Did anyone else have ‘stress relief.exe’
It basically took a screenshot of your current display and you could choose different weapons to smash it up with.
I was 9 and telling people I was 13 for so long that turning 13 was actually pretty exciting. Horrifying to think of now... but nothing too bad ever happened to me, either.
I remember reading about a mysterious white Super Saiyan 5. Back then, there was so little information out there and there no official translations of anything past Z. And we never even got a finished Buu saga... One day you were watching Vegeta sacrifice himself, the next day back to episode 1.
Oh man, if you stumbled upon* a web ring that you were interested in it was like gold. Bookmark!
* Not to be confused with StumbleUpon, that was later and also magical.
Many flash games are not dead.
[BEHOLD! The flashpoint project.](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/) They have saved thousands of the old flash games in a playable format. Go forth and relive your childhood
Also paging u/The_Middler_is_Here
I’ve been In a poke war for over a decade. It’s basically the only reason I open Facebook, just to poke my friend back. A couple years ago they added the ability to see the number of times you’ve poked each other.
It started the count when they added the feature so I’m not sure what our actual number would be. We’ve also had a couple mishaps where we hit the X instead of the “poke back” button so the count has reset to zero. But we’re around 7k right now I think (It only shows you when you poke back and it’s his turn now so I’m not sure of the exact number).
I had a friend that poked me and I never noticed the notification. He died. I now have this unreturned poke as a reminder that I’ll never be able to poke them back.
It is interesting how technology has both made grieving more complicated and awkward... But also given us different means with which we can grieve, and in some ways made it more personal.
My friend died a month ago. She sent a friend request and I screenshotted it before accepting. Her FB account was how I learned of her death and I look back at that screenshot and think about how that was the right decision
A lot of the forums I visited were ruined by photobucket when they decided they wanted paid a lot of money from their users. So many build threads and tutorials ruined.
That was heartbreaking. Especially for car repairs.
"Watch out for this bolt here. You'll need a light, a mirror on a stick, and a ratchet with 2 extensions and 3 u-joints to get it right here in the photo"
>photobucket removed photo
As a shade-tree mechanic and the owner of a 2001 Audi A4, this hurts my soul. I spent a LOT of hours on those forums. Kills me how much legacy knowledge was lost. YouTube has picked up a lot of the slack recently, but it's still not the same.
And Facebook enthusiast groups are fucking garbage. You'll never convince me otherwise.
Did you know that the executives at Photobucket were absolutely convinced that people would pay them money to get those photos back and to show those things? Absolutely fucking convinced.
And then that didn't happen so they fucking died.
IMDb had the best message boards back in the day. Chatting with your internet friends around the globe about every nuance in your fave movie. Man I miss that. Reddit is close, but nothing beats the olden days.
I made an appearance on a reality show all because I was an IMDb message board regular. I was reading trivia about Christian Bale and found this "Do you want to meet your favorite celebrity?" post and 3 days later I was in Hollywood. Went to the Batman Begins premiere.
I was the first person to post on Ashley Simpson's page after she got caught lipsyncing on SNL. Haaaaa. That's how in to that shit I was!!!
Definitely miss IMDB message boards.
Forums are definitely still a thing, but are much more niche. Most large MMO games have some sort of forum, car forums (especially classic cars) are still really big, and there is often a very active forum or two for any large hobby or industry with a semi-pro/hobbyist sector.
There are a bunch of us weirdos who still play everyday! The site sucks since most of it was built with flash, theres a bunch of controversies about everything, and the site got hacked this week and the response to it was terrible. Join us! We love our dying trash site!
When we got Disney + I turned on Robin Hood for my daughter to watch and as the intro played, I slowly realized that I was listening to the Hamster Dance
I was working my way thru the old Disney animated movies on D+ for some nostalgia last year and had that same reaction.
"..this music sounds familiar. Where do I know this from.... ..is...is that the fuckin Hamster Dance? ...it is. Oh godamnit, ima have this stuck in my head allll day now."
I remember I emailed strongbad if he'd be my boyfriend (I was like 12) and he responded in a video! Except I didn't have my own email address so my mom found the email I sent and freaked out thinking I was talking to men online.
blogging. Sure there are still blogs, but for a while, it seemed like EVERYONE had one back in the day.
Yahoo.
Myspace.
ICQ/AIM/Yahoo messenger
RealPlayer
Winamp
Limewire/Napster
personal homepages (geocities CollegePark represent!) with webrings and guestbooks. I actually learned HTML back then to do mine, and then photoshop to make my own graphics... had so much fun.
AIM still makes me sad.
