About a week ago I posed this question to my Twitter followers:

No one had a good answer to this. In fact, there were zero serious answers. Then again, I was asking Twitter, where you would presumably not be if you had a good answer to this question. But I did get a few "likes" which suggests to me that some people at least agree with the premise that it might not be worth it to be addicted to a website in exchange for the few times a year you hear about something cool.

So today I pose this question to you - is it possible to hear about good new things without having to engage with mind-numbing and addictive internet feeds? If anyone has any ideas, I'd really like to hear them. Here's one idea I came up with:

What if there was something like a Discord server where people recommend art/media, but the requirement is that you're only allowed to post stuff that totally blew your mind? You know, the kind of art that makes you think about it for weeks after, or even changes who you are as a person. To post a recommendation, you'd have to write a few sentences about why you think the work is important, kind of like the write-ups I did on absurdly ambitious art earlier this year, or my favorite Canadian animation before that.

Well, you probably know where this is going by now, so here's the invite link:

https://discord.gg/XZtTtxgE

So if you liked either of those blog posts, come join the fun. Who knows, you could be getting in on a budding cult of personality! Maybe you'll even get the rare opportunity to take some screenshots that get someone cancelled one day! Or you can go around to the three or four people on the internet who remember Peck and say, "yeah, I talk to that guy all the time on Discord."

I'm gonna keep it short because I really just wanted to promote the Discord link. This was originally going to be a whole long-winded essay like I usually do on here, but I changed my mind partway through writing, since the welcome page on the Discord is like six more paragraphs you gotta read anyway. (I mean it! Reading the welcome post is mandatory.) Anyway, here's what the opening paragraph of this blog post used to be. it's kind of cheeky, and I liked it too much to throw away:

Every time I go on Twitter I want to die. This was true even back when Twitter was called Twitter - actually this has been the case for about six years. I've watched the website downgrade year after year, and yet no one seemed to care about this until just recently. Why is it that people are suddenly so sensitive to every little degradation of this one website? What changed? I guess we will never know.

This is genuine advice, though this tutorial sort of goes off the rails about halfway through. I thought that was funny, so I left all that in, mostly:

I stand by the title of this video, but if you feel at all baited by that name, here's a blog post I wrote a few years ago that actually has links to a bunch of free resources:

https://emrox.newgrounds.com/news/post/1000875

That's six years old now, so some of the links may be dead, some of the people may be cancelled, etc etc. But if you want a free art education that less resembles deep focus and introspection and more resembles downloading a whole bunch of pdfs and videos that you'll probably never read/watch, there you go. I would like to do a whole tutorial series someday that outlines my own "best practices" in a little more detail, but until that day comes, have this strange video.

^ I copy-pasted that last paragraph from the youtube description. Father forgive me.

One of the first things I learned in college was a tip from a drawing/animation professor, who advised, in regard to exaggerating poses, to "push it as far as you can, then push it some more, push it just a little further, then take a break, take a walk, get a drink of water, come back and push it a little more." Implicit in this advice was that you were very unlikely to "overdo it" and in practice it was completely true - I almost always erred on the side of stiffness, and when the drawings did break, it wasn't because they were over-exaggerated, it was that the practice of over-exaggerating highlighted the gaps in my understandings of anatomy, construction, and the like. It's a pretty crazy feeling when you try your best to push something too far and yet it ends up being exactly the right amount of "pushed." This happened all the time.

Also helpful in my learning to push drawings were the leading examples of the rare artist who could push a pose or expression well beyond any of their contemporaries. John K is the classic example, real animation nerds know Rod Scribner or Jim Tyer, and REAL animation nerds know this shit. I have a great appreciation for these guys - the people who extend beyond precedent and set the bar for what is possible, just barely palatable to the artists and just barely comprehensible to the layman. I might never be as bold and adventurous as they were, but seeing very extreme examples of cartoon exaggeration showed me just how far I was from the upper-limit, and gave me a better sense of the space of possibilities.

If it wasn't obvious, this advice extends to more than just drawing for animation. Pushing yourself uncomfortably far in any endeavor is a great help in realizing the parameters and boundaries of the space you're working in. I've often given the advice to people who do design work (a kind of work that lends itself to obsessively tweaking little details for hours on end), to always overdo whatever tweak or change you're trying to make (if you think there's a mistake, make the opposite mistake) instead of slowly inching your way toward the correct thing in tiny increments. Sort of like jumping into a pool, or ripping off a band-aid, or fixing a bent spring by bending it the other direction instead of holding it in the correct position till it gets the idea. Like pushing poses, trying your best to overdo it has an amazing way of getting you to exactly where you need to be.

I grew up in a time when "Low Arts" like comics and TV and video games were getting a sort of cultural reappraisal - people saying "yes, these too can be art," in spite of their association with infantilism and children's mind-rot. Even though those tides were shifting, remnants of the old sentiment - that the low arts were a sort of pornography incapable of deeper meaning - lingered, and even in underground circles it was extremely unfashionable to be caught taking yourself too seriously. But even though many works of the time were soaked in cynicism and an "it's uncool to care or try" attitude, it's impossible to deny that we were making things that were intended to have some impact on people. After all, if I wasn't trying to affect any change on the external world, why was I making anything at all? Even if the point of a cartoon was just to be a cheap laugh - something that makes you smile for five seconds before you move on, wasn't that too an expression of the way I wanted the world to be?

So for those of you who may have been raised, like me, on the idea that "trying is lame," but have always had the nagging feeling that maybe you actually do have something to say, and that you are only being restrained by the need not to expose your hubris - the ego-driven desire to keep itself concealed - I encourage you to push, push more, take a walk, eat dinner, have a smoke, come back, and push further still.

Caveh Zahedi - 365 Stories I want to tell you before we both die (2021)

Caveh has become one of my favorite examples of someone who lives and dies by his ideals, and seems to take pleasure in suffering for his art. One of his ongoing projects was called this before it became too self-destructive and he chickened out. 365 Stories was a project he published over the course of 2021 and my favorite thing he's done, but for the purposes of this blog post I just want you to listen to this episode:

• Ecstasy at Rotterdam (3 minutes)

The film he mentions in the story is also very good - in it he tries to "prove the existence of god," while also attempting the equally herculean task of connecting with a somewhat estranged father and half-brother, all while being repeatedly frustrated by constant technical problems with the film equipment. [Spoiler]

There's a moment in the movie where they sort of tease "something interesting is going to happen in one hour" and there's a real tension to whether or not they will actually get the interesting thing on film. And when the interesting thing comes, they *do* fuck up in a really spectacular way that, for me, is the shining moment of the film.

