#Are Neopets users ok

[lindwur-fr]

Neopets Users: Half of the website is bungled and sitting on top of 90's spaghetti code that is circumvented by having about 50% of the pages to load in the old website format, we can't change our Usernames since they act as our User IDs that are inexorably tied to our accounts, and the only way we can get some apparel is through a loot box that costs real money, sometimes upwards of 10 bucks for a 25% chance of getting what we want. That's ok tho, my favorite neopet has a custom outfit that looks really nice :] Sucks when the clothing that costs realass money doesn't show up on my pet though. I hope they fix that soon

Flight Rising Users: If the staff releases one more dragon breed with 4 legs and 2 wings we're going to file a class action lawsuit and scream forever

[coulsonlives]

Who was gonna tell me that Adam Powell, the original creator of Neopets, lost his mind and went full-on crypto bro in the neopets discord a few months ago

He totally did the textbook 'us versus them, you're all Poor and Uneducated Bums' thing

And then he literally flipped the bird to everyone

Never meet your heroes, apparently

[bogleech]

Ok but I have seen you talk about this so many times, even referencing it in your old cartoons, so I gotta ask - when and how did you fall in love with neopets, like that?

Wait, is it that obscure now? I didn't know a single person from its inception to roughly 2010 who didn't have a neopets account. It was the single biggest gaming-esque name on the internet for years. Celebrities casually mentioned playing it, it got mainstream marketing tie-ins, it had plush toys people waited in line to buy up and a TCG made by the same company as Magic the Gathering. It's not that I especially "fell in love with neopets" like it's a niche thing but that there was a time it was almost outselling Pokemon, so it's just another huge cultural phenomenon that was a big part of everyone's lives during my teens to twenties, and hits my special interest in creature design since it has THOUSANDS (beyond the pets alone) ranging in quality from extremely creative to just plain heinous. I personally only got invested in it when they introduced the mutant pets, though, because it started out having almost like a "rule" against making any pets that were "ugly." They'd joke about it as a prank for instance, and originally only featured the mutants as part of a storyline they never intended players to actually adopt. They even had a fake alternate version of the site with fake "adoptions coming soon" and somehow didn't anticipate the userbase genuinely wanting the slime creatures.

The Chia and Aisha were my favorites but mainly the chia because that kind of "scuzzy" creature was already my own design aesthetic, polar opposite of the site's established style and reminded me of if Jeff Goldblum got fused with a tardigrade instead of a fly:

Is that just me? I feel like the tardigrade similarity jumps right out but I think it was an accident and they were possibly actually thinking of the rotting giant from Nausicaa:

The fact that they intended its design to be unlovably ugly and were surprised anyone wanted it only made it more sympathetic. Eventually they made mutants available and I got fully invested into playing, at the time having to spend hours a day on their little flash games until I could afford a mutant after months of labor. But then a couple of years later they just abruptly decided they really didn't feel like having its design around anymore and "updated" it, which back then was automatic for all pets owned by all players with no going back:

It had unfortunately been fairly common that they'd just completely, totally redo a pet like this with no warning and no user poll to make sure it's what anyone wanted. You just had to pray they never did it to your favorites.

All the other mutants in that earlier image would also get completely changed or never released at all. They still kept some of the other "gross" mutants and would make even grosser, so that wasn't even part of the reasoning. Just the random whims of mad gods I guess. I think what killed the game for a lot of people was actually when they did this to basically everyone at once, standardizing almost all the pet artwork so they could wear clothes in their new dressup system. It wasn't as drastic as replacing a sludge guy with some kind of hairy leaf guy but it did eliminate hundreds of technically unique designs from the site, and I found someone else's examples they put together so I thankfully don't have to do it myself:

If anyone's not familiar enough with neopets or didn't figure that out from the last paragraph, the ones on the right are just recolors of the same exact art as all members of their species with added accessories (now wearable items) Players used to work hard to get pets they wanted based on their unique poses and personality, but you could only keep the original art for a small number of these. The customization feature kind of attracted a different new fandom, from what people say, but it never approached a fraction the site's peak, which is probably how the brand wound up getting sold to some NFT bros who aren't even involved in the site itself and supposedly never even spoken to its remaining staff outside some business emails? This is unrelated to the brief period it was bought by scientologists and the siterunners had to fight back against their propaganda leaking into it. I really didn't expect to turn this response into a mini article, I should really just make a thing on bogleech.com about it sometime. Some of my tumblr mutuals to this day are people I met through the neopets fandom and probably have equally lengthy memories/complaints.

