#and at the time i was in a neopets guild

[thephooka]

How we got here from there

Or, the long journey of a longform long-running webcomic about a long man with long wings.

In the spirit of @feathernotes and @phantomarine who have been talking about just starting your webcomic and not worrying about being "ready", I was inspired to do a post about White Noise's origin! I'm a little limited by the fact that I either left behind or destroyed a lot of the art I have from prior to 2009, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Cringe Truth below the cut!

The Cringe Truth of White Noise is that it has its roots in a Pokemon x Yu Yu Hakusho x self-insert(s) roleplay thread I used to do with an internet friend I made on Neopets guild forums way back in 2002-ish. We would come home from school every day and RP over AIM, and then when we had to get offline, whoever left first would email the other one, and we would continue via email until we were back on AIM at the same time.

Liya was my self insert.

This isn't even remotely the earliest art of her, it's just the earliest I have on hand. I was drawing her for almost a decade by the time I drew this one. Imagine the earlier drawings as being like I traced over Sailor Moon characters that I printed out from deviantART and gave them a brown ponytail.

The funny thing is Liya really hasn't changed much from her original form! I also had loose brown curls that I kept in a ponytail 24/7 to the point that it showed when I had it down (which is why her hair is 'dented' like that). I did it because I was trans and didn't know it; she does it because she hasn't realized she can just cut it off and be butch yet.

Other characters that date back from this time period: Yoshi (originally an InuYasha/Rurouni Kenshin pastiche), Hawk (I don't remember when he got wings but they were white at first), Numair (named after the Tamora Pierce character and filling a Koenma kind of role), Helly (sort of--I had an elf character named Kamui who had the same temperament, and he was eventually transmuted into Helly) and...Kurogane.

I've never named Kurogane but he appears in the background of the comic a few times, as my own personal inside joke.

Vlad came along somewhere between this RP period and planning the comic, but I can't remember when or why. I don't have drawings from that time (~2004?) but he was the first character I drew when I got a tablet for the first time.

Everyone else came along later when I started actually planning out the comic.

All this said: the reason I started White Noise as a weekly webcomic is because I wanted to learn to draw better.

At the time I was in college majoring in animation, but I didn't feel like I was learning very much at all (the program was badly structured; I had more art history classes than anything else. It was a mess.) I was also working nights in order to feed myself, and so had a lot of downtime. I had this story rattling around in my head from my RP days, so I figured, why not just give it a go?

For posterity here's a photo of a chapter 1 panel in progress, back in 2011 with my typical college diet in the bg:

(Chapter 1 was originally pencil on paper, scanned in and colored in PS. I later re-drew it to make it fully digital to match with the rest of the comic.)

There's been a lot of talking about not waiting until you're 'ready' to start a webcomic, and I agree with that sentiment. Try framing it like this: making a comic every week for years and years will improve your art way more than any prep work you can do before starting the comic. It's like learning to swim. You can read about swimming all you want, but you're not going to really figure it out until you do it. If your early comics are bad, well, that's normal. It used to be an expected part of doing webcomics; I blame the shift into expecting webcomics to be polished from start to finish partly on commercialization in the space, but that's an angry rant for another time.

With this background, here's the collage I posted for WN's 10 year anniversary back in 2021:

And now we're here.

So do your webcomic. Put it on ComicFury or make a janky little site for it. Be okay with imperfect pages and be prepared to shout into the void for a while. Even if it's always a hobby, if it never makes you a dime or wins you any awards--that's fine! You'll be a lot happier if you learn not to worry about that stuff, and just make something that will help you grow and make you happy. We could do with a lot more work like that in the world imo.

#webcomics #comics #wn comic #white noise #comix #indie comics #webtoon #comic history #webcomic history #web comic #original comic #also I'm not going to tell you to not destroy your old work but... #it IS nice to have around so you can look at it and feel good about how much you've grown #can't say I regret losing all that stuff but whatever

[sakuracards]

i'm trapped in neopets hell rn bc of course i am.

and man did i have an eventful neopets experience yesterday.

