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    Sunday, April 26, 2009

    Goodbye, Internet of My Youth

    It's a day a younger me would never have thought would come: Geocities has closed. As I stop and think about it, it's mind boggling.

    My first real foray into the Internet and online social interaction was roleplaying in chatrooms on AOL, circa 1996. I was a real geeky kid (no surprise) and my love of tabletop roleplaying, anime, and console RPGs found chatroom roleplaying a potent drug. I created several characters whose lives were just as real to me as my own, who I lived through, and events in their lives I'll always remember.

    Every character on AOL had their own profile within their account, but some had a separate character profile on AOL Hometown or Geocities. This was back when HTML was incredibly impressive and the people with these custom created webpages were the dedicated gamers. A couple of cribbed pictures of vampires, drawings of castles, and white text on a black HTML background was the coolest thing around. I eventually got on the bandwagon and created my own, complete with my character sheet, a layout for my character's house, and a list of my adventures. It was unfortunately deleted after I stopped logging in years ago but if I close my eyes I can still remember the layout and the red-on-black text.

    These primitive webpages are a vivid part of my teenage memories, and so it is with heavy heart that I pour one out for my homey, Geocities.

    Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities

    RIP GeoCities, You Will Be Missed

    2 comments:

    Stoodert said...

    The internet of old seems to be making way for the new & improved interwebz these days....! First, it was yahoo photos, now it's geocities....!

    Won't be long till Xanga is taken away from me.

    Although - the only thing I remember seeing people use geocities for was their anime/manga fansites.

    (I posted some inuyasha fanfiction somewhere)

    Maren said...

    If a tree falls in the forest, but there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?