so i didn't post here for almost 9 years (jan 2011-dec 2019). what was i doing during that time? i'll try to remember as much as i can. for any of you who were curious or didn't follow me elsewhere, this might be interesting. here is my epic journey from internet edgelord to degenerate weeaboomer.

• 1 month after i left NG i was laid off from my job doing flash animation for games for toddlers. high profile stuff for clients like nickelodeon and disney, but nothing that i personally had pride in. despite that, i actually liked the job at first. it was exciting and a new chapter in my life. by 2011 i had been working there for almost a year, but by the time i was laid off the situation there was so garbage that when i got my 2 weeks notice i was actually elated i never had to step foot in that office again. after leaving the studio, i decided i wanted to try being my own boss and doing freelance work. and i'm still doing that today so it worked out well.
• my first couple freelance gigs were nothing all that interesting. but my first real forays into doing stuff i was actually interested in working on was Skullgirls as a contract animator back in 2011. Back then they were still Reverge Labs. I came in somewhat late to the original roster, but worked on it all the way up through 2nd encore and had a hand in every DLC character that was released.
• starting in 2013 i got into tabling at artist alleys at anime conventions. my first con was Sakura-con. since then i have been to too many to count. My favorite by far is Anime Expo in Los Angeles, simply due to the sheer size of it and having a lot of friends who either live there or visit as well. I don't really get to participate in the actual convention as I'm busy selling all day, but it's still an incredible experience. I don't do as many artist alleys as I used to because it is a very exhausting lifestyle - and obviously this year tons of them are cancelled anyway (including AX) - but I do sell pretty much everything I sell at cons on my online store. But when things start going back to normal if you ever catch me at an artist alley be sure to stop by and say hi, i love meeting new people.
• i played a visual novel called Katawa Shoujo in 2013 and it really resonated with me, so much so that I am still heavily involved in the community today. I started with the Instafeels parodies and from there I've done hundreds of fanart and commissions. I even got the opportunity to work on a few official artbooks for the VN (1) (2 NSFW) (3 NSFW) that were sold at Comiket in Japan. Obviously a lot of time has passed since then and the peak hype has long since gone, but there's still a really strong community of fans that i'm grateful to be a part of. And even though I didn't get to work on the original VN, I'm glad I was able to contribute to the official artbooks.
• After Skullgirls development ended, Lab Zero started another game not soon after called Indivisible. I began animation work on this back even before the Indiegogo campaign in 2015 when they were developing a prototype for people to try out - and even though the game has released, i'm still animating for it today! This game has a crazy amount of playable characters, NPC's and enemies, so it's been a very diverse project to work on.
• I've done a lot of work with Studio Yotta, an online studio of super talented animators from all over the world, founded by my long time friend Jake Ganz. Here's some of the projects I contributed on with them:
• The Sonic Mania opening animation. Specifically, these shots. This was a very challenging project to work on because Sonic & friends had to look absolutely perfect. Obviously, the project turned out to be a huge success. I never dreamed I'd get a chance to work on a Sonic game, a character I grew up and spent so many hours with.
• The Rick & Morty "Run The Jewels" MV, as well as an FX shot on S4E1, "Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat", where Rick's leg gets enveloped by ferrofluid.
• Some animation and a background for River City Girls, this Battle Chef Brigade spot, and a short shot on the intro for Amphibia.
• Aside from that, I've been running a Patreon since 2016 and it's grown into a supportive community I'm really grateful for. If it wasn't for my Patreon, a lot of the things I draw and paint would have never been made. It's expanded my horizons more than I ever would have on my own.

There's lots of other unreleased, unfinished or otherwise abandoned stuff I've either started myself or been a part of that aren't worth mentioning - and probably lots of stuff i've simply forgotten about, too. The important thing is that so much has changed in the last 9 years, and mostly for the better. Unfortunately, this year has taken a toll on my health due to an illness, surgery, and now with the quarantine and everything surrounding that - but i'm still able to draw and animate and that's what I need most.

If you're still reading this then I hope you found this short recap interesting and maybe discovered something you didn't know about. If not, then here's a drawing I made that no one has ever seen before, because I made it just now.

I was honored to be a part of this massive collaboration of over 200 artists to re-animate the Sonic the Hedgehog movie from 1996! The video above were my 4 scenes. I was originally going to do a few more, but I wound up in the hospital and had to give up my other shots. But i'm fine now, and the people who replaced me did a great job! Watch the whole thing here!

Since returning to Newgrounds I realized I actually enjoy going to the front page rather than avoiding it - I believe it's because the content on the front page is largely curated by hand. While you can argue the pros and cons of this until you're blue in the face, and I may just be a web 1.0 boomer with nostalgia goggles who fears change and the never-ending march of iteration, I think it brings to light the frightening amount of content shoved in our faces is served to us by a cold, unfeeling mass of machine code that we've colloquially coined as "the algorithm".

Youtube, Google and similar social media juggernauts have shaped how creators behave - they learn how the machine thinks, and allow that knowledge to shape their content, their creativity, and even their personal image. True, humans have largely sought attention long before the dawn this phenomenon and the internet itself, but we appealed to humans first and foremost. The algorithm is not human, it is merely instructed to behave in a certain way, and does that until told otherwise. It doesn't make mistakes, it doesn't consider outliers. It doesn't care who you are or what you make, it cannot speak to you or empathize with you. It cannot laugh, cry or smile. All it has encouraged is uniformity while stifling creativity - and this is by design.

