(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

The first video of this 918-WAVETRO phone number adventure is finally out! The new show is called Call Wavetro, and you can watch it on YouTube right now!

You might’ve noticed that I didn’t provide an Odysee link this time, and that’s because I’m no longer posting on there. I don’t want to dwell on this for too long, but basically I don’t want to stick around while the site slowly dies anymore. Not a fan of how the Odysee team is handling the situation, even if they’re basically destined for bankruptcy. Oh well, I’ll probably make a PeerTube instance at some point instead.

Anyways, I hope to do interesting stuff with whatever YouTube throws into my voicemail and text message inbox. It’s going to be interesting seeing what thousands of people do with this phone number. Do also let me know in the comments what you think I can do to refine the format I’ve got going on here, other than slowly making the show less about wavetro-centric stuff and more about anything else.

See you on the next episode!

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

It’s time to open pandora’s box. The original Blender 3D animation files for Stickmen 2020 have finally been released to the public under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license!!!! You can find out all the details in my new video on YouTube or Odysee.

I’ve been very afraid to do something like this with my flagship series for a very long time, but I’m now finally ready to see the stickmen gain new life in other people’s 3D creations. For those of you who have been waiting all this time for me to finally release this, thank you so much for being patient with me.

If you’re wondering where to get the files, they’re in the free downloads section on my store at shop.wavetro.net. Yes, the store has also made a comeback!! A few of you already bought some things and they came out great, and I hope things keep going smoothly with this grand re-opening. (No pressure to buy anything though!)

I also still have plans for a future wavetro without any filmmaking, 3D-printed or animated. Ideally you’ll hear more about them soon, since they shouldn’t take long for me to make and post online.

For now though, thanks for still being here four years later! While we may never see a Stickmen 2024 or beyond, I haven’t given up creating cool things for you to enjoy.

See you around.

George (wavetro)

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

I’m alive! With bad news: the secret project didn’t work out. You can check out how far I got before pulling the plug on YouTube and Odysee.

So the idea was to try one last time to bring back my old comedy videos WITHOUT using 3D animation, but after isolating myself and throwing ideas at a wall for about 3 or 4 months (and only having this unfinished test video to show for it,) I can confirm that the show is probably not coming back.

I know it seems like I only need to make the absolute bare minimum for the visuals instead of this convoluted live-action puppetry I was trying to do. Why didn't I just doodle MSPaint drawings on a blank screen, or something else that's stupid easy? It's because the jokes I want to tell just wouldn't land if I did that. Stickmen 2020 would NOT have been as funny if it had any less detail, or if it was 2D. It has to feel like a live-action environment to work.

Only four years later do I now truly understand how crazy it was that I pulled off that series at all. Which sucks! I can still write the scripts, I can still make the audio, but I can't go further than that unless I throw piles of money at a team of people, and I kind of want to pay my bills and buy a house first. Eventually.

But hey, I did give it one last try. Thanks for waiting and I'll actually see you soon more regularly with videos that aren't so tryhard!

George (wavetro)

That's another year gone! Shame it was a quiet one for me again. But that's okay- I do have actual plans for next year.

I may have found a way to revive the excitement and energy of my old shows like Stickmen 2020 and Teddy and Ben WITHOUT using animation and burning myself out for the ten billionth time. AND while also not being horribly lazy to the point of being blammed from the movies portal.

Here's the thing: it WAS going to be comics.

That's what I was building up to last summer with the vector art, but it didn't really pan out. So I pivoted again!

Same policy as last time though- I don't want to say too much about what I have planned. I want to work on this (new) secret project carefully and quietly, so that I don't end up in yet another public burnout of epic proportions.

This image is all I can tell you at this time:

Interesting...

Anyways, if you read this far, I recommend you check out the latest episode of Ask Wavetro that I recently posted on YouTube or Odysee. There's a few segments where I reflect on what I've been doing this year during my quiet absence (excluding the part where I moved halfway across the country and somehow survived the miserable world of job hunting. Again!)

I'm gonna go disappear into my lab now. Hope you have a good winter break Newgrounders, and maybe next year I will finally have something mindblowing for you... but as usual: no promises!

