Early web memories
I came across this Bear Blog Carnival topic on early web memories, and was immediately inspired to write. My early web memories center around a few charming little areas I revisit with fondness. And with no small amount of nostalgia for an internet that I assumed had been forever lost, but which I'm happy to be discovering attempts at remembering and reviving in lots of charming little ways.
One of the first times I remember marveling at the Internet was in, I think, sixth grade, which would have been around 1997-98. I'd often spend the night at my best friend Nicole's house. She had a computer in her family living room and we were given probably too much freedom to play on it. At one point we found some kind of voice chat application where you could get sort of proxy phone numbers and exchange them with other Internet people, then dial them up and basically have a phone conversation with them through the application. There's no way I'll remember what it was called and it sounds so simple, but it was amazing and exciting to us as kids with little exposure to the bigger world. We somehow (probably some variety of "a/s/l" in an AOL chat) connected with and exchanged numbers with a guy named, or claimed to be named, Nelson, and we both developed a mutual crush-slash-obsession with this person. Late at night after Nicole's parents were in bed, we'd dial up Nelson and god knows what we even talked about, but I remember lots of giggling, and taking turns daring each other to ask whatever a sixth-grade girl would think of as a racy question. To this day I really hope Nelson was no older than a teenager...
Around the same time I found Slingo, a game that was like slots plus bingo, and which at the time you could play online against random people. I guess it was something about the simplicity and addictiveness of the game, combined with the novelty of knowing you were playing again faceless but very real opponents who could be anyone and anywhere in the world. I believe there may have been a text chat and also think you could also somehow connect to games with people you did know if you knew their usernames?
Later, I spent a good chunk of time during junior high reading and writing "e-zines", a fancy word for email newsletters. I mostly lurked but sometimes participated in online message board forums, inhabited mostly by other young girls, that served as a way to network, socialize our respective e-zines, and trade "advertising" opportunities, some of which involved real money and even product sponsorships. I remember the primary one of these was called Exced Zine Headache #1172 (it's possible I misremember the number part). I think it was an AOL message board? Anyway, we'd collect subscribers, write articles, and, importantly, design unique themes and layouts for our e-zines using extremely creative font and special character hacking techniques. A lot of the zines were pretty girly, with beauty product reviews and relationship advice (think YM or Seventeen Magazine but actually written, edited, produced, and distributed by teenage girls). Some had more literary or offbeat content, music reviews, or lightly political articles (more like Sassy). I was pretty intimidated and impressed by a few of the e-zine editors, and tried my best to come up with original content and layouts that didn't seem like they were "copying" those I admired so much. There was also a ton of drama, although I can't quite remember what it was ever about. I can't find any lingering evidence of this e-zine subculture, but if anybody out there encounters it and knows what I'm talking about, I'd love to hear it.
Into high school, most of my IRL friends kept LiveJournals ("LJs") and we all seemed to enjoy developing our respective moody online personas on them. Even when we posted reflections on real-life events (often involving the same friends who were reading them) we liked and commented on each others' LJs in a way that felt not dissimilar to passing tightly folded notes to each other in class. It was kind of a secondary, parallel universe to our face-to-face relationships that somehow afforded another layer of meaning to those teenage friendships. We all had MySpaces too, but they were a bit more shallow and seemed to act more as a platform for careful image curation rather than vulnerable expression.
On LJ and beyond, I found a few bloggers that I somewhat obsessed over. There was Batty, a goth girl in Texas who "introduced" me (via her love for and constant posting of lyrics) to The Legendary Pink Dots, still my favorite band of all time, 26 or so years later. I fawned over her fashion and style as a goth-curious 8th and 9th-grader. Sandra B aka novim.net felt like a friend I always wished I had, or maybe someone I wished I was as cool as. At the time she dressed in cute babydoll dresses with big stompy boots and loved thrifting, insects, the macabre, and having adventures with her funky collection of friends that reminded me at times of an alternate universe version of my own high school crew. (Long after that friend group grew up and grew apart, I found out that one of them, my old friend Kristen, who had also followed her online—I think I might have been the one who showed her novimnet's LJ?—eventually met her in real life and they became IRL friends.) I found Gus Mueller through his Big Fun Glossary which I still think is one of the most fun places I ever found on the internet. It also may or may not have contributed to a lengthy experimentation phase with dextromethorphan consumption among my friend group. I followed Gus' blogs through various iterations well after high school. At some point I ended up friending him on Facebook and still see his posts from his life in upstate New York. There was also Tassy Pink, who I remember as a pink-haired porn model who went to Burning Man a lot. I didn't go deep into her porn pic content beyond what she'd post directly on her blog. I think I was drawn to her because I was learning that I loved colorful people and things and wanted to know everything about counterculture stuff, and about people living very differently than I'd ever been exposed to. Also, she definitely influenced me to dye my hair hot pink for the first time in ninth grade. It's funny to think about how much these non-celebrity people whom I randomly stumbled across—and whom I doubt know anything about me beyond my username as someone who followed their blogs (and later social media accounts, in some cases)—actually shaped my personality, style, and interests in pretty significant ways. But I always just loved thinking about how they really are just real people, just like me, and how reading what they put out there made me feel somehow connected to them as humans, via being part of the same internet-imbued world.