Streaming is something that popped off pretty early on with Winamp Shoutcast for me personally. I started watching tons of okay and mid anime through it. Even watched early american aired seasons of things like the Simpsons.

The sites are lost to time, Shoutcast doesn't work like that anymore. I used VLC to connected to some stuff, but I soon jumped over to streaming sites. Every few weeks you'd be looking for a new site




I forget when I exactly found online animations, but I think a friend pointed me to Albino-Blacksheep and Newgrounds around like 99?

I was not that much of a fan of the edgy junk, but it was part of the landscape. People being able to use the swears and make the jokes they would get slapped for on the outside of the monitor. I'm reminded of early OneyNG, Stamper and all that.

I remember replaying videos often. I must have watched stuff like Final Fantasy A+ hundreds of times.

A lot of people pine for the days of Newgrounds and I never understand it. It's still there, it was always there. People just walked away. I even peaced out for like a decade when teenage and young adult junk started eating my time.

I fondly remember watching Knox videos or dropping down the Animutations line and rewatching all of Arfenhouse. Laughing at stuff like Metal Gear Fiesta, Neon Genesis Evangelion Dating Sim and Is This What You Want.

To a fun degree I did get to see the people I followed back then come so far in the current day.
Very early on I was on some small chat service from a regional web provider. Here I learned how to dodge predators and what RP was. I would talk about my small collection of games to random strangers.

I dropped it for a little bit, then started using IRC for a few years. Talking to Runescape friends from another forum, little fan collectives for shows I liked and some metalhead rooms.



With friends I would use MSN messenger or Xfire. Sometimes I would use Ventrillo or Teamspeak for small groups. Skype also popped up here and there.

now I'm on discord.
It's a bit of a weird categorey because the majority of things were sites. But this is more for those sites you would hit up every week or so for updates. pictures, writing and all that.

One of the earliest ones were Final Fantasy fan sites and DBZ ones. I still followed a bunch of Angelfire sites that were webringed together.

I would surf stuff like DBZ Warped and FFonline. FFmusic was also a bit fav. Various ROM sites were also in my list.