[toyhou-se-drama]

ok do the cbc reporters also report every pokemon adopt and oc? replace Pokemon with any other fandom this applies to. Like, where is the line drawn?

No, they don't. Why not? Rule 5.2.

"We allow fandom characters that build on the existing species, setting, or plot of an existing published material as long as credit has been provided and the OC is not intended to represent an already existing character. This includes:

• Canon Species Usage, EG: Pokemon, Digimon, Neopets (or other pet site) OCs, including gijinkas of these species"

The line is drawn when a user posts an AU version of a canon character, or a 'kinsona'/CBC that is the canon character with nothing more than design changes and the same information.

You are allowed to make and post characters that are the same species as a canon character. You are not allowed to post a canon character, but species-swapped/with design changes and near-identical information.

Go to a different site if it's a problem.

[breaking-circles]

[Image Description: Marian Churchland's Dragon Age OC template filled out with Isiik Lavellan, a dalish warrior Inquisitor. Isiik is shown from the waist up, looking warily to the side and crouching slightly. In his right hand, he holds his sword angled up and ready to attack. His left hand is braced out in front of him, the mark glowing a bright green. He is wearing a purple scarf draped over a dark purple jacket with puffy sleeves that end just past his elbows. The jacket tucks into high-waisted brown pants. Under the jacket he is wearing a pale yellow shirt. He has a shield on his back, the strap of which crosses his chest. He is wearing a glove missing its pointer and thumb fingers on his right hand. His dark reddish-brown hair is pulled back in a short ponytail except for two strands that hand on either side of his face. He has Dirthamen's vallaslin, which has smooth, flowing lines on his forehead, cheeks, chin, and along the length of his nose. He is frowning slightly and his brow is furrowed. His long elfin ears are nearly perpendicular to his head, causing him to appear slightly nervous or on edge. He has a pale scar that goes across his lips, reaching from the bottom of his chin to nearly reaching his nose and bisecting some of the vallaslin on his chin. He has heavy bags under his eyes. In the background, faint green lightning fans out from the mark. Next to his head are the words "wow this place is a freakshow. i dont respect literally any of you people." Below the quote is an attribution to "-Neopets User, 2017". Below the drawing, several traits are listed with a line between them to mark where the character falls between the two. Between cautious and reckless, Isiik is very cautious; between selfless and self-serving, he is more self-serving; between emotion-driven and logic-driven, he is more logic-driven; between forthright and dissembling, he is more dissembling; between friendly and unfriendly, he is more unfriendly; between devout and questioning he is extremely devout; and between trusting and suspicious he is very suspicious. Below the traits is a list of his main party: Cole, The Iron Bull, and Vivienne or Solas. Below that, there are a series of symbols that indicate which choices he made throughout the game. The first three indicate he is a sword-and-shield-wielding warrior, who chose the Champion specialization, and romanced no-one. The next row of five indicates he sided with free mages, left Hawke in the fade, preserved the Gray Warden order, gave the Orlesian throne to Gaspard with blackmail to benefit Briala, and drank from the Well himself. End of Image Description]

Ok! Last but not least here's Isiik (pronounced iz-ick), my Inquisitor! He has probably had the MOST change since my first playthrough. He is now an extremely jaded guy who is very much here against his will and refuses to let anyone forget that. His number one goal is getting shit fixed so he can go home and be left alone. The only person he gets along with is Cole and, at times, The Iron Bull. Nearly everyone else has said something to upset him and he holds grudges like a true champion. Basically, I'm living out my 'let me be a hater' feelings through him.

