I have no more "confessions" to add to the ones that've been stated already. The only thing I can think of is..."Brawl Funnies"? Do it. Do it a thousand times. Oh dear god PLEASE do it, I'll watch it forever until the end of time. I've seen a few segments done for it already and that shit's hysterical.

On the same subject though, I think I should put this out there: Brawl Taunts isn't, nor was it ever, MY project. All three of them were wrote and conceptualized by Rina-chan and in fact, the first one was intended to be a Machinima, a "cameraman" for which was never located. I auditioned for voices at her request, then later down the line offered to just animate the thing in a few days as a commission. Three days people, seriously. I was payed for doing both it, and the sequel that came soonafter which I animated in a week. I never considered them a "collaborative effort" because it was never my idea in the first place. If anything, money aside, it was more a favor for a friend than anything else since she wanted it to be finished in some form that wasn't simply a radioplay. Therefore, if you have any "complaints" about the creation of them, or the one that's in development, talk to her about it. She's mentioned outright that she would rather deal with those who didn't like the movies as opposed to myself responding to each and every negative comment.

...and going off of THAT, the only reason a 3rd one is going to exist in the first place is because I don't wanna do it for reasons that should be blatantly obvious by this point. Yes, I'm doing the introduction, but the actual content involving a bunch of Smash Bros. characters spouting "jokes" at every turn is up to Rina-chan's writing and the animation of whoever else feels like joining on board. Fact is, I have no right to tell her what she can and cannot make and put out to Newgrounds just because I don't wanna animate something else for her. So by this point, it's completely out of my hands. I'm not the one to go to for this anymore, sorry.
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Parody Rangers: THE MOVIE will continue as it's supposed to be. There was some confusion over the past week, but as far as I know it's going to remain how it was first made. I think I may trim some stuff anyhow for the sake of eliminating crap that I...simply don't find funny anymore, which is actually quite a bit, but we'll see how that goes.

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$00pah NiN10Doh! is what I'm the most excited about right now. Screw the fact that it's a video game parody collection, I love the animation that everyone's done so far. David, Pierre, Mike and Joey are only a few of the team who finished, but everybody is working hard and I think it'll impress even some of the naysayers. I'm nowhere NEAR as good as a few of the animators that're involved with this project, I'm not afraid to admit that. Just the fact that I'm able to work with them on something so fun is enough for me and I hope I'll be anywhere close to being as experienced as them by the end of my second school year. For those've you who've been waiting patiently, here's a couple screencaps for ya. Thanks for waiting so long!

Okay, THIS was pretty badass. So this week the teacher for my main Animation Class was out on a cross-country trip of some kind, so we had a substitute who ended up being a guest! Ian J. Quartey, of Venture Bros. & nockFORCE fame instructed us for a few hours during figure drawing and gave us a quick lecture for the final hour of the class while showing us some classic NY-based toons. I talked shop with him and a few classmates and it was awesome. He had actually seen my Scott Pilgrim flash ad I made a few months ago too which was pretty neat. The figure drawing sessions were challenging, but fresh. Got lotsa pointers to keep in mind for my artwork in the future as well. SUPERFINE.

First and foremost, since Kira's not currently able to make front page posts, I think it's more than necassary for me to plug this. There's been a huge fan outcry for there to be a third installment of Brawl Taunts...and now it's reached a point where literally only YOU can make it happen! I originally had "Even More Brawl Taunts" planned as an April Fools joke for MUCH later down the line, but I'll be carrying over some of that idea for the opening segment of B.T.3, which will involve the Kirbopher & Rina-chan characters from the beginning and end of B.T.2 as you may remember. After that, is where you fine folks come in! Check out her blog entry for all of the details and be part of her biggest project yet!
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As for myself, as you guys might've been able to tell, I managed to (thank god) get the final two scenes of -Part 1- of the Rangers Movie combined together. Both were about 2 and a half minutes long, which I would've hated with a burning passion to upload seperately, especially since people were pissed enough (as was I) to the fact that the second piece was only 3 and a half minutes. Thankfully my school computer allowed me to get those last two together, which means 1-3 completes the 14 minutes of animation that make up -Part 1-.