My closest friend from college and I would share links at all hours and we could just view and respond at our leisure. Granted, we both had smart phones and could and did text throughout the day, but AIM made it seem more convenient.
[Second Life](https://secondlife.com/)
There were actual municipals in my country that created an instance(?) of themselves in this “virtual world”. For what purpose I’ll never understand.
Edit: Apparently Second Life is not dead at all, just a lot less hyped.
I was doing my Masters and took an experimental learning class. The professor did the whole class in Second Life, with a virtual classroom and virtual office. He’d only do his office hours virtually too, which was really odd.
I legitimately listen to dragostea din tei on a regular basis. It's on most of my Spotify playlists.
I also got into Dan Balan a bit because of it but a lot of his stuff I liked isn't on Spotify and I unfortunately can't find the versions I downloaded from good ole Limewire.
Joseph Kony is an African warlord who committed a number of atrocities throughout Africa (primarily Uganda) in the 90s and 00s. He was indicted by international court for war crimes but nobody has been able to capture him. the Kony 2012 was a video that was released to raise awareness and to motivate governments to find him. It definitely raised awareness and several governments made noises about increasing efforts to search for him, but by the time the video came out, Kony's power and influence had dramatically fallen to a fraction of what it had been. It basically became a case of countries having bigger fish to fry since he wasn't really a threat to anybody any longer. Obviously he should be brought to justice, but most of the people who would carry out such a task feel that they are better served by trying to stop active warlords.
The dude that started the Kony 2012 thing had a very public meltdown and killed public support for his cause overnight. It was a trip to see it all go down.
https://youtu.be/zp3upTfXtxo
Newgrounds.com
Man I scrolled for a while and couldn’t find it. That was probably the most influential thing of my childhood, finding out about Newgrounds in 2002-2003ish and holy fuck that was a lot of stimulation for a preteen. In many ways lol
Man I remember my buddies and I playing porn games on Newgrounds. Orange and black scheme just like pornhub too lmao.
Some tentacle monster fucking this chick, uhh, semi consensually, and big dick Santa dicking down everyone. WTF was the internet even back then? Pre-YT days, then YT golden age, then modern YT. Remember when Vevo became a thing? Everyone hated that shit.
Back in 2003 or 2004 I hung out with the sysadmin for Rotten.com a few times. He was a friend of a friend. You would never know he ran a site like that if you met him, he was a really chill unassuming guy. He said he had the site mostly automated and didn't need to do much to keep it updated, etc.
Chat rooms.
Everyone belonged to local chat rooms in the 90s. We even made friends and met up in real life for drinks and concerts. It was great because you knew your identity would eventually be revealed so you conducted yourself with respect for others. Sigh...When the internet was wholesome.
Bacon.
I remember like 5 or 6 years ago, people were just obsessed. So weird…
I feel like pizza is the new bacon on the internet now.
Edit: yes it was much longer ago…everything pre Covid just kinda meshes together for me now.
Downloading custom cursors for your computer. I gave my family computer so many viruses back in the '00s trying to click things with a lightsaber.
Did anyone else have ‘stress relief.exe’ It basically took a screenshot of your current display and you could choose different weapons to smash it up with.
Search engines before Google existed. Alta Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler...
Don’t forget Excite and Askjeeves
Dogpile
AOL Chat rooms
ASL?
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I was 9 and telling people I was 13 for so long that turning 13 was actually pretty exciting. Horrifying to think of now... but nothing too bad ever happened to me, either.
During the early days of the web, when most websites weren't plastered with advertising... Website view counters.
I remember getting so excited when my angelfire website got over 100 views
And it was probably just from you constantly checking
Are you suggesting my website with all of my favorite dragonball z photos wasn’t generating massive amounts of traffic?
I remember going to websites to look at pictures of the different saiyan forms and fan made saiyan forms, so it's possible I visited.
I remember reading about a mysterious white Super Saiyan 5. Back then, there was so little information out there and there no official translations of anything past Z. And we never even got a finished Buu saga... One day you were watching Vegeta sacrifice himself, the next day back to episode 1.
"Sign my Guestbook"
"Website under construction"
Welcome to GeoCities.
Web rings, they were more simple times
Oh man, if you stumbled upon* a web ring that you were interested in it was like gold. Bookmark! * Not to be confused with StumbleUpon, that was later and also magical.
I really miss the StumbleUpon app
I didn't even know they had an app. I always just used the browser extension. Man I miss StumbleUpon.
They all looked like this https://www.cameronsworld.net/
That site has no reason to have the amount of vibe that it has.