George (wavetro)

UPDATE: Don't buy the 3D printer in this image, get a Bambu A1 instead lol

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

I meant to get this video out way sooner, but it’s finally here anyway: a collection of voicemails I liked from the giant pile you left me on the Family Dollar burner phone!

You can watch this now on YouTube or Odysee.

I want to put more effort into my next video so it may be a while again, and then once that’s out I PROMISE the next Ask Wavetro will follow shortly after. I don’t want to make that series happen too often since the episodes get pretty long.

Let me know which was your favorite voicemail!

George (wavetro)

Okay this video I made is kind of batshit insane. I am basically durability testing a flip phone from Family Dollar with a honey bun that was microwaved for ten minutes. You can even call the phone number at the end of the video but only do that after watching the entire thing pretty please.

The video is available on YouTube and Odysee.

Ok bye,

George (wavetro)

Sorry for using all-caps! I just recently uploaded a 35-minute adventure of my last hangout with a friend (ThatGuyNamedAndy) in the southwest US. To put it bluntly, it was a blast. Obviously that kind of video doesn't belong on Newgrounds in a million years since it will do just fine on YouTube, but I thought I would let you guys know in case you were interested!

Besides, Andy went crazy on the video thumbnail:

This dude should really join Newgrounds. Anyways, you can find the video on YouTube or Odysee. Take care!

George (wavetro)

Hello! Sorry I don't post on here more often. I mean, you know why I don't post on here very often if you've read my past news post or two, but that's not important.

I'm starting to kind of hate doing this whole never-posting-ever thing. I had prior reasons for wanting to make myself silent online (excluding whenever I finish a polished creative project,) but I've had a change of heart since.

I talk about it more in this video, which isn't meant to completely discredit my original "I quit being a YouTuber" video from over a year ago, but it addresses a big thing or two I did get wrong. I miss posting well-edited bits and pieces of my personal life online for the internet, and while I won't ever be returning to my solo animations or game dev, I'll still be making things that are just as entertaining on my YouTube or Odysee channel.

I'll be sure to post anything I make that's more creatively polished on here, because I still do want to work on that secret project I mentioned- the one that's aiming to leave the same impact that Stickmen 2020 did. But let's pretend it's dead for now so that I can focus on making it without burning out. I don't want another Cavefolder or Teddy & Ben disaster on our hands.

Let me know if you have any questions and I'll see you guys around someday!

George (wavetro)

wavetro.net

(this was cross-posted from wavetro.net/news)

We are gathered here today to mourn the loss of the account @ wavetro on Instagram, which passed away peacefully last week. Let's reflect on why this happened, and why I still use the online platforms I'm currently on.

Instagram

Last Thursday, I officially left Instagram with this post.

You don’t have to go read what I wrote on there: the basic gist is that I actually enjoyed most of the app, but I wish it was still its own company instead of being owned by Facebook/Meta. An independent Instagram would probably let me put links directly in my posts by now (instead of just my bio,) and it would probably not be a total spyware nightmare too.

Despite how effective it is for creators to get noticed and for normal users to find posts they like, Instagram seems purpose-built to prevent people from going to other parts of the internet. It's really only good for building an audience if you NEVER plan to leave the app and take your fans with you, so being a creator on there feels like being trapped in a cult.

I really appreciate anyone from Instagram that signed up for this newsletter after I left, thank you for fighting your way out of the endless feed to be here!

And what a shame that Instagram’s smaller flaws in an otherwise enjoyable platform are such huge dealbreakers. I feel bad for the artists that have to use it, as it's basically one of their only options to become known. Oh well, it's always good to avoid the Zuck.

Twitter

It’s been three years since I left Twitter, and it’s funny how not a single person needs to ask me if I ever want to go back.

Not only did my life improve immensely from leaving Twitter BEFORE the Elon Musk saga, but I think ALL Twitter clones are doomed from the start.

Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Cohost, and in some cases even Reddit are great ideas while their communities are still small, but once they get too big, they either run out of money, or live long enough to resort to depressing news, drama, and porn to keep their users hooked (usually with little to no control over what shows up in their feeds.) There is a nonzero chance of suddenly opening porn in your Twitter feed while out in public because someone you follow decided to like a horny tweet on their main account, and you cannot turn off liked tweets from showing up in your feed. Ask me how I know.

