antiquity

animal jam classic.

truthfully, a part of me was a bit embarrassed to admit i played it for a long time. i don't know why. maybe it was because everyone else played roblox, and i felt like an awkward outsider because of it? eh. well, it doesn't matter anymore. i'm not really embarrassed now. 

one of my elementary school friends was the one who introduced me to it, back in the 2nd grade. i got really into it, with the membership and everything. my main animal was a blue fox. i also had an arctic fox named major majormajor, since everyone else named their animal major majormajor at some point. 

i never understood it. 

my main den was... i forget its name now, but it's the one that was deep underground. crystals surrounded it, and it had a bookshelf in its base.

i didn't really collect a lot of gear, just a few things i thought were cute and cycled through every so often. i remember some of my favorite items were a pair of red shutter shades and an orange suit with a red bow tie... you can blame my scene-adjacent sister for that, lolz. at the same time, it was sort of a cute outfit!

i also had a rare orange stud... necklace thingy. people are still really fascinated by those, which is another thing i never understood. i held onto it though. dunno why. maybe no one really knows. 

my favorite thing though, personally, was the story mode. your character joins the alphas of the world to fight off the phantoms, who wish to pollute the world. i often played it with friends, and we got all the way to the end (which was the search for greely back then). but playing it now, it's a bit... bizarre, to say the least. you have all these alphas, who are supposedly the best of the best in jamaa, telling some random kid animal that they're the only hope of the entire world? what? they've got crazy magical powers, and we've got nothing but a lack of fear. and that makes us better candidates for world-savers? even if so, it's not the most moral choice to rely on a kid for that. what are they thinking.

i also really enjoyed wandering around the world and collecting stickers for the nature journal, playing the drink minigames, and checking out some of the parties. i always loved the summer carnival since we got to make our avatar some cotton candy, lolz.

i stopped playing it after a couple of years, since i locked into writing stories. and then, my account was one of the accounts hit when it had a massive data leak. i didn't claim it after such, and so... it's lost to time now. 

i'm a bit sad about it now, since i won't be able to look back anymore. but it's not like i could even access most of what i had anymore! i'm not paying for a premium account now.

that being said. one of the atdi folks i follow on tumblr shares the things that happen on there sometimes, and curiosity got the best of me. i'm a rabbit now, with a cozy cabin. it's been a treat looking back at how things were, trying to go through all the motions again on my own, but i won't stay there.

oh, also. sidenote. what the squid is wrong with the name tteokguk??? korean rice cake soup??? the moderators wouldn't allow me to have it, so now i'm named barleysoup. i don't even eat barley soup. meaaannnnnnnnnnn!