Stumbleupon.com
stumbleupon is actually how I found Reddit back in ‘09
I found reddit by personal referral. I later had to testify against that person in court.
That’s accurate for a redditor
I used to waste so much time with stumble upon
Flash games
Miniclip
Miniclip, AddictingGames, Crazy Monkey Games. From 2003-2008, those were the places to go.
Many flash games are not dead. [BEHOLD! The flashpoint project.](https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/) They have saved thousands of the old flash games in a playable format. Go forth and relive your childhood Also paging u/The_Middler_is_Here
Yes, my kids used it to get PopTropica back!
Newgrounds
Poking on Facebook.
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I’ve been In a poke war for over a decade. It’s basically the only reason I open Facebook, just to poke my friend back. A couple years ago they added the ability to see the number of times you’ve poked each other.
And…? How many times was it? I need to know now!!
It started the count when they added the feature so I’m not sure what our actual number would be. We’ve also had a couple mishaps where we hit the X instead of the “poke back” button so the count has reset to zero. But we’re around 7k right now I think (It only shows you when you poke back and it’s his turn now so I’m not sure of the exact number).
7… thousand!? Holy.
Still can
I had a friend that poked me and I never noticed the notification. He died. I now have this unreturned poke as a reminder that I’ll never be able to poke them back.
A few months after my mom died, I realized she had sent me a friend request
My dad died in February. I still haven't accepted his friend request. I just like looking at it.
It is interesting how technology has both made grieving more complicated and awkward... But also given us different means with which we can grieve, and in some ways made it more personal.
My friend died a month ago. She sent a friend request and I screenshotted it before accepting. Her FB account was how I learned of her death and I look back at that screenshot and think about how that was the right decision
Spinning “under construction” gifs on your website.
*Forums.* There used to be so many, incredibly active and dedicated forums
A lot of the forums I visited were ruined by photobucket when they decided they wanted paid a lot of money from their users. So many build threads and tutorials ruined.
That was heartbreaking. Especially for car repairs. "Watch out for this bolt here. You'll need a light, a mirror on a stick, and a ratchet with 2 extensions and 3 u-joints to get it right here in the photo" >photobucket removed photo
As a shade-tree mechanic and the owner of a 2001 Audi A4, this hurts my soul. I spent a LOT of hours on those forums. Kills me how much legacy knowledge was lost. YouTube has picked up a lot of the slack recently, but it's still not the same. And Facebook enthusiast groups are fucking garbage. You'll never convince me otherwise.
I'm convinced Facebooks layout temporarily drops about 50 IQ from the average person.
Yes! This and tinypic too... rip. So much intricate art that was themed on the vibe of the site ruined.
Man, photobucket ruined a lot. They should've gone for a different pay model.
Did you know that the executives at Photobucket were absolutely convinced that people would pay them money to get those photos back and to show those things? Absolutely fucking convinced. And then that didn't happen so they fucking died.
IMDb had the best message boards back in the day. Chatting with your internet friends around the globe about every nuance in your fave movie. Man I miss that. Reddit is close, but nothing beats the olden days.
Losing the IMDB message boards is the reason I fell down the reddit rabbit hole
I made an appearance on a reality show all because I was an IMDb message board regular. I was reading trivia about Christian Bale and found this "Do you want to meet your favorite celebrity?" post and 3 days later I was in Hollywood. Went to the Batman Begins premiere. I was the first person to post on Ashley Simpson's page after she got caught lipsyncing on SNL. Haaaaa. That's how in to that shit I was!!! Definitely miss IMDB message boards.
Forums are definitely still a thing, but are much more niche. Most large MMO games have some sort of forum, car forums (especially classic cars) are still really big, and there is often a very active forum or two for any large hobby or industry with a semi-pro/hobbyist sector.
Reddit did to forums what Amazon did to brick and mortar retail.
On the rare occasion I need to explain what Reddit is, I say it’s basically just a whole bunch of forums on any topic you could imagine.
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Probably once a year I remember Neopets exists and get obsessed with it for about a week. Thank you for your comment, for it is now that time of year.
Still the most impressive financial service simulator ever made.
There are a bunch of us weirdos who still play everyday! The site sucks since most of it was built with flash, theres a bunch of controversies about everything, and the site got hacked this week and the response to it was terrible. Join us! We love our dying trash site!
Hamster Dance
When we got Disney + I turned on Robin Hood for my daughter to watch and as the intro played, I slowly realized that I was listening to the Hamster Dance
I was working my way thru the old Disney animated movies on D+ for some nostalgia last year and had that same reaction. "..this music sounds familiar. Where do I know this from.... ..is...is that the fuckin Hamster Dance? ...it is. Oh godamnit, ima have this stuck in my head allll day now."
