Chat

I miss AIM. The days where you would race home and log on to see if your crush would come on, and then inevitably not message them if they did. I had the cash register noise set to their screen names.

newgrounds (The Impossible Quiz, anyone remember the square root of an onion?), Numa Numa, The Evolution of Dance, Shortbits 2, Badger Badger Badger (and other Weebl animations), Onyxia Wipe Animation, bash.org, Stumble Upon (a useful toolbar?!), all sorts of great stuff from that time

Not exactly a fav but I’ll always remember when Omegle was brand new. It was before they had video and it wasn’t full of bots. I was probably around 11 or 12 and I had a convo with someone I vehemently disagreed with some or other topic about. We were friendly tho and continued talking on AIM (friendly, never more) and at some point family came up and he explained how things that my father had done to me was abuse and showed me rainn.org. It was such a huge revelation ofc and led to me telling my family and getting my dad prosecuted. That’s why I like discord sometimes I get that old feeling of genuine convo.

GameFAQs video game cheats.

I remember walking to the library specifically to look up video game cheats on GameFAQs, printing them out on dozens of pieces of paper so I could fold them up and keep them in the appropriate game cases.

I'd go so often and get so much exercise from it, my parents didn't even bother limiting my video game time.

I don't think it's online anymore but at it's peak I used to read every post on mlia before it became garbage

God this was a trip down memory lane. Thanks for this. I miss bash.org stuff, maybe some of the old ytmnd stuff, new grounds flash portal, etc.

And IRC…

I really liked "Freeman's Mind" (link to episode 1 from nine years ago). It was super simple, literally just a first-person perspective playthrough the Half-Life games with narration instead of commentary. The narrator acted like the mind of Gordon Freeman and it was really funny. Sort of harkens back to a simpler time on youtube, when 9 minutes of a guy talking as if he were a fictional character while playing a video game was prime content. I remember watching this and in the comments I was begging Ross (the creator) to do Half-Life 2 when he finished with 1.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FYR72mr0E

Also homestarrunner and foamy the squirrel

I spent an unreasonable time at the albinoblacksheep forums. Also Flash Flash Revolution was my jam!

I was a kid in the 2000's so for me the oldies were playing the flash games on cartoon network, miniclip and armor games. My first real exposure to social media was YouTube 2006-2008 somewhere around there watching Smosh and whatever crap was there back in the day.

FenslerFilm's GI Joe PSA Spoofs

playlist

In particular.... https://yewtu.be/watch?v=YlcXposa2I8

Edit:

The company gained a reputation in 2003 for a series of short films which parodied the public service announcement (PSA) safety messages used at the end of every episode of the 1980s animated series G.I. Joe, based on Hasbro's toy line. [...] By 2004, the videos had been considered viral hits, and Hasbro had sent Fensler a cease and desist order.

Wikipedia

Crap, I recognize almost everything in this thread and some of it I consider relatively recent.

I loved forums and participated frequently on a roleplaying forum. Got started roleplaying on Neopets, moved on to gaiaonline as I "matured," and ended up on a regular forum midway through highschool.

I once spent 12 hours on Newgrounds watching the most extreme content it had because I couldn't bring myself to work on a project that was due the next day in middleschool.

Finding a solution to an obscure computer problem in a YouTube video recorded with Unregistered Hypercam, Windows XP/Vista background, notepad instructions being typed at 15 WPM, playing Down With the Sickness, Breaking Benjamin, or one of those 009 Sound System songs lol.

Typing JOSHUA in Terminate, the dialup BBS terminal client, to unlock the war dialer. It let you sequentially dial every phone number in a range and would record each one that answered with a modem handshake.

Stickdeath.com was great back in the day. Remember when flash was cool and not evil.

There was a search engine called like crazy Pete and its tag was faster than a space horse. I remember it took over 4 mins to find a result and there were certain hours where Pete would personally get a result for you.

I was young so I'm not sure how accurate that was but I imagine that it's run by an English man from a computer in his garden shed. From 6-7pm he sits in his shed smoking a pipe and serving people web results.

That video reminds me of You Suck At Photoshop, which actually did teach me a good amount of basic photo editing knowledge.

Chimaera, My Nameserver

Maplestory has my heart and probably part of my soul too. I played Maplestory from ages 5 to 13 and pretty much made a full time job out of it. In fact, last time I was on a forum was basilmarket - if you know you know!

If I have to pick an absolute favorite, old Neopets. Having the little webspaces there is what got me into coding as a kid and I ended up studying & working in IT.
If I can pick multiple, I'd also add phpbb forums of yore, game guides with ASCII art maps, Flash games, and MSN Messenger.

Prodigy bulletin boards and getting WWF PPV results after events ended.

GameSpy. Finding a server you clicked with. Meeting the other players that frequented there. Joining clans and chatting it up on the forums. So much creativity flowed making banners or avatars the showed off your stats from the server and such.

I spent a lot of time on killsometime.com or something like that. I also watched so much Strongbad...

MMS. It was horridly made but it was the first place chatting felt natural to me

The True Meaning of Life Virtual Meditation Chamber.

From Wikipedia: More commonly referred to by its acronym TMOL, the site was originally started in early 2000 as a version of Forum 2000 and The Conversatron, but one that focused on the idea that videogames reflected a deep, self-actualizing message that could improve one's life. The conceit of the site was that it evangelized this videogame-centric, pseudo-Buddhist philosophy via a "Virtual Meditation Chamber", where the site's visitors, or "Supplicants", would ask for the advice or the opinion of the "Gurus". Headed by the fictional "lead Guru wrangler", The Seeker, TMOL ran from July 2000 – January 2004, and the best-of archive of this run is still available online.

Portal of Evil.

If you know, you know.

Hmmm well besides forums I would say one thing I miss a lot is Oekaki. I was really into this for a while.

There was this shockwave/swf video simulation of a psychedelic trip that was looking really incredible for its day. With great soundtrack.

https://youtu.be/is3SG7-VfbQ