That's all the work on the Movie I've done so far. I've basically decided to continue what I was doing in the first place: continuing to finish the Movie until the end of the script I had set in place for me. When it gets down to it, I have no room to complain about something that, despite my feelings NOW, is something I enjoy doing and will get me some incredibly decent funding up until I complete the entire thing. I'll be taking a break for the time being to see if I can finish up MY last bits of work on $00pah NiN10Doh! and hopefully get everyone else's stuff by Halloween, again, without overlapping the Halloween contest that I know a lot of people are working their asses off on to make some great stuff.

I've realized while going through the script, that all of what I had planned for -Part 2- is MUCH bigger than I had originally planned...to the point where I may end up splitting THAT up into two parts, making what I considered to be Part 3 into Part 4. Uneccasarily confusing, I know. However, my original deal was that it would be three parts and a set amount of sponsorship money for each, so I'd have to work that out with Tom to determine what exactly will be done. At the same time, if it weren't blatantly obvious already...despite working my (and more specifically several tech-savvy friends of mine) ass(es) off to try and fix the problem, I seriously need to try and find a way to combine all of the scenes together before I start on the animation process of -Part 2-. I'm not aqquainted with Johnny OR Stamper, but perhaps I can get in contact with one of them and possibly learn whatever magical spell that was used to compile the MGS collabs, if it's theoretically something I didn't know or already try during the month of attempting to solve that issue.

IF however, nothing can be done about combining all of the scenes together, then I'm going to leave it up to the fans to determine how the "episodes" will be submitted. It usually takes me about a month to finish the animation for a scene (a maximum of two that usually make up an "episode" IF I can manage to squeeze them together through whatever means). As with before, this would more be completely up to Tom if it'd be appropriate or not, but what I mean is if people would prefer to me to continue what I had no other choice in doing, which was submitting the pieces once a week for X-amount of weeks that would equate to the scenes...OR, if people would rather not wait and have me submit an "episode" as soon as I make one deemably long enough. Despite the annoying length, a vast majority of movies submitted to NG in the first place usually only DO run about 3-5 minutes or so...so it's not like this is unheard of or anything, it's just inconveniant.

So if it comes to that, let me know here what you'd prefer: To wait and submit each for a few weeks like I did with the three episodes of -Part 1- or to simply put out the -Part 2- episodes as I complete them (WHEN I get to animating them, which will probably start in November). Obviously I'd LIKE to submit full Parts that run a much longer time limit, but this is only a backup. Also, I may be able to submit all of -Part 1- combined to places like YouTube with plenty of links and directions back to NG, so keep an eye out for that...but please don't put 1-1, 1-2 or 1-3 up on YouTube or anything seperately, no offense.

Also, I'll be putting some other little behind-the-scenes stuffage on the production blog not long from now, so be sure to check that as well. I'll try to have some screenshots from a few $00pah NiN10Doh! segments in the near future, as well. Thanks for stickin' with me for now.

First off, few things to point out:

-Give a listen to Kira's Documentary on Newgrounds. It's a good listen during worktime and has some rather interesting stuff. Her editing actually prevented me from sounding like a COMPLETE moron during my segments, but nothing that detracts from it overall. It runs for a good hour, but it's pretty neat and worth hearing.

-Similar note, go play Swain's game. He put a ridiculous amount of time into it and you'll be addicted in minutes. Go.

-Buy Kirby Super Star: Ultra for the DS. Holy fucking shit I love this game even more than I did 10+ years ago. Meta Knight's GALAXYWIDE KILLING SPREE Mode is the most ridiculously fun thing you'll ever play in a Kirby game.

-Sailor Moon Abridged is funny as hell, go watch it.
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Now for more relavent matters.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, it was NOT my decision to put more than one part of the Parody Rangers Movie on the front page at the same time. I was assuming they would simply be replaced one after the other a la Edible Castle. I don't know, nor am I hoping for, ALL four of the "episodes" I had to split Part 1 into to be on the front page at the same time, so I'm holding out for only two being up at once. What disappointed me further during my solid month of trying everything to get the scenes combined, I couldn't even get it down to just TWO halves and have those on the front page like Max's cartoon not long ago. Sadly I couldn't even get THAT to work. Ugh.

