Blingee.com & Internet Archaeology 

personal favourite blingee is of miku in alt clothes captioned "you can be emo and catholic... - father micheal"

I've never heard a sentence that encapsulates my childhood ethos more perfectly than "I got my dad's permission to lie about being 13"

Manifesting that this video helps foster a blingee revival 🤞🤞🤞🤞

Blingee feels like the internet equivalent of gel pens and I refuse to elaborate on this

Oh so *that's* where everyone got their sparkly gifs. Also, LOVE the old potato camera

I'm currently an anthropology/archaeology student and I've noticed SO much interesting overlap with my field and preserving the internet that I grew up with. In dirt archaeology, you have to worry about things like site destruction/disruption (and how this effects context, if things are in situ or have been disturbed), the way the climate is effecting a site (s it permanently hot & dry? Is it frozen? Is it constantly wet? How has the site been affected by changes in this?), and a myriad of other concerns. We're consistently taught that excavation = destruction of context, and context is key for understanding. You don't have to worry about excavation destroying context in the same way with internet archaeology, but you absolutely still have to be concerned about site preservation. We can glean a lot from context clues, but as you've said, there's only so much you can do! I think it's pretty evocative of the Dark Ages as we watch information go unrecorded, sites be deleted, become broken, lose context completely, etc etc. I'm really interested to see the future of internet archaeology and if it becomes a proper field!

Blingee speaks to me in such a violently strong way. They’re just SO funny to me I have like twenty different Bingee images of Sasuke from Naruto for objectively no reason.

I was born in 2008. I've never seen an internet that wasn't 'corporate' but it feels like it's been getting worse especially in the last few years. Internet archeology feels like reaching back to weirder time, when everything didn't have to fit into a neat 'aesthetic' box. It feels like people on the internet got be more like people, and I want that. I want to be a person.

My mother is over 70, and grew up in another country that had a revolution and became democratic/started modernizing way back when she was 25. The last time we visited there, she expressed the same nostalgia people here have for old, decrepit webpages, a sadness of truly never being able to reclaim what it was like to be there. It's an old feeling that's been updated for the modern age.

Even though I was almost 6 years old when this was a thing, watching these videos makes it feel like unearthing ancient texts and cultures.

I love that you filmed this on a Tamagotchi

as an early 2000s baby (2002) watching things like this gives me a really weird sort of nostalgia. it's like an era that I was there for but too young to really understand, so I just have a vague recollection of this era through things I vaguely remember from adverts on Jetix and Nickolodeon or teen magazines that I was too young to do anything but look at the pictures. it all feels like a weird dream, or like having seen something through a fisheye lens

intro punched me in the face w nostalgia

Very worth discussing neocities as a place where people can in fact make websites just like geocities used to be

Definitely misread the thumbnail as “KAWK” which seemed like a strange turn

I cannot describe the type of nostalgia Blingee and that type of glitter art brings me. Like sitting in the computer room, its cold af from AC, its raining out, i’m almost done 7th grade, i’m gonna play Sims 2 later, just got some pink pens, idk my memories of it feel so tangible but I can’t accurately describe them

But what you don't know is that his real name is Strange Aeons....

reminder to those who wish geocities was still around that neocities exists

I literally miss my live journal fandoms so much. I tried to visit the old pages because I was searching for a specific fanfic, and I was shattered to realize how many people had deleted their fics from LJ. There used to be 100s of pages on ship pages, and now there's just a handful pf dead links. It makes me so sad.

We talk about how the internet "is forever" and "doesn't forget" but truth is, the internet is a medium that is even more temporary than most. Anthropologists talk about how we are going to have a black hole of primary source material because so much of what we write is digital. How many people keep their first-hand accounts of major events on their Facebook or Twitter pages instead of putting them in a journal? As soon as those companies go down, all of those accounts are lost. All that history is lost. Internet Archive is a fantastic project, but it can only do so much. Blingee might be kind of a silly thing, but I love that you used it to talk about this issue. It's something that was once ubiquitous. Everyone had obnoxious blingees all over their myspace pages. Now it's a strange ghost of what it once was, and soon it might not even be that.

Can you imagine the chaos if Tumblr could somehow implement something like this as a feature? Maybe letting you stack animated filters on top of a photo you want to post? It'd be the biggest thing since polls!