(Instagram, in contrast, is squeaky clean, but it’s so ad-friendly it feels like being in a bubble from the rest of the internet.)

I do miss pre-COVID Twitter and how easy it was to make Stickmen 2020 go viral on it, but that efficient virality is a double-edged sword. Once sites like Twitter reach a certain point of growth, they're only fun for anonymous users that like fanning the flames of chaos. Creators only exist on Twitter to eventually get torn down for entertainment.

And then there’s Musk. Like many others, I was originally duped into thinking Elon was smarter than he actually is with his rocket ships and electric cars, until one day he bought Twitter for some reason. His decision-making ever since has revealed him to be just a very lucky idiot, but he is exactly what Twitter deserves. I really hope he never walks back his braindead decision to cross out the only profitable thing Twitter has left with an 𝕏.

The only downside I actually have from leaving Twitter is that I’m 200% fucked if my YouTube channel accidentally gets banned or striked. I have no active Twitter presence to ever get the attention of YouTube’s support team. But I’ll take my chances.

Speaking of…

YouTube

Out of all the dystopian big tech platforms out there, let’s talk about the best one.

Yes, I’m dead serious. YouTube is an amazing website. But DO NOT EVER make this clear to Google, because the platform has only stayed this good from all the negative pressure of its complaining users.

You don't scroll an endless feed, you actually get to choose what you watch. Long-form videos have more nuance and context than neurotic tweets written at the speed of news. It’s forced to stay usable without an account (to not break all those videos embedded on websites around the world,) which in turn lets you use SponsorBlock, uBlock Origin, Return YouTube Dislike, youtube-dl, NewPipe, Invidious, etc. Even the usual problems YouTube has with copyright abuse has drastically improved in the last two or three years.

But the best part of the site is how useful it is as a learning tool. Sure, there's a lot of crap to get addicted to, but you can also train the algorithm to only give you helpful videos to learn something new. Maybe you want to quit Uber Eats and learn to cook, or pick up soldering or knitting. How else are there news headlines about literal teenagers getting hired to work on Spider-Verse 2 or a Backrooms movie? They learned Blender for free on YouTube! What other big tech website out there can benefit its users without requiring them to become creators? (Instructional reels/TikToks don't count.)

All that doesn't even take into account of how independent movies and animation pilots can also succeed and thrive on YouTube too, though there is a much better site for finished works like that. A site that had its animation scene killed by YouTube in the mid-2010s, in fact. (Hint: the site's name rhymes with Blue Sounds.)

Google is still evil, don't ever forget that. The support team for YouTube is super evasive. The ads are all either scams or trashy mobile games. There's even a built-in TikTok clone that I will never use.

In fact, Google only loses money on keeping YouTube alive so that there's never a better alternative, and to also collect advertising data like no tomorrow. They're only slightly better than Zuck since you can still use YouTube with tracking blockers, but they're also trying to change that by breaking those blockers in all Google Chrome-based browsers via Manifest v3. Opera, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi- they're all the same Chrome under the hood. Google got the whole world hooked on its browser, and even funds Firefox’s entire existence just to avoid an antitrust suit.

But as someone who’s pretty much grown up on YouTube, it’s better the devil I know (YouTube) than the devil I don’t (Instagram) to keep myself known online. I still hate how YouTube warped my brain as a kid when I accidentally found success as a hobbyist creator way too early in life, but I’m somehow still grateful for it compared to other big websites. What an abusive relationship I’m in!

Either way, for anyone wondering if I’ll ever be leaving this app, just know that I will probably die before I stop posting to YouTube. But don't call me a YouTuber, because I wouldn't ever mind seeing this site get replaced. Unless it’s something from ByteDance.

Odysee

Speaking of replacements: here's one that got close, but didn't quite make it.

For those unaware, I mirror everything I upload on YouTube to a small competitor called Odysee. It had a lot of promise a few years ago, but nowadays it’s on life support.

The big thing to note is that I’ve never seen so many large YouTubers (Sisyphus 55, SomeOrdinaryGamers, Louis Rossmann, etc) repost their videos on a competing site as much as Odysee. No one really touched Vidme or Storyfire, but something about Odysee really clicked for most people.

However, after their parent company LBRY lost an SEC lawsuit and had their main source of revenue revoked, the Odysee team has been dead silent on how the site will make any new money to stay afloat. I think they’re going to shut down any day now.

