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Snowflake Challenge 2
Jan. 3rd, 2026 04:41 pmLoosely defined! Post about your pets, pets from your canon, anything you want!
HOW DARE YOU. I walk in here, say I'm NOT going to talk about fandom because I feel like a square peg, and then here comes this question that I can't not answer without talking about one of the few things I have that you could maybe call a fandom!
I joke, I joke. Because face it, I was always going to bring up Petz:
I'll always be a Petz player, even if I drift in and out of the community. Petz was one of the first things that got me online, got me into art, creature design, coding, all sorts of things. I guess it is a fandom but it doesn't call itself one, and it doesn't feel like one in the usual sense. It's just a thing that has remained constant and present while other communities grow and die. I'll always come back to this little sim game and everything around it.
My Petz pages - if you're into old internet stuff, too, the PC is one of the best windows you'll find into what it was like. Even now, people regularly showcase their creations on websites rather than social media. I have some breedfiles there, and some history notes on the series.
I'm not sure any of the roleplays/creature design spaces etc I used to be involved in would count as pets, though, although I've always had a fondness for the bond creature trope and I use it a lot in my own fiction. There was a lot of virtual pet and animal companion media around at the time that ended up as an influence and inspiration.
HOW DARE YOU. I walk in here, say I'm NOT going to talk about fandom because I feel like a square peg, and then here comes this question that I can't not answer without talking about one of the few things I have that you could maybe call a fandom!
I joke, I joke. Because face it, I was always going to bring up Petz:
I'll always be a Petz player, even if I drift in and out of the community. Petz was one of the first things that got me online, got me into art, creature design, coding, all sorts of things. I guess it is a fandom but it doesn't call itself one, and it doesn't feel like one in the usual sense. It's just a thing that has remained constant and present while other communities grow and die. I'll always come back to this little sim game and everything around it.
My Petz pages - if you're into old internet stuff, too, the PC is one of the best windows you'll find into what it was like. Even now, people regularly showcase their creations on websites rather than social media. I have some breedfiles there, and some history notes on the series.
I'm not sure any of the roleplays/creature design spaces etc I used to be involved in would count as pets, though, although I've always had a fondness for the bond creature trope and I use it a lot in my own fiction. There was a lot of virtual pet and animal companion media around at the time that ended up as an influence and inspiration.
Snowflake Challenge 1
Jan. 1st, 2026 07:27 pm
Huh so it came out. Ok... I don't know if I'll stick with this, but whatever.
The Icebreaker Challenge: Introduce yourself. Tell us why you're doing the challenge, and what you hope to gain from it.
So... I'm a filthy cheater because I'm not a fandom person, or at least not a capital-F Fandom person. I respect fandom, fanworks are real art and all that, but it's not my space in the end. I've tried to be a fandom person but it's a real square peg situation.
So why do this? Well I explained in a locked entry already but because I wanted to talk about my own experiences and history with internet creativity and general nerdery. There'll probably be some fandom adjacent stuff in here too, but don't expect anything about ships or FFN/AO3 or stuff like that. I'm talking creature design, worldbuilding, maybe a bit of virtual life and that sort of thing.
The point? I guess twofold, one, to see if there's anyone else out there with that same history. And two, to try to preserve a bit of the worlds I remember, because too often the history of internet creatives gets flattened to the history of fandom, and media fandom in particular. And there is, or at least was, so much more out there than that. Maybe it's not exactly what the prompts were made in mind for, but there's no law saying I can't, right?
