i'll put some finishing touches on it tomorrow and then probably write some flufff text. really happy with how this is turning out on the whole

i mean i woke up early and everything, i thought i'd at least get to do the clouds

no matter i suppose. clouds'll probably be done tomorrow and then it's onto putting the midveins on all the grass which is gonna be a headache. then i may shade some of the grass if i'm feeling extra ambitious (when i apply that condition that usually means i will) which would be an additional headache. i think it'll be done by the end of the week though and i'll be able to calm down. i suppose i could do the clouds today only i looked in the mirror earlier and bits of my eyes were red and i don't think i should be looking at screens too much.

let's see if i can beat the record before flash player dies

Spent like 90% of my drawing time today on the grass. Hate grass now.

this is going to be something of a stylistic apex i think, for reasons

no idea if i'm gonna be online at midnight tonight so i'll put this out there now. we in the business refer to this as professionalism

them's some hands there, that's what they is yup

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

YES!!!

This is my new greatest accomplishment this year imo

hey. so, if you're keeping track of tom fulp's currently daily news posts, you may recall an off-hand remark about how, in his opinion at least, reading through people's retrospectives in this year was interesting. that combined with today being the last time i log onto twitter this year (i only use it on mondays, though i think moving to only using it on saturdays might make more sense, but currently i'm updating a kind of pet project of mine on there on a weekly basis and it would mess up the flow of things) got me thinking maybe i should write something of my own to see what i've achieved and what could've gone down better.

content warning: this is boring, i wrote it all out and realised it was boring. i'm not an impressive guy so it's not a surprise for me, but if you've been misled into thinking i am in fact an impressive guy, i've got bad news for you.

so first off, since it's inescapable, how did the antagonist of the year, covid-19, affect me? well, in brief, i stopped going to my university and stopped going to my music school. the former stuck and the latter didn't. when it came time to decide if i was going to continue in university for the new year, i chose not to. apparently that was a pretty good idea on my end, and at the time it felt like it, since we were stuck using online courses and somehow expected to adjust to defining our own schedules which i in particular am catastrophically bad at. fortunately, though, i managed to pass 7 of 12 courses, meaning i got enough credits this year that come the new school year next year i will be able to continue there. i genuinely wasn't sure i was going to manage that, only having passed five before the final opportunity to up that amount came. on personal terms this year probably wasn't as bad for me as 2016 was, no-one i know personally has died, though several have lost their jobs which is obviously still bad and i don't mean to be disrespectful by saying this. so yeah, that's that.

now, having said that, as someone who went from being a student to being a neet, that has left me with quite a bit more time on my hands? have i used it well? no. how have i used it though? what have i accomplished in this unending nightmare called life that's worth documenting? well, some is known already, some isn't because i didn't publish it in any form, some of it is sorta known but what i consider pride-worthy may not align with what everyone likes, that's just not how the world works.

for what you may already know, that'd be either things that happened on the forums that had any lasting effects (there are very few such things) or just the art i published. my most measurable newgrounds accomplishment is that i got two of my submissions on the front page this year:

why the former got there is still a mystery to me, though at the time i was drawing it i believe i was on a discord server with a few ng users of some level of repute, one might say, so either of them could have recommended it be put there in another discord server or something. or perhaps one of the folks in charge of what does and doesn't get put on the front page just happened to see it and like it, doesn't matter really but i think it's kinda funny considering the title. the latter is on the front page thanks to template88 who you may know for any of these memorable works:

(i know it's because of him because, if you don't know, there's a forum thread where you can suggest submissions for the front page, and he put it there)

second quantifiable newgrounds victory was having my art featured on the tank tribune, admittedly only due to the attached news that i was taking something of an art break at the time. it was only the second issue so that qualifies me for the status of being a real og, as far as the tank tribune is concerned, so says i. the art in question is here, and has been updated since it was featured because i put it on my print store and wanted it to feel a bit more complete, if you will:

(there was also a legit error in the version on the tank tribune that i covered up in the updated version, see if you can spot it. i've also been featured for quotes and a haiku but those don't feel as cool)

aside from that, there was the rather low-key fro-llab, which, while certainly not as easy to celebrate as getting a front page, still has some level of significance for more people than just me. for context, a (now retired) bbs moderator was taking a break, and i in one thread or another almost jokingly suggested we make a collab to greet him upon his return. this collab took the shape of a rather chaotically thrown-together illustrated fanfiction, in which fro takes on apple to save the flash emulator ruffle, which you may have heard about if you hang around here enough to have found me. during the process my internet was cut off for two days, after which i learned exactly how things were to be done because i'm shit at organising things, and scrambled to write my part, which took the shape of 3000 words written in six hours, which the day after i would compress into a forum post that only allowed me 8000 characters, and i may have done the illustration i did for the thing in the same day, that being my only traditional art submission this year:

(it's a bit shit, i'll be real)

then there's opening a print store and (technically) opening for commissions, though the latter has brought me literally nothing so far, but they both felt rather daunting to me, so going through with them, even if it hasn't really borne fruit yet (i got a total of 36 dollars from both) still feels like a step forward, no matter how little.

