... and so comes New Year's Eve, the time where everyone snaps out of their immediate state of mind to look back at what happened during the past 12 months, spends a short while trying to look the other way, and cobbles together a list of goals for the next numeric year, often lacking the necessary conviction to actually carry them out for any significant length of time.

Here is a short compilation of all of the animated stuff I finished this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7N4sNSKzj8

This year felt odd for me, as it was my first year out of college since I graduated in December of 2014. Beforehand, I was focused on learning and making original 'fine art' and animation for my classes and toughing out the final stretch of my 4-year college education.

During 2015, however, I started the year with no clue what to do in terms of an art/animation career or even just working on animation in general. I felt like I wasn't ready for the next step in my 'career,' so I thought I should just focus on improving my techniques and overall skill, try to find my style and creative places within, and start browsing for my next 'step' later.

As I had to focus solely on original 'fine art' stuff for a couple years, I sort of 'rubber-banded' back to my kid-like disposition of making the usual parodies based on popular stuff of my interest and dumb humor now that I had the chance. The first thing I made was based on a moment from a Let's Player's video on YouTube that I enjoyed and thought would be entertaining, something that many people do a lot, but I hadn't done yet.

Lo and behold, the LPer found it and asked to put it on his channel. I happily agreed and ended up getting a bunch of new subscribers to my YT channel as a result. I never really cared about subs or anything like that before, but something about getting hundreds of new viewers in such a short amount of time made me think I was doing something right. These people included other YTers asking about commissions, so that was another plus. I had thoughts along the lines of 'maybe I can do stuff like this for a while to bring more people here to see my BETTER stuff whenever I do it' and 'the more of this kind of thing I do, the more commission opportunities I could find.'

I've been strangely focused on my YouTube stats and how my 'channel' is growing this whole time, but I certainly hadn't forgotten about Newgrounds. Infact, I was working on a project for Pico Day in March/April that unfortunately didn't pan out. Maybe I'll pick it back up later on and make it 10x as good for another Pico Day or something.

I still want to do some dumb parodies based on well-known shit that interests me, but I also want to start focusing on some original stuff again that I can call my own. I feel like both of these kinds of works have value in different ways, like a yin and yang of sorts, so I enjoy doing both. Then again, this is all in the context of my current mindset and the nature of 'success' on internet platforms; I could very well change my mind depending on how 'successful' I am and where that success is in the future.

Anyway, that was my ramble on 'internet fame' and how it's starting to mesh with me continuing to be an animator without much direction at this point. Hopefully throughout 2016 I'll formulate a better idea of how to make 'success' and 'fulfillment' out of all this disjointed craziness.