13:51 bling bingus? call that a blingus

Remember when you could have a background on your youtube page? Yeah...yeah...I miss that

5:55 "Fast car" was my partner's first ever internet search! His dad sat with him at their family computer, and he told my partner "You can search for anything on the internet!" "Fast car" gives similar energy as searching "Cute kitten photos" 🙏

I can't imagine blingee without the dancing Snoop gif, it didn't matter what crowd you were in everyone used dancing snoop

omg there has to be a way to emulate the blingee look with something like photoshop. In all my teen years I never wanted to make a blingee so much as I do now

in the early days of the internet, my dad was an avid user of a geocities dedicated to paving the earth so people can drive around non stop in their cool hypercars. a simulator he made is actually listed on the front page of the site tho thanks to the death of flash it doesn't work anymore. it was all taken hilariously seriously and it gives me intense tumblr shitposting vibes so I just love that being weird on the online has been around since the dawn of the internet

The intro threw out my back, hip, knees, and I couldnt remember where I put my reading glasses 😅

Seeing those random anime characters was a punch in the face because those were the faceclaims we used to use on our custom-made roleplaying websites. It's like seeing the high school yearbook photo of someone who died a decade ago

A lot of the internet nostalgia over this stuff for me is tied to lost media and preservation. So much of the old Internet is lost and may never be recovered, and that's deeply tragic. I will forever be grateful for the Internet Archive and lost media RU-vidrs for the work they do because of it.

Blingee must be be preserved in order for the next generation to get inspiration for what the internet can be

Just throwing a thank you into the void. Spent the last day trying to get into my old Blingee account. Got in. There was a Blingee of a selfie with a very dear friend who has since passed. It brought back so many memories. Thanks

Use to make so many sims 2 and lesbian winx club blingees can’t believe I forgot

lmaoooo not the one true media intro

I LOVE BLINGEE GIFS, it's crazy on Discord how many NEW Blingee GIFs you can find in fandoms. I've definitely sent Better Call Saul/Breaking Bad Gifs with each of the characters COVERED in sparkly bbg gifs. I've wondered how they did it. I hope someone someday archives all of the "Blingee" transparent overlays and makes an open source Gif creator with it

We had blingees in switzerland too. The french speaking part didn't use myspace as much we used something equivalent called Skyrock. I remember visiting so many blogs literally littered with blingees.

I'm genuinely just shocked that the site is (kind of) still up after all of these years.

I was a blingee user from 2012- to about 2019 and I know people remember it as a kind of a silly funny sparkly website to personalize your own photos but genuinely there was some amazing art made on that website, like those fanatsy landscapes you showed but about 100x more detailed. I got pretty good at graphic design in middle school because of it. This video inspired me to go look at my old account and all the memories came back. I'd be so sad if it went away, I miss all my friends from it! I met so many nice people there. Blingee was a super important part of my life for a while, Thanks for the video Strange!

i love how a lot of in-built gif search bars in discord, messenger etc still have blingee/geocities/early internet-esque gifs i can send to my friends

I'm a web designer and I'm determined to make every website I design look as fun and wacky as possible - BRING BACK CLASSIC INTERNET

This is why I’m learning to code and working to make my own neocities website

The innocence of googling cats is the best part of my own search history

Way back in 1997 when I was in high school we were taught how to make a very simple web page using a template. The template they use had a really weird looking guy on it so instead of replacing it with my own picture I just wrote it as if it was a pet page about my pet cannibal Gunther.

the bit about the internet nostalgia and the rise of scene kids as a way for newer generations to preserve and experience that really hit hard. i recently fell down a rabbit hole with what is essentially my country's ancient version of wordpress that is slowly dying out and reading these people's shitposts, these people who have probably forgotten about leaving such an integral, raw, beautiful piece of themselves behind on the internet, it really made me fall in love with internet history. slowly i started to mourn all the sites i couldn't reach anymore. i even made my own blog and it really was a joy to (try to) code a haphazard blog template myself. it's such a validating yet voyeuristic look inside these people's lives and in a world where everyone's too busy being the tiktok moral police all the damn time, going through those blogs and reading about these awkward, ugly emotions and genuine vulnerability really does feel like uncovering a hidden treasure.

Maybe its just bc ive been doing a lot of collage art recently, but blingee feels like digital collage. And the fact that it used flash so things could move makes it feel right as a digital collage.

the fragility of the internet and digital information in general is something very rtmi. fun fact if you look at old RU-vid videos through the way back machine you can see comments disappear - a video that had 20k comments now may only have 8k. not sure why (I assume account deletion in the early 2010s). while it’s not necessarily artistic or crafted like websites and such, and more likely just considered “noise”, I find it interesting - a slice of communication just gone.

the crunchy video quality is delicious

oh my gods, blingee Edit; there's an image I can't delete from one of my accounts that is a blingee I made when I was around 9 - during the peak popularity! This is a fascinating deep dive I have a personal connection to. I was so confused why I couldn't see comments but then I looked and I saw this video 10 seconds after upload. Wild!

