Are You Ready To Get 'Tooned In!'?
Happy Day Before Valentine’s Day! As you may know, it’s been a little while since I posted my last deviation, but I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, I’d like to being up a game show that premiered less than a week ago as I write this: Nickelodeon’s Tooned In. I’ve seen all four episodes of it that have aired so far, and I’ve gotta be honest, I’m more than a little disappointed by it. If it had premiered in any other time besides Current Year™, it would’ve been an instant hit, but as it stands, they only focus on the same limited number of Nicktoons (and Dora the Frickin' Explorer, of all things), and as a result, the majority of the questions are way too easy for my tastes (especially since there’s an entire category about answering questions based on a very brief clip that played literally one second ago! That’s not trivia, that’s just a test of one’s ultra-short-term memory!). Not only that, they committed the gravest sin of all: they’ve somehow made getting slimed boring! (Probably because it happens constantly with almost no variations, but that’s just a guess)
Obviously, as a ‘90s Kid/Millennial, I’m gonna be much more knowledgeable about the Nicktoons library than these younger contestants by definition, but regardless, this whole debacle gave me inspiration: I could easily make a fanfiction version of this show, but with more Nicktoons to use, and harder-by-default questions! I’ll call it Tooned In: Genius Edition!
However, I’m gonna need your help in turning this fanfic idea into a fanfic reality! Sure, I could start typing out the “pilot episode” of sorts right now, complete with three contestants of my own, but that would just result in me pretty much playing with myself (innuendo not intended), and I’d rather share my knowledge rather than just show it off. So here’s what I’m thinking: I would like you to become the contestants that I, roleplaying as the robotic host Nicky (uncreative name, I know), will quiz and slime! Personally, I’d rather interact with one person at a time rather than having to deal with three people all at once, so the only requirement I ask of you is for you to provide me three original characters to act as contestants (the quirkier, the better!), even if you have to make ‘em up on the spot (or just have two OC contestants and have the third player be a fictionalized version of yourself). I’d even be fine with Expies of preexisting characters (just not the actual characters themselves, since Celebrity Editions of game shows never end well. After all, look what happened to the second/final season of the Double Dare revival!)! We’ll play by participating in a back-and-forth email chain (or note chain, or whatever else), and once it’s all over, the whole thing will get turned into a fanfiction posted right here, exclusively on DeviantArt!
If you’re at all interested in playing Tooned In: Genius Edition, then let me know by commenting on this journal entry, sending me a DA note, or emailing me through either redhead64@chartermi.net or itsredhead64@gmail.com if you so wish. Personally, I’m rather excited by this whole thing, so I hope to hear from at least one of you guys soon!
MY PATREON SUPPORTERS
DETAILS ON COMMISSIONS AND ART TRADES THAT I'M ALWAYS OPEN FOR
Oh, hey, I got the embed to work properly this time! That's a good sign!
OTHER PERSONAL PAGES
My Patreon Page
My "Square Root of Minus Garfield" Strips
MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
Grant Fikes' Cleverly Titled Puzzle Blog
Muller Monthly Music Meta-Crossword
THE END-OF-ENTRY QUOTE
"More mess and gak when we come back! Don't you Double Dare go anywhere!"
— Doc Holliday, the second announcer of Family Double Dare
Geez, has it really been over a year since I last wrote a full-fledged journal entry like this one? It must've been, since the only personal jottings I've written since then on DA were quickie twee-- I mean, "status updates", that I'm not sure a good chunk of my followers even look at to begin with. And oddly enough, the topic of my previous journal entry was about me having an animation of mine being shown at the end of an episode of the annual horror comic-focused webseries Longbox of the Damned, and so is this one! However, whereas I was pretty amped up about me winning that contest last year, this year......... well, truth be told, I'm kinda struggling to feel much of anything this time around, and I'm not entirely sure why.