- snowickle in the advent calendar.

- random fountain faerie quest that got me a chocolate eyrie.

- my entry won Fan Favorite in my guild's first ever creativity contest.

- got a short story accepted to The Neopian Times.

like calm down, neopets, damn.

#someone stage an intervention to get me to stop hyperfixating on neopets #but also don't i guess cuz i'm having fun #i am talking #neopets

[hissi-oil]

I cried so much when I lost the neopets account this kougra was on!!! Was my own fault, but I was heartbroken!!! Featuring one of dozens of really great graphic design sidebar retextures I did all the time.

Bonus red kougra art for a warriors RP guild, I love its proportions

#old-art #neopets

[l3x01d]

So here's Feral~

they have neon goth dreams i hope to help them achieve.

idk y im on a new account? i guess i lost my old password thats a bummer.. anyway im just on here to document customizing my new 2023 furby. first one since the 90s!! their name is feral bc it came in this box and someone in my neopets guild joked it was tryna escape and that made me feel better about buying a misrepresented item. so thats canon now and theyre a premie just like me!

(i luckily got a full refund and used it to buy a bunch of reusable batteries so i basically never need to buy batteries again hopefully)

i used to be ratstalker and thedetectiveconsultant once upon a time but i lost my password. reach out to me if we used to talk/rp!

#neon goth #feral the furby #furby fandom #furby community #furblr #furby #2023 furby #ratstalker #thedetectiveconsultant

[urwaifustolemylongfurby]

I was once 1 of da most popular players on Neopets until I got unfairly frozen. Here is what happened:

The year was 2009. I had a guild with over 9000 members cuz I was rly rich with all the trophies n everyone loved how emo n 1337 I was. Everyone was sending me fan art of my Neopets. I was on top of the world until all of a sudden it was all over. Another popular user started getting more attention then me. I didn't like her cuz she was a prep. She was the Regina George of Neopets n she stole over half my guild members by being funnier than me! I knew I had 2 get revenge. So I made a pet page docu.menting every time she said anything remotely bad sounding with multiple paragraphs explaining what was wrong with it. It didn't work. She did the same thing 2 me! I got so mad I started cr8ing fake screenshots of her commiting freezable offenses n I was the 1 who got froze!

#neopets #unfair #2000s #stories #emo

[traumasurvivors]

you play neopets?? i love it and still check mine from time to time. could we be nf?

Hi anon!

I'd love to be NF. I'd rather not post my username publicly though, so if you want to send me yours on anon, I won't publish it, or come off anon (I also won't publish that.)

I still love Neopets. I used to be embarrassed about it but I've fully embraced it, lol. I'm actually in the process of making a "wish granting" guild where people's goals/wishes are granted regularly. If anyone wants to be a part of it, you're welcome to! I can definitely be a lot more direct here than I can on there that I just fully intend to gift people a bunch of pricier shit all the time lol.

#neopets #personal #not trauma related at all #but it's one of my #embracing my inner child things i do #so

[pnkq]