I'm awed by the audacity of saying "I was trying to make the greatest film ever made," and am humbled by his admission of absurdly high aspirations. If you've read some other posts I've written, you may have gathered that I, too, have absurdly high aspirations that I'm sometimes ashamed to admit to. Like Caveh in the story, it's more often in moments of elation that I get big pie-in-the-sky ambitions about things, but to acknowledge publicly that you get those feelings at all - those feelings most commonly associated with egotism and narcissism, or of thinking you have it within you to make something of godly importance, takes a sort of confidence that is pretty rare, even in real-live narcissists and egotists.

This however is not the upper-boundary of high ambitions.

Brian Moriarty - The Point Is (1996)

This is like fifty minutes long so I don't expect you to listen to the full thing now, but if my writeup piques your interest, I do recommend it! (Also, you may have heard a sample of it already, if you made it to track two of my album)

At the dawn of the world wide web, Brian Moriarty had a vision that the internet was more than a means of getting information to people - that the internet was a stepping stone to some kind of ascension to a higher plane, where human consciousness is not bound by physicality or transitory skeuomorphism. He didn't claim to know what this higher-order thing was - only asking that you indulge in the fantasy that such a thing might exist, and that it may be time to find it.

I don't necessarily agree with his vision, but parts of it seem to be true already - the internet has a strange power to catch you in a brooding/antisocial mood, and coax you into exposing sides of yourself that you would never reveal in polite society. From that, some people will conclude from that that the internet-you is the "real" you, or perhaps that the real-you is the "real" you. But I think that both yous are real, and the internet is now making us all reckon with a new, more detailed, somewhat ugly and somewhat beautiful picture of human consciousness. "The Point Is", in that way, is a vague envisioning of what the natural conclusion of such a shift in perception of ourselves and others might look like. Speaking of which -

Serial Experiments Lain (1998)

The thing that made me want to write this blog post in the first place was watching Lain for the first time (it kicks ass, I would call it a "must watch"), and then reading this excerpt about it on Wikipedia:

Later I went back and read the full interview, and the intention was actually not quite as insanely ambitious as Wikipedia makes it sound - he wasn't hoping to invoke some all-encompassing culture war, just a sort of localized debate between Japanese and American fans that would help them to understand each others' cultures, and what insights they could gain from one another. Still a very ambitious goal, albeit not biblical in scale.

If you've seen Lain and were interested in what it had to say, it's probably worth checking out The Point Is, and vice versa. If you thought The Matrix was deep and interesting, then put away the baby's toys and watch Lain right now. I'm generally a subs guy but I watched the dub at a friend's recommendation and I can't imagine enjoying the sub more, so make of that what you will.

It's good and you should watch it! But don't take my word for it, take his!

Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (2019)

Jon Blow, director of hit indie games Braid and The Witness (and a friend of Brian Moriarty!), gave a lecture at a gamedev conference a few years ago, and among some thoughts tangentially related to game design, detailed a vivid picture of how the current failures of the software industry might be the first warning signs of an impending large-scale civilizational collapse. If that sounds crazy, I recommend you watch it, and you can assess for yourself how realistic any of it sounds. Lacking in any kind of world history knowledge, I was surprised to learn that civilizations have already collapsed many times throughout history, and was intrigued by the notion that institutional decay can happen so slowly (hundreds of years) that a collapse may be imperceptible from the inside.

In the years since watching this I've become a lot grumpier about software being buggy and perpetually half-baked, so if you don't want to become a preachy evangelist for another big looming problem, you might want to skip this one. On the other hand, if you DO want to get mad about Windows being horseshit or annoy all your friends with doomsday rhetoric, check this shit out, too.

I have a great deal of respect for the creators who are willing to take on the throes of people primed and ready to call them 'pretentious,' 'egomaniacal,' or 'wrong,' and will say things they feel strongly about with total disregard for the "optics" of doing such a thing. It's something I tried to do while writing this very post, and I couldn't help but squirm writing sentences like "This however is not the upper-boundary of high ambitions." I guess it takes a long time to unlearn the 'never take yourself too seriously' thing. Walking the line between impactful and overdramatic is also hard; something I tell myself is that the difference between the stuff-that-tries-to-be-deep-but-sucks and stuff-that-tries-to-be-deep-and-works is often a matter of "sticking the landing," so to speak. Attempting serious work doesn't mean you have to relinquish your sense of humor, or take on a weird somber tone all the time, just that you have to think hard about the thing you're trying to say and the best means of saying it.

I have never attempted to do work at the level of ambition I've been describing, but I might, someday. If you ever do, here are some things I've noticed these works have in common, for your consideration:

• A willingness to be "not for everyone"
• A willingness to be slow and long
• Use of surreal aesthetic choices to complement the message, and put the audience in a headspace where they might be more receptive of a radically new way of thinking
• A willingness to leave details vague and open to interpretation, in instances where you yourself can't grasp the entirety of what you're getting at
• An openness to the possibility that individuals can affect great change, and that you could be one of those individuals, and it's okay if you're not or if you're wrong, because people will not hear important ideas unless the people who have important ideas are willing to say them, and we have undoubtedly already lost important ideas to self-doubt and the fear of sounding a little too self-important

In Canada they have this government-funded movie production company called the NFB (National Film Board), with an animation department that's been financing short animated films since 1941. I had no idea this existed until just a few years ago, sometime after I'd moved to Canada to go to college. I don't know if this is something everyone knew about except me, but assuming it isn't, I'd like to share a few of my favorite films from their archive, available for free on youtube and their official website which is slightly more complete.

Begone Dull Care (1949)

Created by the first NFB animator Norman McLaren, this abstract animation was apparently done by etching and painting directly onto film. It's an interesting technique, and creates a wild optical effect, both high-energy and rich with textural detail. And it's better synced to the music than any other pre-computer animation I've seen! I imagine he could see the sound track on the film (that was a thing back then!) and would put down marks precisely where the waveform swells.

Karate Kids (1990)

No relation to that movie. This may be one of my favorite animated films ever, and before I spoil it by talking about it you should just watch it:

I can't embed it (non-youtube) so here's the link

I really love the art & animation in this one. If you watched five minutes and clicked off it cause it's a little kids' edutainment cartoon, go back and finish it 'cause you're about to get your mind blown. I've shown this cartoon to maybe ten people and I swear no one sees that moment coming. And not only is the moment totally shocking and bizarre and morbidly funny, once you catch your breath and take a second to think about it, you may realize it was exactly the right choice for getting the message across loud and clear to the exact people who needed to hear it. There's a great filmmaking lesson here - that violating the implicit rules of your universe is a great way to get the audience to sit up and pay attention. I mean the whole cartoon is great, but the moment is a stroke of genius.

