Hey guys. I'm working on sparking a new meme on Cheezburger, so I'm gonna update this journal periodically with the new LOLs I make. As always, it would be greatly appreciated if you could go check them out, vote for them and like them and stuff.

First of all, thanks go out to all of yous for getting the first Competitive Dash on the front page. This was the one that showed how she felt about second place.
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Second is Competitive Dash debunking the "Everybody's a winnner!" theory. Thanks for getting that on the front page as well.
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Third is Competitive Dash's response to, "Good game!"
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Thanks for helping Competitive Dash's response to the phrase, "It's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game!" make the front page, you guys! I'll put the next one up in a few days.
[link]

Next LOL going up. This time, Competitive Dash takes on the old saying, "There's no 'I' in 'team.'"
[link]

Skin by *kimmy-chu

And it's the most awesome thing anybrony's ever made!



This wonderflonious episode-length My Little Pony animation was not made by me, but rather a Mr. *FlamingoRich and a whole team of people with Hasbro's blessings--worked for more than fifty tireless weeks trying to put this thing together!

If you haven't heard of *FlamingoRich, I highly suggest checking him out. He's got some awesome stuff...including an ongoing storybook he's working on.

If you haven't head about this project--Double Rainboom--before, two things. 1) Do you live under a rock?! 2) Here it is. You have no further excuse for your oblivion.

Anyway, while you're here, I wanna extend my congratulations to *FlamingoRich (Dropped his name three times now. Might be a reason for that...) and the entire team behind this thing. I didn't expect half of what was gonna happen, but you had me smiling the whole way through. I'd also like to extend my thanks. I truly enjoyed that episode, and I can tell a lot of work was put into it.

As for *FlamingoRich (four times) himself (if he's reading this), I heard this was a senior project or something for you up at SCAD. Hopefully the higher-ups up there will appreciate all the work you've put into it as much as I did. From one brony to another, brohoof.

EDIT: On the topic of Rainbow Dash, I made another LOL on cheezburger. I'm trying to create a new meme, so it would be awesome if you went and saw what I did and liked it and stuff.

Here's a [link]

Skin by *kimmy-chu

...Or is it indirect defiance...?

-one Google search later-

...Both work here.

Okay, so as you guys well know, I put up a poll last week when I had finally gotten my hands on a copy of Mass Effect, asking whether i should play as Shepard or Femshep, and though the results are clearly as follows...



...I'm actually going to play as Femshep. Now, since gameplay is unaffected by character choice, the choice boils down to a handful of reasons. The first being stated by ~crusnikjab in response to the poll itself.



After reading ~crusnikjab's comment, I decided to look into the voice acting thing and see if I agreed. Long story short, after browsing through forum posts from multiple websites discussing the topic and watching a video on YouTube comparing "The Normandy Speech" by both shepards, I find I agree with ~crusnikjab. There's something about the way Femshep delivers her lines that I like better than Shepard.

The second reason I'm going with Femshep is removing myself from the picture. See, every time I play a male character in one of those RPGs that allows for character creation, my first instinct is to make him look and act just like me. And since I generally try to avoid conflict (the thing that makes video games fun), I wind up not having a lot of fun playing as...myself. (Besides that, Drew Shepard doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.) If I play a female character, I have the freedom to do whatever and be whoever I want, since I'm no longer limited by the ego telling me, "It has to be like you because you are amazing!"

The third and final reason is minor, but if I think about it, it does have some effect on my decision in one of these situations. See, I put a lot of emphasis during character creation on making the character look good. Sure, I'll only be looking at the back of their head most of the time, but I guess it's sort of the principle of the thing. Besides, I'll see their face in cutscenes, and I don't want to have to avert my eyes every time one of those comes up. Now, with males, I have no idea what looks good because I never think about it, so it's harder for me to make a good-looking guy (that doesn't wind up looking like me. See "bloated ego" above). As for the fairer sex, I know what I think looks good, and it's easy for me to translate that into character creation.

Tl;dr (didn't think I'd need one in this journal)

Thanks for voting in the poll, eveybody; I appreciate your opinions, but screw you guys. I'm gonna be Femshep!
For...various reasons.

Journal design by *Simmemann

Why is everybody complaining about the new deviantART submit page? Sure it's different, but that doesn't mean it's bad. I just uploaded about eight different deviations with it without running into a single problem.

