| July 2022 | Issue #3 |
Have an upcoming event in August you'd like featured? E-mail xoops@fantazzled.com!
| July 2022 | Issue #3 |
 raffles.neocities.org 
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sardonyx-petz.com 
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 ✿ Search Hint: You can 'search' for sites with stamps on the Petz Site Directory! |
What's Happening Around the Community?
by ECRose A variety of events, contests, and discoveries have been keeping petz enthusiasts busy! Here's a quick breakdown of the latest buzz and activities: Silverfish's "Master of Hexception" contest concluded with Bunni, Xoops, and North declared winners! You can view all the h-exceptional entries for this contest on the Whiskerwick Petz forum. The stamp contest hosted by Xoops was also recently judged. North, Bunni, and Arie were crowned winners for their delightful summertime stamps. May and June breed weeks on Whiskerwick featured the Chinchilla Persian and the German Shepherd, respectively. Numerous delightful hexed and bred petz were showcased over the course of these events. A new OW Chinchi base from Autumn was also shared as part of the festivities. Another breed week for July will be announced soon! |
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The deadline to enter the "The Make Your Own Bones" contest is July 1st, and make no bones about it, this will be a tough one to judge! Check out all the spine-tingling entries on Whiskerwick. The Summer Hexing School program is underway! This event pairs experienced hexers with novice enthusiasts. Together, the pair or small group will create a hexed breed, pet, or accessory for their "school project". A wonderful opportunity to teach, learn, and collaborate, the Summer Hexing School is sure to deliver some A+ material to the community. The Summer Olympics have launched on Duke's Group! Teams Dolphin, Angelfish, Squid are competing in a variety of gameplay challenges and other activities to earn points for their team. Registration for the event is ongoing, so pop by the Duke's Group forum and check it out if you and your petz are looking for something fun to do over the "dog days" of summer! Do you have a pet languishing in the throes of unrequited love? Is it impossible to have your two favorite petz out together because of their bitter loathing for one another? Fear not - local petz wizard, gyiyg, has discovered a way to edit petz relationships in a hex editor. The process is straightforward, and gyiyg has posted an excellent tutorial on polygondwanaland! (https://gyiyg.neocities.org/relationshiptut.html) |
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Teaching your petz tricks can be a challenge, especially when there are some quirks and bugs that can happen if your pet has been shifted to different versions of the game. Thor has been studying these tricky troubles and is working on a utility that will fix glitches in the trick section of a pet's file. The current version of the utility doesn't edit your pet's file yet. However, it provides a very useful readout of what tricks your pet associates with each direction (left, right, up, down) and flavor of treat. It also shows how likely a pet is to perform an associated trick by providing a value between 10 and 100. Additional information provided in the readout is explained on Thor's Github download page. Check it out! (https://github.com/kyokichi/PetzTrickFixer) |
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SAY HELLO TO THE OSHIE QUEEN | by Xoops
I previously mentioned I'd be doing some interviews with community members in as many newsletters issues as I can, why you say? I love to hear others experiences, opinions, and feelings on the game and community. I love getting their insight, hearing their tips, and learning something interesting about them. Most interviews will have some of the same baseline questions, but each individual will also be asked some personalized questions. This month I was able to "sit down" with Silverfish - so lets hear what she had to say! 1. I mean, who doesn't love Oshies? But you've created a whole identity around them, so why Oshies? I don't actually remember how my Oshie obsession started but it was a long time ago! I think originally it was a fairly practical matter. I wanted to show an original breed with the PKC that had lots of colour options in the breed standard, wasn't too hard to hex paint, and didn't have an insane amount of competition. They were perfect for that. Then, over time, I came to appreciate them more holistically and now I love everything about them - their adorable worried faces, their weird little pear-shaped bodies, their fluffy tails, that they tremble as they walk, the creative genius that is the mottled texture... They are just so cute! I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about this since it's a more mature topic, so I won't go into detail haha. But I've also come to appreciate the hints to their alternative backstory; that perhaps what we think of as terrified little souls are actually "wired" catnip junkies. That adds an interesting twist to how we should perceive them, I think. Plus, let's be honest, you can hex just about anything and give it an Oshie SCP and it'll immediately tug on your heartstrings. 2. We all think of you as the "Oshie Queen" but I hear you have some dogz too? Haha yes! I do have some dogs! Actually I used to mainly show (PKC) dogs, though most of those pets are long lost now. For many years I showed a very wide variety of dog breeds, but especially American Akitas. My kennel, Hirundo, was probably home to the most American Akita Champions in the PKC at the time. These days I'm more into petzy dogs. I have a soft spot for Scotties and generally like solid black dogs with pricked ears. I also really like the Poodle SCP and trotters. 3. How did you learn to hex and what attracted you to hexing? I started learning to hex back when it was still being done in a hex editor and got more into it when LNZPro and Pet Workshop were released. Back then I just wanted to do realistic recolours for PKC showing and then eventually I also hexed a few realistic (dog!) breeds which were PKC-accepted. I didn't really do a lot of hexing besides recolouring for many years after that. Then about a year ago, with PKC down, I decided it was time to explore the rest of the Petz community. That's how I came across an Oshie hex by Rho that I really loved and I started hexing purely to create something that Rho might be willing to trade for! |
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4. You've recently branched into game content hexing - clothes so far - what has that been like?Really fun! I ran into a few issues in the beginning (disappearing dogs for example) but with a bit of help from the community (Xoops and Bunni especially!) I got through it! I've just been making addballs clothing so far and I think of it as being the hexing equivalent of a 'study' in art - it's a great way to focus on a specific thing and be creative with it without committing to a full breedfile hex. I also love sharing what I've made and then seeing what it looks like on so many different pets. 
