Got very busy networking and collabing with filmmakers out in my area. For live-action stuff, so nothing I can post here, rip. Anyways, be back in a few.

Well results are out! Happy for all the winners, and very happy that I managed to privately guess which one would take first place since I replayed it over and over for about 20 minutes straight.

Honestly, despite not getting even an honorable mention, this jam was so fun and so challenging. I'm just glad it's over and that I can dedicate my workaholism towards other stuff. At least for now.

Really hoping I make it into the collab at least so that I can drink up some more of that sweet sweet Newgrounds clout, but even if I don't, I just feel quite relieved right now. Like finally getting off a treadmill after hours of running.

I hope that after dealing with the Big Hoss himself for two weeks straight, anything, anything at all, will feel easier to animate in comparison, including getting my ideas out there. And at that point, that's all I can really ask for, since I'd just want to do the same thing and grind away at my ideas even if I was the richest guy on Earth.

So yeah. Hope it's all up from here in terms of my animation skillset and that I can bring interesting ideas and moofies to y'all soon. And if anyone's actually reading this, thanks for hanging out, I hope your day's going well.

Updated as of 9/7/2022

---- Projects ----

Neon Boy, obviously. Collab with Friend + CSU students

Building Newgrounds rep through animations and artwork (BigBoyRumbleTumble anim. jam)

Untitled ELWire cyberpunk short film / tiktok series. Collab with CSU student.

Good Days vs Bad Days and misc. cinematic tiktoks. Collab with Friend from OnlyDreamsTV.

MLE music videos for "Stress Relief" and "Why U Callin'?"

AFPA animated short film projects. Collab with AFPA, obviously. (Ghosted, A Trip To The Earth)

Formerly Untitled Firepath main story plot outline. Will have to circle back to this soon.

---- Gamer ----

Modded Skyrim, obviously.

Currently Overcooked 2. Collab with gamer clan peeps.

Modded Cyberpunk 2077

Deus Ex

Night of the Full Moon

Newgrounds stuff like Dynacore

Formerly XCOM 2 WOTC or LWOTC.

Formerly Valorant. Collab with BGN.

---- Social Media ----

Formerly YouTube. Will have to reboot this soon.

Currently Newgrounds, especially BBS forums.

Currently Discord with both gamer clan and OnlyDreamsTV, and a lil' bit of Neon Boy official project discord

Formerly Facebook for job searching purposes of finding PA gigs.

And uh... a lot of adult material. Especially modded Skyrim and other games.

I might have a problem. Or two. Who says being a workaholic stops you from being a degenerate adult media addict?

So here's the story idea: Short animation (or film) in the near-future.

-------

A guy, either a middle-aged or old man, stands beneath an orange streetlamp. He yoinks out cigarettes from his pack and chain smokes. A younger guy approaches him, like he's a celebrity. Turns out he sort of is one, because he's the last smoker alive on the Smoker Registry (kinda like the Sex Offender registry), where you have to sign up to legally buy smokes and essentially get publicly shamed for it all over the news and such (think of that Children of Men movie where the youngest person alive is an actively tracked celebrity in society).

The old man is surprised, then chuckles, realizing he's the last of his kind. He pulls out his last cigarette from the pack and lights it. The younger guy asks if he can try smoking, as he's always wanted to try it. The older guy is surprised, and almost obliges, but stops himself mid-sentence and stares at the kid.

He has a flashback of how he started smoking: He was once a younger guy just like the one in front of him, who got curious and then addicted through multiple strangers indulging his curiosity.

The old man stops. He turns away and stares coolly into the night sky, as the cigarette's orange glow starts fizzling out. He finally answers with "Nah" before the flame of the cigarette, against the night sky's starry background, blows out and fades to black. The end.

--------

(Thus, he has broken the cycle that roped himself into becoming a nicotine addict and left the next generation with at least one less smoker in the world.)