Let's get the obvious suspect out of the way first: the apparent lack of attention this animation has gotten me. It's been a few days/nights since I won this year's LOTD contest, and seeing as I spent a little over two weeks working on it from beginning to end, I was kinda hoping for more faves on the DA version than what I've ultimately got so far, which is the exact same amount that I got for last year's entry: two (or three, if you also include the version I uploaded to YouTube). Yeah, yeah, I know that the number of faves I get for my deviations tend to be all over the place, ranging from a goose egg to well over 100, and I also know that the amount of work put into a certain deviation doesn't always translate into an equivalent amount of positive response (Magnum Opus Dissonance is a thing, after all), but it's still rather deflating to have not much acknowledgement on something after you worked so long and hard on it.
Of course, maybe it's not that, and complaining about a certain deviation not getting many faves like I've been seemingly doing is, quite frankly, pretty pathetic. The amount of faves I may get shouldn't be the main factor in why I create art, and one should create whatever one feels like.......... except that I've seemingly fallen into an artistic slump as of late, and I don't particularly feel like drawing/creating anything at the moment, let alone think of something I might feel like making. Heck, it's roughly halfway through October, and I still haven't begun work on this month's commission I was supposed to do for @B-masterAnimation (the fact that our relationship is starting to go sour -- due to personal reasons which I don't feel like disclosing to the online public quite yet -- hasn't exactly helped matters, either). What's worse, I don't particularly feel like doing anything at all whatsoever, and that seems rather troubling to me.
You see, I've always struggled with self-motivation for quite a long while, dating back to when my teenage self made multiple DA journal entries complaining about a lack of motivation (don't bother looking for them; they're all long gone from this site). But now, when I'm in my early thirties, it just feels..... different somehow. Not only have I still not fully recovered from the flood that hit my house last May (for starters, my house is still getting worked on, months after the fact), I've had genuine bouts of flat-out depression since those teenage days (to the point of even having suicidal thoughts, though thankfully, I've never even attempted acting upon them), and even though I'm taking medication for that, I fear that I still have some symptoms of that emotion lingering around in me, especially difficulty focusing, being fatigued (both physically, as well as being tired of all the feces going on in the world), and worst of all, losing interest in doing things I used to enjoy, and not feeling like doing anything as a result.
Well, whatever the reason is, I would very much appreciate it if you would take the time to leave any feedback you may have through a comment to this journal entry, or you can even contact me personally through a note through here on DeviantArt, or even email me through redhead64@chartermi.net or itsredhead64@gmail.com if you so wish. In the meantime, I'll provide some links to that animation of mine on the off-chance you haven't gotten around to seeing it yet:
LOTD episode with my winning animation: https://youtu.be/kXLJIyPKC
Full version of my animation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JxprMN95A
Silent GIF version of my animation on DeviantArt: Right here!
![Dot Divider #1 Red [F2U]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/0f92c582-5de5-4807-af64-13c5f36b40a5/dcme56k-f8cac7ed-9939-4158-b373-b3e5f0d5e17b.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzBmOTJjNTgyLTVkZTUtNDgwNy1hZjY0LTEzYzVmMzZiNDBhNVwvZGNtZTU2ay1mOGNhYzdlZC05OTM5LTQxNTgtYjM3My1iM2U1ZjBkNWUxN2IucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.FbyJRjURoI_HQa6NfumFpb1qsWv7gGqWtJs475df5tA){kind=small}
MY PATREON SUPPORTERS
@GLmathgrant
@B-masterAnimation
DETAILS ON COMMISSIONS AND ART TRADES THAT I'M ALWAYS OPEN FOR
This is the first time I'm doing a journal entry through DeviantArt Eclipse's "Journal" Tab, and every time I try to embed any sort of deviation to this post, the formatting goes all screwy, and the end of every paragraph loses a couple letters, which proved really annoying when it comes to the random weblinks underneath here. Great job breaking what was perfectly fine once again, Eclipse! 
So I guess I'll have to resort to linking to my commission guidelines through a text link instead:
"Details on Commissions!"
