Confessions

[plantovision]

To be honest I've never played half-life... i never played either of the games

Yeah, me neither. I own the orange box, I just haven't played it.

I haven't even played Portal..

Sacrilege.

I like dogs, but I would never adopt one

Ngl I hate dogs. Was scared of them when I was young, but now I just dislike them. Cats FTW!

Never heard of Expage before but I searched it now and discovered a tale of early 2000s horse website discrimination  Web stables made on Geocities and Angelfire etc refused to cooperate with the inferior Expage stables, which lead to the founding of the Association for the Support of Expage stables. They wrote (translated by me): "The discrimination and belittling of Expage stables on a MASSIVE scale has begun recently. E.g. compared to Geo-stables. On Expage, you can see stables equally as good as on Geo Therefore, we started this association - for all expage stables. Every Expage stable is welcome to join us and we also wish for it from the bottom of our heart!"

Interesting piece of history...

I have no Idea what Expage is, but this is horse website discrimination is suxh a funny concept.

If I'm being completely honest, I was way too young to see the Geocities era web. I just think the aesthetic is neat.

[dotmidi]

Yeah, me neither. I own the orange box, I just haven't played it.

I'm glad im not the only one, i've played tf2 and portal 1 and 2 but nevr played half life..

[Guest]

I often enjoy listening to cheesy 90's pop music for some reason, including bands like NSync and Savage Garden and often use it for my comfort music lol.

[neoratz]

i hacked toontown. when i got caught i swore to my mom i didn't and she had to call support to get me WRONGFULLY unbanned! and then i got re-banned years later when i told another player what i did

[Onio]

i hacked toontown. when i got caught i swore to my mom i didn't and she had to call support to get me WRONGFULLY unbanned! and then i got re-banned years later when i told another player what i did

Oh nooo! Hahaha

[Melooon]

i hacked toontown. when i got caught i swore to my mom i didn't and she had to call support to get me WRONGFULLY unbanned! and then i got re-banned years later when i told another player what i did

Ooph, this reminds me of playing Puzzel Pirates - there was another kid pestering me to "lend" them my ship and my clothes (I had fancy clothes).. I decided I would be a supreme troll and open a trade and pretend I was gonna give them stuff, but then cancel.. but I clicked the wrong button and gave them all my stuff

[Icey!]

Ooph, this reminds me of playing Puzzel Pirates - there was another kid pestering me to "lend" them my ship and my clothes (I had fancy clothes).. I decided I would be a supreme troll and open a trade and pretend I was gonna give them stuff, but then cancel.. but I clicked the wrong button and gave them all my stuff

Oh that must suck.


One time I thought "lol" meant "sorry", I think you can guess how I figured out what it really meant.

[Guest]

Ooph, this reminds me of playing Puzzel Pirates - there was another kid pestering me to "lend" them my ship and my clothes (I had fancy clothes).. I decided I would be a supreme troll and open a trade and pretend I was gonna give them stuff, but then cancel.. but I clicked the wrong button and gave them all my stuff

omg, I didn't think I'd see someone else who played Puzzle Pirates lol. Well, I've never played it but my life partner legit made an account after being told about it by a friend who plays and literally named his character "Fart the Pirate". Best pirate name ever

[Melooon]

omg, I didn't think I'd see someone else who played Puzzle Pirates lol

There's actually a thread about it on this forum! https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=283.0
Its been a LONG time!

[xandra]

Never heard of Expage before but I searched it now and discovered a tale of early 2000s horse website discrimination  Web stables made on Geocities and Angelfire etc refused to cooperate with the inferior Expage stables, which lead to the founding of the Association for the Support of Expage stables. They wrote (translated by me): "The discrimination and belittling of Expage stables on a MASSIVE scale has begun recently. E.g. compared to Geo-stables. On Expage, you can see stables equally as good as on Geo Therefore, we started this association - for all expage stables. Every Expage stable is welcome to join us and we also wish for it from the bottom of our heart!"

Interesting piece of history...

oh my gosh, i'd love to see more about this if you have any links from the archive!

i got my web-building start making "choose your own adventure"-type or, really, text roleplay websites centered around stables. so you'd have to click somewhere to get a horse, choose your type of horse by clicking on an image of a horse, click on the tack store, buy feed, etc. but it was all text based, not very graphic heavy and obviously, no real interactivity outside of clicking links and going down URL trails for different paths of the "story," if there ever was one outside of just owning a horse, hah. but you could share "your" horse (with a link back to the site, of course) on your own website. it was kind of a static interactive adventure.

if i'm reading you right, is that what "web stables" were? you're talking about unlocking a part of my youngest internet self... the nostalgia!

