An AJ Blogger Returns :0

Hey Jammers! This is just a quick post to let y'all know that a cool AJ blogger from years past has been back at it again lately!

It's q1zx!!! 🌠

If you're interested in reading some super fun posts about AJ Classic from time to time, please check out the Animal Jam Lake Blog! You won't regret it!

That's really all I have to say for now. 

Here is a very fluffy bumblebee from this past summer: 

I hope you have as good a day as you can, and I'll see ya in Jamaa!

Should I make a new sig? Maybe? Hmm..

Happy Halloweeny

Hi Jammers! I've been super busy with school stuff as you could probably guess, but I just thought I'd check in and wish all who celebrate it a happy and safe Halloween tomorrow c:

And to those who don't celebrate it, I hope you have a great day too. I don't really think I'm gonna do much myself... maybe at most I'll just paint my face green and call it a day.

Kind of annoying that midterms have to be right around Halloween, but what can ya do.

Well, in the spirit of Halloween (not), I thought I'd share another one of my photos! Shiver in fear at the sight of...

bunny (￣◡￣)

Yes. This bunny was outside my window for about an hour a couple of weeks ago, just relaxing and looking very round. You could have drawn a circle and put some lil ears on top, and it would be 100% correct. 

Oh! Kind of on an unrelated note...

Remember in the last post when I mentioned something about Flash being the reason for AJC's lack of updates? 

Well, it looks like I had totally missed a great explanatory post made by jrl4547 over on their blog! 

You might already know about this because it's been a while, but if you want some more clarity (and a bit of hope) about AJC, I highly recommend you check it out. 

Hmm... I guess I should go back and disappear into the homework vortex now. But first, let's visit the Phantom Vortex! Haven't done that in a while.

It has an out-of-place shop thing there now. 

Pretty standard re-colored fare. Looks like the Bat Zombie mask is nonmember-- too bad it's so ugly.

Moving on– hey, what's that?

!!!

aww yeah. Halloween time.

See you in Jamaa!

What WildWorks Being Sold ACTUALLY Means for AJ

Hey Jammers! After a long and busy summer, I'm back with a post. Seriously, it was probably the busiest summer in my life so far. In a good way, though! I got to do a lot of meaningful work outside. 

Before I continue on to the big focus of this post, I thought I'd share this:

Something I spent a lot of time doing this summer is taking up-close photos of insects outside. There's so much of an insect's world that we can't clearly see from far away, and I think these kinds of photos of bugs in their habitat can help :)

For example... looking at this red milkweed beetle from above, you'd have no idea that they have a :3 face. But up close...

...you can kinda see it, right?

Fun fact: this beetle was very annoyed that I was following them around with my camera and was only on the blade of grass for like 5 seconds before flying away.

–––

And now, the main topic of this post:

WildWorks was sold. 

Surprising, right? 

Well, not really. It's been clear from the updates (or lack thereof) in both Animal Jam Classic and AJPW that WildWorks hasn't really had the resources to add as many new things as it used to. If there aren't actual new items in WildWorks' flagship game, it might be because they haven't been able to pay people to create them. 

For a while I felt like WildWorks was just reducing AJ Classic updates because they wanted to replace AJC with AJPW, but honestly, now I'm starting to think that a big part of it was that they just ran out of resources to equally tend to both games. 

And the more I think about it... the reason might have been Feral. 

So much money and attention got redirected into that game, and ultimately that money didn't come back to WildWorks like they expected. I mentioned this a bit in my Cinder/Feral post a few months back.

And on that note– before I go through the rest of Clark Stacey's explanation of the sale, here's something you might be interested to know first:

The above paragraph is taken right from Clark Stacey's Instagram post. In response to the overwhelming backlash against WildWorks using Cinder to venture into cryptocurrency, WildWorks has disconnected itself from Cinder. From what I can see, this is good news!

And even better...

While the things a CEO of a company says about it are going to be sugar-coated, so far I don't see any backstabbing of the player-base here. It really seems like this deal was made so AJ (and WildWorks) could have the resources to keep on going.

Though I understand the nervousness from a lot of players convinced that this heralds "the end" of Animal Jam. When a company is bought, a whole lot of different things can happen. Sometimes workers get replaced, but what often happens is that the same people will be working, just under different leadership.

