I have waaaaaaay more plushies than any sane, reasonable person would want or need. It's BAD. Everyone has something that they hoard/collect, right? Well, my thing is cotton-filled creatures. They've domainated my living spaces. My room. My closet. My bed. My desk. They are all living rent-free in my home. It's like an invasion of pests in the form of polyfill-fun-time-critters. I cannot use my loft bed anymore, because the entire underneath is full of nothing but these things. I feel obligated to bring one with me every time I travel across state or country. They have taken over my life. I am not entirely devastated.
So, I have way too many plushies. I think it freaks a lot of people out whenever they walk into my room for the first time, genuinely. It's mostly Pokemon plushies, because of course it is, however a large part of my collection is also Webkinz. For the uninitiated, Webkinz is an old computer game where you could adopt virtual pets online by buying the corresponding real-world ones and punching in the attached codes. I used to LOVE Webkinz, in all of it's terrible, early-2000s janky glory. I always played it with my cousins whenever I saw them, them being the ones who forced me to play in the first place. I still remember the garish art of Webkinz, and the weird high-pitched WOW sound effects, and, of course, the strange minigames you would play to earn money in-game, one of which being a game where you try to hit a little guy with a giant club as hard as you can so that he would fly as far as possible. Kind of brutish, but it was Webkinz, and I loved it.
My Webkinz have very elegant names which were bethrothed upon them by my 9-year-old self, a true mastermind of naming. Without further ado, here are some of my personal favorites:
Webkinz was truly the cataclyst to my stuffie craze. Kind of weird though, considering I didn't really actually take care of them or anything when I actually played the game, I just played the minigames instead while they stared at me sadly from the corner of the screen, making strange vaguely-animal sounding noises while they begged for me to feed them.
While I'm getting my thoughts on Webkinz out, It's time for me to finally admit to... my Web-crimes. I hacked Webkinz when I was 11. I figured out how to give myself unlimited money, and I ended up giving my cousins Webkinz-money too. I was genuinely running some kind of Webkinz money laundering scheme, where me and my cousins traded money back and forth on burner accounts. It was... surprisingly elaborate for a group of 11 - 13 year olds.
Anyways, I blame my cousins for plunging me into the deep dark pit of plush-collecting. It's their fault entirely. No other influence. For sure. Maya, Miles, and Madelyn, you probably aren't reading this right now, but I'm shaking my fist very angrily at the sky right now.
Darned teens, and your darned Webbed Kinz!
