So right after I made that last blog post, TikTok has apparently been revived in the US already:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/tiktok-ban-trump-executive-order-jan-19-what-you-need-to-know

See, this is why I tend to avoid referencing current events in my animations and Movie Portal submissions. Animation takes forever, but the world just moves too dang fast--the ban did not even last 12 hours! This does not change the fact that I personally think short-form video content is shrinking our brains (at least our attention spans) and I will not magically decide to get a TikTok account or any of the alternatives (RedNote, Instagram Reels) either way, though this does kind of discourage me from putting more effort into my YouTube Shorts--it is a bit of extra work making a separate "YouTube Shorts" version of my horizontal animations that would be better spent just moving on to the next animation project, and it's not like my animations are (currently) long enough to necessitate making a clip for YT Shorts or TikTok, anyway.

Full disclosure: I have never had my own TikTok account, and I guess as someone who tends to skew more "Millennial" than "Gen Z" (basically, I'm an old goat by social media standards at 30 years old), I looked at the site with the same disdain and fear for future generations that my parents saw whenever I played my Game Boy Advance for more than two hours at a time.

It has shrunken attention spans to the point where you're all probably already thinking this blog post has gone on too long, and has been particularly bad for political discourse in the United States as a distressing number of "my fellow Americans" (read that in your best Barack Obama impression) decide some "influencer" screaming into their phone camera and immediately uploading their conspiracy rants onto social media is more trustworthy than the entire legacy news media of newspapers and TV news (not that legacy media has been much more truthful, to be fair, but at least they have to maintain the illusion of having fact-checkers screen their stories, first). If President Trump immediately tries to bring back TikTok after his Inauguration tomorrow, it will be for the self-serving reason that TikTok and its right-wing "influencers" were crucial in helping him win back the Presidency this time around--ignore the fact that he set off this process of eventually banning TikTok in the first place during the tail-end of his first term in 2019 or 2020.

But anyhow, TikTok's loss is kind of my gain, as in spite of my opinions on short-form videos where literally anyone can post their unhinged lies and get popular, I have been maintaining a presence on the TikTok-like YouTube Shorts website in an attempt to stay current with trends. A lot of it is just vertical, smartphone-friendly versions of the animations I already posted on the Movie Portal here, but I also post speed-paints and, if I get enough of a boost in viewership due to the US TikTok ban and people looking for their next "short-form video fix," I might take the time to start showing my process for 3D art and animation, too! Like with any animation-focused channel, though, don't expect frequent uploads, let alone daily episodes--even on my short-form videos, animation takes time, you know.

Here is a sample:

https://youtube.com/shorts/jB8kgVhkAkk?feature=shared

Can't embed YouTube Shorts like I can embed regular YouTube videos here, sorry.

So Squid Game Season 2 was the most depressing thing I've ever seen. AND it killed my desire to play Silent Hill 2 or any "sad Dad" PS5 game that is not Astro Bot (except I 100%-ed Astro Bot a couple months ago, so I need some other perky platformer to play). Give me ideas of more uplifting, palette-cleansing shows to watch next before my mental health is somehow damaged by a TV show that honestly isn't that much more disturbing than End of Evangelion or the later Hunger Games movies.

I'll keep it as brief as I can, since one of my New Year's Resolutions is not making people online spend time reading my rambling thoughts as much. I'd say that, for the things in my life that I can control and do something about at least, 2024 was actually a pretty good year--particularly in terms of my art and animation endeavors. Basically, I finally acknowledged that I can't be good at EVERYTHING and instead focused my efforts on wrapping my head around making 3D characters. Frankly, the fact that there are now genuinely-viable mobile 3D modeling and sculpting apps like Nomad and Valence 3D helped a ton, ensuring I could ALWAYS squeeze in time to practice 3D art every day, at any time of the day.

My animation, Whiny Do-De-Do, was featured on the BlenderNation website in the middle of this year after sharing it on the BlenderArtists blog. It was just one of many, many featured art that weekend (my submission looked a LOT less impressive compared to the Geralt Witcher fanart it sat next to), but it was a good sign that my stuff was starting to appeal to people more.

I had a very pleasant end-of-year surprise on this website when my "Wormoliana" Art Portal submission got Front-Paged. Just goes to show that making cute-but-weird girls here will get you everywhere. Even if that cute-but-weird girl is a gross worm that definitely leans more toward the "weird" side.

