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.