More old PokéFusions. Most of these are face shots because the software that generated the fusion basically just put the face and color scheme of one sprite onto the body of another sprite.

Couple more old Neopets doodles.

Concept sketches for Hyren in both his blue and mutant forms. I just love the idea of Grundo antennae expressing emotion, such as lowering when a Grundo is annoyed or twitching if they're taken aback.

 I drew this for the Art Gallery, it didn't get in, and I'm not surprised because it doesn't make much sense out of the context of knowing who my Neopets are. But I still think it's funny. The Sway mess with society, but who messes with the Sway? Blynn, of course. :)

I hadn't done any Cookie Run fan art in a while, so here's Cloud Haetae Cookie from the super epic Mystic Flour Cookie storyline in Cookie Run: Kingdom. Her character design is so adorable. I know technically she's a villain, but I don't think she's a bad creature at heart; as a haetae, it's just her job to be loyal to the master of the Ivory Pagoda. And you can't dislike a creature that loves belly rubs.

 

Here's some old Cambrian fan art! <3 (Is it fan art or paleoart when you're doodling prehistoric critters just because you love them? I guess it's both.)

I liked how the Alalcomenaeus turned out so much that I made it into a painting, although I was working from some poorly preserved fossils so there's a lot wrong with the anatomy (missing great appendages and median eyes, telson is the wrong shape entirely, etc.). This is an extremely speculative reconstruction that definitely crosses the line into fanciful, but I just really liked the idea of a megacheiran with an iridescent carapace and brine shrimp-like feathery gills. You never know, it could have happened.

This was all from just one brief play session.

This kid is comedy gold.

 Move over, Calamity Ganon. This kid's got the destruction of Hyrule covered.

 To be fair, the game has the same effect on adults.

She doesn't really read the game text super closely. 

Consequently, everyone and everything in Hyrule has been renamed. 

 More old art. Someone on Neopets asked me to draw a robot Ixi, and I wasn't very good at saying "no" back then. Turned out pretty nice, though.

Thought I'd change it up a bit from the string of Zelda comics with more old art. Back in the day, someone created a "PokéFusion" web page that combined two different random sprites of Gen I Pokémon, and it became a thing in the Pokémon art community to draw these amusing hybrid creatures. I tried my hand at a few myself. 

After I posted my feelings about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and as I've been playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom with their impeccable game design, I got to thinking about what exactly goes into a great Pokémon game, and what I'd like to see in future installments of the main series.

 

She also kept calling Vah Rudania "Vah RuDaniel Tiger", but I couldn't figure out a way to make that work in-universe.

 

It's because there aren't any horses in the Divine Beasts, I'm sure.

Still trying to convince her that this isn't Dreamlight Valley and expanding Link's wardrobe isn't one of the primary objectives of the game.

Sometimes I think she just enjoys making us find new characters for her to hate on.

She also thinks Kass is creepy and weird?!?!

 Gotta love a kid bouncing around in front of the TV while you're in the middle of a boss battle.

 

Kid logic: If you didn't like a plot point, it didn't happen.

If only.

By the way, everything in these comics are either direct quotes or paraphrases from things she has actually said while we play.

She gives me so much material.

 

No gallant poses allowed with this kid.

Prince Sidon is actually one of my favorite characters in Breath of the Wild. It took a lot for me to not say anything while she was talking smack about him literally the entire time we were in Zora's Domain. To each their own I guess.

 

An old random character design. I didn't really have any concrete plans for this character; it was mostly just me toying around with cyberpunk armor. But then I started to put together ideas for a story about a futuristic Kyoto, Japan, where a government agency seeks to preserve the delicate balance between humans and yōkai (supernatural spirit creatures in Japanese folklore) a decade after a devastating war between the two, and I realized this armor design would work great for the agency's field ops unit.

 

We've been trying to help her understand that the clothing options in the game are less about Link looking cool and more about him trying to stay alive.

It's not working.

 Sheikah monks are creepy. But cool. But creepy.

 

What happens when you give your niece the controller.

 Turns out video games are super easy when you've got someone else doing all the legwork for you. :)

More old art, this time of a Neopets character so obscure he's not even canon anymore. Sir Bold Heart was one of several very old Collectible Cards with dated artwork which were replaced by newer cards; if I remember correctly, it was around the time of Champions of Meridell and they were replaced by Meridell-themed cards.

