Meez

Meez was a virtual avatar chatroom website that ran in Flash, and I discovered it in I believe 2008. Due to my old HD dying, I think I don't have any pictures of my avatars. Frankly, I even forgot my username. The things I remember the best about it were the chatrooms. They were like little sidescrolling worlds your avatar could walk around in, and I loved the hidden public chatrooms you couldn't access by just clicking around the chatroom list, instead you had to find those chatrooms by clicking around the world. You also had private rooms where you could play youtube videos which was really cute. My IRL bff and I would chill in my room all the time, playing shitty ass music like Blog 27 (please don't look it up).
Another really fun thing I remember about it were the emotes. If I recall correctly, some had to be purchased, but a lot of them were available straight up, like "rofl" and "dance". The thing I always liked about them was that unlike in MMO's where you had to do a / before the emote to make it work, they'd work without the slash, so everyone was emoting all the time lmao.
Like any avatar based chatroom, you had the popular kids that knew which avatars were the trendiest. On Meez, that would be the scene/emo kids. And you know damn well I was one of them. My favourite collection that came out on Meez was the Kerli colab, which also introduced me to her at the same time, and then to Björk because Kerli listed her as inspiration. So I've been listening to Björk since I was 11 because of an obscure 3d avatar chatroom... Sadly, it seems there's literally just a few sources surviving that mention the Kerli colab, which can be found in this Youtube video. Meez had a pretty interesting approach to advertising, not uncommon to how a lot of games operate today, but definitely uncommon for how these avatar based games used to operate. I also really liked the Lolita clothes they had, many thanks to Rose-chan from LiveJournal for posting these cute gifs.
Meez also had a section for games, some of which you could play with your avatar, some of which were just regular flash games you could find on most flash game sites at the time, like Bloxorz, Mutually Assured Destruction, Cake Mania and Hotcorn. The game I loved the most was Doeo a weird game where you had to hover your mouse over Doeoes (weird square faces) as fast as you could. It was inspired by "Moai no su", a Japanese game with the same premise.
Meez also had a forum section, but I didn't really frequent it at all.

FunnyJunk

FunnyJunk is a link aggregator website, basically a funny pictures site, where you could thumbsup or thumbsdown images. It's actually pretty old, from 2001, and from back when I was a regular there it had a very distinct culture. FunnyJunk's biggest rival was 4chan, even though the site basically dealt with the same type of content. It was to 4chan what Reddit was to it later, seen as a bunch of reposting retards that don't have their own memes so they depend on 4chan's ragecomics, memes and greentexts except... I don't think 4chan gave as much of a shit about it, the feud mostly seemed one-sided lmao. FunnyJunk had the upper hand in claiming it was older, and they also ended up producing a few memes of their own, like the Forever Alone Guy and the "Now Kiss" template, so they weren't completely lame.
Another fun part of the website was the connection the Admin had with the userbase. I remember he posted with a Kim Jong Il profile picture, so everyone called the admin Dear Leader. Later on that Admin stepped down, so Kim Jong Un took over lmao. It seems I actually had a pretty long run on this website, judging by my bookmarks I used it from 2006/2007 up until 2014, well into my high school years! It's a site that brought me many laughs and a lot of entertainment, but the community was kind of annoying and cringe in retrospect. They had an embarrassing feud with Oatmeal, and apparently had a pol 2.0 phase around 2016, which is to be expected.

ShitBrix

"When you see it you'll shit brix" is probably familiar to anyone that's been online in the mid 2000's and early 2010's. I probably found out about it through FunnyJunk, and since I wanted to see more of it I found this site. I remember for a while there was a trend of not actually making the meme scary, but instead you'd find a well hidden pedobear somewhere. Since at the time I wasn't really well versed in english I really wanted to find out what pedobear was and why people found it so funny, so I googled that and... Discovered Encyclopedia Dramatica lmao. I was around 9 years old...