I tried to research these kinds of things and I'm honestly still confused about a lot, but here's a fact that I have read on multiple articles about the sale:

– WildWorks founders Clark Stacey and Jeff Amis will continue to be CEO and COO as they have been. 

That's all I know. It's possible that the game will change a lot, but as I look at what's been written and try to stay positive, I think it won't be so bad. 

Now if D¡sney bought WildWorks... then I'd be afraid. 

Here's the full message from Stacey's Instagram page:

–––

A big thank you to an anonymous commenter for letting me know about this! I'm glad I had the time to write up a post in the same day.

And before I go, I learned about something I hadn't thought of before: there's a possibility that AJC hasn't been updated as much because of technical issues from Flash...?

I don't really follow Jambassadors so I don't know which interview this could be, but it seems plausible. 

Well, this has been a post. 

I hope you all have as good a day as you can!

*using my ghost signature because I still want to be on hiatus :P

Posting Break~

Hey Jammers and non-AJ-players alike! For some reason it looks like Blogger changed the font of most of my posts from the past few years, so now everything looks weird. 

Over the years this blog's HTML code has collected tons of errors, and sometimes it doesn't mix well with new updates that come to Blogger.

And as some of you know, I've been using a test blog to work on coding a cute old-school-AJ new layout. And it's been just sitting there in-progress for an embarrassingly long period of time... *sigh* 

...which brings me to the main part of this post: a hiatus! Something kind of silly for me to announce, as a blogger who only posts about once a month anyway ^^; 

(To be fair though, monthly posting is actually pretty active compared to most blogs in the world, but that doesn't stop me from judging myself based on 2014 AJ blog standards lol)

I'm mostly just declaring a hiatus so my mind isn't yelling "WHY AREN'T YOU KEEPING THE SPIRIT OF THE AJ BLOG ALIVE!!!!!" whenever I'm trying to work on another goal. 

And I have a ton of personal goals that I want to get done this summer. Like, finishing up the new layout... finishing all my half-done animation/video editing projects... unpacking the rest of my moving boxes... and all of these things seem small, but to a depressed person like me who struggles with motivation and tons of anxiety, they feel like huge mountains to climb.  

So all this means is that I won't hold myself to posting every month until I deal with those goals above, but I'm not really going anywhere. I'll be checking and responding to comments like I normally do =)

I hope you all are having a truly nice summer/winter (depending on where you are) and that things keep getting better.

Seeya soon,

Official Free Membership Code for May 2022!

Hey Jammers! Finally, I've wrapped up my Spring semester, and now I got more time to focus on other goals. Whew...

Because of all my school work, it's actually been quite a while since I last logged into Animal Jam. Maybe over a month or two!

But I'm glad I logged in today, because hidden a handful of pages into the Jamaa Journal laid this surprise:

Nice!

Entering this code gets you two weeks of free membership, along with a Spring Small House and a Spring Bunny. The Spring Small House has usually just been in the Den Shop this time every year, but the Spring Bunny is a nice addition– particularly because nonmembers will be able to keep being a Spring Bunny after their two weeks runs out.

Glad I didn't miss this! When I don't have as much time to log in, I like to get the AJ news from Rainbow's blog, but she hasn't been posting as much these days. 

I'm going to try to be more in-the-loop this summer, as well as just have more calming times just playing the game c:

Back to the topic of this code– here are some ideas for how all y'all nonmembers can get the most out of a temporary membership:

– Dress up your nonmember pets at the Pet Stop, because you'll be able to keep what you add to them!

– While you're at it, make your pets sparkly at the Pet Wash– which is such a cute silly thing that it should already be for everyone >:T

– Make some Masterpieces, because you can use your diamonds instead of MP tokens!

– Send typed Jam-a-Grams to people you haven't seen in a while :)

– Go into the Township and ask people to write stuff on your Jammer Wall 

And finally...

– Have fun and be yourself ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Pffft

See you in Jamaa!

An Earth Day Post~

Happy Earth Day! It's DoomyPanda again, reporting live from the library where I should be doing work, but just don't want to right now. 