Besides, the hot new YouTube alternative is some site called Rumble now. I do not want to bother with any more of these YouTube replacements that are all destined to run out of money, and I will probably just end up self-hosting a copy of my videos. But not before Odysee goes down first.

I respect what Odysee tried to do and how far it got, and I will continue to upload my future videos on there until it shuts down. It has a lot of existing YouTubers, it has a decent interface, and it especially has an active userbase, which is no small feat.

But there's no money to keep it alive.

Newgrounds

Man, all these options still kinda suck. Can't we go back to something simpler?

Yes, yes we can.

Hello to anyone reading this from Newgrounds! You guys are the only site I cross-post these newsletter emails to. You guys are also my favorite online platform on this list, better than YouTube and by extension WAY better than Instagram. It’s a much smaller, more niche website, but I’m thrilled that the things I create land squarely in that niche.

Before any of my 3D animations blew up on YouTube, there were already people on Newgrounds gathering around the first episode of cavefolder and the initial Stickmen 2020 episodes, pretty much predicting their future success. Users of the site can directly interact with creators via messages or reviews, since it’s not as massive as other platforms. You can post any movie, audio, image, or game you like, as long as you made it yourself. The site has creation baked into its DNA, and rewards you for trying to make anything at all.

So what’s the catch? The biggest one (that you’re probably already aware of) is its public image. Even after the total Elon meltdown of Twitter, I’ve heard of artists still not wanting to move to Newgrounds due to its history. Its peak era was in the 2000s for pioneering edgy Flash games and animations, and despite the breakout success of Friday Night Funkin bringing in a newer audience, it’s also still notorious for hosting a shitload of porn. People also tend to unfairly drag all of Newgrounds whenever one of its individual creators acts out. The site has a complicated reputation.

It's also hard to be a Newgrounds user if you're not interested in being a creator AND you're not interested in any of the creations you find on the site. It's a harsh reality, but a valid reason the site doesn't have more users. You can't just make people change their interests if they'd rather watch gameplay clips or TikTok compilations.

But there is a very robust rating system powered by its users that filters out low-quality posts and organizes everything else into Everyone, Teen, Mature, and Adult categories. Do you know how refreshing it is to just turn off the “A” button and not have to worry about seeing any porn? Is that so DIFFICULT for you to do, Twitter??

Thanks to that rating system, the coomerism stays confined to the adult content, and everyone acts normally on the E and T-rated stuff. Everyone can co-exist on Newgrounds in their respective areas, and it makes it easier for people to get along. You will run into the occasional annoying child or provocative edgelord, but by and large the people on Newgrounds are damn authentic. It’s like going to a bar and talking with crass but honest locals, as opposed to a big tech website where everyone is dressed up in suits and sponsored products.

Even if you have a few bad interactions with the community, all Newgrounds users still respect you if you are creative in any way. If there’s a subculture or different mindset you wish Newgrounds had, you can start posting your work on there to be the change, and people will largely be open to your new ideas.

A site like this is obviously not very financially viable, so it runs entirely on paid support from its users. Despite how risky that is, it seems to be working so far. Newgrounds’ legacy and community may keep the site afloat in the long run.

At the time of writing, I find it very unlikely I would ever see myself leaving Newgrounds. Whenever building an audience on its rival platforms gets tiring, their small but meaningful community raises a glass and reminds you that your creativity still matters. It’s comfy here.

Substack

Newgrounds and YouTube are great, but if you also want to be 100% safe…

…then nothing gets safer than the tried-and-true email newsletter. Some of you are reading this from your email inbox right now, and even if every online platform blew up tomorrow, you would still be getting these emails from me.

Substack, while technically trying to be a social media platform, does things a little differently. It lets you start a blog and collect subscribers, but those subscribers only have to enter their email to be signed up. No registering an account password or any slowdowns like that, just an email. Crucially, Substack also lets me export this email list at any time, so I can jump to any email newsletter service I want and never lose my audience. It’s bulletproof, since everyone has an email.

The site also lets me set a custom domain, which is why you actually know this newsletter by wavetro.net/news or news.wavetro.net, and not wavetro.substack.com.