The Best 404 Page Ever

I don't know where I found out about this site, but again, judging by my bookmarks it was around 2011. I discovered the whole.. culture around SWF files pretty late in the game, but I was hooked once I found out about it. I spent so much time refreshing this page, and I had no idea you could access it's index at first so finding music or media from the files was a real treasure hunt. I found out about SO many things that basically either predated my time or I just wasn't around for while they were happening. A ton of music to this day I'll associate to some video I saw on this site, like Stevie Wonder's Superstition, Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann or some more obscure stuff like Sound of my Dreams by DJ Splash LOL.
This site can be thanked for introducing me to so so many games and anime and countless hours spent refreshing it...

Dagobah

Naturally, this was the second step from TheBest404PageEver, since anytime I was really interested in a swf I'd search about it and find the version that was posted on Dagobah, where people would be asking about the source or the song playing in it. I can't say I didn't spend a lot of time on this site either, but since The Best 404 Page Ever was a bit more curated I had fonder memories of it.

Barbiegirls.com

Barbiegirls.com was a free to play Barbie.. MMO? Chatroom based? game, that came out in 2007. I guess it's the most comparable to a watered down version of Second Life. I played it for a while, I think I even purchased the VIP for it. I absolutely loved the concept of an open world chatroom, although now that I think about I don't think it had that, but I do remember being able to see other players in specific rooms like the hairdresser and the clothes store. Sadly the game was very lacking in its chat capabilities, since you couldn't actually write anything, more like the text consisted of templates you could send. Very restricted. Unless of course, you bought the 60$ mp3 that would give you the ability to actually send and write PMs ingame lmao. The game closed down very fast, in 2011. I don't have any particular memories about this, except for being wowed by it for a little while and then getting bored of it. There's a nice video about this website by Li Speaks on Youtube, but I had a hard time getting through it because I can't stand her voice and mannerisms (sorry). It's still probably the most well researched piece of media on this topic to have ever existed lmao.

Be-Bratz.com

This game functioned in a similar vein, except I think it was completely pay2play? Meaning, you couldn't register unless you had the Be-Bratz doll and the USB that came with it, or code, or mouse, or something. And guess what!! I had it aw yeahhh. Except the game barely had any online capabilities, I frankly don't remember? What I do remember was that the clothes options were decent, the mini games were cute (the fish and the skateboard one) and the room decoration was fun as well. But these two games were a big miss in my opinion, a bad attempt at trying to cash in on the "kids are on the internet now!" phenomenon, since neither of these two really gripped me! I remember my sister really loving some of the mini games here though.
It's interesting how little of a shit these sites really gave about their userbase and how much of a cashgrab they were. I never received any e-mails from this site (that I literally had to buy an expensive doll for!) besides the welcome e-mail. Not even a "we're closing down, sorry about that, hope you had some fun".

