I am quite proud of infecting the “BBW” tag with my drawing, “Bye Bye Birdbrain.” Oh, you wanted to ONLY see lovely women who made no attempt whatsoever to exercise indoors during quarantine? Too bad! Look at this freaky bird instead of freaky fetish art!

Wait what? You have a fetish for ugly fat red robins being shot at, too?! You might want to talk to your therapist about that, bub.

I’ve made it no secret that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Twitter—its mere petty existence tests my sanity on a daily basis, but I still use it to find artists to help me on projects and test if my art has “mainstream” appeal (it doesn’t just appeal to other artists or people who understand the process).

However, I am increasingly starting to believe skeptics (cynics?) that are convinced that social media platforms are actively starting flame wars so they can get that sweet, sweet ad revenue that apparently comes when a post gets a lot of comments, knowing fully well they are damaging their user’s mental health, making the world a meaner place, and even possibly paving the way for the next Donald Trump—don’t let their attempts to slap political trolls on the wrist long after the damage has been done fool you.

Whether or not that’s how platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube work, I have noticed that I can’t remember a single time that Twitter’s “Trending” tab has shown anything positive that doesn’t make me absolutely furious at a celebrity, a politician, a country, a state, a TV show I had no plans on following, anyway, etc. I have also given up on Facebook and Instagram entirely after being told my political rants and memes there are more likely to get noticed than my art and I should focus on that instead, at which point I wisely decided that getting a few more followers on Facebook was not worth saying controversial stuff all the time that will cost me a higher-paying job, particularly in animation.

All in all, this is just a long way of saying that I will post more often on Newgrounds, Ko-fi and ArtStation and let my Twitter and YouTube accounts shrivel up, as 1) Clearly their algorithms are now massive risk/reward systems that incentivize you for being an asshole online, even if you risk being “cancelled” or even starting actual real-life fights when the rudeness of the Internet inevitably gets to you, and I no longer want to be a party to that, and 2) It seems incredibly difficult and naïve at this point to think I can succeed on mainstream platforms with innocuous or even uplifting content, and the pressure to keep up with their algorithms for meaningless likes and comments is resulting in me rushing my art and potentially hurting my chances of getting a paid job in animation—I know now that succeeding in social media and succeeding in getting paid to draw (so that I can leave my lousy job working at a grocery store) are mutually exclusive goals in my unique case. If I become a famous artist, I could just return to Twitter or YouTube anyway and get far more attention with almost no effort simply by being well-known (though I promise to not become a Butch Hartman)—the days of getting famous on the Internet without already being famous elsewhere are long gone.

With Newgrounds, Ko-fi, ArtStation, and any other art-only sites (I’m going to pretend Newgrounds’ freakish Forum section doesn’t exist) I don’t feel as pressured to produce a huge quantity of art at the expense of quality, and in fact it seems like my art is more likely to be noticed and even promoted to potential employers if I spend the extra months polishing my art to professional levels. So while I can’t give up entirely on YouTube and Twitter (both are still great sources for tutorials and artist help), I’m going to do what I should have done a long time ago and simply make quality art that will get me a better job without trying in vain to compete with people who can easily post quality content on a daily basis, all for likes and comments that won’t pay for the roof over my head.

Just to show you I’m not dead in the corner of a rotting GameStop in Massachusetts or something, here’s what I’ve been working on. It’s for a portfolio that I hope will get me an animation job, so it’s going to take a while...

And yes, I really am crazy enough to model, texture, and rig entire 3D characters (at least with strict medium-poly count budgets) on my iPad. I use a combination of SuperD, Sketch 3D, Forger, iArtPro (for 2D texture stuff) and Clara.io to make this feasible, and no, the tutorials are not nearly as plentiful as they are for Blender, so you need a strong fundamental understanding of multiple mainstream 3D programs before you can bang your head on your iPad until you make something at least N64-quality during an already anxiety-inducing year like 2020 like I did.

I have come to the painfully obvious realization recently that I am much more productive in my art when I am spending more time creating art than looking for “inspiration” for hours on end (it’s generally better to get inspired by real life than to make an inferior homage to another artist, anyway). I am going to spend less time on social media as a result, which is of course easy on Twitter since it is a hive-mind of sadness and despair, but harder with Newgrounds because there are too many awesome people here. Thank goodness for my phone’s airplane mode!

Play around with my latest project here!

https://clara.io/view/b9f35d5c-7e15-4e4f-a3c6-7cd87173b8b8

UPDATE: Out of money for this week. Possibly the entire month. For those of you lucky enough to get a little financial support from me, hope it helps in any way!