Honestly I think Sir Bold Heart could have stayed with updated artwork; he clearly fits the Meridell vibe.

More Neopets clothing items modeled by Neopets (surprisingly enough).

I've been rather busy lately, but I was finally able to get back to the Idaho Museum of Natural History for more paleo doodling!

They've got a great cast of a Prosaurolophus skull, and I figured I needed more hadrosaurs in my life. I also wanted to illustrate a hadrosaur showing some of the more recent discoveries about this group's anatomy, such as the ridge along its back and a soft-tissue crest. Also important is the fact that hadrosaurs had a keratinized rhamphotheca (i.e. a beak) which allowed them to crop off bites of the tough vegetation that made up their diet. Any paleoart you see with a hadrosaur having a flat, kinda flabby-looking duck bill is inaccurate. 

As a matter of fact (and I am aware this is purely personal opinion and most people don't care), it gets on my nerves when hadrosaurs are called "duck-billed" dinosaurs because in life, the front of their mouths would have more resembled a turtle beak. "Duck-bill" also conjures images of these guys wading through swamps and scooping up mushy plants, when it has been known for decades that they were fully terrestrial and ate conifers and the like. It's an inaccurate and outmoded nickname and I really think it's got to go.

Anyway, that's just me being pedantic. Again.

Some older doodles of Celice Anfel from my Neopets fics modeling some of the spiffy robes at Brightvale Armour (which, being Brightvalian, I imagine she shops there a lot). I think the rightmost one got into the Art Gallery?

More hijinks playing video games with my awesome (and slightly horse-obsessed) niece.

A few more old Neopets illustrations, based on Collectible Card characters.

Realizing that I started playing the website before Meridell was discovered makes me feel like, super ancient.

Sav'aaq! I've been on kind of a Breath of the Wild kick lately. Helping my sister and niece play through it is really fun; it's one of those games that's just really fascinating to watch other people play because no two people approach it in the same way. 

I think a big part of the game's charm and appeal is that, while on the surface it's an action RPG, in reality the gameplay reaches a much deeper level than most of the rest of its genre, putting an emphasis on creative utilization of the environment, lateral thinking, and applied physics principles. The fact that there's usually no one right way to approach a problem means that there are as many styles of play and ways the action can unfold as there are players--in other words, a groundbreakingly emergent RPG experience.

Unless you're my niece, in which case it's just a game about riding horses. :)

I was super thrilled to see the Gerudo make such a great showing in BotW! I have an affinity for warrior cultures (if you haven't guessed from a lot of my writing), and I love deserts, so I've thought the Gerudo were awesome ever since the bygone days of Ocarina of Time. I really love the treatment they got in BotW, with an expanded culture and lore and Urbosa being super epic (the fact that she shares a voice actress with Hollyberry Cookie just gives her extra awesomeness points). It was also fantastic to see the Gerudo portrayed as a protagonistic people with a lot of likeable traits, since (with the exception of Nabooru) they were pretty much antagonists during Ocarina of Time.

I haven't actually played Tears of the Kingdom yet, but my (other) sister says as soon as she's done with her copy, she'll lend it to me, so I'm psyched to dive back into Hyrule.

Until then, I am avoiding spoilers like the plague.

 

The conclusion of the Mystic Flour Cookie storyline in Cookie Run: Kingdom gave me all the feels! It was so awesome to see Dark Cacao reunited with his warriors. Poor guy definitely needs a hug after everything he's been through.

I'm also really glad Caramel Arrow and Crunchy Chip came back in the end; they're two of my favorite characters (and in a game where virtually every character is extremely well-designed, well-written, and well-voiced, that's really saying something). I absolutely hate when a franchise has no qualms about offing characters left and right (cough Harry Potter cough), and I was hoping Cookie Run wouldn't go down that path. And they didn't, because they're cool like that, and they're good about not letting their plotlines get too serious, which is one of the many reasons I like the IP so much.

A young Pokémon trainer and her trusty reality-altering companion.

Glitches like Missingno. in older video games were a big inspiration for the plot of Pixeldust. Back in the day, I really enjoyed exploring beneficial glitches that allowed the player to have an entirely different experience from what the developers intended (go anywhere as Fierce Deity Link, anyone?). It felt like I was tapping into an alternate universe that had manifested independently of the developers, as though the game had taken on a life of its own.

