My last post was like 6 months ago, right after the Anniversary Collab was launched. Time surely flies... I was going to post some gems I found but the submit button kept bugging out on me. Honestly, I didn't want to write about anything elaborate but I was getting a bit sick of looking at the old thing. This post just kind of happened lol.

Yeah, so admittedly it is weird how as a creator you can feel incredibly detached from your work. Many of my big inspirers seem to have doubts about their projects before releasing their creations into the world for everyone to see - I usually feel that way myself. While I was passionate about this thing, it's been rather stressful too. Most importantly though, I'm glad to see the Anniversary Collab touched the hearts of so many fellow Newgrounders. I never imagined making it into the top of all time someday.

As for my personal life, I moved into a new place since January, where I now live with a good friend of mine. It's a bigger place and the rent is overall cheaper, which is good. Moving went paired with a bunch of drama which I won't get into. It took some getting used to the fact that things are further away from me now. Also, a lot of rooms still need to be painted, a lot of the electric sockets are apparently way outdated and possibly unsafe. So far the association we rent from hasn't been too helpful so I fear it's going to cost me. And there's a bunch of other things that need to be removed/made that should or shouldn't be there. Some rooms don't even have lighting as it is. Things are moving rather slow but the bare necesities are all there.

While I've learned a bit about electricity, I feel like my knowledge is still rather limited. Many of the sockets on the top floor of the house don't even have a ground. Seeing as I'm using a lot of electrical extensions to get my studio up and running, this thought is kind of scary. There's a desktop and a lot of expensive musical equipment as well. If something were to go wrong is it all going to be toast? I wonder if the output channels on my mixer broke because of this. As a work-around I have to run audio from the auxiliary tracks now... For fear that anything else may give out I haven't been on my desktop in a while, and creating stuff from my laptop is a bit of a drag.

But there's been good things too. Apart from Newgrounds, I've discoved more of Twitch during February and noticed how great and inspiring the "Creative" community is. I feel like Newgrounds is missing part of the action. While I'm not sure where I'm going with this, I feel that NG could utilize this medium. Grey areas such as speedpaintings, tutorials and camera/animation crossovers are already here on newgrounds. But what if we made it an option to watch these streams on Newgrounds? A lot of streamers already advertise themselves going live from the news post section, but it's easy to miss that. Maybe there should be a list of approved Newgrounds "Creative" streamers or something? A Newgrounds hashtag on Twitch might be a good idea too. It would also be cool to see picoday being livestreamed on the frontpage in a pod at the top of frontpage this year. Speaking of Picoday, I'd really like to attend again but I'm not going to be there this year... The past months have been rather expensive on me ):

I am suddenly reminded that I've been doing a lot of writing these past couple of months. There's a couple of big news posts I've been meaning to post, but each of them consists of several entries. One of them discusses the process of creating a "super-collab", but I'm not so sure if anyone's interested so I might not even finish that. The other one is a self-reflecting entry on how I got into making music. I finished 4 out of 5 of those so far, but they're on my desktop. Go figure... The main reason I wanted to write about my music is because I've been stuck in a rut for years. I did the same thing for animation 2 years ago, which ultimately led me to create the Anniversary Project. For the past few years, I didn't even dare calling myself a musician. I finally got sick of this in October last year, when I attended a small gig fest. I realized I still wanted to be a musician and suddenly wanted to play electric guitar right there and then. Seeing as I still felt that way in March, I decided to get on with it. I've been self-teaching and practicing my Les Paul every day for about a month now.

Once I get this whole home-situation figured out, I'm hoping to get back into action. I'm excited to try out 2.5d animation, but I barely have any experience sculpting 3d elements. I downloaded Blender before moving, though I'm not too sure if I like it. I also feel like Toonboom is the best answer in terms of 2.5d animation, but I have yet to learn the ins and outs. I also have this great experimental idea in mind and would really like to bring it to the audio forums, but this'll have to wait. Earlier this year I predicted this was going to be a year of consistancy and exploration. I guess I was right about that. I should remember to have fun sometime.

P.S. I shall try to see if I can post gems again sometime.