Honorable "VERY-late-in-the-year" mention goes to the surprisingly-positive reaction I seem to have gotten from "Cursed Blender Donut!", despite the M rating and the barely-disguised-fetish vibes of the corpulent lady character design, and honestly the image composition and colors don't look all that great to me after looking at it for a while. Either y'all are chubby-chasing freaks, or I just did a good job making the Donut's expression look more like a loose, whimsical expression that is more common in 2D art than 3D. I'll take both compliments.

Like all the other New Year's posts I've been reading, I should thank and mention some of the people that were very social and kind to me; were very helpful with critiques and giving me collab work; or just made some damn good art this past year. This includes: @AlexToolStudio, @BlueEspresso, @CalamityGanon, @CayfettArt, @Chdonga, @chillzozen, @D1MMED0098, @Finasty, @Fizzizz, @Flikki, @FrajjaCat, @Garfenbopper, @Glitching Ghost, @Healmore6969, @HorseFolder, @IceCreamJaxxie, @InsaneDingoArt, @KhaosKitsune617, @LilStank0, @Mindblade16, @Myceli0m, @Nabella, @NeonShambles, @NoahAnimates101, @Project Anarchy, @QueenSolomon @ShockAbe, @SolidSnakeOnAPlane, @SOUP101, @Stepford, @strangermen, @stuckathome, @TheMiamiDeSantos, @TheSketchyArtist, @Typhond, @wubbles64, and @Xinxinix. Whew! This gets harder every year my own follower count grows. She no longer has an account here, it seems, but I would also like to mention Skhaiwaelz, see was very sweet and positive.

MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS (remember to hold me to them!):

• Mellow out--frankly, this will be easy for the simple reason that 2025 is not a major Election year in the United States like 2024 was, but still, for the next stressful even-numbered Election year (2026 for Midterms, 2028 for another major Presidential Election), I clearly need to work on not being so SERIOUS all the time, especially on Newgrounds. You are here for my art, not my opinions, and many of you seem to be too young to even care about icky adult issues, yet.
• More animation: This will be a bit harder, since I can only do it on my no-longer portable laptop and Blender and there doesn't seem to be any good mobile apps for me to at least practice 3D animation away from my hardware. Still, I want to make more animations, longer animations, and animations with more polish than I have been making since I joined here. The upside of my laptop's battery dying after 3 1/2 years is that I will no longer scrimp on the advanced ray traced lighting effects just so that I can make my laptop's battery last a little longer away from the outlet and because I'm too impatient to wait for a slow CPU Cycles render. My computer has similar specs to the PS5 Pro, there's no reason my stuff should look like a PS1 or PS2 render anymore.
• Simpler cartoon textures: This would give me more time to work on the "animation" part of the pipeline, of course, but also after seeing trailers for all the latest Disney live action remakes in the theaters (and of course that terrifying Minecraft Movie trailer), I've simply decided that grotesquely-detailed textures and fur simulations on simple cartoon characters are vastly overrated, and even unintentionally scary in the likely event I focus too much on minor details as opposed to clean and visually-pleasing silhouettes.
• Try again to at least get a short gig in the "industry": this honestly depends on whether the LA animation industry finally recovers from the pandemic and strikes this year, as well as greedy studio execs resisting the urge to eliminate entry-level jobs entirely with AI and making it even harder for those of us who aren't Hollywood nepo-babies to get our foot in the door. But still, I feel I'd improve significantly faster in animation if I ever had the privilege of learning from and trying to keep up with industry legends, forcing me to develop the work ethic I need to make animations longer than 60 seconds at a higher quality AND in a reasonable time frame. I don't think The Amazing Digital Circus would look half as smooth as it does without its animation director, Kevin Temmer, learning everything he needed to know during his days at Blue Sky, working on the later Ice Age movies, for example.
• Get my short-form series idea, Punk n' Gunk, off the ground: Remember the dumb teal guy and angry pink guy in my "Keister Bunny" animation? I plan on making a whole web series based around the lives of these two screwballs!

