Did you get up to any shenanigans? Myself, I was busy being awesome:

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And since the audio on Little Lion Man was especially washed out:

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Earlier this week I reached 100,000 medal points. Then I reached 100,030, because fuck Star Forge. Send your medals when they're earned, not when the game closes, you fucking idiot.

Anyway

I've asked LilJim if he can please remove my two most recent medals, to put me back to exactly 100,000, since that's such a better number to stop on than 100,030. Either way, this is me officially retiring from collecting medal points. I set a lofty goal, I reached that lofty goal, and now I'm done. Also it should take 100,000 points to enter the top 10 now, which is pretty damn cool on its own.

Since medal points were the only real thing keeping me active on the site, this is also me leaving for a while. I'm sure I'll eventually make my way back here, but right now I need to focus on other things in my life. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of the last couple years of high activity here on my part, and I thank the community for giving me the opportunity to have that fun.

See you later!

What's going on here?

Be back later

Hey you. Yes you. When's the last time you took a serious look at what makes it through the portal? Why don't you spend a few minutes and look at it now. Don't worry, I'll wait...

...did you see it? Did you see the mountain of shitty, unworthy entries that make it through? That's because people have no idea how to vote. Since most submissions pass judgment, rather than actually watching an entry and judging it fairly, people just open it, vote 5 and move on, often without even knowing what it is they're voting on. People are playing the numbers game: most flashes pass, so odds are voting 5 will get a save point.

You need to cut it out.

The point of the portal is not to inflate a statistic on your profile which is essentially meaningless. The point is to make sure that only flashes that are worth seeing make it through the system. The point is to be a buffer so that people can say "this is utter trash, this shouldn't be here" and get rid of the crap. You people who are voting 5 blindly are literally ruining the reputation of Newgrounds.

I'm not saying everything should be blammed, I'm saying you need to be more critical of what you vote to save. Actually watch the thing before deciding how to vote, and then vote honestly rather than with how you think the masses will vote. If a submission is crap, vote 0 or 1. If it's okay but nothing special, vote 2 or 3. If it's awesome, vote 4 or 5. But don't arbitrarily vote 5 just because 4 out of 5 submissions pass and you want the save points. If you're only here to increase the number of saves you have, then you're here for the wrong reason.

You're on Newgrounds. Care about it.

I finally got my heavy punching bag set up in the dungeon (by which I mean my workout room). Now I just need to find some gloves that don't have UFC written on them, because I want them to be affordable.

So there's this new medal game called Smiley Popper, which is essentially a remove tiles game on a 20x20 grid. Within 2 hours of it being released here on Newgrounds I did this (full game video, just under 10 minutes):

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That combo of blues, by the way, was worth 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 points, or 1 less than 2^63. All other points are incidental. Sadly, the NG scoreboard only stores up to 2^32 points, so my score will forever be relegated to the tomb of 2 billion point games, but at least I have video evidence of my actual performance.

Several hours later, because I felt like playing a short game before going to bed, I fired the game up again and did this (only the end, less than 2 minutes):

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That's 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,175 points for popping a group of 80 greens (2^80 - 1). A higher score is possible, but certainly not realistic; there's an E24 at the end of my score in the game. I thought I was done, but then I found out the website where the game was developed uses Mochi to save scores, which will actually save the full score rather than cutting off. So I played it again over there, and did this:

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That's 9,671,406,556,917,033,397,649,407 points in a single drop. The next highest score on that site is 2^21 points behind me, meaning nobody else has gotten a drop bigger than 2^62. Now I'm done.

For the second Game Jam, Team Moose came up with Mechanical Ice Apocalypse. It's a really good, and generally considered rather hard, boss battle. And if you want the medals or to submit your time, you have to do it with one life.

When it first came out I beat it in a time that was below 1:56, which long stood as the top time for the game. After the game was updated to shrink the hitboxes it got harder to get a really low time, because the missiles the second time through lasted on the screen longer. As such, I was fairly confident nobody would come anywhere close to my time. And I was right: only one other person has gotten a time below 1:57, and that just barely.

However, I wanted to see if I could find a way to get a sub-1:56 time in the new version now that missiles behave the way they do. So I set up my screen recorder and had at it. And did this:

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So not only did I succeed at getting a sub-1:56 time, I actually did it sub-1:55 AND set a new high score for the game. Because I felt like it. But that's not all: shortly after recording that run I played one perfectly, and came out with this:

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So odds are that's the fastest time that's possible in the game. And it's mine. And there you go.