5. How do you come up with hexing ideas?This varies a lot! I'm mostly inspired by images of plants and animals, both real and mythical. But sometimes it's just a throwaway comment someone makes, like that some detached tail balls in a mixie look like UFOs, or needing to make a Haunted House graphic for a Halloween event, or the time Bard put a funny mixie up for adoption and I thought their tail looked like a tree trunk. I have a Google Doc that is permanently pinned in my web browser and I jot ideas down in there whenever I have one. I actually almost never look at it but just the act of writing them down tends to help keep lots of ideas fresh in my mind. |
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(Interview continued...)
6. How do you keep or create the motivation to hex?I think the main thing for me is to never put pressure on myself to hex. I find that the less I feel like I have to hex, the more I actually want to. The other big thing is not to plan too much. I hate planning in general and it's not always a good thing. But when hexing something, I think it helps to "go with the flow" so to speak. If I have an idea in my head and I start hexing and it isn't looking quite right, or I feel like it'd be good to go in a different direction, I don't try to stick with my original vision. Who cares if it's not quite what I set out to do? I think a striking recent example of this is when I attempted to hex a Flareon. It really wasn't working out how I wanted it to but I kept trying to stick with it. That was the most frustrating hex I've done in a while because I was being too rigid and I very nearly scrapped it completely. In the end I turned it into something completely different, shelved the Flareon idea, and was much happier! 
7. What are some of the biggest hexing challenges you've encountered?Oh that's a tricky question! Probably one of my biggest challenges was making the Oshiedogs/Scoshies. I had this idea that I'd just translate all the cat balls to their dog equivalents and I'd have a dog that looked like a cat. Turns out it's not that simple. Dogs and cats don't have the same body parts - for example dogs have three ear balls, while cats have two - so I had to reassign some of them and put addballs in for other parts. The entire starting point is different as well so even if you do that, you have to make a lot of adjustments before you have something that actually looks like a cat. I had to tweak the file so much that it's one of very few times when I've gotten tired of a hex and had to leave it for a few months before I could look at it again and get it to where I wanted it to be. It gave me a lot of appreciation for the hexers who have attempted this in the past and come out with such incredibly convincing results. It's definitely not easy! 8. Tell me something you love about the game itself? I love SO MUCH about this game! But I think the thing I love most of all is the open-ended gameplay and that you're not given all the information. For example, no one ever told us exactly what personality traits pets have or how they decide their favourite toys or foods, and there's no precise explanation of how inheritance works. It means we have to become scientists to discover what makes petz tick - and 20 years on, we're STILL making discoveries! And I love Oshies of course ;) 9. And what is something you love about the community? I love that the Petz community is so generous and open. Information is shared freely and people are always happy to help. No question is ever too silly and I feel like there's a place for everyone. |
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  What Breed will it be? |
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10. I love to learn people's favorites - do you have any original game favorites? The music box by far! I also really love the in-game butterflies that appear and flit around and the hermit crab. I've never been that into dressing up my pets but I do like the Clothes Closet playscene for taking photos because you can get Oshies to do more than just their usual fearful responses. I also like the Playpen because there's nothing more hilarious than a cat hanging from the ceiling. 11. How long have you played the game and been part of the community? I first played the original Catz game at my friend's house when I was perhaps 9 or 10 years old. I was later gifted Catz 4 and that's when I really started playing. I think I discovered the PKC in the early 2000s. It was before the PKC had its own website so all I have to go on is that my Swallowtail prefix was registered on the PKC website in 2005. But I had already been part of the community before then. I didn't actually get involved with the wider community until last year though! 12. Any final thoughts you'd like to share? I guess this is where I tell everyone to go adopt another Oshie? In all seriousness, I am so happy that I'm part of the community at a time when there is a newsletter, so many petz websites, active forums, competitions, a thriving Discord community which grows every day, new discoveries all the time, it's all very exciting! |
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 check out some new and featured sites, downloads, adoptions - and more! If you would like your site or content featured here, e-mail xoops@fantazzled.com |
milkbc.proboards.com |
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