I actually like Disney’s new Wish trailer for the most part and will likely see it with my willing family members (basically my Dad—maybe my Mom, too, if I’m lucky) this November.

What is wrong with me?

Thought I'd give this a try:

Remember that I also have a Ko-fi Tip Jar so that you can just give me $3 whenever you feel like it and I can just continue doing what I do with the help of the tips! Thanks for considering my services, all!

I’ve noticed a lot of the most talented artists I follow here use a mobile app called Ibis Paint X for their 2D illustrations. I’ve been privileged/spoiled enough to do most of my art on a graphics tablet attached to a powerful laptop AND an iPad Pro + Apple Pencil, so I thought “if I really want to call myself a digital artist in this day and age, then I should be able to draw on ANYTHING, even my tiny phone screen with just my finger!”

I am extremely impressed with Ibis Paint X so far. With the “line stabilizer” turned up to maximum, I could easily draw with just my thumb (and I guess 2 fingers to zoom in and out of the canvas), and I am pleasantly surprised by the sheer amount of brushes, textures, anatomy guides and other assets I could quickly download for use in my projects! It seems more sophisticated than most 2D art/photo editing software I’ve used on my PC, while also acknowledging the limitations of drawing on a phone and how to work around them.

I’m not proud enough of the image above to put it on the Art Portal—it is my first attempt so far—but maybe with a bit of practice this little “mobile app that could” will replace more “industry standard” PC and iPad software for me. And I will get that practice in, because sometimes my back hurts too much after a combination of working out and sitting at the computer all day, but if I can draw on my phone, I can work on stuff even while lying down!

Here it is! This is the project I’ve been working on with sirjeffofshort for almost a year and a half now! He and his team did the improv script and voice acting, and he did most of the coloring, branding and subtle video edits, while I did the animation and character design on a slippery iPad screen and an obscure drawing app that is NOT going to replace Flipaclip any time soon! This was a fantastic learning experience for me and sirjeffofshort was a great and understanding boss, and I can’t wait to see what all of you think about my work and what could be improved next time!

You may think I would need a long break after such a big project, but 1) I already got that break in the week or two leading up to Christmas last month and 2) I love drawing, modeling and animating so much that I can’t go TOO long without touching a pen or stylus before I start getting ambitious ideas I need to get out of my head again! Stay “tooned!” I’m sure no one thought up of THAT pun before…

Like, right now. Didn't exactly have time to prepare something special in the 3 or so seconds between checking my follower count and starting up this blog post. Thank you very much, all 300 of you, I'll make you proud soon, now that my workload is temporarily easing up a bit and I can start posting actual art a bit here, again!

...so, uhh, do I win anything...? A Steam Deck, maybe? I want a Steam Deck...

YouTube: Censors even minor swearing at the beginning of all videos to protect the advertisers—I mean, the children.

Also YouTube: Makes my front page look like Newgrounds on a particularly kinky day:

”Gohan’s New Form” is fantastic, by the way, watch it here or on YouTube, whichever you prefer! I’m sure the YouTube version gets substantially more views, though, while the Newgrounds version has far more interesting and even helpful comments than “Dis is cool” or “Good”.

This is the definition of a first-world dilemma, but I just spent the past 3 HOURS looking at the last 3 DAYS' worth of Newgrounds art from the people I follow that I missed until now. Honestly, maybe I need to limit my reviews to just giving everyone 4-5 Stars and hitting the little "favorite" heart button most of the time, instead of making all these proper written reviews, if I'm not only going to follow tons of people, but follow their art religiously like a true fanboy. The only other possible solution is if you all stop making such good stuff all the time, and nobody wants that "nuclear" option.

The funny and sad thing about this little time sink today is that this was the direct result of me deciding to take a break from Newgrounds instead, because I fear I'm actually started to get addicted to this site. Clearly I picked the wrong site to take a break from, though, because I thought it would be better to watch some dumb meme videos on YouTube instead, but the vibe in that community is especially nasty right now, because YouTube has made yet more dumb changes that could scare off some of my favorite content creators with what frankly amounts to censorship. After thinking about it a couple of days, this change in YouTube policy does not affect anyone who wisely relies more on Patreon and/or selling merchandise, instead of dealing with an increasingly-impossible algorithm that is basically saying, "we don't want to support smaller creators--or any creators, really--because YouTube has been an unprofitable money pit for Google for over 15 years now, so if you could just delete your account to free up expensive server space for us, that would be great!" But you know how the Internet overreacts to everything before in the heat of the controversy and makes everything needlessly morbid for people that just want to watch funny videos or look at dank memes. Clearly Newgrounds would have been the lesser of the two evils for my mental health, though I should practice more moderation in the sometimes-wild forums, too.

