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What do Pet Sites mean to You?
Written by: Elliot Warren(long term VPL member)
Pet sites have been a constant in my life since I was probably nine or ten. At times it was just casual, time-killing enjoyment, and other days it was a religious experience including completing dailies and struggling to beat a two headed leviathan with my sapphire colored canine companion who came up to a spikey joint that might qualify as an ankle in my terrifying antagonist– utterly realistic, in my eleven year old opinion.
We didn’t have internet in my house when I was a child. Up until October of 2013, we were still running AOL dial-up. Yes, weep on my behalf. Still, my mother worked at a library just blocks away from the ‘Elite’ elementary school I was transferred to after only my second year, and when she worked until seven or eight at night, leaving me and my younger brother home alone wasn’t really an option.
So for hours at a time after school and sometimes on Saturday, I read books. I did homework, I helped shelve movies, and sat in on after school children’s programs involving reading to a border collie.
Eventually I ran out of books. Yeah, you heard me, I ran out of books.
With parent permission, however, I was allowed to operate one of the dozen computers.
Enter Neopets, circa approximately 2001. Faerieland had just really hit everyone hardcore, and the pound had been taken over by Dr. Death and the anonymous pink Uni. Half the userbase is sitting on top of the Ski Lodge and debating the identity of the killer.
By May, Neopets has 11 million members.
Of course, being nine, I didn’t really care about any of this. All I cared about was that my Lupe was the most adorable little dog on this planet, and I immediately adopted three more from the pound.
Fun fact: My first ever account wasn’t even mine. I visited the website from a library computer and someone was already signed in. I assumed this was just how it worked, and adopted several pets over the course of the day. (The owner turned out to be a very irritable teenager who promptly abandoned all of the pets and chewed me out the way teenagers do)
Neopets taught me responsibility. It taught me I wasn’t good at it. I quickly got caught up in chatting with others, as well as adventuring out into the wild via Neoquest. After discovering it’s a rather terrible idea to use your legal name in your username (A thing I totally didn’t do) I finally settled up. By then I’d gotten a school friend to join me and joined up with a guild based around wolf roleplay. (Me and everyone else, right?)
With my first character, I established a name that I’d continue to use up until today: Willow. Not horrendously creative, but when most of my peers in the guild had names resembling high fantasy elves, I felt unique. I wrote with the guild for years, eventually creating over a dozen characters spanning several generations within the pack.
Neopets was, essentially, where I got started as a writer. I established a name for myself, and used my pet pages to post short stories. I joined other guilds over the years, even running a mildly successful fantasy guild at one point.
When Neopets sold over to Viacom and the userbase got commercials shoved up their nose, I trickled away. Most of the users I’d befriend were significantly older than me, and many started high school or college or moved across the country to wherever and fallen off the face of the earth.
Still, the effects were lasting. I moved on to forums and kept up my writing. I began to submit to various websites for feedback, and join groups on deviantart. Yet I always trickled back to Neopets, to the forums and the guilds. I was practically raised by my older guild mates, and I spoke to them more than my classmates. At times I got caught up with my pets, creating elaborate back stories for them as well as a family tree amongst the pets of my friends.
From Neopets I fiddled with websites like Gaia, Subeta, and click based sides like Dragcave. In high school, I changed my name to Willow and created an entire new identity for myself.
My first freelancing work was with Icepets back in 2009 as a writer.
With the release of FlightRising, I jumped on the opportunity to do more writing. Many of my dragons had bios, and there were factions within my own lair. I created events on the forums, wrote stories, and plagued Tumblr with stories of brutality between the dragon clans.
Pet sites have shaped me into the writer I am today. Without that first step, I’m not sure I would have kept looking into it. I might have just as easily latched on something like Runescape (I did for a little while though, oops).
The creative, involved community of virtual pet sites have always given me a space to work, receive feedback and create worlds with other users. It allows a level of interaction other games don’t really give you.
I definitely experienced some drama, and met people who changed things for the worse; but the positive definitely outweighed the negative. I discovered the Warriors series through pet sites, a book series I found fascinating.
That led me to forums, which led me to meet others I still hold dear until this day. I also ended up making friends with a childhood art idol, and discovered people aren’t always what you want them to be.
All of it traces back to these pet sites. While I didn’t learn anything like pet responsibility, I did get some basic coding out of it. I never did get my dream pets or beat a high score, but I made some amazing friends and wrote some really terrible stories. Pet sites were the basis of my childhood, and I learned a lot from them, good and bad.
Where would you be without pet sites? When I was seven I wanted to be either a jockey, or a marine biologist. Now I’m a freelancer working primarily with, you guessed it, pet sites.
