Remember when the internet was fun? #1
Mentally, I'm still in 2006 adding glittery gifs to my Piczo website
Am I too nostalgic? Do I need to accept that the golden days of the internet are long behind us? Maybe! But life is tough and sometimes you need to romanticise things to get through it and I just miss the internet before the term ‘brain rot’ was a thing, ok!!!
As a 1996 baby, I never fully know my place within generation discourse - every time I’ve googled it, the answer to whether I’m a millennial or a Gen Z is different, and I kind of feel like I’m floating in the ether between them. But one thing I know for certain is that I am a child of the internet. That beautiful Windows XP interface SHAPED me.
Oh, how I wish I could tell younger Rosie that we did it. We made it. Girl, I spend ALL day on the computer!!! I'll protect her by not telling her about all the horrors that the internet provides nowadays, and instead let her imagine that everyone still plays dress-up on Stardoll and remembers to feed their Neopets every day.
Maybe being online isn't as wholesome as it once was, but even spending the last few weeks on Substack has brought back my love for it in some kind of way (and from the looks of it, lots of you agree with me too)
Guys!!! Existential dread was never part of the plan!!! What happened??? We used to love the internet so much that we had a whole ROOM dedicated to it!!!
As a child, the computer was the most exciting thing EVER. I would get up early so that I could go on it before school, then I would sit through lessons daydreaming about it, maybe at lunchtime a friend would utter the words "…meet you at the Pizza Parlour on Club Penguin later?" (absolute *chills*), the excitement and anticipation would keep building on the bus ride home, until YES, I made it, I’m back, I get to sit cross-legged in front of the monitor again and spend hours existing in my own little virtual world!!! Like wow! Wasn’t the internet such a magical, precious thing when we didn’t have limitless access to it?
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn't completely glued to the screen (I was a victim of the classic “you’ll get square eyes!” lecture and you KNOW I was an anxious child who thoroughly believed it!). I still ran around outdoors and rode my bike and made up dance routines on the grass with my friends and played silly games with my sisters and did all the stuff kids are meant to do. But the computer was a part of that play for us - it was a tool for our imagination, an extra player in our games, a blank journal page full of potential, that helped us figure out who we were and what we wanted to be.
Growing up in a tiny village, in a bit of a bubble, the internet was the perfect escapism for me, and really inspired me to discover and create my own little worlds - honestly, something I am still trying to do, in both my day-to-day life and my art practice too. That silly little Windows computer allowed me to dream big, make friends across the world and discover the stuff that I really really loved. So please let me share with you three of my favourite online gems from when the internet was *fun*, that I do believe have shaped me into the person I am today, in both silly and meaningful ways!!!
The Doll Palace
I have tried to talk about The Doll Palace to so many friends over the years and I feel like I must have dreamed it because no one ever knows what I’m on about, so if you too were addicted to this website, please tell me. And if you also have no idea what this is, let me explain it to you. Remember those pixel dolls that were all over the internet in the early 00’s? The absolute peak of graphic design? Maybe you had one as your MSN picture? This was a whole website dedicated to creating them!!!
Many joyful evenings after school were spent here styling these little pixel divas and creating worlds for them to live their best lives in, and usually the website would end up crashing so that I would lose absolutely everything I had been hyper-fixating on for hours, but that didn’t matter. It was about the creative process, okay!!!
I feel like as a child, this website genuinely taught me about patience and to appreciate the *creative journey*, and not focus on the end result so much. Because as mentioned, it was so glitchy and I probably lost 70% of my hard work, but you know I still kept coming back and I still loved every second!!!
(side note: one thing I do enjoy about myself is that I will constantly find meaning and take life lessons out of absolutely anything - a website from 2006 where you literally just dress up pixel dolls? yeah, that taught me the essence of patience and made me a more gentle and forgiving person <3 I am a sentimental girlie 4ever)
Rookie Magazine
Okay, we were in 2006, let’s travel to 2014 for a sec. When thinking about my 17 year old self on the internet, unsurprisingly the first website that came to mind was Tumblr (cursed), but Rookie Magazine was equally in my orbit (thank god). If you weren’t a Rookie girlie, let me explain - for every black-and-white picture of a girl crying on her bathroom scales that you would find on Tumblr, there would be a beautifully written poem on Rookie about how our bodies are perfect the way they are and why we’re so much more interesting than our weight. These two platforms were truly the devil and angel on my shoulders, but of course Rookie is the one I am thankful for today!!!
I LOVE that Tavi Gevinson created this when she was only 15 and nourished it up until she was 22 (if I ever got to meet her one day I would cry and thank her for her dedication) - I am the same age as Tavi and it really felt like Rookie was a friend that guided me through this very tumultuous period of life! I don’t know about you but 15 to 22 was a wild ride for me!!!
Rookie was a complete safe haven of girlhood and creativity. Guys, I used to literally use this website as a search engine for when I was going through something and needed some clarity. When you’re a 17 year old girl you tend to think you’re broken and weird and no one understands you, yet this website was the blissful reality check I needed that we are never alone in our experiences, and someone out there knows exactly how you feel. It taught me how to be nice to myself, how to be a better friend, how to do my eyeliner, how to make zines, you name it - and I honestly don’t really know who I’d be without it.
Piczo
Okay, we’re back in 2006 again. This god damn website had me learning HTML and CSS as a *10-year-old*. I think of this sometimes and I can’t believe I was coding websites??? As a literal child??? People go to university to do whole degrees to learn how to do that, and I was doing it to make my website play Hellogoodbye - Here in Your Arms on my About Me page, and to make glittery stars explode from the cursor everytime you clicked on a neon pink link. (I recently made a custom cursor for my website, and it took me ALL afternoon. HOW I did this so effortlessly as a child, I will never know)
Piczo was so special and exciting because not only was it on the computer (as clarified, the *most* special and exciting thing), we got to CREATE our own little corner of it, from scratch. Social media platforms are really missing a trick these days with not being as customisable as they used to be! Having a little online space that you could turn into your virtual bedroom and make completely your own was just about the coolest thing ever for me as a child, and I honestly think it would be the same today. Even just choosing the colours of my Substack page got me feeling some kind of way!
I wish more than anything that I could show you a screenshot of my Piczo website that I spent probably years creating and curating to perfection, but all of Piczo has been wiped from the internet, which breaks my heart. I can tell you that my username was something like ‘irockmysocksoffxoxo’ though - prettyyy cool right!!!!
Thanks for reminiscing and yearning for a simpler age of the internet with me. I am now going to go down a rabbit hole and remind myself of all the other internet gems that I used to make my entire personality, and I will definitely be back with a part 2 (because I feel like such a tease for mentioning Stardoll, Club Penguin and Neopets in the first part of this diary entry and then not even properly featuring them!!)
I’ll be back! You’ll just have to subscribe!!
As a 1996 baby as well, I totally resonate with this! My favorites were everythinggirl and Polly Pocket. I remember when my family got our first ever computer and I was so excited!
Lovely article! Very similar to my childhood. Thank God I had a friend in high school who let me read her Rookie magazines because I couldn’t afford them <3 :,)