You told me to keep going, Jett.

blog/2019/june/second-class-citizens.html

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 				<p><h2>Webkinz, eleven years on</h2></p>
-				<p>April 26, 2008. The birthday party mere days before my eighth birthday. First grade- or maybe second; I can’t keep track of time- girls sitting in my living room upstairs, opening presents, having a good time.</p>
-				<p>One of them gave me a little blue hippo for some online game I’d never heard of before. And when all the girls left and the dread of writing all those thank-you notes settled into my chest, I sat down with my parents and signed up with the little code in the tag affixed to the hippo’s paw.</p>
+				<p>April 26, 2008. The birthday party mere days before my eighth birthday. First grade- or maybe second; I can't keep track of time- girls sitting in my living room upstairs, opening presents, having a good time.</p>
+				<p>One of them gave me a little blue hippo for some online game I'd never heard of before. And when all the girls left and the dread of writing all those thank-you notes settled into my chest, I sat down with my parents and signed up with the little code in the tag affixed to the hippo’s paw.</p>
 				<p>Webkinz is a standard game geared for little kids where you can adopt a pet and decorate a house and play shoddy Flash games to earn in-game currency. What separated it from the other dime-a-dozen MMORPGs for kids at the time I joined, however, was the fact that you <em>had</em> to buy a physical stuffed animal in order to receive a code to join, and that you <em>had</em> to keep buying these at least once a year to keep your account alive. If you couldn't afford to buy one in time, or simply forgot, then your account was deactivated and placed in a short waiting period before it was permanently deleted. Because of the forced paywall, the servers could afford to stay open, and so there was only one tier of membership. A few years in, and the company introduced “Deluxe” accounts, which at the time only meant a fancy gold hat you could put on your virtual pet and access to a separate store and a few extra social features. Not that it mattered much to me, since I could play all the games I wanted, and whatever exclusive items I wanted I could scam out of the Deluxe players in the trading rooms with a little bit of effort. Some of those items, like a kimono and a tornado in a pot and a few vehicles, still sit scattered around my inventory and my house to this day.</p>
 				<p>Somewhere along the way, probably with my transition into middle school, I forgot about the whole place. Desperately sought to make my own online game with my nonexistent coding skills, and failed every time. My stuffed animals got packed away into a storage box when we moved houses, and stayed forgotten. It must have been the summer after I graduated from high school, then, that I remembered that Webkinz existed, and logged in to find that I had been demoted to a free tier.</p>
 				<p>Oh yeah, there was a free tier! And the “normal” tier was now a standard membership, and Deluxe members still got to strut around with their exclusive items and unwarranted self-importance like they always had. And half of the wallpapers in my house were gone, deleted long after they were “retired” to make space in the shop for the new Deluxe-only items along with most of the items in those rooms. And a good two-thirds of the arcade games I used to spend hours upon hours playing were paywalled, and my privileges to KinzChat Plus, which was the free-for-all typing mode in the social areas instead of stringing together pre-made sentences, were revoked. My house, once a thematic wonderland with a little school and a massive kitchen and bedrooms for each pet sorted by species and theme, was a barren wasteland.</p>