How to Use Google as a Personal Time Machine

How I Started Writing About Technology and Gaming

I started an e-zine with my best friend Jennifer. We were both teenagers who were hooked on our AOL accounts. We spent hours on AOL Instant Messenger chatting about homework, gaming and anime. Jennifer introduced me to the thriving world of e-zines. We both loved to write so we decided to start our own.

Pro tip: An e-zine is simply an online publication or magazine. Back then (Am I dating myself?) they were distributed via e-mail.

We each took on pen names to write under back then. Since our AOL screen names were so awesome (Jennifer was Misty22782 while I was Neptunekix) we decided to use them when we were brainstorming about the project. And so the e-zine was affectionately named, Misty and Neptune.

How to Use Google as a Personal Time Machine

This was more than 10 years ago. Since then I haven’t been able to find any remnants of the ezine in Google. That is…until now! Google brought back their 2001 archive:

In honor of our 10th birthday, we’ve brought back our oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001. [Google]

I’m a vain woman so the first search I did was for my name. Nothing relevant came up. The next search I conducted was for Misty and Neptune. And this is what I found:

A Listing of Misty and Neptune in a Directory List
And our old homepage It looks like the images we posted have expired so the page is a skeleton of what it once was.

My fellow blogger, Noah Brier, found the domain for his now defunct web development company and an old student project. You’ll be amazed at the stuff that’s still out there. Check out the link and have Google jog your memory.

Misty & Neptune: A Slice of Ms. Pixel’s History

With Misty and Neptune we wanted to provide young girls with a source of fresh articles on fashion and entertainment. We dreamt of becoming the online version of YM or Seventeen magazine. But our content landed outside of the mainstream. We loved anime and we were hooked on Nintendo and Sega. Our passions were reflected in our content. YM and Seventeen were glossy mags about the girls we thought we wanted to be. Misty and Neptune helped us become more comfortable with who we were. We were passionate about games, anime and sugary advice columns. As hundreds of girls signed up for our subscriber list we discovered we weren’t alone.

Can you imagine two 14 year old girls writing anime fan fiction and games? Were we ahead of the curve? I don’t think so. We ran into a bunch of young female editors like us who loved online publishing and were completely obsessed with e-zines.

How Misty and Neptune Prepared me for Business

Looking back on it now I’m surprised at how ambitious we were. We managed to snag two companies as sponsors: Oop! Juice and Gwen’s Jewelry. Both provided us with products to use in contests and giveaways. It was a perfect match between the interests of our readers and the products they had to share.

We did the e-zine for a while releasing monthly issues via email. And then Jennifer and I went off to college and sort of forgot about it. Until now.

Thank you Google!

I want to thank Google for doing this. A lot of the details surrounding the ezine have honestly slipped my mind until now. I forgot that we had the gumption to land sponsors, recruit other writers and even set up our own webpages.

I penned some articles for my local paper as an intern but Misty and Neptune is where I really started to write about my passions. And now I remember it more clearly. Thanks Google!

[Via - Noah Brier]

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