Currently, I'm designing him to be Intersex and Hard of Hearing. I am not part of either of these communities myself so I'm doing my best to research and portray these parts of him as best as possible since I really want to get this right. If anyone has any good suggestions for designing a character with these traits, please know advice, feedback, and critiques are always appreciated :]

Flat versions under the cut, since this post is already too long~

[Image Description: The same drawing as in the first image, though this time without the background or shading, making the colors easier to pick out. In the first of the two drawings, the glowing green mark remains, in addition to a glare on his sword. In the second image, both of those are removed, though a white gash remains where the mark is located. End Description.]

As always, relevant stuff will be in the replies. Thank you for the kind words and such, folks :]

[broken-clover]

Ok so people actually expressed interest so I guess I'll take a good excuse to show off my Neopets customs! I'm definitely not on the level of some really serious users who stake out the really rare items but it's still fun to make my weird cats stylish and give them their own little lore.

Thanks to the anniversary event gifting some free NC, I bought another pet slot and currently have 7!

Dhanue (Donahue/Donnie) is my active main, and even though I know ghost isn't a super rare color I'm absolutely never painting him. Somewhere along the line I just really liked the idea of a steampunk ghost gentleman. He's a gentleman thief with a flair for the dramatic who pretends to be suave but is really a massive troll underneath it.

The only design change I'd like to do with him is finding a better background bc the magma puddle clips into this one. I found one I sorta liked but it's expensive so that's a future goal

0grese was a lucky pound find a few years back! I really love how the robot pets look so weird and angular and gritty without the sleek casing on, it lends well to a slightly spookier aesthetic, I just had to make a her a mad scientist! Though she isn't a bad person, just very timid and odd-looking. She's actually a doctor that studies biohazards and diseases since she doesn't have to worry about getting sick or spreading it to other pets. She also has an unsubtle crush on my Draik but is too shy to say anything

Batatiinha_ (Batat) is another not-really-rare color that I'm not in a hurry to paint. I think it adds to her vibe! I wish I could find a library background that was a bit more ominous, though. And if I can find anymore good gold accessories I might use those, too. I wanted to go for a Midas-esque vibe, with an obsession for riches leading to her obsessively studying dark magic and becoming more ensnared in it until it started altering her body

She and Dhanue go way back, with him often trying to rope her into heists. She finds him insufferable, but it's one of the few reasons she leaves her empty estate anymore and prevents her from becoming a complete shut-in

I love Kaceae way too much, something about baby Aishas actives a rabid part of my brain. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with her background yet, that's still a to-do, but I'm very happy with her little outfit.

She's, well...she's a baby! She doesn't do much aside from chew on her plushies and nap. When she grows up, she'll become a famous scientist, but for now, she's just baby.

Professor_Giri is the pet I moved to my account with the new pet slot I bought. I traded a Krawk for her current paintbrush and I really love the dark blue, even if Stealthy tends to be more about the ninja accessories. So far I'm happy with her custom! Might change later, but for now I like the vibe.

Giri is an adventure archaeologist who studies tombs, and she absolutely does not know when to shut her mouth. She means well, though. She also knows full well 0grese has a crush on her, but is waiting for the doc to work up the nerve to say something.

Weaclen was obtained from a very lucky fountain faerie quest I got during the festival a few years back. Getting an alien aisha was always one of my dreamies! I love their weirdness. In contrast to the space-age tech and design, I wanted to make his customization a little grungy, with garbage and Slorgs. I'm trying to trade for a few more Slorg accessories, either the raincoat or the little faerie companion released during the last festival, that's another WIP

Speaking of Slorgs, Weaclen can't get enough of the things! He collects as many Slorgs and Slorg memorabilia he can get his paws on, and my account's gallery is devoted to his menagerie. He's actually from the future, but an incident with a wormhole sent him back a few hundred years. He's a descendent of the famed doctor and roboticist Kaceae, and upon finding her as a baby, he takes it upon himself to care for her and raise her until she fulfills her grand destiny in a few decades. He considers it a massive honor.