It sure has been a while since I last posted. Probably like many of you, I've been dealing with final projects and just trying to get all my work in before the semester ends. It's annoying how school can sometimes zap you of motivation, but I think I'm still learning a lot about animation, at least.

I'm pretty excited about this summer– if all goes well, I'm going to be spending lots of time outside helping with local wildlife/ecology research C:

So, speaking of which, I thought I'd use this small window of time to share those photos I mentioned from when I visited a desert region last month:

The photo quality better not turn out as bad as it looks in the post editor...

So this right here is a cool nest on top of some cactus! I see a feather so I'm thinking it is a bird's home. Not sure if you can tell, but this nest was actually pretty big– I remember it being like a constructed tunnel with plenty of shade inside. The mud it was lined with probably also helped keep it cool.

And here we have two cool lizards just hanging out and following each other around in the sun. One of them came up to me for a second, actually! I had a metal water bottle with me, so maybe she thought it looked interesting? Ah well, I will never know for sure. 

A bird on a very tall cactus! Not the best photo quality, but I think it would look interesting if it was a painting or something. 

And finally, many frogs. 

–––

When I think about Earth Day, or the Earth in general, I get a bit overwhelmed sometimes. There are so many pressing issues, and so many of them feel so big that I don't even know where to begin. I bet you might feel that way sometimes too!

All of these problems and challenges are simply too big for one person to solve all on their own. Every person has a limited amount of energy to fight back with. 

That's why I think one of the best ways for people who care to make a positive change is to use their own skills and passion to help in the small ways we can, and unite with others who care to combine those skills and passions into a stronger force for change. 

Basically, there are some great things individual people can do to make the world a better place, one small piece at a time, and when we encourage and support each other to make these little changes, those small pieces add up to something big.

That's why one of my interests is planting native plants. You might only have a small amount of space to work with, but you can turn what would otherwise be a boring patch of cut grass into a place where bees and butterflies can have enough nectar to eat. You're helping them survive and thrive!

So, if there was one simple action I'd say is a great way to make the Earth a better place, I recommend you research what wildflowers would be considered native to your area, and see if you can use the space you have to plant some. 

I got some seeds online recently and I can't wait to plant them next week >:)

And if you're interested in this at all and have any questions, feel free to let me know in the comments! ^.^

Once again, happy Earth Day, and I'll see you in Jamaa :)

Speculating About Fer.al and Cinder

Helloooo once again! I'm back. I also happen to be back from a trip I went on with my family. I don't travel much, and especially now with the pandemic it was pretty weird to be going different places, but it actually went well! I saw some cool cactuses, birds and lizards in the desert. Once I move the photos over to my laptop, I'll post a couple here in case you might wanna see c:

For this post, I wanted to talk about some WildWorks related things I've been thinking about. 

But first of all, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, happy Spring!! 

Flowers haven't really started blooming yet where I am and it's still kinda cold, but it'll be nice when plants do decide to start springing back.

Now, let's jump right into this...

After less than two years of being in the beta stage, Fer.al has shut down. 

It was something the player base was fearing, but not totally expecting. Shortly after WildWorks began promoting Cinder, the CEO said this in an interview: 

"Stacey wrote that Cinder will be 'drawing upon the scaffolding of Feral,' a Wildworks game where players control their own mythical animals. Feral won’t be adopting NFT and blockchain gaming, as 'the Feral community deserves to evolve on its own path, and crypto-gaming isn’t what its members signed up for.' Cinder may visually resemble Feral in some aspects, 'but the resemblance ends there.'"

– quote from this article

That article was published on January 14th of this year. On February 18th, WildWorks announced Fer.al's shut down. 

I personally wasn't as drawn to Fer.al as Animal Jam Classic, but with all the time and artistic effort put into that game, PLUS the community that grew from it, it really does feel like a waste.

This makes me think that there might be a few possibilities:

1. Fer.al was meant from the start to only be active until Cinder was done. 

2. The huge negative backlash to Cinder's release made WildWorks realize that it was gonna be a struggle to get anyone excited about it. So... they shut Fer.al down in the hopes that the players most sad about the shutdown would migrate to Cinder to experience the same aesthetic.