OTHER PERSONAL PAGES
My Patreon Page
My "Square Root of Minus Garfield" Strips
MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
Grant Fikes' Cleverly Titled Puzzle Blog
Muller Monthly Music Meta-Crossword
THE END-OF-ENTRY QUOTE
"We've won... Somehow I don't feel like celebrating."
— Chrom, from Fire Emblem Awakening
Yeah! Redhead's a Winner!
Erm... okay, I should probably explain why I'm so excited, so here's some background behind all this: In the middle of last August, Linkara (the creator of video webseries such as Atop the Fourth Wall and History of Power Rangers) began accepting entries for his annual "Longbox of the Damned Bumper Contest". For those who don't watch any of Linkara's shows on YouTube, Longbox (or LOTD for short) is an annual series that airs every day in October where its host, a hammy ghoul named Moarte, looks at a different horror-themed comic book in each episode. The contest being held for it asked viewers to create "bumpers" for it, or short video clips that'll be attached to the end of every episode.
Now, this was the fourth time that he's held this type of contest, but this year's was different: I've actually had motivation to enter it this time! I came up with a couple ideas I could've used for my animation, but since I'm still a relative newbie at that, I ultimately settled on doing an animation style that seemed fairly easy to me: digital paper cutout animation, which I had a little prior experience with when I made the standalone Loud House fanart "Those Two-Piecers Can Be Vicious". I fired up my long-obsolete copies of Macromedia Fireworks and Flash, worked on it for a few days, and uploaded the final product to YouTube in early September. If you haven't seen my clip yet, you can see it on YouTube through this link, or you can watch the original Flash file by clicking the image below:
After uploading the clip, I quickly sent my entry to Linkara, and he acknowledged that he got it by sending a personalized email back to me! Now all I had to do was wait until October rolled around! Once it did, it only took a few episodes to get posted until last night, when my animation successfully managed to get included at the end of his newest video! If you want to view the full episode with my work in it, you can do so RIGHT HERE! (Just beware that the comic covered in that episode is part six of a series Moarte has talked about in previous years, so it's not exactly beginner-friendly...)
And as it turns out, that wasn't the only big thing that happened yesterday: I got a new tablet! And it comes with a snazzy new pen, too, which'll be perfect for my art! It's so new, that the Best Buy employee who sold it to me said it just came out exactly one week ago! So why did I shell out big bucks for a new tablet when the old one is still perfectly functional? Well, you see, I've had a tablet since 2014 or so, and it's been showing its age for quite a bit. Recently, the pen that I was using decided that it didn't feel like working properly anymore, so now there's annoyances like the pen thinking it's touching the screen, when in reality, it's just hovering over it! Now, I've already replaced that pen twice before, and I didn't want to pay for a third pen for a tablet that's no longer being made, so I decided it's time to upgrade the whole dang thing! And that's exactly what I did! Just so you know, I'll still keep the old tablet around (seeing as some of my mobile games on there have save data that I don't know how to transfer over), but the new tablet is going to take priority from now on, especially when it comes to drawing!
Well, that's all I've got at the moment, but before I sign off, I'd like to remind you all that my 100th Deviation should be coming up pretty shortly, so look forward to that! Yeah, yeah, I know that my front page says that I already have over 100 deviations, but I counted all the pictures in my gallery and there's only 98 of them as I type this, so there! (I think perhaps DA is including these journal entries in that list, but I'm not entirely sure.....)
MY PATREON SUPPORTERS
GLmathgrant
.....and no one else on DA! Mind correcting that and helping me out? If not, you can always suggest some new art-related tiers that I could add to my Patreon page, which you could then sign up for!