However, there’s nothing inherently fun or exciting about an email newsletter. It sounds old and boring to the average internet user, and there’s not really any variety with the user discovery on Substack like there is on any other app (unless you’re a scholar or something.) That’s why it’s best to use something like Substack in combination with another website or two. With enough luck, you’ll have some amount of people signing up for your newsletter, letting you rest easy that you won’t ever lose contact with those fans.

In short, I wish email newsletters and self-made websites were more common, so I’m gonna be using something like Substack for as long as I can. If you haven't already, please consider subscribing to mine if you check your email at all!

YouTube Community Posts

If you didn’t come here from your email inbox or my Newgrounds post, then you probably came here from my YouTube Community post! If that’s the case, you might also be wondering:

“Hey! How come you never post any of these updates on the YouTube Community tab?”

It’s because YouTube likes to show community posts to EVERYONE in the algorithm, even people who have never seen my videos before. I want people’s first experience with my channel to be through my work and not my update posts, so I try to keep my YT Community-posting to a minimum. This might change in the future, but not anytime soon.

Going Forward

So here’s the more interesting stuff: what have I been up to?

For anyone that got here from YouTube, you might not know what I’ve been doing since my last video “House Shake” in February.

There is another wall of text in my last newsletter post explaining why I decided to quit game dev, but I’ll just give you the summary: I had a moment of clarity and realized that sitting in front of code for hours is a pretty lame lifestyle. I’ve since been experimenting with other ways to break my old label of being the “Blender 3D guy,” since I’ve been burned out by Blender in general lately.

I recently picked up a new modeling program called Plasticity, and also started turning my 3D models into vector art with Inkscape, as you can see from these new artworks I made over the past few months:

It’s amazing how much has improved over these practice pieces! I can’t even pick a favorite.

However, I am now done making these, and I would like to try making something more interesting with this new vector art style. Something that can be posted in the form of a YouTube video, without necessarily being a video in itself. (It could even end up in the Newgrounds animation portal, but it probably won't qualify.)

The details are pretty fuzzy, and I’ll need to disappear into my writing cave for a few months to plan this out, but I think I’ve figured out the future of wavetro for real this time. In other words, I’ll be sure to have something VERY cool for you in my next post. I’m talking something with the same level of ambition and scale as Stickmen 2020, but without the part where I nearly kill myself to make it happen.

Exciting! But no other details for now unfortunately, you’ll have to stay tuned…

Until we meet again!

George (wavetro)

TL;DR: Don't let the post title scare you! This is about how I thought I was going to leave Newgrounds to focus on making games with an obscure 3D web engine that Newgrounds doesn't fully support, but then life things happened that flipped my creative outlook upside-down. Now I'm back on here making vector art and having no idea where I'm headed. Though it's probably healthier that I just enjoy the ride

(this newsletter was crossposted from news.wavetro.net, I've decided to repost all my future newsletters here like you recommended after all @TomFulp!)

Hello! It's been a while. Again. Seems to be a pattern with me.

I just went through a whole lot these past few months! To make a long story short, I was going to make more 3D web games, then I was nearly unemployed, had my creative outlook rocked to its core, and am now instead making simple vector art (shown further below) with my dwindling free time. I have future ideas of how I can grow it into something as impressive as Stickmen 2020, but I’m just going to embrace the uncertainty for now.

That’s the basic gist if you’re not interested in a long read, but for those of you that are, feel free to continue…

March 2023

So when we last left off, I had finished making a funny little demo of a house filled with physics-enabled objects that you can shake around. I was pretty proud of it after several painful weeks of using Babylon.js, the obscure game engine that makes this demo run so well in your web browser compared to something like Unity WebGL. Put simply, it’s not very fun to use Babylon.

Nevertheless, I began to ask Tom Fulp to help me get the demo working on his platform Newgrounds in order to have more people play it. He told me he got the game working on his end, but it kept breaking on mine with this weird console error:

We never figured out what went wrong, though it was at this point that I realized why there aren’t many 3D games that run in web browsers. See, this console error was related to something with browser security, and I recall seeing a forum post from a while ago (that I wish I bookmarked) mentioning that web browsers USED to have more graphics capability, but then the computer viruses Spectre and Meltdown happened. This essentially resulted in web 3D getting nerfed into a single-threaded and locked-down mess. In other words, if you want 3D games in a browser, you either use a WebGL exporter in an actual engine like Unity and watch your game run horribly, or use JavaScript libraries like Three or Babylon to painstakingly build your entire game world with a plastic spoon.

