums on 9/11; it seemed like at first some people thought it was a bombing. I didn't learn about it until I was home from school and the towers were no longer standing, so, while it was still an alarming and upsetting thing, at least it was something that was already over from my perspective; it must have been harder to watch it unfold.
(which is why my email acc is 'my first name' @ gmail.com, to the vague surprise of people who have asked me for it)
That's impressive! Mine is firstname.lastname at gmail, which is pretty good to have, but I'd definitely be surprised to meet someone who managed to get their first name alone. Unfortunately, I keep getting misdirected emails intended for other people with my name; I don't know if that's an issue for you!
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I also used MSN Messenger to speak to my friends for a while! The text formatting options were fun. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to put all my messages in bold, italic, purple Verdana.
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We got the internet in I think 1997. My older sister taught me html early on so I could make my own website on Geocities, on which I put my real name and used for things like adoptables. I was big into adoptables. The first one I remember is Vikimouse, and I later I was into virtual catteries .... I could not draw cats freehand, but maybe we had a scanner at that point because I think I would trace them out of my cat encyclopaedia? I also remember Pern-related adoptables, where you would have to write a webpage about a candidate waiting to match with a dragon, and the quality of your writing would supposedly determine what colour dragon you got :p The Nameless Forest is one I remember too, I think ... it gives me a very nostalgic feeling.
One of my earliest internet memories is looking up Sailor Moon websites, and being shocked to learn that in Japan, they also had sailor soldiers for the outer planets! Probably the first time I was aware of the regional/language barrier for things. It's funny to think of in comparison to now, where you can look up anything on Wikipedia and it's all catalogued in great detail, versus something that felt more like a rumour.
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I also remember Pern-related adoptables, where you would have to write a webpage about a candidate waiting to match with a dragon, and the quality of your writing would supposedly determine what colour dragon you got :p
I would have been so into these if I'd discovered them! I was in an ILLEGAL PERN ROLEPLAYING GUILD on Neopets; Anne McCaffrey did not approve of Pern fanfiction or roleplaying at the time, although I think she relaxed her stance later.
One of my earliest internet memories is looking up Sailor Moon websites, and being shocked to learn that in Japan, they also had sailor soldiers for the outer planets! Probably the first time I was aware of the regional/language barrier for things.
I think I had a similar experience when I learnt about the Pokémon anime episodes that had been banned in English-speaking countries!
It's funny to think of in comparison to now, where you can look up anything on Wikipedia and it's all catalogued in great detail, versus something that felt more like a rumour.
Very true! A lot of Pokémon websites used to include lists of 'cheats' that were mostly just urban legends designed to waste your time; you don't get the same things now that the games have been pulled apart and studied down to the last bit of code.
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At one point my geocities page was dedicated to the show Pop-Up Video, which was trivia relating to music videos. I wasn't actually into the trivia itself - more the mechanics of the show and the icons of different trivia types. Cataloguing. In retrospect, nothing about that is surprising. I was me, even then.
Sometimes for work I have to look at old websites and it's amazing how many US agency websites from the 1996-1999 era have the same doofy "under construction' graphics. Even the government!
I have a neocities page reserved but am not sure what to do with it. I've been thinking about putting up my finished cross-stitch pieces, maybe.
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I was really into Animorphs for a long time and I spent hours browsing Animorphs webpages. Fanfiction.net was becoming a hub for fanfic at the time, and I'd spend hours on the recently submitted page, refreshing every hour so, almost inevitably presented with new Animorphs fanfic to read each time. The benefit of having an ~11 year old's taste was that I had so much stuff I adored to read.
There's one Animorphs fansite that has survived the test of time: The Animorphs Vortex is somehow still up. It has rants, it has book reviews, it has a longrunning fic that never got finished and that of course can't be found anywhere else! Now that I mention it, I should really save it, because with the way things go the site won't be around forever...
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I think the fanfiction on the NPLU was my first introduction to slash as well! It was definitely the first place that made me realise, 'Ohhh, this is a thing that people write, and there's a name for it.' (Although the name I learnt from the NPLU was 'shounen-ai'. It was some time before I picked up the term 'slash'.)
