Like most people who watched the live-action Netflix adaptation of One Piece's East Blue arc and thought "You know, this was not as bad as I thought it was going to be," and watched the infamous 4Kids dub of One Piece back in childhood, I decided to check up on the anime version for the first time in a while. Naturally, I prefer the ADHD, almost "Looney Tunes"-esque insanity of the animated version better, particularly in the latest arc (Egghead Arc), and I've rediscovered my love of this understandably-popular anime as of late:

Speaking of 4Kid's attempt at sabotaging One Piece's North American success back when I was a kid, I recognize Tony Tony Chopper the quickest out of all the Straw Hat Pirates simply because, for reasons I may never fully understand, Cartoon Network's anime bloc, Toonami, kept showing the same episode of One Piece every Saturday night at 10:30 pm for like 3 or 4 years straight.

Specifically, it was the episode where Nami falls ill while the Straw Hats go to this snowy island or something (somewhere within the Alabasta arc, basically), and Luffy is looking for a doctor and finds one in the form of Chopper and I guess some elderly woman dressed like a 13-year-old at Hot Topic, or something. It was a good introduction to Chopper's character, don't get me wrong, but it was immensely disappointing tuning into Cartoon Network/Toonami every Saturday during the mid-2000's in hopes of at least seeing a re-run of a different 4Kids One Piece episode, only to see that same exact episode AGAIN up until I finished middle school and outgrew children's networks like Cartoon Network in general. No wonder I fell off of One Piece until the Netflix live-action adaptation my mom made me watch re-introduced me to the series.

By the way, my mom actually prefers the live action version, possibly because she finds the constant screaming and shouting in the anime version (and in Japanese animation in general) annoying and the live action version of Nami is probably less likely to give young girls body dysmorphia, compared to how her literal hourglass curves are drawn even in the otherwise-P.C. (politically-correct) 4Kids dub. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Hopefully the Alabasta arc in the live action version will do sweet little Chopper justice and not turn him into some CG affront to God and Creation--not TOO stylized like Toothless in the upcoming How to Train Your Dragon remake, but also not whatever Sonic was going to look like in the first Paramount Sonic movie, before they wisely changed his look.

Work in Progress (emphasis on WIP) of the upcoming animation I told you about, called Punk n' Gunk: Gregorio the Has-Been:

Essentially, this is to assure those of you who are understandably concerned I might be yet another random Internet artist who makes bold claims about my upcoming projects, only for the projects to be quietly cancelled anyway. I am indeed chipping away at this project, I am indeed working on this alone without even one other person to make this easier (because I'm crazy, I guess), and perhaps the only fly in the ointment is that the final release of this project might be delayed a bit, because I found it would be better for the final animation quality (and my work-life balance on weekends) if I only animated one character per shot to a more polished standard per weekend, rather than rush to do get an entire shot's animation done in a single day.

Most shots have two to three complex character rigs to animate (plus 2D FX like sparkles and blood splatter, though those take far less time), so this means it will likely take two-three weekends just to fully complete one shot in the future. Forget about my guesstimates of having this done by May best-case scenario, for now, though on the other hand I just realized I completed 23 whole seconds of CG animation in only a month...

The nice thing of having this preview out there for me is that it allows me to detach from my work a bit and figure out already what could be improved--for example, the color correction (this is technically a "preview-quality" Workbench render, but it's remarkably close to what the final Eevee render will look like, real-time rendering in Blender has come a long way...) and maybe adding some ambient bird and nature noises at the very beginning, because it seems eerily quiet compared to what comes after. Unfortunately, I'm not able to change and accept any feedback on pre-production stuff I finished months ago (the modeling, texturing, the story itself), but these are little things I can do to improve the final product before I hit "Render Animation."

Maybe in the future, I could upload WIP shots to the Work-in-Progress section of my favorite 3D-specific forum, BlenderArtists, to finally get the feedback I need to improve my animations BEFORE I upload them to the Movie Portal here, not afterward. I've griped a lot about how I can't seem to get any good critiques from my irl/offline family and friends, due to them being impressed I can even draw a stick figure at all, and obviously quietly chipping away at my projects alone isn't helping, so this might be a good way to get the feedback I need while still keeping the project somewhat of a secret until it's fully done, to those of you that merely want to wait for the final, polished animation on Newgrounds and YouTube.