It amuses me that almost immediately after writing a scathing review of the idea of organizing personal changes around January 1 (the first paragraph is totally about that), my brain has picked today, January 2, as the day for me to be introspective. It doesn't happen as often as it should, but it probably happens more for me than for most. It happened to me today as I'm sucking back some sniffles of unknown origin, having just finished up playing a bit of a flash game. Odd time, I know. It's important not to dwell on such timings though, as they often distract from what's important, and what's important in this case is what I realized about myself, and what I realized about myself is this:

I waste a lot of time.

It's been a while since I posted up my to-do list, but rest assured it still exists, and it's still rather lengthy. I'm not looking at it right now, but it contains at least the following:

- swap TVs in the basement
- finish the walls in the basement
- finish the ceiling in the basement
- install the floor in the basement
- fantasy book series
- fantasy series prequel book (just the one)
- 2 horror books
- more Haiku (always more Haiku)
- website for Mom
- web tool for me
- update Rooster Tooths for new purposes
- web tool for the Escapist
- lots of reading
- finish cleaning bedroom
- sell Magic cards
- more HTNS

Now, here are the things I waste most of my time on:
- web communities
- flash games

That's pretty much it. I mean, there are other things I spend time on, but it tends to be short amounts at a time. Reading web comics, for instance. At the moment I keep up with [citation_needed], Order of the Stick, xkcd, Garfield minus Garfield, Least I Could Do, Looking for Group, Darths & Droids, and Cyanide & Happiness. At the most these take about 5 minutes of my week. Every other week I spend a few minutes watching what's new over at Ill Will Press, and every Wednesday I watch Zero Punctuation. There are a lot of things here, but they eat up very little of my time. Other than while eating or on weekends I don't watch much TV, so it's not a problem either any more.

So, since when asked I always advocate changing as soon as you realize something needs changing, I'm going to make a concerted effort to change right now. For 2009 I changed the music I listen to, so since it's the beginning of the year I'm going to make a change for 2011. Except for weekends, I am not going to be on any community site (including this one) before 7PM Toronto time, for any length of time, for any reason. I will also not play any flash games before 7PM. Like with the change in music, this is an all at once, cold turkey deal.

Now, since I obviously require downtime sometimes, because I can't be working constantly all the time, I'm going to replace any time I would normally spend during the day on these sites with doing something from my list. So rather than take a break from work to catch up on the community websites, I'll take a break to clean, or to write, or to work on another website. The goal here is to train myself to be more disciplined. I'm 30 fucking years old, and I should know better.

What this is not is an effort to change who I am. It's my habits that need to be brought into check here, not my personality. This isn't about what I do or how I do it, but about when I do it. I'll still be the me that you all know and love (or hate, or whatever), I'll just be me away from the site until 7PM or later on weekdays.

So that's what I'm doing this year. What about you?

This is a message to probably about half the people who submit flash to this site: fuck off. We don't need you. The site would be a better place without you.

To find out whether you fall into the group of people I'm addressing, check the following list and see if you meet any of the criteria.

1) You keep submitting the same types of games with no improvements. This mostly comes down to escape games, dress-up games, and jigsaw puzzles, but I won't discriminate. If all you're doing is submitting the same bullshit you've already submitted before but with cosmetic changes, then don't waste our time. Try innovating. Try doing something new, that hasn't been done hundreds of times before, by you no less.

2) You submit "work in progress" material or "tests". Keep that shit off the site until it's finished and polished and you're proud of it. We don't need to see that you can make a stick figure walk, fucking put it in something. You want to test uploading a flash? Don't. It works. All you're doing is wasting Newgrounds bandwidth and our time.

3) You're submitting something you made by following a tutorial, with at best a minimal amount of cosmetic changes to make it "yours." We've all seen what the tutorials produce, and you're just clogging up the portal with your waste of space tutorial game. Learn from the tutorials and use that knowledge to make something that's actually fucking original.

4) You're submitting pieces of crap that you know are pieces of crap, just for the sake of submitting them. You are a worthless piece of shit and you don't deserve an account. Not only are you wasting everyone's time, you know you're wasting everyone's time, and you're doing it on purpose. You are what's wrong with the Internet. Congratulations, you deserve to die.

And another thing, all you people who vote 5 on things that you know are shitty need to fuck off too. Let's try to have some standards here, assholes. All you're accomplishing by passing something through the portal that is utter trash, doesn't work, or doesn't even fucking load, is making Newgrounds look like a place for people to dump their garbage.

So Merry Christmas and fuck you. I hope you die.