Cyberpets

Remember those annoying Tamagotchis you had as a child? Those stupid pixel blobs booped, beeeped, and shitted their way into hate status, yet still managed to suck our parents' wallets dry. Well, with the new millennium, those bastards infected the internets and evolved into a network of cyberpets!

Cyberpets (also known as virtual pets) are pretty pictures which can be sold to gullible teenagers for large sums of money. They tend to come in the following flavors: Neopets Clone, Wajas Clone, in-game pets (ie: World of Warcraft), Pet Sims, and Click to Grow or "eggs".

Origins

File:Evolution of Cyberpets.png

Back in the day they really would adopt any-fucking-thing.

The original internet cyberpets were created by an internet entrepreneur who had the cunning idea of making money from the picture his 5-year old Down's syndrome daughter had stuck on the fridge. These "pets" were to be uploaded to other people's geoshitties webpages as a cheap ploy to get more links to their own website and somehow, generate profit. In the early stages of development, the pets did not have to look particularly good, or even vaguely recognizable as an animal. In fact, these "pets" didn't even do anything at all more than suck the e-peen of the douche who made them while simultaneously devouring bandwith on the site hosting them.

Then one guy realized there was one flaw to the "use pets to generate site hits" plan: there was no reason to actually keep the pets linked back to the home site. To remedy this, someone created a database that tracked the number of clicks back to the home site each pet received. As the pet got more and more clicks, the pet would "grow" and change forms. Thus the first "click to grow" egg pets were born.

Then, one day, two bored college students who really thought tamagotchis were cool saw those click to grow pets and thought, "Gee, what if we could make internet pets that actually do things?" These bored fools went on to poorly code Neopets. The pets looked like shit, there were maybe 4 games all coded poorly in javascript, and there was little to actually do there, yet, ~~people~~ young girls would still sign up to look after the "pets"; possibly out of pity.

After a few years, Etsuko noticed how popular Neopets was and decided to cash in on things. Still, what could she do that Neopets didn't already do? How about having people be forced to buy their pets for crazy amounts of money in order to play on the site? And thus Wajas and all it's clones was born.

And the rest of the cyberpets? Mutant Tamagotchis. Seriously.

Bonding

Many people on the internet seem to have an affinity for animals - from 4chan opening it's ice-cold heart to defend abused kitties to furries opening their assholes for their pets. Simply typing the word "cat" into YouTube generates millions of results.

The downside to having a pet is that they sometimes require you to look after them and scrape their shit off your floor. The savvy internet user soon realizes that a cyberpet is far better than a real pet because it does not need to be fed, cleaned, or taken to the vet. Best of all, cyberpets doesn't require the "owner" to move away from their computers, ever. Or that was true, at least, last millennium.

Modern cyberpets however try hard to be as realistic as possible. This means the fake pets will eat, shit, fuck, and cost money, just like real pets, only you can do a hell of a lot less with a cyber pet than a real one. Some of them Even encourage you to take them on walks.

With so many similarities to real animals, retards get the two mixed up in their heads and start to form real emotions for fake creatures. These sad bastards form close personal bonds with their imaginaty pets, far outweighing the value of any RL interpersonal relationships outside of those with other cyber pet owners.

Here are some great examples of the wonderful, loving bond people have for their cyberpets!

Asking your best friend to look after your neopets before you commited ~~suicide~~ pseudocide.
Dedicating an entire blog to yout neopets addiction
People have whored themselves out and sold away their hookers and blow to get these blobs of pixels.

Types of Cyberpets

In-game Pets (ie: World of Warcraft: Mounts and Pets)

File:Epic Mount.jpg

Luckily mounts like these are a dime a dozen.

File:WoW pet.PNG

And that's just the card.

Levelgrind to get your own cheezburger cat.

In-game pets can be easily summed up in two flavors, regardless of the game: Pets and mounts. The ones from WoW are the most famous and infamous.

Most mounts are glow-in-the-dark sabre-toothed raptor lion sharks hybrids with wings and tusks. Admittedly, for the average obese neckbearded dweeb, these mounts are pretty awesome. They're mammoths and lions and they can fly and shit. People are willing to go to extreme lengths to get these mounts because who cares if you get the herp if you can ride an imaginary griffin with hot pink fur and neon green bat wings!

In-game pets are a different matter.

Common types of pets you can buy include:

Cats. Just ordinary housecats...like the one that curled up under your sofa to die after it realized it would never be fed.
Cockroaches. If our gameplay is going well, you probably already have swarms of them scuttling around your feet, feasting on dead cats.
Disgusting Oozeling. The diarrhea left behind by the cockroaches after eating the dead cat.
Dogs. Nothing special, just some overgrown mexican sewer rat, feasting on the millions of roaches already in the room.
Exotic Animals. Creatures your typical basement dweller will never see like elephants, parrots, and cougars. Also includes unusual creatures such as the tapeworms living in the intestines of the aforementioned sewer rat.

Unlike mounts, pets don't do anything. They follow you. Sometimes they make noise. That's it. You cannot even pet / cuddle / kick the little fuckers. Some games like The Sims reverse this and force you to level grind your pets to get them to even do that much for you. Unless you level grind your pets, they will only sit there like the wastes of money they are.

