One of the many little resonant buzzes amidst the emanations of the vuvuzela chorus in the back of my mind is a nagging feeling that I have been in A State of Constant Mistake-Making by not being more engaged with the Newgrounds community.

I don't feel like I'm sufficiently surrounded by people who reinforce life patterns conducive to cool-art-doing. This is a place where cool art people are. I should probably connect with cool art people more. The theory that I will be more of a cool art doer if I am jostled by such patterned people seems sound enough.

This me thing was put on the front page a while back:

... and from what I understand, that has enabled me to put this me thing on the front page. So HELLO, READERS OF THIS ME THING FROM THE FRONT PAGE. I am Saltbearer, or So?ing Machine if I am acting as your sound dealer. I've been essentially bed-bound and isolated from meatspace humans for over 11 years, and make weird music on smartphones with SunVox, an inexpensive tracker/modular synth app, which happens to be free for desktops if you'd like to poke around in it real quick. I am generally a wacky li’l goofwad. I most likely have some form of undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorder, which results in diminished prolificity with regards to creation of any form of content in any medium. I want myself to want to finish more music, and give visual art a fairer shot, and write fiction formatted as chatlogs, but I can't seem to remain in any particular headspace long enough to see a long-term project through to completion, and it feels very easy to just put everything off indefinitely.

I just put off streaming unfinished pieces of music until I had almost a year’s worth of backlog, but I finally did it:

(Q1 2024 / Q2 2024)

While I don't have something to contribute as often as I’d like, I've always really appreciated the ethos and functionalities of Newgrounds, and continue to recommend it to musician peers for reasons including streaming quality, fair handling of collaborations, a culture of relative freedom, and the option of embedding music underneath full-res cover art via the Art Portal. I still don't know of an online platform that carries a greater air of being structurally suited to helping tomorrow's great multimedia artists grow.

Most of what’s kept me from being more engaged here has been a lack of impulses to seek new content — I already have an insurmountable backlog of albums I should listen to and shows I should watch and games I should play, and haven't felt like touching much of anything in it lately. It doesn't help that my phone's headphone jack has become faulty (and a USB-C adapter didn't work as well as I'd hoped), and I'm too nearsighted to use my computer easily (I have a new glasses prescription, but have yet to acquire them), so for the time being, it takes some non-negligible extra effort to properly consume content creators’ created content.

I'm also admittedly starting to wish the ~quaint/familiar/nostalgic~ vestige that is the star rating system weren't still here. Over time, it's become increasingly apparent that granular, quantitative scoring systems don't actually convey accurate, useful information to artists or audiences, no matter how overthought the underlying rubrics might be. Receptions of works by niche boundary- and convention-skirting auteurs are prone to being skewed by the wrong audiences finding them and not intuiting how they're meant to be taken, and complicated rubrics themselves may impose approaches to audienceship that detract from one's experiences of works by amplifying focuses upon angles that the works were never intended to be approached from. Those issues can bleed into written reviews, but at least words carry more specific meanings to weigh.

Regardless of how they're used in practice, I do still like that reviews are “reviews” here, framed as opportunities to provide useful feedback, rather than mere “comments” to be dropped off. The default suggestion is to speak more deeply of the art than to give a passing remark.

It often feels forced/unwarranted if I try to offer “useful” advice, though. I'm perhaps too afraid of stepping on toes these days, and of stamping out idiosyncrasies that separate works from trends I'm accustomed to that inform how things “should” be. There are infinitely many ways to Do Art, and I don't want to risk contributing to stifling what might develop into stylistic signatures that would stand out as unique.

But then, I'm always personally curious about whatever anyone might have to say about my works, even if pieces of feedback that are perfectly aligned with my goals and values have been few and far between for all the years I've received any. If it's safe to assume that's a typical lean for artists’ sentiments, then I should probably be more concerned about leaving artists without engagement than giving the wrong feedback... and about not having a tangible presence in the community where I could.

My issues here are ones I assume would be best to simply get over.

I should make a point of engaging with Some Things on Newgrounds on a regular basis (forums included), to remind myself that I can just do that, and that going to the effort often proves rewarding, as there's plenty here to like, and my brain will let me like things, even if I have to drag myself to them.

Numerical valuations of art assigned from my gut feel awkward, but as long as that ball is in this court, I should kick it around and keep in mind that it's just a game. “Waiting for votes” probably feels like a heavier weight than a tainted rating. Perhaps I should just hide my votes.

In time, if I get in the habit of saying things about things thing-doers have done, I'll surely find a voice I feel more comfortable using.

s’yeh I exist and generally like this place ‘n’ its stuff ‘n’ I'd like to feel more like a part of it and encouraged to be so, so here I am acknowledging that in one of the better places to do so.

I'd be like “I'd be like “here's some other me things I've submitted for you to form first impressions around” but everything is pretty unique and has something worth highlighting so it's too hard to pick” but that would be missing a good opportunity so I'll just drop a few more here: 

Shout-outs to an alphabetized subset of a subset of the people whose presences contribute to Newgrounds being a place worth paying attention to, enjoy familiarizing: @asserter @cheez2600 @cthrn @debisco @dynamitegrizzly @fruitsbat @heyjellybear @keith2002 @kindclutter @kingbastard @logickin @neurononeuro @phantasmosthedata @razex @thatandyguy @vekon — @grynmoor doesn't actually have anything up here, but I'd suggest preemptively following in the event they ever do.

There is a Discord server invite in an older news post which is active as of the time of this post, which is not formatted as a link, in order to minimize malicious bot intruders. Closer-to-real-time communication is fun.