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 :>

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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 ^^

Layout Testing :)

Hey Jammers!

These past couple days, I've been making a lot of progress with my longterm goal of redesigning my blog layout. I guess I got a little burst of motivation when I learned that a lot of the older Blogger tutorials I've been finding actually can still work in 2022!

Here's a screenshot of what I've got done so far on my layout test blog:

A few of you may know that I actually finished that header in late 2019, but... never did... anything... with it. 0-0

While the header may have been the biggest part of the redesign– what with drawing the panda, positioning the background, adding glows/shadows, and don't get me started on the fonts– it was the page tabs that made me the most nervous. 

It's just hard customizing page tabs with Blogger. In the past I had tried using an image map (an image with multiple links), but the code stopped working after a while and many people told me that not all the page links worked.

But recently I've found a bunch of tutorials that did work!!! And now, after much trial and error, I think I'm pretty much happy with how the page tabs look. At least on my layout test blog.

While I haven't begun layout designing below the page tabs yet, I think the hardest part is finally out of the way. Hopefully...

> Here's the link to my layout test blog < if you ever feel like checking in on my progress!

I can't promise I'll be completely done anytime soon, but this project has started becoming more fun than annoying, so who knows?

See you in Jamaa!

WildWorks is Trash Again + Some Jam-a-Grams

Hey Jammers! Eek, it's been over a month since my last post. ^^;

This semester of school has been super challenging for me in a lot of different ways, so I've been pretty stressed out just trying to get work done. Though even through my gaps in posting, I'm still here! I check comments every couple of days.

And while I'm busy focusing on other things, sometimes your comments help me learn what's going on in the world of Jamaa:

Or in this case, the world of WildWorks' long list of horrible mistakes TT_TT

The day I learned that WildWorks was re-using Fer.al graphics and user data to push its player base into a shady game that runs on NFTs/cryptocurrency... I had a project for my animation class to edit. I ended up needing to spend the whole night working on it because it was so hard to focus on editing when I was just so disappointed.

For those who don't know, NFTs and other kinds of cryptocurrency have a terrible impact on the environment. They require huge amounts of electricity, produce huge amounts of e-waste (electronic waste), and put massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They are exactly what we don't need right in the middle of a climate emergency. 

So... this just in, WildWorks: you stink. 

I'm frustrated that I have so much emotional attachment to a game about nature run by a company that obviously just doesn't care about the Earth at this point.

That's all I have to say about Cinder. I don't really have the mental energy to write anything more about it.

EDIT 1/1/22: But wait– there's more! Wildflower75 just alerted me to this AJPW Jamaa Journal page from April 2021:

(Screenshot from Rainbow000Pegasus' Ultimate AJ Blog)

...

Well, guys...

I only got one thing to say about this:

–––

While I know it doesn't make anything better, I don't want my first post in over a month to end on an entirely sad note. So here's a small content update I noticed in AJC:

A handful of cute older Jam-a-Grams seem to have returned–

Fun fact: the 'Friends!' one is based on an older JAG that was illustrated in a really pretty way–

The wolf JAG is also based on a cool older one too–

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the newer one also used to say 'Join our wolf pack' but they removed the text? I wonder why.

–––

That's all the content I have for this post today, but one more thing–

While WildWorks may stink, this little corner of the Animal Jam community brings me nothing but joy. 

All of you are kind, awesome people, and I appreciate every one of you. You are what makes this place special! :)

I'm gonna end this post now, but I hope the last few days of 2021 are all good days for you, and I'll see you in the new year!

New AJC Thing: 2-Step Verification

 Hey Jammers! Another quick post here. You know how I pretty much never talk about updates unless it's one of those rare times where something actually new comes to Animal Jam Classic? Well, today is one of those times!

2-step verification is a form of extra security that you can choose to add to your account so even if someone gets your password somehow, they'll still be locked out. You'll also get notified about any log-in attempts, so you can know when to change your password just in case. 

Button in settings that opens the Parent Tools page in your browser

2-Step Verification option in Parent Tools

It's kind of wack that hacking has become such a problem on AJ that 2-step verification makes sense, even though this is just supposed to be a fun and low-key game. 

It's the trading system, man... it's gotten way too intense. The Item Worth Wiki values some items at 100+ spikes, and the community has just gone with it for reasons unknown. With trading feeling unaccessible to so many people, it almost makes sense why some would want to steal items.

I'm not going to turn this post into another item rant, but I still think that a lot of problems would be solved if AJ items had rarity labels that were based off the actual number of that item in the game. It'd make trading a lot more fun and scamming easier to avoid :)

Alright, that wraps up this post. See you all in Jamaa!