I was also very into Animorphs! I got into it slightly before we got the Internet at home, though. If I'd read the books a couple of years later, I would have spent so much time on Animorphs webpages.
Thank you for the link to the Animorphs Vortex! I'm delighted to find it has a 'You Know You Read Animorphs Too Much When' list; I came across so many 'You Know You Like Pokémon Too Much When' lists as a kid.
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- I'm really am so pleased that a few people have kept their fandom domains and character shrines up. :')
- I remember custom 404 error pages more than the under construction ones haha.
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Back then Hyungtae Kim's character designs were all the rage (for turning into wallpapers and website layouts), and Creative Uncut was one of the resources haha amazing
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I now triply want to know who was making these particular cute little Final Fantasy animations, and why they decided to make Yunalesca, Shelinda and Yu Yevon (I think Yu Yevon is the same person?) but not Yuna, Lulu or Kimahri. Looking at the Final Fantasy VII section, their Vincent and Sephiroth are also viscerally familiar. Tell me who you were, mysterious person who illustrated every Final Fantasy site in the early 2000s!
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As a kid, I used to go onto anti-Pokémon websites, seek out the guestbook and write stories about the website owner being attacked by Pokémon. I was very cool.
I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you. HAHAHAHHAAH. I hope you've changed your feelings on Eiko though!
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Browser-specific tags for animating text: If I recall correctly, Netscape allowed "blink" and Explorer allowed "marquee" and nobody cared about Safari because that was the period in between Steve Jobs
rulingholding the CEO position at Apple and Macs were awful and the iPhone didn't exist yet.Sites having the most incredibly gnarly and boring mobile versions, because if you were online it was with a Blackberry from work.
Embedded midis.
Web rings!
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I keep thinking 'I should get a Neocities account!' and then '...but what would I do with it?' A shrine to Squall Leonhart? I don't have much in the way of graphic design skills, and I rocket so quickly between fandoms that it's hard to pin down a good focus for a website; I'm more suited to... well, a blog, which is why I'm still here after all these years.
Maybe a site structured as 'you're exploring Balamb Garden and uncovering all my Final Fantasy VIII meta and fanfiction in the process' could be fun. (You could go to the library for the fanfiction! That would be cute.) It would be a big project, though; I'm not sure I'm capable!
Oh, wow, I haven't thought about marquee text in ages; it used to be everywhere!
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i have so much to say about this
Yooooo I was in all the computer classes! When I wasn't tinkering with CSS and Javascript on my blogs, I was building stuff on Geocities. I had a site dedicated to Chrono Cross (complete with my OC!). And for one of my high school projects was about Final Fantasy, with heavy focus on Final Fantasy 8. I still got the latter, at least, backed up somewhere on a CD. I should dig it up!
I adored character shrines and fansites-- still do. It's no secret that I credit someone's Chibi Usa fanpage to be my inspiration to get into Web design.
Web 3.0 is shaping up to be a hellscape of capitalism and techbros not giving a shit about like, people. So a lot of people have been sliding back to Web 2.0 or even 1.0 style of being on the web. No algos, slower communications (like forums), and hosting their own stuff wherever they can. Yesterweb talks more about it. And I touched upon this not too long ago, but only lightly.
Sites I was on a lot: GameFAQs, Noire Sensus, Newgrounds, Livejournal (Eventually: I was on BlogDrive until I finally got an invite!), wherever else.
And once I figured out animating and putting in transparency in my livejournal icons using my pirated copy of Photoshop you couldn't tell me nuthin.
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This is delightful! Tell me more about your Final Fantasy school project.
It's no secret that I credit someone's Chibi Usa fanpage to be my inspiration to get into Web design.
I love this, too! Personal webpages are such a creative thing, and it's great that they can spark creativity in others.
GameFAQs was such a useful resource! I got so much use out of the videogame transcripts on there. I'm glad it's still around, even if you tend not to get as many in-depth fan-written resources on there for modern games.
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