I watched The Amazing Digital Circus Pilot and really enjoyed it. I can't wait to get to know all the characters more when the series comes out :)
I especially can't wait to see more of Zooble and went ahead and made myself a Zooble plush. Nothing can ever happen to them. Not because I'm proud if how they turned out (that's part of it), but because I filled their torso up with 2 2/3 bags of microbeads and if they burst I'm not going to be able to get everything back in and will be finding beads for weeks after cleaning up. The rest of their body has been stuffed with normal stuffing. I did triple layer the felt in their neck to give it as much firmness as possible to be able to hold up their head. I wanted to avoid using wires or sticks as much as possible.
Zoodle belongs to @gooseworx! Congratulations on the show :)
Tiny sleeping ponies! Sprites of Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, and Minty from the G3 MLP game for the GBA, My Little Pony Crystal Princess: The Runaway Rainbow!
Free to use for anything, I don’t own the sprites, all I did was make the backgrounds transparent!
I explored some 90s-2000s MLP sites! Here's some cool shit I found (and my own yapping below the break)
Cizzy’s site — Collection pics, info, graphics, and adopts. The webmaster specialized in Swedish ponies. Copyright 1998. Still accessible.
Worlds Apart — Hosts a fanfic of the same title. Unsure about date of origin since update log has entries as recent as 2024. Still accessible.
Nethilia’s Stables — Documents customs, an unboxing, and The Minty Experiments (in which the webmaster disassembled a G3 Minty). Unsure about date of origin. Still accessible.
Silverfall’s Ponytopia — A reference for G3 collectors, active from 2003–2007. Includes an index of G3 figures and accessories by year and a news archive that documented each month’s new releases. The webmaster stopped updating in 2007 and chose to leave the site up as an archive. Still accessible.
AppleJack’s My Little Pony Page — Contains collection pictures, Most Wanted lists, and artwork from an MLP fan named Tarah. Some links are broken (such as those for a collaborative chain fanfic and the Map of Ponyland webring). Unsure about date of origin. Still accessible.
Map of Ponyland — Navigation page for members of the webring of the same name. Site created in October 1998. Accessible via Wayback Machine.
The Pony Playhouse — A wealth of pony-related resources and activities by Tapestry. The games and music player were unfortunately Flash-based, and the craft images and button graphics wouldn’t load for me, but Tapestry’s collection pictures and free image archive are intact. Earliest capture is from around December 2001. Accessible via Wayback Machine.
Ribbons and Rainbows — Commentary, customs, and coloring pages by Dava. The pages on fandom controversies and pony restoration tips are particularly interesting. Copyright 2000–2001. Accessible via Wayback Machine.
Color the 80s — Coloring book scans from classic 80s cartoons. The MLP, Moondreamers, Lady Lovely Locks, Jem, Popples, and Care Bears links work. The earliest capture is from October 1999. Accessible via Wayback Machine.
Moondancer’s Dream — Collections, art, pony indexes, opinion essays, and more all framed like a story. Narrative passages and artwork allow the reader to explore the world and ‘meet’ characters. Earliest captures are from 2000–2001. Accessible via Wayback Machine.
Lullabye Nursery — Provides animated adopts for other MLP sites. Earliest capture is from 1999, but the October 2000 captures have the most adopts still visible. Accessible via Wayback Machine.
Main takeaway: GOD I wish I knew how to use html. I have zero (0) coding experience but Neocities tempts me every day.
I’m really in awe of these creators and feel almost jealous of the internet they inhabited. I was born when these websites were created, obviously I didn’t experience the internet culture that they did. They used a riot of pastel colors, they carefully edited box art illustrations as decor, they proudly displayed awards granted to them by their friends. All on websites they depended on each other to share. The creativity and camaraderie is beautiful. Are any of them still in touch now? Do they still think about each other? Have they used the skills they learned for anything since, or are they just a happy memory?
Most of the webmasters I saw chose to adopt a pony name as their own, using it as their online persona. (I even found links to a “pony name registry” where users could check to see if a name was available.) I found that an interesting contrast to MLP fans of today (as I remember watching MLP:FIM commentators who used their original ponysonas as their face online). Idk I just think that’s neat.
Another thing that’s shifted shifted since then? Adopts. In my time online an “adopt” has only ever been a character/character design you can purchase from an artist. On these sites they’re used like trading cards and help encourage users to visit their site of origin. That’s how I found the Lullabye Nursery at all! Other sites had adopt collections on display and Lullabye Nursery’s were by far the most popular. I would love to animate like that someday.
The way the webmasters treated the internet and their sites almost as physical locations fascinates me. You’re reading this post (thank you very much if you are!) and it’s just one of an ongoing stream of content being presented to you. My blog isn’t a Place. The internet has never been a location to me, only an ever-present tool I can carry around with me. These sites are fashioned as distinct islands with personality, using welcome messages and vivid descriptors of scenery and dialogue— Moondancer’s Dream is a prime example of that mentality. They talk about the web rings they are a part of as though each site is a stop on a guided tour. What changed?
I ran Moondancer's Dream! It's so lovely to walk down memory lane looking at my site and the others of that era.
Yes, each website was like a little island. When I first made my website Google did not exist. The best way to get "outside" traffic was to get your website on Yahoo, which at the time was a curated web directory. For example, it might have a category for Collectibles, then a subcategory for Toys, and finally a sub-sub-category for My Little Pony.
But like I said, this was a curated list. They wouldn't list any old website. So webrings and "links" pages were how people build bridges between those little islands.
What led to the decline of personal websites imo was the rise of easy to create forums like those hosted by Proboards. Not that message boards didn't exist before (in fact the MLP Trading Post, the oldest existing MLP site, is a message board created in the late 90s), but ProBoards etc made them easy for anyone to set up. The message board era did spark new ways to be creative, like RPG boards, so a lot of positive things came out of them. Some of the pony RPGs were quite serious and had a ton of lore and their own vernacular, like the End of The Dream board.
But I do have a special fondness for the Geocities days. Even the format of those websites made them feel like physical places; you chose a "neighborhood" based on your interests where your website "resided." My Geocities neighborhood was Shadowlands which was fantasy themed, and my sub neighborhood was Area51. It was also easier to be your own crazy self on them. After all, your website wasn't communal like a message board. It was all yours!
Some people did create ponysonas, and made customs of them too! The fanfic of this era was wonderful, and a big departure from FIM fanfiction, which is typically very grounded in canon. Even AUs like Fallout Equestria are just "what-ifs" of canon.
But the early era MLP fanfics would rarely be set in canon; pony collectors would look at their collection of childhood toys and imagine their own world, relationships, and characters for the ponies. In one story Glory might be the queen. In another you'd find Glory as a villainous outcast. In a third story the writer might have gender-flipped Glory and made him the boyfriend of the main character. Etc. A lot of MLP collectors were fans of fantasy literature and TV shows, and were eager to try their hand at making their own fantasy world.
I've lost touch with most of my pony pals from that era, but I see some of them around online. I follow a few on Facebook and when I went on vacation in London I even got to visit someone I'd known online for decades. :)
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