Been reading an interesting book about 1-Panel "Gag" comics from The New Yorker magazine, thought I'd try some of my own (especially since, for obvious reasons, it takes FAR less time and effort than making a fully-rendered illustration or especially an animation).

Would it have killed them to smile during that one part where the NFL was required to show Dear Leader and his illegal immigrant wife right before the Super Bowl started? Sheesh. Someone get the Smiling Friends in here.

For those not familiar with the reference, this caricature of Donald and Melania Trump is alluding to the classic Grant Wood paining, American Gothic. I know it's supposed to be high art, but the "old married couple" vibes of this image never ceased to make me giggle:

If you don't hear from me for awhile, I am most likely being waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay Prison, Cuba, for making the mistake of assuming I still have the 1st Amendment right to make fun of politicians I don't like. But you will hear from me soon (hopefully), because I have an update this weekend on how my current animation project is going. Farewell for now, Comrade!

I know I haven't been super active on NG lately, sorry, but it's for the best possible reason--I am currently working on the pilot episode of my Punk n' Gunk series I have been talking about, called "Gregorio the Has-Been." I am putting more effort into making this animation as polished as possible, so while it may seem like I've been sitting on my butt doing nothing since I uploaded "Penguobbo Causes Climate Catastrophe," I have actually been diligently working weekends (and even some evenings after work) on this animation. Here is a picture of the Ren and Stimpy/SpongeBob-esque "gross-up" shot that will assault your eyes for a couple seconds when the animation comes out:

As a reminder that animation, especially solo animation, is hard, even though I've been working on this one or two shots per weekend immediately after finishing my last short animation, it looks like I'm in this for the long haul. At my current rate, I should be done around late May, and the worst-case scenario is that I won't finish until mid-July, and either way that only means I have the ANIMATION part of the pipeline done, meaning I still have to render the whole thing and maybe do some post-processing afterwards, so expect the final animation to finally be released in mid-June in the best-case scenario and August or September in the worst-case scenario. Finally, I WILL force myself to go on hiatus after it finally releases, because in retrospect, immediately moving on to a huge animation project right after finishing up one that was still kind of big (by solo animation standards) and had its own frustrations was one of my dumber ideas, self-care-wise...

So, uhh, you might have to be patient with me this year, but this is a much more ambitious project I've been wanting to get around to doing for a very long time and hopefully my influences of classic SpongeBob and '90's Nickelodeon show through loud and clear in the final project (and I'm not just referring to that one gross-up shot), and ultimately enhance your viewing experience. I'll still be able to show up from time to time to enjoy and comment on your stuff, as well, but clearly I need to be more diligent in chipping away at this one and I may not even be super active online overall as a result. Stay "tooned" for more potential updates on this!

So I've had the surreal experience today of being exposed to recent European entertainment at both its absolute best and absolute worst.

First, the bad so that we end on a high note later. OneyPlays is back (as sad as it sounds, I was genuinely hurting not having their dumb entertainment amuse me since their Sonic 3D Blast video last Christmas Eve), and they couldn't have picked a more controversial, toxic game to return with, 2024's EU-funded Dustborn. The Spider-verse inspired visuals look decent, but that's where the compliments end. Supposedly, it was made by European devs who were frustrated by Donald Trump winning the US Election back in 2016 (I'm sure they're furiously working on a Dustborn 2 right now, then), but the characters are SO insufferable and unlikeable, bullying each other and Nazis (or at least that's what they call people that disagree with them, this is no Wolfenstein), it almost feels like a right-wing psy-op to make us liberals look as stupid as possible before all the major world elections last year. Basically, it sounds like the polar opposite of fun, and it sold poorly. In fact, I'm still not 100% sure the game actually exists.

Thank goodness I watched Flow later in the day with my family. It was probably the first avant-garde European animated movie I've watched since I inexplicably watched The Triplets of Belleville at the age of 7 or 8, and it was fantastic--surprisingly easy to follow, too! It blows my mind that the entire movie was made in Blender (as opposed to prohibitively-expensive "industry-standard" software like Maya and Houdini), rendered in Eevee, and the water was accomplished using a $50 Blender Market plug-in, plus it practically moved me to tears at times without a single line of dialogue. Much better use of European tax money.

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...