Neopets Retrospective

 

I normally talk about movies and cartoons from the previous decade but I feel it’s time that’s time to discuss something that’s more  exclusive to the 2000s, and that’s the popularization of the internet. I know it’s been around since the 90s, but back then it’s mainly used for pornography and black market goods. I know that’s still the main use to many but as the 2000s decade was progressing, all these new websites were coming along, many of which was for social networking that wasn’t something most kids were going into, so what kids really had then was this wonderful browser-based animal RPG called Neopets. It’s where I went onto the internet when I was young. Neopets was probably riding off the super popularity/success that was Pokemon. Neopets was a site where we could have virtual pets, and there was a large world there that we could do quite a bit in… it was just a quirky early internet site made for college students…

A transcript from the video which I found earlier today about Neopets, and I want to write a bit about it as I think it’s a good starting point/back story to the virtual part of my project.

I think Neopets.com is the virtual equivalent of a physical childhood play thing for some people my age. If you asked them what is their earliest internet memory, perhaps it will be Neopets. Like Pokemon, Neopets is made up of fictional world that is richly inhabited with creatures, items and many more. I didn’t own a GameBoy when I was a child, but once in a while when I meet my cousins, I would borrow their GameBoy and play Pokemon on it. We would take turns playing it and while it was quite fun, I never fully experience the fun of being a Pokemon trainer. But I had a computer at home and my cousin got me onto Neopets. I became so obsessed with it, and I was absolutely enchanted by this rich world. That was in 2004 when I was ten years old.

Anyway I could go on about why I loved Neopets so much, but it is quite embarrassing and I remembered being called a ‘Neopets freak’ in primary school, and it’s not the main idea of this entry… But what I eventually took away from my Neopets-crazed days was learning how to code stuff. There was a page on the website that taught users basic CSS and HTML (things couldn’t get that complicated on a web browser then anyway), which they could apply on their user profiles to beautify it. Looking back, I thought this was a very interesting way to get users to personalize their profiles. I’m not sure what was the reason behind encouraging players to use coding to change their colours of the text and add web links. As a young girl, I was drawn to making my user profile pretty and stuff, so I had to learn these basic tips and I think that really got me interested with web pages and web design. I didn’t have a topic that I was interested in, so I dedicated most of the web pages I made to my dog. I took pictures of my dog and put them on the web page, and accompanied the photos with stories about her. neopetshtml

Anyway, I got really carried away making all these web pages. But it was all in good fun, and I eventually quit playing Neopets, moving on to making more of these webpages for good.

I wish I had screenshots for all these stuff. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to embark on the virtual part of my project. The Internet is brilliant, and with it, we are able to keep track of data. I quoted Deyan Sudjic previously about the immortality of data on the virtual reality, but I sometimes feel that paradoxically, all of these data is quite ephemeral, as objects of memory. They are more fleeting than physical things: a piece of Post-It someone left for you, or a piece of jewellery your aunt gave you. The concept of time and relevance on the Internet is perceived differently than in reality. Once something is updated, and new things come along, you can’t really find an old version anymore. Things get old quickly on the Internet. Servers and domain spaces have a time limit. My old websites can never be retrieved again because the free web hosts I were using were either gone, or were developed into something else. I tried to keep backups of my artworks on the Internet on a thumb drive, but I lost it ages ago. Amongst various attempts of rebooting my virus-infected computer also leads to the loss of data over the years. What I have now is my blog, my Internet journal. Even the media I upload have a shaky, unpredictable life span. Old pictures from 2005 cannot be retrieved, because the servers have died. I thought my blog would be the most appropriate thing I can use to talk about this ephemeral nature of Internet memory, because I have been using my blog for a long time, and given it’s time and space on the virtual realm, it is quite a relic. The rest of my Internet ventures have been very short-lived, relevant for the time that it was popular.

Neopets’ rich fantastical world also retains the nostalgic and innocent quality of childhood playthings, albeit on a digital space. When it became really popular back then with children, it was labeled as a website with ‘sticky content’ that got children to spent hours and hours per week on it (children like me). Comparatively speaking, the effects of Neopets on young people is nothing compared to websites like Tumblr and applications like Instagram, both of which are used widely by many young people. Tumblr is also a rich world full of content pertaining to real-life and popular culture. It is a mass Internet media of unfiltered content, which can be a good and bad thing. For example, pornography .gifs are a popular thing on Tumblr. Skinny inspiration is also popular on the website.  I mean, I’m no prude or anything, but I find it quite worrying that such content are so easily accessible to anybody. Along with the few other popular social websites, it generates and feeds a culture that thrives on these images for envy and jealousy. Tumblr’s (in)famous endless scrolling function means that you’re constantly, forever, addicted to this stream of content.

