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!