This is part 2 of a lil blog series I'm writing about my 2020. Here are the previous posts:

• 2020: COVID drain, my NG life after Grounds Patrol

The Newgrounds Podcast was born (and looked nothing like it does now)

On February 20th, almost exactly two months after Grounds Patrol’s last episode, this trailer came out. (Hey, shoutout to @Snackers for leading the charge and making it amazing.)

The trailer said, “THE HEART OF GROUNDS PATROL, THE SOUL OF THE CRICKETS”. That’s mostly what it started as -- let’s take the camaraderie and live-recording aspect of ACOCk, and apply a Grounds Patrol level of editing and production value.

The first breakthrough, I think, came when @GoodL took a page from his experience producing TV news and suggested that we get a handful of people together, become a team, and divide into roles to fill for each episode. We have an “anchor” that leads the show, a “reporter” that talks about the community goings-on, another person “on the scene” to talk about the current front page, and so on. People can stick to roles they like, or they can switch around, and not everyone needs to be in every episode.

That exact news setup didn’t end up surviving, but I bring it up because the “people can switch roles, not everyone needs to be in every episode” idea has lasted to this day and is a huge reason the show has lasted this long (and IMO the reason the show will last for a long long time). It makes the recordings more flexible, the hosts more equal in status, and the show itself stronger for not being tied to the constant presence of any one person. We’re a Hydra -- cut off a head, we grow more heads. (Hail Hydra.)

In the beginning, it was GoodL, Snackers, @ninjamuffin99 (who’d helped me with GP and is always a champ), @HenryEyes (who I’d never known too well personally but who is charming and beloved/missed by all), and myself kinda behind the scenes. I wasn’t comfortable being in the mix myself yet, sort of because the embarrassment from ending Grounds Patrol made me not want to be in the spotlight, sort of because I wanted the show to feature people with NG experience talking about NG and I didn’t feel like I had anything to add. @littlbox helped out a lot with the concepts but had to duck out for real-life reasons before the show really started.

We put out an open call for a few more hosts, and @JohnnyGuy, @Staggernight and @RGPAnims joined almost immediately. @PsychoGoldfish came a little bit later -- we had stayed close after he guested on Grounds Patrol, and he’d been part of a big special I’d done with him and ACOCk the year before. He came into the loop as an occasional guest host, threw a meteoric drunken St. Patrick’s day stream-fest for us (that I’m surprised was ever recorded, much less edited into anything), and was soon pinch-hitting for NGP so often that he became one of the most central people on the show.

In that early period, I was happy that NGP was growing and that people were having fun with it, but I have to say that personally I was feeling distant. Everybody kind of knew each other and had banter and inside jokes, and I was mostly just the guy with the clipboard trying to keep everything organized. We’d have monthly crew meetings (a nightmare to coordinate with, if you’re counting, nine hosts) where I felt like a failing high school principle trying to get everyone to shut up and write a show schedule while nobody’s listening and everyone’s laughing and saying shit I don’t understand. I felt like I was producing someone else’s show, not one I had a stake in myself.

And I can’t fault anyone for this! The fact that everyone on the show knew and liked each other was great, it meant they could go on the air and have fun. It was nothing but my own feelings of disconnection from people, coupled with the responsibility I felt like I had to create and organize this big show, which probably made me come off as a boss rather than a friend or team member. Like when your office hires some uppity middle-management type from another building to come take over all your shit. (Which is something I’ve never experienced, I just imagine cubicle life to be exactly like it is on TV.)

Around the start of summer, I had no idea what I was going to do about my fading connection to the show we’d started. I kinda wanted to leave. But that felt like Grounds Patrol all over again, taking my ball and going home when I wasn’t feeling happy, leaving everyone else to figure it out.

Luckily, the show was about to take a giant turn. In a remote little channel in the show-planning section of our Discord, a random idea I’d thrown out earlier was starting to gain momentum. I’d figured it would just be a little fun thing to do; I had no idea it was going to change everything. *bum bum bummmmm*

Read next: The 2020 Summer Block Party changes everything

Hey everyone!

It's mid-January 2021, and I've been really wanting to write up a year-in-review post for 2020. Everyone else has been doing it, and I love bandwagons. *spins fidget spinner*

But when I started writing, I couldn't really stop. There's just so much to talk about. COVID hit, my life changed completely like six times, @TheNewgroundsPodcast began (how has NGP's entire life only been in one year, it feels like it's been going forever!)