And finally Zekotah (Zeko) is a pretty simple custom that I'm nonetheless really happy with. Faerie just lends itself nicely to pastel and flowers. If I find any garden-related pieces I like better I might change them, but I like this general vibe a lot

Compared to the others, Zeko lives a pretty quiet, uninteresting life as a gardener, but she's fine with that. She's mostly nonverbal and hates commotion and being crowded, so she's perfectly happy to spend most of her time in the flowerbeds in quiet solitude. Making friends is difficult, so if you're nice to her and don't make a lot of ruckus, she would probably die for you

[evil-camille]

my sweet sweet bbs 🥺

ok, I just sent a ticket to Neopets support asking for access to my ancient Neopets account that I made 18 1/2 years ago. I am hopeful that I will get it back as I even have my current main account linked to the user page so fingers crossed I can feed my babies again.

[rommaru]

Yesterday I got informed about some old gossip people told about me years ago in neopets.

The goddamn neopets dot com.

A virtual pets game that some adults take too seriously.

Take a sit while I tell you and old story and I hope you get a good laugh as I did.

So neopets has been running since 1999 to this day. There are two currencies: neopoints and neochash. Neopoints are the main currency, they can be earned by playing games, doing quests, random events, selling items and many other ways. Neocash are purchased with actual money and can only be used in a specific store to buy clothing for your pets. Think about this as neocash can buy awesome skins, but everything else runs under neopoints keeping the game "fair".

As any other game, users build the economy and the market based on supply and demand. Shady tricks to make your way into the rare items exist such as scamming, hacking rich accounts, taking advantage of glitches and straight up black markets.

In my early years playing there I made a friend who made his path to richness by reselling items and playing games. The problem is that this guy loved to give polemic opinions and talked without filters so he quickly became a despictable person for some users. People tried to hack his account and stalked him on his social media, luckily none of that worked. Tired of all this drama he decided to take a break from neopets but before that he asked me to take care of some of his most expensive items so even if his account was compromised on his hiatus they would be safe on mine.

I doubt a little because while I was always aware of the drama surrounding him, he was always kind to me and our friendship was not so public so it was unlikely that my account would become the new target for hackers. What I didn't thought through was how suspicious our transaccion would look like at the eyes of the staff.

The next day both accounts were frozen. Imagine little Rommy all sad because I loved my ugly pets so much and my little account that I had worked for sevenish years. I submitted a ticket explaining how I never cheated and provided all possible evidence. Neopets customer service is well known for being slow and inefficient, so I just waited and waited and waited.

People quickly noticed my friends account was frozen and somehow they found out about me, not entirely but they knew there was another user in the formula.

What is the juicy gossip?

People said that I was some kind of celebrity influencer offering sexual services in exchange for items and neopoints. I was frozen because my friend was a client of mine...

Ok, hold on, let me just...

I haven't laugh so hard like this in a while. Do you know what is even worse? I was a minor when this happened.

Whatever they knew about me it was very little and probably they were just trolling because it was a popular thing to do back then ¯_( ͡• ͜ʖ ͡•)_/¯

I never got harassed on my side account or social media.

Speaking of my side account. I have a confession to add to the story. The usernames of both accounts are fairly similar so I would be easy to tell it was me. Remember neocash? Neocash has a different economy system based on item trading. If you want an item, you offer your items, find a trader and agree a fair deal.

I got into neocash trading before my main was frozen, but I became really good at it in my time using my side account. So while strangers shit talked about me I was taking advantage of a glitch.

To summarize it, neocash could be bought from the neopets website or by redeeming physical cards that could be found in stores such as Walmart. Cards were available in a couple countries outside USA and due to actual currency convertion it could be cheaper to get foreing card codes rather than buy them from the website. Keep in mind that 1000 neocash equals $10 USD in regular price. Of course getting cheaper cards is not against the rules and it's still a common practice.

The glitch would not recognize what currency was used to buy the card and would assume that the amount was in USD. Let's set an example, if I remember correctly, someone told me that 1000 neocash would cost 10,000 CLP, the glitch would reedem for the amount of 10,000 USD. I'm not saying that Chilean cards would do that, I'm not even sure if they were sold in Chile but this is the most dramatic scenary I can think of.

