I'm really glad I (finally) got around to playing this. Although I wasn't online at this time and never really got to the level of online-ness of Alex and her friends, a lot of the game was familiar to me. The Mac OS 9 nostalgia (we deserve it with the amount of MS-DOS nostalgia out there!); the fandom chats (in my case, the Percy Jackson fandom, with people who still talked like Alex and Sammy in 2014); the personalities (Jenni is strikingly similar to a friend of mine from a Carmen Sandiego forum); and - it has to be said - the parental abuse.
Honestly, seeing much of my own father and stepmother's behavior in Alex's dad kind of reminded me that yes, it was as bad as I remember it - if not worse - and yes, it really was abuse, looking from the outside in. Thank you to the creator(s) for that.
There are two things I wish were different with regards to the game controls. One is a volume control for the SFX as well as the music; the other is an option to disable the screen effects at the start of the game. I have a hard time seeing to read sometimes, and I didn't realize at first the option was there to calm down the visual distortion while chatting with John.
Thank you again to Victoria and her team for making this game.