Hello My Future Girlfriend

1998Catchphrase / personal homepageclassic

Also known as: Hello My Future Boyfriend · Kidblount

Hello My Future Girlfriend is a 1998 Tripod-hosted homepage by 11-year-old Michael Blount featuring his yearbook photo and audio introduction that spread across Newgrounds, making Blount one of the internet's first reluctant meme celebrities.

Hello My Future Girlfriend is one of the earliest personal web pages to go viral, created in 1998 by an 11-year-old boy named Michael Blount from New Mexico who built a Tripod-hosted homepage to find an online girlfriend1. The page featured his yearbook photo and an audio recording introducing himself, and it spread across Newgrounds, 4chan, and early web forums in the early 2000s, making Blount one of the internet's first reluctant meme celebrities2.

TL;DR

Hello My Future Girlfriend** is one of the earliest personal web pages to go viral, created in 1998 by an 11-year-old boy named Michael Blount from New Mexico who built a Tripod-hosted homepage to find an online girlfriend.

Overview

Hello My Future Girlfriend was a personal web page built on early-web hosting platform Tripod by a sixth-grader named Michael Blount. The page was simple even by late-'90s standards: a yearbook headshot of Blount wearing a blue polo shirt, wire-framed glasses, and a dark-brown mullet, alongside an auto-playing audio file1.

The audio greeting went: "Hello my future girlfriend, this is what I sound like. I'm 11 years old, in the sixth grade, in New Mexico. Please PM me. Bye! Thanks for stopping by!"1 The recording was crinkly and compressed under the limitations of dial-up modems, giving it an endearing lo-fi quality that made it even more memorable.

The page was a pure product of its era. Before Myspace, Facebook, or any real social networking infrastructure existed, kids who wanted to connect online had to get creative1. Blount's earnest, unfiltered approach to finding a girlfriend through raw HTML turned his personal page into an accidental time capsule of Web 1.0 innocence3.

In 1998, Michael Blount was an 11-year-old in New Mexico who had just taken a two-day beginner HTML class5. He lied about his age to create an account on the now-defunct web host Tripod, then built his "Hello My Future Girlfriend" page out of what he later called "an act of desperation"5. He was chatting with people on Yahoo! at the time and wanted something like a profile page to attract an online girlfriend1.

The original page is now lost, but its contents were preserved through mirrors and archives. Blount's site included his yearbook photo, the iconic audio greeting, and his email address1. The page sat relatively unnoticed for about a year until September 1999, when the humor site Chimp.ca discovered it. The site's owner, Magoo, contacted Blount via ICQ to find out whether his girlfriend request had actually worked4. Over several messages, Blount revealed he had been talking to a few girls online. Chimp.ca then interviewed one named Jessica, a 15-year-old gamer who had found the page through a Counter-Strike news link6.

A troll named Chris, going by the alias "Streak," also got involved. The 16-year-old from Texas had been impersonating a girl to catfish Blount, and only confessed after his peers saw it as "preying on a poor defenseless innocent little boy"7. After this incident, Blount changed all his email addresses and chat handles and went offline for six months5.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tripod (personal homepage), Newgrounds (viral spread)
Creator
Michael Blount
Date
1998
Year
1998

In 1998, Michael Blount was an 11-year-old in New Mexico who had just taken a two-day beginner HTML class. He lied about his age to create an account on the now-defunct web host Tripod, then built his "Hello My Future Girlfriend" page out of what he later called "an act of desperation". He was chatting with people on Yahoo! at the time and wanted something like a profile page to attract an online girlfriend.

The original page is now lost, but its contents were preserved through mirrors and archives. Blount's site included his yearbook photo, the iconic audio greeting, and his email address. The page sat relatively unnoticed for about a year until September 1999, when the humor site Chimp.ca discovered it. The site's owner, Magoo, contacted Blount via ICQ to find out whether his girlfriend request had actually worked. Over several messages, Blount revealed he had been talking to a few girls online. Chimp.ca then interviewed one named Jessica, a 15-year-old gamer who had found the page through a Counter-Strike news link.