I remember the transition from Sixx to Biersack and I remember the transition from Biersack to Black. I shall be here forever

Blingee reminds me of the last time I customized my myspace page. At the time Mega64, an old group of content creators, decked their's out in rainbows and tacky gifs to make it as flamboyant as possible which inspired their fans to follow suit. I spent HOURS perfecting mine. It looked like the rhinestone aisle of a craft store was celebrating pride. True myspace art. Then my dad, who's a little old fashioned in some regards, tried to add me. I didn't want to explain myself so I panicked so hard I deleted my myspace. Years and years later I'd come out as pan and everything was cool, but I have to wonder if him seeing my layout a decade earlier gave him time to come to terms with it before I even figured it out.😂

As a Nebraskan, hearing Nebraska referenced by anyone, let alone a non american, is crazy. I was just punched in the face by Steve from Nebraska

This reminds me of Flipnote AMVs. All of those are all archived, and that's soooooo awesome and nostalgic

the sadness i feel watching this and knowing that I will never be able to be a true 2006 internet user is just they took this from us :(

I still live in the neighborhood I grew up in and started taking my dog for a walk around it. I was walking by one of the schools i spent a lot of time at both attending it and just playing around and near it. I caught a glimpse of a field and a tree line and thought something that youd see on a shit post on tumblr "i no longer know this place but i still dream of it"

I love looking up blingee anime angel gifs on discord for that very *specific* nostalgia. Getting to use HTML to design my Neopets profile with lots of glittery gifs was also huge for me from that time

although there is still tumblr, there’s also neocities!! i never used geocities, but from what i can tell, it’s pretty much the same thing! i’ve been having a lot of fun making my own website and exploring other’s websites :3

The "best friends" and "I love you" stamps in the first blingee being lesbian colors is poetic

The One True Media thing made me whisper "oh god..." to myself

I feel like the pinterest collage feature could capture a feeling similar to this but modernized.

This makes me want to go back to Livejournal and roleplay as a 2003 emo.

Watching you have fun was so cute < 3 When Blingee was popular I was just a child learning English (it's not my first language), so I always thought that when I'll learn the language, I'd be able to use Blingee :') Years later, here we are...

Oh my god. I just logged into my old blingee account I hadn’t touched since 7th grade… all the anime and vocaloid edits… Honestly, it really reminds me of a time where I made and posted fun stuff for myself just because I enjoyed it. Even if only two people liked it, I still made stuff I was proud of.

Strange is overflowing with joy in this one. Blingees are love, blingees are life.

I remember when we used to share these via Bluetooth, since everyone had either a flip phone or a touchphone (remember those? I had one💅), so no Internet. Bedazzled butterflies and hugging teddy bears with metric shit tonn of sparkles were like a tokens of friendship.

Your talk about early Internet nostalgia reminded me about my favorite browser game about dragons that has been shut down for over 10 years. All of the dragons have been created by the people who were playing the game (the looks were chosen on a forum contest). It wasn't mist exciting but I absolutely adored it, even tried to get into the contest at the age of seven. The creator of the game tried to bring it back few years ago but unfortunately he died prematurely and all the effort to restore it has been shut down

My heart fully stopped at the Andy Sixx stamps… absolute blast from the past ahhaha

truly one of the things i appreciate most on tumblr (apart from the whole subculture of injokes etc) is that to this day i can fully customize blog themes!! it's literally so fun to spend an afternoon picking the exact colors i want and how posts and notes and tags are displayed and what pages i can make in it... also for all its technical problems in literally every other feature i do think they've hit a perfect spot in terms of (beginner) user friendliness for this: if you know html you can do a lot, but even if you don't you can use a base theme from someone else and still have it turn out very personal and customized - and, in true tumblr "we're gonna keep the old internet Community Vibes going" fashion, a lot of people who do know html share their base themes freely so! a nice upgrade/spiritual successor from geocities in this sense

My friends and I do PowerPoint parties (it's where you make a PowerPoint on whatever you want and present it to your friends. You know, for fun), and for my last one I absolutely loaded the slides with as many Blingees as I could find on Google images. My friend had to show all of the glittering gifs on her giant flatscreen TV. It was glorious

i deadass thought the thumbnail said "kawk" so i spent way too long staring at it before it registered in my head that it actually just says "rawr"

I need a blingee account NOW!! This is literally what I do with my photos with picsart minus the gifs.