And sure, there’s a fancy new browser technology called WebGPU that’s coming along soon to replace this WebGL shitshow, but once it arrives, there's no point in using Babylon. You might as well use an actual game engine that will be able to properly export a 3D game to your browser with it, like Unity or Godot.

Godot.

I’ve heard lots about that engine, especially in the comments of my game dev logs on YouTube. Godot is a game engine that’s probably the most well-built there is for a free and open-source program, and it even comes with a vocal fanbase of people that make the software their entire personality: just like Blender! Wow! Despite the super-passionate users (and actual criticisms of the engine I’ve been told by some Unity users,) it’s very impressive what it can do for 0 dollars.

But what really caught my attention was that the team released version 4.0, a complete upgrade of the engine that makes the 3D more powerful and detailed. The WebGL exporter wasn’t really improved at all, but I finally decided to throw away my dreams of interactive 3D worlds in a web browser just to give Godot* a try. And wow. I loved it.

I recreated Camera Snap and House Shake in the engine in a SINGLE week. It was absolute bliss, and I will forever recommend Godot's* wonderful intuitive-ness to any aspiring game dev. Sure, it’s not the most powerful engine, but the learning curve felt almost non-existent. It was a joy to get things working, and I felt more empowered than ever to be a game developer.

However, I couldn’t really share my Godot* creations online as easily. The only existing platform I had was Newgrounds, but as established before, Godot’s* web exporter (like Unity’s) isn’t very good. I asked Tom if it was okay to upload gameplay footage of my Godot* games to the Animation portal instead, but he correctly pointed out that the portal’s really only meant for animated films.

We chatted for a bit about creation types that can’t find a home within the existing Newgrounds portals, since the site is built to prevent the low-effort content spam of YouTube by filtering through specific kinds of media with demonstrated effort. The only thing I could really do is post game screenshots in the Art Portal with some artistic angle, but that would hog attention away from hard-working artists that also post via static images.

It seemed like I had nothing to post to Newgrounds anymore. So I left.

I then did one last interview with the very talented host @Aalasteir on the Newgrounds-centric podcast @OffTheWallShow, where we discussed everything that happened to get to this point, as well as other things in general about online creation. If that sounds interesting to you and you have two hours to kill, give it a listen!

Unfortunately, the reason why I didn’t tell you about this podcast interview sooner is because it quickly met the same fate of all my other interviews: what I said on there about my future has already become outdated.

Because while all of this was happening, I was starting to apply for new jobs since I was feeling burned out at my current one. (It’s my only source of income, as I don’t have the discipline or networking ability to freelance. Doing job applications every day is also quite draining for me.)

It looked like I was destined to become a Godot* game developer, and to also find a new day job at a relaxed pace. But once March ended, this would no longer be the case.

April 2023

It was no April Fool’s joke. At the start of this month, I found out my job was going to be switched to a half-time schedule, and once I finished all current work projects in May, it would then turn into unemployment. Oh dear.

To be clear, this did NOT happen because I was already looking for a new position, but my job search did ramp up (along with the stress.) I was really starting to grapple with how much more energy I needed to start putting into getting income for survival, and not waste it on self-actualization through creativity. It all led me to start seriously re-evaluating my life.

I’m not going to disclose much about my job for privacy reasons, but I can at least say that it’s a desk job. It involves sitting at a computer all day, and so I started to ask myself, “why is your primary hobby and source of joy ALSO sitting at a computer all day?”

This is why I posted statuses on my website talking about starting to be repulsed by programming and wanting to go outside more. Obviously I’m not trying to shame people who code for a living or for fun- hell I might even end up coding at a future job one day. I’m also not implying that I’m going to throw all my electronic devices into a dumpster and start camping in the wilderness for weeks on end.

I just suddenly had a strong desire to REDUCE the intensity of my computer-centric hobbies, and INCREASE the amount of time I spend going outside to a park and spacing out for a bit. Nothing more.

