Neopets: Bah, Humbug.

Neopets.com is an online virtual pet world that I joined all the way back in 2000, but had very little interest in when the selection of pets only ranged from cutesy to fruity. That is, until the introduction of "Mutant" pets, one of which I fell in love with at first sight:

With its flabby, corpsen body, bulging eyeballs and extremely weird mouth, the Mutant "Chia" neopet demanded that I actively participate in the website to raise one of my own, and it quickly became one of my top favorite creature designs.

...But the Neopets staff giveth and the Neopets staff taketh away. They were always a very unpredictable and finicky beast, prone to editing and re-editing their own creations without warning and without mercy.    Barely a year after the release of the mutant Chia, the site artists decided to give it a facelift into something they felt was more "marketable"; the sad, lowly abomination you see below:

Now more tasty vegetable than ghoulish mutant, I couldn't even bear to let my pixelated pal go on living this way and promptly put seventeen bullets through his skull.

That, or I changed him into something more tolerable, like this mutant Blumaroo. Whatever. The point is, there has never been anything else on Neopets that appeals to me anywhere near as much as the original mutated Chia, and neither my respect nor my interest for the game has ever fully recovered.    This piece of official artwork (also long deleted from their servers) sums things up nicely:

...But not as nicely as my "fan art" featuring Neopet's co-creator Donna Williams (unfortunately no longer working for the site, but let's blame her anyway) :

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