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R1665

Age 40, Male

Kentucky, USA

Joined on 2/17/08

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R1665's News

Posted by R1665 - May 8th, 2016


Well, Pico Day has come and gone.  As I write this, there are likely still people at the office partying it up.  I, however, have just finished the 11-hour drive back to Kentucky.  I'm ready to take a double-shot of NyQuil, pass out, and enjoy the final few days of the vacation week I had set aside for this

This was my first Pico Day and it was quite a bit more than I had expected.  I'm normally not too great with large social gatherings so it was a bit overwhelming.  I had never met any of these people in person before and really only knew a handful of them by reputation.  All of which was far greater than my own.  I might be able to animate the shit out of some sprites, but right then I was surrounded by some real top talent.  Lots of animators, musicians, voice actors, and other people of great ability talking about a myriad of different subjects about which I had little to nothing to say.  So, a lot of my time at the beginning was just wandering around looking at things and trying not to look like too much of a dope.

I definitely got the sense that I DESPERATELY need to learn how to draw something.  It's kind of hard to be asked what you do and not be able to show an immediate example.  "Sprite animator" is not exactly the kind of answer I want to give in that situation.  Especially when I haven't done anything to warrant recognition over the last few years.

Still, despite my awkwardness, everyone there was SUPER COOL.  I chatted up @TomFulp a few times and I must give him props for being a spectacular host.  I know crazy events like Pico Day have to be a major strain and he handles it like a fucking champ.

Anyway, it took me a little while to find a groove.  But that groove did come.

I met and chatted with a whole lot of awesome people and I won't get into all the details here.  Not trying to write a book.  I will say that I definitely look forward to doing this again.  Next time, though, I'll be much better prepared...


Oh, and also...

VGE4 SCREENSHOT!

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The fighters are finally revealed and I promise that this will be like nothing you've ever seen before.

Time for me to get to work!

(...after a good night's sleep, of course.  I'm fuuuuuuuuuucking exhausted...)

R1665


Posted by R1665 - March 10th, 2016


Okay, so...  I've decided to go to Newgrounds HQ for Pico Day weekend.  @MysticSkillz talked me into it...

That's right.  An irrelevant sprite animator who hasn't had a major action release since 2011 will be making the trip to Philadelphia in a sad attempt to rekindle a defunct animation hobby.  I mean, who gives a shit, right?  We all know that web series like the VG Exiles fall off the radar and get lost.  After four and a half years of a bad partnership and lots of hype with little substance, what good could possibly...

.

. .

. . .

. . . .

. . . . .


BOOM!  FUCKING SCREENSHOT!

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Yes, that is a three-story-tall dragon with a kunai jammed into its snout.  Boy, does he look pissed...

After four and a half years of delays and sidetracks, VG Exiles Episode 4 is finally happening.  At this moment, I have ten seconds' worth of choreo to do before the end of the fight.  That's it.  Ten more seconds and this half-a-decade-in-the-making fight will come to an end.

Now, I still have a long way to go.  Finishing move, scripting, voices, story scenes, lip synching (yes, I said "lip synching"), and all that.  I very highly doubt that this will be ready for upload by the beginning of May, but I can most certainly have the fight section spit-polished and ready to pimp out by then.  Maybe it can show up on the Pico Day stream.  Maybe not.  Maybe I can just screen the fight for those in attendance...

At the very least, it should keep @Tom Fulp distracted long enough for me to swipe some office supplies.

So...  see you guys in Philly, maybe?

R1665


Posted by R1665 - January 16th, 2016


I'm back in school now.  I've become a non-traditional student at the local tech college and I'm pursuing a diploma in HVAC.  I guess this is what happens when your life turns sour and you decide that enough is enough.  You make drastic changes.

Now, one might think that going back to school would leave less time for animating.  That might be true in later semesters, but right now this has turned into a major boon for VGE4.  I have a solid two-hour block between the end of my latest class and the time I have to roll into work.  That is time that I have dedicated to animating and it has been amazingly helpful.  I've been getting way more done in the college library than at my own desk at home.

I just go in, find an isolated spot in a corner somewhere, and animate on my laptop.  It's quiet and there aren't any distractions.  Just me and Flash.  Getting stuff done.

