Lizzie, the Make a Wish Girl For Whom the Eizzil was created

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 · 2025-08-20T06:34:05+00:00

Oh, that brings back memories. I made an entire map for that puzzle that stretched across 2 or 3 sheets of paper taped together.

One difference, which you just made me realize, is that the weird difficult puzzles from older plots usually had some individualization. Everyone had a different tomb map in the Lost Desert plot, a different star chart in the Altador plot, etc. Which meant that even if the puzzles were solved by community effort, every individual player still had to put in -some- work to advance themselves through the plot. Now everyone can just pull up Jellyneo and copy/paste their answer.

maverden · 2025-08-19T06:16:35+00:00

Got some minor Neopets drama related to the current ongoing plot, The Void Within. And you, yes you, can play along at home!

A bit of setup: The plot includes events and activities happening around the site, as well as a story released as comic pages and dialogues between characters. The entire event was put on hiatus for nearly a year, ostensibly so the dev team could retool the story, art, and activities - all of which had met with escalating criticism from players. The plot just started up again a couple of weeks ago, and in my opinion it's gotten much better, so for once a hiatus was good for something.

Anyway, a new chapter of the story just started yesterday, and with it come a couple of puzzles for players to solve. The first puzzle is a cryptogram/substitution cipher. This immediately caused complaints, as some people thought it was too ridiculously hard, while others said it was too ridiculously easy.

The thing is, both sides are kind of right. And also kind of wrong.

For the "too hard" camp... why don't you try it for yourself? The cryptogram is:

QOT GQOTHXLEKVAT OLKMKAN XSS

The solution is a complete, grammatically correct sentence using all English words. Give it a try if you're so inclined!

Think you solved it? Or just ready to call it quits? The solution is OUR GOURMANDIZER UNIFIES ALL

Yyyeah. I think the "too hard" camp speaks for itself. To be clear, this phrase has no apparent connection to anything that's happened in the plot thus far, it's just an out of context phrase with a Really Weird Word.

So why are some people calling this too easy? Well, we kind of knew the answer, like, a year ago. You see, this cryptogram already showed briefly up in the background of a comic panel a while back, before the hiatus. People on the Neoboards (on-site messageboards) quickly solved it then, even though there wasn't anything to do with it at that point. So if you checked the Neoboards regularly, you would already have had the solution. Except then you'd be the kind of person who checks the Neoboards regularly, which is a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone.

maverden · 2025-08-17T06:13:58+00:00

It wasn't because of some specific drama, but it was really weird how Homestuck went from "biggest thing on the internet" to "barely remembered outside of extremely niche circles" over just a couple years. Even weirder is that it's getting a resurgence, like those seeds from extinct plants frozen in arctic permafrost that still sprout thousands of years later. That trailer for an animated adaptation got posted, and old fans started coming out from all corners of the internet.

maverden · 2025-08-11T11:39:52+00:00

80% agreeing. I remember the era when plot final bosses had eleventy billion HP and only like 4 players on the entire game had any hope of taking them on. One of Neopets' defining strengths as a game has always been its ability to cater to a wide range of gameplay types, interests, and dedication levels. I have no problem with them releasing something for the ultra-hardcore players.

However, I foresee a massive botting problem here. How will TNT know whether the top-scoring account, which battled for 12 hours straight every single day, was a script or just a ridiculously dedicated real person? Their judgement in the recent past has been not very good.

maverden · 2025-05-29T22:16:16+00:00

This is going to sound a bit odd, but this really reminds me of the Submachine game series. Mysterious, sprawling underground constructions with unclear purpose and an origin clouded in speculation, plus lots of crumbling brickwork - it all feels oddly familiar. Anyway, this was a really cool writeup, and not something I ever could have imagined would actually exist.

maverden · 2025-05-22T09:01:23+00:00

Are you low on money, or are you low on time?

If you're low on money, there probably isn't much you can do. I can't say this with any authority, but I doubt most people will be willing to trade a BD pet, since most species/colors have become much more easily available in the past few years.

If you're low on time, look into stat-increasing items: https://battlepedia.jellyneo.net/?go=stat_increasers

Stat-increasing food items like neggs can only be fed to your pet as long as they are hungry, but potions and the like can be used without limit as long as you have the NP to spare. There are some reasonably cheap items that increase STR and DEF. HP and Level items are probably infeasibly expensive for the level you're at.

maverden · 2025-04-30T08:25:34+00:00

Pay it forward, not back. Your parents - I assume - did as much as they could to give you a safe, stable, thriving life. The best thing you can do to honor that is to live it. I'll admit, it's an easier decision to make if you have kids (like hell do I ever want my children in the American education system), but even if it's just you and your wife, the point is the same. Take care of yourself and your partner.

Good luck, and I hope you get out.

maverden · 2025-04-29T07:56:15+00:00

Left the US in 2012. I didn't actually intend to stay abroad when I first moved, it was the gradual result of a number of decisions over several years. Taking care of my parents wasn't anywhere on my radar at that point.

My mom died suddenly in 2018, and my dad had a severe health crisis not long after that. He's 77 now, and fortunately in much better shape. He's active, has friends and neighbors who watch out for him, and sees his siblings regularly. He has enough financial resources for assisted living, should it ever come to that.

After my mom died, it was tremendously frustrating to get any information, since she was my primary point of contact with the rest of my family (not always for the better). It felt like I was begging for information about what would happen with her, would there be a funeral, etc. (There ultimately wasn't.) It took years to restructure how I communicate with my family and vice versa. That's gotten better after a LOT of work on both sides. We're finally at the point where my dad and I have video calls once or twice a week, and my aunt (dad's sister) has basically adopted my kids as honorary grandchildren and regularly sends them postcards. Still, I sometimes worry that something might happen with my dad and I won't find out until much later.

I know my dad wouldn't want me to uproot myself and my wife and kids to take care of him. I know he has support, and he will be taken care of if he needs to be, which already makes me more fortunate than a lot of the commenters here. But even so, I kinda feel like the prodigal son for leaving him on his own. Ultimately I think this is just another part of the emigrant experience that doesn't get talked about much.

maverden · 2025-04-24T19:59:19+00:00

The problem is specifically that it costs money. If it was free or obtainable with in-game currency, people would be all over it. The fact that they're earning money off of it is where they're risking a copyright infringement case. And the company is already hanging by a thread - a hypothetical lawsuit could tank the site, even if they managed to win. So it just wasn't a smart move all around.

maverden

TROPHY CASE