A troll named Chris, going by the alias "Streak," also got involved. The 16-year-old from Texas had been impersonating a girl to catfish Blount, and only confessed after his peers saw it as "preying on a poor defenseless innocent little boy". After this incident, Blount changed all his email addresses and chat handles and went offline for six months.

How It Spread

The first major wave of attention came on July 2, 2001, when Tom Fulp, the owner of Newgrounds, posted a link to Blount's original page on the Newgrounds forums. On March 1, 2002, a mirror of the site hit the front page of Metafilter. By 2004, threads about the page had appeared on the eBaum's World Forum and Winamp Forums, where users called it "older than the internet itself".

The page spread through 4chan, IGN message boards, and GameFAQs threads. Blount's earnest, lovelorn tone was irresistible to early-2000s internet edgelords, and his yearbook photo became an instantly recognizable image. By July 2007, forum users at Jinxworld were actively hunting for Blount, and they became one of the first groups to find his Myspace profile.

In 2008, the blog Misanthropy Today featured the site as an "Internet History Lesson," and Blount was interviewed by Revision3's YouTube show Internet Superstar. He also started selling merchandise with the catchphrase and published his story on a personal blog. The page was shared on Reddit in December 2009 as a piece of nostalgia, with the original poster calling it their "oldest LOL/WTF moment".

How to Use This Meme

Hello My Future Girlfriend isn't a meme template in the modern sense. There's no blank format to fill in. Instead, it typically functions as:

- A nostalgia reference: People link to the archived page or quote the audio to evoke early internet culture. The catchphrase "Hello my future girlfriend" works as shorthand for innocent, pre-social-media online earnestness. - A reaction/joke setup: The yearbook photo and audio clip get posted in threads about awkward internet moments, cringe content, or discussions about how different the internet used to be. - A parody format: Some users have created their own "Hello My Future [X]" pages or videos, mimicking the structure of Blount's original homepage.

The meme is best deployed when someone wants to reference the weird, optimistic, slightly desperate energy of the Web 1.0 era.

Cultural Impact

Hello My Future Girlfriend holds a unique spot in internet history as one of the first "accidental viral celebrities" of the web. Blount went viral before the word "viral" was even used to describe internet content. His page is regularly cited alongside Dancing Baby, Hampster Dance, and "I Kiss You!" (Mahir Cagri) as a defining artifact of the late-'90s personal homepage era.

The 2010 "Hello My Future Boyfriend" follow-up added a layer of significance. Blount's public coming-out through the same format that made him famous turned a cringe relic into something genuinely touching. MEL Magazine later profiled him as one of their "Internet Boyfriends" series in 2022, framing his story as both a portrait of early internet culture and a personal narrative about growing up in public.

The Chimp.ca interviews from 1999, preserved through the Wayback Machine, are some of the earliest documented examples of a website conducting interviews about a viral web page, making them a piece of internet journalism history in their own right.

Full History

The story of Hello My Future Girlfriend traces an arc from Web 1.0 naivety through early internet trolling culture to an unlikely redemption. When Blount first put the page online in 1998, there were no guides written on how to survive sudden attention, and no infrastructure for turning internet fame into money. The page was a message in a bottle from a kid playing the field in Yahoo! chat rooms.

The Chimp.ca interviews in late 1999 were the first time anyone tried to document what was happening around Blount's page. Magoo's interview with Blount revealed a shy kid who was genuinely excited that girls were messaging him. Jessica, one of his online contacts, told Chimp.ca she was "impressed with fancy HTML work" but clarified that having a girlfriend request page didn't particularly attract her. The Streak impersonation incident, where a 16-year-old trolled Blount by pretending to be a girl, was an early example of the kind of online harassment that would later become commonplace. Streak had even gotten his computer science teacher to spread the prank around school, making it a minor local event.

After going dark for six months following the trolling incident, Blount came back online but kept a low profile. The page, meanwhile, lived on through mirrors and archives. When Newgrounds and Metafilter pushed it to larger audiences in 2001 and 2002, Blount suddenly started getting waves of emails and even phone calls to his parents' house in the middle of the night. "There were a range of things in there. Some were nasty, some were good, like, interested in being my internet girlfriend. Or they were catfishing," Blount told MEL Magazine in 2022.

