Well. I joined Neopets on June 11, 2001. I know, because it says so on my User Lookup page. I use my toastlad personality as a handle there. My first neopet was Geico_no_Mayo the blue Techo, followed by WebOfConfusion the green Aisha (adopted from the pound), then Dogobah the yellow Gelert, and finally, GigaChloe the red Shoyru. I go to the site every day if I can. The things I try to do every day include feeding my pets, collecting interest at the bank, looking for stuff to buy at the Igloo Garage Sale, possibly grab some free omelette and/or jelly, see if I can win anything at the Tiki Tack Tombola, the Wheel of Excitement, and the Fruit Machine. Check my stock portfolio, sometimes consider buying or selling stocks. Every once in a while I check Coltzan's Shrine to see if I can get anything. I have a shop, though it rarely has anything in it, and a gallery (not to be confused with my Otakuphrenia Gallery). And every day in December, I check the Advent Calendar. There may be a few other things I do more rarely.

But enough about me. Let me talk about the site. You can create or adopt neopets, which come in a bunch of different cute and interesting species, but you can't get more than four total. There are also petpets you can get so your pets can have their own pets, but I don't think they can have more than one each. And I think perhaps there's such a thing as petpetpets, or pets for your pet's petpets. But that's taking things a little too far for me. Well, all this takes place on the virtual world of Neopia, which has a number of different regions. Me and my pets happen to live on Mystery Island. The currency of Neopia is neopoints, but then there are other currencies, like dubloons or neocash or whatever, I don't really deal with such things. You need neopoints so you can buy all sorts of items, like food for your pets, toys they can play with, books they can read, medicine when they get sick (though there are ways to possibly heal them for free), or... lots of other types of things. It's a whole bloody world, okay? There are tons of games of every kind, most of them are in flash, so it's best not to even bother unless you have broadband (but there are also plenty of things for which dial-up is quite sufficient). There are all sorts of events, and... I don't know. There's far, far more going on than I've ever explored. Too much for me to get into even if I spent every waking minute on the site. You can have neofriends, join guilds, have your pets battle against other people's pets... it just goes on and on.

It's just... really amazing and fun and cute and addictive and immense and full of history and whatnot. And, I suppose probably the closest I'll ever get to playing an MMORPG, though I don't really think of it as such... I suppose it sort of is. Anyway, I do wish I'd do more than I normally do, but... like I said, it's too big for me. But I do enjoy the stuff I do there, and I love my neopets, Geico, Webby, Dogo, and Chloe. You know, it's funny, I think I first heard of the site from a banner ad that appeared on my old message board years ago, and the ad had a shoyru in it, which I thought was really cute, but a shoyru was the last pet I ended up getting, some time after I joined. It was really hard to choose pets, there are plenty of others I'd like to have but I couldn't get. Because like I said, you can only get four (though you can always leave your pets in the pound if you want to get new ones, but I'd never do that). But of course, you can see other pets all over the site doing stuff, not just ones owned by players, but fictional ones involved in the various official games or stories, etc. (which are often slightly anthropomorphic versions of neopets). And there are toys you can get for your pets that are like plushie versions of pets, and... all sorts of things, so it's not so bad not having all of them as actual pets. Not to mention countless merchandise you can get in the actual real world based on the website. They have their own TCG, and video games, and cereal, and toys, school/office supplies, etc. There's a cellphone version of Neopets as well, which if I had money I might consider subscribing to someday, if it's still going on. And there'll probably be a movie at some point.

Rambling on here. Dunno what else to say, except that one of the regions of Neopia is Faerieland, so yes, the game also has all different kinds of faeries, who are quite pretty. And they can be found not just in Faerieland but all over Neopia, even in space. So... since I'm just this crazy, I started a gallery for faeries (see links above). My favorite has always been Illusen the Earth Faerie, followed closely by the Soup Faerie. I'm also fond of the Grey Faerie and Jhuidah the Island Faerie, but the others are all nice, too, even if some of them are evil. Illusen is also GigaChloe's favorite, while Webby's favorite is Jhudora the Dark Faerie. (Webby's a bit of a goth.) And... hopefully I'm not forgetting to say anything else that might be dreadfully important....