Hello My Future Girlfriend

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.

Hello My Future Girlfriend holds a unique spot in internet history as one of the first "accidental viral celebrities" of the web1. 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 era3.

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 touching1. 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 public1.

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 right4.

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 money1. 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 him4. 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 her6. 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 commonplace7. Streak had even gotten his computer science teacher to spread the prank around school, making it a minor local event7.

After going dark for six months following the trolling incident, Blount came back online but kept a low profile5. 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 night1. "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 20221.

There were no brand deals to broker, no T-shirts to sell, no Cameos to distribute in the late '90s1. 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 Urlesque5. This is where the story took a turn. Blount announced that he was gay and recorded a parody video titled "Hello My Future Boyfriend"1. "I'm 22, still in New Mexico, and I'm online a lot so you should IM me," he said in the follow-up1. His resurgence was covered by BuzzFeed, Blippitt, and the Tosh.0 Blog3.

"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"1. By 2022, Blount was in his 30s, still living in New Mexico, taking college courses, and hoping to move into business administration1. He left his coding career behind in middle school.