“I Could Never Abandon Them”: Neopets Users Play On

Published by The New York Times, November 2021

I wrote about longstanding Neopets players taking care of their cyber companions for The New York Times. With much of the early 2000s era platform breaking down after the discontinuation of Adobe Flash, I spoke with different pet owners about how they’re taking the future of the site into their own hands.

For so many women in their 20s-30s especially, Neopets is where they first got a taste of coding, web design, animation, writing, and more. Browsing today takes you back to the days of the early web, when glittery profile pages were patchworked together by loving fans (so different from today’s templated, streamlined web). And as one of my interviewees said, “it’s rare to have something on the internet last so long as a lot of our online lives are so ephemeral.”

This article was featured in the Weekender as one of the The New York Time’s top weekly stories. It was cited by CNN, NPR, The New Yorker, and more—and I was interviewed by KCRW’s Madeleine Brand about the story.