There were no brand deals to broker, no T-shirts to sell, no Cameos to distribute in the late '90s. The machinery that turns clout into cash simply didn't exist yet. Blount received trolls instead of money, which is a rough deal for a kid who just wanted to connect with someone.

The comeback happened in April 2010, when Blount, then 22, posted an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit and did an interview with Urlesque. This is where the story took a turn. Blount announced that he was gay and recorded a parody video titled "Hello My Future Boyfriend". "I'm 22, still in New Mexico, and I'm online a lot so you should IM me," he said in the follow-up. His resurgence was covered by BuzzFeed, Blippitt, and the Tosh.0 Blog.

"I'm at the point where I can look back on it and laugh," Blount wrote on Reddit. "Although I'd still love to make money off it, it really hasn't been a priority for me. I do still cringe whenever I hear the audio playing". By 2022, Blount was in his 30s, still living in New Mexico, taking college courses, and hoping to move into business administration. He left his coding career behind in middle school.

Fun Facts

Blount lied about his age to create an account on Tripod, the web hosting service where his page first lived.

The "Jessica" that Chimp.ca interviewed turned out to be "Streak," a 16-year-old boy from Texas catfishing Blount. The site documented the full unmasking in a separate interview.

Blount's page predates Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, and essentially all modern social media. He had to use raw HTML on a free web host just to put himself out there.

Google search interest for the meme peaked at its earliest tracking point and saw a small bump in April 2010, coinciding with Blount's Reddit AMA.

Blount told MEL Magazine he still cringes when he hears the original audio playing.

Derivatives & Variations

"Hello My Future Boyfriend" video (2010):

Blount's own follow-up, where he came out as gay and invited boyfriend applications. Covered by BuzzFeed, Tosh.0, and Urlesque[5].

Chimp.ca interview series:

The humor site conducted multiple interviews with Blount, his online contacts, and even the troll who impersonated a girl, creating an early internet documentary of sorts[4].

Merchandise:

Blount sold items with the catchphrase through his personal site around 2008[5].

Internet Superstar episode:

Revision3's YouTube show featured Blount in a 2008 episode[5].

Frequently Asked Questions

Hello My Future Girlfriend

1998Catchphrase / personal homepageclassic

Also known as: Hello My Future Boyfriend · Kidblount

Hello My Future Girlfriend is a 1998 Tripod-hosted homepage by 11-year-old Michael Blount featuring his yearbook photo and audio introduction that spread across Newgrounds, making Blount one of the internet's first reluctant meme celebrities.

Hello My Future Girlfriend is one of the earliest personal web pages to go viral, created in 1998 by an 11-year-old boy named Michael Blount from New Mexico who built a Tripod-hosted homepage to find an online girlfriend. The page featured his yearbook photo and an audio recording introducing himself, and it spread across Newgrounds, 4chan, and early web forums in the early 2000s, making Blount one of the internet's first reluctant meme celebrities.

TL;DR

Hello My Future Girlfriend** is one of the earliest personal web pages to go viral, created in 1998 by an 11-year-old boy named Michael Blount from New Mexico who built a Tripod-hosted homepage to find an online girlfriend.

Overview

Hello My Future Girlfriend was a personal web page built on early-web hosting platform Tripod by a sixth-grader named Michael Blount. The page was simple even by late-'90s standards: a yearbook headshot of Blount wearing a blue polo shirt, wire-framed glasses, and a dark-brown mullet, alongside an auto-playing audio file.

The audio greeting went: "Hello my future girlfriend, this is what I sound like. I'm 11 years old, in the sixth grade, in New Mexico. Please PM me. Bye! Thanks for stopping by!" The recording was crinkly and compressed under the limitations of dial-up modems, giving it an endearing lo-fi quality that made it even more memorable.

The page was a pure product of its era. Before Myspace, Facebook, or any real social networking infrastructure existed, kids who wanted to connect online had to get creative. Blount's earnest, unfiltered approach to finding a girlfriend through raw HTML turned his personal page into an accidental time capsule of Web 1.0 innocence.

In 1998, Michael Blount was an 11-year-old in New Mexico who had just taken a two-day beginner HTML class. He lied about his age to create an account on the now-defunct web host Tripod, then built his "Hello My Future Girlfriend" page out of what he later called "an act of desperation". He was chatting with people on Yahoo! at the time and wanted something like a profile page to attract an online girlfriend.