Anyway, just thought I'd give you guys a small update.  I had kind of stalled over the last month with my animations, but this new block of dedicated time is reinvigorating me.  I might need to start going there on my off days just for the productivity boost.  It's way easier to get stuff done when you're not at your home computer being distracted by games, food, YouTube, alcohol, a bed five feet away, and porn.

So...  yeah.  VGE4 is coming.  No release date in mind, but it's being worked on.

R1665

 

. . .

 

...and fuck you, Carl.


Posted by R1665 - November 30th, 2015


After two embarrassingly long years, the RANDOM SELECT COLLAB is finally done!

Check it out!

- - - - -

I am grateful to everyone who took part.  They exhibited extreme patience with my ...delays... over the last two years and I cannot thank them enough -  MysticSkillz, Ills10, HeartlessKarma, and weyden.

You guys are awesome!

...and it feels good to finally be back.

R1665

(Oh, and, of course, fuck CE-Rap.)


Posted by R1665 - November 2nd, 2015


Time for some real talk, people.

Among my strongest character flaws is a tendency towards wrath.  I'm the guy who will happily burn down an entire village just to get back at one douche living in it.  Looking back on these last four years, I wish I were enlightened enough to walk away.  I wish I were zen enough to view it as a learning experience and move on.  That's definitely something I need to work on.

For now, however, I'll just have to settle for smashing CE-Rap in the nuts with a sledgehammer.  Here we go.

- - - - -

Way back in the olden days on 2011, I was stuck in a very troublesome predicament.  I had just parted ways (amicably) with 3XStudios, the man behind the artwork of VG Exiles 1 and 2.  We had both agreed that the professional separation was for the best, but I still had no artist.  I still had no way to bring a non-sprite detailed story into a sprite movie.  I couldn't draw worth a crap and was left with an unfinished VG Exiles 3.

Then, CE-Rap came along.  We hammered out VGE3 and formed a strong professional relationship.  Well, as professional as it gets for hobby work.

...and looking back on it, it didn't take long for things to start sliding downhill.  Because artwork was such a time-consuming and difficult thing to do for free (the series made absolutely no money and I'm poor), I was very receptive to any ideas he would bring to the table.  If he wanted to put something in, he pretty much got it every time.  My reasoning was that it's entirely too much work to heap on somebody without giving them some creative control.

Unfortunately, he started abusing that control.

It started as minor changes - stuff that hadn't been scripted and finished already on VGE3.  A change in attitude here, a planned character use there.  When he discovered that I never actually had a plan for the series but rather made it all up as I went along, he wasted no time writing out an entire series plotline.  It was this giant, convoluted "lore-heavy" saga that extended from ten years before the current team to however the fuck long it would end up being in the end.  He kept established canon in mind as much as he could, but he wrote a hundred times what could ever be displayed in the video format.

Eventually, the plot changed so much that it became necessary to scrap the entire series and start over.  I resisted at first, but once again cowed to the dozens of seemingly rational arguments he had in favor of that action.

You see, Rap was a manipulator.  He was a silver-tongued bullshitter who knew how to talk his way in and out of any situation with lawyerly precision.  He saw (and even described) himself as a super quick-witted guy who was always forty steps ahead of whoever he was working with.  He was above.  He was advanced.  He always felt that other people were too slow for him and he eventually realized the problem was that he was so fucking brilliant that "normal" people couldn't keep up.  He was always the smartest motherfucker in the room and could make no mistakes.  He could work out all the possible future consequences of an action, and therefore always knew the best route.  Not just "knew", KNEW.  Uppercase.  He was the professional.  He was the head-down-eyes-forward-self-driven-uber-rhino-badass and he KNEW WHAT THE FUCK WAS UP.  He was FOR REAL.  He was UP FRONT.  He DOES NOT BULLSHIT.  (...and his real name is "Carl", not "Carlito" as he claims.  Because obviously the first personal detail you're going to learn about him is complete and utter bullshit.)

Now, you take a guy like that who lives up his own asshole and partner him with somebody like me.

