I just turned 24. Which is cool, considering that's my lucky number :)

By god, I'm getting old...

Original image by Bryan Lee o'Malley

So yeah, I'm making another list of gems overhere. Also, here's something I've been working on this week:

I wanted my 100th news post to be somewhat special, but meh. Screw it. Instead I'm just going to leave this song overhere. Initially, this was an experiment I did a little over 1 year ago. Please forgive me for raping Muse.

Also, congrats to Cyberdevil for being an official Newgrounds veteran! I never knew it to be possible to find the old Newgrounds profiles with the WayBackMachine, and had given up on it. Thanks to him, I gave it another go and found my old profiles. Better yet, I found the old flashes I had Wade delete for me!

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First of all, a happy new year everyone! I hope 2013 has been a great year for all of you, and I wish the best in this upcoming year. Last year was a great year for me here on this website, and it very much inspired me to get more involved. So yeah, that is one of my resolutions.

One of the things I've been doing lately, is spend more time in the flash portal. Initially, I just wanted to change my level icon, but I soon came to realize I've been missing out on lots of cool gems. I haven't found a lot of them just yet, but there's a couple of animations that got my attention, for whatever reason that may be.

Whatever you're doing, I hope you're having a wonderful time!

Have some Lindsey Stirling.

[NEW IN 2013]

It was still January when Newgrounds released Swivel and changed the lives of every animator on this website. Around the same time I visited Writersblock's page and found out he published a book! He said he'd love it if someone were to make a booktrailer, and so I took the bait. I never had a flash of mine featured on frontpage before in the 9 years of membership, so it was a pretty special moment for me when the finished product did just that. Shane's book very much inspired me to get back to writing myself, so I started fleshing out the concept I had for the comic I wanted to make. This was also the year I pretty much got the hang of actionscript 2.0, and created a whole bunch of experimental little projects. I still have a long way to do, but yeah. Somewhere in October - the 21st to be exact - I hit a 10 year milestone here on NG, and celebrated this occasion with a series of newsposts. Tom made mention of it in a newspost.

 

Also, here's a fun fact: Newgrounds released a rich-text editor for blogposts today.

[FLASH & COLLABORATIONS]

Towards the end of 2012 I got restless, as I had not been sufficiently productive for quite some time. While lurking Newgrounds, I found out about Writersblock's book. I bought it, read it, designed some characters, sketched some of the cool scenes from the book and then put all of that together. We set a deadline for the first of June and I missed it by 2 weeks. It took another 2 weeks to get the voice acting done. A month overdue, but it reached frontpage, and hopefully made a lot of sales! I took a break after that, but started messing around with a Halloween-themed game concept during October. It didn't really go anywhere. Actually, I had been messing around with actionscript for the span of the entire year. Some of my favorite experiments included a  bullethell thingy which I made from being inspired by do-don-pachi, and an audio knob (5.7 MB), much like the ones from fruityloops or whatever other digital audio workstation.

[AUDIO]

In the previous years I had been very private about my creations and it really started to eat me. I decided to drop a few tracks on here, and gradually started to realize that I didn't want my songs to be hidden any longer. The album I've been working on will remain private for now (I should really finish it sometime), but I promised myself to upload other stuff more frequently.

[OTHER YEARS]

• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• 2006
• 2007
• 2008
• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012
• > 2013

[NEW IN 2012]
Newgrounds kicked off the year with a fresh redesign. While the new look was nothing short of amazing, it took some getting used to. The new audio visualizers however, I immediately fell in love with! Then, a few months after the redesign was launched, everyone's favorite cat Sherbert passed away. A sad day in the history of this website. In real life, I moved out and didn't have internet for a while. That's when I opened flash and decided to mess around with actionscript 2.0. Since I'm used to javascript, I picked it up pretty quickly. I'm still not great at using it, but I did improve a lot since then! Apart from another attempt at making art for the NG calendar, I didn't do very much this year. I was however a bit restless and wanted to make stuff! I watched Scott Pilgrim The Movie during summer, and read the inspiring comics towards September. A couple of weeks later I was struck with a great concept for a story, and decided I should be making it into a comic. What followed was a lot of brainstorming.

[AUDIO]
I was meaning to create a serious album this year. I got pretty far in the making, but haven't finished it. The album title was going to be "What The Hell Was I Thinking", and would be entirely inspired by my delusions in 2006 (which partially thrived on the belief that the world would end in 2012). I was chasing after the feel of this song, and I must say I got very close to recreating the atmosphere of those days. I should really go and finish the rest of the album sometime.

[OTHER YEARS]
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
> 2012
2013

[NEW IN 2011]
This year was much less eventful than the year before. Looking back now, I don't think the circumstances were very motivating for me to work on anything. A mix of all sorts of things created a distance between me and my beloved Newgrounds. But worth noting is that I met Wallpaperman in Amsterdam a second time. He visited around the time those riots broke out. I took a notepad with me so that we could work out some ideas for a New Pot Jam, but we didn't actually do much when he got back home. As we sat in a coffeeshop, I drew a picture. Later on I scanned it and then traced it in flash. Initially it was meant to go into Pot Jam 3, but since that never happened it became my userpage image when the redesign was launched in 2012. Anyway, towards the end of 2011, Luis PM'd me that he would maybe come to Holland. Too bad this never actually happened. I also designed and printed a couple of T-Shirts for personal use. I might do more of that in the future.

