First things first, PV02 has another comic update!

You can read it here: https://www.pv02comic.com/

I'm still kinda at an impasse project-wise. I don't know exactly what I'll work on next for my NSFW project. For SFW, I still have Hiro the Dense 2 to work on, and have been dragging my feet with the critique video. Woo.

Also kinda had art block for the past few days.

Also over on my Patreon a lot of people recently hit their milestone rewards, so I've been getting through those.

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Thank you all who liked Curly Brace: Hacked 2! I'm rather fond of the style change in it, just cause it emulates the style of the game more closely.

Some things I've realized (or re-realized. I already knew this stuff. Why didn't I follow it???): if you're doing a single continuous scene in Toon Boom, don't try to get fancy with doing loops externally, and don't separate it into cutoff points. Just make it one big file, and loop things manually. Yeah, Hacked 2 would've been about 6000 frames, instead of 5 scenes that were at most 300 frames that looped in AE, but I would've had way more minute control over things, and it would've been easier to edit and fix parts. Plus I wouldn't need looping markers.

The biggest change I'd've made however probably would've been to zoom in more, or do a few cuts to more intimate angles. One big advantage of the first one was it was done from a webcam perspective, which meant it was close and front-on. I wanted a 3Q angle for the climax scene.

Granted, part of why I didn't do multiple angles was cause I wanted to get this done quickly--just two months after releasing the Shantae animation, which had taken me a whole year. The prior one had taken like 4 months or so. That's pretty impressive to me time-wise, to be honest.

Curly Brace Hacked 2 drops today! AAAAAAA

It's uploaded and tagged and all here on NG. Just need to publish it.

You can support my work over at https://www.patreon.com/Zedrin

ALSO! Forgot to mention Sunday, but new webcomic update! It's intense! And edgy!

https://www.pv02comic.com/

Curly Brace: Hacked 2 is completed! It is currently available in early access for patrons! You can view it early by becoming a patron.

The total runtime is 4 minutes roughly AND VERY OBVIOUSLY is nsfw.

As with the first one, it contains a lot of robot hacking / hypno goodness. If that aint your thing, you might not like it.

Also as with the first one, it's a single continuous scene for simplicity's sake (which allowed me to get it done WAY faster than my last project. The Shantae one took me a full year to finish. Oof.)

Now if only I had actually built the project files like that instead of splitting it into different sections, I would've saved myself a lot of time, syncing issues, and rendering woes. One 2000-frame animation is way easier to manage than five 400-frame animations.

It'll be up here on Newgrounds within the coming weeks.

Additionally, there was another update last week for PV02. (Forgot to mention it here.)

March 7th was also Gardevoir day, so I did a request stream and took 11 requests in the span of 5 hours. They're all up on my nsfw Twitter.

If and when Newgrounds gets full multi-image support I'll likely post em all to here. Doing em individually in the description or even just as several uploads feels a bit spammy / hard to scroll through / is a bit time consuming, however, so I'm gonna hold off for now and limit it to just a few.

Hiro the Dense 2 is also underway. I have WIPs going up on my patreon, and I'm making slow but stable progress. With Curly done I can also dedicate a little more time to it--optimistically I may have something ready sometime in April or May, but let's be honest, animation deadlines are never accurate.

Streams for that go up on Youtube on Saturdays, if you're interested in checking them out. I stream 4-7pm AZ time (which is now the same as Pacific with DST).

That's all I got for now.

Haven't posted here in a while. BUT ANYWAY

Project updates:

Hiro the Dense 2 is underway. Animatic is done, and I have a workflow for animating the full thing in Toonboom without resorting to numerous scene files. As before, when it's ready, Patrons get early access, then it'll be viewaable here on Newgrounds a day before it goes live on Youtube.

Curly Brace: Hacked 2 is done with animation, and is in the compositing stage. Shouldn't be long before it's done. I'm very happy with it so far. (As before, since it's adult, it'll be Newgrounds exclusive after its patreon early access.)

My critique video has been rewritten to its third draft and I'm finally satisfied with it. Need to finish recording for it, but I've managed to get its time down to just what's essential. There's enough content out there on how to take critique, but not a lot on what makes a critique good.

Last week was incredibly busy for me so I didn't get to work much on any art or projects.

BUT there is a new PV02 comic update! You can view it here: https://www.pv02comic.com/

(Updates every other Sunday)

im very tired

My newest comic page is up! https://www.pv02comic.com/

I haven't mentioned it here much, but I run a webcomic about Pivot (which is also where Override is from). It updates every other week.

