Neopets.com changed my life (2019)
annastreetman.com40 points by bariumbitmap 6 days ago
40 points by bariumbitmap 6 days ago
I also credit Neopets, but it was really the confluence of Neopets, MySpace, Geocities/Tripod, Xanga, etc. that really formed the base for so much of my career.
Every once in a blue moon I'll meet someone who can trace the genesis of their career to neopets. I learned to code from neopets. It started from html, then I fell into a cheats crowd, where I learned Visual Basic (some of the best early cheats were in Visual Basic).
Then one day, a guy coded a program in Python. It was only one with a "modern" style (it used Window XP styles, while most VB6 programs looked like windows 98 programs), and it used threads so it could watch multiple stores instead of having to manage multiple processes.
I must have been 12-13, and I was completely floored with it. I was convinced everyone programming in VB6 was wrong and the future was Python. I eventually self taught myself Python just to write my own cheats, which I eventually sold to others for millions of neopoints. Then my account got frozen and I moved on to other games.
I hung out with the neopets kids in school who were doing html stuff. I never really got into neopets myself but some of them were really into geocities which I totally clicked with. Some of my friends were artsy so I made pages for webcomics and CYOA games (with hand drawn graphics to accompany). Those friends ended up getting careers in the arts while I ended up as a computer/electrical engineer.
yup neopets was also my first contact with programming because I wanted to have a cool website.
put it aside for years and eventually became a programmer later in life
Same here!
I’m in my mid-30’s now. In high school I learned HTML because I really wanted to customize the styling of my Guild (I think that’s what it was called).
And then built a neopets fan site and forum which taught me basic business (trading links with other fan sites, hiring/managing forum moderators, and eventually sold the fan site during junior year).
The will to customize my MySpace profile was also a driver for learning HTML.
I sometimes think about this in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly.
> in the context of today’s highly controlled platforms that simply don’t make space for users to customize or do anything outside the platform directly
There is Roblox, which is popular with kids and lets them upload minigames written in Lua.
I followed this exact same path. Started with HTML for guilds, learning to slice PSDs and ended with learning VB6 to develop auto buyers / adopters :D Slopdog forums was my inspiration for using VB I think?
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They didn't say they were proud, plus their account got banned so they were punished appropriately, plus... It's just Neopets...
You could say the same about anything, but cheating in multiplayer ruins the experience for others. Cheating in single-player? Great, we call those mods, but in a multiplayer game I'm happy to think of OP as a piece of shit for not just cheating but writing the cheats for others.
Even if it's just indirect competition, by giving yourself an advantage compared to others you affect what others percieve as a healthy benchmark for performance.
"Just neopets" isn't an excuse, you could say the same for any online game.
Cheaters even wreck just the scoreboards for some games. You might think a fake score submissions is about the least damaging thing since it doesn't directly effect others gameplay at all, but it still ruins the experience and affects the community's ability to compare and share genuine runs.
Being banned eventually is hardly a punishment, doubly so if they ever sold-on their ill-gotten gains for real money.
There wasn't a hint of contrition in OP's post, and the downvotes I'm receiving suggests that the culture of entitlement is so great now that cheating in multiplayer isn't even seen as bad anymore.
I hope you share that same energy for people doing high frequency trading or writing advertisement engines. Cheating in neopets is probably at the lowest end of harm caused by cheating and also hurts neopets devs more than it hurts other players.
I think it's reading into a lot into OPs comment. A lot of people look somewhat fondly on dumb/slightly illegal things they did as a teen, even if they would never do such a thing as an adult (nor encourage it in current teens). The downvotes you are getting are likely due to guidelines violations (be kind, curious, not snarky, etc) not due to your actual viewpoint.
That very well might be true for some of my family members, I'll have to ask. Perhaps not in terms of a career, but certainly in terms of computer literacy.
For me, it was the game Starseige:Tribes (1998), which had a (comparatively) phenomenal client-side scripting scene. I could learn the magic incantation, and now the HUD has a new box with a timer in it, or my character "speaks" new phrases--not intended by the designers--by interrupting existing canned phrases at the right times, etc.
There's something magical when skill-learning happens really close to a personal payoff from it.
Something about starseige:Tribes was just so primordial.
I still occasionally have dreams of various Tribes levels.
Same with Descent - I swear there is an alternative universe where my soul is adrift in that space, recently ejected from my ship ..
Love this, I learned to code via a combination of neopets and MySpace. I made tiny animations in bootlegged versions of flash and then imported them as iframes, it was such a fun way to be creative and build stuff online
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
neopets also changed my life. some a-hole stole my account and after that, elementary school me became deeply conscious of infosec.
I had a very similar experience. Writing the HTML to spruce up the homepage of my Neopets guild was my first introduction to any website creation or programming.
Ragnarok Online private servers communities did pretty much the same for me. We were very die-hard on PHP, MySQL, C and ancient JS/CSS.