Speaking of Patreon, let's segway into my next topic: I want to get to a point with my art and followers where I could at least make a small amount of money to support my animation. It's a lot of hard work doing animation, and I don't know how much longer I can get by just on "passion," so making at least a little bit of money would help ensure I still have the motivation to take on increasingly-large projects all by myself. Even if I do get my "dream job" working on an animated movie in Hollywood, some of my career sources say that I'll only work at most a year before I'm let go and have to start the job hunt all over again, so it would also be ideal if in between major gigs I could get by solely on freelance work instead having to consider working at that sucky grocery worker job again (which is in the process of replacing its cashiers and baggers with automation, anyway--not even sophisticated AI algorithms, it turns out that Windows 98 and XP have long been capable of running automatic check-out stands).

I fully understand, though, that many of my most loyal followers right now can't justify even donating to my Ko-fi on occasion, let alone making monthly donations of at least $1 a month on Patreon if I ever decide to make one. Usually, it seems they are only a young teenager and can't legally set up a PayPal account or otherwise give money to ANYONE online without their parents' permission. Or they come from a notoriously economically-unstable country like Brazil or Turkey and I should be helping THEM out financially once I'm financially secure again, myself. All I ask from you is if there is any way I could improve my "marketability" on Newgrounds so I could at least ask for commission work every once in a while and expect at least one of the slots to be consistently filled. I know looking at my Art Portal submissions over the years shows that I am very unfocused, constantly jumping between topics and art styles and not even deciding if I want to be a 2D or 3D artist (I'll probably try to focus on and master 3D this year).

Any other ways I could prove to potential followers who are old enough and financially secure enough that I'm worth working with and I'll always do a good job for them?

I’m going to keep this (kind of) short, since I actually have a busy day with my family today. Shocker, a post from me that is relatively quick to read, right??

You might be happy to know that 2022 was actually kind of a banner year for my art. I got involved in a ton of team projects, most notably contributing to Michaelsoft Binbows ‘97 and quietly chugging away at a large animation project since late 2021. My follower count skyrocketed as I became more active and social here, and with ArtStation and Twitter in particular shattering every last illusion I had about mainstream social media sites I feel like spending more time here in 2023, there just seems to be more of an actual community here and I’m pretty sure that Tom Fulp doesn’t want to hurt me like Elon Musk does if he ever finds out about that viral Tweet I made once making fun of him in 2020.

As for resolutions? Umm…Obviously I need to find a job so that I can have a decent income again, and it needs to be less demeaning than being a bag boy surrounded by Karens who read way too many conspiracy theories and yell at me like I have anything to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. I can assure you this post would have been more of a downer if I stuck with that retail job, perpetually surrounded by some of the most pessimistic and complain-y people on the planet for 8+ hours a day (basically, irl Twitter). But I am practically 30 and need to support myself and potentially an entire family, so hopefully I find something that at least pays well enough to make the bad stuff worth it and allows me to actually hire help for my ambitious animation projects, too.

As for art, I need to get better at 3D modeling if I want to get a “dream job” working on a large animated production at Hollywood or an AAA game studio, so I’ll be continuing to master Blender once this project I’m working on is finally done. I also want to learn RPG Maker more because that recent game I made in it was a fun learning experience and it might be a great new hobby for me, making funny takes on the standard SNES/PS1 JRPGs of the ‘90’s. I will focus more on RPG Maker 2003, though, because unlike MV it looks like you can actually play the 2003 games on your phone in addition to PC, plus the extremely low resolution by today’s standards will ensure I don’t spend too long doing the art for each game.

That still came out kind of long. TL;DR I know some people have had a rougher year than others, but you can at least rest assured that I am the LAST person you should be worried about going into 2023. I was so productive this year on multiple fronts!

Here’s to an even better 2023 for all of us!

I made a game for the Game Portal.

Why are you looking at me funny? It's the truth! I did! I made a game in RPG Maker MV and called it "ButtChrono!" If you are a fan of old-school RPGs and sardonic humor, check it out right here on Newgrounds' Game Portal!

Thank you for all the support you all gave me this year! 2022 has been a banner year for me and I'm excited about what projects I'll be able to finish and make in 2023! Hopefully this game puts you in a good enough mood to be inspired throughout the next year! Merry Christmas to those that celebrate it, and to those that don't, Happy Holidays!