The entire history of Eddsworld based on my knowledge of nothing: alright, so pretty much in 1992, Wayne’s World was made and you’re probably thinking, what does that have to do with eddsworld? But I have answers for you, my friend. This guy Edd who was only like 4 years old at the time made a comic called Edd’s World, with correct grammar because sure. Then timeskip like 7 years later and kaboom Eddsworld begins. But it’s like Edd’s World cus sure. And then Edd meets this guy named Matt and friendship ensues. Then the first Eddsworld animations are made but they’re just GIFs about characters dying and stuff like that. Then in like 2001 Edd joins Neopets and makes a guild or something called Edd’s Kill-a-thon but that gets changed to just Edd’s World later on. And then Edd’s World comics start getting made. But digitally this time. Cool. Then in 2002 Edd gets flash which will be important later on. He makes a lot of stuff on flash and it’s pretty cool so yeah. Then he makes his first ever game, Interactive Stickfaces. Nice. But then the Edd’s World comic ends and there’s a cartoon called four-limbed freak but that only lasted like 4 episodes. Then he makes more stuff. And in June 2003 he joins Newgrounds, which is cool as well. Then more stuff is made by Edd. Like a lot of stuff. BUT THEN SOMETHING INTERESTING HAPPENS!! So basically Edd meets Thomas, or just Tom. Nice. Now there’s like 3 people. But then in November 2004 Tom and Tord like officially join. Tord came in like somewhere not 100% sure. 2006 bad shit happens. Like Edd gets cancer and Tord gets suicide threats but Tom and Edd joined Youtube so cool. Luckily in 2007, cancer ends. 2008 Tord gets sick of this shit and leaves. 2010 WTFuture releases which is apparently Edd’s favorite Eddisode. Nice. But then 2011 comes along and Edd gets cancer again. Shit. 2012. Tragedy. Edd makes his last ever animation: 5ever. Edd dies from leukemia in March. Then Tomska gets diagnosed with depression. Edd’s funeral happened. Tomska hires another guy to voice Edd and another another guy to animate. This is the start of Legacy. Well now that that terrible year of 2012 was over we got 2013. More animators, that’s pretty much it. 2014. Fun Dead comes out, and that’s like the most popular one. Then in 2015 Mirror Mirror comes out but that’s not really that important. AND THEN IN 2016 The End comes out and everyone’s hopes got way too high and they thought Tord might come back. Spoiler: he doesn’t he just leaves again. Then a ton of people leave, including Tomska, the voice of Edd, and the animator. So pretty much now we have: Matt and Edd’s family. That’s all. 2020 and George Gould (Edd’s brother) voices Edd now. 2022 and another Eddisode comes out in over a year. 2023 and Eddsworld gets their own Youtooz but woops nevermind it sold out. And that’s pretty much it because I don’t see us in 2024 yet, you? 

#eddsworld #history

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

Hiya, how are you doing today?

11. 🌈 RAINBOW SLOTH: Wild card! Share one thing about your WIP that you have been waiting to be asked about!

Please and thank you!

Thank you for the ask! From this ask game.

*squints* Fourth one, and I am running out of ideas even more. As I mentioned before, nothing really, nothing is stopping me from talking about anything I wanna talk about in the first place. But. Names!

All characters in Till Death were named after someone/something.

Eilis was one of my Neopets. I've been a bit sentimental lately, as the site apparently has a lil resurgence, but last I checked, my account was gone and I had forgotten the PW, and lost the email, so. It was an pre-change plush Ixi :) I named other things after my Neopets before, but I really liked that name.

Finnian was one of my rats. I had two albino brothers, Finnian and Winifred, so I named his sister Winifred :D I drove several hours to pick them up, back in the day. I miss my boys.

Avery was named after a friend.

Alyx wasn't really named after anyone, pretty much the only one.

Livia was named after I just redid the story in Guild Wars where she appears, and I was a bit annoyed by her.

Luca was one of my hamsters. The hamster was much nicer than the book-guy!

I have not yet fully decided if another one is called Vermouth or Wormwood. Fun fact: In German, Wermut can be both the drink, and the herb. I've been going with Vermouth all this time, and I still like it, but damn, doesn't Wormwood sound great for such a prick. Anyway.

Clayton and Ara are also named after something, but I'll take that one to my grave, because it's related to my job.

#salad-ask #thebejeweledwatercat #this ask is not oc related #I am on tumblr because I want to forgot how I am doing so #.. *trails off and presses post* #wip: till death

[plushie-neopet]

Nostalgia

I'm going to relive my history with the site a lil, but it's already running long, so I'll put it under a readmore.

When I was first told of Neopets in ~2000 I was frequenting a Digimon oekaki (drawing board) and drawing Lopmon/Floramon/Kiwimon with alarming regularity. I joined Neopets because friends on the oekaki asked me to. I made a blue shoyru, which I painted purple because I liked the user hrobi's purple shoyru Antorcha and the art on the site card for Antikia Lighten. I think at the time I thought the site made the card based on the user's pet.