Of Dice and Men (1988)

One of the first 2D computer animated short films ever, and another all-time favorite of mine. If you read the credits, you'll note that writer/director/animator John Weldon actually created the software it was animated on! Using just eight colors (RGBCMYKW) it was rendered one frame at a time and shot by a film camera aimed at a computer monitor. How do I know this? I emailed him and asked. [Please note: I officially have an email from a guy who won an Oscar]

Brad Bird once said of The Incredibles that he wanted his team to "use every part of the buffalo" - to try and find creative uses for every little thing their tools were capable of. Well I don't think I could name a 2D computer-animated film that squeezes more juice out of its software than this one. The eight available colors are stretched to create a vast palette through dithering, the backgrounds are detailed with earthbound-esque algorithmic patterns, and shape-tween-like interpolation stands in for inbetweens often with a total disregard for form. It's the type of thing that can only exist at the dawn of a new medium, when there are no rules, and yet he still manages to break them.

I don't know if any of you will love this aesthetic like I do - I've always had a thing for high-contrast, dense and saturated visuals - the sort that can only be produced by a computer. Did you know I liked Problem Solverz? Not just to be a contrarian either - I saw the first episode on TV, before the internet collectively decided to ignore the possibility that it might look like that on purpose! Well the show got cancelled, Paper Rad doesn't exist anymore, and ac-bu is kicking ass, so it looks like we're behind Japan yet again when it comes to making interesting animation that pushes the medium forward. Nice going guys!

Mindscape (1976)

You know that toy where it's a box of pins and you press your hand or your face against it and it makes like a 3D image of your hand? Well if you make that same grid of pins 10 times larger and make the individual pins 10 times smaller, you can cast a light against it and get a neat tool for "painting" greyscale images that, unlike regular painting, you can edit infinitely without the canvas degrading. This makes it a viable medium for stop-motion animation, or at least it is when taxpayers are footing the bill, since it's an absurdly time-consuming process!

Pinscreen animation is all the limitations of stop-motion combined with all the limitations of animating on a sheet of paper. Like clay or puppet-based stop-motion, you can't go back and fix mistakes, and you have to remember the speed at which everything onscreen is supposed to be moving or the end result comes out weird and jerky. Like animating on single sheets of paper, you don't have multiple layers to make manipulating the image more manageable. That means any time anything moves, the background has to be re-drawn bit by bit wherever the foreground elements move out of the way. And remember, you're manipulating physical pins, which takes forever to begin with.

But limitations, of course, are the fuel for creativity, and every choice of shot, movement, and optical effect in this film is designed around the few things pinscreen can do, and the zillion things it can't do, like moving the camera, or a simple zoom. Because actually, you can move the camera if you abstract the space into something manageable, and you can zoom in on an image, if you can make it make sense to do it like this.

I really like those little moments where common filmmaking techniques press against the boundaries of the medium, and something entirely new is created. You would never think to do any of those things unless you were working with a crazy painstaking animation technique like pinscreen, and yet all the strange choices, born of necessity, get the job done just fine.

These days I get the impression that animation always starts with story, and then the visuals take whatever shape they need to to get that story across without breaking the bank. (by the way, those stories usually suck!) While that kind of top-down approach to art is valid and important, I think the bottom-up approach is equally important - starting with the tools, the raw ingredients, and asking "what can this do?" - "What kind of shots can we animate with this tool?" Then, "what kind of story can we tell with those shots?" And finally, "what kind of message can we convey from that story?" Wouldn't it be cool if an animated series took that same approach, starting with the unique fingerprint of the tool, and working outward from there? (oh wait, there was one!)

Rectangle & Rectangles & Rectangle (1984)

FLASHING LIGHTS warning! The whole thing is one long flashing-light sequence, actually. I think the best way to take this one in is to get in a dark room, get close to the screen, get comfy, and turn it up to just below ear-damaging volume. After a few minutes it starts to feel like you're on drugs - especially if you're *actually* on drugs, which probably makes it even better!

There's plenty of other good stuff in the NFB archives, again, free on youtube and on their own site nfb.ca. They also have a free app on most chromecast/roku/appletv type-things, but it's not especially good at recommending stuff unless you know exactly what you're looking for. But the youtube channel pretty regularly posts good stuff from the archives, and if you liked any specific thing I linked, you can probably do a search for that director and find more stuff by them. I'm especially a fan of Norman McLaren, John Weldon, and Kaj Pindal, who apparently taught at my alma mater the entire time I was there. He's dead now, so looks like my opportunity to meet him is gone forever. Oops!

There are actually a few things to come out of the NFB that you may have seen before, but I didn't mention any of those because they were all, in my opinion, "just okay!" Here's some other stuff I liked that I didn't put it this post, but you can check out if you are so inclined!

https://youtu.be/XAMtmK7ObkA

https://youtu.be/HuRM0q0Ixkc

https://youtu.be/ZYkzNuEQhUs

https://youtu.be/LFrFRslbJ2s

https://www.nfb.ca/film/to_be/

Unrelated but semi-related, I put out an album last month that you can buy on bandcamp. Maybe reading this post has given you a sense of my weird tastes in aesthetics, so if you want to hear their auditory equivalent then go listen to a few tracks. I uploaded the less illegal-sample-y tracks to NG, so go check those out in my audio uploads, or get a little preview of everything in this audiovisual promo video I made here! It shouldn't be hard to notice the influence from these Canucks!

One month ago today I turned 25! A while ago I used to do a post-mortem every year of the stuff I did in the past year, but I have very little to report other than "a bunch of animation work." Instead, I'm going to talk about the future for a sec, and then talk about a little side project I've been toiling away at for a few years now.

Something I noticed when I was younger is how eager a lot of young people are to embark on insane and overly-ambitious projects. It makes sense - if you've been doing something like animation for 6 years and you've only been alive for 16, that just feels like a giant chunk of your life and it's easy to start thinking it's time to get to work on your magnum opus or whatever. I noticed this, of course, because I had made this mistake several times, and funnily enough zero of those projects ever got past the pre-production stage. Same with anyone else I've ever heard talk about their big epic masterpiece at age 16 - they pretty much never get past 10% completion.

