Ancient AOL Message Board Signatures That I Am Still Thinking About

I spent too much of my preteen and adolescent years on forums. Mostly AOL Message boards, at least to start with. For those of you who weren’t there at the time… well, you didn’t miss much. Twitter and Tumblr are basically the same thing, just faster, and there are tons of forums still around. The way people talk hasn’t changed that much.

One thing I don’t see very much anymore, though, are signatures. Message Board Signatures were the bumper stickers of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I think my first ones were a reference to Wacky Delly, a Rocko’s Modern Life episode — because naturally, preteen me’s favorite show was a show about a neurotic wallaby trying to live in a dangerous, farcical adult world, and my favorite episode was about desperately trying to maintain artistic integrity while pandering to fans and entertainment executives. Nearly everything was written in blue and gold, my school colors, and for far too long, in Comic Sans.

When I got a boyfriend, all of my signatures became about him, and our little inside jokes —“Remember that time we got kicked out of Waldenbooks?” (We didn’t actually get kicked out, they were about to close.) Then when the relationship soured, they became about my frustration with him, and about how I hated them after he dumped me. (He was too busy over on LiveJournal to notice or care.)

It was a formative time in my life, one I probably wasted. But at least I will never forget the people I met along the way, because against my will I have memorized their stupid sig lines. Here are a few.

• The preteen girl whose signature was:

  “Hey now, I’m a pop star, gonna put my make-up on, go on a date!”

  Directly beneath that was an explanation that she knew the real words, but this was her own personal version of it. I’m still not sure if she was the same girl who also had “I want it that way” and “I’m a genie in a bottle, gotta rub me the right way!”, which prompted one of my favorite responses from a bitter preteen boy, ever: “Congratulations. You chose my three least favorite songs to put in your sig.”

• The preteen girl whose username was something like Awesum3231 who accidentally put a post about a book in her signature, instead of a post. So all of her posts were followed by

  “I read Ella Enchanted and it was Awesum! It was a bout a girl who has a spell put upon her by a faeiry. The faeiry’s name was Lucieienda.”

  Awesum3231 made lot of posts along the lines of “who keeps putting this at the end of my posts? whoever does this please stop it! :(((”

• The girl who also didn’t seem to understand how to edit her signature, so forever had the following three reasons her life was awesome for one week in 1999 added to every subsequent post, and sealed into my mind:

  1. Its my birthday

  2. I can wear shorts!

  3. Also SPRING VACTION

  #2 was always my favorite part. Maybe she had a strict school uniform? Either way, I hope she’s still enjoying wearing shorts.

• The boy from the Malcolm and the Middle and That ‘70s Show message boards who had this:

  MOM: Why do you have to be so negative all the time?

  ME: To piss you off. By the way, how am I doing?

  GODDAMN, did I hate that guy. It’s always bad when someone quotes themself. You just know he grew up to be the worst. (Or maybe he’s better now. I’d like to think I’m better than I was at 13.)

• The regular on the Nickelodeon boards whose family decided to leave AOL because they wanted to ditch dial-up and get a cable modem. (We used TCP/IP to log onto AOL at my house, but this guy was also kind of insufferable, so I wasn’t going to argue with him to stay.) When he made his big announcement, he decided to change his signature from

  JamesM986

  *Nicktoons Fan*

  *Britney Spears Fan*

  *Futurama Fan*

  to just

  JamesM986

  *CABLE MODEM*

  I guess everyone has their fandoms.

• The other Nickelodeon message board regular whose signature read,

  “If you’re not part of the solution, well, you must be on FOX!”

  Again, these were the Nickelodeon boards. For children. It’s a special kind of child who has a personal agenda against the FOX network.

• The girl who called herself “Princess Hayley,” whose signature informed the Nickelodeon boards that she and her friends were “the most popular people in the universe.”

  In the whole universe. I was 12 and already not very popular, and I remember feeling overwhelmed, wondering how I could ever compete with that. If she really was that popular, though, what the hell was she doing on those boards discussing CatDog with the rest of us losers?

• The kid on some AOL Teens board who ended their posts with:

  “They can clone the baby, but can they clone the soul?”

  I can’t think of a better example of late-‘90s hot-button topic Youth Pastor energy than that.

• The white girl who was trying to be anti-racist, I think, by having a very long signature about how Black people’s skin remained black in all circumstances, while white people were “green in sickness, blue in cold, red in heat”, and so on. She concluded it with:

  “And we think we have the right to call Black people ‘colored’?”

  I don’t know if she wrote it herself, or heard it somewhere, but I can’t think of a better example of failed early-2000s political correctness than that.

• The guy on the grown-ups’ Harry Potter discussion boards (as opposed to the kids’ Harry Potter boards, which I thought were childish, because I was that kind of kid) who was a proud and out liberal, and always had something to say about politics in his signatures. Except usually they were things that didn’t quite make sense to me. For example:

  “Everyone believes in liberal economic benefits. Liberals believe in economic benefits for everyone.”

  I… still don’t really know what that means? Or at least, it doesn’t quite mesh with what I know of most self-described liberals in the U.S. these days. Anyway, he seemed like a pretty cool guy, otherwise. I’d like to think he’d be horrified at how bigoted JKR’s turned out to be.

• The teenage girl from the Harry Potter boards, one of the ones I later joined an RPG with — I can’t remember if I met that group of girls on the kids’ Harry Potter boards, before it was overrun with kids, or if she was one of the fellow kids on the grown-up boards — who offered what I still consider pretty solid life advice:

  “When life gives you lemons… stick them down your shirt and make your boobs look bigger.”

• This guy:

  

  There were also some guys on the show choir boards who were a bit too eager to give shout-outs to their girlfriends in their sigs. For some reason, the relationships never seemed to last very long. Nothing like Craig from Brea or Chula Vista or wherever always having “I love Michelle!” and then “I love Tanisha!” and then “I love Amber!” under their posts, until eventually one day it turned into “I love Mateo!”

• The girl who wrote a lot of poems (mostly about Ben Affleck) on the AOL Teen Writers Poetry boards whose signature included the line:

  “Sex is like Pringles: once you pop, the fun don’t stop!”

  I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but now I do, and my God, I wish I didn’t.

• The girl who didn’t have any kind of signature at all, but showed up out of nowhere one day and responded to every new poem posted in the AOL Teen Writers Poetry boards with just a single word:

  “Cliché.”

  With the accent and everything. Fucking harsh.

Twenty years later, and things have changed, but I don’t know if people have. It makes me think of actual ancient forums, like this collection of graffiti from ancient Pompeii. It’s one of my favorite things ever. Most of it is extremely crude and sexual, and often it specifically calls out particular people — looking at you, Theophilus, and poor Epaphra. Change a few details, like the names of gods and leaders, and it could all probably be found on any wall or forum still today.

Stuff I Did This Week: I’ve been doing interviews to promote Showbiz Kids, which comes out TOMORROW, July 14th, at 9PM Eastern time on HBO! I’m so excited for this, Alex Winter was wonderful to work with, and it was a joy to discuss child stardom with someone who actually gets it. The movie itself is great, an honest analysis of what it’s like to be a child and to be famous, and I’m so proud to have been a part of it.

Fake BBC Show of the Week: She Only Drinks the Other Kind (don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about, UK, there’s only ever two kinds of things in England)