Neopets to Myspace to Web Design: A Slightly Embarrassing Origin Story

Welcome to this corner of my site!

I find myself loving the concept of blogs but not always loving the experience as a user. If you’re here, I want to give you the most I can for your time, hopefully in a way that pleases your eyes.

I brace myself as I begin this post because I’m fully planning to expose myself with embarrassing and hilarious content from my youth. If you’re a 90’s kid, you may get a little nostalgic. It’s also one of those full-circle realizations that my hobbies led me to my actual career. Here goes nothing… we all started somewhere!

the shared family desktop circa 1999

Sorry iPad Kiddos, Have YOU Played Minesweeper?

I am a full-fledged internet kid. Some of my earliest memories with my siblings revolve around PC games like Solitaire, Minesweeper, and the best of all, Pinball. I also grew up in the Silicon Valley, so we were exposed to even more random educational software (Millie’s Math House, anyone?!). I cherish the times I used to sit on the arm of the couch while watching my dad “show me” how to program with simple bash prompts.

shoutout to our logitech webcam <333

The Legend, Microsoft Paint

Of these early applications, the one that truly held my heart (and far too much storage space on our poor desktop) was MS Paint. I was already a creative child in traditional tactile forms, but something about creating art digitally fired me up!

The Legend, Microsoft Paint

Neopets Really Started It All

When you’re the youngest of three, you want to do what your siblings do. They helped me create my first Neopets account at age 6, and I was thoroughly addicted to it for… a lot of years. I still stand by this being an awesome platform to learn so many web skills at the time (but probably not up to our online safety standards of today – ha!). This was where I first started experimenting with .gifs, file types, font styling, HTML, and CSS.

i had to hack both my yahoo and my photobucket to find these gems

HTML Was My Jam

In comparison to present day, it baffles me that so many kids and teens spent their free time creating actual pages, with code, pretty much from scratch. Many of us (myself included) would find other people’s HTML and CSS resources to copy + paste. At the time, each pet came with its own blank page. You could also style Guild pages, which were essentially the original Facebook groups! We didn’t have the luxury of the page builders of today, so simply turning your font red and bold was a big deal.

deeply passionate about fonts from a young age

dUn Dun DUUUN... Social Media

Then came Xanga… along sprung Myspace… and now social media pretty much runs our world. Facebook, Instagram, you know the rest. But I just had to give Myspace a quick shoutout. This platform let you edit your source code!! Because I was already excited about HTML and had some family on there, I made my profile in 4th grade.

Now, 4th graders are successful TikTokers, but at the time it was a little odd! Luckily I had Neopets to teach me to be careful, and let’s be honest, I was in it to make my page pretty. I spent hours and hours editing my profile – and I’m sure this is the time that many others also dabbled in some coding. 😉 I can’t log back into Myspace which actually saves me a lot of embarrassment. Here are some photos from that golden era.

if you rocked the neon skinny jeans and side bangs… you get it

The Rest Is History

The next chapter was college as a computer science major for 3 years. At that point, I had a slight mid-life crisis and figured out a major to make my interests work: Interdisciplinary Studies in 3 Departments: Computer Science, Art, Math. Oh yeah, it’s a mouthful. But that’s a story for another day.

Reminisce on your past in terms of how it got you to where you are today. The pieces never made sense at the time, but it all led me here – finding joy in my work daily!