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.