I could ramble on about how trash Youtube has become for hours, but I don't think I need to do that here. And it's obviously just not Youtube. I just think about how more automated the internet has become as the more people use it and wonder if the lack of human interaction between creators and the platforms they post on has had an overall negative impact on not only the people who consume the content, but moreso the people who create it. Because not only has the automation made creators become more desperate, but it's made the platforms less sympathetic to the plights of creators. Just look at Tumblr, once the world's most popular microblogging platform, getting cold feet from being removed from the Apple store. Its kneejerk reaction to stepping outside of Apple's walled garden was at the expense of millions of its users who did nothing wrong, and suddenly one of the few platforms left for adult artists was vaporized.

Realistically, these places are probably just too big for them to be curated by human hands. There are an increasing number of creators competing for a smaller and more valuable space. Maybe if Newgrounds was as big as these places, it would end up the same way. Maybe things would be better if the average internet user was visiting more than 3 or 4 sites a day, or maybe i'm just pining for the days when it wasn't almost utterly pointless for smaller communities to exist for no reason other than nostalgia.

Who knows what the internet will look like in another 20 years, but I hope that there's still a place where it doesn't feel like you're screaming into the void.

as you may have noticed i have been uploading old art i haven't posted here. i have a backlog of quite a few years of art (that i still like) and it'll probably take me a few months to go through it. i'll try to pace it out so there's only 1 or 2 a day instead of spamming the portal all at once - but if you follow me elsewhere you'll probably see a lot of stuff you've seen before for a while.

#5: ZOIDS WILD

While it's no Bakugan Brawlers, Zoids reminds us all of something very important: Pokemon is fucking stupid and for dumb babies. This testosterone-fueled adventure sends us back to the constant hellscape that is robot dinosaurs beating the everloving shit out of eachother. It really makes you think "hey, i want to buy these as toys." And guess what, you can! Zoids gets 5 cool dudes out of 5.

#4: SARAZANMAI

Are you secure enough in your sexuality to watch 3 teenage boys get naked, share their most intimate feelings with eachother and do butt stuff? No? What are you, gay? This anime is more manly than Fist of the North Star and Berserk combined. So what are you waiting for? Put on your big boy pants and step in to the world of kappas and shota fanservice loaded with subtext. 5 magical anus balls out of 5.

#3: ZOIDS WILD ZERO

It's the sequel to Zoids Wild, but they called it Zoids Wild Zero instead of Zoids Wild Two. Fuck you. 5 expectations subverted out of 5.

#2: BEYBLADE BURST GACHI

The series all about letting it rip finally does away with its biggest flaw - women. Beyblade Burst Gachi has exactly what the fans have been craving since day one, men fighting men in the most epic arena of skill and strategy ever created - the Beystadium. Beyblade is mankind's pinnacle of achievement in competitive spinning top games and will likely never be usurped. Women just don't have the stamina or mental fortitude to wrap their feeble minds around everything that goes in to the art of "the rip". And I don't see how that statement could be misinterpreted in any way. That aside, there's no question that Beyblade Burst Gachi is the Beyblade experience refined. 5 spinning pieces of plastic out of 5.

#1: XL JOUSHI

This is literally an anime about how huge this guy's dick is. No beating around "the bush" here, he's got a massive cock and you're gonna know about it. As an added bonus, you can get free PUA lessons just from watching this series. Ladies are basically 100% guaranteed to love you if you act like the men in this anime. Bonus points if you have a huge schlong. 5 spiked drinks out of 5.

I hope you agreed with everything on my list, otherwise I will be forced to dox you, file false DMCA claims on your content, and report you to the Blam Police. Thanks!

pranked bro epic style

if you want to see my art go to http://rtil.deviantart.com

it's halo the gameboard

kudos to the VFX team on avatar but that aside can we all just agree here that story/acting/script-wise avatar was a stunningly mediocre film? how desperately closed in and detached do we have to be to become severely depressed that we don't live in a CGI world haphazardly inspired by the very nature of our own? why must we captivate ourselves with the guilt of simply being human?

at the very least i can say i underestimated james cameron before this movie came out. i thought nobody was going to be interested in disturbing motion captured blue aliens created by an ego-centric jaded director who willingly admitted he wanted people to be sexually attracted to his "creations". but time and time again his dances with wolves pocahontas sci-fi epic tops the box office - although to his credit nothing really good has come out recently with the exception of peter jackson's the lovely bones.

which reminds me - shouldn't filmmakers be using cg to help tell a story instead of hide a bad one? the lovely bones may have been long-winded but at least jackson used technology to propel story elements instead of give us neon blue migraines for 3 hours.

and on a final note, unobtanium. real creative name there. as if the ill paced narration to explain every story bit to death wasn't enough, you had to make a pun out of the name on the mineral on a planet called pandora. way to treat your audience like a bunch of idiots. but maybe that's what they want.

$2 billion says yes!

speaking of $2 billion - avatar is NOT the highest grossing film of all time domestically. inflation in mind, it hasn't even passed titanic. the prize goes to gone with the wind, which in today's dollars would have made almost $2 billion domestically. barack obama's fault? you decide.