Then, with just a little more age and perspective, you look back at your skill level when you attempted to do the big ambitious project and think "man, that would have been a huge waste of time if I ever finished it - I sucked!" And then you realize that relative to where you could be in the future, you probably still suck and probably should not start any more big epic projects any time soon. It feels like it would be a better use of time to just work on skill-acquisition and do lots of little projects to get more experience and find your voice or style.

That's where I'm at now, and today I'm going to double-down on making the present moment the "learning phase" of my life by announcing a new long-term goal for improvement: I am going to learn more in the next ten years than I did in the last ten.

In other words, whatever the difference in quality of work was between ages 15 and 25, I am going to try and beat that between 25 and 35. This will probably be pretty hard for a few reasons:

1. There's less to learn. You know, 'cause I already learned a lot of it.*

2. Younger people just pick stuff up a lot quicker. There's some biological explanation for this about some protein in your brain that stops producing as you get older, but I have my own theory that I think is a pretty big piece of the puzzle: older people are more self-aware about how shitty they are at the thing they're trying to learn, and it's way way easier to get discouraged. Not only does this make it easier to go "I can't do this I quit," but it puts you in a mental space where you take less risks, and you gotta be willing to fuck up a lot if you want to make substantial progress. (I could talk about this a lot more but I'll save it.)

3. You get tired quicker

On all fronts I think the only way to overcome these hurdles is to just work harder than I have in the past. Which gives me some hope - I'm pretty lazy as is, so working a little harder is well within reason. If you have any tips about that sort of thing please share! Even if it's just some bruce lee quote or whatever. It's kinda hard to weed out the good advice from the self-help charlatans when it comes to "motivational" stuff or just advice on doing hard work, so if there's anything you can think of that has had a real and lasting impact on you I'd like to hear it!

The reason I'm announcing this ten-year goal publicly is to give myself some accountability, but maybe my deciding to do this will inspire some of you to do the same. A lot of people kind of stop getting better at their craft after college-age, or even regress, so here is my pledge to not do that! [If something radically changes like I lose my arm in a car crash or get a stroke, this pledge is void.]

The rest of this post was actually written two months ago, but I couldn't post it because it references stuff that wasn't out yet. Now it's all been released, so here!:

--

One day about four years ago I was thinking about how there are a few artsy things that I would like to get good at before I die, and I got to thinking about what the right "order" might be for attacking them. It occurred to me that if I ever wanted to do music, I should pick it up while I'm still young since, for whatever reason, musicians overwhelmingly seem to peak at a young age - between 18 and 30. And so, with next to no experience in music-making under my belt, I started trying to write songs.

Here's a very early one

Four years later I'm still at it. I've done a few collaborative releases with friends, but most of the stuff I've made is unreleased. Most of it is really not that good. But every once in a while, something will have a little glimmer of something interesting, and so the game is to grab hold of those little interesting things, and collect them and refine them and find tidy little homes for them next to the other interesting things, and eventually have enough interesting things to compose a thoroughly interesting song, and eventually have enough thoroughly interesting songs to stitch together a totally bitchin debut LP.

That has been the goal since the beginning, and so far I have exactly one song that is good enough for the LP.

I'm starting a new paragraph to give the last sentence a little extra punctuation. That's a little writer's trick. Did it grab your attention? Good, because it was an extremely misleading statement. At the rate I'm going you might think the album will take 40 years. I designed my writer's trick to make you falsely assume this. In reality, the album had like seven songs at one point and then after I finished the eighth one, I decided that that one should be the new bar for how good the songs should be, and everything else got canned. That's also not the first time such a thing has happened. So most of the process of making this album will actually be the process of my learning to make music, and then once I can make a whole bunch of songs that all meet an equally high standard of competence, I'll have something to share with the world.

...Actually, I do have some stuff to share right now, too! I like to do a lot of fuckaround stuff (in fact it's crucial to the learning process, at least for me) and every once in a while I'll release some of it under a wacky pseudonym on me n' my friends' crappy bandcamp page!

The Connecticut Hungry Tapes - a few months ago I challenged myself to record one song every day before breakfast. Many days I did not eat until 3 pm. Here are the highlights of that experiment, which I just released yesterday. I like a lot of it! **

Een! and Een! 2 - Me n Reid made these in one day each. You can even tell!

I also worked on a few albums in an exquisite corpse sort of process with some other friends I met right here on newgrints! If you're only going to listen to one thing I link here, make it this:

Exqs 3 - The Others Are Here

The second one was also good

It seems like the hot trend now is for all your favorite internet toonists to decide they are also bedroom pop musicians, so if I want to eventually release anything "real" it's going to have to be pretty good or I'll be "just another guy who did all the usual internet artist stuff" instead of "the guy who did x and y and z and they ALL kicked ass." And because I'd hate to be that first guy, I've been devoting a lot of time and energy to trying to be good at this music thing - good enough that you won't just hear it and think "wow that's pretty good for a guy who is mainly an animator and video games guy", good enough that upon hearing it you will forget about me, the animator/video games guy, and just think "wow that's pretty good." Or even, "really good," and proceed to repeatedly listen to it as if it were something you heard on your spotify discover weekly.

--

(Present Day) I know most people will not be too interested in the music stuff, since music especially seems to be the sort of deal where it either is or isn't "your thing" and there's way too much of it out there to be bothered with some guy who is still "just learning," but if you're big into experimental art-project stuff, or have a taste for things that are a little rough around the edges or outsider-y, you might find something you like in there. If you're intrigued but don't have the time or patience for a full album, people have said these specific tracks were good.

If you listen to any of that and there's a song or sound or moment you think is cool, let me know! It's always neat to see where my tastes align or don't with the people who listen. The last song I linked almost got left on the cutting room floor because I thought it was too shitty, but bobby liked it so I left it in.

* I mean not really, because there's a practical infinity of stuff to learn, and infinity minus anything is still infinity, but once you learn all the basic stuff everything just takes a lot more work to understand, so that's really what I'm talking about here.

** As of 10/3/2021 I am the only person to purchase my own album on bandcamp, because I wanted it on my phone. It looks really sad.

I wrote this post a few weeks ago & didn't post it because I was kind of moody when I wrote it, and I don't like subjecting people to my moodiness. (Actually that's too charitable - really I don't like having my moodiness archived on the internet for the indefinite future.) Today I read it again in slightly lifted spirits, and I still think it's interesting, so here it is. The title is kind of pretentious but I couldn't think of a better one (suggestions welcome).

