I am having a ball going through @crystalgeocities (who is doing THE LORD’S WORK) and it’s bringing back all sorts of memories from the years when I was first exploring the internet. I want to draw your attention to:
scented // licorice
Web rings and cliques, you guys. They were a thing, and they were a thing that ended up leading me to some of my oldest internet/fandom friendships.
Through webrings and such, I found the world of online charm clubs– which I feel, outside of the friends *I* have who remember/took part in them, NO ONE REMEMBERS. I would love to be contradicted, so get in my asks if you remember these.
A charm club was, basically, a forum with an extra collecting component. It was mostly social, to meet people and chat about this or that. You’d have basically an avatar that represented you– your charm– and you would collect the charms of others in the club by sending them a trade request. Then you’d save a copy of their charm, and then add it to a charm cabinet or page or whatever, usually hosted on Geocities, and hand-coded in HTML in Notepad.
I think I found charm clubs through Sailor Orion’s Refuge, because the creator, Meghann, was part of a few, and eventually started her own, based on otaku senshi. The Senshi Exchange Club.
Our charms were little sprites of our otaku characters– in the style of the sprites from the SNES game, Sailor Moon: Another Story. I’m Facebook friends with a number of the people I met through the SEC, and I’ve met some of them in person! We’re all now adults and in our 30s, so it’s been awesome to reconnect as we cross paths out in meatspace.
First point: LYCENTIA WATCH! This was another of her layouts. :B
Second: This image was part of a series of fanart drawn by a very talented artist known as Anna. She was very good at the house style of Sailor Moon, and her artwork looked like they were for real cels– she was really good at imitating/replicating the style and look. I believe she did some artwork then for my friend’s otaku senshi, Sailor Orion.
I don’t think she’s had any online presence in the years since. But if anyone knows her or what she’s up to, just let her know her artwork was appreciated by a ton of people!
Towards the end of Geocities’ reign, there was some shade thrown back and forth here and there because there were maybe a handful of group comp images that got reused all over the place like this. Like, if it was anime style, transparent, and had all the senshi, then it WAS one of these different comps.
People complained that everyone use the same ones, and they should make their own to be ~unique~, but graphics editing programs weren’t nearly as easy or cheap to come by as they are now, so by the time that shift DID happen, Geocities and the fandom in that form had moved onto other platforms and places and those handful of group images remained as markers in time.
So it makes me happy to see one of these comps in the wild, because THOSE WERE THE DAYS~
Long ago, my gal Lycentia had a legit copy of Photoshop or Corel or Jasc Paint Shop Pro or whatever the fuck people used for digital graphics in the very late 90s and she made website designs and layouts and graphics that people could use for their own websites with credit.
THIS WAS ONE OF HER LAYOUTS and I know that because I used it for MY Geocities website one time back in the day.
