I didn’t see anybody talking about the news here, so I thought that I could share a summary.
The Neopets Team announced today that they’re under new management. They’re no longer affiliated with Jumpstart (which announced their closure back in June) or their parent company NetDragon.
(Dominc Law, worked for NetDragon and was an old school Neopets player. He put together a team to work on saving the brand.)
Also in that blog post the team talks about how they are well aware of the problems the site has been through in the last decade, they acknowledge the lack of resources which resulted in the Neopets website being left broken.
Going ahead, they are going to focus on community requests, such as speeding up the process of Flash Games conversion, clearing up the page conversion backlog, bug fixes, mobile compatibility issues and improving customer support.
Most importantly, in my opinion, they clear up that they WILL NOT go forward with any Metaverse bullshit, and will instead work on creating a game that feels like Neopets:
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At this point, they have secured $4M in funding from various (unnamed) investors with additional funding from the management buyout. For the first time in forever, it looks like TNT has the resources they need to move the brand forward. In the blog post, they mention they have already hired developers and artists to work on the fixes the site needs.
From what it looks like, the game will be a mobile social life-simulation, parallel to the current website. We don’t have to worry that neopets.com will be replaced by a mobile app.
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As of now, they have announced:
A brand new plot, scheduled for early 2024
A 2 million(!) NeoCash giveaway
More transparency with monthly updates from the team, scheduled AMAs
Neopets will be under the control of a new, unified entity: World of Neopia, Inc - the website will remain the same (neopets.com)
A Brand Ambassador Program
No longer going forward with NFT/Metaverse stuff
At the end, they published a FAQ with some answers that I found to be good and very interesting:
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”
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If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.
This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:
If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I’m not hearing about that, so… Tree law!
The Studios: *speak*
Botanists and other Tree Experts:
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Update and confirmation of Imminent Tree Law:
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He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.
And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.
All this to be a Captain Planet filler villain to some writers. And yes, it’s currently just the writers officially picketing there; SAG-AFTRA recommended against it for petty bullshit like this and the suddenly necessary sidewalk construction.
Because smallpox used to kill about 30% of everyone who caught it. The successful vaccine program run by the world’s medical community means that no one will ever die of smallpox ever again.
Because rabies is 100% fatal without a vaccine. No one needs to die of rabies ever again. It is entirely preventable.
Because 1-2 in 1000 who get measles, die. Vaccines let us contain outbreaks or fully wipe them out. There is no specific treatment for the disease once you have it. Your immune system either wins or you die.
We like vaccines because vaccines save lives and raise our standard of living.
My mother, now in her 70s, talks about how her mother wept for joy when her children received the polio vaccine. Because she didn’t have to be afraid of polio anymore.
A 2019 study found that measles can cause “immune amnesia”, cutting your antibodies by 10%, up to almost 75%. Meaning, you’ve become that much more vulnerable to a whole slew of illnesses that you used to be protected from, and it doesn’t matter if you acquired the antibodies via a vaccine or recovering from an illnesses - they are gone. All those shots you got as a baby? The boosters you got through grade school and as an adult, including the annual flu shot? Guess what: measles most likely wiped your body’s immune memory of those and you’ll have to get them all. Over. Again.
my grandparents have to lock their car doors when they go to sunday mass because people have been breaking in to unlocked cars and leaving entire piles of zucchini
i feel like i should’ve added more context when i posted this. my grandparents live in a rural area where farmers and casual gardeners alike are, at this point in the year, suddenly being hit with unexpectedly abundant zucchini crops. there aren’t just some random vandals leaving zucchinis in people’s cars for the hell of it, this is the work of some very exasperated, probably very elderly, folks who have more zucchini than they know what to do with
Yep. You can also expect to find a bag of zucchini on your porch.
My grandfather once found his neighbor stealing his tomatoes out of his garden at three in the morning. Red-handed, with a basket of the nearly-ripened ones. He thought he was going to find gophers or something, but no, here’s Henry, taking his tomatoes. The best ones.
There was a long pause between them.
My grandfather (allegedly) said, “Henry… it’s OK. You can take some tomatoes if you want them.”
Henry sighed in relief.
“But,” my grandfather said, “you have to take two zucchini for every tomato.”
There was another long silence. “That’s a harsh bargain, John,” said Henry. “But I accept. I’ll tell Joe up the street, too.”
My grandfather said, “Tell Joe he needs to take three.”
a friend of my dad’s came by in the middle of the night, he seemed very nervous when my dad answered the door. he wouldn’t come inside but he leaned in and whispered to my dad in spanish, “i have some fresh grapes for you.” and then this happened:
the melon was a special bonus.
MY DREAM
A friend of mine lives in a rural area and he has been surrounded by zucchini for most of May, June, and July.
At one point he was so done with the whole zucchini madness that he came to classes actively begging people to “Please please please!! Take some my family’s damned zucchini!! I’ve been eating zucchini for weeks!! I’m going insane!!!”
Having grown up in a rural area and having come home to zucchini on the front step or in the mailbox, i find it highly amusing the OP had to clarify. I’m sitting here nodding “yup.”
I have a friend with a garden in Oregon who literally made Zucchini Chocolate Chip Cookies and sent them to me in Indiana. I texted her back “I SEE WHAT YOU’RE DOING HERE”
I’m waiting for the day when someone will hear about my background in Botany and ask me for advice on what someone who’s just wanting to start exploring planting vegetables should try.
I know fuckall about gardening because my background is wild plants and not agriculture, but I’m gonna tell them
“Zucchini. Definitely try Zucchini. Just plant plenty of them and you’ll get a decent sized crop! They’re very rewarding to grow.”