Which is basically exactly what happens in Pixeldust, where the main character utilizes a glitch to travel to maps in an MMORPG that aren't supposed to be accessible to the public yet, and creates her own alternate (and much more interesting) narrative to the game's otherwise really cliché plotline. I think that's kinda the secret dream of a lot of RPG gamers, honestly.

Currently helping my sister and niece play through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the first time. My niece is a hoot. These are all based on things she actually said.

Not pictured: "We have to find more Clorox and get lots of Clorox Seeds!"

Lo'gaan Shelumiel, princess of the moon elves of Kesh'tame Woodland and master ranger, and her sworn enemy General Noggerath, a mysterious orc warlord whose forces have invaded the peaceful land of Avonell to steal its pixiedust, which powers all the world's magic and technology. This is the plot of Heroes of Avonell, the super-advanced virtual reality MMORPG featured in my cyber fantasy novel Pixeldust.

I did this sketch because I've never drawn Noggerath and wanted to try out some stuff for his character design. Lo'gaan is also fun to draw; I based her outfit off of traditional Korean armor and clothing (the fictional development company who created Heroes of Avonell is based in South Korea).

Also, I wanted to announce that there is a new, revised version of Pixeldust coming out very soon! I recently re-read it and discovered that I wasn't really satisfied with the first edition; the prose is very clunky in spots, and there were some prime character development opportunities I missed out on. I also realized there were a number of parts that I'd altered from the original draft to go along with my editor's recommendations, but actually, ever since I published the first edition I hadn't been able to shake that it wasn't really how I wanted the story to go. And it feels very overwritten at times, like I was trying to solve problems in the original draft that didn't actually exist.

I'm not saying the editor didn't do a good job - she did a great job and really helped me polish the story development - but now I realize there were places where I should have stayed true to my original creative vision, instead of assuming that the editor was always right and that I had no idea what I was doing (I've gained a bit more confidence in my writing since then). So I've given the novel a bit of an overhaul, and I'm much more pleased with it now. I drastically changed some parts, including a big element of the ending, which I mostly did to lead in better to ideas for a sequel I've been tossing around.

As for Lo'gaan and Noggerath, I realized that their character arcs needed more substance and closure. In the revised edition (spoilers) Lo'gaan goes along with General Orsamus's descent into control-freak megalomania because she's distraught over being just an AI in a video game instead of a real special snowflake princess. But the protagonists - including Noggerath, who's not a bad guy and was only invading Avonell in a misguided attempt to save his own kingdom - help her understand that her true merit comes from her strength of character and honorable deeds, not a fake title of royalty and a fictional backstory. Noggerath saves her life after she helps them escape from Orsamus's forces, and offers her sanctuary at his home kingdom of Caed Dhraos. The two work together to protect Caed Dhraos from Orsamus, who has gone on a self-righteous power trip, and eventually end up a couple in a twist of irony. 

All of this was something I vaguely hinted at in the first edition, but in reading it again I felt like their character arcs just weren't coming through clearly enough and weren't emotionally satisfying, just hints of character development that seemed to be lurking under the surface but never properly manifested. I think my revisions soundly fixed that issue, however, as well as a lot of others.

The revised edition is not up for sale yet, but it should be soon. I'm very grateful for all the nice reviews the book has gotten, and I hope that this new edition will live up to those compliments even more than the previous one.

 Lately I've been musing about how cats are basically mammalian dromaeosaurs who figured out how to make all of their claws extendable, and then I just had to draw that.

Honestly I think cats and dromaeosaurs are really good analogues; they have similar ecological niches as small-to-mid-size hypercarnivores, and dromaeosaurs probably had a similar level of intelligence as cats (i.e. diabolical geniuses).

Of course, that means the logical conclusion is that they'd make great pets.

Koraidon from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. 

I didn't dislike Scarlet and Violet, but I also didn't think they were the strongest entries in the core series. I feel like they had some good ideas and timely innovations, but didn't implement them to their utmost effectiveness. 