Funny how things work out.
Written by: Elliot Warren(long term VPL member)
Pet sites have been a constant in my life since I was probably nine or ten. At times it was just casual, time-killing enjoyment, and other days it was a religious experience including completing dailies and struggling to beat a two headed leviathan with my sapphire colored canine companion who came up to a spikey joint that might qualify as an ankle in my terrifying antagonist– utterly realistic, in my eleven year old opinion.
We didn’t have internet in my house when I was a child. Up until October of 2013, we were still running AOL dial-up. Yes, weep on my behalf. Still, my mother worked at a library just blocks away from the ‘Elite’ elementary school I was transferred to after only my second year, and when she worked until seven or eight at night, leaving me and my younger brother home alone wasn’t really an option.
So for hours at a time after school and sometimes on Saturday, I read books. I did homework, I helped shelve movies, and sat in on after school children’s programs involving reading to a border collie.
Eventually I ran out of books. Yeah, you heard me, I ran out of books.
With parent permission, however, I was allowed to operate one of the dozen computers.
Enter Neopets, circa approximately 2001. Faerieland had just really hit everyone hardcore, and the pound had been taken over by Dr. Death and the anonymous pink Uni. Half the userbase is sitting on top of the Ski Lodge and debating the identity of the killer.
By May, Neopets has 11 million members.
Of course, being nine, I didn’t really care about any of this. All I cared about was that my Lupe was the most adorable little dog on this planet, and I immediately adopted three more from the pound.
Fun fact: My first ever account wasn’t even mine. I visited the website from a library computer and someone was already signed in. I assumed this was just how it worked, and adopted several pets over the course of the day. (The owner turned out to be a very irritable teenager who promptly abandoned all of the pets and chewed me out the way teenagers do)
Neopets taught me responsibility. It taught me I wasn’t good at it. I quickly got caught up in chatting with others, as well as adventuring out into the wild via Neoquest. After discovering it’s a rather terrible idea to use your legal name in your username (A thing I totally didn’t do) I finally settled up. By then I’d gotten a school friend to join me and joined up with a guild based around wolf roleplay. (Me and everyone else, right?)
With my first character, I established a name that I’d continue to use up until today: Willow. Not horrendously creative, but when most of my peers in the guild had names resembling high fantasy elves, I felt unique. I wrote with the guild for years, eventually creating over a dozen characters spanning several generations within the pack.
Neopets was, essentially, where I got started as a writer. I established a name for myself, and used my pet pages to post short stories. I joined other guilds over the years, even running a mildly successful fantasy guild at one point.
When Neopets sold over to Viacom and the userbase got commercials shoved up their nose, I trickled away. Most of the users I’d befriend were significantly older than me, and many started high school or college or moved across the country to wherever and fallen off the face of the earth.
Still, the effects were lasting. I moved on to forums and kept up my writing. I began to submit to various websites for feedback, and join groups on deviantart. Yet I always trickled back to Neopets, to the forums and the guilds. I was practically raised by my older guild mates, and I spoke to them more than my classmates. At times I got caught up with my pets, creating elaborate back stories for them as well as a family tree amongst the pets of my friends.
From Neopets I fiddled with websites like Gaia, Subeta, and click based sides like Dragcave. In high school, I changed my name to Willow and created an entire new identity for myself.
My first freelancing work was with Icepets back in 2009 as a writer.
With the release of FlightRising, I jumped on the opportunity to do more writing. Many of my dragons had bios, and there were factions within my own lair. I created events on the forums, wrote stories, and plagued Tumblr with stories of brutality between the dragon clans.
Pet sites have shaped me into the writer I am today. Without that first step, I’m not sure I would have kept looking into it. I might have just as easily latched on something like Runescape (I did for a little while though, oops).
The creative, involved community of virtual pet sites have always given me a space to work, receive feedback and create worlds with other users. It allows a level of interaction other games don’t really give you.
I definitely experienced some drama, and met people who changed things for the worse; but the positive definitely outweighed the negative. I discovered the Warriors series through pet sites, a book series I found fascinating.
That led me to forums, which led me to meet others I still hold dear until this day. I also ended up making friends with a childhood art idol, and discovered people aren’t always what you want them to be.
All of it traces back to these pet sites. While I didn’t learn anything like pet responsibility, I did get some basic coding out of it. I never did get my dream pets or beat a high score, but I made some amazing friends and wrote some really terrible stories. Pet sites were the basis of my childhood, and I learned a lot from them, good and bad.
Where would you be without pet sites? When I was seven I wanted to be either a jockey, or a marine biologist. Now I’m a freelancer working primarily with, you guessed it, pet sites.
Funny how things work out.