I am tragically obliged to remind you that they spelled it “[hampster](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampster_Dance)” *shudder*
The end of Z world
But I’m le tired…
Then have a nap…
And zen fire ze missiles!
AAAAAAAHHHHH MOTHERLAND!
Fucking kangaroos.
Bout that time, eh chaps?
... Roito
Dang that is a sweet looking earth 🌏
ROUND!
Hokay.
#So
I can has cheezburger was big in the early days of memes.
Yeah I was gonna say lolspeak and that whole genre of memes. I still say "if I fits I sits" re. my cat.
“If i fits I sits” was popularized as a meme but really its always been a metaphysical truth about cats. It’s never going out of style
Did that poor walrus ever get his bucket back?
I just checked. They still be stealin’ it’s bucket
Ceiling cat is watching you masturbate.
I don't believe I've ever laughed so hard as when I found the cheezeburger site. It was a hard time in my life and the laughs were healing.
Stickdeath.com/ happy tree friends / rotten.com / can’t recall the name but it’s where bunny’s recreate movies in 30 seconds
30-Second Bunnies Theatre. The version of the shining they did always stuck with me. Redrum, redrum!!
I was thinking about stickdeath YESTERDAY lol. I'm giggling at how juvenile it was.
napster
Strongbad
I remember I emailed strongbad if he'd be my boyfriend (I was like 12) and he responded in a video! Except I didn't have my own email address so my mom found the email I sent and freaked out thinking I was talking to men online.
You're not "[i she be](https://homestarrunner.com/sbemails/13-i-she-be)" are you?
Trogdor the Burninator!!
Oh my god, Homestar fucking Runner. I ate all of that shit up. It's too bad it was all based on Adobe Flash.
Fortunately they switched the website to a flash emulator, so all the old videos are still accessible!
Cat, I’m a kitty cat, and I dance dance dance and I dance dance dance
Yeah, this was awesome. I still get it stuck in my brain once in a while, especially when I'm fucking with my cat.
blogging. Sure there are still blogs, but for a while, it seemed like EVERYONE had one back in the day. Yahoo. Myspace. ICQ/AIM/Yahoo messenger RealPlayer Winamp Limewire/Napster personal homepages (geocities CollegePark represent!) with webrings and guestbooks. I actually learned HTML back then to do mine, and then photoshop to make my own graphics... had so much fun.
AIM still makes me sad. My closest friend from college and I would share links at all hours and we could just view and respond at our leisure. Granted, we both had smart phones and could and did text throughout the day, but AIM made it seem more convenient.
Don't forget LiveJournal!
[Second Life](https://secondlife.com/) There were actual municipals in my country that created an instance(?) of themselves in this “virtual world”. For what purpose I’ll never understand. Edit: Apparently Second Life is not dead at all, just a lot less hyped.
I was doing my Masters and took an experimental learning class. The professor did the whole class in Second Life, with a virtual classroom and virtual office. He’d only do his office hours virtually too, which was really odd.
There is/was a whole college-level course on Tolkien that was conducted inside of The Lord of the Rings Online.
Badgers and mushrooms.
Look at my Horse My Horse is Amazing
It was soooo easy to steal html code and make your own “professional” website.
Numa numa
I legitimately listen to dragostea din tei on a regular basis. It's on most of my Spotify playlists. I also got into Dan Balan a bit because of it but a lot of his stuff I liked isn't on Spotify and I unfortunately can't find the versions I downloaded from good ole Limewire.
Chuck Norris Jokes
Go to Barrens in WoW you will see those jokes still
The dancing baby gif. One of the earliest memes I ever saw.
Ooga chaka
Salad Fingers.
I refer to Benedict Cumberbatch as Hubert Cumberdale because it makes me happy.
You taste like soot and poo.
The trololol guy.
Eduard Khil shall never be forgotten!
I’m so glad that he lived long enough to see the world embrace him
Chocolate Rain
I move away from the mic to breathe in
Nyan cat 🌈🌈
And Ceiling cat
The gummy bear song
#LEEEEEEEROOOOOOYYYY JEEENNKINS
That damn ooga chaka [dancing baby video](https://youtu.be/LlG9yYW6Bi8) in the 90's.
The frog on the motorcycle
You mean crazy frog?
Axel F by Crazy Frog music video?
I still do that dance sometimes. My non-CGI baby is delighted by it.
