Just wanted to let my listeners know, I'm on SoundCloud now:

https://soundcloud.com/user-87548724

Starting to browse a little on that service. There are some nice entries there. Would be great if some of you would be to have a visit!

Just one or two days ago, @exotworking published his final animation project for his studies a few years back. Some of you may know that he is working on games, most famously here on Newgrounds with Lucky Tower. A few months back, he released a "lengthy" game called "The Longing". I immediately remembered that I inteded to to a Let's Play in German but forgot till today. So I started my long yourney of waiting 400 days in a long Playthrough. As I like the English language, all ingame texts are in English. So If you want to spend 400 days waiting together with a german and english speaking dude, check out my Let's Play here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLxGzfLWekU&list=PLsVaaKDugh1cm2bE70oSx6gxdJg9Ox6wK

Check out exotworkings things, they are fantastic!

The longing on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/893850/THE_LONGING/

Fields of Rape:

Lucky Tower:

Welcome to 2020!

Oh what a lovely year 2019 was for me. Let me tell you. But first:

I could convince my collegue to join Newgrounds and publish an audio piece of his own. Give it a listen, I think it is amazing.

Also stay tuned for Pixelday. We each got a song brewing. He ist already pretty much done. For me it's a few more hours of work but I am very pleased how it turns out.

So, back to the topic: 2019. I finally got something I never had in my 40 years of life: Rest. Last year marks the year I definitely got out of dept and started enjoying calm evenings without worries. Some of the past years had bleak outlooks containing one or two existential crisis but I never lost my optimistic attitude. Nontheless, I had several sleepless nights pre-2019. These were gone now.

Starting in spring, I put away lots of things which I kept over the past years to keep me busy and explore all possibilities live could give to me. Fun stuff but it was just time to move on and possibly make room for more exciting things. But then, something unexpected, but equally amazing happened: I got lazy.

Strange thing, but I think I gained 10 kilogram of weight over one year just because I really enjoyed doing nothing for a change. And for a time, I would not worry about it. Only at the end of the year, I started to feel a bit too chubby and now, I'm shaping myself back again. And I also wanted to shape my productivity in creative things again.

Sadly, the coppa thingy killed basically off my motivation to do film stuff. And I just started to enjoy a new camera. Oh well, there are other things I spent money on the past years which were far more stupid. But I lost yet again a new playground where I could be creative.

I must do things. The end of the year made me think what I would do with my time and energy. Unfortunately, I haven't really found a new toy yet but I got one or two things which I still enjoy. One is music, the other is programming. For the second though, my enthusiasm is slowly fading and so I'm a little on the edge.

If you got any ideas, not involving Bungee jumping or learning how to dance, feel free to lit some pixels below in the comments. Maybe there is something I really haven't thought about!

Let's see how 2020 turns out. There are possibilities!

It's now several days since the story with YouTube and Coppa. One barely remembers that YouTube was sued several millions and creators will soon be forced to take responsibility for YouTube's omission to comply. I guess, we will hear more about it on January 1st when there is no more escape. But up until then, I wanna share my view.

I quit YouTube.

It was fun while it lasted. Already in 2018, it became very unfunny to me to publish content. At the beginning of 2019, I stopped doing it regularily. Now, I unpublished all of my movies due to the Coppa incident.

I think, Coppa is a good thing. I think YouTube's reaction to it is bad. I found myself saying no to this platform after several days of thinking. A platform which circumvents the law to make money with children is just not what my mentailiy tells me to be right. I can't support that platform anymore.

I do not miss it. In fact, my spam email folder suddenly is very silent. That's nice.

I did have more than 1K followers, but as I only seldomly published movies the past year, not many people reacted upon the complete removal. But I don't mind. To me, it always was a hobby for myself, the occasional fans were just a bonus. Monetization was never a thing which suited me.

I'm sure, if you are a YouTube content creater yourself and would unpublish all your work now, you wold be forgotten as fast as I am.

And you know what? That's not a bad thing. There is always somebody else people will watch. You do not have to force yourself to think that you are indisposable. I quit before it could crush me. If you are thinking of doing the same, be courageous, you will feel much better. It's not that hard actually.

Too bad for all the Newgrounds Flash game videos. But hey, the games themselves will live on, as far as I've heard! So that's certainly something to look forward to!

Yeah. So that's it. Hope, some of you had some entertainmenet with my videos in the past. :)

Hey everybody,

This is a post about cleaning up the past, leaving the comfort zone, weighting values worths, freeing up time and planning the future.

