First REAL Free Membership Code! + An Unreleased Den Arrives

Hey Jammers! I hope you're all doing well and taking care of yourselves. The update a couple of days ago was surely surprising– or not, depending on how you look at it. 

I'll go over the Jamaa Journal, but in my opinion the two stars of this update are the 2-week free membership code (the first of its kind, I think) and a brand new Spring-themed nonmember den!

At first I was really surprised by this– but then I realized this is probably a gift from AJHQ during this difficult time when most schools are closed and people are staying inside. Thanks so much, AJHQ!

So you enter the code into the code box, and...

 Voila! You can be a member, for free, for two weeks.

I just realized now that Clark Stacey (AJ CEO) tried to cryptically hint at this 2-week promo about ten days ago:

I periodically check his Twitter for stuff like this, but I guess I missed this one. Dang :P

Additionally, he's said that the new work-from-home policy that is affecting Wildworks (and a lot of other businesses) is not slowing down the production of Fer.al or AJ updates. So that's some good news! 

***Keep in mind that this is the only actual free membership code in existence. AJHQ doesn't have secret free membership codes– if a code exists for free membership, you will hear about it from THEM in the Jamaa Journal– not some random Jammer who promises free membership if you go to their den.

Never give your user/password to anyone, never input it into any website other than the Animal Jam homepage itself. The only reason another site would ever ask for your account info is if they want to hack you, take your items, or even take your real money. 

So be safe, always.

With that in mind, what are your favorite things to do with membership? Personally, the only reason why I'd want a membership is so I can buy from My Shops:

If you have enough diamonds, which are easy to earn if you're patient enough to accumulate them over time, My Shops are the easiest way to get the rare or semi-rare items that would otherwise take a million years to find and trade for (especially if you're like me and don't have many items to trade).

...However, because of my big spending spree to write up that "Ideas for the Terrain Bundle" post, I have a grand total of zero diamonds XD oh well

Before we move on from the topic of membership, I had a thought recently: should certain members only dens (the older ones, like the castle or treehouse) be made nonmember? Most of the newer member's only dens that come out are MASSIVE in comparison, and are usually more popular. I dunno, just thought this would be nice. I love the treehouse and the castle den...

The next star of this update: the Spring Small House! I bet this means we'll eventually get a Summer Small House as well. I wonder what that would look like...

You can tell by the sharp, solid colors that this den design was created more recently than the Autumn and Winter Small Houses, which seem to have been older den designs that AJHQ dug up. As a result, this is probably my least favorite Small House den, mostly because the grass looks too flat and untextured like glass.

However, I'm sure any nonmember who likes the Princess Den will appreciate this nonmember alternative! 

When I first saw this den design, I thought it looked very familiar. Now I know why: it was leaked a while back under the name "yardGarden" and you could find pictures of it on the Animal Jam Wiki. There are also older images of the garden in a castle den:

It's exact! From what I gathered, the garden add-on seems to have been designed at least before 2018.

I don't condone hacking Animal Jam's files, but the Animal Jam Wiki has a great page of unreleased items and dens that are fun to look through. As an example of a gem I found, look at this:

It's a spooky version of the Princess Den! Wow. Would you ever want to decorate this den?

Moving on...

Pet lemurs are back! And isn't that such a lovely image? I love the glowing moon against the dark blue night :)

The Spring Festival has returned! Though I'll still always cross my fingers that one day AJHQ will bring back the Jamaa egg hunt...

The April Fools party is back in town!

And once again, important information for the concerned souls of Jamaa.


That's all for now, Jammers. But before I sign off, I wanted to address the elephant in the room: how are you all dealing with the virus going on? It can feel really bad to not have the structure of school, or to not be able to see friends in person. I've been feeling that struggle myself.

Feel free to speak your mind in the comment section, or if you want to rant to me in a comment you don't want me to publish, let me know. It can feel like a really lonely time, so I want you to know that I'm here for you if you need.