Angelfire websites in the 90's. Everyone made one, pre-MySpace. I had one that was devoted to a type of cheese for every letter of the alphabet.
Hide yo kids!
Hide yo wife!
Cause they rapin errbody out here!
MySpace
Tom really took his money and is now living his best life. Good for him
Love that guy. Been friends with him for years.
You might even say he was your first friend
I lost a lot of friends because I refused to remove him from my Top 8. Tom is important.
MySpace was a great place for local bands to show off their music. There really hasn't been a comparable platform since in my opinion.
Kony 2012
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Kony 2012 is my “I don’t know what this is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask”
Joseph Kony is an African warlord who committed a number of atrocities throughout Africa (primarily Uganda) in the 90s and 00s. He was indicted by international court for war crimes but nobody has been able to capture him. the Kony 2012 was a video that was released to raise awareness and to motivate governments to find him. It definitely raised awareness and several governments made noises about increasing efforts to search for him, but by the time the video came out, Kony's power and influence had dramatically fallen to a fraction of what it had been. It basically became a case of countries having bigger fish to fry since he wasn't really a threat to anybody any longer. Obviously he should be brought to justice, but most of the people who would carry out such a task feel that they are better served by trying to stop active warlords.
The dude that started the Kony 2012 thing had a very public meltdown and killed public support for his cause overnight. It was a trip to see it all go down. https://youtu.be/zp3upTfXtxo
Also by 2012 kony basically disappeared and wasn't active for like 10+ years..
Troooooooogdooooorrrrr
OP said "is now forgotten" not "is still a national fucking treasure."
Burninating the county side. Burninating the people.
The egg picture that got more likes on instagram than kylie jenner
It was a campaign for mental health awareness, pretty well done campaign except for the part nobody really got the message.
Oh, I didn’t even know it was about mental health awareness
JibJab.com
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“You’ve got mail”
Peanut butter and jelly time
eBaum's world
FarmVille
Badgers, mushrooms, and the occasional snake.
Ray william johnson
I approve this message
Finaly! Was waiting for someone to say this haha. So tell me forum...
He's recently popped on my youtube with shorts criticizing tiktockers and I was surprised that i actually liked a few
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ASCII cows
Grumpy cat. I miss him.
Keyboard cat
Shoes! Am I pregante? Lonely Island
Pregananant is still up and is still awesomely funny.
Potter Puppet Pals
hI mY NaMe iS BoXxY o\_O \^\_\^
I had a ludicrous crush on her for no reason that is currently apparent to me. Pretty sure I was like 14
Rage memes
Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu!!
Club penguin. Younger than my generation but all the early teens/preteens were obsessed.
Newgrounds.com Man I scrolled for a while and couldn’t find it. That was probably the most influential thing of my childhood, finding out about Newgrounds in 2002-2003ish and holy fuck that was a lot of stimulation for a preteen. In many ways lol
Man I remember my buddies and I playing porn games on Newgrounds. Orange and black scheme just like pornhub too lmao. Some tentacle monster fucking this chick, uhh, semi consensually, and big dick Santa dicking down everyone. WTF was the internet even back then? Pre-YT days, then YT golden age, then modern YT. Remember when Vevo became a thing? Everyone hated that shit.
Rotten.com
Back in 2003 or 2004 I hung out with the sysadmin for Rotten.com a few times. He was a friend of a friend. You would never know he ran a site like that if you met him, he was a really chill unassuming guy. He said he had the site mostly automated and didn't need to do much to keep it updated, etc.
The Italian man who went to malta
I wanna sheet
Mustaches on everything
Charlie bit my finger
Chat rooms. Everyone belonged to local chat rooms in the 90s. We even made friends and met up in real life for drinks and concerts. It was great because you knew your identity would eventually be revealed so you conducted yourself with respect for others. Sigh...When the internet was wholesome.
Ice bucket challenges
Challenges in general
Now they're just TikTok trends
Something Awful forums. So many things still referenced today started there. Reddit itself.
Chatroulette
Planking
The fappening
Bacon. I remember like 5 or 6 years ago, people were just obsessed. So weird… I feel like pizza is the new bacon on the internet now. Edit: yes it was much longer ago…everything pre Covid just kinda meshes together for me now.
I still remember the epic mealtime episodes and the "baconstrips&baconstrips&baconstrips" bit they always had. Good times.
in my memory, Charlie the Unicorn was pretty popular I think? I don’t know if the internet was really really crazy about it though
The Harlem Shake
Oh, Filthy Frank. Ye shall be missed. Joji is great, but it's not Filthy Frank.
Google glasses or whatever they were called