Spacefem really started before spacefem, if that's even possible, so the first parts of this history might not be terribly interesting. But it's here.
Contents |
This story will start with the ever-faithful Fire Hazzard, who taught one of his nerdy friends that she too could start a web page on Geocities. Notice that his is still there. He's also a big fan of pong, in case you're wondering. The girl, who was not yet Spacefem, checked out HTML books from the library, and wrote some thoughts and articles... including but not limited to a quiz to see if you were a Militant Feminist.
The girl starts college and starts getting some creepier e-mails from internet freaks, so she decides to make up an online name. Something nerdy and scientific, but still female-sounding. After brainstorming, Spacefem it was.
Spacefem has actually died and been replaced six times since this occurred.
The website, located somewhere in the Wellesley neighborhood of Geocities, has no direction or purpose. We cling to this tradition even today. Stick death animations were added after Spacefem accidentally downloaded a GIF animator and realized they were sort of fun and easy to make. Unknown to her or anyone at the time, animating stick figure death scenes was really a pretty exciting trend.
Another site feature: Adopt a Useless Blob. Thousands of homepages at this time had "adoption centers", where you could copy an image of a pony or butterfly or dried sock to your homepage. We made fun of it.
Spacefem tries in vain to buy spacefem.com. It doesn't work out. Someone nabs the domain. So she buys spacefemsplanet.com, and keeps growing the little website. The site got more and more popular though... mostly due to a friend from the stick death community, crisco, who made cuter bouncing 3-d useless blobs. Also sometime around this era, the Militant Feminist Quiz became self-scoring through the miracle of javascript.
A very preliminary forum started up on eboards. Ingryd was one of the first top posters, and still has an icon named after her today even though she's long since disappeared. MFS was also involved in the early board, he met spacefem on a wonderful site called geekizoid. But if you ask him, he'll tell some story about kerosene and arm-licking. We think. He had fewer kids then, we're not sure what he was paying attention to.
Through a fortunate twist of fate, spacefem got spacefem.com. We moved servers and installed a real forum... invisionboard, also known as forum 1, on August 24th. This didn't last long... we were kicked off that server, told that invisionboard was eating us, and installed phpbb (really forum 2, if you ask us who know) around December. A few members from forum 1 stuck around for forum 2, and we restored their join dates for posterity's sake.
The useless blobs, still just as useless, became oddly popular. We started getting entirely too many damn newbies on the site. Spacefem spent her free time hacking the forums and learning php. The Militant Feminist Quiz, and the host of other quizzes by this time, shed the javascript and went server-side.
The "What HTML color are you?" quiz brought a lot of people to the site. The main page now featured articles from the forum.
Everything after 2004 is barely history, although if you're aware of anything feel free to add it. We're just churning along being exciting.
Okay, we did start this wiki. We'll see how that goes.