Thank you for reading <3

~DoomyPanda

THE BETA FONT QUEST IS OVER

I CAN NOT BELIEVE IT

I UPLOADED AN IMAGE OF THE MYSTERY FONT TO A FONT IDENTIFICATION FORUM AND I KID YOU NOT, SOMEONE IDENTIFIED IT IN LESS THAN 10 MINUTES



THE QUEST OF ONE THOUSAND YEARS HAS COME TO A CLOSE


Let this teach you a lesson, children...

Dreams do come true.

And never forget...

Jam on!

Fer.al Dragons + The Beta Font Quest Continues

Hey Jammers! So a couple days ago, I got an email notice from Fer.al:

This was probably the first actual email update they ever sent out, if you don't count the original beta-testing form.

I was hoping it was gonna be an announcement about Fer.al finally going out of beta, but I guess all good things take time, because it was just a notice that they will be accepting a new wave of players into the closed beta:

If you signed up for beta so many months ago but were never sent an invite, this could be a lucky sign!

Though, I have a funny feeling I won't be accepted. Why? Well ya see, I have two email addresses that forward email to each other's inboxes, and I may have accidentally input an email address into the beta form that was originally sent to my other email address. 

It's a small thing, so maybe they'll ignore it, but maybe they won't ^_^;

However, this email notice was not just about the new wave of closed beta invites... it revealed something new, too!

This is a screenshot from the new-and-improved Fer.al homepage. Along with the well-known kitsune and senri, it seems Fer.al players may be able to play as dragons as well!!!

This made me very excited because when I originally heard that Fer.al featured mythical creatures, I wasn't imagining dragons; they completely slipped my mind. BUT NOW... I am super excited to play as a dragon.

According to the Fer.al wiki, this is some leaked concept art for the dragon:

Super cool and sleek :0

You know, I wonder how far Fer.al will take its array of mythical creatures. 

Will they also tap into urban legends as well as ancient ones? Will we be able to play as bigfoot!?!?! That is the question we should all be asking.

---

The next section of this post is all about my obsession with figuring out the name of a particular font Animal Jam used in beta testing. It sounds boring, but if the idea of seeing me go full detective mode sounds amusing, read on! X)


So, you might possibly remember around August, when I was being productive trying to redesign my blog's header:

It is almost done, I just want to add on some leafy accents to it to make it feel complete. I've sketched them out, planned to trace them digitally... and I'll do that... eventually :P

The reason why it's taken a million years for me to make progress with this is that I view my blog's layout like an art project; a visual tribute to my favorite artistic aspects of Jamaa as it's changed over the years. I wanna get to the point where just looking at my blog will make me (and you too, hopefully!) instantly happy and peaceful. 

So naturally, I was very very very particular about everything in this new header, especially the font. I gotta be honest with you– I'm tired of TikiIsland (the font in my current header right now).

You may have noticed that this font I chose for the "ANIMAL JAM" text in my new header is not TikiIsland. So what is it?

The truth is, I have no idea.

In case you forgot, or if you're new here... I actually drew that "ANIMAL JAM" text by hand based on a mystery font that was all over the beta Animal Jam homepage. I know; I still can't believe I had the patience for that. 

Here are examples of that mystery font:

In late August, I looked everywhere trying to find this font. I used font identifying tools, looked at the beta site's page source code... but no luck. I eventually came to the conclusion that this font is impossible to find because it was made specifically for Animal Jam to use.

That's what I thought... until a few days ago.

So, I was bored and decided to look up some old kids shows from the Discovery Kids channel that I used to watch when I was little. I found one called "Truth Or Scare," and to be honest I didn't remember it at all... but they used this mystery font EVERYWHERE in their show! If you look closely, you can tell.

And that show was produced a long long time ago, around 2002... so this font was definitely not made specifically for Animal Jam. Therefore, it should somehow be publicly available.