 

Research: B Is For Bauhaus

Just read a book ‘B Is For Bauhaus’ by Deyan Sudjic. It’s a book about understanding contemporary culture and design.

Here’s some interesting things I found in the book that will be relevant to my report.

On our relationships with our possessions,

The collecting impulse is universal, and it goes on to the roots of what is it to be human. It pre-dates mass production and design, but it reveals the essential nature of our relationship with our possessions, how they communicate with us, and the various ways in which we value them. understanding the nature of collecting tells us something about ourselves as well as the nature of things.

To collect any object, we have traded in the original meaning and are looking for something else from them.

The journal is a repository of memories and events. These are also considered possessions. When I look at my archive again, I find myself looking for something else from the words and drawings that I’ve made over the years. Many times I draw the comparison between the person I am then, and now. These are markings that indicate my growth as a person and a creative.

We collect possessions to comfort ourselves, from addiction and to measure out the passing of our lives. We collect because we are drawn to the subtler pleasure of nostalgia for the recent past, and the memory of far-distant history. We collect sometimes to signal our distress and console ourselves in our inability to deal with the world. These are the motivations that designers need to understand, and the qualities which they manipulate when they create objects, whatever their nominal function.

I’m particular drawn to the point he made about distress and consoling ourselves. This year I hardly made any drawings. My journals are filled instead with writing that I made in order to try to understand my own FYP concept better. I also find myself grappling with the struggle of being with a young adult. Time and finance are the resources that have to keep competing with each other, and it makes me feel frustrated. I find that I must divide my time and attention each week to work commitments, FYP, and spending time with friends and family. I look at my older journals and I find that I lost the luxury to make the drawings and writings that I used to. I rarely have the time to feel bored anymore, each moment is dedicated to keeping up with my to-do list. I guess it’s one of the reasons why I needed to deactivate myself from social media. In becoming a young adult, some of these juvenile struggles have definitely (and thankfully) faded away, but along with that, I also lose the need to make artwork about these things. But that’s not to say that I need to be some kind of angsty youth to fuel my creative process. Looking at my journal archive also makes me realise that I sometimes need to not give a damn, and occasionally make some impulsive artwork that makes no sense. To think like a child again.

Collecting is in one sense about remembering, but the digital world never lets us forget anything. Paradoxically, it has also undermined our ability to remember. Our email and text trails will last as long as the server farms that have already conferred a kind of immortality on anybody with a Twitter account.”

This point is definitely relevant to the virtual part of my work. My project is split between my virtual and physical archives. It documents the relationships made online and off.

We remember where we started from online, because the date is recorded when we first made friends on the virtual realm. Green buttons tell me that I know you from a measurable distance. Conversations are trivialized with the advent of animated and very expressive egg man oyster cat girl stickers. Grids of photos let me glimpse into your life and I could say yeah I guess I know you. How many backspaces will it take to bring me back to when there were no green buttons? When your status is set to Away on MSN? Remember the time I told you I was playing The Sims and you told me how you got rid of your Sims? And then you said you were going to build some furniture for your room over the break. And then the conversation ended and the next time I went online there were no traces of the conversation happening. Despite being given a chance to keep an archive of the chat, nobody really goes to the effort to do so. And now we can go back as far as we wish to and point out the beginning of everything. Everything is laid out and easily accessible, pictures and words and the little green circle next to your name. Archiving comes easier for all of us, collecting data is as easy as typing hello to you. The question is how much of this is worth remembering and archiving. You may not remember, but the Internet remembers for you.

Something about virtual reality

I was going to crawl to bed after my night shower, body loosen up by the heat of the water, phone in my hand, notifications pinging. Wanting to rest, but unable to. I decided to turn on my computer instead and be productive. I still like to work on a desktop. A desktop computer means business. You get too comfortable with the mobility of a laptop.

Two days ago, I decided to delete my Instagram application and say a virtual goodbye to an audience I don’t really know. But in my quest to deactivate myself from social media, I am still inevitably stuck with it because of work commitments. I now have a Facebook account just for class and work. Work accounts are okay, it filters out a lot of crap that are usually on personal news feed. I started to think about why I needed to deactivate myself, always, from social media, and what it means to do that, and how that would influence the virtual part of my project.

This evening we had a little chat about WordPress. The plan was to strongly encourage students to use it to share their work. I thought about WordPress and my long-term use of it for a while tonight, and what the Internet means to me in this project. It begins with blogging. I really enjoy using WordPress. I was a user of Blogger, until I bought my own domain and wanted to transfer my blog to my domain. Unlike WordPress, Blogger cannot be installed on a personal web server. But you could easily install WordPress on your cPanel and create wonderful themes around the script. Creating a blog theme (no matter what blogging website you use), is not as difficult as it sounds. I like to build what I call a skeleton theme, something that is very pared down to the basic elements of a blog: date posted, blog entry, user. Then depending on the purpose I had at the time, I’ll turn the skeleton blog layout into something else.