Bella Sara

Bella Sara was a card trading series aimed at based horse girls. I was never much of a horse girl myself, however, Bella Sara won me the fuck over. In 2007 I spent all of my lunch money on this!! And it wasn't simply because I wanted the cards, instead it was because you could register on the bellasara.com website and collect all of the horsies you'd obtain through cards. I was a sucker for online integration with real life items, the pattern is becoming obvious lmao. The flash game itself was really chill, once you got your horses you could take care of them, brush their mane and tail, clean them up, feed them, all the basic pet care stuff these types of games provided. I remember there was a room decoration aspect to it as well, and maybe a couple of minigames? Once again, it would seem all of these sites followed the same motif.
I guess as with all others, I got bored of it at some point. Finding random Bella Sara cards has become a staple of any spring cleaning done in my family home though, and each time I'll remember that nice and sparkly website with the beautiful music playing in the background (or was it the commercial music?). In 2015 I got a bit nostalgic for it and I seem to have remade an account when I looked through my e-mails, but it seems the site has now shut down, likely because of flash support dying. Sucks! The site is still alive and advertises an app, but I'm not sure if it's legit or active since the cards stopped being produced in 2017. Sad...
I would also like to express my frustration at how hard google searching for images is nowadays. God forbid you want to search for something pre 2010, the results will be non-existent. It feels like the internet really is getting smaller, and the sites of our past are going to be easily forgotten... Save your screenshots and internet memories! (and don't let them be wiped with a dying HD like mine did...)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Ok, maybe this doesn't really fit into my favourite childhood sites page but I don't know where else I'd talk about this. I probably mentioned on my site, somewhere, once or twice, that I was never a PC gamer as a child, or that TERA was my first mmo... Well, that was a lie! To be fair, I have supressed my memory of this place because I could barely play it due to how bad my old family PC was, but still... every time I recall this MMO I get a strangely comforting feeling, as MMOs have always fascinated me since they seemed so far out of reach. Up until this point I have probably went through the disappointment of barbiegirls.com and bebratz and I wanted to experience a "real" MMO. I actually have 0 idea of how I discovered this, but yeah there it was, yet another cash grab, this time by none other than Disney, but yet it seemed to have a lot more meat on it compared to the former two games! Well I downloaded it, made my character and... I had like 5 fps! 12, maybe. I did manage to grind a few levels, I remember meeting Will Turner somewhere, I remember fighting in a graveyard... aaaaand that's about it. I didn't really manage to go much further as the game was almost unplayable. It did feel really cool to run among real people while killing stuff, a feeling I wouldn't experience until 7 years later. I did get into a few chatroom virtual world games like imvu and worlds.com but I'll talk about those some other time.
Anyway, I did some research on this a few years ago and found a few shutdown videos and it seems this mmo was actually fairly liked. Disney started up a ton of little game projects like this around that time, like Pixie Hollow, which was also beloved and I know a lot of people that remember it fondly. Sadly these games were nothing but promotional material it would seem, and none of them had a long run, which is kind of sad. My childhood seems to be littered with memories of these games that were started up as basically nothing more than a commercial and a cashgrab which... is kind of bleak! It appears both of these games have private servers (or private servers in the making) which is cute.

Sullen Riot

This is going to be a cringe one. Yes, as you can see, Sullen Riot is a Green Day fanfiction site. Actually prior to this, I was an active poster in some general Green Day fandom forum, which was really cool. Sadly, I can't find the name of the forum anymore, or any proof that I was a part of it (like e-mails). Almost as if this thing never happened. But what I could find, was this fanfiction site. Truth be told, while Green Day was my entry point into fanfiction, I never read any fanfiction afterwards, like ever again. I just don't have any desire to read it, idk why. Except... during this time I also got into South Park, and I became a proud 11 year old South Park fujo. I devoured those Creek fanfics like you wouldn't believe. But these two instances are the only occassions where you could find Cabbage reading fanfiction and feeling incredibly embarrassed that she's witnessing her favourite band members go through mpreg.

So, what was it that I found so captivating when it came to Green Day fanfiction? I actually can't recall myself lusting incredibly after these men that were my dads age, but the world of Green Day fanfiction was incredibly rich for two special reasons. First, Green Day had a lot of side projects. At the time, the two most popular side projects of theirs were The Network and Foxboro Hot Tubs. In both of these, each band member assumed a new personality and alias, which enriched the world of fanfiction where each alias became its own person. Second, at that point two of their last albums, American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown both had fictional characters in them along with a whole story, so there were many fanfics regarding that too. Also fanfics would often reference and use characters/real people from other punk bands lmao, it was a whole thing. Pop punk extended universe?

That's really it about this site. I hardly remember the fanfics I read. I do remember reading one fanfic named after "Lost in the Supermarket" by The Clash. I think it might have featured some of the "characters" from Foxboro Hot Tubs, and it was definitely a slash fanfic. I was reading it before lunchtime, and I remember my mom calling me to help set the table, and then I felt really bad I was reading something so perverted before lunch lmao.