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When I was young I had it firmly in my mind that I was going to do something *important* with my life, and I believe now that this was my way of dealing with that youthful existential dread that arises when you first grasp the reality of the fact that you, like everyone else, will someday die. The thinking goes that if you have some visible influence on the overall trajectory of life on Earth, then your presence will be felt long after you die, and your life will be just a little less meaningless overall. Of course then some smart aleck will point out that if you wait long enough everyone will die, the universe will end, and at this cosmic scale your existence would have meant just as much as if you'd died the moment you were born. In spite of this being probably true, the idea of making a difference and living through your influence on the world still "works" as a cure for the common existential cold, for as long as you believe it.

I don't think I've ever asked other people about this, but I'd be willing to bet there are a lot of people out there who have thought the same way, and had had their ego stroked enough as a child to be totally convinced that, yes, they were destined to do something VERY important, and by fulfilling their destiny as an important person they wouldn't have to pay mind to the reality of dying and being completely forgotten as time marches ever onward without them.

For the people whose peace of mind hinges on the idea of eventually having greater cultural significance, you might start having some unfortunate revelations around your mid-20s. One - that there really is no guarantee that you will succeed at the thing you're trying to do. There are probably millions of stories of people devoting their whole lives to some cause that they felt would be their big contribution to humanity, only to die before anyone takes notice. We don't hear these stories because these people were not famous. Actually, if you're looking hard enough you can find them, and they are depressing.

Two - some people succeed wildly at the very thing they set out to do, only to find that, with all their power and influence, they have not quelled the voice in their head saying "maybe this is all a waste of time." I don't know what was going through Kurt Cobain's head when he shot himself, but my best guess is it was some cocktail of said voice and a refrain from Automatic For The People. I have had a milder version of this, having worked on a cartoon show that was apparently seen by many millions of kids. You'd think this would give you some kind of lifetime self-satisfaction buff, but the warm feeling goes away in like a week.

Three - the realization that you are probably not the best choice of person who should have that level of influence over that many people. In a world of 7 billion people, the chances that your unique voice should really be heard by millions - such that they spread your teachings and carry your legacy long after you die - seems a little far fetched, even if you were the "best drawer" in your 3rd grade art class. True, no one can do exactly what you do in exactly the way you do it, but there is probably someone a little smarter, more empathetic, more eloquent, and a little more deserving of the audience, and I think we can agree that the world would be a better place if everyone else got out of the way and let these people speak. (Then again, the bar for what society will present to millions of people is disturbingly low, so maybe it's not so bad for the pretty-good guys like me to take their shot, at least for now.)

It was probably easier to deal with abstract existential fears back in the stone age - or maybe they didn't exist, because back then there were more literal existential fears such as "cold," "no food," and "big snake." But at least back then people didn't have to confront the reality of there being 7 billion people on earth who also would like to feel important. Back then, the world, for all you knew, consisted of the people in your immediate surroundings, some other guys you met once or twice in your travels, and maybe some other other guys you haven't run into yet. And in that context, it's not hard to feel important. If you are, in your mind, 1/200th of the population of earth, that's kind of a big deal. To have an equivalent sense of self-importance today, you would have to affect more people than are currently alive in the US. (Or, technically, you would have to BE everyone in America, and then affect vastly more people.)

There's a lot of people touting the evils of smartphones and social media - citing stuff like the increase in teen suicide following the iPhone boom, and a lot of that is attributed to the whole slot-machine-in-your-pocket thing. And it is evil that tech companies are exploiting people like that, but maybe a big part of social-media-depression isn't just about twitter hijacking your dopamine receptors - maybe it's that now we all must confront the reality of the vast sea of other people who also want attention. 7 billion is a bitter pill to swallow for anyone who wants to feel significant, but when you're bombarded daily with random samples from the sea of people, and you can see their bedrooms and dogs and five-o-clock shadows, the bitter pill becomes thick and spiky as you realize that these people have exactly the same disease as you - the need to be seen and to feel important, regardless of how distinguished they really are, or how much they really deserve to be seen. Unconsciously, you get a vivid picture of how big and real that 7 billion figure really is. Consciously, you realize that your feelings of self-importance don't come from some objective assessment of your own self-worth - it's just something everyone gets by default.

Getting over the self-importance thing is probably just a part of growing up, and I'm probably only doing it now because I got a lot of positive feedback for most of my life. It's kind of ironic that the people we see on our screens probably only got there because they were able to hold onto that ego just long enough to succeed for real (or they really were a one-in-seven-billion talent, but that seems to be the minority.) And so the people with all the influence are these weird, arrogant, anomalous people who are mostly delusional and disconnected from the reality of most people's lives - even though they are the people who purported themselves to be voices of great importance to the greater population.

So I've become a bit disillusioned lately, but you know what - at least I'm an artist! I have my whole life to prove myself wrong by doing something meaningful. If I played football I would be so fucked right about now. I can't imagine how bad it must feel to age out of the only thing that gave your life meaning. Or like, you get one injury and your whole scheme gets derailed and you turn into Uncle Rico.

-

I have a great respect for culinary artists - there's a real humility to someone creating art that will be enjoyed by exactly one person, for exactly one moment, never to be eaten again. He can make the same dish again, of course, but they will all be subtly different, and when he dies, that's it. Paintings can live a pretty long time and books can last as long as the language they were written in, but great cooking will always die with the chef. He can hand you the recipes, sure, but to execute on that sort of thing at a high level you need to have technique - at which point the art is more yours than the original author's. In any case, their capacity to leave a "legacy" is pretty limited. Maybe some people will write about the great chef and pass along some of their unique insights, but people 100 years from now will never taste the greatest steak cooked today. It is only for now, and that's perfectly fine. Actually, It doesn't even have to be the greatest, and that would still be fine.

So here's a journal entry. A pretty good steak, from me to you, right now, in the present moment. Maybe you hate it, but the joke's on you because you read it, and I have subtly affected your life, and that means I win.

12/06/2020

--

Present day Marty again. I want to add one more bullet point to this so no one thinks the takeaway is "you're going to fail and you should just give up" - which, to be clear, is not at all what I was trying to say. It is still important to try. If 10,000 people try to do something significant, and only 100 of them actually do, those 100 wouldn't have done anything if all 10,000 decided it was too unlikely. And of course, before they succeed, no one knows if they're in the 1% or 99%, which is why it's important that everyone tried, even if 99% of them failed. I think it is noble to try and fail, and that is what I will continue to probably do. For the record, I also don't think the numbers are nearly that bad, since there is a lot of stuff to do and comparatively few people who are serious about doing it.

