As many have noticed something has gone amiss with avatars. Rest assured we are looking into it. Stay tuned for moar..err more updates.

Update-Please do not blame poor *Mudkips as the owner of that account had nothing to do with it at all and has in fact not even been on in over 6 weeks.

In truth, yes it was us, dA who did it. It is April Fools of course. Tomorrow you shall get the whole story why this was done

So how did this come to be? Months of planning filled with direct intent to rile people up and destroy avatars that were painstakingly made by, in at least on case, someones girlfriend and led to tears of "why why would you replace my avatar formed of love with a MUDKIP?"

Was it to get another oh so shocking expose written on encyclopedia dramatica?

Was it to secretly announce our buying out of 4chan? Well, it was that but that's a different story. Just kidding. Maybe.

No, in truth it came from sitting around HQ and, if memory serves, people asking me repeatedly wtf I am talking about half the time when I make odd references to things I see in the community. Mudkips being one of them. Like walking into $Waveswinger's office and asking her "Mudkips, yay or nay?" or asking $SGonzalez how his buddy Brian Peppers is, or sendling link after link after link of weirdness to $chris, $jekor and +silvein who unfortunately for them sit right across from me.
Inevitably I get asked what this crap is so I end up giving big history lessons, sending links to encyclopedia dramatica, wikipiedia, things on dA etc and trying to nail down the history of some of the larger memes out there as accurately as possible because oddly, knowing this sort of nonsense is part of my job.

Now with the whole mudkip thing, that, despite what some anonymous 4channers ( who really dropped the ball when they merged with 7 chan and didn't change the name to 11chan ) will say, it did in fact, originate on deviantART, with some random person asking a pokemon fan artist if they indeed did like mudkips. Why this otherwise fairly unoriginal little question caught on in such a huge way is beyond me, but catch on it did and come from dA it most certainly did.

Now when we were sort of brainstorming for April Fool's ideas, ( at this point I will leave out the names of the ones who actually came up with the idea and so on so some you more...humorless types don't go leaving them some of the nasty messages you have left me ) the idea of changing everyones avatar to a MUDKIP came up and we all went and decided it was the best course of action.


And that uhhh...is that. Much like all things that explode on a massive scale, the origins are pretty small and unassuming. Anyway, tis done, nobody died, nobody has thier avatar perma changed to a mudkip aside from those of you who adopted the cute little guy.
Who was made by `Chimpantalones by the way. But don't harass him if you don't like it, I simply asked him for one and he had no idea what it was going to be used for So my apologies Chimpy