Hey, class! It’s Katie…or as my readers call me, “Kat” (came up with the pen name in 8th grade?).
Before I explain what this blog is, I’m going to give some history.
Back in about January 2008, I got a version 5 of a Tamagotchi Connection digital pet toy. Since I was one of the first people to get my hands on one (out of luck) and I was really liking blogs, I decided to log my progress online for others to read. The night I got my toy, I opened up my first blog on TamaTalk.com: The Squid V5 Log. (I would later open more short-running Tamagotchi blogs but The Squid V5 Log was the major one.) Long story short, it became really popular; it became the top blog in the blogs section of TamaTalk. To this day, I am not sure why so many kids liked reading it and sent me so many letters loving it. Maybe it was frequent updates about a product they cared about? Maybe my immature middle school humor amused them?
I also wrote a lot of “fanfiction” of Tamagotchis, Webkinz (those stuffed animal/virtual pet hybrids), and other various virtual pets. They all had underlying messages of embracing who you have in your life and looking for bright spots in life.
Fast forward maybe about six months after the Tamagotchi blog began, my Tamagotchi V5’s batteries died. Now, keep in mind, I was 13 so it was difficult to convince my parents to get up and get me a hard to find WATCH BATTERY that was a little pricey ($5 for one little small battery from Radio Shack) for my stupid little toy. Plus, I didn’t have the motivation to put in a new battery. I was bored of Tamagotchis at that point, which to anyone else who has owned a Tamgotchi, is understandable. Tamagotchi is quite a commitment for a child–it’s checking on a digital toy anywhere from every few minutes to every hour all day from morning until night and taking care of any of its needs. There was a pause feature, but I wanted to raise as many generations as possible before my battery kicked out. I managed to raise 12 generations of Tamagotchis, which was the longest–my last streak close to that was raising 10 generations of Tamagotchis in the 4th grade. The rest of my toys got up to the 4th generation if they were lucky.
Fast forward another month–July 2008. To keep things brief, basically my parents were at the height of their drama. Cue the affected kids who now have mental problems due to chaos! It was a bad night, and I decided I wasn’t going to sleep until I could get some nicer thoughts into the brain. I don’t know how my late-night wanderings landed me on WebkinzInsider.com (a website I used to visit but I made more friends on outside Webkinz chatrooms so I never went on that forum), but it did. I found myself in their “Meet My Webkinz Family” message board section, and I discovered a new activity. The message board section was created so people could simply list how many Webkinz pets they had and post a couple of pictures, but it turned into something else. Someone started a trend of taking pictures of their stuffed animals (and sometimes the virtual pets in the virtual houses) going on adventures and interacting with each other. Next thing you knew, most of the people who visited the section was doing it. The section became more about creativity than trying to impress people with how much money they spent on a company. I read through most of the “picture story threads” and decided, “I like this. I want to do this. I can do this.” The next day I did a photoshoot of my stuffed animals, and what happened after this ignition was the development of the Kat and the Webkinz series–basically a soap opera for the youth where normally inanimate objects went on adventures and had drama with one another. And I incorporated a diverse cast of characters and had storylines that showcased all kinds of issues people could deal with.
Fast forward to like 7 or 8 years later…
I’ve reflected recently on how much I’ve liked running the virtual pet blogs. The only thing I didn’t like was the lack of traffic they got on dying fansites as well as restrictions from the forum moderators about postings (they REALLY want to keep things G–can’t even include crush feelings!). I thought, why not move both blogs and all of my other virtual pet creative content to a whole new blog and expand from there? I also had the idea to open social media accounts to attract attention.
Recently I’ve been very interested in using media as a way to teach important life skills (socio-emotional stuff) to people who might need it. Now, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood are TV shows that cover all the skills toddlers/preschoolers should know, but older kids have either “outgrown” the skills or are turned off by the simplicity of the shows’ styles. Older kids (elementary, pre-teens, early teens, maybe even late teens and adults) don’t really have anything to help them tackle complex problems unless they’re lucky enough to go to therapy or they decide to invent money and time in lengthy self-help books.
Now, I already love writing for older kids. There’s so much humor you can throw in that they will appreciate plus they’re old enough to REALLY feel those emotional curveballs you throw in. So I thought, why not turn my online series into something beneficial? I would have some fun updates on the lives of my virtual pets, then I would have stories and blog post discussions about life skills. I would try to do my best to reach out to any kid I could to show them that they are not alone and there is hope.
My stories tend to be pretty easy to follow. Well, the format of simple (yet suitable for older kids) writing with depictions following every major line is easy to follow. It’s like a comic book! I do a lot of continuity stuff so it may be hard to follow that, but I try to utilize flashbacks as much as possible.
I’m going to use this blog to experiment what I want to do with my official blog over at Blogger (currently still importing the billion blog entries/picture stories/other creative content I’ve made over the years) and see if I can get a good grade in class for it.
I know it may seem like a weird concept but I hope you enjoy some sample stories of my v-pets (short for virtual pets–either I found it or thought of it when I was like 13)!
Enjoy! ❤
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