While we're on the topic of change, who's ready for the big season finale of MLP tomorrow? I'll be honest that I'm speaking as much to myself as I am to the rest of you when I say, "Don't be afraid of change. It will happen, things will become different, and you just gotta learn to adapt. If those making the change know what they're doing, they'll be able to make the change as comfortable as possible. Ya just gotta have a little faith sometimes."


That said, I'm still nervous as an armadillo crossing a four-lane highway about the finale. Hopefully, it all works out.

_{^{Yeah, I live in Texas. Can you tell yet?}}

Specifically about whether or not I should upload a particular piece of artwork.

Lemme 'splain. The entertainment editor for The Eagle newspaper up here at NTCC has this little blurb she does every issue where she picks four things that really interests her and says a little something about each. When she came up with the idea, she approached me about making a cartoon version of her to use in every issue, and in a fit of inspiration, I created this:



Basically, I created it as a base so that each issue, I could change up her costume and make her look like one of the things she's talking about in any given blurb. My question to you guys is whether or not you're interested in seeing them uploaded to my deviantART gallery. I've got about...5 created so far, not counting the base, and I've got an animated .gif of the changing costumes that I'm gonna update every time I add a new costume to her repertoire.

So if you would like to see what i've come up with...

A) Would you like me to upload all of the "Amanda Thinks" images?

B) Would you like me to upload the base (or basically move it out of my scraps folder)?

C) Would you like me to upload the .gif?

C.1) If so, would you like me to upload it and update it every time I add a new costume, or would you prefer I waited until the "What Amanda's Into" series was over and uploaded it once I had all the costumes included?

Let me know in the poll ([link] or in the comments below!

So after talking things over a bit with the _{^{personinwhosegalleryIfoundsomeofmyart}}, I found out that she herself didn't actually perform the theft.

What I mean is she wasn't the one to scale down my thing and turn it into a low-quality .jpg; she was just the uploader. From what I hear from her, she got it from a friend who in turn got it from google.

I've done some google searching on the image specifically, but nothing like what was in her gallery has appeared. Perhaps it was taken down wherever she got it from.

Anyway, like I said I talked with her a little bit, and I told her about art theft and all that, and she actually seems pretty agreeable about it. She said she won't be doing any more uploading of stuff to her gallery that isn't hers, so as far as I'm concerned, we're good.

_{^{I'm still gonna keep an eye on her though. Ya never know who you can trust on here.}}

Turns out somebody got it in their head it would be a good idea to download one of my vectors, downscale it and kill the quality then upload it as their own.

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I'm not really mad, because
A) this was a resource vector, and as such, it's technically there so people can use it as they need
B) This can only mean I'm becoming well-known enough on deviantART to have to worry about this kind of stuff.

Though I still am a little miffed because they didn't give me credit for the vector, and that kind of churns my butter a little bit.

I already reported the deviation to deviantART, so that's been taken care of. I'm not gonna suggest you go to the deviation page an yell at the uploader for what they've done, but I am gonna leave the link to it here if that's what you wanna do.

Yeah, it kind of sucks that this happened, but people are stupid. Ya gotta kind of come to expect this kind of stuff (Wow, that's cynical!).

Anywhizzle, big thanks to ~VladimirMacHolzraum for lookin' out for me and pointing out the culprit. I'm gonna throw a llama badge at this guy.

Eh, money's tight right now, so Denton's gonna have to wait.

Good thing I've got a plan B and didn't burn all my bridges when I left NTCC last semester.

I'll go for one more semester, grab my associate's in science, gather together some extra change and go to UNT in the fall.

It's gonna be easier in the fall, anyway. So many things like getting a work-study job or moving into a dorm usually go on a fall-to-spring schedule, not the other way around.

Hey, so I dunno if I mentioned this to you guys, but I've been trying for the past month or so to get stuff settled so I can see about getting myself accepted to University of North Texas to get myself a degree in programming. I'd say I'd been struggling with my school's admin about getting things wrapped up since...probably late November, but that's another story.

What I wanted to let you guys know that, despite the struggle and the last-minute nature of me applying, I received an email today congratulating me on getting accepted to UNT.

I'm gonna be moving up to Denton and out of my parents' house sometime within the next few weeks, and it's gonna be my first time living entirely on my own since I won't have a license and will be too far away to ride my bike back home on weekends (unless I want to make a trip out of it, be able to stay at my parents' place for about a half hour and make a trip out of getting back, but I don't think I wanna go that route).