Submission of the content itself aside...the fun is gone. Ask me a year ago when I was excited about just simply how FUN it was gonna be to work on this massive thing...let alone the sponsorship; hell, that wasn't even part of the picture by that point. I didn't think money was gonna be a gigantic issue for me at the time, I just wanted to make this ridiculous feature-length movie, getting every stereotypical internet-scum joke outta my system in this final NG-audience cartoon, work on my animation skill and just have a good laugh with my friends about it. After several things happening, with the incredibly (predictably) bad feedback I've gotten on the parts released so far being only the LATEST thing, all of the fun I thought I was gonna get out of doing this has been sucked out. I'm sure there's a few out there that're taking sweet, sadistic pleasure in the fact that I'm stuck in this rut.

When it gets right down to it, I flat out DON'T want to do this thing anymore. I wanna move on to bigger and better things already. The problem is that, and hell even people tons more respectable in this place have told me this, I'd be fucking CRAZY to pass up sponsorship money, regardless of what the content I'm producing is. The fact of the matter is still that I -need- that kind of funding I've been offered for this now-considered "crap" project. Part 1's ending, similiar to the last episode I did of TTA, could almost be considered an "ending" if it were left by itself and I had just given up...but hey, look! I'm in a lose-lose situation again! I'm gonna get people saying "good, stop working on the movie. It's a piece of shit and I don't wanna see it crowing the front page anymore, asswipe" AND I'm gonna get people saying "What, you're gonna quit? AGAIN? When there's money involved this time? God, you're such a pussy."

What's even worse that I really have like, virtually NO room or justification to even be complaining about this in the first place. When it gets down to it, I reaped what I had sewn for the last two years when I started this in the first place. Long story short, I'm really conflicted on what to do next. All of Part 1 will still be released and put out by the end of the month and $00pah NiN10Doh! will still be finished as well. I've gotten suggestions by some people to trash and/or rework the remainder of the gigantic script that would make up the theoretical Parts 2 & 3 of the entire hour long movie, to shorten it and just be done with it sooner. I'm a bit shakey on that route but not completely against doing it. There's a lot of confusion going on for me with this and it's kind of causing a problem...for everyone, let's face it.

I'll probably be sending out a few e-mails to try and find a "resolution" for this. Next week I'll be making a post regarding what I -actually- wanna be doing right now. I think there's a few of my peers around these parts that'll be semi-interesting in hearing about that. Bear with me folks.

Well, might as well start off by apologizing, huh?

We've tried every possible method known to MAN in order to get all scenes of Part 1 combined, with no luck in the end. We did this for about a month after the animation for the first 14 minutes was completed. Unfortunately, my only option is to submit it in pieces.

The way this will work, I'll be submitting four movies, once a week for four weeks. Since the combined, 14 minute Part 1 of Parody Rangers: THE MOVIE was going to be on the front page for about a month, there will be four "episodes" that will replace each other on the front page every week upon submission. So Parody Rangers will be on the front page for a solid month.

I know this'll probably be a giant pain in the ass for a lot of people, but please trust me when I say my friend and I tried EVERYTHING to get this combined into a submittable .swf for Newgrounds. At the very least, we CAN combine these into a movie file submitable for YouTube when all's said and done, so that you can watch several of the scenes in a row with no hassle (hopefully even all 14 minutes in a row as one video) and even later down the line a possible HD download. All of that will be available AFTER all four "episodes" have been submitted to Newgrounds (snd our schools leave us alone so we can work on them).

The point of doing this project for the sake of Newgrounds and helping out the website, so I wanted to make absolutely sure that this would show up here first. Tom's approved this method, so hopefully with that in mind you guys'll bare with me. Each "episode" will be anywhere from 2 to 3 minutes in length, sometimes a little longer, depends on which scene and/or scenes are being submitted. Either case, plenty to keep you occupied for a month, and thankfully this is JUST in time to work out without clashing with the Halloween contest.

Hope you'll enjoy it for what it is and I apologize for the gigantic inconvenience.

So today I went to the Richard Williams event at the Meuseum of Modern Art here in NYC, accompanied by the likes of Mike Luckas, Chris Zito and Mike Ruocco. A few more folks from Newgrounds wanted to make it, but sadly the tickets sold out incredibly fast so I'm not completely sure if they even got in. We were lucky enough to get ours super-early.