I alwas was and will be a creative person. But as many of you know, with the gift comes the curse and so my personal folder of yet-unfinished-and-probably-never-being-able-to-find-the-time projects grew once more by a yet to be determined count. With almost 40 years, this leaving-behind-behaviour has become routine and if there really is something like a midlife-crisis, I probably had about 3 of them every year. I long for the future, for new stuff, for challenges. That's the curse.

So every now and then, I clean up. I clean up very much. This happens about every 5 years. It starts slow with small details which you put aside, thow in the waste bin or simply move from the desktop to the archive. But then, suddenly, you start to realize that you do not care that much anymore about related stuff. You have no motivation to look at it, don't want to spend time and money on it. And then you throw that away and again, there is even more related stuff which you do not need anymore because you just threw the other things away. And so it goes on and on and suddenly you realize, that you are actually ending an era.

Ending eras is kind of melancholic but a necessary step in any creative process. Unless you make your hobby your job, you have to evlove, otherwise you stall. And stalling is the black matter of creativity. It is unavoidable, undescribable, undetectable and yet we all know, it exists and we are drawn towards. But you are unable to tell until you hit that critical spot where you lose interest, and then you suddenly know, you were stalling for already a long time. Self-persuation, procastination and finally lying to yourself keeps you falling into this trap all over again and again and again.

So I like to think that the melancholic part about ending eras is not so much the pity or shame of not finishing something but the regret of the lost time spent trying-hard for no rational reason and hence the positive outlook of changing that now. It's a realization of what is simply put the solution to the problem of boredom. And when pondering if this all could have been avoided, simply remember that this is not a profession, it is a hobby, a personal thing which we all do for ourselfes. And so we can rethorically ask with a smirk: Where would be the fun in it if all would be perfectly orchestrated? I still love being creative and just move on to new stuff.

New eras are a wonderful thing. Start fresh and build a new life from the ground up. I had several eras. Starting drawing comics, starting new jobs, starting relationships, starting gaming, starting programming, starting my own company, starting doing let's plays and now starting music.

When looking back now, I once more see now how much I was spending on time and money for things which have just been in my comfort zone. It's a good thing to find such a zone but every now and then, one has to leave it in search for another. Why spending money on an application license which I now will probably not need anymore, why spend time looking for reassurance when you know yor are only scratching the surface, why keeping everybody waiting in uncertainty when one can simply end all speculation, why making promises one does not want to keep anymore.

A sad thing which I observed more and more recently is that many creative people flee from their era. They work so hard, keep making promises, push themselfes to limits unbearable until they hit the wall of demotivation so hard, they simply rage quit, leaving behind a sour taste of failure and displease. I see it in game development, in animation series, in music, in video channels, in fandom-sites, in forums, ... If you observe yourself being in such a mood of almost falling apart, do yourself and your fans a favor and quit early on, remembering the good times. Not wait until you destroyed yourself. It's not always easy or even possible to do this but try to be aware. You are no slave, even if you maybe get payed for it and your fans have high demands.

Ending eras can be very fruitful. Don't ever think of creative eras being a failure for not being successful. You did it for yourselfes and you evolved by doing that.

With that said, new eras come. Old eras come to an end. No, I'm not leaving Newgrounds or something. I'm just sharing my process over the last few weeks and months. I'm sure most of you can relate to this. That's how things roll.

Be creative!

Ok, I just bought FL Studio some days ago and having lots of fun with it. I am proudly presenting my first work: Sputnik Tango.

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/838248

Headphones recommeded. Scouting recommended. ;-)

Just some basic synth and standard beats but you can do so much with that. After years of absence, I finally have the inspiration and time to dive into music again. Grew up with the Amiga Octalizer but lost myself in other hobbies since.

I plan to compose more in the future. Just for fun.

Enjoy!

On January 1st, I tried to clean up a little my computer and found out that there are still some old music pieces laying around which I compos(t)ed more than 10 years ago. So I thought, why not post them on Newgrounds to make some more entries for my audio submissions. Maybe to finally get scoutet? Let me know what you think!

A classical song:

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/782557

Three funk / dance / experimental / 80ies songs:

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/782571

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/782572

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/782576

Had a lot of fun rediscovering my old experiments but it was no easy task to make the old files work. Who in the world composes with GarageBand anyway?

For Pixelday, I thought I could play an old game which I really liked here on Newgrounds.

Playthrough in German.

Play the game here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/519030

As part of a weekly livestream, I play games here on newgrounds in German. This time, I played the lovely game with our ultimate friend Cuboy: Back to the Cubeture.

Play the game here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/513114

Owlboy deserves every credit there is. And even though it is not a Newgrounds game, I follow the lead of admiring the beatiful pixel-art platformer by delivering you a Let's Play in German:

Go buy that game, it is nostalgically beatiful and fun to play.