Miss Bimbo

I already mentioned Miss Bimbo (now known as Bimboland/Ximboland) on my dress up game directory, but I feel like it deserves a proper entry in this directory too. After all, this site, along with Stardoll is what first got me to participate in online communities. No joke, I was 9-10 and posting on these forums like it was nobodies business! Not really, I had a handful of posts on MissBimbo... but still!
I believe this story begins with my bff, finding out through her older sister, that there's a dressup game that's a bit "dirty". Inappropirate, if you will. A dressup game in which you have to become a trophy wife, get breast and nose surgery in order to progress, maintain a very low weight etc. Yes, all those things were necessary in order to progress in this game! By having a job and a wealthy bf, you earned your daily income every day you logged on. If you became too fat or too skinny, something bad could happen. Forgot what, I think your bimbo could literally die. So, if you strip away the very controversial theme, this was kind of like a pet maintenance + dress up game in one! The upkeep of your bimbo meant you had to log on every day in order to earn money, and if you knew you couldn't do that you could send your bimbo on vacation, otherwise she'd die. The forum section of the site was very active. I remember uploading pictures of my irl christmas tree there one christmas. A lot of the people posting were actually older women, there were teens and kids too but I remember older women in particular keeping these daily life topics active. And the forums weren't really unsafe and nsfw, if I recall correctly. I was stunned to see so many sissy fetishists once I came back to the game in 2019, when it rebranded a bit. However, I do remember there being a ton of staff drama, like a crazy amount. My english was so bad at this point though that I didn't really get what's going on. I mostly avoided all the meta talk.

I earned my money in this game by exploiting. I'd make thousands of accounts and challenge myself in duels, and then use alt accounts to vote for my main account. I got super rich that way and never had to spend money on currency. I don't think there even was a premium currency which made things easier. I was pretty active by creating competitions for other players though, and I loved to wear Avril Lavigne inspired outfits. Or like angel/devil shit. Here's one old outfit of mine that I recreated on current bimboland and below you'll witness my real and authentic blingee monstrosities. You can see in the second row I was quite the noob because I still had smaller, default breasts and I THINK I didn't have facial surgery there. In the last row I'm higher level, judging by the big boobs. The censored part is my username, since I still have the same one.

I have to admit, even though the game was very controversial and promoted horrible values to young girls (it wasn't meant for young girls though from what I understood but you know.. it just so happened to have the perfect formula to attract young girls into playing it lmao), it didn't affect me negatively at all. I seemed to understand that it was very ironic and I didn't take it seriously, and neither did my friend... Or you know what, maybe my english was so bad I didn't really think much about it at all. The fashion was cool and in my mind it wasn't much different from Stardoll. Ironically I think it's less harmful than the way bimbocore is being promoted today, even though I can't say I'm fully supportive of it.

Also, I forgot to mention, but Miss Bimbo has the original, french and more stylish version, called Ma Bimbo, same premise, but I liked the overall art direction and style more in that one. Ma-Bimbo still exists, although I'm not sure how alive it is. I found these pics from 2019 on their forums and they're pretty cool.

Fantasmagoria

Back in 2011 there weren't many places you could order weeb stuff from, especially in eastern europe, without it costing you an arm and a leg of course. Well this store came in clutch, because it delivered to my country. Sadly, I didn't manage to find an old snapshot with pictures so all you can see is the simple layout...
I ordered some of my first weeb merch from this site. Not counting manga and japanese games. I still have the online receipt for the "Hatsune Miku fabric Anime Poster" and "Black Rock Shooter Scythe keyring", 8 and 4 euros respectively, with the shipping being 6!! euros. Sigh. I probably spent my whole birthday money on that... I still have the Miku poster in my room, it's just neatly folded. Along with my massive Jojo poster, which I still love lmao. Seriously, that thing was like 2 meters wide. I've never been a big consoomer because of this location restriction, which in retrospect isn't so bad. Wild to think about how these things are a lot cheaper and easier to get nowadays. I remember thinking about ordering from TaoBao around this same time when it was popular on /cgl/, amassing a huge shopping list, even managing to find a proxy but then ultimately giving up out of fear...
This was definitely a thing everywhere, but it's interesting to see how weebs and alt fashion subcultures were so close considering stores for the latter would start stocking up with weeb merch in the 2000's. I kind of miss this era! I found out about anime in a similar vein, it basically went like this: get into the punk/metal subculture in my town -> a lot of dudes there watched south park -> discover south park -> start watching south park meme videos on youtube -> find a south park redraw of the soul eater opening -> start watching soul eater. Yes unironically this was how I became a weeb. Of course I fully knew what anime was before then, but this was the final push for me lmao.