gremdark

I've suspected that the modern "adoptable" is a several-generations removed descendant of 90's and early 2000's "cyberpets," but as a kid I mostly only ever interacted with free-to-adopt pets that could be adopted by an infinite number of people; I was aware limited-quantity pets via application submissions and "breeding" were available, but I have fewer memories of them because I didn't really have a website to participate in them with. (I just saved the free pets on my hard drive, lmao.) It's very similar to how limited adoptions have existed in the Petz Community since at least 1998, but I mostly just downloaded free petfiles or breedfiles that didn't require talking to people.

(kalium has talked about similar levels of rarity and scarcity existing with roleplay characters in fantasy animal forum RP of the era, which is 100% a related phenomenon... just one I've been exposed to less on my own end.)

The problem with researching cyberpets? It's hard to find evidence via search engine that they ever existed. I keep getting results for some very recent take on the "robot toy dog" concept being sold under that name, as well as unrelated garbage articles and images that happen to have good SEO. Robot dogs (and other robot pets like Furbies, and virtual pets like Tamagotchi, etc) were part of a general Y2K fascination with virtual animals, but they are not even a little bit the same thing as a cyberpet. A cyberpet is a funny little image file that lives on the internet, got it? Some are just static pngs, some have "mechanics" that are roleplayed by the creator and adopter, some of the later forms of cyberpet whole website backends like Dragon Cave or Neopets. Bunnyhero Labs even had interactive Flash-based cyberpets. But a cyberpet is, at its core, an picture of an animal on a website, with some kind of certificate or verification showing that you've "adopted" it and that it's yours. (Even if it's one of the ones can be adopted by infinite people, you often get a little adoption certificate to put on your page next to it.)

But... I think I just found some evidence that backs up my theory of adoptables being an evolution of cyberpets?

There was a cyberpet marketplace. They used fake currency, not real money, but still. You have the concept of character designs as a good that can be bought, sold, and traded! Right here at the dawn of the 21st century!

The Market

Welcome to the Market, a unique place where one may buy, sell, and trade various creatures.

How it works
If you wish to participate in the market you must send in a form requesting registration. After becomming a member, you will recieve a certain number of credits. Credits can be used to purchase goods and livestock of many varities. As a member, you will recieve 100 credits(c.) on the first of each month. That means everyone gets 100 credits every month just for being a member! Yes, I did change it back from three to prevent inflation. Credits can be obtained in many ways:

Wyvern Breeding- Breeding wyverns is an interesting and profitable buisness. You start by purchasing a pair(or more) of the creatures from the market. Females may lay eggs once every month, after paying a small fee. They may lay up to 10 eggs and the owners have the option of selling the eggs or hatchlings to other members of the Market. Wyverns, if they are available, can be found in the Roost.
Selling Livestock- Selling a creature that YOU MADE. Adds for creatures may be placed on the board below. The livestock auction is now open! If you wish to sell an item, please do so on the Livestockboard.Also, auctions are to be posted ONLY on the auction board.
Doing a Favor for Yours Truly- If you wish to do a trade with me dirrectly or if I ask you for help with something, you can earn some credits. Just dont bombard me with a hundred trade requests please ~.~

I, DragonSpyrit, must be notified of ALL transactions via the form that will soon be posted below or Email. You must tell me how many credits a person spent, who they were, and who you are. The 5c. selling fee has been deactivated. I will also be keeping running lists of your credit totals.

Also, please keep in mind that the Livestock board is the main part of The Market, not the Roost.The roost is down again due to the fact that DS is overwhelmed with stuff to do. Id appreciate it if no one complained, concidering that I get no money fro wyvern sales and it takes 20 minutes to draw, scan, color, upload, and put each wyuvern up on the page.

(I've left all of the misspellings on the original page as is...)

Here's an example of a "market stall" for boutique cyberpets. You can definately see how the concepts at play here have evolved into new forms later down the line, right? And here's another market stall, and yet another.

BTW: That last site, Clearwater? Also has a bunch of free-to-take cyberpets, which is the main thing I remember it for. If you have a website, consider adopting one! I always liked the Glerit on the "canyon" page of the site. There's also two secret pages with secret pets...

If you're into smallweb/oldweb stuff, consider adopting and making free cyberpets! They're such an iconic part of early web culture for me, as irremovable from my nostalgic conception of my childhood as dubbed anime and Nintendo games are to a lot of my age-peers. And you know what? I never see them acknowledged on the intentionally nostalgic throwback sites people make at all. Never! They're literally collectible gifs, don't people love those? Cmonnnn you wanna make a web page for magic animals so baaaaad

Current Mood: nostalgic

james_davis_nicoll

One character in my Outgunned game gets a laptop as part of his starting gear. Game is set in 1977 so I told the university age player he could have a programmable calculator or a slide rule.

"What's a slide rule?"

ysabetwordsmith

dialecticdreamer is hosting Magpie Monday today with a theme of "Loose Threads." Leave prompts, get ficlets!

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Current Mood: busy

rocky41_7

I collect false treasures in empty wardrobes.

This quote by Paul Eluard opens book #14 from the "Women in Translation" rec list, which continues to fatten up my TBR list. This is Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho, translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. This novella, originally published in the 1960s, is about the ways in which women are subsumed by the men in their lives, or otherwise are buffeted about with less control over their lives than they ought to have.

