Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

At 3/22/05 03:24 AM, Deadlock32 wrote: Do their submissions automatically go to some sort of charity or would you go to the next runner up? (sorry if you have already answered the question)

A runner up would eventually be selected. We plan to allow authors to pre-submit their address in the future, so that we have it on file if they win.

At 3/21/05 01:06 PM, KaynSlamdyke wrote: Out of interest, and because I'm thinking about how fast I have to move with my animation projects to attempt to qualify, is this contest going on all year?

I plan to continue the contest for as long as we can afford to. If we ever have to tighten our belts, it is possible some day the prize money could vanish and we would stick with the award certificates and t-shirts. I would rather see the prize money and number of winners increase, though. :)

The voter of the month was HeresyInc. Here's a pic of the certificate!

At 3/20/05 11:30 AM, pythagoras- wrote: But you got paid to post about those "whacky" comercials in the past though, right? Not that it's relevant.

Yes, I do the occasional paid plug and I hope it's pretty obvious to regular users when I do it. I usually try to use the word "plug" in the post, although I occasionally plug stuff for friends as well. For example, if I plug that Milton software, I am just doing it to help out one of my friends. I really should create a front page accound for a blatant "plug-bot". :)

I just mailed out the award packets for the top five contributors from February. In case you didn't see, our panel of judges picked these submissions as the five best from February:

Interactive Buddy v.1.01
Bunnykill 2
-Play-
Valentine's Day Special
X-Men:Dark Phoenix Rising

Each of these authors is receiving a prize pack including a certificate of award (complete with embossed gold NG tank seal), a Newgrounds t-shirt and a check for $250.

Shock-Value, the creator of Interactive Buddy, chose to turn down the $250 award. He asked instead that it be donated to The American Cancer Society. We have honored the request and NG is now ranked as a "friend" to the ACS (minimum "friend" donation happens to be $250). It really feels good to know our awards are not just helping Flash authors, but are helping others as well! I don't want to put pressure on any future winners, though - you've earned whatever prize money you receive. :)

I also sent out the $100 check for the voter of the month, who is receiving a Newgrounds t-shirt as well. Yay!

Congrats again to the winners! In less than two weeks our panel will be deciding the top five contributors for March!

At 3/19/05 09:33 PM, Dizfunktion wrote: Does Bluebaby just pay to make advertisement updates?

No. None of the front page affiliates pay to make announcements.

I loved Eternal Darkness and Einhander, mentioned above. Also all the Dynasty Warriors games. Guardian Heroes and Radiant Silvergun on the Saturn... Power Stone 2 on the Dreamcast was one of my favorite games ever for multi-player... Katamari Damacy of course...

Remember Ninja Warriors 2 for the SNES? That game had some of the best graphics ever for a SNES game. I always mention Gunstar Heroes for the Genesis... Ys 1&2 for the Turbo Grafx CD... That's it off the top of my head. I can't say NO ONE knows about them, but I don't think any of them had huge sales.

At 3/17/05 12:44 AM, Dave_OPreska wrote: Tom,
Hey, It's me Dave, from Friday night at Lovejoys. Glad to see you made it back to Philly in one piece. I had fun hanging out, I think we did have quite a few beers, now that you mentioned it. Driving home was quite interesting...heheh...uhhgg...

Yo! I was hoping you would turn up, since I didn't know what your user account was! Also nice to see your demo reel! I don't know when I'll be back in Austin - with any luck I'll be at SXSW again next year!

One of the authors with content on the front page received this email, apparently spoofing my email address as the sender:

From: TomFulp <Tom@newgrounds.com>
Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:09:36 -0800
Subject: Congratulations Newgrounds Present you with.....

Enjoy hope to see more of your work soon.

There was a 46k file attached called "flash". It is most likely something malicious. Please note that I will NEVER send anyone random files such as this. If you receive an email from me with a file attachment, don't open it until you specifically know the context of our communication!

At 3/16/05 02:48 PM, LazyFuckingBastard wrote: Tom, you made an error!

"NG mod gfoxclock came to the talk!"

He's actually not a clock, he's a cook. A chef, not a time-telling device.

Haha, dammit! I had cook originally but then changed it after his last post was from his gfoxclock account. Doi doi doi.

At 3/16/05 02:07 PM, pythagoras- wrote: Isn't this the second lit piece in a row where Tom smashed piss throughout most of it?

A disturbing trend is emerging... My SXSW piece isn't much different. :)

I've put up a page about my trip to South by Southwest!

Also be sure to check out my page about the Independent Games Festival.

Read my post below for more info!

I think I had something stuck in my teeth in that picture. :)

At 3/16/05 05:50 AM, Aapo_Joki wrote:

At 3/16/05 01:25 AM, DrAtomic wrote: Look at that, two people behind two of 2004's coolest games. By the way Tom, update the Literature page, I hate losing the links to your more-recent adventures!

Why does Tom have that same retarded smile in every picture?

I guess I just have a retarded smile.

At 3/16/05 02:54 AM, gfoxclock wrote: I meant to ask you in Austin, BTW, but forgot... did you meet a guy named Thierry Nyugen there? He worked for CGW back in the 90s... which I believe was combined with Gamespot and I think he might still work there. He was (still is?) a game reviewer for 'em.

I don't think I met Thierry. I hope to have the SXSW page up today. It takes a lot longer than I thought to prep everything, although I did finish prepping the images yesterday and I don't think I'll be getting ahold of any more from other people.