My main issue with SV is that in a nonlinear massive open-world RPG format, there really needs to be more for the player to do, and more ways to flesh out the game world, than the main plotline. Scarlet and Violet gave no compelling incentive to stray outside the path from one plot goal to the next, except for (extremely repetitive) Tera Raid Battles and the (occasional, very sparse) NPC trainer battle. A generous amount of sidequests would have really helped pad out the main plotline content in a meaningful way, like in Legends: Arceus (which I greatly enjoyed). 

I know Scarlet and Violet were trying to do the whole Zelda: Breath of the Wild thing, but I think maybe the developers should have more carefully scrutinized the really smart design choices that make BotW such a fantastic game, including the fact that BotW uses copious amounts of side quests to encourage you to explore off the beaten path, making full use of its enormous world map. When I played Pokémon Violet, I felt like I was constantly having to invent excuses to not have to zoom straight to the next plot destination and finish the game too quickly, and a tightly-designed game should create those excuses for you.

In addition, I feel like Paldea was extremely lacking in lore and development past, basically, the personalities of the named NPCs and the main (a.k.a. only) plotline. It's a big place with really not a whole lot going on outside of its towns--or even in its towns, which are mostly just buildings you can't enter and soulless menu-based shops. This is a shame and a real downgrade after every other previous core series game was crammed full of helpful and entertaining NPCs, usually some sort of addictive side activity or two (I loved Black 2 and White 2's Join Avenue and Pokéstar Studios), and busy environments that really helped bring the world to life. Scarlet and Violet, for all their fancy graphics and massive overworld roaming, ultimately aren't a whole lot but landscape, and landscape alone does not make an immersive RPG experience. 

Another, more minor quibble is that I feel like the player character customization took maybe one step forward and one step back in Scarlet and Violet. I loved the ability to customize your character's facial features in a more involved way than just changing the eye color and makeup, but I hated that you were stuck wearing variations of your school uniform the whole time, and most of the accessories were just not appealing (neither were most of the hairstyles, to be frank). The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero introduced a paltry handful of new outfits and accessories, but not even being able to individually choose what top and bottom you're wearing just feels extremely restrictive after the customization systems in previous Pokémon games. Hopefully they won't do that again, because it's not the 2000s anymore; games nowadays certainly have the memory capacity to let your characters wear whatever you want.

In summary, Scarlet and Violet sort of have the vibe of being cautiously noncommittal, like the developers wanted to make a mechanically innovative Pokémon game but didn't dare to inject a significant amount of personality into it, maybe in an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. The problem is that when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one and making a really vanilla game that lacks a solid creative direction. I think I can speak for a lot of Pokémon fans when I say that what got me hooked on the franchise, and has kept me playing all these years, is the experience of exploring and being immersed in vibrant, lively worlds with plenty of quirky charm around every corner. Scarlet and Violet just don't give that same type of satisfaction; it's more an exercise in speaking to the like five NPC's in a city with unique dialogue, and then wandering off into vast empty spaces to train your Pokémon before heading for the next plot point. That's the sort of RPG gameplay model we outgrew in the 90's. In 2022, and from Pokémon, I expect more.

Honestly I want to see another Pokémon Gold/Silver(/Crystal) remake. Generation II was my favorite and I want more reasons to doink around in Johto. (I actually started playing Crystal again recently and fell in love with it all over again. Gen II was brilliant. We need more like it.)

Social media stinks.

I'm stepping away from social media until humanity can get its act together, and I'm writing this post to encourage you, dear reader, to critically examine how you use social media, how it is affecting you, and if there is anything you feel you should change about it. I don't enjoy being a Negative Nellie, but with the prevalence of social media in everyone's lives nowadays, I think it's a topic that requires serious consideration, and more people need to speak out about how much harm it can cause.

I don't think I would label myself a social media addict by any means. I could barely handle Facebook once a day. I really only signed up for Twitter/X because I was hoping more people on there would be interested in my work than on Facebook. I even had an Instagram account for a period of time, but deleted it because the spambot comments on my posts were super obnoxious--and I got more of those than comments from real people. Suffice to say I already had a pretty low opinion of social media in general, but lately my opinion has just gone through the floor, and I've finally realized that the handful of ways I benefit from social media are not worth the heinous drawbacks.

I'm posting this not to expect you to sympathize with my problems, but because recently I have been made increasingly aware of just how toxic and detrimental social media can be, and I want to spread awareness in my admittedly small sphere of influence, because one never really knows who one is reaching and how it is affecting them. I'm writing this because I care about you, reader, and your mental well-being. I'm giving you permission to take care of yourself.