It may be a bit of a long game, but I’ll enjoy their screams of despair from across the void as they realize that they will eat zucchini forever
This is NOT an exaggeration, guys. Zucchini (and most squashes, really) will outgrow you so fast. Let our tale be a caution– or an encouragement, whichever. You decide as you hear the story of Squish.
When we were so broke we had to choose between gas and store-bought-food (I think I was about 10?), we had a garden so we could eat regularly (we also had chickens and pigs and hunted, but that’s beside this point). One summer, we planted 6 rows of yellow squash and 6 rows of zucchini. Each row probably had 10, maybe 12 plants in it. We created this giant squash-block in our garden plot so it was all right there together in the middle, and the needier plants like tomatoes were on the outside of the whole plot. We thought we were clever, til the first crop started coming in.
The outside two rows of each squash, yellow and zucchini, were normal. High yield, of course (because squash), but standard size for both summer squash and Italian zucchini. The inner 8 rows, however, created this hybrid monstrosity that we called Squish. It was pretty– a nice swirly yellow and green combination that made it clear the squash and zucchini had interbred.
Squish became a living nightmare for us. Something about the hybridization caused them to forget how to stop growing, or at least how to grow at a normal rate because those suckers were longer than my dad’s forearm, and bigger around than my (albeit child-sized) thighs. They didn’t get all hard and nasty on the inside, either, for some reason, like most squash will at that size. And they just kept coming. I don’t even remember seeing that many flowers, but every day we were pulling upwards of 20lbs of Squish out of the garden, only for there to be more the next day, or sometimes by the end of the day if we harvested in the morning. I don’t know where they were hiding, but it was like some sort of squash portal had opened into our yard and started crapping out Frankenstein’s Squashes.
At first, it was great. We could eat all we wanted and not worry about rationing it. But the growing season in Arkansas is long, and we had incredible weather that summer, so those darn things kept alternating flowers and fruit. Pull off a few Squish, new flowers budded out, and they ripened super-fast in the heat. We were absolutely swimming in Squish, because they were so big that even gorging on them meant only 1 or 2 got eaten per meal. (I think I recall using a few particularly enormous ones as swords for a duel with my sister, if that says anything about their size. I cannot overemphasize how absolutely, heinously gigantic they were. You probably don’t believe me but I am not kidding. Those things were bigger than a newborn by several many inches and a couple pounds.)
We had (luckily) a big deep freezer, and someone gifted us a bunch of freezer ziploc bags, so we started chopping them up and freezing them as we pulled them off. We ran out of bags real fast, so we caved and bought a ton more. We filled that deep freezer near to bursting. It was probably 3-4 feet deep, (as I remember barely coming up to the edge of it), and at least 4-5 feet long, about 2.5 feet across, and we filled it to the top with Squish. And that’s while we’re eating fresh ones every day with dinner! But still more Squish came before the first frost, so we started packing the fridge. And my grandma’s freezer. And my grandma’s fridge. And feeding them to the pigs and chickens. And giving them away at church.
Do you realize how big a deal it is that people who were so broke that they had to choose between gas and the power bill were GIVING AWAY FOOD??? That’s how much gosh darn Squish we had. And little did I know, but apparently, my dad HATES squash. He only planted them because they were a cheap, quick source of food and my mom loved squashes. And he got stuck with the folly of his decisions. For over a year.
Yep. We had Squish in the freezer for over a year. Eating it regularly. It lasted for over a year. A family of 5, plus often feeding my grandmother, we ate off a single garden’s haul for over a year. Of just the Squish. I tell you, if we’d had a farmer’s market back then, that Squish could probably have single-handedly lifted us out of poverty. Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.
We never planted both again, probably because my dad would have combusted out of rage if he’d ever seen another Squish in his life. But man those were the days for thems of us what loved squash.
So survival tip: If you need an absolute crapton of food, plant you a row of yellow squash and a row of zucchini, and keep that pattern going for as many rows as you like. You too can drown in Squish and love it.
Oh wow.
The last story is well worth the read. It might be long but I found it absolutely delightful! Thank you for sharing your childhood Squish gardening adventures!
Meanwhile, people are starving to death.
Ands What do you expect poor rural farmers who just have excess zucchini to do about that exactly? Mail them to Africa?
I was just talking to a friend today about gardening and she said “I’ll plant zucchini for this project.”
“Oh dear… what’s your damage control plan?”
“Oh,” she said, intuiting what I meant. “Eating the blossoms. Love stuffed blossoms. Pumpkin, squash, zucchini. It keeps the crop down, and you get lots of mileage out of them. You keep a mixed crop that way, too. Plus, people don’t always welcome gifts of zucchini, but they find gifts of blossoms exciting.”
This struck me as absolutely game-changing.
My problem is that I legitimately love zucchini. “Lizard,” you ask, “why is that a problem? Just eat the zucchini!” The problem is that in the middle of the growing season, there will be a point where I physically can not consume enough zucchini to keep up with what the plants are producing. It does not matter how much I chop, freeze, fry, bake, etc– there will always be a point where I have more zucchini than I have time in the day to do something with that zucchini.
But eventually it runs out. Like summer, it’s as intense as it is fleeting and come November I want for some zucchini fried with onions. By January, when I’m planning out the spring garden, there’s always that thought, that voice of hubris whispering in my ear… “maybe I should grow more zucchini?”
Children, it is a trap.
It’s getting on planting season so this is your annual reminder to ignore the siren song of zucchini.
Yeah. They did that. I bet the ‘clarification’ came as a result of some strong legal threats.
So be aware in the coming weeks that if your favorite actor reportedly says something shitty about the strike that makes your blood boil? Check the sources. There’s going to be a lot of uh, spin in the news.
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