In other news, I've got 2 sequels in the works, 1 nsfw and 1 sfw. Both are sequels of my respectively most popular projects :V

Newgrounds has had a lot of new additions lately, especially given the influx of new artists. A lot of friends have come here, and I've seen my follower count shoot up as people are finding me here now too.

Iz great.

I've mentioned this before, but some art friends have been a bit surprised by how Newgrounds is. One thing I've expressed to peers coming here is that Newgrounds is a gallery-oriented site, not a social media-oriented one. It's fundamentally different from places like Tumblr, Twitter, etc., and is closer to things like Pixiv and Deviantart, and that's by design, not accident. I've seen some people say they'd want to see a complete site overhaul so it'd be more like a blogging platform, which I don't think would be good. It shouldn't completely redesign itself to be a social platform and sacrifice its identity. (Plus it literally just had a redesign a few months ago.)

That all considered though, it can take a few cues to implement some new features that benefit creators without fundamentally changing itself. Already a few changes have been made which has been great. There's a few things that I want to see as well that I feel would work well on Newgrounds:

• Photosets - This is my biggest 'want.' For some reason this kind of option is popular more with places like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, which has been weird to me as it's the most 'gallery' like feature they usually have. And weirder still, Pixiv afaik is the only gallery site that utilizes it. The ability to upload multiple photos to a single art post on Newgrounds would be a huge advantage--this opens up to art sequences, variations, alternative comic styles, and more, without spamming the art portal or hiding things in the dumping grounds.
• Gallery Folders or organizational tags - I've always really liked how Newgrounds has your works sorted by year, so I'd want this preserved. But, I'd also like the option to put folders in the art gallery, just for organizational purposes.
  • Or alternatively, maybe organizational tags. Tags you use or select would show up on the side when viewing your gallery, and clicking one would only display content that has that tag. I was gonna say these could be separate from gallery tags, but with the tag expansion they could just use the standard ones.
• A more casual comment system - At the moment, the only way to comment on a video or art piece is to leave a review, which you can only leave one of, which kinda makes it hard to discuss works back and forth. It'd be nice if there was kinda like a small, separate comment section in addition to reviews where people could comment freely, while keeping reviews front and center. (Thinking on it, there might be a reason something like this doesn't exist, but I'm not aware of specifcally what it is. I still feel like it has merits still that outweigh potential negatives.)
• Some way for users to share others' works - Taking a cue from more mainstream social media, things like retweets and shares result in a lot of exposure for an artist. They also allow for content-aggregator type users to share and curate works without reuploading them. The curator is able to partake in art communities even if they don't have much drawing ability (in ways other than critique or commission), and it's in a productive, symbiotic manner, so long as they abide by the community's guidelines. (FB and Twitter in particular do have issues with reuploads, but that more comes from their nature as social-media specific platforms, the impulsive nature the sites encourage, and that most of their moderation is done by robots.)
  Currently, favorites exist on Newgrounds, but they only appear on your page--they're strictly for your reference, not so much anyone else's.
  • One option is if there was a toggle when you follow someone so you could see what they favorite as well. Their favorites would show up as actual posts in your feed. (This is kinda what Deviantart has.) This let's you follow someone cause they find content that you want to see.
  • Alternatively and more ambitiously, maybe if there was something like a special feed, either individual or a kind of group one that one or more people could manage and curate. People could follow this feed separate from  (or in addition to) its the curators and its contents would appear in their own feed. The curators would be able to embed content, be it their own or from other users, and since it's embedded, it'd go directly to the original creator's upload instead of duplicating it. This hypothetically could also handle content from the dumping grounds, which would allow people to take advantage of it a bit more often. (This isn't something I'd really expect to be implemented cause it's kinda complex and probably wouldn't be realistic to put in at the moment.)
• Drafts and Scheduled posts - Pretty simple, just a way to save WIP journal entries or media posts, or to set a timer for when posts will go public. This would be super useful for videos in particular, especially in cases where you might have early access on something like Patreon.

The Shantae monstergirl animation(s) I've been working on for a very long time are finally done!

There are two versions: a regular one, and a futa one where Rotty has a dick. Both versions contain 4 scenes + forms.

As it's NSFW I'm not gonna stick any images of it in this journal entry, but I've posted some previews over on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/zedrinbutt

Patrons can view it early over on my patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/posts/23270818

For non-patrons, I'll have both versions uploaded here on Newgrounds come Christmas!

One thing I really wish Newgrounds had was a way to do photo sets, so you can have multiple pictures in a single art post, like if you do a sequence or set or something.