Oh my goodness, that is so funny.

Geocities definitely felt more advanced than Expage. If I recall correctly, you couldn't just edit the whole site with Expage. There were separate fields for the header, body, and footer that you could edit separately, and you were stuck to choose some of their limited options for graphics, dividers, songs, etc. It was still great fun though. I met my best friend on that website, we've been friends for over 20 years, because I stole the color of his background and that made him upset.

The front page of Expage looked like this:




Here's my archived Expage website, courtesy of 10 year old me.

Here's my friend's archived Expage website.

And this is one of the absolute MIDI bangers you could choose from, hahaha.

holy crap. similar story. /c0cac0la is my only archived site that i can remember. expage was really funny too because you had to create a whole new account just to make a second page on your site, so you'd have, for example, /c0cac0la1 and /c0cac0la2 as your splash page and your main page. it was such a hassle. and if you wanted anything without the header and footer parts, you'd host that page elsewhere like on envy.nu or something similar. (i actually write a little about it in my digital history, if you're interested!)

through expage, i met two friends that i'm still friends with to this day! we all bonded due to being 8 years old on the internet and saying we were much older, LOL. on the side of expage i was on, there were group AIM chats that we'd have often between people who knew each other from their expages. anything similar like that on y'all's end?

edit: almost forgot my confession! in the '90s, it was all about concealing who you were on the internet because it was unsafe. at least, that's what i took away from it. you were supposed to hide who you are, but i was making a ton of new friends and needed an identity. so i, an 8-year-old girl from tennessee in the US, lied and said i was from australia, of all places! the only thing i knew about australians was they ate vegemite from time to time, so i was sure to sprinkle that in periodically with whatever i was talking about going on that day. 

[Onio]

>we all bonded due to being 8 years old on the internet and saying we were much older, LOL. on the side of expage i was on, there were group AIM chats that we'd have often between people who knew each other from their expages.

edit: almost forgot my confession! in the '90s, it was all about concealing who you were on the internet because it was unsafe. at least, that's what i took away from it. you were supposed to hide who you are, but i was making a ton of new friends and needed an identity. so i, an 8-year-old girl from tennessee in the US, lied and said i was from australia, of all places! the only thing i knew about australians was they ate vegemite from time to time, so i was sure to sprinkle that in periodically with whatever i was talking about going on that day.

That is GOLD!

I completely forgot about those separate accounts; I probably didn't even question it. I do remember sequencing pages like that. Man, I miss that website. My friend successfully created a clone a few years ago that he called "OrcPages," but took it down.

I think I was running on Yahoo! Messenger during my Expage days. I remember playing a bit of Yahoo! Pool and being so impressed by the "pros," hahaha. I got in a conversation with my friend's older brother on Yahoo pool, who told me I was in a lot of trouble for stealing that background color from his little brother's website, that it was illegal, etc. Turns out it was just him trying to intimidate me, but at the time I thought I was going to get sued

[Commodorn]

I have a memory of me blatantly cursing at somebody in Animal Jam after getting something
scammed from them at a party. This was back in like.. 2011. The filter then was pretty loose and possibly buggy-- I didn't get temp banned for that until the day after despite it being a very common word.

I also.. um.. for some reason someone on there gave me their password at some point. They had that glitched, magenta color on one of their animals and got VERY angry at me when I messed it up. The glitches in that game were a lot of fun, by the way; I loved figuring out new ways to make your main animal stay a member-exclusive animal as a non-member every time the poor bastards tried to patch that one. Almost as much as using lag to avoid properly re-spawning within an adventure so your (technically dead) animal can get dragged through walls and enemies without getting affected...

... Yeah, talking about this game after not consistently playing for nearly a decade feels strange. I've probably broken it in more ways than I can even remember within that 4 to 5-year time-frame.

[shevek]

Something fun and lighthearted: During my teenage years, Battlefield Heroes was really popular. I used to play it with someone I had a crush on. They did something bad then that broke my heart, so me and a friend made the plan to grind the game really hard to reach max level faster than my crush and also repeatedly kill them ingame if we came across them. We never actually met them ingame, and I'm not sure how reaching max level quicker is a flex on someone, but in our teenage heads it made sense somehow