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this site is best viewed on desktop using google chrome! also, custom fonts are only working on macs for some reason 
i made girlnet because i wanted a reason to tap into the massive archives of pixel glitter cutesy graphics that dont have any place to sit in modern websites. i'm so intrigued by digital maximalism, but until i came across this tiktok, the entire digi-hyperfeminine era completely slipped my mind. i didn't actually maintain a site like this back when it was popular to do so, but doing it now brings me this tween joy that keeps me glued to my computer screen for hours.
click around on the icons to find more!
a lot of it is still under construction, so bear with me!
here are some buttons to sites that i kept returning to in the build process
coming soon!
when i moved from one city to another, i left everyone with my email and i hoped that we'd be friends forever. that summer i'd spend my saturday mornings sifting through my precious inbox, savoring the rainbow colored sentences and ascii art from people i'd forget about in three years time. when we were lucky, our parents gave us chat privileges and in the thirty minutes leading up to time, i'd lull over my avatar, making sure she represented who i felt like being that day. what did we chat about? it was nothing really. but it was the act of connecting in real time that made it special. we were two hundred miles apart but it always felt like the internet could carry our friendship for many miles more.
i wasn't allowed on myspace. my parents said it was dangerous for kids. they were right, but i was still jealous when my cousin logged in during our sleepover to show us how cool her page was. "these are my top 8", she said, "if you had one i'd put you on there too." i asked her who tom was and she laughed, "he's there for everyone."
a few christmases later i got my own laptop. my parents said it'd be good for school but maybe they meant for it to be a peace offering; something nice for the isolating years ahead. the night i made a tumblr, i was up until 3am trying to figure out how i was supposed to carry myself in that space. as a platform, it felt more like an mmo than facebook, the new definition of social media. there was a world associated with tumblr which meant it came with its own language and culture. as a user, you were expected to build out your own corner of that world and then invite people in. it was why the platform became so conducive to fandoms and early "core" aesthetics... because we all followed this norm of planting a flag and making ourselves visibile to those who waved the same ones. we know now how harmful those echo chambers got... but in the moment, that validation was our first taste of belonging. we were kids doing shit on the internet that we weren't brave enough to do irl. it was exciting and it made us feel important.
when tumblr got sold to yahoo, the joke was that the ban on nsfw content drove us all away. not all of us are perverted enough to adopt that narrative. it was more about something that felt intimate becoming more of a reflection of the big real world. it was the ads, and the algorithmic content, and the brand exodus. old tumblr worked because it didn't feel like we were being told to do anything. there was an illusion of agency because we had so much control over our own experience. ironically, we went searching for this high in places that could never work---instagram's premade grid profiles, twitter's (old) 140 character limit---and before we knew it, we became dramatized caricatures of ourselves trying to make sure our personalities were received in this new, sterile infrastructure.
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who do i become on the internet? is it still me?
i reflect on this a lot because a part of me feels wrong for believing that the person i present as online is more true than the person i default to in real life. i think i'm just more comfortable here... it's easier to pour my heart out into a text box while i sit alone at my desk. there's also this matter of consent; if you're a relative nobody online, then most of the people who engage with these little spaces are people who might care. most of the time, dumping my silly thoughts on people in real life feels like surprise target practice, and most days i'm too insecure to try throwing the dart.
it's funny, actually, that the friends that know me the best right now are people that i met online. we were just five random girls who laughed at the same jokes and now they know my whole heart. there's something true about chance encounters... but in the age of the internet, we navigate fate with a little more specificity. when the entire world is at our disposal, we are allowed to ask for the exact people we need.
