A eulogy for a site that raised me.

Old friend, though you still shamble on it is clear that your core has been hollowed and your soul bled dry. Nevertheless, I am fortunate to have my memories of what this place once was.

On December 31, 2020, Adobe Flash was officially unsupported, breaking hundreds of site elements and leaving the place borderline defunct. But the death knell for this site had sounded many years before, in fact the place had been hearing continuous knells of some form or fashion for the past 10 years or more. This is to say that even in my time, the site was regarded as past its prime, adulterated by the insidious capital interests of viacom. (oh, it's jumpstart now?) I wasn't one of the first, and I definitely wasn't one of the last. I remember Neopets as a bleeding giant, I remember seeing hundreds of complaints by older, wiser users from my earliest days there. I remember watching the old art slowly get chipped away and replaced with new pieces, the soul of the original site waning as mundanely as the erosion of a beachside cliff.

The collapse, the point of no return, the precipitous fall into unuseability loomed, but back then it loomed distantly. Within the belly of the ship of theseus thousands of us logged in each day to do dailies, barter on the forums, restock shops, submit scores, gamble, code, roleplay, trade stock, trade pets, and just putter around. I will always remember Neopets as a bit patchworked, navigating the site meant traversing through layers of old and new assets, seeing the art style shift and change under a hundred different hands. This patchworkiness extended past the art, into the soul of the site itself. The place was bursting with Stuff to Do, and just beneath the shiny new layers of recent content lied a deep well of strange, ancient things. A fully functional html rpg? Yeah we have one of those and a sequel too, hope you don't mind refreshing your page for every move. Your pet may have shiny new art but their petpages will always remain a flashback to 1999. I enjoyed the rough around the edges quality, and the fact that it remained in spite of the best efforts of the sites management.

Many words have been spilled about what a heavy loss it is, that current generations lack kid-friendly sites that will also teach you how to code, how to buy low and sell high, how to draw, how to write. It wasn't a perfect community, but it was a warm enough nest to me and thousands of other fledgelings at the time, and for that I'll always be grateful. Let me tell you Webkinz and Club Penguin didn't give me even half of what Neopets did.

Out of all of them, I never expected Webkinz to be the last one standing. It's funny how life works like that sometimes.

There was and is a lot of content on Neopets. Enough to occupy at least some of every afternoon and weekend for countless childhood years. Big enough to be a distraction or an escape or a lifeline anytime, as long as you can get to the computer.

Though the site may continue on for a while yet, I still feel myself mourning. Goodbye to late nights scrolling through shops smattered with ancient flash art and new assets mishmashed, goodbye to refreshing auctions and trade lots, goodbye to roleplaying, to guild membership, to bungling through html tutorials. Goodbye to dailies, to staring covetously at the rainbow pool, to monthly neolodge check-ins, to turmac roll, to waking up to a box of neomail. Goodbye to the place that smuggled the concept of being trans into my hermetically sealed garden of eden, in its own whimsical and abstract way. Goodbye to my old pets and the person I was when I raised them.

Neopets was a good website. I'm biased but I'd say it was one of the best.