Often these useless pets also cost a lot of money. Not gold, actual honest to god spendable money. Up to and over $800 sometimes. Making it worse, some games even demand that you pay a monhtly fee (subscribe) to be able to even use the pets you bought for obscene amounts of money. For the sake of comparison, you can buy a single pet with a year's subscription for $1,040 that does nothing except maybe chirp now and then or you could go out and buy uranium for between $60 - $200 and a bottle of champagne with gold in it for $21.50 to toast being master of the world and still have money left over to build your doomsday device.

Wajas Clones

Moar info: Wajas.

If conventional cyberpets are too boring, you can easily create your own electric dragon / winged wolf / multicolored scene hermaphrodites (preferably all three). They come in billions of wonderful colors with adorable accessories

All of these sites are the same except for the pets featured. No exceptions. In these sites you...

Pay for a beautiful pixel animal that is a recolor of the same base line art as all the other beautiful pixel animals
Pay for beautifully-drawn accessories for said beautiful pixel animal
Pay for an account upgrade to get better food and accessories for the beautiful pixel animal
Pay to breed your beautiful pixel animal for even more beautiful babies
Pay other users obscene prices for shit that the retarded staff released only once

But it's all worth it for these amazing site features! Come play poorly-coded mediocre games full of exploits (if there are any actual games at all) for piddly amounts of in-game money! Chat in our welcoming forums full of BAWWWing attention whores and enjoy the security when things are inevitably locked-down by nazis and everyone posting is banned! Gaze at the incredibly buggy layouts, impossible to navigate toolbars, glitchy databases, and, broken everything else with long downtimes at random!

And when everything blows up in your face you can count on the very professional staff made up of 16 year old girls volunteering for in-game money to pick their favorites and ban everyone else. In fact, you don't even have to do anything wrong to get banned most of the time: the artists who reign over their are also known for starting of banfests simply because someone mentioned their anatomy fails, that their emo band sucks or just because they are having PMS.

Even though these kinds of sites fail hard, people Still sign up and pay money in droves.

Click to Grow Eggs

Remember the e-peen sucking link pets we mentioned earlier? These are the next step in them. People are spending hours clicking madly with the hopes of "catching" a rare "pet" in these sites. Some sites even have the balls to let you buy all the rare pets for money, refusing to ever release them for free... even though every single one of the rare pets looks exactly the same.

Everybody and their mother is spending countless hours whoring themselves out to get these eggs posted on every post, thread and forum on the internet. Eggs feast upon pageviews and popularity - the more they get, the larger they grow. You're only cool if you have a page filled with 100s of eggs and are able to hatch out all the dragons, birds, snakes, cats and other shit these morons can think of.

Neopets Clones

Did you get b& from Neopets or just want an option that isn't privately owned by the Church of $cientology? Then do not despair: there are many, many good alternatives to Neopets out there! Well, that is if you could even consider Neopets to be "good" in the first place.

These sites basically all have the same coding, features, and playstyle as Neopets. The creatures are intelligent animals that wear clothes, hold jobs, and generally have lives far better than yours will ever be so long as you stay in that basement-dungeon of yours.

The art on these sites generally suck balls as the focus on these sites isn't on raising and playing with pets. Nope, these games actually revolve more around gathering useless imaginary items. Items make your pets happy. Items heal your pets. Items give your pets educations to get jobs. Items do everything except get you laid and make you successful in the real world. Nope, those things are reserved for the owners of the site who made up the items.

You need these items to win the game! If you don't get and use enough items your pets could die. The shops restock regularly with amazingly creative items to enhance your virtual pet experience and are always bought out by bots within 1 minute of restock.

Packages of special "limited edition" items are frequently sold in these games. As items are the most important thing in this game, they always sell to retards with more money than brains. A few of these games also sell limited edition pets, but who cares: imaginary items are calling! You can even get subscriptions to some of these games in order to collect even more incredible rare items.

Don't stop at buying virtual crap for your virtual house, though! You can surround yourself in real life honest to goodness memorabilia featuring the virtual items and pets you waste your real life on!

Pet Sims

File:Customs-CanusNovus.gif

Engaging pet sim gameplay!

So far all of the pets have not been very pet-like at all.

Click to grow eggs: Do nothing but suck e-peen.
In-Game pets: Do nothing but eat your jew gold.
Wajas Clones: Eat jew gold and are recolors of the same shitty lineart. Oh, and might be able to breed.
Neopets Clones: Just an excuse to hoard items like mad.

Wouldn't it be great if you could have a real pet online? That's where Pet Sims come in! These highly educational simulations attempt to be as realistic as possible while still having the pet be a cyberpet. Usually realism means a ton of tedious, time-consuming work for a poorly-drawn pixel animal that you can't even really play fetch with.

In these games you have to feed the animal, clean up after the animal, take the animal to the vet to keep it's shots updated, train the animal, discipline the animal if it has been bad, play with the animal to keep it happy, spay/neuter the animal in order to prevent millions of mutant offspring, and even treat the animal for fleas. Some games go further than that, though, and have you micromanage everything under the sun from what is trained and how to which foods are fed at which times.

