I cancelled one of my Neopets so that the others may thrive

polygon.com:

Every morning when I turn on my computer, I do what everybody else surely does: my Neopets dailies. I spin the Fruit Machine; I visit Coltzan’s Shrine; and most importantly, I go to the Secret Laboratory Ray and zap my pet.

For those not hip to Neopets, the Lab Ray allows you to “zap” one of your pets to get a random change. Their gender can flip, their stats can increase or decrease, and they can even change colors — some of which are rare, coveted colors that you can only unlock via Lab Ray. If you want a Chocolate or Robot Kacheek, you better get zapping.

I’ve been playing Neopets for so long that, at this point, I just adopt pets from the pound, zap them into something nice, and then give them away. I have a set of expensively painted pets that I love, so I try to share that wealth. Very generous, I know.

However, changing which pets you own changes the order in which they may appear on the Lab Ray screen. So one sleepy morning, after sending off a successful zap to a player and adopting a new pet, I mindlessly clicked the wrong pet. While most Lab Ray changes are monotonous stat changes, I, of course, got “lucky” in this one instance, and my prize Lost Desert Usul got a color change to Glowing.

To be clear, Glowing isn’t a rare Lab Ray-exclusive color, it’s just horrendous. (No offense to Glowing lovers out there.) My Usul lost her adorable black neck fluff and traded in her robes to just be radioactive. I was literally shaking at my desk with my mouth agape, realizing what I’ve done. Luckily I was able to fix this quickly, but that mistake has haunted me since.

Now, to avoid accidentally clicking the wrong pet, I slap this big cosmetic on top of whichever pet I’m zapping:

CANCELLED.

The absurdity of this cosmetic’s existence is funny enough; to understand why, you need to know that before the term “cancelled” was popularized into what it is now, March 3 was always a “cancelled” holiday in Neopets. The news page would read, “March 3 has been cancelled due to