I've been told that I write with an air of "authority".  It creates the impression that I'm more knowledgeable, assertive, and confident than I really am.  People who know me IRL know that's not the case at all.  I'm insecure as fuck.  I constantly second-guess myself.  I look for flaws in my own reasoning and I am acccommodating to a well-reasoned counter-position.  I value being wrong.  I value being mistaken.  This makes me vulnerable to bullshitters and manipulators.  I've been taken advantage of a few times because of it.

...and THAT'S where I've been for the last few years - in CE-Rap's World of Bullshit.

The original Exiles canon was the first to go.  It had to be rebooted to meet Rap's new story.  We worked through a good 75% of the fight scene for a brand-new VG Exiles Episode 0. (or rather "1" this time.)  We swapped Ken out for a souped-up version of Vice from KOF.  We changed the setting.  We changed the setup and the story.  We did custom spriting.  Everything was looking good.

Then Hurricane Sandy happened and Rap disappeared.  While he was gone, I created FAILtality 2 and stuck his name on it.  I organized the Random Select Collab with other fine animators.  I started up new solo projects knowing that everything would have to go on the back burner when he returned.

...and go on the back burner they did.

It wasn't long after Rap's return that we got back to work.  He was a big Captain America fan and had to make himself part of the Random Select Collab after learning that I had drawn Cap and the Hulk.  We spent a few months putting that together before stopping at around 75%.  (Never to be completed...)

You see, Rap now had a slick new plan - making money.  Advertising.  Sponsorships.  Partnerships.  YouTube revenue.  Making a living off this, son!  Doing this for money!  (Some of you might be seeing the flaws in this already and you are 100% fucking right.  More on that later.)

Nooooowwwwww, The VG Exiles reboot was no longer good enough.  The Exiles is copyrighted by Marvel.  The sprites, sounds, and music we use are also third-party owned.  If we were going to monitize this, we had to eliminate all of the copyrighted material.  It had to be "our" series.  So we could sell the fuck out of it.

XEUS WAS BORN.

Xeus was a once-again rewritten version of the VG Exiles with all-new content.  It was still based on video game characters, but those featured were amalgamations of already existing ones.  Take Jon Talbain, mix him up with some Ifrit from Final Fantasy, some whatever the fuck from Skyrim, give him fire powers, and call him SOVENSBANE.  Take Stryker, mix him up with some Solid Snake, some Stargate, make him a couple of decades older, and call him JACKSON.

That kind of shit.

Needless to say, this turned a relatively simple flash series into a nightmarish clusterfuck requiring custom EVERYTHING and the next two decades to produce.  That would take money.  Lots of money.

Fortunately, we had a mutual contact in California.  This guy had gotten into the toy business and was doing pretty well for himself.  You know, the kind of business that Rap could latch onto like a leech and suck dry for support money while we went around selling our Xeus humunculus to any internet group who would show it and pay us.

He wanted us to move out there and get started CREATING THE FUTURE.  By this time, he had me hook, line, and sinker.  Full assortment of stars in my eyes.  I was ready to commit to the great California Quest!

...buuuuuuuuut he wasn't.  He was still neck-deep in shit from Hurricane Sandy.  I was eight hundred miles away in Kentucky.  What could I possibly do?

Well, I could rent a large SUV, drive all the way to New York, pick up him and his stuff, drive everything back to Kentucky, and let him move in with me.  ...and that's exactly what I fucking did.  Because I'm an idiot.

August - December 2014.

Rent free.  Utility free.  I'm buying his groceries.  I'm buying his metric ton of cleaning supplies.  I've given him a cell phone and now I'm paying to put minutes on the thing.  I upgrade my cable internet to the best possible speed so he can stream hi-def videos while he does whatever the fuck he does all day instead of watching DVD's like a more considerate person might.  I'm paying extra for his subsequent data overages.  I'm working in a warehouse.  So... needless to say...  I'm going broke.  He's not paying for shit.  He deeply regrets not paying for shit.  Wait, scratch that.  He deeply regrets that I CAN'T HAVE A PAYMENT AT THE MOMENT.  Not that he can't pay.  There's a difference.  The former is a "gift" he can't give, but shouldn't be expected to.  The latter is his failing and fuck knows he's not gonna word it like that.  Because lawyer.

