Oh boy, a post about guilt among collectors?! Let me get my anxious self in here! I'm joking, mostly! I'm sure at some level you know these comments are bunk, but it's hard to hear all the same! So I don't blame you for wanting to hear less-depressing replies to the same argument!

In terms of morality, let's be real... being alive as a human in 2023 is incredibly wasteful in general. If you live in the global West, if you own a cellphone, if you eat prepackaged foods, if you drink coffee, eat meat, you are surviving off of the backs of human suffering. If you are too focused on 'waste as sin', then your only option is to move to a commune and spend your days weaving baskets to atone for the sin of being alive. It's easier to point the finger and say 'oh, THOSE are the sinful wastrels!' and point at someone else, than to consider the ethics of child labor in producing most of the world's chocolate, just for one example. The people on Reddit posting about how evil it is to find pleasure in collecting 'the wrong thing' are likely posting from a computer or cell phone - do I have big news for them about the labor that is involved in those industries! /sarcasm

I saw a really good quote that stuck with me, I think from Tumblr - I actually googled it, and it's from a poem, "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. Here are the first lines:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

It's a beautiful sentiment, and one that I'm drawn to, especially as an anxious person myself. There's a lot about my life that I'm sure someone could point to and say, that's so wasteful! And so what? Every life produces waste. Waste is not evil. Being human and fallible is not evil. Nobody's perfect, and if you take pleasure in little bits of plastic that remind you of kinder times, gosh! In times like these, I hope we can forgive each other for the little quirks and foibles that keep us going every day.

I don't think it's wrong to want to do better, and in fact, I think we should do our best to lessen human suffering, especially on a global scale. But the answer is changing the industries that do these things and the capitalist society we live in that permits and rewards it, not tracking down Bluey collectors on Reddit to harass and make ourselves feel better. The world needs more kindness, and less of whatever that group of Redditors is doing right now, LOL.

(I also think it's very "interesting" that it's popular to dump on collectors for being weird, but not on the people who make NFL a lifestyle... and I think it's interesting to consider the gender disparity between the groups of collectors being targeted and the NFL megafans... hmmm I wonder what the difference is! )

I think is Gypsy, who is a UK pony like Hopscotch!

there was a customizer here - badjuju - that did really cool dreadlock ponies so short answer is yes you can do dreads on ponies with synthetic hair basically as a minature version of doing dread extensions for people

found this :

https://www.pinterest.com/badjuju86/my-little-dread-ponies/

Yes, great memory! I was thinking of her too, but I could only remember the 'juju' part! I have also seen people emulate dreads using yarn, since on a pony head it looks more like braids or dreads, depending on the yarn texture! Might be worth looking into!

Is her eBay auction not open to the US? Understandable, I just went to go look for her and couldn't find one! She's truly a gem!

Flitter that's a great point! I know that's kind of a big hurdle, especially if you're more of a casual user - and with the death of Photobucket, it's like, where do I easily upload photos? Is Imgur still a thing? Probably! But I don't know how to use it! I usually 'cheat' and upload all my photos on Tumblr, but since I'm posting there... I usually don't remember to crosspost.

I know it's only semi-related, but I saw an interesting tumblr post that said that image hosting is part of what makes starting up any kind of new blogging/social media platform really expensive and difficult, compared to the old-school forum days. It costs a lot of money to have your own server or to pay someone else to host it, so there's far fewer sites getting started in someone's garage, for example. So it sucks not being able to easily upload photos, but it is nice that the Arena is (hopefully) cheaper to run without it!

Yes, thank you Loa!! I've just sent mine in too! (I'm also making a public post because sometimes my messages don't work on the Shoutbox, so I am hoping my PMs are still working, LOL!)

How cute is this!! Happy Halloween!!

Oh LORDT look at those prizes!! I'll have to give this a try, let's see if I can dust off my keyboard skills well enough to keep up!

Thanks for the super fun game, and congrats on 20 years MLPArena!!