I don't feel like posting a giant epic novel of a blog post, and I also don't want to post it super late, so I've decided to break it up. I'm posting two things here today, and expect more posts every day until I'm out of stuff to talk about!

Please don't hesitate to comment if you enjoy these, share if you want, and thank you for reading!

COVID taught me that free time doesn’t equal amazing creative potential

When 2020 started, I was in Los Angeles helping an escape room company design their next project. This was an amazing experience. This company is, I dunno, an almost "artisanal" escape room company. If other companies' escape rooms are saturday morning cartoons, this company's escape room is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. (Not really bragging -- their awesomeness has very little to do with me, I just found them and needed a job and lucked out.) I was going into the building, running experiences for groups of people, designing graphics, working with builders and set decorators, helping write the story and design the gameplay, it goes on and on. I was kind of in heaven.

Unfortunately this meant that when COVID hit, I was:

• in the most contagious city in the most strictly-regulated state in the USA, and
• working in a field devoted entirely to locking friends together inside small rooms with no air flow 24/7.

We shut down the bookings immediately. But the company wasn’t ready to just furlough us and wait the year out -- the government was promising a really solid small business grant (CARES Act) and we were hopeful to use that money to continue working on our big project remotely!

So when quarantine began, I was doing 8 hours every weekday at our kitchen table. Honestly, I remember being kind of jealous of my friends who were instantly laid off and suddenly had mad amounts of free time. I love free time! Having free time in my life is why I’ve been able to do creative projects, develop skills as an artist, get involved with creative communities like Newgrounds, all of that. I’m usually the kind of person that will instantly fill any amount of free time with a project. TV shows, video games? Rarely. Free time has to be project time. Hustle time. Create-your-legacy time.

Anyway, I got my wish pretty soon. The CARES act was mostly a giant mess, money ran out, and I was furloughed pretty suddenly.

I’m not a psychologist, so take this with a grain of salt, but here’s the thing I learned about creativity: it comes when your brain is actually getting engaged with life stuff. I get great ideas when I’m showering as I get ready for work, when I’m driving, when I’m solving problems, when I’m doing physical exercise-type stuff. Cue the quarantine: I’m showering in the middle of the day or whatever, I’m not driving anywhere, there are no problems to solve, the gym is closed (not that I used it much anyway).

I had free time, but for what to make during that time? I had nothing. There were days where I was able to scratch out ideas for stories and huge dream projects, but I wasn’t making anything past the concepts, nothing I could build or publish or post. I was immediately pissed at myself for finally having the time I’d wished for, and wasting it. Worst of all was seeing my friends who had similar time and were able to achieve their dream project. Pure toxic comparison behavior. I cursed my peers for their finished screenplays, their new business ventures, their success.

So obviously I had to work on not comparing other people’s situations to my own. I’m better at it now, but it’s still a struggle sometimes. Besides that, though, I had to recontextualize my whole habit of equating free time with project-development time. It’s not just that I create things as a way to pass time. A part of me has always tied my self-worth to what I create, and what I will create. My ultimate dream is to make a living by creating my own content and being supported for it. I’ve been guilty of thinking I’ll never be successful until I’m able to make the great thing. I mentioned earlier that I fill all of my free time with creating stuff? A lot of times it’s not passion, is desperation. Creating things in my free time has always been my idea of investment in my future, the only way I’ll be able to avoid a soul-crushing career in a cubicle or whatever.

I’m still a bit guilty of this. To a small extent I might always be. But I feel like I’ve faced the toxicity of this head-on. Creating things shouldn’t be a desparate clawing attempt at being a professional creator. It should be a labor of love and self-expression. And not should it be that, but in many ways that’s all it can be, because if you spend time trying to force creativity out, it’s not gonna be there.

The beginning of my year on NG was a post-GP funk

In December of 2019, I ended my (mostly) solo podcast project, @GroundsPatrol. In short, Grounds Patrol was the first podcast I’d ever tried to create, I’d just returned to Newgrounds after several years, I was inspired by interview podcasts like Nerdist and You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes and the mock community-news podcast Beef and Dairy Network, and I went to great efforts to make the show as polished and professional as what I was used to listening to myself. I had fun doing the interviews and ended up having nothing to offer in the way of “community news”, so it quickly became an interview-based show. I strived to keep the editing top-notch, the polish level high, the release schedule consistent and the guest list long.

