Good golly, 2023 is almost here! Time for the...

I’m going to keep this one brief, as a lot of what’s happened this year doesn’t really pertain to Newgrounds, and has been pretty well recorded in my previous updates this year.

VIDEOS

Not many videos this year, folks.

Ghost —

This was a lot of fun to do. You can read more about the making of this in a prior entry, but this short helped remind me why I love filmmaking in a time when I was in serious danger of forgetting — making fun creative sh*t with awesome creative friends.

Home —

All I did was add a video background to a four-second scene in this. It’s great, though. Freaking love @idontknowcorp ’s animations, and you should too.

MUSIC

Was a little shorthanded on music this year as well. This is in part due to my larger projects this year, but also because most of my music-working was in service of the In Flight EP that I released this past October. You can check it out on Bandcamp, Spotify, or here on Newgrounds!

Also put together a song based on a sketch @spicybagel posted, and am pretty happy with the result. Bagl is someone whose work I really admire, so I’m really glad to have been able to put this together.

Also check out his new song “Joyce”:

PICO DAY

For this year’s Pico Day, I headed over to Denver, CO to meet up with a bunch of NGers at the residence of @PsychoGoldfish. It was a brief but amazing and memorable trip. I’m really happy to have been able to met so many of these people irl with whom I’ve shared many a VC with over Discord and laugh hysterically as we made Alexa wet fart for a solid minute.

Josh votes in favor of renaming Newgrounds "Poogrounds"

YOUR FRIEND LOGAN

For nearly four weeks, I was on the road with two other guys (my producer Matlock and cinematographer Sean) and filmed nineteen different interviews for Your Friend Logan -- the documentary I've been working on about late artist/musician Logan Whitehurst. This encompassed the mass of the interviews — we’ve filmed three additional ones since then, and have one more planned before we call it quits.

It was extremely tiring, and I think definitely contributed to a major burnout late in this year. I wouldn’t give it up for anything, though. To have been able to meet so many awesome people, see so many great places, and stay in so many sketchy airbnbs was worth it.

I’m currently in the assembly portion of post-production, after which we’ll assess the extremely rough cut and make some decisions. Expect a huge update in the next few months.

You can check us out on Instagram, Twitter, or, if you're a boomer, Facebook.

FILM SCHOOL

The segment that is the majority of my life right now. I’m now in my third year, and honestly things have been pretty darn good. My second year ended in a lot of turmoil, both external and internal, but this year I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some awesome and talented people on our thesis film.

I’m so excited for it; it’s about a romantic relationship gone wrong in 1979 post-punk Manchester. Ambitious for a small budget and crew, but I’m confident we have the resources to pull it off in style. We shoot the weekend before Valentine’s Day, and there’s a lot lot lot to do beforehand, and the shoot itself is going to be a beast of another color, but I’m fully confident in this crew to make a pretty darn awesome movie. Heck, I may even share it here once it’s done.

However, there’s been downsides to this as well. This year is the first time I’ve been burnt out…multiple times. I always figured being burnt out meant you were just tired, but for me, it was an all-consuming negative thought loop that was just hard to break or escape. The best way to describe it is comparing it to Sisyphus; I had done so much work to get to this point, but there's nothing but work ahead of me. I’m just always going to have to roll the boulder up the hill. And at the top of that hill is another hill, and another, and another….

Obviously, this kind of mindset is unsustainable, so I’ve taken steps to minimize this. I’ve started jogging, drinking loads of water, and eating relatively healthy (on a college student’s budget). And it’s actually helped. Who knew that taking care of yourself would be good for you??

I’m definitely not going to act like this is a unique experience and not something every single person goes through, but it was interesting to hit this wall for the first time and really experience it. And as long as I continue to take steps to minimize this, that's okay.

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tl;dr

In summary: this year has just been a really tiring and exhausting year, one full of a lot of positive change and growth, but also a lot of setbacks and personal blocks. Pretty much the standard whenever you’re chasing down something you really want to achieve, but I just have to prioritize sustaining myself through the long haul.

I completed a lot of the things I wanted to accomplish this year, and 2023 is going to be ever-more exciting (and exhausting).

zzzzzzzz (also a very accurate portrait of what this year has felt like)

Special thanks to @GoodL and @Bitbeak for being awesome. Looking forward to yearlies, bois.