2024 may go down as one the most substantial years of my life. the year i graduated high school, the year i got my first job, and most important (to me), the year i finally started to post my work publicly and tried to make a name for myself online. i talked about it briefly when i first joined twitter, but i was a lurker for a very long time. i still made art, but i only ever shared it with a very small circle of friends. not that i thought my art was bad, but i was never confident enough in it to be comfortable releasing any of it to the public. not only that, i wanted my first impression to be something grand. something that would let me immediately gain an audience so i wouldn't be posting into the void for however long it would normally take to find fans.
the "grand" project i was planning on releasing has been stuck in limbo for a long time, for a number of reasons (lack of motivation/laziness, being more passionate about other things, some parts being so old im kinda conflicted on whether or not i even want people to see it lol). i came to terms with the fact that, realistically, it would be a very long time before i had a big project to release. i was so bent on taking a shortcut to building a fanbase, while at the same time not being committed enough to the project i was banking on to actually finish it. the final nail in the coffin was the shutdown of Nitter, the Twitter backend i would use to browse, and i finally decided to bite the bullet and made my Newgrounds and Twitter accounts. to my surprise, in just a few months of posting, i was earning dozens of fans! in a little over half a year, i had gained about 100 followers on twitter, and by the end of this year i now have more than 50 fans on Newgrounds. hell, it only took me about two months of being on Bluesky to gain over 150+ followers on there.
had i not made my accounts at the end of january, i dont think my creative output would have been nearly as huge or consistent as it was this year. a good chunk of my motivation came from pleasing my newly found audience. after years of downplaying my skills, believing my art wasn't nearly good enough to for anyone online to seriously like it, let alone over a hundred people, you all proved me wrong.
so with all that said, putting aside my usual snark and goofy wit, i want to sincerely thank everyone who liked and supported my work this year. i'm grateful for each and every one of you. hope you all had a wonderful 2024 as well, and if you didn't, i hope 2025 is even better for you
p.s. here's an intentionally shitty video i made for 2022 new year. funny how im more proud of this than i am my very first video, which i really hate lmao