So the event was hosted by John Canemaker and went on for a good couple of hours. Essentially, the panel was a smooth switch between the discussions of John and 'Dick' and the questions that were posed to him (none were taken from the audience, though that may have been a good thing in retrospect) and a nice collection of clips from his work. We were shown the opening sequence to Roger Rabbit, the Title Sequence to the original Pink Panther movie as well as "The Charge of the Right Brigade" (the latter of which was REALLY neat), his own original cut of the Thief & the Cobbler trailer, the "Greedy" scene from the Raggedy Ann & Andy movie as well and one short scene from his version of A Christmas Carol.

Near the end, we also saw a few clips from his upcoming DVD version of the Animator's Survival Kit (I FINALLY picked up a copy of the original book for myself), specifically routines regarding lipsynch/dialouge and walk cycles/general fluid movement. I can already it's -very- in depth and comprehensive, so I'm hoping my school will manage to snag a copy. Along with that we were shown the last few bits of his commercial animation, which in this case, were LITERALLY commercials! In comparison to his other work I could tell they were kinda rushed jobs, but even on their own they put tons of animation done today, online or broadcast, to absolute shame.

As many would expect, he's also a very genuine and wise individual. Very humbling, accepting, but doesn't screw around at all, as I could tell from a few of the stories he shared with the audience about his work with various "interesting" producers, as well as other animators that NOW do some of the best stuff out there, or in a few cases, already have. It was incredibly inspiring and I'm more than certain SOMEBODY caught the entire thing on video, so keep your eyes peeled on the yootubb for a recording.

Afterward, my group 'o chums and I mingled around with a few of the people who attended. No luck finding any NG folk but plenty of teachers from my school were around and it was nice to interact with a few of them in that type of setting. We got a couple quick autographs after a 15 minute wait, and I got my sketchbook signed as well as a quick convo with the guy. He was very responsive and encouraging, so that was pretty spiffy.

Tommorrow another event will be going on, albeit not to the same level of extremity as the Richard Williams event, but a roundtable of animators talking about the state of the industry at my school. Hopefully I can see some NG folk there for that one. That's all I got for ya!

OH GOD KIRBOFAG MADE ANOTHER FRONT PAGE POST, WHUDDADICK.

* First off, apparantly much of the TTA fanbase on Newgrounds isn't aware of this, but Season 4 (Ground Zero) was cancelled a while back. For details on as to why, please listen to Episode 54 of "Wha-Chow!" for all of your questions to be answered. I have no plans of continuing the series past Episode 073.

However! Blazing Lycoris on DeviantArt is starting up a TTA: Ground Zero webcomic entitled "Crisis Requiem". It's a sidestory mostly focusing on the character of Ruri and her virus double, Irura, who wreaks havoc on TOME and becomes one of the Guild of Anubis' greatest weapons. I know there are plenty of fans of the series out there who would appreciate this comic and get a kick out of it. The first three pages, along with the cover, which I illustrated, are all up on the official DeviantArt page for it. Check it out and hope those've you who enjoyed the series will enjoy "Crisis Requiem" just as much!

* Next order of business, the Rangers Movie. The Animation for "Part 1" (the first 14 minutes of the entire movie) has been completed since the first weekend of September. The past couple of weeks (and technically earlier than that) have been spent by myself and Marc Levy, my friend and tech support godsend, testing everything imaginable in order to get a submittable .swf of Part 1 to submit to Newgrounds at all.

Related tangent for just a moment, there seems to be this conception by people that I don't know how to actually animate. This assumption makes sense, based on my submitted work alone, but I think it's fair that everyone should be aware: I've worked on the animation of the Rangers Movie since May, for several months up until the beginning of September. Prettymuch the entirety of that 14 minutes is composed of frame by frame traditional animation with hundreds of drawings (fully lipsynched to boot). The movie, obviously isn't exactly original and by many standards won't be "funny" to people, so far into the animation process I've mainly worked on it as an excercise in furthering my skills...it's what I'm majoring in.

