🐬 flippr0, the dolphin

Some buddies are pets. flippr0 is a legend. The dolphin of the underwater wing was retired, un-retired the very same day, and then retired for good, which makes it the rarest buddy in all of teachChat: a true collector's item that leaps once and lives forever in the save files of the lucky few.

Name origin

A leetspeak nod to Flipper, television's most famous dolphin, who headlined his own 1960s series and made an entire generation want a bottlenose best friend. The zero in the spelling is a modern hacker-toy wink, the same energy as an old jailbreak tool name. Somewhere, a very smart marine mammal is unimpressed by our keyboards.

Life stages

How to bring them home

You can't, and that is the whole mystique. flippr0 was cut from the roster once and reinstated the same day (the underwater wing could not be missing its dolphin), then permanently retired in the final roster trim of July 2026. Retired buddies are off the store shelf, but owners are grandfathered: if you bought flippr0 with your points, you keep flippr0 forever.

Their yard

flippr0 came with a sea yard: bright tropical sky over sun-striped open water. In underwater yards like this one, some of the usual yard life swaps out for sea creatures.

Field notes

• The little retro window's title bar reads flippr0.exe, docked right next to the chat send button.
• Tap the dolphin and it does a little dance and bumps a heart counter. The counter means nothing, and that's the point.
• flippr0 keeps its own level bucket, fed only by your participation score, never by clicks, and switching buddies never loses progress.
• Deep in the code, the id is still "flipper" because early purchases were recorded that way, and the sprite notes describe the grown form as a leaping show-off with a white belly.