Today, I want to talk about a topic that is very close to my heart and takes me right back to when I was 13, 14 - exploring the world of free website creators and online communities for the first time. But before I start recounting all that, I'll preface with a few things from my childhood:
I was a big fan of Charmed when I was little. With my friends we used to pretend we were witches all the time, I would make a book of shadows and whatnot. I also had some Ouija board experiences with another friend and we used to be really into the supernatural. I once filled one of my school notebooks with lore and pictures of unicorns, giving a lot of data that I thought to be realistic. Same with dragons, witches, mystical cults and religions. It just progressed over time, but the fascination never died.
The early 2010s were a time of change as it always happens on the internet. While there was a lot of saturation when it came to looking up aesthetics or music, there were also a lot of gems. (I bet there still are, I just don't know the places to look these days). As a teenage girl exploring the internet I had some go-to websites that were very important to me in particular...
First of all (and the reason why I discovered a lot of things that I am still into today): The Warrior Cats Forum! Yes, Warrior Cats not Warriors because I am german :) It was the first forum that I was really active on, making characters, participating in role play but also digital art! I started out with paint, eventually got my hands on a pirated version of SAI plus a Wacom tablet and drew away... Except I thought it was quite bad and I wanted to improve it so I did pictures for others for free and regularly got overworked, instead of saying I was overworked and didn't want to do this anymore deleted or abandoned my account never to be heard from again until I made a new one with a new name a few weeks later. Maybe I was a little bit of a toxic child... But oh well.
That forum was also the place where I first showed some of my written work to others, which I haven't really done in the same fashion ever since.
However, a lot of people who were into Warrior Cats were also into horses and/or alternative fashion which happened to be things I was into as well, so I drew a lot of interests from there like anime, emo style, goth style etc.
Secondly, Jimdo! I don't know how it went but back in the day, when you had a jimdo site you could easily find other peoples pages who were often equally small. In that way we discovered each others content and started commenting on each others pages, supporting and following up on what we were doing.
There is one site that particularly burned itself into my mind and I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called. It was something like Nachtgeflüster or Nachtschwärmer. I vibrantly remember the look of this guys site though: It was very Vampire / Phantom of the Opera like with pictures of wine glasses and such. The focus of his site however was his poetry and short stories which were - like my drawings - beginners work, but quite promising. I loved reading his stories and coming back every other day to find new content on his site. This is what we did, who we were. And he would come and compliment my latest drawings. It was a wonderful website-friendship.
However, like everything else I ended up abandoning my websites on a regular basis and at some point I just lost the link to his site, never to find it again. This was my first delve into really dark themes and a vampiric gothy aesthetic that fascinated me ever since.
Beyond that I also used Google+ quite a lot to connect with people over fandoms and phases that I had. Some of those people I am still in contact with today, but given my age I got into a lot of grooming situations with older men as well, not realizing at the time that it was very weird.
My interest in website creation and the dark and mystic only flourished through all this time and I still hope to make meaningful friendships and find each others gems in this way. :) I will gladly link your personal pages here, just message me and let's be website buddies!!