I had a lot of neocash for dirt cheap. I'm pretty sure more people knew about this but neopets was a messy place (it still is) that recently had took multi language support away, so I can see why non native English speakers were mad and unwilling to repport their glitchy cards.

Anyway, if those trolls were aware of my neocash trades back then (because most trades are done in a public forum) I could't blame them for thinking I was a hoe selling its body for real money to waste on a game lol.

At the end, it took a year but I had my account back. I continue to play neopets with no consequences from those days.

[moved-please-leave-me-alone]

I posted 4,156 times in 2022

That's 4,156 more posts than 2021!

376 posts created (9%)

3,780 posts reblogged (91%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@cartoongore

@w1steria-tea

@fancyson

@catboybeebop

@awesomeface

I tagged 953 of my posts in 2022

#jimmy.txt - 395 posts

#we got a letter! - 173 posts

#mutual mail! - 164 posts

#fave - 24 posts

#vocaloid - 8 posts

#save - 8 posts

#inanimate insanity - 7 posts

#mecore - 6 posts

#unreality - 5 posts

#club penguin - 5 posts

Longest Tag: 134 characters

#i need to analyze music more honestly liek i need to analyze zoey van goey music and the yellow dress music and the infested music and

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Hi *drops this here and runs away at full speed*

29 notes - Posted December 2, 2022

#4

Ok im sorry but I hate the idea of “scenecore”. Its an aesthetic that waters down and destroys the whole purpose of scene. Its also weirdly sexualized. But thats just my 2 cents

29 notes - Posted November 20, 2022

#3

Kitty and puppy friends forevers

61 notes - Posted November 30, 2022

#2

Soemthing very interesting I noticed about the BFDI and II fandoms is something I like to call “The Shipping Square”, and I don’t mean a love triangle, as there isn’t really any romance in either of these two shows, but more so 4 specific characters that fandoms are drawn towards when it comes to shipping. It’s something that I can only explain visually, so I will.

While not exactly the same (I’ve seen way more people make Test Tube and Paintbrush content than Leafy and Coiny content) the idea’s still there. It’s still way more prevalent in the ii fandom since those 4 are actually on a team together, it still applies to BFDI too.

Of course, many somewhat ships with these characters exist out of these shipping squares (in ii there’s Silver Spoon x Paintbrush and Cabby x Test Tube, for instance, and in BFDI there’s Flower x Leafy), the ones in these squares are most popular, not just for the character but in the fandoms themselves, which is very interesting to me.

I don’t really have a point to make with this it’s just food for thought

77 notes - Posted December 6, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

ALRIGHT HERE WE GO. DNI if you: never had a Sonic phase, prefer normal taxidermy over rogue taxidermy, people who hate dashed URLs, people with numbers in their URLs, you hate dogs OR cats, you think vampires are hotter than werewolves, you never played an online pet site game (Neopets, Marapets, Meowr, etc), you never played an online kids MMO (Animal Jam, Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, Webkinz, etc), you actively use Twitter, you think Sticker Star is better than any of the first 3 Paper Mario games, you skip seasons of TV shows to get to the “good part”, your favorite season is winter, you dont listen to any music artists with less than 200 subs on YouTube, you never ruined any of your toys trying to do a “custom”, you dont download random gifs from the Internet, you never pirated something before, or if you never did Khan Academy before

244 notes - Posted November 15, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[wobster109]

Twitter isn't going down all at once, but it was never going to. No site gets that big and popular without being pretty stable. I'd expect trouble to gradually pop up over the timespan of a few weeks and months as crucial but unexciting tasks get overlooked.

I'm no systems expert. I'm a programmer who writes code in a little silo, so I'm only peripherally aware of how systems, applications, networks, etc. all work together. But here is my best guess.

Here are some places Twitter might start breaking down.

Software is always changing, and some of those changes are in underlying tools. Look for the words "API" or "patch". If whatever uses it is not updated, it's going down. One example is how neopets games don't work anymore: Neopets doesn't own or develop Flash, but it relied on Flash.

