Feel like bitching and don't feel like dumping this on my Discord contacts so into the Sheezy journal it goes lmao. While I'm on a Neopets kick, I constantly see people shop around Grundo's Cafe as a cool alternative, but it always leave a bad taste in my mouth considering that from what I've seen of it, they kept a LOT of the racist stuff from classic Neo and only made very minimal changes that don't really do much of anything to address the problems.
Like, they changed one or two Desert pet designs, but the Lost Desert as a whole is still "orientalist ancient Egypt land where everyone's dressed in loincloths and pharaoh getup". They got rid of the Tombola guy but Mystery Island as a whole still has the "tikis and luaus" aesthetic. Like, their whole daily where they have the random singing Kyrii who makes references to corny white Tiktok teen music and meme songs could've been a good opportunity to reference actual Native Pacific Islander artists and give them spotlight, but I don't think anyone on the team actually wants to go to that level of effort.
While regular Neo is no saint in that regard and has a lot of grandfathered-in issues, I still side-eye them for keeping a lot of this stuff in while constantly making a big part of their platform and advertising "Being Classic Neo but more progressive" to the point where it gets pushed as that CONSTANTLY, not to mention the fact that they don't have the same problems that keep a lot of this from being fixed on regular Neo! They're not beholden to keep/redesign a little over two and a half decades' worth of on-site content given that it's a fanmade ground-up remake and they can easily pick and choose what they want to keep, not to mention they don't have to worry about any item redesigns messing with people's expensive customizations and (presumably) any redesign backlash getting directed primarily at fans of color and not the staff, AKA the main reasons why we likely haven't seen complete overhauls on Neopets yet. Just, if you're gonna talk the talk and hype yourself up as the cool, progressive alternative, you should put in the effort, you know?
And granted, some of my bitterness is also directed to seeing lots of casual and not-so-casual bigotry from avid players so like. Bad associations might also taint this but still.
At this point, I'm more or less caught up with my backlog of stuff I wanted to post on Sheezy! There's a few more things, but I either need to edit them or clean up/make some other things before I post them here lol. So, until then, I'm just gonna ramble about something else:
A few days ago, I finally completed a childhood goal nearly twenty years in the making, and that's finally completing my Jellybeanies collection! For some background, Jellybeanies was one of the fifty million Webkinz clones that came out during the mid-2000s, and had a scented plushie gimmick and some surprisingly detailed worldbuilding for a pretty basic virtual pet site. Each character had their own birthday and star sign, an element, and whole bunch of other unique tidbits in their character card, and the general aesthetics (element system! color-coded characters! cute fantasy world!) really appealed to me. I caught an ad for it while watching on-demand TV when I was seven, and became obsessed with the little guys! I'd ask for two new Jellybeanies every Christmas, and even though I didn't play on the website, I adored the plushies to bits. Unfortunately, the line quietly died off by the early 2010s with only one plush line to speak of, and also before I was able to get the last two beanies I needed: Peppermint Chocolate Penguin Palmer and Blue Orchid Bottlenose Dolphin Skye.
I ultimately managed to find a new-in-box Palmer on eBay in 2022, but had kind of given up on finding Skye. After all, the line was a flash-in-the-pan Webkinz clone that died not four years after it was made, and there was no way there'd be a huge market for any of that or anyone seriously selling these, right? I'd kinda made peace with that until one day, when I was talking about them with some friends, searched eBay for Jellybeanies on a whim... And found a lot with Skye, the very last Beanie I needed! She just came in today and is in super good quality, and once I figure out what box my last three beanies are in, I'm gonna do a photoshoot with my whole collection to celebrate!
Honestly, one day I'd like to get the rights to the series and revive it as like, a set of kids' books or a monster-catcher RPG or something, just because I feel they were way ahead of their time. If the series had been released like, a decade later, I'm sure they would've been huge hits with the kidcore/toycore crowd, and I'm taking this as my divine sign to do it (/j), considering that this happened right after I batted around a Jellybeanies rpg concept. Anyways, here's the commercial for the original line to leave things off.
Finally got through the better majority of my backlogged art that I wanted to upload, so now I'm moving on to mirroring my fics here!
That also has me wondering: is there a way to upload documents here that I missed, or at least paste them in a way that preserves formatting? It's admittedly kind of a pain to have to go back and reformat everything on long chapters...
Update: managed to find a way! Pasted my document into Wordhtml and copied the html-ified version, and that preserves all the formatting!
Situation: I'd paid for a sheezy subscription via patreon and linked my account, but my benefits aren't showing up on said account. I tried to contact staff about it via email, provided my receipt of purchase and everything, but never got a reply back afterwards (and this was like, a week and a half ago) and still don't have my benefits. Kinda worried I fucked something up because my patreon is tied to a different email than my sheezy account and I don't really know what else to do lmao.
EDIT: this got taken care of, thank you sheezy team!!!
Might as well advertise this. I've opened up quick doodle commissions on my kofi! Send me five bucks and I'll draw just about anything within reason! https://ko-fi.com/c/43796ecea4