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Goku Has Got a Big Monkey Penis

Remembering Dragon Ball Z Fan Sites and My First Web Page

A view of planetnamek.com on archive.org from 2001

Making websites was a hobby I started as a kid. My first site was a Dragon Ball Z fan page on Geocities. It was composed of images I saved from better fan pages than mine, and it was packaged with my role-playing scenarios where Frieza had returned to do...

Well it was something like that I'm sure.

There was an iframe menu along the bottom and an iframe header at the top with pages contained in the center. I can only imagine how small of a space that content must have been packed into. I know it was a red/orange-colored theme that somewhat matched the color of dragon balls, which were used to space out menu items arranged horizontally along the bottom.

Late 90's E/N Websites

If you wrote and published a 280 character anecdote to your website in 1999 about how Five Guys fucked you twice when they put onions on your burger for the second time this week when you specifically said, "No onions," many readers would have asked, "Why are they posting this? No one cares."

Enter the Attention Whore

you are beautiful no matter what they say ^_^ Naaah

In the age of Twitter and selfie photos from smart phone cameras, it's hard to imagine a time period when the average Internet user was not already accustomed to what they would have called attention whores: people who posted self absorbed blurbs like the one above which are extremely commonplace today. Turning your digital camera around and snapping a pic of yourself was for the most part unthinkable back then. People sometimes did it but they walked with the mark of shame their attention whoring earned them for doing it and I can promise you they would have never let someone in real life see them doing it.

I'm not saying this was necessarily the right way to look at it, but people had certain expectations about what did and did not constitute post-worthy content. In this time period, the Internet was thought of as an information resource, not a dumping ground for minutia. But signs that the Internet was bound for shitposting no matter how much it was looked down upon were apparent even then.