This could be as silent as authentication protocols. What this means is that different chunks of code are always asking other chunks of code to do things for them, for example when I tweet from my phone, my phone asks Twitter to post the tweet. The tweet is not posted on my phone, it is posted on Twitter, where anyone can see it, browser or mobile. So Twitter needs to decide whether to post the tweet to my account. Well, my phone tells Twitter that I am signed in, but does Twitter believe it? Or is it a hacker pretending to be my phone? There are all sorts of protocols before Twitter will believe my phone. Think of it as whispering "The eagle flies at night," or perhaps "I like your shoelaces". Now, security experts are saying "No! That phrase is too common! You need a different phrase!" And if Twitter doesn't have anyone who can update their code phrase, they will no longer know whom to trust. I used this example specifically because authentication protocols are always changing.

In the same vein as Flash, a lot of third-party stuff is licensed. Annually or monthly. Something as big as Twitter probably uses a bunch of third-party stuff in its code. It's easier and more robust than writing it from scratch, just like me building my own table with my own hammer won't come out with a great product. I do not know what third-party software Twitter is using (one guess is it probably uses some image-scanning tool). Personally, I work at a small-medium company and we use third-party software for bug reports/ticketing, and we rent Cloud space from one of the big Cloud providers, and we contract with a company to watch our network traffic for hacking attempts. If we don't renew the contracts, then our stuff stops working. This won't happen to twitter overnight, but crucially, the people who know when it will happen, and to what, might be fired or gone.

Maintenance - data: electronic stuff generates data and logs all the time, and the more data you have, the slower stuff runs. We routinely archive our old logs and files. Some of it is very low-tech -It will take you several minutes to open an excel doc if it has 100k lines in it, and it will freeze when you scroll. A database is like a high-tech version of that. Twitter is always looking up who your mutuals are, what they posted, what you posted, etc. With something like 2/3 of its staff gone, are the crucial databases getting archived or cleaned? (For databases of tweets, it's probably automatically cleaned up. But somewhere down the line, there are probably a handful of somethings - folders, obscure databases, files etc - that are not. Here, we have a text log of user updates that someone manually archives every few months.)

Maintenance - incidents: sometimes something comes up that only a human can fix. One example of this is when new hire A's ID got typoed, and their account got merged with person B, and they can't access any of the stuff they need. Another example is a physical device goes offline, and the reason is it got physically unplugged. Does twitter have the staff to investigate and manually handle these situations? A few issues here and there is probably ok, Twitter probably has redundancies built in, and is not relying on any one person or device. But if it becomes a backlog, and issues pile up over time, there could be trouble down the line.

All this to say that Twitter won't be gone overnight. More likely it will gradually have more and more errors popping up, and get slower and buggier until it falls apart. I think this will start to become more noticeable after a month or so.

It sounds like Twitter is already seeing the first signs of trouble. Axios reports that Twitter has gotten bad at detecting copyright infringement. That may have been one of the third-party tools it was relying on.

[irontacotimemachine]

Ok so like I tried to come back to neopets and the fucking site doesn't work anymore so I dropped it but this bring joy to my cold dead neopian heart. Also like my bourgeoisie accounts are impossible to get into so any of my accessible accounts are itemless and have no money so I'm one of you, I promise! I'm totally not a (former) hoarder of ultra rare items whose identity is (was) based on having all the points compared to the average user!

[vissenya]

▬ 𝖦𝖤𝖳 𝖳𝖮 𝖪𝖭𝖮𝖶 𝖬𝖤 ▬ & nine people you want to get to know better

tagged by: @lucarias THANK YOU!! :*

tagging: not tagging anyone because I HAVEN'T BEEN HERE IN AGES AND I DON'T KNOW ANYONE'S USER ANYMORE LOL. but as always, please do this and tag me in it if ya do!

last song: porcelain by moby (it's in the generation electronica spotify playlist ok)

favorite color: pink/purple/lime green PRETTY MUCH EVERY COLOUR?

currently watching: castlevania nocturne!

last movie: we just watched stonehearst asylum, it was OKAY-A! the last movie i saw in theatres was a haunting in venice, it was also OKAY-A!

currently reading: gyo by junji ito, my favourite :)

sweet/savory/spicy: absolutely all three, i will not choose

relationship status: married binches!!

current obsession: SPENDING ALL MY MONEY LOL. and king of the hill. but also my alice in wonderland phase is back in full swing too

last google: jeremy allen white.......... .... .. .. ....

currently working on: trading for customs, and petpages for my neopets!