The forward by Kate Zambreno is a wonderfully complementary piece. She talks about the anger she feels going to a woman's funeral and hearing the dead woman sanctified by men in her life who did nothing but take from her, who can speak of her only to praise what she did for others, and can say nothing about what the woman herself was.

Sometimes you can read a book and just know the author was angry when she wrote it. This is one of those. The book uses the phrase "discreet rage" about one of its characters, and I think that sentiment succinctly describes the whole book. The protagonist, Dora Rosario, is ten years into widowhood, and she has devoted her entire life to mourning her unremarkable husband as much as she had previous devoted her life to supporting his every opinion regardless of whether or not she agreed with it. Now, a decade on, her mother-in-law reveals something about Dora's late husband that changes her entire perspective.

I would like to believe we are moving away from the world portrayed in Empty Wardrobes (though not with as much success as I'd like), but this is a stark reminder of how even a few generations ago, in the Sixties, a woman's identity was so controlled by her husband's. There are only two men in this book--Duarte, Dora's dead husband, and Ernesto, the longtime partner of a side character--and they both, through social structures, exercise incredible control over the lives of the women around them without any respect or even knowledge of their impact.

The three main women in this book--Dora, her daughter Lisa, and the narrator--each take a different approach to the male romantic partners in their lives, and none of them comes out the better for it (well, perhaps for Lisa, but I personally doubt it will last), because the ultimate problem is societal attitudes about the way men and women are meant to relate to each other.

It's not a long book, and I can't say much more without spoiling things, but I also think it does some fabulous things with its narration and perspective, and the way it doles out information. Really an excellent framing that allows for a lot of fluidity and filling in gaps with your own visions while remaining clear in the nature of the story it's telling.

This book was only translated into English in 2021, which is a shame, because I think it would have struck a nerve much earlier, but we have it now! Costa does an excellent job with the work too; the writing is full of punchy phrases like the above, and she captures some realistic dialogue--characters repeating themselves, responding in ways that don't quite match up with what was asked, etc.--while keeping it natural-sounding.

ysabetwordsmith

These poems are spillover from the January 6, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. They were inspired and sponsored by Anthony Barrette. They also fill the "Up the River" square in my 1-1-26 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. These poems are the first batch in the collection Haiku for Natural Monuments of Japan.

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Current Mood: busy

ysabetwordsmith

This poem is spillover from the January 6, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by

janetmiles. It also fills the "Soup to Nuts" square in my 1-1-26 card for the Public Domain Day Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the Big One and Mercedes threads of the Polychrome Heroics series.

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Current Mood: busy

hannah

Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

Top Ten Times I Called It In And Walked Away

In no particular order, not alphabetical, chronological, or according to any level of importance -

1. Supernatural - I know people who watched it all and my hat's off to them, but after season eight, I knew it wasn't for me anymore.

2. Teen Wolf - sometime in season three or four, it went from being a show on MTV to an MTV show, and I was done.

3. House - end of season five or six, when not only had the characters grown stale, but the lighting had gone sour.

4. True Blood - somewhere in there, between seasons, I realized I couldn't do it anymore.

5. Game of Thrones - for all that I was enjoying myself, I realized it was a provisional, conditional love, and the creators had violated the last of those provisions.

6. Marvel comic movie adaptations - animated and live-action Spider-Man movies, Deadpool, the X-Men region, TV shows, the MCU as a whole. Much like House, the lighting's sour and the characters aren't nearly as much fun to watch anymore. I'll still come back from time to time, and leaving the movies is different from leaving the fandom, and it's not my fault they set standards that they then failed to meet.

7. X-Men comics in general and Joss Whedon in particular - because even though I watched Buffy and Angel long after walking away from Whedon, I knew from seeing him kill off a character he said he loved writing that he wasn't someone I could trust anymore, and when Marvel gave the go-ahead for that move on top of all the other repeated future ends of the world, I knew I couldn't trust them either.

8. No small number of fandom-based podcasts - because I don't have much patience for "um" and "like" and "you know" and other such filler words when I know you've taken notes and prepared for this well in advance, and you've also set up multiple Patreon tiers. When there's money involved, I expect you to use your time better than that.

9. Stargate Atlantis - because for all the raw entertainment value it offered, that value came tempered with a feeling of obligation and a gradual lack of playfulness - which can be done, provided the show commits to being more serious. I didn't get a sense of that.

10. Doctor Who - because the tidal nature of the show meant it'd gone out, and I never bothered to wander back to find if it's come back in, which told me all I needed to know about how much I'd enjoy spending more time with it.

Let me emphasize this isn't an anti-rec list, this isn't a set of warnings about not getting into something to begin with, this isn't even much of a set of complaints. This is something that, for all the frustrations involved, makes me happy because learning to know when to stop is a very grown-up skill. Knowing when you need a break or you've had enough takes work, and acting on that takes additional work. It's something that can be applied to situations more serious than a TV show - a friend who's no longer fun to hang out with, a job that's draining you dry. Walking away from something that ultimately doesn't mean much makes it easier to do it for something significantly more serious.

I could probably come up with another five or ten without much trouble, but if I did, it'd turn into an airing of grievances instead of a meditation on learning a new skill in a safe, controlled environment.