I joined my friends' guild, and in a guild event I won a silver paint brush and re-painted my shoyru. It was actually pretty interesting, because I was trying to make her look mirror-shiny in art I made of her, and that taught me a lot about colouring. I played for a bit over a year. I legit talked about 9/11 as it happened in that guilds' lil chat area. I had to calm down an American kid who went by the name 'Piggy' because her parents were REALLY upset about it and she was panicking. And shortly after I lost interest and the login details.

When I came back March 1st 2002, I made my kuroi_muchi account but occasionally I would look up my first account. It was wiped in the purge, however. The first pet I made on my kuroi_muchi account was a gelert... But I didn't connect with the old gelert art and didn't feel inspired by it.. Also, I forgot to capitalise her name, and that bothered me. I pounded her. She still exists on-site, but now she's a Woodland Poogle. As I write this, she is 8005 days old, so she is almost 22 years old, like my account. Her owner plays semi-regularly, but was last spotted about three months ago.

I still have the second pet I ever made on my current main, but she's on a side account. She's a Halloween Aisha named Itla, and given I always drew the red 'outfit' as part of her fur I don't want to remove it to put other clothes on her... She was my first serious roleplay character (a demon catgirl RP'd on MSN messenger) and now I like to joke that she's happily retired.

Shortly after making kuroi_muchi, I found a Neopet-themed Oekaki called 'Sako's Oekaki'. This drawing board was accessed via Sako the then-shadow aisha's petpage. Sako's petpage is now a jumbled mess of broken script, but it mentions the Oekaki to this day.

My Halloween aisha was quite popular there! The board focused quite a bit on aishas and roleplay, as well as art. There was an ongoing theme with angel and demon aishas - and my Halloween girl was obviously one of the demons. I'm not even going to say it was cringe - we were kids playing with concepts of belief and morality. I feel like that's pretty important when you are developing your world views. I made a lot of very dear friends there. Actually, I met my first ever girlfriend there. Long distance, but cute and meaningful. One of my friends from that board wanted to make plushie pets together, to match. Plushie grundo/chomby MPs were under 100k np, so we made those. He made a grundo, and I made Kijiwa the plushie chomby. And I kinda fell in love with plushie neopets after that. I wanted to make more... but then conversion happened and they lost a lot of their charm, and gosh they were EXPENSIVE, so I didn't until much later.

When the purge happened a lot of people had long lists of names they wanted, but I only had one. My name is Rain, and I like birds, and I like the meaning of 'rainbird' - a bird that sings to warn of an incoming storm. Rainbird was the only name I grabbed when it was released, and they became the pet to represent me. For a while I lab zapped them, unsure what would work as 'me'... But I eventually decided that they had to be a bird, and I would acknowledge my love of plushies and try to draw them the way they should look. So Rainbird is a plushie bruce. If Toy had been around I might have been tempted, to be honest! But I quite enjoy my fat purple penguin.

Rainbird is female on-site (but uses they/them) because I made them before my own public transition. It's one of the few things I might like to change, if it becomes easier/cheaper in the future. I am aligned more with masculinity than femininity, but... Well, it's fine to have little markers of how I've grown. Hell, I 'announced' my transition subtly with art of Rainbird. Before the pride flags were added to the site, and when discussion of the subject was against the rules. I wasn't discussing it, though. I just... drew a bruce wearing a bow.

I think I won a gold BC trophy for this picture.

It's probably silly that I can connect a lot of memories to a pet site. It's probably silly that I have a rainbow chomby plushie on my desk right now, when I'm in my mid-30s. It's probably silly how sentimental I'm feeling about all this. It's probably silly to be running a blog dedicated to a 25 year old site and the art that people make based on it. Sometimes it's nice to be silly.

This year I made Teald - based on an OC I have been writing and roleplaying for years. It felt like coming back, looping around to something familiar. I will take inspiration from strange places, and I will bring my inspiration back to places I know. I am glad the NCUCs came back - realistically, that faerie lenny mp probably would have sat in my SDB for years more. I just don't like the converted lenny art. But I knew that if Teal was anything, they'd be a faerie lenny.