...Well, so much for being brief, but at least I resisted the urge to autistically ramble on top of all that typing. Speaking of autism, if you made it this far, here's my latest mini-review of the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (the movie, not the Genesis/Mega Drive game, the latter is a freakin' masterpiece):

It was good. And funny, especially with Jim Carrey finally giving a less-subdued, more manic performance as both Dr. Eggman and Dr. Gerald Robotnik. I guess what stops me from giving this anywhere near a 10/10 (besides the writers REALLY wanting to shove everyone's favorite "angry black woman" stereotype, Rachel, into these plots, though at least her shenanigans didn't take up like 60% of the movie like Sonic 2 movie...) is simply that I am a grown, 30-year-old man and the humor and storytelling was clearly aimed at little boys--which of course was true of the previous two movies, but I guess it was still a novelty back then to not only see a "decent" video game movie, but one that (mostly) does my childhood favorite, Sonic the Hedgehog, justice, and that's no longer the case today. I also think the writers clearly struggled with re-writing Sonic Adventure 2's plot to better fit in the separate universe the Paramount Sonic movies reside in, and certain references like Sonic saying "No snacks or in-flight movie? I'm outta here!" or G.U.N. turning on Sonic, Tails and Knuckles felt forced--this particular one might actually be for the more casual Sonic fans, as opposed to someone like me who grew up with Sonic Adventure 2 as one of their first video games and thus will nitpick how they handled Shadow and Maria's friendship incessantly.

I also think the movies may be limiting their potential audience by essentially making these movies testosterone-fueled sausage-fests for an entire trilogy, now. Outside of "Pretzel Lady" and her sister...Rachel...there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgment of any of the female Sonic characters, like Amy Rose or Rouge the Bat, and this is just anecdotal evidence, but for the third movie I only ever saw 6-10 year old boys and their parents in theater besides my Dad and me, compared to the other two movies where at least there a few little girls in the audience, as well. On one hand, you kind of have to respect the Paramount Sonic movies for resisting the longtime Hollywood trend of forcing "girl power" narratives in movies that don't appeal to most feminine tastes in the first place--usually written by someone who couldn't write a strong male lead to save their life, let alone writing a strong protagonist that happens to be female, or queer/gender-fluid, or any other under-represented identity in the US. But again, as someone who knows Sonic Adventure 2 like the back of my hand, I was wondering why Rouge didn't show up at any point, and not having 1/3rd of Team Dark from the original game seemed to have forced writers to try to hard to come up with some new plot contrivances where Shadow or the Robotniks did things Rouge did in the game, all while making sure it makes sense with the universe the other Paramount Sonic movies established. Without spoiling anything, it's looking like the inevitable 4th Sonic movie will at the very least acknowledge the existence of female Sonic characters, but it's probably too little too late for young girls who now dismiss these movies as something only their neurodivergent brothers can enjoy.

All in all, though, it was fun action kiddie fare. As long as you don't expect the quality of early Pixar, artistic European movies like the recently-released Flow, or any other studio that recognizes that just because the target audience is children, you don't need to "dumb down" the story and themes, it's a fun and funny popcorn flick to watch at least once, especially if you are a fan of either the games or actors like Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves.

...And if SEGA is not going to bring back the Chao Garden in the video games, then they should make the Tokyo "Chao Garden" cafe from the movie into a real-life place. Just think of the money, SEGA!

So basically, the battery on my laptop after almost 4 years is a goner, and due to my environmentally-conscious beliefs (I WILL NOT plug in unnecessary energy-guzzling devices like my laptop and game consoles during "peak hours," when my US State uses dirtier fossil fuel sources to meet evening electricity demand); and Newgrounds being more of a "desktop-first" website design (I'm not super-comfortable looking at this NSFW site on a portable phone that my co-workers could easily glimpse at; GIFs and especially WebP animations in the Art Portal don't seem to work on my phone's web browser), I may be on here a bit less in the future, pretty much just on my days off of MAYBE Friday, and definitely Saturday and Sunday.

And that's assuming I'm not using those same days off from my day job instead to grind away at my latest Movie Portal animation, though of course the upside of having my laptop plugged in at full RTX 3060 GPU-utilizing power is that my computer will run my animation software substantially faster (even for seemingly-simple 2D animations, but definitely Blender and Eevee will benefit most), compared to when my laptop is running on battery and merely using my less-impressive CPU, and I could get a LOT more done on my laptop on the days I do make animations and renders on it.

 Most gaming laptop batteries typically die out within 3 years, so it's impressive mine managed to last a bit longer, but still, it's disappointing my hardware is now useless away from an outlet like a desktop computer...