On that same note, and back on track, it's sad that I've worked for four months animating, and am continuing to work for hours with my friend in order to submit a movie that I KNOW is not going to be well recieved by the actual community. I know the fanbase that already exists will enjoy it for what it is, and at the very least it will help the hits for Newgrounds so I can be happy I'm assisting the website itself in some capacity. Above all, I literally HAVE to finish and put this out because I'm in dire need of the sponsorship money in order to continue going to college and uh, oh yeah, EAT. My only option may possibly even be splitting each SCENE into a seperate movie to submit, which may result in something Parody Rangers-related being on the front page CONSTANTLY, which will probably get me in even deeper shit with the community than I'm already in.

I'm locked into a rut that I literally can NOT escape from. It's certainly not something I'm enjoying, but it's all I can do at the moment and WILL be doing until most likely the Summer of 2009. I'm not expecting any credit to be given, because I think by this point even if I made a completely original cartoon with completely traditional animation front to back, it wouldn't matter to anyone.

* Last bit to mention, $00pah NiN10Doh! is continuing to be worked on still. A few people have dropped, but the overall project isn't suffering. The animation that's been completed so far looks absolutely amazing, I'm hoping the segments I've animated will measure up even. I'm not gonna be making a giant deal about the collab when that's compiled and finished, but I know a few are curious about who's involved in this installment, so I'll drop a few names:

The likes of Zach Bellissimo (Mario eats the mushroom), Mike Ruocco (Ice Climbers), David Smith (Captain Falcon stuck in traffic), Dorn Matthews (Pokemon board meeting) and Marcello Passement (Toad in the Ghost House) will all be returning. Newcomers to this include the absolutely AWESOME GillPanda and Sprite37, who have turned out some of the best flash animation I've ever seen. Also, I'm really happy to have Cycon and LegendaryFrog on board, as it's amazing in itself to be working with people I looked up to before I even TOUCHED flash.

A few games that will be included for this collab will be Mario Party, Excitebike, Duck Hunt, Earthbound, Bomberman, Game & Watch, Tetris, Donkey Kong Country, Starfox, Warioware, Megaman Battle Network, Fire Emblem, Pikmin, Pac-Man and several others. I tried to extend out than more than just the Smash Bros. roster, hence why there's a few games that aren't entirely Nintendo-exclusive, but had plenty of good material to spoof. Also there'll be a much more comprehensive menu, designed by Richie Zirbes, with a scene select that will have every detail about the segment: including the writing, voice cast, music etc. so that there'll be no confusion like there was with the previous. Also in case I didn't mention, this will probably be the final of any other NiN10Doh! collabs I head up. That's not a 100% guarantee, but realisticly speaking I don't see myself doing any more after this.

[This was originally a post on the Parody Rangers Movie Production Blog but I'm reposting it here for convenience. The Movie's current completion progress is about 80%]

Late into my 11th Grade year in High School, I began thinking of a new concept for a flash movie after realizing pretty far in that my previous series wasn't being very successful. Wanting to do something slightly more advanced than moving sprites around on a battle grid shooting pixelated projectiles at each other, I looked at something that would also be more appealing to Newgrounds, which was where I continued to post my flash movies since I first started in 2004. After listening to some funny clips recorded by Egoraptor, I got inspired and realized that Power Rangers hadn't really been spoofed in cartoon form on Newgrounds. Dragonball Z, Mario and Sonic dominated the parody department for a good long while and I had always been a huge Power Rangers fan as a kid, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Wanting to start basic with the use of "character models" along the style of other graphics within Newgrounds movies, as well as many flash-based cartoons on [Adult Swim], I designed the Rangers before the summer of 2006 began and conceptualized the overall movie. I wrote up the script, casted everybody with some of the best voices I could depend on from the previous project I worked on, along with Egoraptor who was kind enough to join the cast with his intepretation of Zordon & Alpha 5. I designed each of the Rangers with something specific to focus on in the animation, such as Meat's muscle structure, Chan's anime character-like movements, or Pinky's...assets, all of which later came VERY much in handy for when I started to fully animate the characters in the current movie.