Through learning how to make my own blog layouts, I met many interesting online friends. There were other girls who made beautiful websites, (which were essentially some well-made themes) and we would comment on each other’s efforts. I got to know them better by reading their blog entries. We all discuss our daily lives, each one of us residing in a different corner of the world, and shared our experiences in making the blog themes. I think that’s why WordPress stayed with me for so long. I have very fond memories of those times. I also like that WordPress didn’t change to something else. It was quite the only bit of the Internet left that I cared about and use frequently. It was media without the social part. There were no heart symbols at the end of my entries inviting my invisible audience to like the post I’ve written. There is no reblogging link for them to share my post on their blog. When I make a theme later on this semester for the virtual part of my FYP, I’ll not be making one that fits people’s mobile phones or to include any of these social quirks. I don’t really care. I know mobile phones are really convenient to view web content quickly. But if you couldn’t spare the time to take a look at what I’ve made on a real computer then it’s quite a waste. I’d want to invite my audience to go to the trouble of creating a username and leaving an actual comment. I think that is akin to leaving someone a handwritten note, in this age.

So I would like to propose that the virtual part of my project is a celebration of these “analog” things before the crazy advent of likes and follows. I think many people of my age would resonate with that. Before followers are called followers, they were called ‘friends’ (i.e Livejournal user profiles) Before stalking someone’s Facebook profile, there was Friendster profiles. And way before that, there was also stalking someone’s user lookup on Neopets. I want to combine these things and my blog content, to create an artwork, as a response of sorts to the question “what did you do online when you were a teenager”?

I also want to be clear about not referencing to social media for this. I won’t be making a Facebook page about this. I don’t want social media to heavily influence the outcome of my work, or to even be a part of the conversation. Perhaps in my project report, I will discuss further about this aspect, but I don’t want to work to have any of these.

Project Hyperessay 1: The Archiving Project

This is a draft and a quick sketch of my ideas, some of these thoughts would require some more fine tuning before being developed into a full-fledged project.

My project will be about archiving memories, particularly memories in a virtual space. What really sparked my interest in this was how quickly I realised the social media landscape has changed. Here’s a diagram of social media I found on Google:

fb-social-media

I would say that that people my age are lucky enough to be able to have internet access at a relatively young age. I remember being able to access the Internet when I was about 8 years old. I think it’s really important to address this point on generation vs Internet, particularly in the area of social media. For me at least, I feel that I entered this whole virtual sphere at an age when it had helped significantly develop my sense of identity, interests and especially the idea of an online persona even before I really knew what that meant. It’s interesting to note though, before I’ve taken this OSS class, I’ve never truly examined the term ‘virtual’, ‘cyborgs’ or the ‘disembodied’, and even I find it hard sometimes to write about it in my research critiques because I think that to some extent, and for a large part of my life, I’ve been really living the virtual life and living out these concepts that we’re looking at, that I haven’t yet stepped back to take a look at all of this.

I was a huge Internet nerd. I was really big on Neopets.com and the website opened me to the world of html and css. I didn’t have much real-life hobbies then, but I enjoyed making webpages and creating content. I made my first blog with Blogger.com and I used my knowledge of basic html and css to tweak my layout so that I could include every facet of my Internet life – I remember adding the same Flickr photostream on the sidebar of my blog and uploaded pictures of my real life desktop clutter, my dogs, and (very rarely) pictures of myself taken with my webcam.  I also bought a domain and explored making more complicated webpages. I loved the idea of having this virtual space for myself and being able to create and add whatever I want to this space.

Back to the social media landscape and what sparked my project: I realised the vast change when I logged into myspace.com a few months ago. It used to be a really popular social media website much like Facebook. The website had changed a lot, and presently, they have removed the blog function. My old profile and photos are still there, although I was more interested to find my old blog. I found a link where I could download a zip file of my blog archive and so I did.

collectingdata2

It amazes me then, that I could simply download an archive of these things that I’ve written years ago, and at the same time, it never occurred to me that I could feel such nostalgia in such a technological context. So using the blog archive I’ve downloaded from MySpace, I made an online zine (http://beverleyng.com/internetmonsters) in which I try to encapsulate this nostalgia, by juxtaposing these entries with some artworks I made at that time I wrote the entries (even my artworks then were made on the computer), paired with some screenshots of other virtual things that I was interested in then.collectingdata

This semester, I decided to take this project further by downloading the archive from my WordPress blog which I’ve been writing in for a long time. As I was downloading it and reworking them for a core module, I drew parallels with the various concepts that we have been discussing in class, as well as with the readings that we’ve done over the weeks. Beyond archiving entries, I am also interested to examine the various persons I’ve been throughout these years, and how these personas had been immortalized by words and kept in virtual space.

vmeo

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I’ve not quite decided yet how to carry out my final project. I might have been a bit lengthy on the basis of this project, though I would like to be very serious about it as I want to carry it further in terms of final year project. But this is what I have so far, do comment below if you have any feedback or suggestions!