To clarify, my point in writing this wasn't to wallow in self-pity or spread negativity in that depression-fueled "hey man I'm just being real" kind of way - I wanted to look specifically at the feeling of wanting to make an impact, as I believe it's something that a lot of artists have that helps them to aim high, and is a weird thing that both propels you to do your best work but can also cripple you with self-doubt. I don't really hear people ever talk about this, probably because any talk of self-importance can seem arrogant or egotistical, and so, to appear humble, we the arrogant & egotistical don't speak openly about this stuff because it's just too unflattering. But I still think it's an interesting thing to think about, and even in the event that I'm in a minority of people who have thought about themselves this way, I am not above mining my own character flaws for interesting content.

A few years ago I made a post about running ads on cartoons and why it's not a very sound business model. I still agree with pretty much everything I said back then, but there's another angle that I only kinda touched on in that post - running ads has a general cheapening effect on the actual content, and it goes beyond ads being invasive and tacky.

Back in like 2014 youtube changed their system for how ad revenue was distributed and it fucked over certain kinds of content, like animation, in favor of easy-to-produce long-form content - podcasts, let's plays, vlogs, and the like. Animators got very outraged by this, and I made the point (not back then but in that post) that by relying on a big corporation's money algorithms, they were ultimately leaving themselves wide open to being screwed. I was thinking about it again today, and now I would go as far as to say it was practically inevitable that they were going to get fucked because their income came primarily from ads, and in this post I'm going to try to explain why.

But first, an experiment - take a second to think of the greatest, most important and personally affecting works of art you've seen - any books, movies, games, shows, etc. that you believe have made a real impact on your life. (For real, think about it.) What was primary source of income there? Were they selling the product itself, a subscription service, taking donations, getting government funding, running ads, or something else?

Here's what I came up with:

A few books I really like - the money comes from selling the actual book.

A few movies I really like - the money probably came from theater screenings mostly

A few video games - all the type that you buy upfront and not the free-to-play microtransaction-y kind

A lot of albums - (before the 2000s there was probably some money in album sales, but in recent years musicians make the bulk of their money through touring, so some of each)

A few lectures - either paid for by a conference or given pro bono

One podcast - has a paywall (ad-free though!)

One comic strip - ran in newspapers back when those existed, so the money came from some mix of newspaper subscriptions, ads, and book sales. Don't know what the predominant source of income was

One show - ran on cable tv, which runs on ads

So at least for me personally, when it comes to "how does great art get funded," advertising is not getting a lot of representation. And yet, a pretty big chunk of the media I consume is ad-driven. What gives?

Generally speaking, why are movies better than tv?

Why are books better than magazines?

Why are albums better than turning on the radio?

Why is netflix better than cable?

Why is nearly everything better than those stupid videos on facebook?

Why does advertising seem to turn everything it touches into a more vapid, cheaper, shittier version of itself?

Unlike some anti-advertising crusaders, I don't think ads are inherently evil or unethical. If you have something important to share with the world - so important that you're willing to drop a few thousand just to shove it in some people's faces, I think you should be able to do that. But the unfortunate reality of ad-based income is that there are just these weird consequences that seem to consistently poison content. Here are the ones that I'm aware of:

1. The more ads you can hit someone with, the more profitable the content is. This is why long-form serial content is more desirable in the eyes of money-people at youtube - quantity is more valuable than quality. The content still has to be good enough to get people to engage with it, but this lends itself to factory-produced, rinse & repeat clickbait-y productions. It doesn't matter if the window is minimized and playing in the background while you go do something else - as long as they can stream ads, youtube is happy. And as a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company, they are probably not about to leave money on the table in the name of "prioritizing quality content." For this reason I think it was inevitable that animators, along with all the other internet filmmakers who choose to do elaborate, thoughtful work would get screwed by youtube. It's like a law of physics that everything will always gravitate towards running as many ads as possible. Short-form content that takes a long time to create just doesn't survive in that sort of system.

If you really want to make it on youtube, you have to tailor your work to their systems, and those change constantly anyway so it is possibly a giant waste of time to begin with.

2. The audience did not pay for it, and therefore the creator is less obligated to deliver a worthwhile experience. If someone pays $60 for a video game and it sucks, they'll feel pretty ripped off, and so there is a whole category of journalism dedicated to telling you whether or not a game is worth paying for. Same thing exists in film, literature, and music. This sort of thing doesn't exist in spaces of free content - save for "likes" there's no culture surrounding the evaluation of quality. Even though there should be! We are paying with our attention and our time, and my time is currently worth 15-19 USD an hour!

I can't say I have any kind of hard evidence for this point, but as someone who has experience creating things, I completely believe that people will care less about their work if there isn't an imperative to fulfill a social contract. Back when I made flash games if someone wrote a bad review saying the game didn't work, I would generally take on an attitude of "hm that sucks, well whatever fuck off I barely know how to program anyway." This would be pretty inappropriate if this was a product I sold to someone on steam, and I would probably genuinely feel bad.

3. Being beholden to advertisers puts limitations on what you can say. In this day and age, saying anything too controversial can get an angry mob reporting you to your advertisers asking them to drop you*, and you also would probably want to play it safe when talking about anything related to the product you're doing your ad reads for. There's a podcast I like where the hosts just constantly shit on web technologies and startup culture and they probably would not be able to do that if they were taking checks from squarespace. You certainly wouldn't be able to say any of what I'm saying here if you were also running ads. (That said, Newgrounds still runs some ads, so go buy a Supporter Upgrade and maybe Tom will forgive me for posting this to the front page of his website)

This would not too big of a deal if we were still getting paid to make cartoons, but I can imagine this has a much more insidious effect on unedited content (aka the exact kind of thing advertisers like, see 1). When people are broadcasting live, or just want to have to do minimal edits to their recording, they have to internalize a sort of self-censorship where they just avoid certain topics completely, and are not interested in pushing social and political boundaries (aka the exact kind of content these media seem to be best suited for).

I think restrictions can inspire some creativity, but when everyone is bound to exactly the same restrictions, it's like putting boundaries on the entirety of an artistic medium and that sort of thing usually sucks.

I was thinking of adding a fourth point about how doing a squarespace read just makes you sound like a shill and how that can subconsciously erode the trust between you and the audience, but there's nothing inherent to advertising that turns you into that sort of liar. There's a correlation between bad content and disingenuous ad reads for sure, but I don't think it's the ads that are causing the content to be worse, so I'll save that one.

Now am I saying that all art has to aspire to be "great, important and personally affecting"?