You may be acutely aware as of late that there are people out there who don't see art as valid, useful, or even hard work. You may feel like there's no point in pursuing art in a world where computers can generate decent-quality projects in mere seconds, faster than any of us can even go to the bathroom or make a sandwich. You go tell those kinds of people to eat a sick snail, because I self-taught myself scripting as it applies to RPG Maker, tried and failed multiple times to upload it correctly to Newgrounds' Games Portal, watched a ton of tutorials and read a lot of forums and FAQs to get through the toughest problems, and even manually enhance each default RPGMMV sprite in a photo editor (Paint.Net, in case you're wondering) because I didn't quite like the look of the default sprites, but didn't have time to manually make new spritesheets due to my freelance animation work demanding too much time. But my ultimate reward for all that self-inflicted frustration is a game that I can truly say is MY work. Not an AI's, MINE.

It's all about the journey, not the destination. ChatGPT can only hope to make worse copies of my more unhinged jokes in ButtChrono, there's no way it could come up with this stuff on its own without human data to regurgitate from. You can't buy this sheer satisfaction and motivation that I just gave myself by making that game I always told myself I was going to make, but thought I was too dumb to be able to do. Don't deprive yourself of that massive self-esteem boost just because you're alarmed about what you're reading in the news and in art forums right now!

DON'T LOSE YOUR WAAAAAAAAAAY...!!

So I'm glad I left ArtStation. Epic Games is no longer even seems to be responding to the ongoing protests and even allowing people to commercially sell AI-generated reference packs on the website's store, not the least bit concerned about how a single artist can produce 5,000 packs of reference images that include 200+ familiar-looking references each without stealing or cheating. Clearly major gaming companies have learned nothing at all from the NFT fad that lasted just until recently (Ubisoft is jumping into this most recent fad, too, because of course they would), and we have to fend for our own future, assuming websites filled with AI-generated garbage aren't already being seen as trashy "Skid Row Dollar Store"-looking visual noise even to consumers who are unaware of why artists are protesting this.

I'm sure you've already heard of this, but you can check with this website if your art is being used by Stable Diffusion and its ilk.

https://haveibeentrained.com/

Luckily, I have yet to find any of my art or characters on here, but it is telling that a lot of the images that do show up are blatantly famous copyrighted images, video thumbnails from extremely well-known YouTubers like Pewdiepie, book covers and magazine covers. Hopefully that alone should give reason for large companies to sue people stealing their work into oblivion.

If you have money and don't feel TOO icky about how The United State's money-obsessed lobbying system works, then consider giving to this GoFundMe so that artists in America can pay to have a lobbyist fighting for them in Congress:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/protecting-artists-from-ai-technologies

There is unfortunately legal precedent that the act of scraping the Internet for images to use in an AI program is okay with a U.S. court case back in April saying it's legal. Yet these programs operate under some fancy-sounding "LAION-5B" license that basically states these images can only be used for experimental, learning and overall non-commercial purposes, and particularly on ArtStation, the game High on Life and Adobe Photoshop's latest big update, the images are definitely being used for commercial money-making purposes when they are not supposed to. I'm extremely confident the otherwise-terrible "lawyer up" culture of US companies will put a stop to this blatant plagiarism of their IPs, though the courts move slowly here and it may be years before we get some clear guardrails that allow human jobs and AI to at least co-exist. Politicians may even work on this for their own sakes because the misinformation potential of AI deepfake technology specifically concerns them. But hopefully this GoFundMe succeeds to increase the chances of things working out before it's too late.

Seriously, ArtStation's transformation since being bought out by Epic Games is like the classic 1980's movie Pretty Woman being played in reverse--whereas the fictional prostitute in that movie was transformed into a well-respected member of society by the end, ArtStation went from being a classy site for potential employees and employers in art-and-animation-related industries (by its very nature as a portfolio site, there was no drama because drama obviously hurts one's chances of getting into these tough industries), to a frankly slutty-looking dumping ground for AI-generated shitposts either because ArtStation being bought out by Epic made them financially immune to the consequences of people canceling their Premium and Pro subscriptions (or people outright deleting their accounts like I did), or they are deluded into thinking they can compete with other trashy, declining general social media sites like Twitter without having to at least make a less-cumbersome mobile site or phone app, first. Seriously, Newgrounds has made far greater progress in improving the mobile version of the site without "Daddy Money" from Epic, what's ArtStation's excuse?