I was introduced to the site in 2006 by a girl a few years older than me who my mom tutored at the time, and it was over for me the moment I created my first ever pet Chubbychicki the Green Pteri (since lost to the 2012 Neo Purge, RIP).

My early days on Neopets were spent playing with real life friends, usually going through the Pound together or playing flash games (many hours were spent on The Great Desert Race, a boardgame style race game where you could play it multiplayer if you had someone sitting beside you irl). We also had a closed guild for our warrior cat roleplay. My solo neopet hobbies in my first few years were drawing my pets (mostly ripping off artists I admired on the site) , browsing petpages, and reading the Neopian Times every Friday. The site definitely kicked off my love for drawing and character creation and stayed as an outlet for that for the rest of time. The site also definitely targeted my growing young brain which had a genetic disposition to addictive tendencies and fused itself to me permanently whether I liked it or not. I memorized the names of all 53 Neopet species and logged my neopoints gains in my diary.

When The Coversion hit in 2007, I tried to quit the site in outrage. I have distressed diary entries from this time about how I just couldn't handle the pain of the change and how ugly my pets now were. I didn't last long though and I returned to the site by 2008, starting a new account which I'm still playing on today. By 2011, all my real-life friends had moved on from caring about their virtual pets, and I led a fairly isolated Neopian existence from then on. I was a passive observer of The Neotag on tumblr in 2013 but was too shy to interact directly with people most of the time. I had fluctuating activity on site depending on how busy I was in real life but I never could resist coming back no matter how badly the site declined in quality. I got into pet trading as a main hobby, and still tried to submit art gallery and Neopian Times submissions here and there. I join the Altador Cup for Team Shenkuu for eleven years in a row, playing hundreds of games of Yooyuball. I logged into Neopets on the day of my high school graduation.

My longest hiatus from the site was probably my three years of college when I was balancing school and two jobs and sort of fell offline in general. By late 2019 I had graduated and had a lot more free time and decided to check back in on the site. It was sort of abysmal. A lack of funding and attention left the site without a ton of updates and a steadily dwindling userbase. Then my beloved cat died in November 2019 and I ended up trying to fill the void she left in my life by shifting my attention to the 30 virtual pets I had. I returned to the form of my 10 year old self where Neopets consumed all my thoughts and life, but this time I had a better grasp of basic HTML and CSS, better digital art tools, and my own laptop, meaning I could make whatever I wanted happen. I started fulfilling childhood dreams - racking up flash game avatars and trophies (smaller userbase meant a more accessible high score table), I learned about food club and the stock market and started raking in Neopoints to paint my pets, I started making petpages and pet lookups and putting up custom art for all my pets. I would get struck with sudden solutions for character ideas and stories that had sat as vague concepts for years or even decades. I would go home after work and play Freaky Factory for three hours straight while listening to the Cats (2019) Soundtrack on loop. It was a Neopian fugue state. I spent November 2019 to March 2020, my last months of freedom in a Pre-Covid Lockdown world (not that I knew it), sitting on my laptop alone in my room playing Neopets dot com. And then the world ended and well I just kept playing neopets. Flash died at the same time and I just downloaded an alternate browser to run an old version. I couldn't be stopped. I worked on petpages on company time. I stayed up until 4am playing Meerca Chase II and gave myself heart palpatations. In hindsight I was actually really unwell wow. Where was I going with this.

By the time 2021 rolled around, I was making real progress on some of my eternal Neopian goals. I ended up trading for my first ever UC, a Mutant Scorchio. I later was selected as my first ever successful application for a UFA UC Baby Eyrie, and later still a UC Darigan Kau. During the application process I somehow convinced my friend Elliott to make an account and we fed into each other's obsession. I spent a really really stupid amount of money on a custom plush of my beloved Faerie Xweetok, Fofah_Xweetok, and the furry who made it went way off reference and made a heinous homonculus who looks nothing like my dear Fofah. (insert image). She arrived in the mail almost a year after ordering her, just in time for me to have JUST moved out of my parents house and remind me how I probably should have saved that money for the rent I now had to pay. But anyway.

I started seeing my girlfriend and then she ended up making an account for the first time in her life in 2023. I had 39 pets at this point, which I am considering my maximum, at least until every single one has their own custom lookup and some existence on at least one pet page. The site went through a massive change with their new leadership and UC pets became legally buyable. I got into Stamp Collecting. The site is becoming increasingly paywalled as time goes on but it's also the most active it's been in years. I attending the in-real-life Neopets 25th Birthday Part in my city. Sometimes people make the mistake of asking me what you do on Neopets dot com. It results in me holding them hostage for fifteen to forty five minutes and explaining the ins and outs of the gameplay and inevitably the Neopian Black Market. I'm just still playing Neopets every day. and I will until the end of the site or end of my life, whatever comes first.

• compile favourite posts
• compile favourite on-site items/images
• find more stamps and blinkies and graphics and stuff
• add more fun formatting if needed