Apologies for my inactivity, but I've been up to a lot lately and have stuff I want to share! Especially with all this negativity going around lately, I wanted to shed light on something positive.

I flew over to California for a couple days to spend time with my pal @RemiDoodlez and attend Short Short Fest in LA for the first time! My good friend @QueenBoo was kind enough to drive and let quite literally the entire NG meetup group carpool in her vehicle, so major props to her for that! We ended up staying for the entire duration of the event.

First block was some animated shorts and live music. The musicians that played improv'd everything while inviting us up from the crowd to draw on a whiteboard- each person that came up drew parts of a body until we had created a freak of nature together! It was a super fun creative exercise that got the energy going for the rest of the day. We also had a storyboard artist from Teen Titans Go! talk about her work in the industry and she provided a slide presentation explaining how her drawing fan art over time eventually helped land her a job! (Her main point was that experimenting with AUs in fanart demonstrated having the ability to build new ideas off of old ones.)

Second block was 5 second shorts, as well as more pointers from a storyboard artist that worked on the CN show Clarence. He showed us a storyboard he made for the show and demonstrated how you would present it- meaning he fully voice acted it as well as provided sound effects on the spot, creating a very immersive experience! It was insanely cool to see.

Third block was one of my favorites, as the creators of Chowder, Robot Jones, and Code Name: Kids Next Door came on to speak about what it was like to be thrusted into the position of a showrunner and overall told of their experience working in the industry during their time at Cartoon Network. Towards the end, they answered some questions from the crowd and drew each other's characters on a whiteboard- the creator of Chowder drew Robot Jones with a robo dick!

And then came the final block, THE Short Short Fest! 2 hours of non-stop toonage! It was so insanely cool to see so much work being presented on the big screen by animators in our community, and even cooler to be able to experience that with other Newgrounders who were just as geeked out about it as I was! XD It was just such an amazing time overall and made me feel so much closer to the community as a whole.

Some other highlights from my trip, which was mainly spent with Rem (@RemiDoodlez) and Vicky (@QueenBoo) included going to Huntington Library, which is this big beautiful botanical library filled to the brim with gorgeous gardens and educational centers. I especially loved their selection of succulents! We also went to the LA Zoo and Knotts Scary Farm in the same day, which was exhausting, but such a blast! Definitely one of my favorite theme park Halloween events now. I also found out that Knotts Scary Farm is the oldest Halloween theme park event in the US! We also did a zombie themed escape room (we won!), and Vicky showed us some of her favorite spots to visit, including this hole in the wall arcade that had a modded arcade machine with Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid on it! (We played on this bad boy almost the entire time, but can you blame us?)

This trip was such a fantastic time- I've been a bit of a homebody lately so it felt wonderful to be able to get out of my shell and spend time with my NG Cali pals! Life can really kick you in the nuts but moments like these remind me it's pain worth dealing with. Love you guys!

In some bonus news, apparently I was User of the Day on the 26th of September! I was outta town when that happened but luckily I randomly decided to check Newgrounds towards the final hour of the day and saw that! Very cool!

I'll just end this post with saying what I usually end up saying, which is that I love this community and everything that it's brought into my life with all my heart. My life would be so much more dull without it. I'm definitely going to try to attend Short Short Fest again next year, maybe even in Philly! I guess we'll see what the future holds, but for now I'm signing off! Thanks for reading!