I started Spacegirl way back in 1996. In internet years, it was the dark ages. eBay was barely a year old, the Onion just launched its website and Blogger didn't even exist yet. I was a twenty-four year old with a newly-minted BFA in Illustration living in the smallest studio apartment in the West Village. I created Spacegirl as a way to learn html and break into the exciting new field of "Web Design". And it worked. I landed the first of a string of full-time web jobs that lasted until the summer of '04. And all the while I worked at these tedious, mind-numbing jobs I kept up Spacegirl because Spacegirl was my life.

Spacegirl consisted of several components. First there were the random essays. Random was my primitave blog, before "blog" was even a word. I'd write about whatever I felt like and, for some reason, other people would read it. And they liked it. It was all very odd. I don't know what compelled me to post personal stuff like that for strangers to read. I guess I'm a closet exhibitionist. I've kept an analog journal since I was sixteen, so a more polished online version seemed like a good idea. Also, those were the days when content was king and I needed content. Another part of Spacegirl was Fifteen, a few fragmented memories of my years as a teenage goth. Along the same lines was the Teen Angst Journal; instead of reminiscing about my teenage past, I posted genuine journal entries from 1989 along with contemporary commentary. And no version of Spacegirl would be complete with out my artwork.

In the early days (before I even snagged the domain name) Spacegirl was a part of Swanky.org, a group of cool young designers who gathered together in cyberspace to share stories and design maxims. Then Spacegirl became a charter member of Chickclick, one of the first girl-centric web portals. It was the heyday of the internet boom and I actually made money off of my site. It's hard to believe now, but it's true. During this time I started another site, CHERRYsucker, on online literary magazine for teens. CHERRYsucker was fun while it lasted, but in time it became too much work to keep up. While Chickclick petered out in a couple of years, Spacegirl lived on.

Oddly enough, Spacegirl's demise was Blogger. I started a blog at TRIPPYswell and the ease of blogging (Look Ma, no HTML!) made posting to Spacegirl a chore. Alas, blogging is so effortless that I don't put as much thought into what I write anymore. The random essays are carefully written and thought out. My blog entries are sometimes no more than links to other sites or banal complaints about how bored (or boring) I am. A couple of years went by with out my adding anything of value to Spacegirl, so I took it down. I got a few emails asking what happened, but how could I explain my apathetic laziness with out sounding like a complete ass? Recently I've been thinking about Spacegirl, about how cool it was, so I resurrected it. It's got a revved-up design and I will be putting up the old stuff when I can, but I don't think I'll be adding anything new. Spacegirl is an homage to a lost, but fun time. And it's time for Spacegirl to be back out there.