Reminiscing about Gaia Online.

Good day my negative Nancy's. I hope this blog finds you well.

I have been watching the animation side of youtube a lot a while ago and suddenly in my recommended feed a video appeared called "The Rise and Fall of Gaia Online." and my mind time traveled to my collage years, and I was filled with a sense of joy and sadness.

Let me explain.

Gaia Online is a Social media platform that was made with Anime fans in mind. It focused mostly on forums, Guilds and an avatar that you could dress up to look like however you liked.

I signed up for Gaia Online many years ago, 2010 to be exact, I signed up during the time when Gaia's economy had barely started to become a problem.

I remember when I signed up, I did so with my best friend at the time.

That friendship was very much the best friendship I have ever had. We would hang out on the site, play the games and the MMORPG that they had.

We would play during and after school.

We made multiple accounts and had so much fun in the forums, being characters and attacking living saws in the flash based MMORPG.

For us the Social media platform was just a place for us to chat and have adventures during and between classes. I can very easily remember how it was. Sometimes we would play side by side, other times we would call each other and chat while we played.

These are very happy memories for me.

It was an amazing friendship and I cherish it every day.

I can remember the joy we would feel when between the two of us, we had enough Gaia Gold to buy the items we wanted.

We would use a website called Tek Tek to make what was called a "dream avatar". this helped us to make outfits and see items before we bought them.

We would hang out in towns and chat with others, make friends and connections. Most of the time though, we spent together.

While on the site I usually used my main account that has the same user name as I have in most places JBCBlank. However, after a while I got into the "cosplaying" side of the site and started using my other Account, MstrLestatdeLioncourt. We were a little into Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles back then. I stayed mostly in the forums and I remember we used to have a lot of conversations with people in the Chatterbox thread.

I have many responses in there I am very sure.

• I can remember the few days of the long thread name epidemic where people would make threads with ludicrously long names, and we would be creating threads just to push them down. Just spam creating spam to be honest. But that was OK, because it was fun. I have so many fun memories with that game.

• I can remember grinding in ZOMG! To get all of my rings to lv. 10.

• Being very upset when they removed ZOMG since it reportedly added lag to the website.

• I joined the nudest group where we made our avatars, as nude as we could afford. I couldn't get completely naked but I did my best.

• I was in a vocaloid Guild as a Mod where the leader told me that she was a Republican so she knew what was best for everyone.

• I got "married" in the game. I don't remember what benefits being married did in the game.

• I was a commissioned artist for a while. All the art i did for Gaia is on my Devianart Page. I also got art commissions for Gaia gold. Which I still have somewhere.

• I started a few Guilds of my own and even some Roleplay threads that I loved, but they did not have dedicated members.

There was an Item that I saved Gaia Gold forever to get. It is Called Dainty Porridge and I LOVED the hair that it had. I need it, I spent so much time grinding for gold to get this item.

All in all it was great until they removed ZOMG! And the economy of the site tanked. It was fun and I honestly would not mind playing it again.

Thank you for listening.

Be safe, and be mindeful.