I’ve quietly spent the last 15 years playing a sort of knockoff, bootleg version of Neopets called Marapets. It’s exactly like Neopets except much more low-budget and smaller — Neopets had 25 million members at its peak, while Marapets numbers top out in the thousands. It’s been my little secret, but now that Club Penguin and all of these other childhood game fans have resurfaced during quarantine, I’m more than happy to admit that I’m spending all of my spare time on a vaguely furry-themed digital planet of chimeric animals.
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Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a junior staff writer at MEL, where she began working two weeks after graduating college. Her work is a blend of cultural analysis and service, covering everything from reconsiderations of low-brow hits like Joe Dirt and Nickelback to contemporary disability issues, OnlyFans and the types of minor questions about life like why baby carrots are so wet. She’s also reported on social media phenomena like “simps” and “pawgs.” In 2018, she published her 111-page undergraduate thesis on Insane Clown Posse, the Juggalo subculture and the subversive aesthetics of class. She is from God’s Country, rural Western Massachusetts.
