Where did all this talent come from? I was told NG was "dead" (by people who live on Twitter), but every week there are animations/games submitted that would've been top 5 of the year In the 2000-2010 "glory days."
This is officially my 15th year on Newgrounds dot com.
I somehow have
456 saves
&
456 blams? Whoah.
I have 10,436 XP, which I think means I've voted on ~5,000 videos/games? Avg 30 seconds each, I've spent at least 2,500 mins on videos here. That's 42 hours at least. And there are apparently 10,000 users who've watched more?
Joined at 13 years old in 2005 and submitted this really, really bad Star Wars cartoon that somehow has 250k views.
Newgrounds was so popular it propelled talentless hacks like 13-year-old me to e-fame.
Time is a flat circle, cause 15 years later, I'm still parodying the Star Wars prequels.
Star Wars was a global phenomenon, so it's how I, an American kid growing up in a remote Thai village with a 56k modem could relate to both my American friends over AOL Instant Messenger and with my Thai friends.
So of course it's the first thing I animated when I learned Flash.
Here's me in a Bangkok newspaper for an animation award intended to advance Thai kids' in arts and technology.
I don't think I was what the program creators envisioned...
First taste of NG "relevance" was when my poorly tweened shape-tool (didn't have a tablet yet) cartoon "Dare" featuring Switchfoot's "Dare You to Move" somehow picked up a lot of views.
It's been removed here and YouTube a lot of times when the record companies came for the internet.
This was before thousands of Facebook and YouTube channels capitalized on the "wholesome content" craze, so I think it did well because people found the positivity refreshing among all the "edgy" content?
My mom and aunt went to watch it and accidentally clicked on a nearby submission under judgment and saw Strawberry Clock's head on some naked dude swinging schlong. Ah, Newgrounds.
If you were around then, you probably remember that I had a weird chip on my shoulder, which is a bummer cause I missed out on having a lot of the fun early on that I had in my later years here. @MindChamber rightfully called me out.
Thankfully, artists far more friendly and talented than me looked past that to collaborate and burn time on the old AOL messenger, cause I learned an insane amount from those folks, like @AlmightyHans, @RuberNinja, @Luis, Edd Gould, @RWappin, @FunyMony, @Gerkinman, @MiddleFingerRings, @Godlimations, @TommyVF and @MarcyVF and many others. Probably missing some. Thanks for the fun times, all. Trying to follow what you're all up to these days.
Since 2005, I've graduated high school, graduated college, gotten a few jobs, moved all over the US, gotten married, had a kid, and here I am.
I want to do something original soon. Tried an original series a while back, but it was pretty derivative.
At least I came back in 2013 and finished it.
While I was at it, I realized nobody ever finished their "To be continued" cartoons from the 2000-2007 timeframe. So I figured I'd do it a decade later.
I got active lately cause COVID's opened up weekday evenings and weekends.
But I'm really enjoying the connection with old and new content creators here and on twitter (https://twitter.com/joshwimble). I'll try to not go on such a long hiatus again, unless this whole having a kid thing gets to be a handful.
StickmanMarkinson
Congrats on being here for 15 years. Yeah some people on Twitter want to pretend that this website doesn’t exist. (Which it is sad)
squeakytoad
Their loss. And thanks!