Three installments later with a decent amount of success, it was a good ride and meant a lot to me to recieve any sort of recognition on Newgrounds for the first time. However, it hasn't come without its mistakes in the process. My first mistake with the series as a whole was having such a specific set audience in mind from the beginning. With production of an actual cartoon for broadcast for instance, your audience is definitely something to consider, but not in the same way, since this ended up causing a few other issues. My second mistake, going off of that, was the "style" of humor that I ended up depending on. My whole approach at "marketting" Parody Rangers 1 started with promoting Egoraptor doing a large amount of voice acting in it, as well as the use of several jokes from the previously linked clips. Then, to add fuel to the fire, my obsession at the time with various internet memes from a few certain websites didn't quite help.

The three movies continued to be less and less about spoofing Power Rangers and more about jokes along those lines in order to "appease" the niche on Newgrounds that I had drawn in. Since the Feature movie is a direct adaptation of the Power Rangers movie with Ivan Ooze, I think it goes back to the "roots" of the original idea being to poke at Power Rangers, all in good fun, but still with plenty of "those kind" of jokes that some people still enjoy as well. For both sides of that spectrum I think there's more than enough to entertain, very much also in thanks to my amazing voice cast that just make everything a thousand times funnier than what I actually write...because to be honest, I don't look back on any of the 3 installments, or even this current feature and genuinely think I'm ANY sort of expert on comedy. At all.

In either case...and this applies to anything I make and put out for people to see, the point is to entertain. If the audience that exists gets a kick out of it, THAT'S what matters regardless of what my thoughts are. The Feature Movie is essentially an explosion of all things Parody Rangers are known for; this is both a good thing and a bad thing. However, I can simply hope that everyone who watches it will just take it for what it is. Then, once I'm finished with the entire thing I can move on to, what I can also hope will be, bigger and better things. Still, I think it's important for any artist or creator to accept older works as themself being at that stage during that point in time. Even if they weren't necassarily "Good" stages, I feel that way about both TTA and Go! Go! Parody Rangers now, even with the latter still technically going on. It's prettymuch all I can do.

[This was originally a post on the Parody Rangers Movie Production Blog but I'm reposting it here for convenience.]

Aright, so we're at this point, the summer's almost over...time for a reality check.

"$00pah NiN10Doh!" probably won't be out by this month. I'm pushing for everyone on board, including myself, to finish all of their segments, but honestly I don't think it's gonna happen. I was hoping it'd be released by mid-summer, but by the time the convention swung around I knew that wasn't gonna happen, so I aimed for August.

More importantly (I guess?), the Rangers Movie is continuing to be worked on and I'm currently animating Scene 4 (out of 5). This one I DEFINITELY wanted to be out by the end of the Summer, or more likely the very beginning of September. Yet again, honestly, s'probably not gonna happen. I've finished plenty of work for $00pah NiN10Doh!, but the Movie needs to come first since I'm in serious need of money for college.

Now for the big one, in regards to the Parody Rangers Feature Movie as a whole.

I'm not going to bore you all with details, nor do I feel like sharing them here, but long story short: a LOT of stuff has happened since San Diego Comic-Con. Some of that "stuff" has forced me to also take a major reality check on the Parody Rangers "franchise" (I use that term EXTREMELY lightly) overall...that being, it's really not that good in the first place. In fact, many of the reasons people like it in the first place, are things that have nothing to do with me. There's quite a bit of meaning behind that statement alone.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate when anyone enjoys anything I've done, regardless of how I feel about it. Nevertheless, my feelings have changed, plus, as previously mentioned, I don't wanna be doing this forever. I genuinely WANT to finish both of these projects I'm working on currently, in case of the Movie being all three parts of it. There's a slim, SLIM chance that Part 1 of the Movie may be the only part that is actually finished and submitted, however I'm not aiming for this outcome. I'd much rather complete the movie in its entirety and complete the "story". That's more likely to happen, but I'm putting that possibility out now, so you're aware.

I know a lot of this is a bit vague and I apologize for that. Bear with me for a bit longer and I'll hope for the best. What's relevant about this post, I guess you could say, is that hopefully Part 1 will be finished and released by September, while $00pah NiN10Doh! follows soon after.

Hey, so. ComicCon. Long story short: It was fucking incredible.

I'm making a semi-con report since I'll be lucky enough to get you guys to read THIS much as is.