3. Too expensive to keep both games going at the same time?

I don't know, the idea that Fer.al was always just testing grounds for Cinder just feels weird to me.

WildWorks having pretty much just copy-pasted Fer.al's Shattered Bay into Cinder (see screenshots above), makes me feel like Cinder was mostly just stitched together out of assets originally meant for Fer.al. 

The Cinder homepage mentions that Cinder has been in production for about two years, but I wonder... 

This screenshot which I posted a couple of months ago was from a Jamaa Journal page in AJPW from April 2021. If this page echoes WildWorks' viewpoint at that time... then maybe the concept for Cinder is actually a lot more recent.

Maybe the 'two years in production' refers to Fer.al's production. That game did serve as the foundation Cinder was built off of.

Eh... not just built off of. That's literally the blood lake from Fer.al on the Cinder homepage. 

As I've been writing this post, I've been doing a lot of research and I stumbled upon something that might give some more clarity:

According to this article, WildWorks invested 6 million dollars in Fer.al over its two-year development, and they didn't think the game was making enough money for that investment. 

Now I'm thinking that Cinder came about for a simple reason: WildWorks just needed money, and they thought an NFT game would be the way to get it. 

I found this on the Cinder homepage:

('Coffers' means funds btw)

Pre-production of Cinder probably mostly refers to the production of Fer.al. So, the money players spend on NFTs in the game is needed to raise the money to keep Cinder in development. 

I don't know much about game development, so I don't know if that actually means anything... but it seems to me that, yeah, Cinder was thought up more recently than two years ago. 

...

This is tiring to write about...

I'm gonna go eat something now, and I hope you do too. 

This was a long post >.<

Byeeee

Art for Popcorn!

Hiya Jammers! I hope you're all doing well today. My laptop's losing charge, so this will just be a short post to upload the art of Popcornpizza25's AJ red panda that they won in the raffle!

I hope ya like it :>

If you're Popcorn, this art is just for you to use as you wish!

Whew... this drawing is such a huge first for me. I get so nervous about drawing animals, especially if they're sort of stylized, so I rarely end up with complete-feeling artworks of them. Animals are just so cool and I feel like I can't really capture that coolness in a drawing xD

But I tried, and I think I'm pretty happy with how this turned out! I aimed for a mix between how red pandas look on AJ and how they look in real life.

Also, aside from the initial sketch, this is also the first full drawing I've done on GIMP! I've honestly been having an easier time drawing with GIMP than I ever had with Photoshop. 

Something I learned about how to create line weight with digital art is to use an oval shaped brush instead of a circular one! I recommend you try it, if you want. 

This is also the first drawing that I made a special signature for :3

Well, that's all I got for now. I have some ideas for a couple posts, so I hope I'll be able to get to writing them after my school work is done. I have so many hours to do.... AAAAAA

See you in Jamaa!

Art Raffle Winner~

Hey Jammers! Happy March to you all. I hope we can make this a good month ^^

As promised, today I'll be announcing the winner of this past month's small art raffle. Big thanks to everyone who entered, and don't worry if you didn't find the time to enter– I'll be doing more of these in the not-so-distant future =)

Thought it might be fun to announce it through a little video! 

I assigned each person who entered a number from 1 to 4, and used a random number generator to find the winner.

So without further ado, the winner is...

(Click full-screen! Also, for some reason it's weirdly blurry until the halfway point, but it's not that way on the actual YouTube page :| )

Psst, don't keep scrolling! You can find the raffle winner at the end of the short vid above!

But if you can't play the video or don't feel like watching, then I'll let you know here that the winner is...

Popcornpizza25!

Congrats, Popcorn! I'll be drawing your AJ character like you requested, and I'll post it once I'm done :D

(It would be the same white and yellow red panda that's in your blog banner, right? Let me know when you can so I can be sure!)

Gonna try to go all out with this one, so I can't promise when it'll be done ^^; but I'm gonna shoot for March 16th at the latest! It'll be digital art btw c:

Well, that's all I got for now. I'm gonna go do some drawing homework, and after that I'll start planning the drawing ASAP!