YES I LOVE BLINGEES

literally just closed tumblr last post i saw was ur blingee post

I finally watched the Saw movies last year and IMMEDIATELY went to see if there were blingees- and was blessed with seeing so many UwU

So THIS is where all those images were coming from back then? This is really cool to see, thank you! I hope digital archivists are already on the case with preserving this slice of internet culture, it's worth keeping around.

this level of grief over the old things on the internet is so real… I used to play in all those interactive worlds like club penguin and kung fu panda world and animal jam and Disney fairies world and they’re all gone now 💔

The sadness around dead websites is so real, I miss Polyvore and all of the creations I made there everyday

Blingee is just early Internet scrapbooking and I'm here for it.

11:00: "We may live to see Twitter and Facebook deleted forever." Well, I can't speak for Zuckerberg, but Musk is certainly trying his hardest to make that happen.

As a French who grew up in the 2000's, I didn't know about Myspace... But we had Skyblogs. And oh my god, the blingees were everywhere on Skyblogs too. When I look at them I remember all the time I spent on my fanfic/fanart blogs throughout elementary and middle school. It does actually feel nostalgic... Even worse considering Skyblog closed last year and everything was deleted :') Fortunately I managed to go back and take screenshots of my blogs beforehand, lol. Thank you Strange for the ride!!

Yeah I’m really glad you got me into tumblr a while back. After having been a fandom girlie for like 10 years and somehow not really getting into tumblr, your video on gimmick blogs finally made me reactivate my ancient account. And it came at the perfect time to get back into a fandom I used to be in (the phandom, now that Dan and Phil are like back) and I’m really enjoying it and am so glad to no longer be on fandom twitter. So thanks :)

I think a lot of it has to do with how the internet was back then too. Kids now have gotten tired of the corporate look every major website has, Websites kids used to go to now being long gone, hell even things like 3D Pinball or solitaire no longer being added to newer windows systems. They miss the freedom they had now being gone to corporate blandness. This lead to them finding and rediscovering things and are doing their best to remake them in their own flair. The amount of blingee-inspired photos i've seen have absolutely skyrocketed during these years and its easy to see why. We're basically experiencing a second boom of this stuff like weve seen those 30-20 years ago

flash player being deleted was one of the most devastating blows the internet has ever suffered, it should be criminal tbh

I too remember just looking up images of stuff online and simply scrolling for hours, thinking "why does every other image look like this?!"

Blingee, livejournal and geocities... so much ancient lore in here. So much lost. I had a deep dive into my email-account, finidng old livejournal conversations and being smacked in the face with who I was more than 15 years ago. I can only hope we'd still be able to get along.

“Let us not forget bleeeehhh” 20:18 Truer words have never been spoken

Don't you smack me with GeoCities like that. I wasn't ready.

This video was a delight. The internret being hard to archive is one of the reasons I've started downloading and printing memes and fanfics. For my enjoyment now and nostalgia later.

Blingee and photobucket were the GOATS of the Neopets custom pet page. Learn all my basic HTML from coding those pages. It was just dozens of gifs of Gerard Way in a row on a bright red background

That intro threw me back so hard

That cheeky Harris Bomber guy in the middle. 😅

I just need to say that watching you blingee after a shift that lasted way too long made me feel so much better. The shot of nostalgia directly into my eyeballs really almost floored me. I loved it

now THIS is what ive been writing for. a real masterpiece and a true relic. ive been sending my friends old blingee gifs for years and nobody ever understands 💔

As an archives/library student, digital preservation, especially of complex objects like websites and games is so important! But I do think that it is important to be realistic. We can't preserve everything, but we can turn that nostalgia into making new things that capture the good parts of the old.

"I don't think, I fully know that." is about to become my new catchphrase

I think about the sort of internet nostalgia you're getting at here a lot. I'm 30 and I've been extremely online since I was 9 or 10 years old. I'm also the kind of person who likes to reminisce a lot, like look through old journals and such, and it sucks that so much of the internet that defined my adolescence is just gone. The Warrior Cats forum I met my best friend on in 2007 was deleted a long time ago and only a few Wayback Machine snapshots remain. So many memories I wish I could go back to but just can't.

NOT THE ONE TRUE MEDIA WATERMARK

The borders on the side are healing my soul

Is this how we got all these sparkly fairy gifs? :o OMGGGGGGG Thank you I was wondering about those!

Girl, you’re bringing back my beautiful childhood memories of Pokemon and AMV slideshows with Eiffel65 and Nightcore. 😩😩😩

a few years ago i wanted to make an art project with blingee because i think it's absolutely incredible as a website and because i'm very nostalgic of the simpler times... now that i know that finding a flash emulator will get me back to bing able to create w my account i will definitely do something. thank you for making this video