(Stylish for Chrome is being non-responsive...)

Old screenshot: the AABB is currently broken again.

Fuck.

As the last post said: no more Facebook. I'm off using it altogether, and don't even have the Messenger app. My FB account should be in its final stage of deletion automatically in 12 days.

This leaves me with lots of room for making changes. Picture Book Fiends (the "meme" page for celebrating old school picture books) is out of my hands, and I'm not running around in circles after political news, so I've got more time to do other things.

I have 26 projects to finish.
I've already written them down, but now I need to write some more and revise even further, because priorities need to be made if I am to survive this crap. I'm hoping to return to Newgrounds patronage, with animations and art, but I need to see where that fits on the sorting algorithm of what things I should get out of the way first - before I swamp myself with another workload that's planned out wrong and that I can't handle. The one that's bothering me the most is The Mouse Initiative, so I should get back to writing that and conclude the damn thing already. I also need to write my actual stories, like Crimson Room which is not on The Internet but is a psychedelic short story in Wordpad.

Facebook is not a good place, you know? Lots of stupid spam, annoying posts, trolly attitudes from people who aren't caught on to the fact that you're both on the same side, and being separated from real friendships by weird surrogacy friendships (with the same person in both regards). At this point, Facebook is just about good for nothing.

If things go as planned, I might even challenge The Blue Overhang by making my own social network. Not an annoying, pop-content filled one, or even one that can be used for marketing products. It'd be very intimate, have lots of integrity, and be all about wirelessly communicating with people who you actually do see in real life.
This kind of thing tends to sound audacious, to a lot of people, but with the way my life is I really don't see why not. It almost seems like a no-brainer to give site design a try within the next 10 years.
It also seems pretty obvious that I leave, now that I hear it's part of a massive NSA-tier conspiracy almost on par with Brave New World. I was pissed off at Facebook already, and now it has to be about surveillance state dogma.
All it took for me to make this decision was a good excuse.

Vidme's down, and therefore, so is my last post's showcase video. This is the Death From Minecraft information page created by Vidme's software team after the suspension. It has a better description of what the cartoon was about and why I gave up on, and then posted, it. I am very happy with Vidme for keeping the stats and descriptions up, because it really proves that these things existed, and provides invaluable pieces of internet history.

So, Vidlii.
I was very sad when Vidme went down, and it was so much that it took me a while to consider that this similarly named successor could fill the gap. Eventually I decided to take a less blurry-eyed look at the new monolith of a website, and realized that, holy crap, it looks like the really really olden time days of YouTube.

This caught my attention really fast. Not only was it trying to look and be like the old YouTube was when I was too young to even understand YouTube, but it has star rating systems right now that show up alongside the thumbnails, and you can freaking change the colours and features of your channel. I took advantage of this at once, and made myself a black channel layout with dull lights in place of the default accents, with the banner image that I always wanted to get working on YouTube, but couldn't. It's called Wardhouse and Frack, and it's right here. It's based on a combination of two other majorly different channels I've had elsewhere, and has footage that is no longer viewable anywhere else.

I'm quite amazed at the lengths Vidlii's owners went to to make this site look and feel like our nostalgia's target. Not only do you have all these colourful NG-grade rectangles and bells and whistles, but the URLs for videos and channels are faithful to how YouTube's URLs used to be typed. They have the same syntax.

Unfortunately, there are still problems. I've read the community guidelines, which seem pretty hard to follow and nonspecific, leaving room for lots of paranoia that my videos might or might not be flagged, and a lot of video-makers - even on the front page - have set the bar for video quality pretty low. I'm hoping to help bring the five star MP4 rating back to greatness.

It's a new website, Morty, somebody's gotta bring a little culture.

...but you can view it here. I posted the unfnished animation on Vidme a few weeks ago.

As you can see the video part of that video had very little in it and was not conclusive, but ultimately I was just animating a C418 track in Flash. It's called Death, and if you listen to it here you'll get a very good idea of what was going to be in the rest of the animation. I was not going to add any noises or sound effects myself. As you can guess, it will probably never be finished.

Do you ever get that?

I have realized that there are too many problems between me and completing that Minecraft animation. For my next Flash, I'm going to make something simple, easy, and comedic instead.

Sure, it's not finished yet, but now it's only a matter of time. It seems like I finally know what I'm doing. I've actually got this game to the point where player movement and physics is almost completely sorted and soon all I'll have to do is program environments and draw tile maps. The red and black part of the picture above is a temporary testing board.

It's a cartoon about something a little more sophisticated and not some jokes that are over-played and stupid, but until this afternoon I did not make a good enough swap-out for the tank guy in the preloader, so that is much better now. I also added some tweaks to the rough pre-animation that real animators are supposed to use as a guide before they fill the drawings in with proper detail. (I am... not what I call a 'real animator'...)

All this after half a year of not doing anything super useful in the cartoon side of my own creativity. What's my secret? Well, I think for me, if I've got nothing entertaining to do, the presence of alcohol in my bodily system is a good productivity motivator. It's seemingly been making me move forward in a lot of areas.