DETAILS ON COMMISSIONS AND ART TRADES THAT I'M ALWAYS OPEN FOR
Details on Commissions!Boy, begging and pleading at the end of the text portions of all my most recent deviations must've worked, because I've actually got someone to commission me! Now that I've completed my very first commission, I've updated my Patreon page to include my artwork in addition to the puzzles I make at my puzzle blog. So for future reference, here's a few basic rules on how these commissions will work going forward:
Each commission costs only $6 (Cheap!) or 600points (Also cheap!) for single images; $12 (or 1200
OTHER PERSONAL PAGES
My Patreon Page
My Puzzle Blog
My GameSpot ProfileMy Fanfiction.net Account
My Kongregate Account
My Last.FM Account
My "My Anime List" List
My PlayStation Trophies
My "Square Root of Minus Garfield" Strips
My TV Tropes Page
MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
Buzzerblog
Buzzr TV
Conceptis Puzzles
Equestria Daily
Grandmaster Puzzles
Grant Fikes' Cleverly Titled Puzzle Blog
Griddlers Net
The Griddle
Internet Movie Database
Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest (subscription required)
Muller Monthly Music Meta-Crossword
My Nintendo
Wikipedia
THE END-OF-ENTRY QUOTE
"Heh-heh-heh, I won! ♪ I won, I wooo-ooon! I-won-I-won-I-wooo-ooon! ♪"
— Wario, Mario Power Tennis
Self-Promotion Problems
Clearly, I need to promote myself better, since my current strategy of "throwing art into the vast ocean of DeviantArt and hoping for the best" is turning out to be wildly inconsistent in terms of results. On one hand, some of my pieces of art have been very successful by my standards, particularly my Loud House fanart ("Luan and Lucy" and "Blanket Memories" currently have over fifty and eighty faves, respectively). On the other hand, the fave count for other deviations get stuck in the single digits and teens, and two of them (depicting video game characters from Lemmings and Cel Damage) currently have no faves at all!
Okay, I can kinda see why no one would care for the first pic (seeing as the Lemmings title she comes from is a crappy dumbed-down mobile game that I highly doubt any people here play), but the other one? She's a sexy/cute demon girl!!! Posted on a site infamous for its kinks and Fetish Fuel!! Why has absolutely no one faved it yet?!?!
Er, sorry, got a bit off-track there... Anyhoo, I guess the point I'm making is that I have no idea how to make my stuff more visible! The obvious solution would be to join some sort of social media site and post my stuff there, but that plan's clearly not gonna work when I steadfastly refuse to join any major social media site (especially not too-big-for-its-own-good Facebook or Twa-- er, Twitter), so that's clearly not an option.
I could also keep making and posting Loud House stuff, since that seems to be the most popular out of my work, but here's the thing: I don't want to be reduced to making only pictures of Loud House characters; I'd rather branch out and make other types of deviations in addition to that! You see, the "64" in my username comes from the Nintendo 64, which obviously means that I really like video games, yet none of my video game-related art has made much of an impact so far... Dangit, the sheer amount of faves my Loud House fanart managed to get have really spoiled me and messed up my way of thinking...
Speaking of fanart, I just realized something... save for a couple exceptions, I've done nothing but fanart and art of other peoples' characters since returning to this site! Sure, the faves for those two exceptions are also pretty low (one of them only has two so far), but regardless, I think I need to branch out away from just doing fanart if I want to solve this problem, and I believe the best way to do that is by creating original characters! And I mean actually original characters; not Sonic-style recolors or "people that have just moved to Royal Woods"-type OCs. I already have a few new characters to create in mind... heck, I imagined up enough characters to serve as the basis for an entire webcomic! I haven't come up with a name for this currently-theoretical comic yet, but it'll be about five women from five different decades (from the 1950s to the '90s) living together in the present day. I'll probably start by making full-body portraits of these ladies, so I hope you'll look forward to it!
Boy, this entry seemed to go all over the place, didn't it? Well, whatever; this entry's starting to get too long, so I'm gonna stop here. If you have any thoughts on anything that I just typed out, please let me know in the comments, or send me a message. In the meantime, here's everything that I always put at the end of these journal entries!