No... I think there's a place in this world for junk food, but I know there are a lot of young people out there who are aspiring to do really great work, and if they're raised in a bubble of ad-funded content they might not realize how destructive ads are to great art. Further, I think most of the work we're exposed to now is the cheap, ad-driven kind, and it sucks that that's taking up most of the attention-space. There's probably a lot of really great and inspired stuff being made, but we're not seeing it because it's not as profitable as the cheap stuff, and that just sucks for everyone.

Am I saying that creators have to immediately stop running ads on everything?

Also no, but I think it's worth bringing all this up because we don't really have a good alternative yet. It seems like patreon is working out for some people, but it's not perfect. I tried my own thing a while ago but stopped doing that when I got a "real job" that's paid for by ads. I feel pretty shitty about my ad-based livelihood so thank you for not mentioning it. Here's a real pie-in-the-sky idea I had today - what if we had a "premium internet" like how satellite/cable is supposed to be better than antenna TV, and you pay some monthly fee to get a subscription to all the quality-curated websites, and the money is distributed to the ones you actually like or something. Any billionaires want to work with me on this???

If you have any ideas on how to fund content better I'm all ears. If Andrew Yang money ever becomes real then that will solve all of this shit and art will just be unprecedentedly amazing because we could all stop worrying about paying rent. That would be nice.

--

I was channeling this talk for most of this blog post, so if you thought this was interesting maybe you'll like hearing Jon Blow talk about how microtransactions poison video games. I might listen to it again now to make sure I didn't just lift anything from him verbatim.

* I made a point about this on twitter a while ago - most of us seem to be on the same page that big corporations only really do things in their own interest and are generally selfish and evil, and yet we are effectively tattling to coca-cola when someone does something we don't like. Shouldn't they be the last people we trust with the power to make big decisions about ethics and acceptable censorship?

Why do sponsors think it reflects badly on them if their ad plays before some questionable user-uploaded content? Like we know coca-cola is not sponsoring nazis. we know the preroll ad and the actual video are completely separate entities. Why are they so worried???

I'm 23 today! 23 is a very scary age where you start seeing wrinkles on your forehead and your hairline recedes as gradually and imperceptibly as your memories of being a teenager. I've been getting quarter-life crisises every year on my birthday since I was 18, so I guess the thing about your birthday being shitty and a reminder-of-death as you get older is real. Somehow I thought I'd be "above" that.

When I was in my teenz I used to use NG to blog about life updates every year on my birthday - a sort of post mortem for everything I'd made that year. This post is a little like that, but I'm just gonna blast through the last three years all at once and talk about why I'm surprised I still have a job in animation.

When I first started working on Pencilmation stuff I dropped everything & left school to go work on it, since I'd never been offered a full-time job before and was compelled to seize the opportunity (as anyone would, after trying and failing to get a foot in "the industry" for four years or whatever it was.) Part of that decision was that I'd seen so many YouTube businesses go belly-up after some algorithm change, sudden mysterious decline in views, or "adpocalypse" (actually that hadn't happened yet?) - in any case it seemed dumb to wait around and finish school while a tenuous first job sat in the balance. So in Late 2017, I dropped out of school, moved back to America, and worked remotely on Pencilmation for about a year.

Around Summer 2018, I realized I wasn't very happy to be in total isolation all the time (I was living out of some guy's attic in Buffalo,) and I had saved up enough to pay for my last year of school out of pocket, so I went back to school. At this point I felt a little stupid because my job still existed, so I very well could have finished school on time and then taken the job offer - Instead I had to complete my fourth year with a whole new class of people, which isn't a lot of fun when everybody knows each other except for you. In spite of this, my year rocked and we made a bangin senior thesis game, which is a pretty big contender for my favorite project I've ever worked on. If you haven't seen it check out this post.

Then school ended, and somehow, my job at Pencilmation was still there waiting for me. While I don't deny Ross' business savvy, I genuinely didn't expect to be able to do Pencilmation for this long - I've even publicly maligned the idea of making all your money on YouTube ads as being stupid and unstable. When I first dropped out of school I really felt like a hardened internet animation veteran making a tactical decision to ride with a channel for a few months, and then resume my life when it inevitably went bust, but none of that ever happened. In fact, Pencilmation is doing better than ever with something like 11 million subscribers, so I guess I'm just retarded.

It's only occurred to me just yesterday that Pencilmation has probably now entered the upper-echelon of YouTube channels - some people have theorized there's a kind of "Too Big To Fail" zone on youtube where some content just makes so much ad money that the higher-ups at YouTube are more lenient with rule enforcement and you actually have some weird level of job security. Actually, I just looked it up and this isn't just a weird allegation, YouTube moderators have confirmed this to exist. This isn't just some random weird moral failing from YouTube - a the very same phenomenon can be seen on Twitch in a really transparent way. It's interesting stuff.

In the last few years, the weirdness of how people make money on the internet now has made itself very apparent and I feel a little uncomfortable participating in any of it. I don't know if it's always been this strange or if that's just when I started listening to Reply All, but it all makes me very nervous about the future. Pencilmation defied my expectations by persisting in the notoriously difficult YouTube climate, but it's doing so well that it may now be benefiting from the slanted system that has quashed so many other animation channels. It feels weird to be on this end of the equation since I've been so vocal about my distaste for this whole thing (at one point I even seriously tried developing an alternative revenue stream), but as a hardened internet animation veteran, I've learned to take what I can get.

(I like my job btw)

Usually when I write a new post on here it's because I've been thinking about some topic for a long time and I just need a place to put it out there so I can stop thinking about it. This is kind of like that, but instead of thinking about a topic, I've been thinking about this big fuckin game I've been making over the past 8 months. This means I'm a lot more scatterbrained about the thing and I have no idea what I'm about to write, but I definitely want to tell you about this thing so let's go!!!!!!

Trail Mix is a co-op puzzle platformer about creating weird shapes of guys and using your weird shapes to navigate a 2D space. We made it as our thesis project for our final year of school, and it's probably the coolest thing I've ever worked on. It's coming out for FREE as a downloadable game for Mac and PC on April 26, and hopefully a we'll have a web build for NG coming up real soon.

Features:

• 13 Levels - 8+ hours of brain-bustin puzzle platforming!
• Secret bonus collectibles for extra challenge!
• That HOT classic newgrounds flash game aesthetic!
• The guys look at each other!

Now I know you're all creaming over that trailer and can't wait for the 26th, but guess what you don't have to because the game is already 99% done and you can play the 99% done version RIGHT NOW on itch.io: https://puzzsoft.itch.io/trail-mix

Why would we release a 99% done game, you say?

