My earliest memories of the internet are from around 1999. My dad would let me watch him play online games of MechWarrior 3, Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena, and other early online multiplayer games on his giant home-built Windows 98 PC. He would let me choose what lobbies to play in and would also let me press a button to launch a grenade or something every once in a while. My dad was also a huge Microsoft fanboy, so we had an Xbox the week it released, and I have many fond memories of me and my brother messing around Halo multiplayer over Xbox Live. I still have that original Xbox with the original hard drives/data stored on it from over 20 years ago. My experience with the internet was pretty passive at this point, but my dad and my brother were having fun so I also thought it was fun. :)

What REALLY kickstarted my internet life was Neopets. Word of mouth through elementary school led me to opening up my account all the way back in 2004. I was absolutely enamoured with the site and would spend hours on the family computer exploring the forums and Neopea Central. Every time my family and I would be out of town either camping or on vacation, I'd get worried about my Neopets starving while I was away lol. This was also back when you could create personal pet pages, so of course I attempted to teach myself coding so I could write backstories for all my Neopets. I would use super basic HTML to add pretty font colors on top of stock photos I downloaded from Photobucket and write from the perspective of my Neopets about what their life was like. Of course because I was 13/14 years old my writing was not that good. Those pet pages are shockly STILL UP 17+ years later. Here's the personal page for my lupe if you want to read some real cringey writing from a 13 year old lol.

In 2005, I got my first digitizer tablet for Christmas, a Wacom Bamboo. I taught myself Corel Draw and Photoshop Elements 7 (programs that were included on the Wacom install disk) so I could enter the Neopets beauty contests. A lot of entrants would post links to their Deviantart so you could check out other entries they'd made, and I was blown away by a site dedicated solely to creating your own art gallery that I set up an account. Deviantart was the main hub where I spent the next 6 years of my online life. I made a lot of online friends over Neopets/Teen Titans/Homestarr Runner/Danny Phantom fan groups and we would draw each other birthday gifts and share ~fancy art tips~. No I am not sharing my username because as much as I fondly look back at these days my old account is extremely cringe lol. (Shoutout to Reeko450 and DPFan4Ever! If yall are out there, you guys were the best)

Another site I spent a lot of time on during this period of my life was the Titans Go! forums. I was a huge fan of the show and I remember running to the family computer after a new episode aired so I could gush about how cool it was with other Teen Titans fans. This is also where I got my first experience with AMVs. I remember a lot of specific Teen Titans AMVs (one of which was an AMV of Cyborg and Beast Boy being BFFs set to "It Takes Two" by DJ EX Rock, and another AMV of the 'Why make trillions' scene from Austin Powers but edited around Slade and Robin, which I thought was hilarious at the time), but they were all uploaded to pre-Youtube hosting sites that are defunct now. Most have been lost to time. I actually don't remember what my username was on these forums, but TitansGo! was taken offline years ago, so trying to search for it now would be kind of futile. This is also where I had the most experience with Geocities, since users on the forum would make their own fanpages and link to them in the sig of their posts. I also never had a MySpace, since I spent all my time here and on Deviantart instead. I know, shocking. A 14 year old in 2005 with no MySpace account, lol.

The last big webspace I used was tumblr. I can't remember how, but the first tumblr I ever discovered was a blog called 'STFU Conservatives' (lmao) back in 2009. I didn't actually make a tumblr for myself until 2011. I still use my original tumblr account, with the original username, and never left the site even after The Great Porn Ban. I was a stereotypical 2012-2014 tumblr user, and in the beginning I was very much into Superwholock, Homestuck, Welcome To Nightvale, and other classic tumblr fandoms. Yes I was on the site while Dashcon was happening. I also spent a lot of time on 8tracks to find music during this time, and actually made a couple of internet friends there after sharing our tumblr blogs with each other. As much as I hate to say it, a lot of friends I made on tumblr transfered over to Twitter and we had a lot of fun talking amongst each other over our locked private accts (and eventually private Discord). Obviously tumblr and twitter are nowhere near the same as they were 10 years ago, but out of all the big social media sites, I feel like tumblr is the only one that still has some of its original genuinity.