ok ok so i do want to do a quick rundown of why this is happening for the people who just logged on to neopets to witness the chaos tonight:
in 2004, neopets was sold by its original owners to Viacom where the site was advertised pretty regularly on Nickelodeon’s 6-13 age block programming (as i understand it)
This made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move. for the next 10 years complaints about the site’s slowly deteriorating quality would be attributed to Viacom’s ownership & users would long for the glory days of draik mps being 11 million neopoints (they are mercifully down to 350k as we speak)
At any rate, in 2014 it was announced that Jumpstart (yes, that Jumpstart) was interested in neopets due to its largely older userbase. many people[1] praised the buyout, as they felt it would bring neopets out of the early 2000s, where it felt like the site had been stuck for a decade. Jumpstart has a decent foothold in the mobile app market, and neopets still didn’t have a mobile-specific site platform. Progress seemed on the horizon for our favorite site
[1] It should be noted that many users were worried that their favorite staff members would be leaving, but they were assured multiple times by these staff members that this would not be the case. More on that in a minute
September, 2014: Jumpstart begins the process of moving the site off of Viacom’s old servers and on to the new ones. The move is not smooth, lag plagues the site for the remainder of the week and the site goes down multiple times, finally having to be taken down entirely when users try to log in and are told en masse that their passwords are incorrect. other fun problems during 2014:
shops no longer are able to sell items so users lower their prices to ridiculous lows to try and move stock that is literally frozen in place
pets glitch so only one body part displays at a time
KeyQuest (one of the most popular games on the site that uses real money to provide board pieces) is taken down for the move. I will quote the official facebook page here: “ …we plan to bring it back up within a week or so afterwards.” It is now 9 months later and KeyQuest still does not work
userlookups go down and stay down for months
the New Features page, the twice-weekly updated site news, gets downsized noticeably. items get announced with paragraphs of padding to make up for the lack of actual “new features” and what is released is glitched and doesn’t stock in shops or show up on site
The site goes down for a few days in Oct to try to fix the lag problem, but nothing really changes and an expensive item is given to every user who logs in after Oct 3rd as compensation for the downtime, causing the price to deflate from 1.5 mil to 30k in less than 24 hours
January, 2015:
After a rocky (Jump)start, nothing new gets changed or fixed for some time. Site still lags incredibly and goes down often. A piece published in September starts gaining traction, noting that Jumpstart may not have had to pay a penny of actual money for the “dying” site.
March, 2015:
THE (real) NEO-PURGE –
On March 6th, neopets users awoke to find that a vast majority of staff members had been fired from the neopets Team offices, leaving only a handful of mods to work the boards over the weekend. These were staff members known by name to the userbase and who regularly had contact with them. Many users feel betrayed, and rightly so. Jumpstart staff had largely turned a deaf ear to the complaints directed at them, and users felt their only line of communication that remained at Neopets had been cut off. The first neopets mobile app was released a week later to severely disappointing results. (seriously it’s terrible)
—-
Since March, a steady stream of former staff have been fired one by one, culminating in the removal of Droplet, the editor of the Neopian Times and known for her dedication and love for the site.
And so we come to June. Jumpstart overhauled the old filter system and decided that it was good enough to leave unattended (perhaps as a test for the upcoming long 4th of July weekend in the US)? I don’t know whether or not the moderating team was laid off or just given a reprieve, but the former seems likely given what’s been happening.
With no mods to ban offending users, the site has become a haven for shitposting and discussing taboo topics such as “homosexuality” and “politics” (both of which are explicitly forbidden as topics in the official rules)
This is personal speculation, but i believe that the mayhem occurring right now is the result of 9 months of pent-up anger at Jumpstart for their negligence of the site. Jumpstart has made this bed and they’re going to lie in it.
The other day I came across this awesome program by accident
(I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several
times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.
It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.
There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be
downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79.
I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I
haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The
website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well.
Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the
features available in both versions.
There are three features the free version doesn’t have:
Can’t save OBJ files for export
Can’t download models and poses from Doll
Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)
It can’t load saved files
The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and
close the program, you can’t load that
pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I
found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why
reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you.
But, the default
model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference
it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:
There’s a pose tag
that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and
waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much
follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.
Even
the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See,
like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:
The morphing tag
is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and
choose from
a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has
some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones.
Don’t like the
options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider
that
lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design.
So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii
Muscle-chan!!
The scale tag
lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different
joints. This
feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body
shape
variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more
digitigrade
model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular
human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)
Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant
hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.
The ability to pose
hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from
a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers.
And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like.
In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.
Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should
totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.
Ananke's Stuff 