My sister was a prolific graphic designer beginning in her adolescence. The Neopets community fostered knowledge-sharing about web coding; after learning enough to begin designing guild page layouts Corinne paid her skills forward, updating her own guild’s designs and taking requests for guild themes in the chatrooms.

One theme for Cookies Galore, an early guild of hers, has a heading scene of one Neopet offering treats to another. But she appears to have edited out the larger drawing that oriented their ground. They are instead shrouded together within an atmospheric haze of dithered chocolatey geometry. #663333 and its nearby neighbors become the particulates that diffuse the scene’s edges and then recede into a mass of cocoa liquid, vapor, and gas.

The controversial prospect of Van Gogh’s affliction with vision impairments has fascinated me since I learned of The Night Cafe (1880). Orbs of light carve through the room’s vacant air and materialize around the lamps. The lights feel astronomical. Are they exerting their own gravity? Or am I experiencing the defining traits of medical pathology, like subacute angle closure glaucoma or xanthopsia?

My vision at the time of Corinne’s Neopets heyday seldom escaped the gravity of my own adolescent density. But she moved at celestial speeds from her adjacent bedroom.