Newgrounds Office Visit + Cream Cheese

This past weekend was pretty redonk. I got the chance to meet up with a bunch of people I've known through the internet for the last 3-4 years. It's kind of weird actually shacking the tangible hand of someone you've only known by a username for so long, but after a little bit it's pretty comfortable actually. I guess that makes sense though, we're all into the same things online, I wasn't expecting them to be THAT different in person.

So Saturday morning I walk about 15 blocks to meet this guy Luis Castanon and Michael Swain at Hotel Omni in Old City. Luis is a Mod on the Newgrounds forums and he's a ridiculous animator known for stuff like The Perfect Murder and Luis vs. Clockcrew. I've known him for quite some time and how I probably converse with him on a daily basis. It was awesome to finally meet him. Swain is practically a professional animator whose done everything from Blockhead to Mastermind. He's very outgoing and hilarious, you can definitely tell so in his animations too. He does all the voices too, he's real good at voice acting.

So we meet up at the Hotel to wait for Tom Fulp and his wife April. Tom created Newgrounds in 1995 and has had a solid website since 1999. It was awesome meeting the creator of a site I spend so much time on. He's a really cool guy to and extremely knowledgeable about everything it seemed.

We headed over to breakfast at some diner and then we piled into his car and drove about 30 minutes outside of Philly to Glenside, PA where the NG office resides. I have some pictures of the place on Facebook but I actually can't show a lot of them because they want to keep some things secret until a public release. I got to see a ton of possible new features they are going to put on the site and a lot of things they are working on.

I got to meet their three head programmers for the website as well as 3 of their animation and art direction staff. All of them were really cool. One of them had this which he let me try. It's like a super upgraded version of the tablet I have. It was so awesome. It's pretty much just like drawing on paper, but on the screen.

The main reason we were going was to drop off all of the I, WZL guys that everyone from Newgrounds made. Luis started the competition a couple months ago and he finally got them all back and we wrapped it up when we were there. Basically we set them all out on a table and voted for which we thought were the best.

Bob, one of the main NG programmers (also a really cool guy) was checking out the I, WZLs when he picked up my Moss-Punk and said this is most definitely the coolest one and my favorite. He kept going on about it and I told him it was mine and he thought that was crazy. So he puts it down and and picks up my Rust-Punk guy and says "Alright then this one is definitely the second best" "Eh...thats also mine" hahaa. One of the other guys there, Jeff, comes up and says "Jesus Bob why don't you just go on the closet and start sucking his dick, then" Tee hee

So we voted on the top five winners and they actually picked BOTH of mine so there were six winners. But yehs, I won. I'm getting an NG shirt and a big Munny from Kidrobot. Pretty raaaad. I'm excited, but I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet. I got time.

They were also massive nerds though. Half the time they were there some of them were watching some anime movie and the rest of the time they were playing Rockband and some Tower Defense clone for xBox.

We left the office after awhile and went back to Philadelphia for Cheesesteaks on South St. They were delicious.


Thats Luis, Shawn Tanner (another crazy programmer and animator on Newgrounds), Swain, April, Tom Fulp, and myself.

It was really cool meeting them all but I gotta say I felt out of my element a lot of the time. I spent much of the time just kind of listening and sitting around in the background which I kind of regret, but it's hard to compete with people who have been in on the flash scene for 10+ years and are programming whizzes. The coolest part of the trip besides meeting all these fantastic people was seeing what it is like to work in Flash and game development on a professional level. See, I am at one end of the spectrum as a lowly amateur animator and seeing more or less the peak of web development and animation as a career is really inspiring. It gave me great insight on what working on that level is like and how they more or less started out where I am. It was definitely cool to have that inside look and things.

I don't want to repost many pictures so you can find them all on Facebook.

Besides that I've just been rocking Philly like you do and hanging out. I might see Dan Deacon this weekend which could be cool. Apparently there are some pretty solid shows coming up but I can't be bothered to check them out now. I have class in a few minutes anyways.

I caught Jer on gmail chat the other day too which was awesome. I think that was the first time I'm spoken directly to him since he's left. Besides that it's all been through facebook and blogs pretty much. It was great talking to him again. SO LIKE COME BACK SOON, k.

I hope you all are feeling a little LOST. Cuz I am.