By that time, Xeus had been put on the back burner as well.  Mortal Kombat X was due to drop in April, so we had to drop everything and do FAILtality 3.  With FAILtality being easily the most successful thing I had ever done, Rap felt that releasing one on the heels of MKX would propel us forward and get the ball rolling for the California move.  That's right.  His plan was literally

FAILTALITY 3

??????

PROFIT.

I mean, how the fuck else were we going to get out to the west coast?  Rap certainly hadn't shown any ability or desire to carry his own weight, so where was this miraculous windfall of money coming from?  We didn't know, but Rap ASSURED me that it would all work out.  All we had to do was take this extremely complicated set of FAIL scripts we had written and cram eight months of work into an impossible five.  ...and when I say "impossible", I mean literally fucking impossible.  I did the math.  He gave no fucks.  We just had to make the attempt - even if it meant working for five solid months with no real breaks and 1.5 hours of sleep a night.  Unpaid.

So there I am - slowly losing my bank account.  Working a production schedule in which he gets to tell me when to work on flash and when to go to bed between my normal work shifts (which are paying all the fucking bills).  I have a manipulative, egocentric, (and I suspect sociopathic) prick setting the rules in MY FUCKING HOME.  All in the name of "brotherhood".  Rap was the BOSS.  He had made himself so.  (Hell, no sooner had we decided on the name Rhino Rex Studios that he appointed himself as the CEO of the "company".)

By this time, I had lost complete control of absolutely everything.  In my desire to make him feel welcome both in my flash projects and in my home, I had surrendered the captain's chair.  My desire to give him creative control for his hard work was not reciprocated.  If I didn't like an idea, I was "not seeing the bigger picture" or "not imaginative enough" or "not really committed".  If I wanted "my" idea done, I had to argue against his counter-idea that he had already built a giant tapestry of support for and could argue with his usual manipulative lawyer bullshit.

By the time Christmas rolled around, I was done.  I was out.  I officially walked away.

...and he stayed.

For the NEXT SEVEN MONTHS he continued living rent-free in my home.  I didn't have the heart to kick him out.  By his own statements, doing so would result in him going back to a Hurricane Sandy relief shelter and living in squalor.

...and still he remained controlling and manipulative.  He ruled the roost.  I continued going broke.  I eventually had to stop buying his food because I couldn't afford it.  I couldn't afford decent food for myself, either (the positive upshot of this was that I turned it into a weight loss game and dropped fifty pounds).

I went through multiple mental and emotional breakdowns.  I would have these moments of lucidity and fire off an angry email, but I was always willing to be walked back into the fog by his silver-tongued lawyer bullshit.  Our personal relationship rapidly deteriorated.  We eventually reached a point where we couldn't even interact (except for that one time where he blew up his own fucking computer and spent three hours dressing me down for it).

The end finally came one night when he knocked on my bedroom door and asked me to clean the kitchen.  I flatly refused.  An argument began.  It escalated.  I went to shut the door between us and he shoved his way in.  At this point I'm just repeatedly telling him to get the fuck out of my room.  Then he puts his hands on me.  That kind of "arm touching yeah-whatever-dude" male dominance bullshit.  I shove him.  He comes back and now we're nose-to-nose UFC style about to come to blows.  I tell him to take his swing.  All the reason I need to throw his ass out of my home.  After many more angry words he finally walks out, determined to use whatever legal recourse he can get to remain in my home, including paying part of my rent so he becomes a "tenant" and must be formally evicted.

Thankfully for me, my landlord and her husband live one floor beneath me and heard everything.

The next morning, I'm looking into eviction possibilities and Rap comes at me with the whole "we BOTH went too far" line of bullshit.  If ever there was a time for him to stand up and admit he was wrong about something important, that was it.  And he failed.

As it turns out, you don't have to actually strike somebody to be charged with assault.  Him pushing his way into my room was assault.  Him putting his hands on me was assault.  His nose-to-nose escalation was assault.  He did it and I had witnesses.

Interesting tidbit - when you give somebody the option of GTFO or go to jail, people tend to GTFO.