I don't know why I felt like sharing all of this. Perhaps this too is a little marker I am leaving online, so I can look at it years from now and remember. If you read it all... well, thanks. Thanks for coming on this stroll down memory lane with me. There's more I didn't add - I have many more Neopets, after all! But this felt worth sharing, or at least writing down somewhere.

Stay excellent.

#mod post #long post #my art #site art #my ocs #nostalgia #memories #halloween #aisha #purple #shoyru #plushie #bruce #itla #rainbird

[fuzzydreamin]

Doing the Writer Bingo thing, considering myself tagged by @theartofblossoming because they said so

I got bingo twice!

Gonna tag @new-eyes-extra-colors @bokatan and @nukanaptime if yall haven't already done it - blank template is under the cut along with me talking about my answers and writing - feel free to ignore it if you want lol.

I don't actually have any of my fics public rn because I hid all of my old ones (they were HP and thats blech now), but I had... 13 fics, including a completed multichapter amongst a bunch of oneshots and abandoned starters, lol.

So I have had a Fanfiction.net account, but I never posted fic on there. I just read fic there. I also read fic on a bunch of other old sites that don't exist anymore and haven't for many years, but didn't have profiles on them. I don't even remember their names, I know some were primarily non-english sites that just happened to have some of their fics translated - some of the best fics honestly. I've only ever posted on Ao3 because it wasn't until I was basically done with highschool that I felt confident enough to write publicly.

Never had a wattpad phase. Never even read fics on it and I honestly click away if fic links lead there. I just don't like how it's set up.

My most popular oneshots were my two hard E rated smut fics, which rivaled by multi-chapter fic for a while but got overtaken by it while I wasn't looking, hah.

Some of the earliest writing I ever did was roleplay. I joined a Warrior Cats roleplay guild on the Neopets forum as a wee child. I didn't even know what Warriors was when I joined, I just wanted to play with cats. It introduced me to the series though, which became a big part of my life with reading and art. The roleplaying was fun for a bit but... well there were issues but I guess we were all kids. Didn't help that they were all American so I had to do weird hours to join events. I don't do a lot of roleplay overall, I've dipped my toes in again here and there but never anything dedicated. It's rather intimidating honestly.

I've never beta read anything or had a beta. I work entirely alone and prefer it that way. I just do it all myself and quadruple check everything and then freak out after posting and check again and again to pick up any small spelling mistakes that might've slipped past me.

Always been a nerd for researching. Sometimes I'll be researching something by my own whimsey and that'll become part of a fic after the fact, lol. I like when authors sprinkle in little bits of knowledge, and some of my favourite fics are ones that have me highlighting terms to look them up further.

I never actually had an outline for any of my old fics. I would just start typing up whatever came to mind at the time and post it when it felt ready. It's a miracle I finished a multichapter fic at all honestly. But I'd also be manic in my writing, being that I'd blast out one or even multiple chapters a day for a while and then randomly stop and not look at any of my fics for months or even years. I did begin to start fics with some outlines and collected thoughts later on, and I'm outlining so very much with my newer fic and not writing in a manic state anymore thanks to nearly a decade spent working on my mental health. I'm writing from a better place now, but I often look back at my old works and wonder if I haven't lost something over time due to the large break I took in creating, which is something that goes for my drawing too. Overall though I have a lot more hope for my future works being more planned/thought out and far superior to anything I've put out before - though I didn't get many complains on my old stuff, just a lot of very confused watchers who got overstuffed and then left in the lurch. Sorry.

The "anxiously waits for feedback" thing I think is something pretty much everyone feels when they put any work out there. I really get it with the immediate posting and having to double and triple check that I didn't misspell anything, or get something wrong, and that what I'm trying to say comes out clearly - as if people will point it out and laugh at me or something when I know they won't / haven't even had time to read it yet even though it's public. I've found it's best to just distance myself after posting and doing my doublecheck though, like just enjoying a game or an episode of something and trying to forget about it for a bit and avoid checking it too frequently. Like meditating, but with a distraction.