Social media is an open forum, and humanity can't handle those right now. In an ideal world, everything people say would have value and meaning. In reality, mental illness makes a lot of absolute rubbish come out of some people's minds. And one of the really unfortunate things about social media is how it gives the illusion that said senseless rubbish is on equal standing with actual intelligent reason. 

Just as bad, it gives mentally ill people the opportunity to connect with other mentally ill people, giving them a community where their insanity is validated, enabled, and normalized, which is probably the worst possible thing one could do for them. Mentally ill people often use social media to say and do things they could never get away with in real life, and even if you're not actively engaging with these people, it's still harmful to constantly be exposed to their insanity on a daily basis. And it's so pervasive and insidious that no matter how much blocking and filtering you apply, junk still gets through appallingly frequently. 

I'm all for freedom of speech to the widest reasonable extent, and I'm not saying we should (nor is it really possible to) turn the Internet into a dictatorship, but I'm really uncomfortable sharing the same website with the likes of conspiracy theorists and political radicals. If sane people usually try to stay as far away as possible from mentally ill people in real life, why are we being forced to come in constant contact with them on social media? 

No matter how many times I try to tell the social media recommendation algorithms that I'm not interested, crazy people's posts keep showing up in my news feed as "recommended", I have to read their comments every time I go to write a sane comment, and whenever I post something, I kind of cringe a little inside not knowing what kind of weird comments it's going to get. Social media platforms have a long way to go in the realm of actually caring enough about their users' safety to crack down on nonsense.

Social media ironically decreases the quality of people's social lives. (More like antisocial media.) Clinical studies have shown that social media usage contributes to increased feelings of depression, social anxiety, and low self-esteem in teens, but those issues definitely don't stop on your 18th birthday. Even though social media promises to connect you with millions of other human beings around the world, it actually enhances feelings of loneliness and isolation as your connections with people are limited to shallow "likes" and "lols". The Internet creates a horrifying virtual (un)reality that psychologically manipulates you into thinking your interactions and relationships with other users are meaningful, when in actuality they see you as nothing more than a name on a screen and some entertaining words.

Social media does not guarantee increased success in your career. I have written many, many, many posts about my failed attempts to find an audience for my work online. I tried for ten years. I'm exhausted and I have yet to regain all the money I poured into promotional and advertising efforts. When I wrote my first novel, I was given the impression that the Internet would make it easy for an indie author to find an audience--all I had to do was post on social media and the readers would flock to my work. Well, that couldn't have been further from the truth. 

What social media actually does is establish a system wherein users are attracted to accounts that post aggressively, competitively, and on-trend--regardless of what those accounts are actually peddling. Fast food corporations with savvy (and well-paid) social marketing teams have gobs of followers liking their entertaining daily memes, while nobody cares when an author posts saying they published a novel. The priorities of the social media collective simply do not align with the priorities of anybody who values quality over quantity, and if you're not willing to attempt to run that insane rat race of social media content creation, you're going to get mowed over.

So yes, there are some serious flaws with social media--flaws which I could no longer ignore because they were causing me massive amounts of unnecessary stress. I may post on Facebook and X now and again, but they are definitely no longer part of my daily routine. Or even my weekly routine. And again, I strongly urge you, whoever you are, to consider stepping away from social media and finding some better uses of your time. Go outside and touch grass, people. Hug your family. Bake a cake. Visit a museum. Rediscover the wonderfully superior offline world around you.

Truth, context, perception, and planets

Rather differently from my usual fantasy doodles and occasional opinionated rants, today I've got a bit of an art history essay to share.

I recently watched a very intriguing and thought-provoking lecture by Randall Rosenfeld, archivist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, where he discussed the late 19th-century astronomical illustrations of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. (You can view a gallery of Trouvelot's lovely renderings here: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-trouvelot-astronomical-drawings-atlas)

At the crux of Rosenfeld's presentation was a question he had no satisfactory answer for: why are some of Trouvelot's illustrations almost photographic in their accuracy (such as the Orion Nebula), while others appear highly foreign and almost caricatures of their subjects' true appearance (such as Jupiter)? Trouvelot was a trained and very skilled artist, using the best telescopes of his time. When his lithographs were published, they were widely praised by professional astronomers who saw nothing wrong with the way he had depicted anything. Other artists before him actually rendered these subjects with more accuracy (you can see a good selection of early Jupiter artwork here), so what was going on?