Now, he's gone.  His shit is gone.  My home is mine.  My future is mine.  ...and if there's anything in this universe resembling cosmic justice, CE-Rap will spend the next twenty years chewing a tunnel through the base of Shit Mountain.

- - - - -

That grand finale happened back in July and I've been struggling to get back on my feet ever since.  I'm fighting like hell to come back to flash, as it was pretty much the only thing I ever did that amounted to anything.  I've decided that I'm not going to let this mooching fuckhole ruin the only good thing I ever did.  That said, I am un-cancelling the VG Exiles.  It will return.  Just not in the same form it would have taken with Rap and most definitely not soon.  I need to perfect the art of sprite-based storytelling and be able to do the entire thing on my own if need be.

To that end, I am going to finish some older back-burnered projects while getting started on my brand new series.  It will be hugely story-driven and will help me build the skills I need to bring back the VG Exiles on my own.

I'm a brand new man, now.  I'm the Captain.  Time to take back my ship.

R1665

(This is, of course, the abridged version.  There is a LOT more.  Some of it WAY worse. I will answer any questions that I feel I am able.  I will also post a link to this journal in every future journal I do until I get tired of trashing CE-Rap's already beshitted reputation.  Why?  because fuck you, Carl.  That's why.)


Posted by R1665 - June 11th, 2015


I should have written this entry months ago.

I don't know why I've been putting this off.  The fact is that I have had a really hard time animating as of late.  For various reasons, a lot of the joy I used to take in the process has been largely sucked out.  I'm not dead yet, but I'm far from healthy.  At this point, I feel that talking about it a bit might help me get back on my feet.

CE-Rap and I have gone our separate ways creatively and now I'm back to working on my own.  The events that led to me walking away are largely responsible for my current state of demotivation.  Long story short, my joyful hobby became a tortuous "professional" effort.  I surrendered my control and became little more than a tool, trying to meet other peoples standards, schedules, and expectations.  I realize now that such "professional" attitudes are a kiss of death for the hobbyist.  The more disciplined results might have looked better, but what good is having a better product if you have to sell your soul to get it?  Once the joy is gone, nothing else matters.  You might as well just be putting in more hours at your shitty day job.

Anyway, I'm done with partnerships for a while.  For the forseeable future, everything I do I will have to be able to do on my own.

Exiles is still dead.  Even if it hadn't already been reworked into oblivion, I still cannot produce it anymore.  I don't have the artistic talent necessary to continue from where VGE3 left off.  It's just too much of a production.

That does not mean that everything that had been planned for the Exiles must necessarily be scrapped.  The whole thing about the Exiles was that I could produce fights between whatever characters I wanted and I could have a multiverse angle to stitch it all together storywise.  Now that the whole Exiles premise it toast, I'm simply going to take some of those badass matchups I had planned and do them as one-shot stories.  Sooooo... single-serve badass fights that would have existed anyway with the Exiles, only in a more streamlined form.

Now that my involvement in the Sentinel Destruction Collab 2 is over, I will prioritize the Random Select Collab.  (The original entry I had for that was a joint effort with Rap and now unusable.)  I must animate a new scene for that.  That won't take long if I can find a groove with it.  ...hopefully.

After that's caught up, the immediate future will be about getting some closure on other unfinished business.  As of this moment, I have multiple unfinished projects.  Those that CE-Rap and I worked heavily on together shall forever remain in the vault.  However, I still have three fights of my own that have significant progress made and require only to be finished.

After that, the one-shots.  Possibly intermixed with a new series I have in mind to replace the VG Exiles.  More on that later.

Anyway, that's the situation for better or worse.  I would appreciate any motivation or encouragement you guys could send my way.  I have a long trek ahead of me and my shoes are already worn out.

R1665


Posted by R1665 - February 2nd, 2015


As many of you already know, I will be taking part in TechLeSSWaYz' second Sentinel Destruction Collab! ...and since I can't seem to get SHIT done otherwise, I might as well put everything I got into it.

I've been in a real funk for a while and getting back into regular animation is proving to be a lot harder than I thought it would be.  Burnout is a bitch.  Still, I am slowly dragging myself back up from the pit.  It's a day-by-day thing.