I have commissioned art for fics at least twice - but neither of the fics actually made it to the point were the art could be used. Oopsy. Was still fun getting the art.

So many unfinished and unpublished fics. I could probably complete that Danse/Butch smut oneshot I was doing back at new years...

"Editing and formatting is hell", I mean... I've mentioned my tendency to quadruple-billion-times check things twice now. This makes three.

Ideas in the middle of the night are the worst. I can't type shit out on my phone, it takes too long and I get frustrated (I'm also sleeping next to my partner and he'd question wtf I'm doing with a light on), and even if I try the ideas are already escaping like very agile moths. My condolence is that ideas that come when I'm half-asleep probably actually aren't that good anyway and just seem so to my sleep-addled self.

I don't need tea to write, but it definitely helps. That or an iced mocha. ... it's totally the effect of caffeine and sugar on the ADHD... I'll be bouncing up and down while I sit there but at least my fingers will be moving over the keys.

#fuzzy.post

[clarenecessities]

4/11/23

19 years to the day since i started playing ol’ neopets.gov. i am & always will be immeasurably grateful for the people it brought into my life (okay, most of them) and the paths it’s taken me down. i may not have been using the site itself since the NFT debacle, but i have my neoclone of choice. my neopets themselves may be locked behind a ‘change your password’ wall since the data leak, one i don’t care to climb, but they’re more than just pixels on a screen, you know? i always had a hard time accepting that, but being out of it for so long now, i really do understand what everyone was trying to tell me. you couldn’t take ‘em away any easier than you could take my tattoo. hell, it’d probably be harder--my data hoarding’s much more impenetrable than my skin.

and they’re not what really matters, anyway. the people i met through this site--my teenage guilds, my school buddies, my gay little family--if i could tell 9 year old clare how loved & accepted she’d feel one day, she would instantly attack me. like literally no hesitation. idk why it’s so hard for people to grasp that if i’d seen a version of my future self it would have been on-sight until one of us established dominance

#daily clare #neopets #you're all losers & i love you so much. ty for playing loser games with me #past clare

[telnaga]

the One Time i tried to roleplay with other kids online i got warned and suspended off the Neopets Warrior Cats Rp Guild for spamming and my depression and anxiety was so bad that i cried so fuckin hard about it and never tried again

#the slightly older kids moderating it were so mean about it too. they were PISSED they were FURIOUS

[toxoplasmewsis]

saw that neopets restored a lot of their old flash games and i'm getting back into it for the first time since the mid 2000s... wtf do i do??

Make an exclusive guild and invite me to it

[tampon-on-the-sidewalk]

Not me being old but I’m just reminiscing about when roleplaying was one of the main purposes of the internet.

When everyone had their OC’s biography templates so detailed that reading the bio in itself was like reading a novel. Children and teenagers would learn coding just so they could work on the html for their Neopets pages(showing said characters), roleplay guilds, or make their own forum 

Writing paragraphs on paragraphs of story with your friends and coming up with some of the wildest and yet most heartfelt scenarios. 

Joining a thread where the characters, while not from existing media, are already made (ie highschool rp premade characters) and you got to explore and expand on those characters. 

Email and AIM inboxes being full of the next installment of these shared stories, rather than being nothing but spam ads. 

Do I have the mental capacity to roleplay again? Absolutely not. But it was such an important time for me as a young creative and its disappearance is kind of evident in modern day capitalism internet.

#roleplaying #writing #remyrant

[strayfriend]

I have spent all week with my neopets guild from high school. We have known each other ten years now. I've visited most of them a few times over the years, but last (and first!) time we were ALL together was for a camping trip five years ago. It's so nice, and so easy, and so sweet. Now two people from this originally online friendship are getting married.

Center pics are from our original camping trip five years ago. I can't believe how young we look. It really doesn't feel that long ago.

#you wouldnt download a spouse #their wedding is TODAY #Im 💕🥲

[jadeyharls]

What is your most treasured childhood memory?

probably when i first started talking to john dave and rose in our silly little neopets guild that no one else wanted to join

it was the first time i felt like i was actually making friends

how could i not treasure that?