piczo

before my time on facebook, twitter, and even myspace, i was devoted to the social network/website builder called piczo.

piczo was a structure-free myspace. it had a completely blank layout at first, and was used by me and a few other girls from my elementary school. if you weren't on piczo, you couldn't keep up to date with what me, maddie, jessica, and katherine were up to. we spent our days editing the HTML of our website, adding widgets, walls, chat boxes, and more. it was up to you, the third grader, to decide what your website would look like. it usually consisted of text, photos, and images that screamed what genre of a girl you were. girly = pink, shiny, glittery. sporty = soccer ball imagery. emo = black, dark. most people fit into one category. i chose girly.

after a few months of having fun on our piczos, my friends and i turned our sites into profitable businesses somehow. we displayed what we called "edits" on our piczo sites. "edits" were just filtered images of ourselves, blended with other images of ourselves, with cute text/icons on it. these images eventually made their way around our school, and girls became obsessed. they wanted edits done for themselves, and had no idea how to use photoshop, let alone put a filter onto a photo, which we all can do seamlessly today. the first couple ones, we did for free. then we would charge our friends $20 for three photos. i have no idea why we wanted money or what we did with the money, but it worked. and yes, copycats aroused from our school. other girls who wanted to get in on the action of making these "edits" but there was no real competition.

the chat boxes we added to our websites became a problem. anonymity was allowed, and while most people remained true and displayed their real name, often times an anonymous username entered the chat and wreaked havoc. it was clearly not a random person, as they would name specific people in our school and talk about them. these were the moments where i wished i could moderate my website, but i had absolutely no ability to block a chat box user. 

we even had what we know today as a facebook wall. and although i wasn't a chatbox anonymous bullier, i did often repost chain mail onto my friend's walls. and these were SCARY, threatening chain mails. not just a "you will get kissed on the nearest possible friday" chain mail. 

i remember one chain mail in particular that used to scare me to death. and wow i looked up one word that i remembered from it and found the original chain mail and holy hell it is so funny and clearly written by a 9 year old. 

"My name is Alexa Black. I have blue eyes and red hair. Don't ask why. Didn't I tell you? I am dead. My best friend Summer was dating a boy named Jake, who hated my guts because I broke up with him. I was sitting inside while Summer was in the bathroom and Jake came in and told me that Summer's brother had lost his ball on the roof and he wanted me tog et it. I got out a ladder and climbed up. I didn't see the ball. I heard Jake say "Goodbye Alexa." Then I fell to my death. Jake had pushed the ladder over. Jake lied to Summer and said that I jumped. That night I appeared by him and said "Goodbye, Jake." I pushed him off the bed and he got a concussion. When he told the doctors his story they thought he had hallucinated so they sent him to the ICU and tested him. When they found he was healed they sent him to an insane asylum. 
If you do not repost this to at least one other person, I will appear to you and kill you next week. Don't believe me? 
Case 1: Mikey was going down the street when all of a sudden he remembered he forgot too send this death chain to one person. He crossed the street and got shot by four bullets and got hit by a flying chainsaw.
Case 2: George was in his bedroom, looking up death chains on his laptop. All of a sudden, he saw me standing in the doorway. I started calling his name and then I took an axe and chopped his head off.
You have 4 minutes to send this chain mail to one other person or I will haunt you forever!"

there are so many incredible moments in this chain mail. i love the attempt at striking fear by the blue eyes and red hair descriptor. i am obsessed with alexa not being able to kill jake and just giving him a concussion, so iconic. i love how she has the receipts of her other deaths, although she doesn't say she killed mikey, he just gets "hit by four bullets and a flying chainsaw" and kudos to the author, because a flying chainsaw was definitely in my top 5 worst fears as a kid. 

i remember posting this exact chain mail to this friend's piczo site. i wasn't really close with her, which is why i chose her as the one person i shared it with. yes it's dark but think about it, i had to choose one of my friends i was ok with dying. well, it came back to bite me in the butt. she got so scared she told her mother and her mother called me and told me to never share chain mail on her daughter's piczo again. i had to find a new friend to post my chain mail to, one of my closer friends. this was hard for me to go through but luckily, none of my friends died. 

piczo taught me coding, sacrifice, and artistry. thank god for piczo. rip piczo 2006-2012, just a baby.