[bakurapika]

ok im gushing to my friends about how I want more people to know about subeta, so I guess I will advertise here too!!! (add me @donteatacowman there

subeta is basically neopets but still in classic format and slightly more adult friendly

(yes i know there are other pet sites like flight rising, but subeta was very much inspired by classic neopets back in the day)

i think they just need like a tiktok or something being like ARE YOU NOSTALGIC and suddenly they will be profitable

they have pride flags and mobility aids as wearable items etc

cash is only needed to buy user-created art to wear (or another few bonus things to make the game better, but like, instead of 10 quests per npc a day, you can do 15…), and if you create that art, you can make a profit (in the form of the cash-currency). you can make that cash currency other ways. i just spent actual cash on it for the first time in almost 10 years :| because im like holy shit the game is still active and making updates. i want to help with server costs

like seriously you can just play it as a dress-up game since you can try on things that you don't own

i know im sounding like an ad at this point but it is a cool thing and if people just KNEW about it, it would have this huge resurgence imo

i also just got nominated for a spotlight :) for my pet's profile aka neopets style html/css

(yes the pet art is dated - they update them over time but some of them are still early 2000s looking lol)

pls reblog if this looks interesting to you! im not affiliated with subeta but i really hope they keep going strong and attract new users

[shinelikethunder]

OK, a few notes, aimed at curious non-coders who'd like an idea of what can or can't be done with this:

It's a PHP library. It's used on the backend, as part of the software that runs on Tumblr or Twitter or Craigslist or Neopets or whoever's servers and spits out the raw webpage content that your browser ends up displaying.

This means it has very little to do with frontend UI tweaks or browser extensions like XKit, whose extra functionality is pretty much bolted onto the page after the fact via JavaScript that runs in your browser. Not only was this written to serve some pretty different purposes, PHP is for server-side use; this isn't code you can slap onto someone else's site by running a doohicky on your own computer. It also isn't a full-fledged app like Wordpress for site admins to run on a server as its own standalone thing.

So what is it? Basically, a bunch of prewritten, adaptable code that backend devs can use to make life muuuuch easier when they're coding the parts of their apps that handle content feeds. Retrieving chunks of them, combining them, filtering them, reordering them, caching them, all before the end results are served up to visitors. The code Tumblr's released so far is almost 100% agnostic about what that content might be, where it might come from, or what format the data's in. Like, out of the box, a couple of the fancier sorting tools are just aware enough of "blogs" and "posts" to throttle stuff that might hog an algorithmic feed? But that's about it for now. The bones of all this are pretty flexible, and most of it would be just as suited for wrangling, say, a YouTube recommendation stream.

IMO the niftiest (and, ok, most messy-ass bitch, but in a fun way) parts I've seen are its solutions to... call 'em general plumbing headaches. Like "if we're filtering a feed, e.g. yeeting posts from blocked users out of searches, how should we handle auto-grabbing a few extra items to potentially fill out each page of results? Can we fine-tune how aggressively to do it, if some filters will be weeding a lot more posts than others?" Or "wait, so the dashboard is paginated by post ID, likes are paginated by date liked, and search results are paginated by... witchcraft? Is there some unified way to just treat it all as 'wherever we left off' in each of these feeds we're mixing and matching? Can we make the damn computer figure out when & how to fetch more from each?" Or, idk, big sets of posts that get algorithmically sorted, and how to keep the post order from jumping around as they're loaded or reloaded. Yeah, boring details. But making all those parts (AND caching!!!) play nice together is the absolute devil. That's stuff you want already solved when you sit down to slice and dice some sexy custom dashboards.