 

 

life is a process journal

archive10 theday1 theday2 theday3 theday4 theday5 theday6

Saving pdfs of my archive, month after month, year after year. As you can see, it takes quite a few hours to do so, perhaps because I stopped many times along the way to take part in some predictable reminiscing.

While combing through my entries, I also found a handful of entries throughout the year, this is just about my all time favourite poem by david levithan (from the book ‘the realm of possibility’) it’s a well-thumbed book of mine, opened so many times to this poem, that flipping open the book takes me straight to that page. I believe I have more entries than these.

Just realised the book is also currently in my bag which I’m rereading for the millionth time, on my way to school. I never get tired of it.

teenage grime

IMG_9515 IMG_9527 IMG_9529
a really short weekend, burned from looking through my physical journals and taking some photos. going to leaf through these books briefly and maybe sieve out some ideas for my final, or anything, really. i thought about the term “tags” and what randall packer said about “tag cloud”, perhaps that could be something. i think with this project, my material is really endless and heavy, and i could go so many ways.

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some stuff that i wrote some time ago from my blog, that may be useful for research and this project on archiving and remembering time. thoughts about the process of memories, blogging and keeping a journal.

spent the weekend dreaming again. it was terrible. i don’t know what i am thinking man. i quickly made a few pages of a new zine last night, because the thought of you is too terrible. it is called “letters to you in Arial”. i made it because i imagined that if i had a typeface to carry the spirit of my writing, I would use Arial. i wanted to hide behind Arial because it is used on many boring letters you do not want to receive. bills and admin stuff. and handouts in school. you don’t know the writer. oh but it is ok. does not matter.

Thought about reviving my tumblr and posting art related things there. Keeping a blog is effort. Keeping a picture blog- more effort. I guess it is why, year after year, I am able to blabber incessantly on this page. It is far easier to write. But then, I also have feelings to account for. feelings often need to be expressed in words, rather than pictures. For me at least.

Realised I have been blogging for 10 years. How very long. And how very whiny. Perhaps. I am happy that there are little pictorial documentation of my teenage life, as discussed previously… I was an ugly teenager. Like damn ugly and fucking awkward. Yes a fair percentage of us all had been awkward to a certain degree, but mostly this side to them shed away after a while and suddenly they just become average people. Normal. They just breezed through this awkward phase to become this completely nondescript character. I really don’t know how I am still not pass this stage. Am I ? I really don’t know. Very sad. But anyway, I’m glad these written words are all that is left about teenage me. It would be difficult to paint a picture of me with these dark pieces of writing if you don’t know me. Thank goodness.

reading: what is contemporary art

notes from e-flux journal: what is contemporary art

critique of presence by Jacques Derrida
the present is originally corrupted by past and future, there’s always absence at the heart of presence.

‘comrades of time’ by boris groys
when we began to question our projects, to doubt or reformulate them, the present becomes important. it’s because the contemporary present is constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision, by the need for prolonged reflection.

the past is also permanently rewritten, names and events appear/disappear, reappear/disappear.

comrades of time: contemporary in German means comrade. to be contemporary is to collaborate with time, helping time when it has problems/difficulties.

now and elsewhere by raqs media collective
time girds the earth tight. day after day, astride minutes and seconds, the hours ride as they must, relentless. in the struggle to keep pace with the clocks, we are now always in a state of jet lag.

how do we orient ourselves in relation to a cluster of occasionally cascading, sometimes overlapping, partly concentric and often conflictual temporal parameters?

on forgetting
as time passes and we grow more into the contemporary, the reasons for remembering other times grow, while the ability to recall them weakens. memory straddles this paradox. we could say the ethics of memory have something to do with the urgent negotiation betwene having to remember (which sometimes include the obligation mourn) and the requirement to move on (which sometimes include the need to forget). both are necessary and each is nontionally contingent on the abdication of the other, but life is not led by the easy rhythm of regularly alternating episodes of memory and forgetting, cancelling each other out in a neat equation that resolves itself and attains equillibrium.

haunt a record
what does it mean to haunt a record? when does a presence or a trace become so deeply etched into a surface that it merits a claim to durability simply for being so difficult to repress, resolve, deal with and put away?