“Hello My Future Girlfriend, This Is What I Sound Like”

Does everyone remember when the internet was new, and we all knew it was awesome but we didn’t really know what to do with it yet? It was a weird time, right? We were like, “I know I can use this internet tool to reach out to people all over the world and get them to date me.” And we were right to think that! That is what the internet is for. And this kid was smart. Do you remember him?

His name is Mike Blount, and in 1998, as a sixth grader, he built his own page on the now-defunct web host Tripod (he had to lie about his age to build the site) after taking a two-day beginner HTML class.

“I had learned a little web development, one of the last things being how to embed audio into a webpage and thought it would be neat to have a little clip added. It was a .wav file, long before I knew about mp3. It was originally hosted on a tripod account, because only there could I fake my age as being 13 and create a hosting account. At the time the whole idea seemed entirely innocent to me,” he later said on Reddit. Reddit later called this the “original WTF/LOL moment.”

At age 22, Blount made another video called “Hello My Future Boyfriend” because at that point he had discovered that he was gay.