---------

Usually I write these inspired ideas down onto a Google Doc, but since this one is particularly inspired by Newgrounds, I'll just write it here to help make clear which ideas were inspired by NG and which were inspired by outside life.

Got inspired by this political BBS topic about smoking and I came up with some ideas on how to phase out cigarettes by treating it like technology rather than like a drug. If you make a superior technology, the outdated stuff is phased out by most of society. This is true of the refrigerator replacing the icebox, of the newest iPhones replacing the older ones, and even of cigarettes with filters replacing non-filtered cigarettes.

Who knows if I'll ever have enough time to animate it. But it'd be fairly simple with barely any big movements or action, unless I fill it with way too many subtle quirks. At least it'll be here in written form for now until then.

Just got my first fan as of today, that's freakin' ebic. Big shoutout to @FlankoTanko, love you brah.

What a cool birthday gift!

Well, today was cool. An anonymous someone surprised me with a month's worth of Supporter as a birthday present. Even more reasons I have to thank Newgrounds for being such a cool platform.

Still undecided on what to eat for dinner, as the parents are working today and won't be back until the evening presumably.

Posting on the forums is starting to get easier and easier after I created my first topic a few days ago. I think it'd be nice to stick around Newgrounds as a community for a while longer, but it seems to hardly be a permanent solution to the human condition, from what others have mentioned regarding older members that left over the years.

Current anxiety about my unemployment is increasing. Slowly, but still increasing, progressing from 0 - 5% range into 5 - 10%. Having conducted a little more research on Patreon campaigns launched by Newgrounds and other internet artists or animators at large, they seem to perform much worse compared to artists that prioritized YouTube or live-action performers overall. Hard not to be demoralized when my artistic superiors, the innovators of Flash and Newgrounds alike, are undervalued compared to campaigns like Lindsay Ellis who has quit YouTube entirely nearly 8 months ago and still makes $10,000 a month, with text updates to the campaign only coming out every 2 or 3 months on average. And with plenty of pity donors staying on due to her baby's recent birth.

Newgrounds has proven to be a closer community than I expected. It's also smaller than I expected, despite the exodus from Tumblr and Flash's death. So it seems my plan for world domination and becoming a niche internet celebrity won't be featuring Newgrounds at its core until the platform expands.

I'll need to make more progress on Neon Boy before soliciting collaboration help from NG forums / collabinator. A completed Animatic v2 should suffice as a show of competence, alongside the extensive documentation. But with the recent posts on the forum, perhaps it wouldn't be too unwise to try and build up some good will with the regulars or to post some non-Neon Boy content every once in a while. It doesn't seem like comics or scripts garner that much attention though, so the best strategy may be to simply animate the side projects myself (KD-Chan, Inkers, Z-Maps, etc.) myself. Not going to be easy, but what ever is in this line of work?

• Newgrounds = seems viable to pull at least a few collaborators after Animatic v2 is complete.
• R/animation = implausible, but not impossible to pull some free labor after Animatic v2 is complete. They seem more wary and less beginner-friendly regarding their "shows of competence" than NG.
• Unofficial NG discords = wild cards that will probably work in our favor
• Animators from Youtuber discords / other public discords = craigslist-level wild card.
• Craigslist = well..
• Real life CSU animation club / related discords = unlikely, even with animatic v2. Busybody students are grinding for grades already, much less for personal projects. But we'll see.

Beyond that, I've got no idea where to look for animators / artists. I'll probably discover some amazing new platform 3 months after Neon Boy is finally published, knowing my luck.

That'll do for this b-day post. I should do this every year, considering I'm too old for presents now and too distant from the VSA gang as a non-raver to get any surprise parties thrown on my behalf. We'll see.

We'll see.

My first post on Newgrounds. I would have never bet that Newgrounds would be the last bastion for all things free, indie, and most importantly, Flash-based, but here I am.