Rosenfeld ended the lecture with the question remaining open. But as I was absorbing the information he presented, a hypothesis sprung into my mind and I wondered if it might not be along the right track. I emailed Rosenfeld but never heard back from him, so I'm posting the contents of that email here (slightly edited to read less like an email and more like a formal essay), in the hopes that maybe it will help someone along in figuring out the answer to this interesting historical conundrum.

 

Zoltan Arnyek, the darkness-aligned Halloween Kyrii battlemage from my Neopian Times series Shadow Play (the link goes to part 1; you'll have to navigate to subsequent Times issues to read the rest). I've actually also written him into a few other Neopets fics that I never submitted to the Times; I'll put them here on the blog eventually.

Zolt looks like a villain, but he's actually a goodhearted warlock who cultivated his dark powers and let the wild turn him into a Werekyrii in order to gain the upper hand against evil magic users that he spends most of his time hunting down in the Haunted Woods. He's an old associate of Isengrim's, and while at first in Shadow Play he's grouchy and distrustful, Terra's family helps him understand that it's okay to have friends, and while it's noble to put other people first, it's also important to take care of yourself so you can be there for the people who need you.

Zoltan has absorbed so much darkness magic that it quite literally flows through his veins and causes glowy streaks in his skin and mane. Between his mastery of spellcasting and his excellent swordsmanship, he's not somebody you want to be up against in a fight. He's also a great example of how none of the Neopian magic elements are inherently good or evil; it's got everything to do with the intentions of the spellcaster (Skoll, for example, was a rather nasty earth mage). 

Also, he's surprisingly good at embroidery; the designs on his cloak and vest are his handiwork. It's not just for fun, though--the designs are actually protective spells, which he uses in lieu of armor. Zoltan was a fun character to develop and I enjoy writing him when he pops up on occasion.

 

Another old sketch, some humans in Neopets wardrobe items. (I wish the Space Grundo outfit looked that good on Hyren, but his site artwork makes him so stubby.)

Some old Pokémon illustrations. I maaaaay have submitted something (not one of these) to the Pokémon TCG illustration contest last year. Would be cool if I placed. I guess we'll see when they announce the results later this year.

 

Here are some old sketches of anthro Neopets wearing customization items from the website.

I will be completely honest, I feel like the idea of allowing you to dress up your Neopets sounded fun on paper, and the old site artists came up with some really lovely clothing items (as evidenced here), but I think a lot of the clothes just didn't translate well into the fact that on the website, owned Neopets have much more animal-like physiologies than many canon characters. As a result, wardrobe pieces that would look really good on something shaped more like a human just come across as a bit doofy on, say, a stubby-legged quadruped or a cartoony-proportioned dinosaur.

For example, back when I still played the website, it annoyed me that the real(?) Blynn's pose had her sitting on her haunches, so any tops, pants, or skirts I put on her made her look squat and fat, when Zafaras are actually quite svelte. Clothes looked just as bad on Hyren, and it didn't help that the new Grundo artwork gives them even shorter torsos than before, when I consistently imagine Grundos looking like Gorix from the Return of Dr. Sloth plot. There's a huge discrepancy between how Neopets are portrayed in canon material and the graphics used for user-generated Neopets, and you can't just slap clothes on the latter and assume it'll come across the same as the former. 

I just feel like overhauling the pet graphics and introducing a dress-up system was unnecessary, somewhat devalued painted pets who used to have unique (i.e. non-palette-swap) artwork, and in many cases actually made the species designs less appealing (cough Zafaras and Grundos cough). Unfortunately, it was a decision probably made by the fact that offering wardrobe items for real money would likely be a great source of revenue, because plenty of site players aren't as pedantic about design as I am and just want to stick some shiny clothes on their virtual pet.

I mean, it worked, and that's where most of Neopets's revenue has likely been coming from since they introduced pet customization, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

At least it's better than (shudder) NFTs.

/opinionated rant

Character design for a story idea I've been tinkering with. Cyberpunk kitsune because why not?