It's probably just healthier that way, anyway, only visiting here when I absolutely have the free time and I'm less likely to be in a bad mood due to certain things that happened at work, like with any social media website. But you'll have to get used to me not seeing your own lovely Art Portal and Movie Portal submissions at all unless you specifically post on weekends or your stuff gets Front-Paged, sorry about that in advance...

Most Christmases, I'm too busy with my family to even check Newgrounds on Christmas Day, but I'm letting them sleep in this year, so Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of you, too! I have also been told that this year, the first day of Hannukah also falls on the 25th, so Happy Hannukah for those who celebrate it, as well!

I don't know if it was intentional or planned in any way, but I am particularly grateful this Christmas for the sheer amount of top-notch indie animations I've been seeing this past month on both Newgrounds and YouTube--whether it was the excellent 4th episode of Monkey Wrench (currently my favorite indie cartoon of them all right now--please support the show!), the equally-excellent and too-relatable 4th episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, excellent music videos from Miles John and Chris O'Neill/Zoukeau, or all sorts of other amusing indie efforts that I can't remember at this moment, I was eating GOOD this December and all this quality entertainment genuinely did wonders at keeping my usual seasonal depression away this year! I even managed to squeeze in one more short, experimental cartoon myself (Pibbles the Panda Eats a Lemon) to bring my total self-made Movie Portal submissions this year to a record 6 animations!

I'll go into it a bit in my New Year's Eve post later, but despite certain anxieties about real-world issues that are out of my control (and frankly irrelevant to this art- and animation-website), this past year has been a much-needed turning point for me and my art efforts, finally being a bit more focused in my studies (recognizing I can't truly be great at any part of the animation process unless I picked a specialty and stuck with it for at least an entire year) and I have some promising and hilarious new cartoons in the pipeline for you to enjoy throughout 2025. Now that I FINALLY have a consistent workflow and art style, I might even start work on a longer, more-ambitious video (at least 3-5 minutes long, with multiple backgrounds and characters) this next year! Hope your "TikTok"-length attention spans can handle the longer video lengths, and Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good night!

For posterity's sake, I decided to show you all a very early animation I made when I was only 16 and just started uploading on YouTube (I would not re-discover Newgrounds and finally set up my own account here until almost a decade later). I used Anime Studio Basics 2010 or something like that for the wonky animation, which has since been renamed to Moho Studio (I like the old name better). I had no proper training on animation when I made this--I was still just a kid, and YouTube tutorials weren't quite as prevalent as they are now, and free alternatives like Blender were still borderline-unusable for dumb children like I was. Tell me what you think! But hopefully you're not thinking "Wow, 16-year-old Jeffrey was so much better than 30-year-old Jeffrey"...

...Horrible, horrible things happen.

"Waluigi clown" is my favorite.

I can't seem to actually find it on the Front Page myself, unfortunately, but apparently it was on there long enough to drastically improve the amount of views, Favorites and 5-star votes of this particular Art Portal submission (by Newgrounds Art Portal standards, at least). Thank you, @PBot and/or @TomFulp, for (allegedly) boosting the visibility of this particular 3D render of mine for a bit, much appreciated!

I knew just making cute girl characters was a quick and easy way to get FrontPaged--even if the cute girl in this case is a worm...

In all seriousness, though, this is the second time an Art Portal submission landed me Front Page honors (allegedly), the first time this happened was that "Triple-A Chair" render I did over a year ago. A lot of the comments under Wormoliana seem to suggest I went quite far with making it look like something you would see in a triple-A video game or a major movie (particularly the high polygon count in the wireframe render), so this seems to suggest people seem to be more drawn to my more detailed, hardware-pushing 3D renders (especially if they're just plain interesting to look at on top of all that). That does mean I should probably spend quite a bit more time polishing my 3D renders to a truly-professional standard before deciding whether to post them on the Art Portal at all, but on the bright side it seems I hit a "sweet spot" in my online art efforts now where people now seem more than happy to wait as long as it takes between my posts, so long as when I DO post, it impresses them about as much as Wormoliana and, uh, "Triple-A Chair" did.

Obviously, chasing clout, even on a small, cozy website like modern Newgrounds, is not a healthy goal for myself, and "Internet success" rarely, if ever translates into people actually working full-time at a major studio, finally getting paid for doing what they love. The teenagers that tend to front-page cute girls (even my worm-girl, Wormoliana) on social media sites are a completely different audience than the "mainstream" audience that keep SpongeBob, modern Disney and the concept of constantly remaking or rebooting movies and TV shows that didn't even originally come out that long ago on life support.