After getting in to San Diego the previous day, my group, which consisted of Mike, Zach, Tom and our first-ever meeting with the fabled Tara Billinger, checked into DoubleTree and we checked out Preview Night of the con. Admitedly I didn't spend too much time with my travelling partners at the time of the con itself, as I quickly made my way over to the Behemoth/Newgrounds booth beneath row 5000, which was incredibly conveniant by the way. After getting to meet most of everyone, I hung with Kira Buckland, Ross O'Donovan & Hans Van Harken that night. We headed to their hotel with a group of others for some Smashin' and good times were had, and even CZ joined in on the fun!

We had a good number of fans come to say hey over at the booth, which was an awesome lead up to the absolutely outstanding party we had on Friday night. I gotta fuckin' hand it to Tom Fulp and the fine people at Behemoth (who brought you Alien Homonid and now Castle Crashers) for setting this thing up. I got to mingle with many, many fine folks I hadn't fully interacted with, including Krinkels, Ryan Miller & Jenna Smith, the Super Flash Bros. and tons more. This party just really made me proud to be part of a community like Newgrounds, with so many creative people in one place...and I can say that I'm in that pool of talent. Screw the naysayers of the animation world that scrutinize this site, I love it, and I love everyone that's in it.

There were some speedbumps for me here and there. I had some MAJOR issues with my debt card thanks to the hotel having some screw-ups...and then after the fact we almost got kicked outta the hotel one night, but thankfully avoided that. I missed the Avatar panel on the Friday, but went to the party for its entirety instead of the last two hours, which was a much better idea in the long run. Cycon, his brother Jared and girlfriend Elise, Channel Cat and Kira were all nice enough to set me up with a cab to get back home that night as well. You guys are the bomb...s.

Con-related stuff directly, let's see...met Jhonen Vasquez and got to speak with him for a bit, where I got some helpful advice from a fellow animator. I met Bryan Lee O'Malley the creator of Scott Pilgrim & the Avatar creators later on, both for a total of 30 seconds each sadly, but pleasures nonetheless to make their aqquaintences. Got some autographs from them, which was neat. I also met Erin Fitzgerald, the voice of Nazz & May on Ed, Edd & Eddy as well as her buddy Mel Crosby, both of them were incredibly nice and I swear talked to me for like 15 minutes. I got some great feedback from them after checking out some of my stuff so I did a decent amount of networking while I was there. Ironically, it was also mostly with people I didn't plan on trying to network WITH in the first place, which was a neat surprise.

Bought a few things, but not too much due to money troubles. I gotta sketch from Tokyopop Artist and FUNimation voice actor, Sonny Strait (Krillin, Usopp, Hughes) at his Artist Alley table. I got a copy of "Adventures in Voice Acting" on DVD, finally. I bought my own copy of Scott Pilgrim Volume 4 from the Oni Press booth, as well as a copy of good sir Chris Reilly's comic Igor at the SLG booth. Probably picked up a few other things, but most of my money was dedicated to eating...which is sad because I realize I didn't eat nearly enough as I should have during this trip. Also I tasted sushi for the first time, which is totally not groundbreaking by normal standards, I know, but it was a big deal for me. Oh and a bunch of us watched a screening of AiKa R-16, the first anime featuring Kira as a lead character, and we all laughed our asses off at the ridiculous amounts of unecassary pantyshots and titshots.

The only thing I was disappointed about was my farewell. I feel like I didn't get to say goodbye to everyone. Nonetheless, the fact that I got to meet everyone was enough to satisfy me. Along with satisfaction, I felt...resolved. That definitely describes this con pretty well, for me anyway, that a lot of stuff was resolved. Many of those things of which were a pretty big deal. I feel incredibly refreshed and happy. This was one of the best weekends...hell, WEEKS of my life. So to everyone...Tom Fulp and his lovely wife April, Flash Bros. Tom & Dim, Luis, Afro-Ninja, Anigen, Egoraptor, Ross, Hans, CZ, Mike Ruocco, Ryan & Jenna, Cycon and his DCK crew, Red and especially Kira, you guys made this fuckin' trip for me. Thanks to all of you so much for an amazing time.

Just got back home today, where my team and I saw off Tara and her mom & sister. We'll be seein' Tara down here in a month or so for school, but it was thanks to her and her family that this trip was even possible in the first place so thanks to you guys too!