Still, beyond that it did not give me any new leads. It's not as if TV shows ever put the name of the font they use in the credits.

However, it gave me a new drive to figure out this font, and I spent hours and hours doing the following:

– Using the Wayback Machine to look at the beta site and go into its page source to see if the font name is recorded somewhere in the code. (Don't worry, it's all legal– just good ol' fashioned Inspect Element on Google Chrome.)

...and the result of that? Nothing, because all uses of the mystery font were in images, not in highlightable text.

 – Uploading image examples of the mystery font to font identifiers like FontSquirrel and WhatTheFont.

...and the result of that? Nothing. No matter how clean those images were, no matter which ones I used, none of the fonts it matched to them were even remotely similar.

– Looking up things like "tiki font" or "chunky font" or any other words that might describe the mystery font on font databases and Google Images. 

...and the result of that? Nothing, unless you count my mini discovery of a font that I recognized that was probably in an old Jam-a-Gram:

However, I tried to look at old Jam a Grams to see if I could find the one with this font, and I couldn't... which is weird cuz this font looks super familiar.

I looked everywhere, all through the biggest font databases... and I ended up with nothing.

I still have two last bits of hope: 

1. Maybe, someone at AJHQ will know what the heck the mystery font is and tell me the name. Honestly, I've become so obsessed with it that I might just pay real money for it if that's what I have to do.

2. If that fails, and I feel like it might... I will just straight up recreate the entire font for myself just so I can use it a few times on my blog. It's making me lose my gosh dang mind

Until then... this font will haunt my dreams.

                                                

Well, not all was for nothing. While I was looking around in the page source for the beta site, I found this really lovely background image that I think I haven't seen before!

It's ominous in a peaceful sort of way. I think it would be a wonderful background for me to use on my blog sometimes (maybe for Night of the Phantoms?), and I bet you can use it as a desktop image if you want!

The original file for it is big enough for that, but maybe it'll get compressed if I upload it to this blog... hopefully not.

I hope you enjoyed this earlier-than-normal post! See you in Jamaa, and remember to be kind to yourself and others~

~DoomyPanda

Ideas for the Terrain Bundle!

Hey Jammers! Yesterday was the update, and in typical DoomyPanda fashion I will skip all the parts that I think are uninteresting and focus solely on what I think is the star of this biweekly update: the terrain item bundle!

On this blog, I used to occasionally mention "building block items"--- smaller (usually nonmember) items that you can put together into bigger things. I used to refer to Ice Blocks as building block items:

Remember these cube-y things? They haven't been in stores since 2013, but people don't seem to think about them as very rare.

However, the following new items are WAY more useful as building block items:

Whoa. Lots of items, right? And in my opinion, the best part is that a good fraction of them are nonmember!

Which is why this post will feature some ideas for how to use these items to decorate a den! All are nonmember, of course. I'm a nonmember. :P

First up, ways to use the stone pieces:

You can make a half-circle to sit against a wall to provide a base to a special item you want to draw attention to. Another example:

Kinda looks like the base of a fireplace. Fancy! :0

Let's think about how to use a full stone circle:

So admittedly, I think the Stone Circle from Return of The Phantoms looks more unified than the terrain bundle stone circle.

I think a half-circle looks fine, but maybe not the full one. 

There are also stone rectangles, and so if you really tried hard you could try to make a nonmember stone floor. Not saying it'll look as good as if you used the adventure prize Stone Circles, but you can try.

Moving on... the grass tiles!

I was hoping I could use the solid colored Grass Tiles to make a green nonmember rug, but this ultimately looks more like someone spilled their kale smoothie on the ground.

Hmm... Let me try again:

Hmm. I guess you can have a little indoor green area? 

Well, there goes my whole 24 diamond budget for this post. I hope you all enjoyed!


---

Before I go, remember to keep your compassion, even in difficult times like right now. Be kind to yourself, and be kind to others.

That is all.

Jam on!