Interestingly, I'm not sure whether or not this library is involved in aggregating your followed blogs' posts into the raw stream that powers the dash. Whatever's handling that may be more like a data source that these tools are pulling from; they seem more focused on manipulating streams once you've got 'em, and inserting bits of one into another, like the way recommendation carousels occupy a slot on your dash that might otherwise have been a post. IDK how they'd perform trying to combine the latest from hundreds of blogs at once.

So third-party devs who can't wait to unleash the full power of Outlook email filters on the Tumblr Experience™ may still be stuck with the "/users/dashboard" endpoint of this hellsite's API... whose terms of service include a blanket prohibition on reordering dashboard items. Or inserting/removing posts from any content stream. In fact, if I'm reading this ToS right, they just open-sourced a library that we are pretty much forbidden from using on any of the data streams provided by their API. So... guess it's a good thing these tools are designed for all kinds of uses.

StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.

Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.

First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.

What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!

StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.

On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.

So, what’s included in the box?

The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.

A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.

Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.

Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.

An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.

Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.

What’s still to come

Documentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!

More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.

If you have questions, please check out the code and file an issue there.

[halfsplit]

ok like think about it. Pet website, tomagatchi style maybe? I always wanted a beautiful marriage between a tomagatchi style/neopets style website where you do have to care for your pet and can also customize them and you just have that stimmy character art that neopets had for a moment there. I also appreciate FR's style of all the pattern combos, but really I think paintbrush-esqe colors are just so nifty and simple.

Flash-like games are the best for pet websites imo. Even just a good set of like, 10 or so games + maybe something similar to NeoQuest and some solitaire-esqe games would be plenty entertaining enough

Does a pet website even need an economy? I think a lot of pet websites downfalls is when the economy inevitably gets fucked. I'd just nuke that. Play the games to buy items and maybe have items that are more of a treat and rare to find in shops, but eliminating trade and item stock shortages may just be the best bet. I hate seeing what happens when the main social-interaction in websites economy based

User avatars are just Too Much. Just let people draw themselves or have someone else draw their avatar pic and you're good.

Of course, you NEED to maintain forum avatars Tho... And signatures.

A forum that has 0 rules, like, the pet website should be the stimmy, fun, cute part of the website and fully functional and satisfying to play solo, and the forums can just be what the fuck ever.

What would be a REAL game changer is to add a dash-like system to a pet website. You can follow or subscribe to user feeds. Post your content on forums, and if someone likes it, they can just follow you and get a feed of your stuff. The forums need to be... Lesser, than reddit, but I'm sure a smart enough tagging and organizational system could be figured out

Allow youtube/Vimeo/etc videos to be posted/linked, too. I'm sure creating the ability to post videos would just be too costly to maintain even for a small community. Ugh, I loved how on... I think it was this website, nutrino pets, the user pages allowed you to have a YouTube video that posted on your profile. so dope.

And just like, completely free range. Everything is allowed except for like, child-endangering/bigoted things.

Dope ass user pages that you can edit the fuck out of, and pet pages that can act as additional side blogs with perhaps their own following systems? Or maybe that would detract with the fun simplicity of just having a Cute Critter to foster

[utility-fish]

Ok so I’m not trying to make a scene but just so you all know it looks like the user @murhuedur has been reposting a bunch of popular neopets-related posts and blocked me when I asked her to credit one of my original posts (but I can still go to her blog in another tab apparently bc tumblr is a joke)

Besides two posts with fake Neopets hints from this post of mine there was that parks and rec “do you think a depressed person could make this” meme with a screenshot of someone’s neo account, which I know I’ve seen before but idr who posted it and a few more that look familiar

This was her response to an ask someone sent about this

Which...if you like a post someone else has made and want it on your blog there’s literally no reason to repost it instead of reblogging.  The only difference is that reposting implicitly gives you credit for something someone else made.  With the fake neopets hints that were one part of a longer post I guess you could plausibly say that you didn’t like the rest of the post enough to reblog it but that’s not a reason to block me when I ask you to link the original.  Overall it seems like maybe you’re the one "preoccupied with that internet clout.”  Personally I just don’t think plagiarism is very nice?

Anyway if you’re not ok with this maybe block this person, at the very least don’t reblog these posts because I’m not ok with someone taking credit for something I made and I doubt most other people are either