That all said, would you guys be interested in seeing my sketches and less 'polished' pieces uploaded here? I wouldn't post them to the art portal, they'd just go to this account's gallery. I'm worried that doing individual sketches though might lead to a lot of clutter in peoples' feeds.

Usually I keep those limited to Twitter or Tumblr, but Tumblr is currently capsizing due to the upcoming 17th policy changes.

Tangentially related, the Shantae project will be ready some timet his month! I have screencaps of what it's like here: https://twitter.com/zedrinbutt/status/1069426905760194560 (NSFW obviously)

A lot of people already know that Tumblr's been dealing with a purge issue going on (even was addressed in the site news). For those who don't, the short of it is Tumblr got in trouble with Apple for pornography, assumedly because of child porn (possibly from the bot epidemic). The assumption is that the recent purges are from them sending an overzealous algorithm to remove accounts that might be in violation, but a huge number of accounts hit were very obviously compliant or even SFW. Very little has been confirmed so nobody knows 100% what's going on, even after 3 days.

Whatever the reason, people are wrongfully getting deleted. Some people got their accounts back, others have yet to, and even some have gotten them back only to be nuked again a few hours later.

So a lot of people are moving to Newgrounds and Twitter. That all considered, Newgrounds shouldn't be seen so much a replacement as something of its own. It's more like a web gallery and archive page for artists than it is a social media-focused platform. Tumblr had features like like image sets, asks and responses, and reblogs to share content from other users. Newgrounds lacks these, but it does have a review system, a robust maturity rating system, has a lot of support for collaborations, and supports a wide number of filetypes. It kinda makes it a different creature entirely.

What's more it's also been independent since its birth and has alwas been pro-NSFW and has always been curated. It's a relatively safe archive to put your work on. 

Newgrounds isn't something I'd use to replace a site like Tumblr--it's something I'd use (and have used) regardless of the situation, in addition to whatever platforms I might be on. Even if Tumblr wasn't melting down at the moment it'd still be a smart idea to at least set up a NG page.

To any new artists here, be sure to get at least 4 pieces of art up right away so you can be scouted and show up in the art feed!

Anyway, quick rundown of personal updates:

• Shantae project is nearing completion. Its scope has been readjusted: instead it's going to basically just be a loop collection, with 2 loops and a climax for each form. As of writing this I have 3 more animations to do (though one form I might redo entirely). Holy FUCK this took way too long to make.
• I've got a short SFW animation-animatic idea that I hopefully will have out by xmas.
• I have two other sfw animation projects that are going to be coming in 2019, but I have yet to start. Both are sequels.

All these will be up on Newgrounds as well as Youtube (with a few of them being newgrounds first or even exclusive)

So, around the end of May my wrist started bothering me. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn't even go into a pushup position without severe pain.

I've taken about a week off and, while initially my plan was to give it a lot of rest, I think instead I actually need to be stretching and working it some, not to any point of hurting, but just to help it get strong again. My arms have kinda wasted over these past two months from not being able to exercise completely, and I think it's hurt my arms more than helped. Using some massage balls and special stretches has really helped remove the pain.

I think I'm back in a position to draw again, but I need to take it easy. That said, I tried drawing today, only for a year-old squashed bug in my Intuos4 to resurface, where it skips whenever I start drawing a line. This makes it impossible to draw anything detailed. I swear this happened from uninstalling the XP-Pen drivers after I was done with my tablet review.

My prior methods that worked last time were unsuccessful in fixing it this time, but a friend of mine suggested turning off 'double click distance,' which fixed it. Turning it on causes the glitch to happen, turning it off, no glitch.

So, today wasn't really fun, but at least my arm, for the first time in 2 months, is able to go into a pushup position again without pain, and at least my tablet is working again.

I want to start thinking up ideas for a Hiro the Dense sequel (one where I can actually play with visual gags more, it's something I shirked off due to time constraints and the whole fbf thing in the original), I have a laundry list of merch items to make, I have a list of patreon rewards to tackle, and I still have that Shantae hentai animation to do.

Almost forgot to mention, I now have a method for approaching foreign language dubs of Hiro the Dense! I'll be making announcement on it at the start of August, but I've had a few people ask me about doing dubs, and I had declined before. I don't want people to freely profit off my work, but I also don't feel it's fair for me to just claim their uploads because voice acting and dubbing is still a deal of work itself. My MCN's implementing a revenue share system however, so at least over on Youtube I'll be able to split revenue with them. I'm very excited for this, and a few dub creators I've been in contact with are too.