aside from those i passed 200 fans on here, sitting, at time of writing, on the very sexy number 222, including kidgalactus and thepsychosheep who i want to highlight on account of them being some of my favourite artists on here, no offense to any other cool creators who also follow me on here; and on twitter dot com two of my drawings passed 50 worthless likes and no-one followed me as a consequence of either so that didn't mean shit. these are the drawings in question, though, as it would be weird to not divulge that:

now, that's all for clout-based victories. what more personal victories do i have under my belt from this year that are worth putting here? well, let's start with just listing my favourite drawings this year, as i did on twitter earlier today hence inspiring me to write this guff:

(twitter only allows four images per tweet but five is a nicer number so i added the first one to round it out)

aside from that, i wrote 60,000 words of the first draft of a short story i've had in my head for a while, around the middle of the year, and, rather disappointingly, only about 1,500 words of the second draft, 1,000 of those being the summary of it that i made once i realised where the story was going over the course of the first draft and furthermore realised that i hadn't adequately led up to there at all. i sort of got pulled out of writing for exams and never managed to pull myself back in. i have many potential resolutions for the new year, so many, in fact, that i'm not sure all of them can be achieved, but one of them is getting back on this project. other big thing was finishing a 60,000 row excel spreadsheet that i created in 2018. it was at least partially powered by spite, though sending it to the dude on his and my shared birthday was also a way to kind of end beef, such as it was. we haven't interacted since because he's a nerd.

i read nine books this year, and i consider most of them rather valuable experiences so i'm including that as an achievement, especially when reading lolita required having my phone on hand at all times to look up unfamiliar words and terms, including but not limited to: poltroon, palliative, bobby-soxer, telestically, connubial, plangent, hirsute, and indian file. among these books if there's any i'd swear off of reading it's armageddon by robert rankin, a self-satisfied and bafflingly sexist sci-fi comedy that really prompts the question of why my parents have at least twenty of the same man's books, but i guess i'll find out eventually if i can be bothered to read all of them.

as far as other media is concerned, i saw the lighthouse and it was cool and i simply cannot remember any other film i saw this year that i hadn't seen before, i got somewhat acquainted with jethro tull, i listened to the entire yes discography, i might've listened to the entire bowie discography though i honestly can't remember if that was this year or last, a similar situation with george harrison's discography, and i listened to more yoko ono albums (six of them) than most people have. aside from that i probably also listened to more music from this year while it was still, in fact, this year, than i've done so for any previous year, and i listened to john lennon's song god way too much:

(this song is not happy, it makes me sad)

and finally i replayed pokemon ruby, as you may know, and on account of its being honestly rather mid in many ways despite my fondness for it, it made me think about things, and made me come up with ideas, and maybe those ideas will result in something of substance next year but we'll have to wait and see.

but enough about how much media i've consumed, let's move on to me being shit. so, at the outset of this year, i know of at least two projects that were in mind the whole time and never realised. they were both fan projects, though one had more of me in it than the other. one was i was intending to do a series of illustrations of things from twilight princess, fairly self-explanatory, and one was that i intended to illustrate a sort of story outline inspired by the klaatu album hope, which is very good and you should listen to. the former is losing enthusiasm from me. not because i've stopped liking twilight princess or the idea of drawing shit from it but because the internet is saturated with zelda art like you wouldn't believe and that inherently makes me feel like adding to the pile has less value. the latter seems more likely but then again i can only do so many drawings per year at my current rate so it may still not bear fruit by the end of next year, upon which i will write an equally riveting piece about how i failed that year too.

now what's to be done next year, evaluating how little i've achieved? well, many things, making the task rather daunting. prior to many of these other projects is that i basically need to move to tablet next year. for those who don't know, all of my digital drawings are done in adobe illustrator with a mouse. i don't think this makes them worse necessarily but what it does do is make my life not harder, but certainly slower. to fix this situation the somewhat daunting prospect of changing my method entirely seems to be the only way forward, and i've been aware of this on some level since before the year began, so i've been putting it off all this time but upon having all the free time in the world and finding it inadequate the matter is simply inescapable.

with that at the forefront, what art projects do i have planned? well, the klaatu thing i mentioned earlier hopefully, but also come may a rather more personal project that i definitely want to do but it would feel rather crass to put here, as if advertising it when it's not really something i consider a product in the same way i might do for a lot of my other art. aside from that there's nothing big planned, art-wise, other than doing sprite draw again next year, the same way i did this year, and the year before that. twenty-five sprites into twenty-five designs, at some point in july i assume. what i'm hoping to do is to set myself up to be able to stream the drawing process by then, and hopefully raise some money for charity since even if i'm not using a mouse by then, twenty-five designs will probably still take me a while.

as for other projects, getting back on writing is up there as the most important one, and tied for the next level of importance are trying to finally wrap my head around the fucking engineering calculus that's been the bane of my existence for two years now, and learning to code at least a little. nothing complex but i have a game idea, it's a bit weird, and i don't want anyone to suffer through my nonsense until i know what i'm doing at least a little.

tl;dr i assassinated vladimir putin and replaced him with a robot it was wild

and with all that written down, have an advanced happy new year. hopefully it won't be as catastrophic and deadly as this one, and maybe, just maybe, if i can be bothered to brave the many horror stories and fly to the us where i assume most of you are, we may even see each other face to face then.

That's a nice number, it's divisible by 2, 3, 6, 37, 74 and 111, and all the figures are the same