Cartoon Doll Emporium (CDE) was a dressup and social media website launched in the 2000s and shut down in 2019 (with its social portion being shuttered in 2015). this is a sideblog sharing snippets of archived portions of mostly the social side of CDE, known as MyCDE, because i find that interesting. all usernames and names will be left out for privacy's sake, as many of the sites users were young.
blog is run by @insanitize
this is a blog dedicated to the various forcibly abandoned profiles on the now defunct website Cartoon Doll Emporium.
the types of things archived here:
user bios (with sensitive or identifying info redacted)
CDE Spaces, which were a type of room users could decorate and display on their profiles
flairs, those badges commonly seen on profiles
awards, which were like achievements given out for certain things
background illustrations
less common to see will be comments if i find any that i like, and maybe avatars. full avatars are actually surprisingly hard to come by in archives of the site. most of them are lost, so they'll be very few and far between
i will NOT be archiving photos found on profiles, as those can include reposted artwork, personal work, or even photos of users
that's all. you can check under the readmore for q&a
questions i already have answers to if you plan on asking any of them
Q: Who are you?
A: @insanitize
Q: Do you have any personal relationship to the site?
A: yes, but not a deep one. we used the site and its social media aspects regularly between 2012 and 2014, but don't remember much about it anyways, and really preferred other kids social games and fashion social games. we especially preferred the gameplay of stardoll, though we liked cde's anime items, which is what i remembered it best for
Q: Why CDE?
A: i find it fascinating that something you've spent a lot of time interacting with can just vanish. in the real world, unless it's destroyed, the physical locations you visit don't disappear when you're not looking, you just leave. but online, the spaces you inhabit can be wiped out of existence in seconds. it's common for people my age to look back towards our childhoods and find that a lot of the spaces we held dear have been lost and even forgotten about entirely. i think this is a major factor towards the recent draw in appeal to lost media, a lot of people want to find at least some remnant of what they knew. CDE is no different. i want to keep it close
Q: I'm in these archives and I would like to not be. Can you take [x] post down?
A: yes, send me a message detailing what posts your account is on and i'll remove them
Q: Can you find [x] for me?
A: unfortunately because of the way i'm looking for these and the way cde urls are structured, finding anything specific is next to impossible. most likely no
if you have any more specific questions just ask me and i'll do my best to answer them with what info i have or can dig up for you. lala
Thank you for letting me know 🥲 I've been going down the rabbit hole to find my profile all morning. I love that there is at least screenshots/photos to have nostalgia over
Can you help me find my profile?😭cde was my childhood and I'm struggling to find it on the way back machine.
thanks for reminding me that we have this blog, LOL. we need to stop forgetting to update it
unfortunately, due to the way URLs on CDE were structured and how sporadic the sites archives are, it's very unlikely you or i will be able to find any specific one user profile unless it's by happenstance. if you remember your username i can scrape around for maybe some evidence of it on other user profiles or other parts of the site, but even then it's a long shot
i understand the pain very badly though, if we could find ours it would have been the very first thing we posted
in the meantime I'll share a thought: it's interesting to see how children pick their likes and dislikes. for a lot of these kids, you'll see favorite movies and favorite shows and whatnot and find that the selection seems really random, before you realize that that's all the kid has seen that they know they enjoyed. i think children likely establish a framework for what they consider preferences very early in life, especially since young children tend to be highly opinionated as well. and how many people can remember learning the words for "like" and "dislike/don't like" ? those are ones you start needing pretty early, they may be in the repertoire of words people learn the quickest for their utility (alongside stuff like "help" and "stop" and "please" which also communicate needs)
anyways all of that to say seeing kids say they like or don't like the only stuff they know of yet is fun and interesting and opens a discussion about how children develop a model for preference. most websites targeted to kids are good places to learn about how children operate since they're basically freely accessible playgrounds in writing, but anything you'll find with a free-text profile field will generally show this early preference stuff in action
I FORGOT TO KEEP QUEUEING THE BLOG because the past few weeks have been unbelievably stressful for me. my bad ! will have a new backlog of posts soon, hopefully going out another month at least
an interesting apparent collaboration between CDE and Musicshake from 2011. Musicshake is an also mostly defunct website now due to the closing of flash web support which allowed users to create songs by building them in a simple daw using premade samples. we used this website regularly as a kid as well and had no idea the two had collaborated at any time
