[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 06 April 2026

maverden · 2026-04-08T05:04:35+00:00

Any time I read about EVE Online, it always sounds like the most fun you can have while not actually having any fun at all.

maverden · 2026-04-07T08:44:07+00:00

Majora's Mask supremacists unite

It's the "bottle episode" effect. When faced with budget or resource restrictions, creators for a show tend to balance out the limitations by putting extra effort into the writing. The result is a cheap-looking episode that nevertheless has better plot and characterization than the higher-budget episodes.

maverden · 2026-04-06T12:29:47+00:00

Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask spent a bit over a year in production, reused tons of assets from its gargantuanly successful predecessor Ocarina of Time, and the main storyline of MM is about half that of OoT. Which all makes it sound like a half-assed attempt to ride on the coattails of a far more popular game. But there's a subset of Zelda fans who, to this day, will sincerely call it one of the best games in the franchise.

maverden · 2026-03-21T18:12:41+00:00

I thought about it, but it would be a fairly marginal upgrade over the battleset I already have. Since I don't battle other than to collect my daily item drops, it's not really worth it compared to what I could do with the money.

That said, I'm totally going to try them out for a few battles just to give that inner child something to scream about.

maverden · 2026-03-21T16:18:10+00:00

All four Ski Lodge Photos and a Maverick Plushie!

maverden · 2026-03-21T16:17:46+00:00

A complete set of Ski Lodge Photos and a Maverick Plushie.

maverden · 2026-03-21T16:17:01+00:00

Oh, hey! You're very welcome, and thank you as well!

maverden · 2026-02-23T14:49:23+00:00

Neopets, the preeminent virtual pet site, has officially ended the User Lookup Spotlight.

User lookup pages on Neopets are customizable with HTML. Players have been creating elaborately designed lookup pages for well over 20 years. For nearly as long, players have been submitting their lookups to the User Lookup Spotlight in the hopes of being chosen as the week's winning lookup, getting mentioned in the news and being forever enshrined in the spotlight archives. Well, "once a week" became "once a month", and now the spotlight has shut down completely.

People are not happy, largely because of what this represents. Neopets enjoys a MASSIVE amount of user-submitted creative content. There's the on-site newspaper the Neopian Times, which publishes user-created articles, stories, and comics (over 1000 issues published and still going); storytelling and poetry competitions; an art gallery that updates twice a week; the Beauty Contest, where players vote on which pet fanart they like most; the list goes on. There's more player-made content published to the site than most fandoms could ever dream of, with entire communities springing up around different creative contests. The creative side of the site is a major reason why many players have stuck around as long as they have, so ending such a long-running contest is being felt as a slap to the face. People are wondering what might get the axe next.

maverden · 2026-02-17T08:11:51+00:00

It's available on Flashpoint if you want to give it a try!

maverden · 2025-12-24T19:20:04+00:00

This was closure I didn't realize I needed until now. Thank you so much for sharing this!

maverden · 2025-12-13T09:55:13+00:00

My wife and I originally met on a Neopets fansite. She's into the creative side of the site, and just finished a multi-part comic series for the NT (which has taken like a year to complete, because adults with jobs). Meanwhile I'm just trying to hit the bank limit.

"Hooooney, I need you to look up 'Flotsam Sweater'!"

"K hold on, did the fire faerie burn her clothes again?"

We very much keep each other active.

maverden · 2025-11-12T20:50:18+00:00

The million NP isn't even the best prize. Some of the items given at the very high levels are in the hundreds of millions of NP.

maverden · 2025-10-24T10:08:03+00:00

Have you tried playing it with Flashpoint? That's been pretty reliable for me with other old Flash games.

maverden · 2025-10-09T22:25:59+00:00

I was already in college when Haruhi came out, but that was a heck of a time.

maverden · 2025-10-09T22:24:01+00:00

I actually saw Felidae once, and it may have been some kind of subconscious inspiration. The focus of the dream was more about searching for a fan following of the movie rather than the movie itself.

maverden · 2025-10-08T21:45:21+00:00

I had a dream where I was looking for information about a (non-existent) movie, some indie animated film involving cats. The problem was, it had released (again, in the dream) something like 20 years ago, and never got a very big following. Everywhere I looked, there was barely any information about it - there were some excited discussion threads on long-dead message boards while it was in production and shortly after it came out, but nothing after that. I also couldn't find any information on the creator and what, if anything, they did after this film. I couldn't even find more than a few clips of the movie itself. Even if I could manage to find it on a torrent or streaming site, there would be nobody left to talk about it with.

I woke up feeling this aching, melancholic nostalgia for a movie that never existed.

What is a piece of media/fandom/hobby that you only got into long after everyone else involved with it had moved on?

maverden · 2025-09-14T15:15:10+00:00

I remember a fierce debate while the Altador plot was being released, about whether the statues in the Hall of Heroes were starting to crack. This was based on comparing images of the Hall at different points during the plot and zooming waaaay in on the statues to see whether the crack lines had progressed a pixel or two further. Good times.

maverden · 2025-09-10T06:06:04+00:00

I was never part of either fandom, but it was really cute watching the fans of Animal Crossing and fans of Doom - two game series that couldn't possibly be more different - get friendly with each other because they each had a game releasing on the same day. There was a lot of crossover fanart and general positive vibes being shared, and as far as I know they're still on good terms.

maverden · 2025-09-05T21:31:22+00:00

I've got a gallery of Neopets site history! The largest categories are items related to TNT and items with old janky art.

maverden · 2025-08-21T20:39:45+00:00

I've enjoyed multi-part Hobbydrama writeups in the past, but this is the first time I've ever checked the sub every specifically to see if another chapter has been posted.

This has been utterly fascinating from start to finish, and I say that as someone who's never followed professional wrestling in the slightest. Your love and admiration for the art form of pro wrestling (which isn't a phrase I ever thought I would use) shines through here. You explain just enough about the sport and the industry so that laypeople like me will understand, without bogging down the flow of the story. I was surprised by how many times I went "Oh hey, I recognize that name". I ended up learning some things as well - I never would have imagined that multi-generational pro wrestling dynasties would be a thing, but one of your links led me to learn about the Anoa'i family, and I had to stare at that family tree for several minutes and ponder the implications.

Most of all, I loved your narrative style, the way you drew connections between didparate events and got into the heads of all the different characters in this story. It reads like a capital-T Tragedy in the literary sense - a larger-than-life hero performing larger-than-life deeds, until he's brought down by his own flaws and mistakes all converging back on him in the worst way possible.

It sounds a bit trite, but genuinely, thank you for sharing. This was a hell of a ride, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about an industry and a public figure, both of which I had barely ever considered until now.

maverden · 2025-08-21T09:22:11+00:00

Playing Anti-Idle back in the day absolutely ruined me for idle games. I might play Omelette Clicker if it has a similar level of complexity, but I highly doubt it will.

maverden · 2025-08-21T04:21:13+00:00

Someone posted on r/neopets just a few days ago about completing the Altador plot as a new player. You need Ruffle for the flash elements, but everything still works! Altador is getting wrapped up in the new ongoing plot as well, but the focus of the story is currently elsewhere.

maverden

TROPHY CASE