The original page is now lost, but its contents were preserved through mirrors and archives. Blount's site included his yearbook photo, the iconic audio greeting, and his email address. The page sat relatively unnoticed for about a year until September 1999, when the humor site Chimp.ca discovered it. The site's owner, Magoo, contacted Blount via ICQ to find out whether his girlfriend request had actually worked. Over several messages, Blount revealed he had been talking to a few girls online. Chimp.ca then interviewed one named Jessica, a 15-year-old gamer who had found the page through a Counter-Strike news link.

A troll named Chris, going by the alias "Streak," also got involved. The 16-year-old from Texas had been impersonating a girl to catfish Blount, and only confessed after his peers saw it as "preying on a poor defenseless innocent little boy". After this incident, Blount changed all his email addresses and chat handles and went offline for six months.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tripod (personal homepage), Newgrounds (viral spread)
Creator
Michael Blount
Date
1998
Year
1998

In 1998, Michael Blount was an 11-year-old in New Mexico who had just taken a two-day beginner HTML class. He lied about his age to create an account on the now-defunct web host Tripod, then built his "Hello My Future Girlfriend" page out of what he later called "an act of desperation". He was chatting with people on Yahoo! at the time and wanted something like a profile page to attract an online girlfriend.

The original page is now lost, but its contents were preserved through mirrors and archives. Blount's site included his yearbook photo, the iconic audio greeting, and his email address. The page sat relatively unnoticed for about a year until September 1999, when the humor site Chimp.ca discovered it. The site's owner, Magoo, contacted Blount via ICQ to find out whether his girlfriend request had actually worked. Over several messages, Blount revealed he had been talking to a few girls online. Chimp.ca then interviewed one named Jessica, a 15-year-old gamer who had found the page through a Counter-Strike news link.

A troll named Chris, going by the alias "Streak," also got involved. The 16-year-old from Texas had been impersonating a girl to catfish Blount, and only confessed after his peers saw it as "preying on a poor defenseless innocent little boy". After this incident, Blount changed all his email addresses and chat handles and went offline for six months.

How It Spread

The first major wave of attention came on July 2, 2001, when Tom Fulp, the owner of Newgrounds, posted a link to Blount's original page on the Newgrounds forums. On March 1, 2002, a mirror of the site hit the front page of Metafilter. By 2004, threads about the page had appeared on the eBaum's World Forum and Winamp Forums, where users called it "older than the internet itself".

The page spread through 4chan, IGN message boards, and GameFAQs threads. Blount's earnest, lovelorn tone was irresistible to early-2000s internet edgelords, and his yearbook photo became an instantly recognizable image. By July 2007, forum users at Jinxworld were actively hunting for Blount, and they became one of the first groups to find his Myspace profile.

In 2008, the blog Misanthropy Today featured the site as an "Internet History Lesson," and Blount was interviewed by Revision3's YouTube show Internet Superstar. He also started selling merchandise with the catchphrase and published his story on a personal blog. The page was shared on Reddit in December 2009 as a piece of nostalgia, with the original poster calling it their "oldest LOL/WTF moment".

How to Use This Meme

Hello My Future Girlfriend isn't a meme template in the modern sense. There's no blank format to fill in. Instead, it typically functions as:

- A nostalgia reference: People link to the archived page or quote the audio to evoke early internet culture. The catchphrase "Hello my future girlfriend" works as shorthand for innocent, pre-social-media online earnestness. - A reaction/joke setup: The yearbook photo and audio clip get posted in threads about awkward internet moments, cringe content, or discussions about how different the internet used to be. - A parody format: Some users have created their own "Hello My Future [X]" pages or videos, mimicking the structure of Blount's original homepage.

The meme is best deployed when someone wants to reference the weird, optimistic, slightly desperate energy of the Web 1.0 era.

Cultural Impact

Hello My Future Girlfriend holds a unique spot in internet history as one of the first "accidental viral celebrities" of the web. Blount went viral before the word "viral" was even used to describe internet content. His page is regularly cited alongside Dancing Baby, Hampster Dance, and "I Kiss You!" (Mahir Cagri) as a defining artifact of the late-'90s personal homepage era.

