What the hell is this doing on my tumblr dashboard in 2021. What’s happening. None of you know what this is. Nobody even heard of this when I was on it in 1998.

“Palace Chat” was a chat program that worked like club penguin except it came out almost ten years prior and it was meant for adults. When I got addicted to it in 1998 I had to be in the 1% of users under 30.

The smiley faces were default avatars you had if you didn’t make a proper account. Once you had a username you could import any image files you wanted into Palace “Props” you could edit, share, mix up and reposition to make your own avatars.

I grabbed this screenshot off google but I have literally been in this very room. Milton’s avatar looks cool, does anybody know what that’s from?

People made palace chat servers that were like elaborate exploration games with free props hidden around like items which was cool but none of the users seemed to care about that stuff so they’d just hang around the main entry room and talk all day about their sex lives or whether or not Bill Clinton ruined America.

I originally watched the world premieres of Futurama and later Invader Zim in real time with a bunch of people on “The Anime Palace.” I had a “TV Card” in my desktop PC allowing me to watch television on my computer and take screenshots. I made an avatar out of a screenshot from the intro. I had possibly one of the world’s first Invader Zim chat avatars. Then I had an argument with someone who thought it was going to be trendy just because Jhonen Vasquez made it and they didn’t believe me that I actually hadn’t heard of him before.

Sorry I re-reblog more often these days (nobody sees edit additions and nobody knows what I’m talking about if I make a whole new post??) but here are other funny memories of this obscure internet chapter:

• Positioning yourself where your avatar overlaps or touches someone else’s without their permission was considered so rude a mod would step in.
• Making exactly the same avatar as someone else on purpose, even if it’s just a popular video game character or whatever, was even ruder.
• EVERY troll would say “….kinky” whenever that happened.
• Every time you moved or you changed avatars, the server had to process it for everybody. Being too fidgety could lag or crash other users.
• You could assign favorite avatars to hotkeys. If you mashed those keys quickly enough it would lag everyone so bad that doing this often got you a permaban.
• Mods had the ability to lock you into the default avatar, which people thought of as “stripping” you, and they could trap your avatar in place which not only “stripped” it but displayed chains and padlocks over the smiley face.
• Lots of couples would make complementary avatars or avatars that could fit together.
• It was possible to position yourself so your username was off screen and some people would then wear an avatar made from a piece of the room’s background image, perfectly camouflaging themselves.
• You had to download the official Palace color palette file and apply it to your chosen image in a paint program for it not to look like complete ass when imported as an avatar
• People skilled enough at making avatars look at all decent would be rewarded with rare props, mod powers, whatever
• There were private rooms and private chat function but accidentally broadcasting your text as a public announcement to the whole room was one misclick away
• One time a moderator disappeared with their girlfriend into a private room for a while and nobody had ANY means of contacting them to tell them they were sending their internet sex as a stream of announcements to all 100+ rooms and 1000+ users on at the time for like an hour
• Crucial to your appreciation of that last note, announcements were often set up to display as speech bubbles from the mouths of like, anime characters or the MST3K robots integrated into the background images
  

I’m glad this is back on my dash because I would like to present for everyone an actual, authentic palace chat room background image I’ve recovered with BOTH Ash Ketchum and Crow T. Robot on it, which I saved 23 years ago because I thought it was just that funny taken out of context:

When I saved this image file, they were still making new episodes of the sci-fi channel MST3K and there were still only 151 pokemon. Pokemon was also such a “new fad” and considered so intrusive that some servers tried to ban discussion of it.