The concisest way of putting it is that our big deadline for having the game done was last Thursday, but we didn't want to release it then because we were spending all our time finishing the game and not hyping everyone up for the big "launch." But also our deadline was actually just a big student showcase event and we wanted to be able to tell people they could go home and download the game right away. So you can grab the game right now, but we're also going to make little fixes up until we roll out version 1.0 on the 26th.

Is it futile to try and hype up a free game that's actually already out? Maybe! But if you want to help us out, (and it would be greatly appreciated!!!!) you can follow our fake company PuzzSoft on twitter and retweet promo stuff to help us get the word out. If you do twitch streams or let's plays I would be forever grateful to anyone who wants to play our game in front of an audience! (That said, I highly recommend you actually play with two people! It's possible to play the game solo, but the one-player mode is really just a debug feature we left in. It is not the intended way to play the game!)

Why am I so invested in spreading the word about a free game no one will profit from?

I'm seriously really proud of this game and I think it's got a lot of great stuff in it that I really don't think you'll find anywhere else. When we were collectively designing this game we looked at a lot of really cutting-edge indie puzzle games, and we ended up subverting a lot of the stuff that's trendy right now, even though it's already a super niche space for game design to begin with. Actually, I wrote a devlog on one such idea. We had to write a lot of development process stuff as part of our grade, but if you like design stuff or my writing you can check those out.

What is PuzzSoft?

Every team had to have a team name so that was ours! We are:

Michael (@magnivez)

Rachel

JohnLee

And me!

PuzzSoft Homepage

PuzzSoft on Twitter again

Fuck it here's the game link again

I have a lot more to say about the game but I'll save it. Please play my game!

Hey wait a minute where have you been all this time?

I told you school!!!!!!! And all last year I freelanced on Pencilmation, which I'm going back to doing now that school's done. See I told you I was busy!!!!

I started going to college a little over three years ago, and it was a tough decision bc if anyone was around at the time you might remember there was a pretty strong anti-art school sentiment from the last generation of web animators (and I mean the LAST generation amirite?) Anyway the prevailing argument was that studios care more about quality work than qualifications, and everything you learn in school is stuff you can find on the internet anyway. Despite all this I went to school, and I found out that they were only half right:

YES, just about everything you need is online for free.

BUT, where the fuck is it?

I lied a little bit, I didn't go to school for art, I went for game design, and I learned a lot more about programming in my first few weeks than I ever had looking up tutorials online. The book we used was called "learning processing," and it rocked my fuckin world. I coulda bought it on Amazon and saved myself $10,000, but without having a guy to point me in the right direction, I probably never would have found it, and I would probably still be pretty bad at coding.

Anyway if you're an animator/artist, get FUCKIN ready cause here's how to get all the shit everyone told you was out there but no one told you how to find: 

1. 4chan

Alright if you're like I was two years ago, you probably thought 4chan was for weird nerds and that kid who knew about porn before everyone else when they were like 11. WELL boy was I surprised to find out there are more boards than /b/ and they actually have some smart guys on 'em. The sticky on http://boards.4chan.org/ic/ has links to a TON of useful art stuff, so get that bookmark button ready:

https://sites.google.com/site/ourwici/

2. Tumblr - Ask

If you've been around the Tumblr block you know that maybe like 70% of the people on there have an "ask" button that lets you send in questions. If there's some aspect of art that you want to get better at, just find someone who does it well and ask for advice! As long as you aren't going up to super-famous guys with 20k followers, most everyone will write back, and if you didn't know, you can ask stuff anonymously. I've done this a bunch and have found some pretty great resources that way. (Most guys don't get a ton of engagement anyway, so go make some artist happy!)

This one wasn't about anything specific, but just some guy that I found that I liked! Here's his blog.

3. Friends

Alright you know how they say you go to school to make connections? You can make connections on Skype and Discord, and you can really get the same constructive/competitive environment you'd get out of school. I met most of my guys in a NATA-based group a while ago. See if you can find something like that I guess? (Hey if someone wants to help me out with some discord links that'd be great)

4. Books

If you have a library anywhere near you, get a card and start checkin out books! A lot of the time you'll find some shit you've never heard of that inspires you more personally than the more general reccomendations people tend to make on the internet. If it weren't for my school's french-speaking population, I never would have discovered the works of Andre Franquin, who I really think might have been the greatest cartoonist who ever lived.

There are also a few big repositories of art instructional books online. Now most books are copyrighted, so I'm gonna have to slip you this one under the table

*swoosh*

^Tons of good shit in the 4th and 5th links. There are other ways to download books for free, but I think there's a rule on NG that says I can't tell you how to do that.

5. Reddit - How to learn anything imaginable

My brother showed me this one -

Think of something you'd like to learn, eg "game development," "watercolor," or "piracy"

Head on over to google and search for "_____ reddit" (or "learn __ reddit" or whatever works)

Usually you can find a sticky thread at the top or an faq in the sidebar, which will usually include a link on where to get started! Here's what I found:

Game Development

Watercolor

****swoosh****

I didn't really read any of these I was just trying to make a point. Actually I read one of them. Maybe.

6. My own collection

Alright so this post was mainly geared towards how to FIND resources and not any specific ones I use, but here's a few of the guys I swear by:

John Ks Blog Probably the best free resource specifically about cartoon drawing

Animation Resources Stuff to read when you run out of John K

Proko Fine art instuctional vids

Animator reels Tons of these on youtube, highly recommend the ones on Hayao Miyazaki, Rod Scribner, Fred Moore, Koji Nanke, Jim Tyer, Milt Kahl, Tissa David. I'd link to them by name but I'm getting tired and I have to get up tomorrow

BOOKS (these are all amazon links cause yeah we get it "swoosh")

If you're just starting out and you want to learn how to draw, read both of these (yea both)

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Fun With a Pencil

These two embody two pretty different approaches - observational drawing vs construction. If you liked the first one better, keep lookin at stuff and keep practicing. But if you liked the second one better, try the other Loomis books, and Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair

Understanding Comics is super easy to read and tackles some really cool theory stuff. It's the kind of thing where once you've read it you really think about what you're doing more deeply and analytically.

The Little Book Of Talent is good for general meta-learning stuff. Good bite-sized info for you "tips" guys

Perspective! for Comic Book Artists

Did you think I was going to link the Richard Williams book? Get real ya fuckin nerd. Last thing cause I really gotta go to bed, here's some general advice:

http://www.lifeclever.com/what-50-pounds-of-clay-can-teach-you-about-design/

http://aboutthestart.com/talent-vs-practice-who-wins/

lil amendment - be careful around shady websites, ok? don't be stupid!!!!