The 2010 "Hello My Future Boyfriend" follow-up added a layer of significance. Blount's public coming-out through the same format that made him famous turned a cringe relic into something genuinely touching. MEL Magazine later profiled him as one of their "Internet Boyfriends" series in 2022, framing his story as both a portrait of early internet culture and a personal narrative about growing up in public.

The Chimp.ca interviews from 1999, preserved through the Wayback Machine, are some of the earliest documented examples of a website conducting interviews about a viral web page, making them a piece of internet journalism history in their own right.

Full History

The story of Hello My Future Girlfriend traces an arc from Web 1.0 naivety through early internet trolling culture to an unlikely redemption. When Blount first put the page online in 1998, there were no guides written on how to survive sudden attention, and no infrastructure for turning internet fame into money. The page was a message in a bottle from a kid playing the field in Yahoo! chat rooms.

The Chimp.ca interviews in late 1999 were the first time anyone tried to document what was happening around Blount's page. Magoo's interview with Blount revealed a shy kid who was genuinely excited that girls were messaging him. Jessica, one of his online contacts, told Chimp.ca she was "impressed with fancy HTML work" but clarified that having a girlfriend request page didn't particularly attract her. The Streak impersonation incident, where a 16-year-old trolled Blount by pretending to be a girl, was an early example of the kind of online harassment that would later become commonplace. Streak had even gotten his computer science teacher to spread the prank around school, making it a minor local event.

After going dark for six months following the trolling incident, Blount came back online but kept a low profile. The page, meanwhile, lived on through mirrors and archives. When Newgrounds and Metafilter pushed it to larger audiences in 2001 and 2002, Blount suddenly started getting waves of emails and even phone calls to his parents' house in the middle of the night. "There were a range of things in there. Some were nasty, some were good, like, interested in being my internet girlfriend. Or they were catfishing," Blount told MEL Magazine in 2022.

There were no brand deals to broker, no T-shirts to sell, no Cameos to distribute in the late '90s. The machinery that turns clout into cash simply didn't exist yet. Blount received trolls instead of money, which is a rough deal for a kid who just wanted to connect with someone.

The comeback happened in April 2010, when Blount, then 22, posted an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit and did an interview with Urlesque. This is where the story took a turn. Blount announced that he was gay and recorded a parody video titled "Hello My Future Boyfriend". "I'm 22, still in New Mexico, and I'm online a lot so you should IM me," he said in the follow-up. His resurgence was covered by BuzzFeed, Blippitt, and the Tosh.0 Blog.

"I'm at the point where I can look back on it and laugh," Blount wrote on Reddit. "Although I'd still love to make money off it, it really hasn't been a priority for me. I do still cringe whenever I hear the audio playing". By 2022, Blount was in his 30s, still living in New Mexico, taking college courses, and hoping to move into business administration. He left his coding career behind in middle school.

Fun Facts

Blount lied about his age to create an account on Tripod, the web hosting service where his page first lived.

The "Jessica" that Chimp.ca interviewed turned out to be "Streak," a 16-year-old boy from Texas catfishing Blount. The site documented the full unmasking in a separate interview.

Blount's page predates Myspace, Facebook, YouTube, and essentially all modern social media. He had to use raw HTML on a free web host just to put himself out there.

Google search interest for the meme peaked at its earliest tracking point and saw a small bump in April 2010, coinciding with Blount's Reddit AMA.

Blount told MEL Magazine he still cringes when he hears the original audio playing.

Derivatives & Variations

"Hello My Future Boyfriend" video (2010):

Blount's own follow-up, where he came out as gay and invited boyfriend applications. Covered by BuzzFeed, Tosh.0, and Urlesque[5].

Chimp.ca interview series:

The humor site conducted multiple interviews with Blount, his online contacts, and even the troll who impersonated a girl, creating an early internet documentary of sorts[4].

Merchandise:

Blount sold items with the catchphrase through his personal site around 2008[5].

Internet Superstar episode:

Revision3's YouTube show featured Blount in a 2008 episode[5].

Frequently Asked Questions