2/12/25 - Today I worked on the bones of my website! Jesus Christ, this is harder than I thought, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. I bet in a week it'll be all set up and looking decent enough to come seamlessly back to.

2/22/25 - IT'S HAMTARO TIME! Yeserday, I discovered a Hamtaro fansite that hasn't been upadated since 2003 but almost everything is still up and preserved. I explored for a while, and honestly was brought to nostalgic tears a couple of times. Like, the "webmistress" (that's what we used to call the host in the Old Days. Does the New Old Web still use webmaster/mistress?) had scanned in some old Hamtaro stickers and written bios about all of the characters and I got SO excited! I definitely was a Hamtaro fan as soon as it came to the West, but unfortunately did not have cable and just wound up rewatching the same promo VHS tape that came with the Bijou plush I got in '02, and although Hamtaro is still very high on my watch list, I have only tangentially engaged with the franchise so far. More about Hamtaro's place in my life in a second, I gotta finish gushing about this website first. I read the entire bio page and now know more about Hamtaro side characters than I thought I'd ever learn without intentionally consuming the entire series. As I got deeper into the site, I saw "guild" in the nav bar and opened it, wondering if maybe guilds were a thing of the old web outside of Neopets because I was only familiar with Neo guilds...it was a Neo guild! And they have a list of all the members active at the time. I'm still an active Neopets user (21 years and counting!) so immediately I had to check out the guild to see if it or any of the members were still active. Nope, but the page is still up. Did some poking around to a couple profiles that were high on the chain of command, and they're all abandoned but with some things still beautifully preserved against the sands of time. Notably, these accounts only had the original maximum number of 4 pets, and their names didn't even have any numbers or underscores on them, indicating they were older then mine, and therefore around before the first big Neopets boom. So that was fascinating! Back on the Hamsite were also preserved projects by members of the guild, including Hamtaro fan art (some very impressive, and most charmingly mediocre). My favorite piece was a happy birthday picture featuring Bijou which said the recipient's full birthday including the year 1991. This was posted in 2002 and there were 12 candles on the cake. Like, this was some stranger's twelfth birthday card from their Neofriend in 2002 and HOLY FUCK I hope they still keep it around! [sobbing] And then, and then, and THEN!! THERE WERE FANFICTIONS. Hamtaro fanfic by a bunch of Neopian tweens, and YES I read them all. There were like 5-8 of them iirc and all pretty short so I just...read through 'em all and genuinely got to feeling like I was friends with these girls frozen in time during one perfect childhood summer, budding writers and artists so invested in which cartoon hamsters they thought had crushes on each other. Somewhere between the excited spelling errors and the interations between writers ("can Pashimina PLEASE have a crush on Zippy????"" and "It's [username]'s birthday and she got a new hamster so let's add them to the story!) I felt something, and it was beautiful.
I hope those kids never stopped drawing and writing, and I hope they are maybe still around on Neo. Most importantly, I hope they still love hamsters.

So Hamtaro is one of my favorite properties, even though I've barely encountered the tip of the Hamberg. In 2002 I acquired that Bijou plush with the promo VHS tape (I still have Bijou actually, and I parted ways with the tape but replaced it again years later when I thrifted a copy (I like to believe the same exact one somehow found me again). This was my introduction to Hamtaro, and I liked it enough to follow that up by getting a Hamtaro lunch box the following year (which incidentally was lost when some boys stole my Easter candy from it. I later actually saw the lunchbox in the lost and found at school but I was already to anxious to like, let an adult know what happened and ask for help getting it back. I'm still deeply sad about this actually). Anyway, I never actually saw the show beyond that tape because Hamtaro aired on Toonami and I didn't have cable growing up. But holy shit I must have watched that tape a lot more times than I remember, because while reading the Hamfictions I realized that the authors were spelling out some of my vocal stims on (virtual) paper? Yeah, I make cartoon hamster noises sometimes and just...forgot where they came from for years? What else do I just not know about myself? o_0 I also obtained more Ham-Ham plushies later in life, including the matching 2002 Hamtaro plush, a Hamtaro and Bijou that I won on Toreba during that era of my life, a bootleg Bijou, and a vintage birthday Bijou I imported from Japan. Then there are also vintage Hamtaro stickers on my scooter, a couple of Japanese Bijou toys, the pouch I used to keep my Switch in is Hamtaro-themed, and he's literally my avatar on MAL. So there is still very much a deep love for the characters. In fact, the first game I ever emulated was Hamtaro Rainbow Rescue in 2015, which was a very rough year for me (I didn't even beat it, I only got to Orange) and probably cemented their status as comfort characters if they weren't already. Further back, circa 2006 I was hell-bent on getting a hamster (I had itentions of building a hamster army to take over the world, I'm not sure what my plan was but I remember that goal) and I wonder about the role Hamtaro played in that. The timeline mostly makes sense, though I'm not quite sure what got me thinking hamster, especially since I was exposed to rats as pets by my first grade teacher and was chosen to care for Saturday during the summer, so you'd think I'd go for a rat again as my next pet but after spending a whole summer selling Happy Meal toys at my apartment's playground, I finally had saved up $80 to buy a hamster and the necessary supplies, and the PetCo lady talked me into impulsively getting a gerbil instead, opening a whole new arc of my life with Miss Tabithums Gerbille Bizzkitt.
After some further thought, I speculate that the "I, Freddy" books and my mom being biased against rats also probably impacted my decision. Anyway, Hamtaro isn't fully subbed, which is the main reason I haven't watched most of it yet, and that acutally is what started me down the path of my vintage anime project. I wanted to watch it in the original Japanese, couldn't find it, and got really stuck on what to watch. Eventually I decided to just "begin at the beginning" which would also keep me occupied while waiting on someone to sub the series for me. I don't think that effort has advanced much since 2022, but a girl can dream and at least now I've seen so much vintage anime. Regarding that project, I am still in the 70s with Captain Harlock. So I guess you could say I met my boyfriend through Hamtaro lmao