ORIGINAL POST:

I'm not made of money, but I got my Christmas shopping done pretty early and I'm going to make some small donations to all of my favorite Newgrounds-ians this week. I've really grown to love this site, especially compared to Twitter, and I want to support everyone that supports this particular site so that we can get more awesome and creative art, cartoons, games and music here. Thank you for all your work this year!

Maybe I’ve been reading the news too much today. I’m not used to having Fridays off, I still need to figure out healthier ways to spend my waking moments. But peoples, I’ve tried long enough to be positive this year. Please let me vent, just a little...

1) The Sony/Funimation/AT&T/Crunchyroll merger is actually quite disappointing to me as a strong believer of free speech. For the first time since 4Kids was in business, there seems to be no way for me to watch anime that isn’t neutered to the point where it insults children in the US, and that is the best-case scenario considering 4Kids at least didn’t go out of their way to make us California progressives look like utter pansies that are somehow convinced that adding anti-patriarchy statements in Kobayashi Dragon Maid will help solve real-life issues like income inequality, rather than just give right-wing media yet another reason to make us look more dangerous to “democracy” than we actually are.

Either way, “Americanizing” anime kind of defeats the purpose of watching something from a culture with different values than our own, and I already have American cartoons if I’m not in the mood for anime. “Just pirate anime!” you may say. That would be a great way to send a message that I don’t want to put up with the American politicization of anime as if I WANT to be anxious about the slow demise of civilized society even when I’m watching TV to recover from my latest panic attack—if sites like 9anime didn’t just borrow from Funimation and Crunchyroll subs and dubs. I don’t know, I can’t see myself watching anime in the near future until it is an escape from reality (or at least Twitter drama) again...

2) Working in retail still sucks, I am not well suited for a customer service job where I have to be social, even to the most homicidal male Karens, I have to do most of my co-worker’s work in addition to my own because they won’t, you know, show up for work, somehow, even in this economy there aren’t any new people being hired to at least split up the workload like in past years, and of course people are still not taking you-know-what seriously and doing the bare minimum of wearing a piece of cloth on their face. Sure, this physical workload well beyond my pay grade has allowed me avoid gaining quarantine weight and even lose about a quarter-inch on my waistline, but at what cost? ...Everything...

I don’t want you to worry about me, these are just sour grapes that have been bugging me—I knew that the needless drama would continue even as genuinely-awful people like Donald Trump lose relevance and power, but I was hoping it wouldn’t affect my actual distractions from you-know-what like anime or video games—I didn’t even get started on what Nintendo’s been up to lately because, if I’m honest, my current “Nintendo” boycott will end in a week or less once I realize that boycotting all entertainment will make it very hard to cope with quarantine if I have nothing to do but look at horrible news all day. Plus, I can still tolerate Nintendo’s shenanigans over Sony making us liberals look more ridiculous than we already do by censoring “anime tiddiez” and ignoring non-Twitter-related actual issues that are more important.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a government that could stop anti-consumer monopolies like the Funimation/Crunchyroll merger and find good bipartisan solutions to other thorny issues so I don’t have to think so hard about “how the sausage is made” and just focus on getting a better job?

I have actually been a very busy banana regarding art pieces last month. I guess between this and running are my coping mechanisms at the moment.

What this means, though, is that I probably won’t have time to upload all of my art from last month on all my socials in one sitting. I suppose I would have the time next Tuesday, which is my day off, but that is also Election Day in the US and I feel it is my sworn American duty to not encourage anyone to even look at what is likely to be a very annoying day on social media, so I won’t upload on that day.

My plan is to slowly upload last month’s art on Ko-Fi, then Newgrounds, then Twitter, and last-but-definitely-least some videos on YouTube that you will likely have already seen on Newgrounds. See you then!

Peoples, peoples, such yer cake holes for one goddamn second, for I have an announcement to make:

I will not participate in No-Nut November this year. For one thing, I’m 26 years old and genuinely so sheltered that I’m not even sure what “nut” means in this case.

Also, I don’t want to be a sexually inhibited criminal like Frolo from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame or that OTHER “Jeffrey.”

That is all. Go back to eating mud or whatever you peasants do.

I’m going to spend the rest of the year building my presence in Ko-fi in hopes that I can make a little bit of money on my art. I will still publish my art on Newgrounds and Twitter at the end of the month in the form of art/sketch dumps, but for now I want to prioritize Ko-fi and hopefully grow less dependent on my frankly-stressful job. Newgrounds will still be my first priority when uploading videos and GIFs.

Feel to donate to my Ko-if here if you enjoy my work:

https://ko-fi.com/jeffreythrash