But considering that NG is not run by an unpredictable algorithm and the Front Page stuff seems to be simply decided by someone important at the Newgrounds office REALLY liking your particular submission that day, stuff like this does really help me decide where to focus more of my efforts and limited art-making time on. Plus, I just live for the amusing comments and reviews I always seem to get here, and more people making jokes and calling them reviews under my goofy pieces can only be a good thing!

So basically, thank you for whoever decided to (allegedly) front-page Wormoliana and thank you for those that keep this small little site interesting for me with your amusing reviews and comments, much appreciated!

How's that for a shocking click-bait headline?

But yeah, I saw the recent Wicked movie with some of my family. It was actually pretty good, despite the actresses engaging in needless controversy on the Muskrat site (the lady who plays the Witch/Elphaba apparently didn't like the poster fan-edits on Twitter where they gave her red lips, like in the original play poster, even somehow interpreting it as racism).

...Whatever, that stuff doesn't remotely affect my decision to watch movies at this point, and as for the movie itself, it was a quite impressive, faithful adaptation of the play I actually saw in San Diego back in the late 2000's, and I forgot how catchy a lot of the songs of this particular Broadway Production were. Fun fact: Idina Menzel, who played the Witch/Elphaba in the original run of the Wicked play, went on to be the singer and voice actress of Elsa in Disney's Frozen franchise. Better yet, despite the inevitable gripes from the likes of Critical Drinker and other right-wing drama queens about the diverse casting (compared to the original Wizard of Oz about 90 years ago), it really did feel like an old-fashioned Hollywood musical in the vein of Music Man, Singing in the Rain or Grease, where the director seemed to have acknowledged that the best part of ANY musical was the actual music, dancing choreography and sets, and focused on that instead of spending too much time with story and exposition--although Wicked in particular was always a pretty solid prequel story to The Wizard of Oz.

Of course, this is sort of a review, so I should mention it isn't perfect. I genuinely think Universal could potentially get sued for some false advertising, because I went in convinced I was going to see the entire play in a single movie, only to learn this movie was only "Part 1" and there is going to be at least "Part 2" a few years from now to wrap up the story--essentially, like Beyond the Spider-verse, it seems to only end at "Act 2" and we're going to have to wait a long time just to see the Third and final Act of this simple story. As someone who still waits in vain for a Mega Man Legends 3 or a Shenmue where Ryo Hazuki final gets to at least land a single punch on Lan Di, I've grown to absolute DESPISE cliffhangers in stories, but again, the director seemed to have wisely focused more on "musical vibes" than the story, and I found myself not caring too much by the end that I was getting an incomplete movie, as the amusing, old-school dancing and set-pieces sufficiently distracted me from that fact.

That's all I have for my "cons" list, really, a minor gripe that ultimately didn't turn out to be a huge issue at all, definitely one of the better Broadway-to-Hollywood adaptations in the 21st century, along with The Greatest Showman, Les Miserables, and, um...I REALLY wanted to like Disney's Into the Woods, just because it was so morbid compared to what you would expect from the House of Mouse, and a rather lovely Taylor Swift as I think Rapunzel, and even Chris Pine in that particular movie making me question whether I am as "straight" as I think I am. But I digress...

The casting is also the absolute best I've seen in a long while--basically the polar opposite of that Borderlands movie, unlike that movie everyone in Wicked seemed BORN to play that specific role. For example, it may be eyebrow-raising to see Ariana Grande get ANY role considering some of her controversies, let alone a lead role as Galinda/Glinda the Good Witch, but who better to play a vain, petty, virtue-signaling attention seeker like Glinda than someone who is a vain, petty, virtue-signaling attention-seeker in real life? Also I'm biased because I've always had a bit of a crush on Ariana Grande since she played that squeaky-voiced character in the TeenNick show, Victorious--of all the painfully-awkward Cuban Americans she had to date for a while, why did it have to be Pete Davidson and not me?? Ahem...

But yeah, pleasantly surprised by this movie, puts its likely $200 million+ budget to good use for once, but hopefully I'll regain some of my testosterone levels back once the Sonic 3 Movie comes out and I watch it. Keanu Reeves as Shadow the Hedgehog, YEEEEAAAUUUHHH!