See you in Jamaa~

Art Raffle Time + Mastertracks Title Music

Hey Jammers! It's that time– the day of my Jam-iversarry :D

10 years. Wow.

During the first couple years, I don't think I would have guessed that I'd be playing AJ for this long, but at the same time, I could never imagine quitting. 

I remember around 2014, or maybe 2013, I made a big emo post on here about going on hiatus from AJ indefinitely... only to come back like 2 days later xD

Whether I like it or not, the world of Jamaa holds a big piece of my heart, and so, so many memories that have shaped me into the person I am today. It can make me feel self-conscious to admit that, yeah, but I know a big bunch of you feel the same, so I know I'm not alone <3

That being said, I do deal with a lot of overwhelm, so I'll admit that sometimes the thought of writing posts here on top of all my other different projects can get, well... overwhelming. 

But I'm okay with that. While I have a ton of different interests that pull me in a ton of different directions, this one right here is an interest that's helped me through some truly difficult times. And it's really all thanks to you :')

Thank you for reading Animal Jam Stream, and thank you for being a part of this great little corner of the AJ community! 

–––

To celebrate this milestone, I was thinking something low-key but still nice. 

So how 'bout an art raffle?

If you'd like to enter, comment down below by Feb 28th...:

•    your username – either AJC, AJPW, or both if you want

       •    what you'd like in a drawing – could be your character, could be anything! I'm usually better at drawing humanoid characters, but I'm happy to draw nonhumans as well. (Appropriate for all ages, of course)

•    how you'd like to get your art if you win – I could post it on this blog for you, or give it to you as an AJC Masterpiece (I got no tokens on AJPW, sorry!)  

...and the winner will be picked randomly on March 1st!

I hope this is something y'all will be interested in :>

–––

Before I go, here's one last thingy:

I like the AJPW Mastertracks title music, so I saved it for anyone else who also likes it :>

That is all.

See you in Jamaa!

Layout Testing Part 2 – A Transparent Teacup

Hey Jammers! It's February again– month of the Lunar New Year, the Friendship Festival on AJ, and the month that will mark another year since I first set paw in the world of Jamaa. (AAA I know that wording sounds cheesy– but ya know what, I'm gonna leave it in there. Because it's happy)

Ideally, I'd host some kind of a contest or raffle for the 17th, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get around to that, mostly because I don't have many interesting items to give away. Hmm...

Would any of you be interested in a contest/raffle that didn't involve item prizes? I could draw something for whoever ends up being the winners– perhaps an OC, the winner's animal, or something like a custom Masterpiece? I'm sure I still got some MP tokens lying around here... 

Let me know in the comments what kind of thing you might be interested in this month! C:

–––

Redesigning my blog has been a fun and relaxing process for me, but I know the next part of this post where I talk about it might be a bit boring to you. Nonetheless, some content is better than no content, so here it is:

That slightly blurry green-ish block thing on my layout test blog is my new coding victory– I've figured out how to put an image behind each post's date header. That green thing is a test image!

I'm not sure where the idea came from, but I was thinking that each post should have a lil teacup on top of it.

And after searching Jamaa, I found the perfect teacup:

This one.

What's also good about it is that it's naturally pixelated, so it was much easier to erase its background.

One issue, though:

Ignoring the positioning (which I know how to fix) the teacup at its normal size looks just blurry enough on the test blog to annoy the perfectionist part of me.

Something I've learned is that it's good to create your drawings/graphics at a size at least 2x bigger than how you want to display them. That helps minimize the fuzziness. 

So I opened the original screenshot in GIMP, zoomed in 4x:

(Somehow, increasing the actual size of the image in GIMP made it blurry, but zooming in on it didn't..)

After going ahead and covering the overlapping machine part with a hard pixel brush, I used GIMP's convenient color-select tool to erase the rest of the background.

Then I filled the layer behind it with bright green. Because increasing the actual image size would make it blurry for some reason I don't know yet, I needed to screenshot the zoomed-in teacup and then erase the green.

Ta-da~

When I get around to it, I'll find a way to add this to my test layout in a way that looks cute. 

EDIT: Just realized it still has some white spaces around it, dang. Back to work, I guess...

Aaaaaand that's all the rambling for now! See you in Jamaa ^^