I must have followed at least 5 new artists today alone. It's gotten to the point now where I unfortunately cannot give all the people I follow my full undivided love unless I delegate my overly-generous 5-star reviews and pathetic excuses for jokes to paid workers.

Please stop exposing me to exciting new artists, Mr. Fulp. I need time to work on my own Newgrounds art and you are just feeding my addiction to cool drawings...

Is it okay if I post quick animations in the Art section of Newgrounds (not the Movie section, I’ve learned the hard way the audience there prefers content that is at least as long and as professional as an old Tom and Jerry short, which is fine)? Naturally, for the sake of getting a job, I will still have to work months on end on a single polished, portfolio-worthy project, but maybe in between I can quickly fulfill my primal urge to quickly draw a quick animation cycle of a dog-baseball-lawnmower mowing the lawn like back in my Flipnote Studio days as a teen?

Posting more often would certainly be good for the “algorithm” that will hopefully make employers more likely to see my more polished stuff, and the fact of the matter is that, like most artists, I don’t want to just make “marketable” and trend-following stuff all the time, sometimes I just want to make something quick and weird with complete disregard as to whether it fits the “Disney” or “Dreamworks” style.

This will also mean I will be drawing 2D animations more, as I’m not Beeple and 3D animation and rigging takes too much time and mathematical prowess for experimental, almost-daily posts. Some people may be happy with more 2D frame-by-frame stuff in 2021...

After the admittedly-disappointing reception to my previous 2 animations across social media, I think I'm going to have to learn to be more patient and spend significantly more time on my 3D renders and animations. Basically, I'm going to try to spend around 3 months on still images and 6 months-to-a-year on animations, which means I will be a lot less active here outside of appreciating other people's art. The trade-off, though, is that hopefully my stuff will be FAR more polished when they do come out, and let's be honest, your favorite artists tend to be the ones that upload at a similar rate that JonTron uploads videos or we get a new "proper" Mario and Zelda game from Nintendo--The wait is annoying and tortuous, but when their beautiful art DOES eventually come out, your faith in humanity as a whole is temporarily restored! Likewise, I am capable of far more polished works than what I have been putting out so far, but I need to give myself a lot more time to actually polish my raw ideas in the first place.

I would also like to make more portfolio-worthy pieces so that I can finally get out of my retail/grocery job that is making me too physically exhausted most days to even sit up and load up Blender on my laptop for 30 minutes. Don't even get me started on the Karens and "Florida Men" (but in California) that actively go out of their way to make me as miserable as them, or how my boss keeps increasing my hours against my wishes so that I have to deal with them more and more...

Another thing I might work on is toning down the post-processing effects in my art. Renderers like Blender's Cycles and Eevee already produce some nice effects right out of the box (when done right) and I have a ton of easy 1-click LUTs that can easily achieve the final look I want, so adding tons of other effects like Bloom and even more Color Correction than what the LUT already achieved on top of all that other stuff results in a very gaudy-looking final result, as I have come to realize when looking at my last few submissions here. See you in 3-12 months!

Working on a new animation on the ol’ iPad.

I’ve noticed on Newgrounds that I see a lot of fanart of franchises that I absolutely adored as a kid (and now), but are not super relevant to the younger generations, such as Klonoa or Um Jammer Lammy. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that there is still a “safe space” of sorts on the Internet for people that are ancient by TikTok/Twitter standards, but how am I supposed to understand the FLOSSing and the drips and the “red is sus” and the Cancel Culture if I spend most of my time on this surprisingly pleasant site?

I know I’ve said that I would use YouTube a lot less, but I did upload my latest video, Pupper de Poppers, in an attempt to see if it’s still worth the trouble uploading to that site (as opposed to my occasional gameplay videos and low-effort memes that seem to get thousands more views there). It did not—even on my Ko-fi, which I am still gradually building my audience on, I’ve gotten a handful more views on Puppers (in GIF form) than on my 10-year-old YouTube channel. Of course, not only is Newgrounds more animator-friendly, I’m more likely to get feedback (constructive or otherwise) that will help me do better next time.

Therefore, I will narrow down my list of social media sites to consistently upload to include Newgrounds, Ko-fi, and Twitter (as much as I hate Twitter, people seem to appreciate my stuff that actually takes time and effort to publish there). I’ll just use YouTube strictly for fun and occasionally upload videos of obscure games I like or something, but otherwise it doesn’t seem worth it to dedicate any significant amount of time to it that would be better spent on improving my animations.

Popping up tomorrow!

Still chipping away at that 3D character I’m working on for my portfolio. Patience, young Padawan.

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.