To this day I’m really proud of Grounds Patrol, but it never could have lasted longer than it did. The schedule was tough, my desires for the show didn’t seem to match up with what people wanted (the most successful episodes were sometimes my least favorite, and vice versa) and I felt increasingly out of my depth reporting on a community I’d literally just rejoined. The worst part about running a project solo is that you’re the only thing standing between it and the abyss. If life stuff or mental stuff or any other stuff gets in the way of you making the thing, the thing just stops, and if it stops, there’s nobody around to pick it up and it’s pretty much done. (Just ask literally any webcomic artist, they know). I stopped Grounds Patrol because I knew that, if I didn’t, I’d eventually just end up ghosting. I’m sorry to say it, but when you’re under pressure and you work in an online community, ghosting is very easy and very tempting.

(If you’re reading this and you were a Grounds Patrol fan in the months of silence between its end and NGP’s beginning, I’m sorry. It pains me to admit I was tempted to just disappear. If it’s any consolation, and I mean this seriously, what kept me here through all that was my gratitude towards you all, and the responsibility I felt in having created a show that meant something to you.)

My original plan was to find a new host for the show and basically give them the keys. I figured that, if all I did at the end of the day was kickstart a cool Newgrounds news podcast that someone in the community could run, I was still doing a good thing. So I got to work on finding the new host. Luckily for me, another Newgrounds podcast was gearing up to end around the same time.

So I don’t remember exactly when Grounds Patrol and @ACoupleOfCrickets started being talked about in the same sentence, but it’s kind of hard to talk about one without the other. Another Newgrounds podcast, same community focus, very different style of approach. @GoodL and @littlbox started their show only a couple of months before I started my own, and their style was much looser, unpolished, the editing minimal. (They can tell you much better than I can how their show wasn’t originally NG-themed, it just came up often enough that they branded it as a NG podcast after the fact, which I think is hilarious.)

It wasn’t long before our two shows were playing to the same crowds and dipping into the same pool of guests, and a little rivalry brewed up. It was fun. I’ll say from my own end, I never thought any less of ACOCk (the k is silent!) for being “less polished” than my own show. If anything, it made me wonder how much of my focus on polish and presentation was worth it, especially if their show seemed to connect to people equally as well.

Okay, so as I was looking for a way for Grounds Patrol to continue on without me, I wondered if GoodL and littlbox would be up for taking it. My idea, which looking back seems a little shitty, was that they would happily fold their show into mine and continue their show format under the umbrella of Grounds Patrol’s style and brand.

They didn’t bite. It turns out, when you and another show have a rivalry going on, the idea of letting the rival show politely eat yours doesn’t really feel like much of a truce. Who’da thunk. Instead, we started talking about combining into something else, a new show, a new identity, something bigger than either of us...

NEXT: The Newgrounds Podcast was born (and looked nothing like it does now)

What do you do?

Recording music from my keyboard, trying to fool the ears into thinking this is a full band with horns and stuff. Does it pass?

...and I'm making a video series about it! So whether you're interested in escape room design or you're a @GroundsPatrol podcast fan and want to see what I look like... here's this thing.

Meanwhile, Grounds Patrol keep chugging! Next episode on the 15th babaaay.

The other day I got to go onto the Newgrounds podcast A Couple of Crickets and talk Grounds Patrol, my old art and music stuff, and a whole bunch more. Like, a WHOLE bunch more. We talked so much. You know the saying "give infinite monkeys infinite typewriters and they'll write the complete works of Shakespeare"? Well let's just say if we hadn't turned the mics off eventually we'd have gotten a fair bit into Much Ado.

Listen to it here:

Why did my game Erotic Paul just show a black screen on startup and nothing else? No idea. But, quickly, sorry that happened. I've taken the game off the portal today and will be giving Paul a nice, thorough checkup. And next time he goes up he'll be right as rain. Until then, sorry I posted a dud! We learn!

I've started a Newgrounds community podcast called GROUNDS PATROL. I'd love it if you checked it out. Expect a lot of news and interviews and stuff coming up very soon.

You can find the page for it HERE. And listen to the first episode HERE!

Woo!