About Me

Hi, I'm skissors. I'm a zillennial programmer who's tired, but trying her best. I currently live in United States midwest with my husband Kyle and little dog Pippin. Besides Petz, my passions include web development, video games (both playing and developing), thrifting, and various fiber arts.

My Petz story began in late 2003, when I was gifted the Dogz 4 / Kid Pix combo CD for Christmas. I quickly fell in love with the game, but it wasn't until a few years later that I stumbled upon the petz community when trying to fix an issue with the game not working correctly on Windows XP.

I am very grateful to the Petz games for exposing me to the early internet, back when it was small, weird, creative, and personal. Without those experiences, I don't think I would be the person I am today. I've drifted in and out of the community over the years, but as any petz fan can tell you, Petz is something you never truly leave.

The best way to contact me is via discord: @skissors
Please mention petz in your initial message or you might get ignored as spam.

Site History

YAPS was officially established in 2026, but I've owned serval petz site before then, and I though it would fun to cover the whole history here

Checkerboard v1 (2014)

My first Petz site, Checkerboard, was created in 2014. It was primarily a crew site, but it also offered litter requests and adoptions too. When I decided to make my own site, I knew I wanted it be something creative, unique, and fun to explore - a philosophy that has guided my web development to this day. I also remember really being inspired by the layout of Schat! and it's square based design. Looking back, the site had problems - the way is was coded was really inefficient and it was ill suited to widescreen displays, which were only going to become more common as time went on. However, I'm proud of how innovated and creative it was, and the fact that I managed to pull something like it off despite being completely self taught at the time.

Alive Enough v1 (2022)

This initial version of Checkerboard went offline sometime in 2016, as entered college and no longer had the time to maintain a site or be an active participant in the petz community. However, I never fully left the community, and after graduating college and settling down, I got the petz bug once again. So, in 2022, I decided to launch a new site - Alive Enough. The name was inspired by an academic article I read about Furbys, as I initially intended for this site to cover all sorts of virtual pets games, not just petz. However, I never got around to adding much none-petz stuff to this iteration of the site.

I spend a lot of time experimenting and developing the look and colors of the site. I liked the idea of incorporating old windows aesthetics, but even at the time I felt Windows 95 and XP were overdone, so I decided to use Windows 3.1 vibes instead. One special feature of this site not visible from screenshots is the fact that the windows could be dragged around. There was no real point to this, other than adding a touch of fun and whimsy to the page.

I also managed to save a screenshot for the Halloween reskin of this site! I always loved when sites would do special holiday themes, and it's something I like to do for my site when I have the time.

Checkerboard v2 (2023)

Having established a new general purpose petz site, I started to become really nostalgic for Checkerboard and decided I wanted to bring it back to once again be my crew site. I actually managed to find the source code for the original, but it was so messy and amateurish that I decided it would be easier to just remake it from the ground up. The new widescreen design fit better on modern screens, and could easily fit my now much larger crew. I was also very proud of the fact that this site was actually fully responsive and mobile friendly, despite the fact that I think very few people ever looked at it on mobile.

nekOs and Petz Corner v1 (2024)

In 2024, I decided to redo my site yet again. I wanted to do something even more ambitious, to really flex my programming and design skills, as well as explore more things that are possible with the modern web. Around this time I also played the game Hypnospace Outlaw, which really reinvigorated my love for web development and personal sites. I ended up creating what I call nekOS, a fantasy operating system inspired by HypnoOS through which you can view my collection of sites. As part of this, I broke up what use to be one site into 3 small sub-sites - Alive Enough, my general purpose personal site, Petz Corner, my petz related stuff, and Checkerboard, my redone crew site.

The original Petz Corner design was thrown together fairly quickly, as at this point in the project I had already spent so much time on the nekOs frame itself and just wanted some place to put the petz related info I had removed from the main Alive Enough page. I really leaned into vintage petz vibes with this, using some of the buttons from the web fun pack as the main design feature of the whole layout. The only other notable part was the header text, that utilized a wavy animation inspired by the font animation system in Hypnospce Outlaw.

Petz Corner v2 (2025)

As I said, I never was fully happy with how the Petz Corner looked, so in August 2025 I gave it a refresh. The color scheme was mostly maintained, but I made heavy use of dithering, gradients and thick black outlines. While the initial goal was to invoke the feeling of classic kid-focused software (such as Kid Pix), I feel like the dithering ended up invoking a sort of comic book-y vibe too.

YAPS v1 (2026)

Finally, in 2026, I made the decision to rebrand all my petz specific content under a new name: YAPS. This allowed me to both collect all my disparate petz projects under a single name and a single site, and to more cleanly separate those projects from Alive Enough and my non-petz related work. Once again the color scheme was maintained, but soften into a more pastel, candy vibe. The biggest change was switching from the small box based layout to a more open layout designed to invoke classic iframe style sites. This allowed me to give the content even more room to shine, as well as incorporated some pages as iframes, such as the Petz Park page.