I'll introduce myself to the void here, I guess. Hi, I'm MysteryIDK. Since 11 years old, I wanted to be a YouTuber, trying to make Minecraft Let's Plays (ahead of the curve, I know). Then my dad swiftly stomped on those dreams and said I'm not allowed to live on the Internet. It only took 9 years and a viral pandemic for my dad to realize the joke was on him.

However, those dreams of being a true indie creator and of me making a living off of people's pity / faith in my projects will never die, since I'm a TRUE DOOM MURDERHEAD.

Here's a list of everything I have or have currently done with my life:

• Graduated high school AND college (shocker!), B.A. in film: specialty of production management (producer's school for any director's school flunk-outs)
• Got a YouTube channel to 100 subscribers, then got it banned by Pokimane after a tweet to her about her abusing the copyright strike system to censor criticism
• Made a second YouTube channel which is my current one. Posted nothing of value on there as of yet.
• Wrote and directed a 2.5 hour long theatre play (spring 2019) for my school's VSA club. Never got the credit for it because of club politics and drama crediting the useless director instead, who also played the main actress.
• Made a vanity project / short film (summer 2019) called "Captain Vietnam" to prove I was better than the useless "director" who conceptualized the theatre play as her own vanity project. (Premise was that 4 ex-lovers come back into main character's life at the same time. Guess how many ex-lovers she had.)
• Started working on Neon Boy, my current project (summer 2019), originally conceptualized by the brain of my high school friend after one too many deaths in Hotline Miami.
• Took a few one-time gigs on film sets or live events. Got to meet David Hayter, Rob Heaps, Kanye West, and Casey Neistat on the job.
• Nabbed a few part-time jobs, worked long enough to qualify for unemployment and get $10,000 from the government in back-pay.
• Squandered that $10,000 on meme stocks and Dogecoin in foolish hopes of becoming a millionaire and changing my family's life. (Haven't sold yet, though, so maybe...?)
• Finally finished a rough animatic of Neon Boy in summer of 2021, since I couldn't (still can't) animate at the time, so my high school friend was doing all the drawing.
• Slapped together a decent pitch with concept art, slides with cyberpunk graphic design by me, and the animatic to present to alma mater's animation club. That pitch went to waste after animation club's president said I can go kick rocks due to time constraints of the club's weekly in-person meeting formats.
• Finally recruited a small team of students willing to help with Neon Boy's pre-production (spring 2022) after hanging around animation club a little longer and posting physical flyers on campus. (Yes, we skipped the fundamentals to rush the animatic to completion, in hopes that the animatic would help recruitment.)

So what am I up to now? Well, I'm happily unemployed and unmarried, and I don't ever plan on moving out of my parent's house since my 93-year old grandma lives with us, and my mom's getting older too. So there doesn't seem to be a rush for me to land a full-time salary yet. (Not that I feel any less guilty about it.) It helps that my brother's becoming a physical therapist, so he can be the doctor of the family.

My unemployment is quite busy somehow. None of it is paying me anything, mind you.

• Working on Neon Boy in all departments, trying to set all the team members up for success by drafting production documents like shotlists, style guides, calendars / timelines, etc..
• Working on animation club's storyboards and backgrounds and driving back to school every Friday.
• Writing a plot outline for a huge series I've had in my head and kissed my pillow for, in whatever free time I can get. (it's not much, somehow.)
• Written a first draft script for Episode 1 of a project called InterDoorMensional that I discovered in Discord. It's not ground-breaking. (premise: 3 male teens somehow get the superpowers of Ben 10, The Mask, and Sans from Undertale, and they have to juggle schoolwork with saving dimensions from a big bad President Business ripoff from The Lego Movie.) Still, I need to poach animators from wherever I can.
• Hopefully getting gas money by making music videos for my chiropractor, though she has a severe case of cold feet despite approaching me initially and asking for help.

Thanks for reading this far, whoever you are. I hope I can finish making cool stuff to show off to you epic gamers and animators before my parents eventually kick me out.