Breeding in these games is iffy at best. It usually comes in two forms: nearly impossible to get correct planned breeding (that still results in ugly babies), or spontaneous unplanned parenthood resulting in 50 billion mutant offspring to care for. Once the babies are born, they have to be vaccinated, and from there cared for just as you would for adults. Some games even program in the fact that young animals are incredible forces of destruction that will shred your in-game stuff! How thoughtful of them!

Money is impossible to come by at best. So, once the little shitballs have destroyed all of your stuff, you are going to go broke buying replacements in order to be able to care for your pets. This will leave you broke and unable to buy food. The unhappy pets will then proceed to shred everything in order to teach you a lesson. Don't worry, you can always buy more fake money with your real money to avoid this!

In the end death is the only reward. Your little fleabag will up and die within two years of play. All that money you spent will be down the toilet and you will be BAWWing like a bitch that your pixel pup is dead and gone. oh noes! Don't worry, though: you can buy items to make your pets live forever! Now they can eat, shit, fuck and shred things until the website closes. Hooray!

Still sound good? Here's a cost breakdown.

Real live pet rat: lives 2 years. Learns tricks, can be used to scare girls, looks badass sitting on your shoulder. Lives in cage (can't shred anything), eats cheap lab blocks ($2 a month) and sleeps in used newspaper (free).
- Total lifetime cost: $26
Simulated pet rat: lives 2 years. Learns not to shred your digital stuff but still shreds it anyway, maybe competes in some virtual contest for virtual money, makes you look retarded to your friends (oh wait, you don't have friends! It's cool). Lives on website ($10 to buy), eats virtual lab blocks ($5 a month), sleeps in fancy virtual cage ($25), wears adorable virtual accessories ($45). Shreds everything every 3 months.
- Total lifetime cost: $590. Also, you have no friends, not even a rat.

IRL Cyberpets

File:IDog clothing.jpg

People do the same shit with real dogs.

IRL cyberpets were toy robots of dogs and cats, which could be taught tricks, but thankfully never took a shit on the floor. Once again, these particular toys (known as iDogs and iCats) came from Japan, created after a lonely Hikikomori realized he loved his iPod more than himself and started dressing it up. Robot dogs such as these lost popularity as the internet entered the mainstream after their owners realized internet pets don't need batteries, don't break, and can be forgotten for months on end.

NOT Cyberpets

A cyberpet, by definition, is a pet that is connected to a specific website. For example, a MaraPet is from marapets.com. However, even though this is super simple, people still get it wrong and mislabel things that aren't cyberpets as cyberpets. Here's a few examples.

Fursonas are NOT cyberpets. They are personifications of cartoon-watching bestiality enthusiasts. They ARE nine-dicked fox-dragons, dammit!
Sparkledogs are NOT cyberpets. They are personifications of BAWWWing 16 year old girls. These always grow up into Fursonas. Protip: some girls make their sparkledogs into actual cyberpets on Wajas clone sites.
Real animals are NOT cyberpets. They are cheaper and far more fun.

Cyberpet Examples

Jesus, they're everywhere!

Enjoy playing on these many, many high quality cyber pet sites! Just remember to bury your wallet and credit cards before you start or you will regret it.

Adopt me! About missing Pics

Family friendly!
Subeta knows Nagas
Only $70!
Khimeros Brat

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Not like Wajas at all!
Only $50 to own the first of these?! SIGN ME THE FUCK UP.
Only $25 before wings, accessories, and background!!
methcat- Pocket Puma Pets' unfunny lolcat.
Actual pet vs promotional artwork from powerpets.
Neopets versus a Marapet.
Howrse is a realistic game endorsed by real horse owners!

Click to grow Eggs

Here are a few of the many, many sites that waste your time with endless clicking.

Dragon Cave- One of the most infamous egg-clicking sites known for sending teenage girls into screaming fits of "PLZ CLK MY DRGNZ OR THEY WILL DIE!!" The biggest drama whore is it's owner, TJ09. Visit it here!
Unicreatures- Eggs with the balls to make you actually buy the rare pets. By the way, rare pets don't count towards quests or any in-game activities, yet retards still buy them.
Valenth- Steampunk buyable adopts as drawn by an overweight female otaku. By the way, Doctor Nefirian Dreamscar is a self-insert character for the creator's yaoi fantasies.
MWC- Formerly a Warrior Cats pet site. this site introduced "user made pets" and now is overrun by shitty MSpaint drawings that were farted out of the ass of a 5-year old.
Flowergame- A very boring site in which you make grass grow.
Global Pokedex- a pokemon trading forum with nazi-like rules run by sad, basement-dwelling manchildren and furries.
Pokefarm- A shitty Global Pokedex copy; they're touchy about this subject and users have been banned for bringing it up because the admins couldn't handle the truth.
Magistream- Yet another site that makes you pay for rare pets... that do NOTHING! Seriously, the free pets are the only ones that can do things there.
Heresy Adopts- In the Grim Darkness of this virtual pet site, there is only War. Also notable as the only adopts site where the pets don't piss rainbows and shit sparkles.