the more time i spend on neopets the more the entire place feels deeply fucking haunted. it's not just "99% of the 100k max users are millennial adults chasing the sweet high of nostalgia, same as you" it's that. the site is old. it's the Appalachian mountains of the internet. there's older geocities sites and the like still kicking around, I'm sure, but I don't know anything on the scale of neopets, a site that is the digital equivalent of two vast trunkless legs of stone in the desert, and that isn't only because entire sections of the website haven't been touched in two decades
there's some strange, inexplicable emotion that stirs within me every time I look at the item listing (on an entirely separate website, because neopets only exists on the sufferance of websites created to prolong its agonizing half-life), for something that is over twenty years old, so vanishingly rare it might as well not have ever existed, and even the best databases don't know what the item was for, or what it does. Some of these items don't even have images! They'd be old enough to drink, if they existed!
What's the emotion? Nostalgia? Not exactly. Even as a kid, I was never playing at the level to be able to afford or win these items, due to a condition known as Being Seven Years Old. A mix of bittersweet tenderness for an ancient ruin that used to be a playground in living memory? A constant awareness how the digital age is sand slipping through our collective fingers? All that and more!
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