MY PATREON SUPPORTERS
GLmathgrant
DETAILS ON COMMISSIONS AND ART TRADES THAT I'M ALWAYS OPEN FOR
Details on Commissions!Boy, begging and pleading at the end of the text portions of all my most recent deviations must've worked, because I've actually got someone to commission me! Now that I've completed my very first commission, I've updated my Patreon page to include my artwork in addition to the puzzles I make at my puzzle blog. So for future reference, here's a few basic rules on how these commissions will work going forward:
Each commission costs only $6 (Cheap!) or 600
OTHER PERSONAL PAGES
My Patreon Page
My Puzzle Blog
My GameSpot ProfileMy Fanfiction.net Account
My Kongregate Account
My Last.FM Account
My "My Anime List" List
My PlayStation Trophies
My "Square Root of Minus Garfield" Strips
My TV Tropes Page
MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
Buzzerblog
Buzzr TV
Conceptis Puzzles
Equestria Daily
Grandmaster Puzzles
Grant Fikes' Cleverly Titled Puzzle Blog
Griddlers Net
The Griddle
Internet Movie Database
Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest (subscription required)
Muller Monthly Music Meta-Crossword
My Nintendo
Wikipedia
THE END-OF-ENTRY QUOTE
Rat: "It is finished! The book that will change the world!! Behold, world... My gift to thee!"
World: "Meh."
- Pearls Before Swine strip for April 13th, 2014
How Do I Improve My Patreon Page?
.....
Wait, what?! That last bit's not good at all! Clearly, I need to beef up the DeviantArt-related half of my Patreon page! This'll be tricky, since my Patreon was originally made solely for "Redhead64's Obscure Puzzle Blog" (where I create and post a new word puzzle for people to solve every Monday), and even though I expanded that page's scope to include DA stuff, it's become increasingly clear that there's next-to-no overlap between the audiences for that blog and right here on DA. However, since I'm not going to double-dip and make a separate Patreon page just for my artwork, I guess I have no choice but to provide better tiers related to my deviations.
Now, I've already changed the $6 "single image" and $12 "comic" tiers so that people who sign up for those can now request me on a monthly basis (rather than a "plz sign up for a lower tier after I get paid, kthx" type of system), and I've also altered the main $1 tier so that DA members who sign up for that (or a higher tier) are now listed on journal entries like these as thanks. Access to select deviations with no watermarks or Patreon URLs has been bumped up to a minimum of $2 a month, and a new tier has been added where, for $3 or more a month, you gain access to sketches and other works-in-progress of any future and upcoming Deviations.
Now that's all a good starting point, but are there any other art-related tiers I could add? Well, besides "timed exclusives" or "Patreon-only pics"? I don't want to resort to either of those, but I'm fresh out of ideas for what else to do! So if you're reading this and would like to help, send me a note or comment on this entry with any ideas for additional tiers that you may have! (with an optional suggestion for how much it'll cost, if you so wish)
That's all I've got at the moment, so I'm going to end this entry with all the usual end-of-entry stuff!
MY PATREON SUPPORTERS
GLmathgrant
OTHER PERSONAL PAGES
My Patreon Page
My Puzzle Blog
My GameSpot ProfileMy Fanfiction.net Account
My Kongregate Account
My Last.FM Account
My "My Anime List" List
My PlayStation Trophies
My "Square Root of Minus Garfield" Strips
My TV Tropes Page
MISCELLANEOUS LINKS
Buzzerblog
Buzzr TV
Conceptis Puzzles
Equestria Daily
Grandmaster Puzzles
Grant Fikes' Cleverly Titled Puzzle Blog
Griddlers Net
The Griddle
Internet Movie Database
Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest (subscription required)
Muller Monthly Music Meta-Crossword
My Nintendo
Wikipedia
THE END-OF-ENTRY QUOTE
"You double-dipped the chip! [...] That's like putting your whole mouth right in the dip!"
- Timmy, from the Seinfeld episode "The Implant"