Well, it's been a couple of months since my last post.

I have a problem where I'll start getting good at something, say "That's good enough." and then lose all interest. That's more or less what happened with me and my contributions to the art community. I ended up finding a job bartending at a little hole in the wall, it's been helping me stay afloat with bills and such, but I stopped doing anything art-wise for a while.

Last month I finally started working on the website for my comic, www.bartenerds.com. (Yeah, yeah, it's a corny name. Think of something better, and I'll be happy to steal it.) Everything on the site is made from scratch, while finally learning Photoshop, I've been dabbling in Dreamweaver and HTML as well. I told myself I wasn't going to advertise for it at all unless I managed to at least go a month without falling behind. Well, I got to a month's worth of material (Updated Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and I'm working on uploading the last few comics from the last week and I'll be caught up to the current date.

This has been the most ambitious thing I've ever done in my sad little life and just from posting a few comics on here and Reddit, the site has already had over 10,000 views since October 1st. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't mean a whole lot compared to the millions of views the more well known webcomics attract every week. Still, considering that up until this summer I've never contributed anything to the Internet other than a post on Toonzone (member since 2001), I'd be content with just getting 20 views a day.

Newgrounds, to me, is where any motivation I have was born. Between the positive responses to the Flash and constantly seeing better artists than me posting their work every day, I can honestly say that without this site, I would never have done any of this. This post is just a way to say thank you all for helping me start this race and attempt to do something more with my life than serve people drinks.

I've been an artist since I was a kid, but I've never actually worked on anything of my own for more than a few hours. All my work has been copies of other people's work, or a portrait of someone I know. I've never even opened the Photoshop program before, and despite having a Wacom Intuous 2 tablet since 2006, it's just been collecting dust in front of four different computers since then.

I've easily drawn more in the last month than I have in my entire life and I can already see a notable improvement in my work despite still not attempting anything crazy (yet). Every day I must spend at least 8 hours in front of my computer working on shit, and I haven't been able to get any instant feedback from the site considering I haven't shown anyone. I've decided to keep everyone in my life and the 500+ people on my Facebook in the dark as to the existence of what I'm attempting here. If this actually takes off, I want it to be simply from you all, the people of the Internet. The only people in my life that I can relate to, despite never having met any of you.

Once the last few comics are uploaded to the site by the end of the weekend, I've been simultaneously working on a Flash animation for the "About" portion of the site as an introduction to what I'm trying to accomplish here. Hopefully that goes up here within the next week. It's 7:30 am on November 11th and I wanted to get this written down before I lost my train of thought as I've got like 3 Adobe programs open in the background all waiting for me to get back to them.

Thanks again, Newgrounds.
You're all my muse.
Cool runnings!

Joe Sim
www.bartenerds.com

Well, the first animation I've ever done has been uploaded. It passed the "Under Judgement" phase quickly enough for me to feel good about it. At just about a thousand views in less than 12 hours and considering I'm just some shmuck no one has ever heard of, I'm pretty ecstatic.

I've got a website brewing, just kinda broke right now so can't afford web hosting just yet. I'd like to put out a webcomic at least 2 or 3 times a week with a stupid nerdy YouTube video once or twice a month of, I dunno, me singing Animaniacs songs or playing something on the instruments as I learn how to actually play them.

You see, I lost my job bartending last month at the bar I LITERALLY helped build over three years ago. Since then, I've lost all desire to go out drinking and partying and have been primarily stuck either on the Net, or on the XBox/PS3/Normandy SR2. In the process, I've realized just how much I missed being an antisocial, video game playing, cartoon watching, borderline virgin. So I decided to finally embrace my ubergeekiness and also learn how to do all the things I always wanted with the help of the internet.

I had absolutely no idea what the hell ActionScript 3.0 was a week ago.

I knew nothing about tweening. Nothing about .swf files. Nothing. Flash was, and to a lesser extent, still IS, a mystery to me. I made that last video using maybe 5% of Flash's capabilities and at least once every 3 days, it would just delete whatever I had been working on for, well, those last 2 or 3 days.

Luckily, as I tell people, we exist in an age where it is ignorance for anyone to claim "I don't know how to do something." when all you have to do is go to YouTube, type in "How do I do ________ ?" and you can pretty much assume you'll get 7 different people with step by step videos that'll help you.

I've been learning the piano, the drums, the guitar, and the bass VERRRRRY slowly over the last few months (bought them all when I actually had money), but I plan on composing my own music for future Flash Animations, and I just love music in general, so now that I have the ball rolling on this whole "being a web animator" thing, I'll be on the instruments double time. In the process, if anything funny goes down, I'll probably post a video or something.

I've been a social pariah pretty much ever since AOL came out, and I've been studying stand up comedy like it's the SATs since I was 10. I've even gone up on stage a few times, and plan on doing so very soon. (I've started writing material for the stage as well) So I'd like to think I "know what funny is".

With that said, I promise you that I won't upload any retarded nonsense unless I, PERSONALLY, find it funny. Judging by the response from "Mustang Gets Off Work" so far, I think we're all in good hands. I know that there's the capability of making money on Newgrounds, but that's not the intent here. If that was the case, I wouldn't have uploaded the FMA video without attaching ads and so forth. Granted, once I get enough street cred with the Internet, I'll probably start selling out terribly.

For the time being, however, this is just to entertain you guys and see what you think of it. Considering geeks on the Internet helped me create the animation/music/etc, it's only right that I give something back.

After all, equivalent exchange IS alchemy's one, and only, rule...

So, until, the comic/website gets started and the next animation comes out, I'll talk to you all some other time.

Cool runnings!
Joe Sim