[FLASH & COLLABORATIONS]
As I said before, I didn't do a whole lot. I wanted to give Pico day a shot, but never got very far. And I tried to get some friends in real life to make flash or games with me, but those attempts sort of failed as well. The same could be said for a project me and Wallpaperman were working on. In this project we were supposed to share the screen. Thinking back now, I should have tried finding some new partners over at the flash forums. That, or sign in on MSN to see if my old buddies were still around. Or, you know... Send a PM through Newgrounds?

[AUDIO]
I made Slow & Hungry as a submission to the NAC'11 Zombie Apocalypse competition, and apparently missed the announcements when I placed 4th. Pretty silly. The loop I made after that was a quick experimental thing I did for a Halloween contest, because I was too late to make anything decent. A lot of my work this year had much potential, but I never finished any of it. Even if I had, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have uploaded any of it to Newgrounds. I now realize that Newgrounds always was my reason to keep creating music; I had an audience. Ever since I stopped doing that, I lost my will to finish anything. I learned my lesson here.

[OTHER YEARS]
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
> 2011
2012
2013

[NEW IN 2010]
This year wasn't very memorable for some reason, even though I had plenty of projects on my hands! I joined an official Newgrounds Ringtone Contest and placed 10th in the competition. I still have a recording of the announcement on Radiogrounds. The next contest was the FL Core contest, and I placed 3rd that time! The prize I received was a frontpage feature, which was the first time I ever got featured with a solo submission! I also helped out Godlimations by creating music for his game Yarrr TD. I don't remember why or how, but I gradually lost contact with my Australian buddies Lochie and Writersblock over the course of this year. One of the fun things I decided to try was the 31 Days Of Horror Challenge, which became a yearly thing for me. Also around this time, it was possible to buy "Mystery boxes" from the NG office. This made for some pretty interesting threads on the BBS. Worth noting is that life in the real world got a lot more interesting for me at this point, so I spent significantly less time on Newgrounds than I used to.

[FLASH & COLLABORATIONS]
Initially meant as a collaboration, I finished Potjam 2 all by myself. After I was done with that, I was hoping to create something for Robot day, but screwed myself over by making it into a way too big project about a hacker and his 2 droids in the steampunk age. Seeing as I made an entire mix of Newgrounds songs, and aspired to draw all backgrounds in photoshop, it should come as no surprise that I got nowhere close to the deadline. And since no one was there to collaborate with me, I started to feel a bit lonely. This was pretty demotivating, so my productivity decreased. I don't remember working on any other projects apart from this little thing.

[AUDIO]
In terms of audio, this was one of my proudest years. Everything I made pretty much sucked, apart from those few contest entries. Since I felt like those were my only serious submissions to begin with, I suddenly grew pretty confident with my musical skills, and became convinced that I could pretty much create anything I wanted to. As a result, I felt like it was a waste to distribute my music for free. Looking back, I don't think that was a very progressive way to think.

[OTHER YEARS]
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
> 2010
2011
2012
2013

[NEW IN 2009]
It all start when Writersblock invited me to join January's Monthly Writing Competition. The objective was to write a Newgrounds Fan Fiction of your choice. I chose to write a prequal to Los Días Sin Días and surprisingly got second place! In February there was another contest, so I gave that a shot too. I didn't end up doing so well. Then in March, Luis organized an Amsterdam meetup. Something went wrong during the first day, and I ended up strolling around the meetup spot. Catoblepas and his friend were practically doing the same thing, so we hung around for a short while and split up after that. The next day everything went well, and I wrote an entry about it. Not too long after that, I decided to join the NG Sketchbook Tour. I would have gotten the shirt too, if it wasn't for creditcard payments. The same could be said for the 2010 Calendar. I joined a bunch of artists to create art for it, but they didn't pick my work in the end. Oh well. At the start of summer, Tom introduced "Power Of Three" to the community, so I teamed up with Lochie and Writersblock. Unfortunately, my mother died along the way. Eventually I got stuck doing all the thinking for our PO3 project, and we didn't make the deadline. I sort of forgot about it after a while. Too bad, it was looking pretty promising! Lochie and me created a few minigames though. At the end of the year I got very much involved with the Newgrounds treasurehunt. I recommended and reviewed many many movies, which was really fun! Also, Tom gave away free Wacom Tablets to the most promising artists on the site. Lochie was one of them. As for me, I received some free Newgrounds merchandise for recommending Fucking Kids as a Halloween gem.

[FLASH & COLLABORATIONS]
Lochie and me worked on a lot of projects this year, but most of them were never finished. He especially liked to use my audio, and sometimes requested songs. This is how I made 8-Banquet and both Cosmonaut songs. We had a pretty amazing game in the making. One of the earliest solo projects I was working on this year was a valentinesday flash; another one of those projects I should have finished, but didn't. Also, I thought nobody had any shockwave files from my Back To The Front project, and I had lost them forever, but someone still had them after all! They sent it to me, and I imediately finished the project as quick as I could. Better late than never, I guess! Somewhere in August I did another "lovey dovey" animation, and in October I finally decided to quit the NG Levels Collab to submit the animation by myself. After that, I did an attempt at a Christmas flash but never got far.

[AUDIO]
In contrast to last year, I finished a couple of my songs this year. I still did a lot of loops though, and a lot of them were made for people. Lochie Loop was a present for Lochie, B-Day Beat was for a friend's birthday, and Violet Flower Headbands was dedicated to my dead mother. Never Coming down again, 8-Banquet, Running Game and The Cosmonaut were all requested for flash projects. Fun Fact: Violet Flower Headbands was submitted on my mother's birthday, which is Christmas.

[OTHER YEARS]
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
> 2009
2010
2011
2012
2013