It’s no secret that I am Very Online. I thrive here. But it’s a love/hate relationship. The amount of information and entertainment at our fingertips is incredible, but it can also be toxic and breed a specific type of brain rot.

It’s never been perfect, but there was a time when the internet was simpler. It was a place you went, experienced, and then left until it was time to enter again. There were very specific corners you could go to find your place. It was fun, it was weird, it was full of cats (ok, that hasn’t changed.) These are just a few examples of websites I used to frequent.

I encourage everyone to utilize archive.org to relive some of these days as well as The Old Net, where you can even play in Paint again.

gURL.com

I discovered this website sometime in the early 00s after seeing my sister on it. Typing it in later when I finally had my hands on the family computer, I was amazed at the world I discovered. There were answers to questions I’d been pondering but was too embarrassed to ask anyone, as well as answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of yet. As someone who read a lot of Judy Blume, this site was like an extension of what I was learning in those books, but in a more modern, cool way (and I still think Judy Blume is very cool, just for the record). It talked about puberty, feminism, and sex in a straightforward but easy to understand way that was rare for the time. You could be 13 or 16, or in my case, much younger, and still feel like the people writing actually understood you.

Created in 1996, gURL had a zine-inspired vibe with illustrations instead of photography. As the creators told The Cut, “Part of the directive was to not use photographs, because we wanted girls to be able to insert themselves and not compare themselves.” gURL was sold to Delia’s, then went through a number of other hands, including one who, around 2011, rebranded it in a too-soft way that signaled the end of the edgy go-to girl site. Now it redirects to Seventeen Magazine, which is interesting considering the creators Rebecca Odes and Esther Drill started gURL because there wasn’t anything they liked about girls’ media at the time: “We started an ongoing conversation about what we didn’t like about Seventeen magazine,” Drill says, “which I pretty much hated and could not stand to read, and which Rebecca had a more love/hate relationship with — hated and could not stop reading.”

When I think about scrolling gURL, it plays in my head like an episode of My So-Called Life—romanticized nostalgia of a much simpler time when figuring yourself out was the only thing you needed to worry about. You can argue that there is even more information available to us now, so there’s no need for a website like this to exist, but there’s also too much available too soon. It makes me sad to think a generation of girls can’t sneak onto gURL to make sense of their feelings.

Stumbleupon

It’s been a long time since I got online and didn’t go to a specific place. We have our rotations: TikTok, Instagram, email, whatever news site you frequent, work stuff. The internet used to be vast, full of random niches that were impossible to know about unless you used Stumbleupon.

Stumbleupon was a perfect browser extension that took you to random sites, allowing you to truly explore the internet in a time before Reddit or Tumblr. It didn’t survive the modern internet—as one Redditor suggests, “the internet is no longer as interesting as it was when StumbleUpon was in its prime”—but there is a new site made to relive those memories. It showed me a few cool things, like ImageGlitcher, but it wasn’t the same. That Redditor is right, the internet just isn’t as cool.

Dollz Mania

I’m starting to think everything I did on the early internet happened only because I saw my sister do it. I caught one glimpse of this site and needed to play. Dressing up pixelated baddies? Hooked. I imagined I would look exactly like this the moment I turned 15. This definitely paved the way for my Bratz obsession.

Myspace

I’ve never been outgoing in real life, but the internet has always been my safe space. One of my early internet memories is joining a Good Charlotte message board. My parents talked about the dangers of internet strangers but I was obsessed with the chance of having friends outside my town who liked the same thing as me. One friend, who I only knew as Georgia Peach, made me a sparkly GC banner to use in my signature and I will love her forever for it. It was on this message board where I learned about Myspace and quickly headed over there to make an account. I didn’t know anyone on it at the time—I was in elementary school—but I quickly started friending people.

Eventually, everyone I know did have one and I could somehow use HTML to make the profile of my dreams. I never had someone show up at my house like in Degrassi, but I did do stupid things like talking to older guys while posting pictures of myself in bathing suits. That era is truly mortifying. Still, Myspace will forever live on as the best social media site. It gave you a space to express yourself, but it wasn’t as polished and highlight reely as Instagram is today. Then, my mom found out about it because an Oprah episode told parents to check their browser history. For years, it was a revolving door of making profiles, getting caught and being forced to delete them, and making new ones. We peaked here.

More Websites I Was Obsessed With

• Myscene: Like Dollz Mania, the idea of being able to dress up and makeover dolls hooked me for hours upon hours. There’s a version of the old site still around for playing too.

• Tumbler: Do I even need to mention Tumbler? It’s obviously on this list because it was such a perfect site and perfect era. It’s still around, but it’s not the same.

• Neopets: I remember being introduced to this game by a friend, and being both obsessed and somehow never actually understanding how to play. I’ve always been a wannabe gamer.

• Xanga: Now what could I possibly be journaling about as a middle schooler? Embarrassing.

🎸 I’ve talked about Josie and the Pussycats already in this newsletter and I will talk about it again. The cinematic masterpiece was released on April 9, 2001. Though it’s based on the band from the Archie Comics, I can’t imagine brainwashing and subliminal messages were talked about back then. Wardrobe? 10/10. Soundtrack? 10/10. Casting? 10/10. Weird plot that somehow works? 10/10.

🧷 April 16, 1999: SLC Punk is released. I remember exactly the first time I saw this movie. I was home alone with my sister, who wanted to watch it and I objected at first. But I became forever obsessed and spent years quoting it in AIM profiles (“It's a crazy fucked up world and we're all just barely floating along waiting for someone who can walk on water.”) It also further cemented how much I love Matthew Lillard.

👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨 April 19, 1998: Some of the movies you think are Disney Channel Originals were actually episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney, like My Date With the President’s Daughter, which features one of the most iconic dresses ever made. Other notables include Model Behavior and Life-Size, Tyra Banks’ most iconic role.

💿 April 15, 1997: It was on this day that MMMBop was released and my life was forever changed. A month later, Hanson’s first album Middle of Nowhere came out. My sisters’ and I’s obsession couldn’t be contained and a few months later we saw them in concert from the very last row of a huge arena. Too many people count them out, but this album (and their whole discography) is worth a listen.

👚 April 30, 2004: Mean Girls is released and Wednesdays will forever be known as the day to wear pink. Some of this movie is unrealistic, sure, but never has media come close to showing just how vicious teenage girls can be.