a designers first doll

I’m nine years old, eyes an inch away from the huge humming CRT monitor of our Windows 95 computer. Sweat trickles down my back as I painstakingly move to mouse slowly back and forth. My fingers ache as I curse and undo my last stroke. My focus is sucked back into the room behind me when my aunt enters.

“Eva, why are you zoomed in on a boob?” She asks with a mix of worry, confusion and amusement. I shift annoyed and uncomfortable at the obvious answer.
”It’s a dress up doll!! I’m drawing clothes on her!” I zoom out in Microsoft paint to reveal a set of pixel art dolls, neatly lined up with my crude additions to them. One is wearing all pink with what appears to be a trucker hat, the other is a goth diva with wiggly fishnet tights and an Avril Lavigne shirt. I don’t tell her that they are girlfriends.

The online world of The Doll Palace was an early 2000’s phenomenon that blended chat rooms, avatars, fansites and teen counter culture. As a young autistic girl, the doll palace was my afterschool sanctuary. A place where I could express and explore my growing identity without the often cruel judgment of my peers. It was my first exploration with a graphics focused community. The minimum age was supposed to be thirteen, but like any internet savvy minor I was accustomed to lying. The site was the home to a community of hundreds of different doll makers; 2D drag and drop pixel art dress up games. The doll makers were community made, different artists adding to the community with their own ideas and pushing the groups aesthetic in different directions. There were “Prep” dolls (short for preppy, think Paris Hilton types), Emo dolls, the now problematic “Thug” dolls, more niche Korean Candybar dolls and “tiny dolls”. There was a code of ethics among the doll creators — no stolen content. It was a small, self regulating community of creative young women who valued imagination and friendship.

The community contributed to the greater internet in other ways too. The site had numerous early Blinkee makers. Blinkees were generally small phrases or single words spelled out in square bubbles that lit up or flashed. Users would painstakingly rearrange and export each frame from the site and then assemble them in Photoshop to create a GIF. These were used in forum “signatures” and decorated personal webpages. Users shared each others Blinkees as links to their sites, promoting each other and the larger community they were members of. The internet felt bigger and more personal back then. Instagram was still ten years away, so if you wanted to have a personal presence on the internet it was either Myspace or your own blog. A few years later I created my first website, my own Piczo site (which is now sadly lost to time). Piczo was a proto-Square Space where users could drag and drop site elements and write simple HTML code to create their own personal blog with as many pages as they wanted. My own site had pages that took ages to load because I had filled them with embedded youtube videos of bands like All American Rejects and Evanescence.

It’s interesting to think back on this deeply personal and customizable internet, and to realize that most of it is gone. They servers are no longer paid for, and the users either grew up or migrated to newer “cooler” sites like Facebook. I miss all these hand-made, non commercial communities. It was easy to imagine the universe of the internet as something more akin to the Matrix with its ever sprawling blogs and fan sites, than the blue and white sterility of social media conglomerates where your parents share minion memes and post Trump quotes.

Xx_SoUrCeS_&_LiNkS_xX

Articles:

1. https://dollzmania.neocities.org/history/history-overview

2. https://www.salon.com/2003/10/07/dollz/

3. https://theoutline.com/post/3964/the-palace-game-history

4.

Doll makers to explore:

NOTE — the web archive links take awhile to load

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20210723204435/http://www.easydoll.com/

2. https://dollzmania.neocities.org/dollmakers/

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20201109041341/http://www.thuggndivazdollz.com/enter.html

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20220406214737/http://elouai.com/candybar5/dress-up-girls.php

5. https://web.archive.org/web/20050601002325/http://thedollpalace.com/

6. https://web.archive.org/web/20220406214737/http://elouai.com/candybar5/dress-up-girls.php