Another Official Animal Jam Blog!

Hey there people of the Internet!

In case you didn't know, I live in Canada, and there are two official languages of Canada: English and french. I can speak both, since there's this thing called "french immersion".

I've been really curious about what it's like to play AJ in different countries since I recently encountered a few Jammers visiting from their Brazilian and French servers. Since I know French, I thought it would be fitting for me to try to find a few resources for French Jammers around the Internet. Somehow I found the official Animal Jam blog for the french Jammers out there: "Le Petit Explorateur", which translates to "the small explorer" (possibly it could mean the young explorer, but I'm not too sure!)

As you can see, it almost looks exactly the same as The Daily Explorer. I decided to poke around a little bit to find out what this french blog was all about.

One of the first differences that immediately jumped out at me was this:

The alphas actually write their own posts! If I really rack my memory, I'm sure I can remember a post or two that was written by Peck for an art contest, or Greely for jammer safety, but not every single post. For some reason, I couldn't find any posts that were written by Cosmo, so I'm not even sure if he really exists on Le Petit Explorateur...


Another thing I noticed when scrolling through this blog was that they use much the same format, and even the same artwork, which isn't very surprising, given that Le Petit Explorateur is basically a French version of The Daily Explorer.

This was a post about the Jammer Snaps Contests. That cool picture with the polar bear talking in front of the camera is actually what the Jam-a-Gram looks like for when AJHQ sends in your News Crew Plaque if you've won it.

Speaking of News Crew, I was very curious about how News Crew was organised on the blog. Unfortunately, there was no bulletin on the side which tells you the different topics, but I encountered a french News Crew member who explained it all to me.

Le Petit Explorateur doesn't actually have "News Crew". It has this thing called "Histoires de Jammeurs" which is basically a short story writing contest. It was only introduced in January of this year, which I found interesting. There must not be many people running around the french servers with those camera badges!

I noticed a few other differences, but they weren't that drastic, so I'll just list them very quickly here:

The people who write the posts for this blog like to use different colours of font frequently in their posts, most notably blue and orange.

This isn't really a difference, in fact it's exactly the same. I just want to confirm that the RIMs on the french servers are exactly the same, and even the posts are simply translated into french.

For the french News Crew, you don't actually send in a screen shot, but AJHQ provides you with a cool little art piece. Pretty jazzy if I do say so myself!

In general, the posts seem to contain more emotes and shorter paragraphs.

Speaking of emotes, Le Petit Explorateur seems to use slightly different ones from the ones that our blog uses.

This is possibly the coolest difference between The Daily Explorer and Le Petit Explorateur:
The official french AJHQ account actually opens up their buddy requests from time to time and then announces it on their blog, so that everyone can have a chance to buddy the one and only AJHQ (or in this case, there are a whole bunch in a whole bunch of different languages and countries).

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Sorry for the impossibly long post! I just found this whole other official blog stuff wonderfully interesting! I hope you did too. Here's today's masterpiece:

"Just keep swimmin' "

-Pinpun

The Aftermath of News Crew

Hello lovely jammers!

So, this is pretty awesome, and I'm sure you all know about it by now, but I won News Crew on Thursday!

I'm still super hyped about it! I can't believe my dream on AJ has finally been satisfied! Now my new dream is to get a positive player plaque!

For all you people who are interested in News Crew, however, this post isn't for you. Because I'm going to be talking about what happened after I won News Crew, not how to submit or anything, because Snowyclaw and a couple of other people have amazing videos on that that you can check out!

So let's get into the story..

It was about seven o'clock in the morning, and I was supposed to get ready to go to school, but since the computer was right in front of me, I could't resist. So I ventured over to the Daily Explorer, which has become a habit of mine, since I didn't really have enough time to play AJ very much anymore (end of term testing and all that  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). 

Then I remembered: News Crew is announced today! I usually get so nervous when that happens because, well, I never win. But this time it felt completely different. I was eerily calm. You know, like the calm before the storm? I think that's a decent analogy.

So I go to the DE, and scroll down, and this is what I see:

I just started silent screaming into my hand and hyperventilating. I mean, this is a big deal! And then my sister comes over to see what I was screaming about, says "congrats" and then just sort of walks away to go pack her lunch for school.

I read over the whole report again to make sure it was actually mine even though my username was in the screenshot XD

Then I remembered that I would probably get the News Crew plaque already, so I rushed over and logged on to Animal Jam to see if they'd sent it already. Even cooler, when I logged in, this was what was waiting for me:

Do you see how many jags there are in my inbox?! 35 total! And guess what? 33 of them were buddy requests! I accepted them all, because I'm a nice jammer lol.

At the very start of all of those jags was this one:

And yes, I did document the whole process of opening it

Isn't that just majestic? Yes, I did put it on my trade list, but no, I would never in my entire life ever trade it. I just wanted to see what people thought it was worth. 

Anyways, once I got to my den, in about twenty seconds it looked like this:

There were a lot of people there, including a few of my new buddies, and a few of my old buddies, like Karalee and Gracie. However I did make a ton of new friends like Jammer6dv7m and sleopard0109.

Throughout the day I kept on getting more and more buddy requests, people informing me that I got on the DE, and congratulations Jags. Throughout the whole day it just seemed like a constant stream of people. Each of these screenshots was taken at a different point of the day, just so you get how many people came and went.

I also taught some people how to enter into the News Crew contests. Everyone was so nice and I had probably the best day I have ever had on AJ. 

We had a bit of a "penguin party" hehe

We also attempted at one point to take a selfie, but it didn't work out so well...

Oh well, I had so much fun with these people!

The only thing is, I was with one of my News Crew buddies a couple of days ago, and I was asking them about their badge, and when it came to them. They said that it had appeared in their little badge stash immediately after their article had been posted to the Daily Explorer. I still haven't received mine, and am in the process of an almost battle of e-mails between me and the AJHQ representatives. I feel really bad for pestering them, but that badge does mean a lot to me. 

If anyone has questions, leave them in the comments below, or you could ask me on AJ! I might be doing another post on News Crew in the future, about tips and guiding ideas, but I'm not sure if anyone would want that...

Anyways, masterpiece of the day:

Pretty great, huh?

-Pinpun