I was going to put a giant list of other things I was reflecting on during this uncertain time, such as the growing oversaturation of young online creators and the destiny of most creative careers doomed to become soulless marketing pawns, but there’s no point in making you read all of that depression. The bigger takeaway was that this looming threat of unemployment really made me re-think my relationship with being a creator on the internet. And then something funny happened once April passed.

May 2023

Surprise! Turns out after a thing or two happened, my job is safe again. I wasn’t going to be unemployed anymore. Wow, that’s great! Back to work I guess. Business as usual…

Except it wasn’t business as usual. I did not immediately frolic back to Godot* to start creating needlessly complex projects that may not even properly represent my passions, pursuing yet another complicated hobby that enables all the worst parts of my workaholism. It would be the same problems of my 3D YouTube animations all over again.

I needed something much, much simpler. Even if it’s less cool to online people.

This is where Plasticity entered the picture. It’s a pay-once-to-own-forever software that puts a new spin on 3D, where you model with curves and lines instead of vertices and sculpts. It’s basically CAD software for artists, and it fixes my long-time frustration of dealing with arranging stupid dots to make a 3D model.

I really like this program. It makes 3D fun again. It made me want to give something in particular one last go.

I tried downloading a bunch of Blender plugins, modeled a simple character in Plasticity, and made this rendering called “simple hill.“ I then posted it on Instagram just to see how people would react.

This was really done just as a last ditch effort to see if I have any love left for Blender after using it for nine years. To finish this render, I had to do a lot of work I no longer enjoy. Not great.

But I tried again with “mount melt.“ This time, I REALLY felt the friction and barely had enough will to pull this scene together. My bag of tricks ran out fast, and I had to re-use the grass plugin from the simple hill.

This was an important moment- it made me realize my future is no longer primarily with Blender. Though I can still use it to arrange models or edit videos, I largely don’t want to be “the Blender guy” anymore.

This brings us to “crossing over.” I used this piece to silently communicate to everyone that I was done trying to make 3D look pretty. Modeling’s only been fun with this new Plasticity program, and dealing with materials and textures is still no fun.

I decided to experiment with having a new primary program: Inkscape. It’s a free vector program (similar to Adobe Illustrator) that I occasionally used for video thumbnails and website assets. After using it to trace the simple character on the right, it seems to provide interesting results.

Finally came “shipment sea.” This is where I now found my new path. It’s not terribly exciting, but this is a whole lot more interesting to me. No need to worry about lighting and nodes when you can just create a plain 3D model, pose it, trace it in 2D vector lines, and bring it to life with only colors and gradients.

I’m not tied to simple 3D objects and basic Blender scenes anymore. I can try making deeper, complex pieces with more meaning, explore worlds more nuanced than my old comedy videos, and really start to tap into the ideas of my head that have been dying to get out.

Though I have no idea where I’m going. I can’t ever say for sure anymore. But I know that right now, I want to do more of whatever this is.

With this, I can return here to Newgrounds. I have actual creative output again. I’ll make more of it and post it on here (and on Instagram too. Thank you Instagram followers for being my guinea pigs.) I might even create a dedicated page on my site for these renderings too.

I have a few ideas of where I can take this simple vector art into something more relatable and exciting like my old YouTube videos. Some of you may know what I have in mind, but I’m not going to say my plans right now. I don’t want to promise something I don’t end up doing like cavefolder, so I’ll just reveal it whenever it’s ready.

There is still a nonzero chance I could drop all of this and find something new again.

But for now, I'll be fighting against the draining urge to give up creating, and just keep making this simple vector art to show the world that I'm still alive and going. Maybe life, bills, and jobs will make me drop off the face of the internet one day, but maybe it won’t. I will keep updating you on what new things I try to make, even if they're very basic or infrequent. In a 2020s world of exhaustion and burnout, here's to hoping this blossoms into something new and greater.

Until next time,

George (wavetro)

*JULY 2023 UPDATE: In light of recent drama that went down in the Godot community, I can no longer recommend the game engine. It’s not a “scam” per se, but there are detailed accounts of seasoned Godot developers not being able to finish their games because all of the engine’s features are perpetually unfinished once you dig deep enough into them. Beginners like me would have never noticed this until I'd become advanced enough to file a bug report to the team, only to have it ignored for over a year and counting. It seems like commercial game engines are currently the most viable options for long-term learning. Oh well, maybe O3DE will be better