Anyway, I'm super-excited, cause this is a pretty big thing, man! The move's gonna be a little awkward, but I've already got a good amount of friends up there already, and at least one of them I've only known here on deviantART thusfar.

Anyway, next few weeks are gonna be focused on getting things taken care of between here and Denton, so art's gonna be as slow as it has been for the last few weeks, if not slower once I start school.

But, since I don't want to end this on a low note, have some "Wut?"

Gonna be cutting back on a few things I've joined in because too much things at one time overloads me and makes me not want to do anything at all.

Also gonna be shifting my focus as far as (almost typed fart! ) the website I mainly use from here on deviantART to tumblr. That's where Ask MORT! is, that's where I'm gonna start putting up some more blogs, and that's where my attention is needed at the moment.

I'll still be on deviantART as a social network (just coz I got so many amaze friends on devART, but if you really wanna see activity from me, you're gonna hafta follow my tumblr blog(s) and subscribe to my YouTube account, since that's probably where most of my uploads and activity will be.

Sorry if this inconveniences any of you, but I'm trying to discipline myself creatively and really reign in my procrastination thing. Bear with me, and I hope to see ya somewhere else out there!

<sub><sup>Oh, yeah--hope you all had a Merry Christmas or a happy Hanuka, Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Saint Nicholas' Day, Advent, Saint Lucy Day, Bodhi Day, Winter Solstice, Dongzhi Festival, Soyal, Yalda, Mōdraniht, Saturnalia, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Anastasia of Sirmium Feast Day, Malkh (or Mulkh...however it's pronounced. Little Julian Smith Joke there.), Boxing Day *deep breath*or Saint Stephen's Day, and I hope you will also have an enjoyable Saint John the Evangelist's Day, Holy Innocent's Day, Saint Sylvester's Day, Watch Night, New Year's Eve and Hogmanay!

Or...whatever it is you prefer to celebrate in December. I think I got most of them, though.</sup></sub>

Haha I betcha guys didn't know I was going through finals week, didja?

Well, I was. It wasn't as major a thing as it coulda been, because one class didn't have a final, another I had an A in and was exempt from taking the final (sort of a disappointment, but I'm also glad to have gotten the free time), and I ended up with only one test to take.

That was pre-cal, and I was stressin' pretty bad over it (or would be if I were a test-stress kinda guy. Though it's still not saying much, this test was one of my most stressed-over, however.). But I did some last-minute cramming, wrote some notes onto a 4X6 index card (totally legal in the testing center. Gotta love it! ) and made it out of there alive with a C.

Now, after checking my grade in that class, looks like I gots a C overall. So, good day.

On the agenda for tomorrow is packing up my stuff, going to a white-elefant Christmas party (I'm gonna wrap a game of Don't Break the Ice to look like the TARDIS! ) and the midnight premier of The Hobbit (part 1, so I've heard). Then, Friday, I'll be moving out of the dorms.

And on the seventh day, I shall rest.

Haha so what's going on with you guys?

because I don't do enough of that on this site already.

Anyway, I made a LOL for memebase with a legitimate concern. So iffn' you guys could go check it out and thumb it up or whatever, that'd be awesome!

[link]

So, I've spent the last week playing around in Pencil (a free animation software), trying to get a hang of how animation works. Come to find out today the program is utter crap on Windows.

I'm not gonna complain about the features that don't work on Windows--or even the bits of it that didn't work in general--in favor of continuing with the story. You see, after finding out Pencil was crap, I decided I'd just go and look for another free animation software that did all the things it did, but with actual functionality. I browsed every result Google gave me, and suffice to say, one doesn't exist.

So, I finally cracked and took a look at flash CS6, figuring since it was just software, it couldn't be too expensive.

Boy, was I wrong! If any of you out there are looking to pick up a copy of flash, be prepared to shell out $699 for the thing. I personally am not going to bother, as I've got other things I need to spend that money on, but that leaves me right back at square one--no money and no way of animating things.

So guys, simple question: why do you have to be rich to be an animator?

Anyone got the sense of deja vu? Ah well. Thanks for Joining me LIVE as I made some let's play-type videos and stuff.

Yep, I got no classes to go to, and I've pretty much decided when I woke up that today would be dedicated to livestreaming and trying to animate stuffs.

So, come with me and see just how bad I can mess stuff up live on my livestream channel!

Alright. That'll be it for the night. It was going so well too until I got to her face. That bucking face!

Thanks you guys for coming!

If ya missed and wanna see what it was you missed, as always, follow the [link]