Soooooo... once I've rekindled my animating spirit with this collab, I intend to finish up the Random Select Collab (at last), and then perhaps put in some work on a few older unfinished projects.  I'm not making any definite or long-term plans just yet.  Not ready for it.

So... yeah...
 

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R1665


Posted by R1665 - May 21st, 2014


Well... it's May.  The Random Select Collab is now five months or so overdue.  I don't think there's much of a point in keeping things quiet and unsaid.  We're way past that.

The fact is that the RSC, as well as all of our other projects, are at the point in which heavy involvement by CE-Rap is required.  For pretty much all of them, We've been at a full stop for the last several months.  We had enough of a window to collab on my section of the RSC, but that was about it.  The problem is that CE-Rap never really recovered from Hurricane Sandy.  Things continue to be shitty for him.  The result is that our house now looks abandoned - faded paint, piled-up newspapers, waist-high grass, the whole nine yards.  Quite honestly, I'm surprised that people even check this page anymore.

But... there is now some real hope for the future.  No bullshit.

Sometime in June/July, CE-Rap will finally be getting out of New York.  He's moving out.  No more hurricanes.  No more headaches associated with living day-by-day.  He'll be touching down someplace more condusive to our continued joint venture - MY PLACE.

Yep.  You read that right.  We're gonna be roomies.

And THAT is when we will make up for all of the lost time over these last couple of years.  We've got long-term plans, but the short-term is pretty much US PUTTING IN WORK.  We've already got several projects just needing that... little... push.  ...and then the dam will break and there will come a FLOOD of new content.  Those of you who have graciously shown so much patience will see this old house turn into party central real damn quick.

First on the list will be the Random Select Collab.  After all this much wait, that's gotta be priority one.  After that, we got multiple tracks we can follow covering multiple genres and formats.  Exiles may be gone, but I think everybody will appreciate the glut of quality material that will be taking its place.

In the meantime, I've decided that no matter what happens, I'm NOT going to be skunked for 2014.  To that end, I've decided to go ahead and fast-track a new "skirmish" sprite mini-series.  Whatever it ends up being, it will center around the action.  Shorter, condensed, rapid-fire.  They may not be the full-length fights of the Exiles and they likely won't have the complex storylines and art production, but they won't take eight months to produce, either.

The drought is nearly over.  Hang in there, folks - storms a-comin'...

R1665


Posted by R1665 - January 25th, 2014


Okay, so no January release for the Random Select Collab.  It would seem that even Mother Nature herself is working against us.  It might seem like a cop-out to blame blizzards and polar vortexes for our production delays, but I'm gonna do it anyway.  We're only a few weeks' worth of work away from having a finished product.  The problem at this time is getting myself and Rap in the same room at the same time to get it done.

That said, please maintain patience.  If you are a collab contributor, please know that your work was not in vain and we WILL get this out - just not as soon as we had hoped.

If you want to pass the time, just watch this in a constant loop until the RSC drops -  

R1665


Posted by R1665 - November 25th, 2013


Just a quick few words since I haven't put up a new post in nearly four months.

The Random Select Collab is still being worked on and we are on schedule for a December-January release. More stuff is in the pipeline and we'll let you know where you can go to check it out.

--------

On a completely unrelated note, I must officially recant any earlier statements I have ever made regarding the suckiness of Steam. Now that I have a good PC capable of playing PC games, Steam has become awesome. Now I'm not only ripping flash resources from games, but I'm actually capable of playing them, too! ...plus the games are cheap. Not bad.

My Xbox has been sitting disconnected for months and the last time I booted up the PS3 was for GTAV. That said, I don't think I'll be going for any of the next-gen consoles, at least not for a long while. It's been a LONG time since I've seen a console exclusive worth buying an entire system for.

So... if you happen to be on Steam and want to add me in the unlikely event that I'm playing the same game as you at the same time as you, my STEAM ID is, of course, "R1665". Maybe we can blow shit up together sometime.

...anyway, in case we don't put up a new news post before then, have a happy Thanksgiving (to those who celebrate it) as well as a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

R1665