I just got back last night from my week-long trip all over the country! Last Tuesday, April and I flew out to San Francisco for the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developers Conference. Alien Hominid won three awards, read all about the trip here!

On Friday, we flew to Austin, Texas, where I spoke at South by Southwest! I was planning to not make a front page post until I could present pages documenting both trips, but I just spent over seven hours cropping pictures and writing commentary for the IGF page and the SXSW page will take just as long. I'm planning to have SXSW covered tonight or tomorrow, including pics of me and April with some celebrities! Oooooooh!

To celebrate our awards at the IGF / GDC, we are offering free ground shipping from the Alien Hominid store for the rest of March! Go to the site and shop your heart out - we have the game for PS2 and Gamecube, t-shirts, figurines and skateboard decks! Enter the coupon code "gdc2005" to receive free ground shipping - otherwise it isn't free.

Be sure to check out the IGF page, it has tons of pictures from the trip!

I hadn't posted the list because James is in Japan and just sent over a text file output, with lots of columns full of other data (user ID, movie ID, user name, email address). It would take forever to clean it up so I was gonna wait and get a cleaner output later. But here is the top 30 because everyone wants it real bad. In the future, we could possibly change the front page archive to a top list, which includes the daily winners AND front page features and is ranked in order of votes. Who knows...

Magical Trevor 2, NG TT and Aggressive Alpine came SOOOO CLOSE:

Interactive Buddy v.1.01
Bunnykill 2
-Play-
Valentine's Day Special
X-Men:Dark Phoenix Rising
NG TT Series Finale -A
Magical Trevor2
Aggressive Alpine Skiing
Artificial High 3
Bill Cosby Fun Game
Rebel Burger Ep.1
X-Men: Death Becomes Them
Viviparous Dumpling
FF: Mixed in Balamb2(1/3)
Proto
Slayer Episode VIII
Inner Demons
Bump Copter 2
Minushi - Chapter 9
team laser explosion 3
FF: Mixed in Balamb2(2/3)
TmsT's "Up Skit Creek"
The World of Abbreviation
Final Fantasy Day Care 1
Trapped 5
Fresh Aqua
-Obsolete-
Paper-Back Bust
The Bounce
rocketDRIVE

We received a lot of great submissions in February and have tallied the results from the community vote for the top five! Here they are, in order!

1. Interactive Buddy v.1.01
2. Bunnykill 2
3. -Play-
4. Valentine's Day Special
5. X-Men:Dark Phoenix Rising

Each of these authors will receive $250, a Newgrounds T-Shirt and a certificate of award!

Also, we award $100 each month to one of the users who has voted on NG submissions. For February, the cash goes to HeresyInc! It just happens he also submits. :)

At 3/6/05 01:18 AM, AzianBum wrote: By the way, is this your first time to Austin?

Yup, this will be my first visit to Austin!

At 3/5/05 03:17 PM, brendanmulv22 wrote: enough of the nostalgia. Keep up the good work and if you want to, I'll mail you the article (postal service so you can put it in your secret scrapbook). email me or message me or whatever you do.

I picked up a copy already, but thanks! :)

At 3/4/05 05:24 PM, Jack_Sparrow wrote: Not gonna say anything about The Behemoth's nomination for the best new studio for the Game Developers Choice Awards?

Oh yeah... Behemoth was nominated for best new studio! :)

At 3/4/05 05:19 PM, Incredible_Hulk wrote: But Steve couldn't do it. He thought about his server family and how much they'd miss him. His daughter Samantha was a star server for the little league processing team. Steve couldn't take the leap. He would of broken Samantha's mother board.

I love it. :)

At 3/4/05 05:06 PM, JeremyLokken wrote: Is this the same festival, or are there two of them down there?

Same festival. It has three portions: Film, Music and Interactive.

At 3/4/05 12:40 PM, VeryProudofYa wrote: Well that sounds very usefull, but how often does a server crash?

Our servers used to crash a lot, although we have really dependable servers running at the moment. However, we have had recent crashes due to recent traffic spikes. That was mostly due to our bandwidth limitations - when we reach our max bandwidth, we "drop packets". When this happens, the end user's computer makes additional requests to our server, trying to complete the download. What eventually happens is the servers become backlogged trying to deliver all the data and they crash. We are resolving this by raising our bandwidth, which we hope to have complete by the end of next week.

Tim is finally installing the load balancer, which is a big box that manages all the servers. When a server crashes, it takes it off-line so no one hits a dead server (something which currently needs to be done manually). It also evenly distributes the traffic among the servers so they all run at the same capacity (currently, a single server can randomly get overloaded with more traffic than the others). So in general, it should make the site performance more robust and dependable.

This Sunday, expect the site to be down from 8am until as late as noon. Tim will be taking Newgrounds off-line to make some big hardware changes. This could take as little as an hour, but it may take up to four hours before the site is back on-line.

ATTENTION SAN FRANCISCO

If you live in the San Franciso Area, please come out to the Independent Games Festival Pavilion at Moscone Center during the Game Developers Conference. The Festival is open to the public and is FREE. We will be there with Alien Hominid and Edmund will be there with Gish! Dates are March 9th - 11th from 11:30am to 6:30pm. I won't be available on Friday the 11th, however...

ATTENTION AUSTIN, TEXAS

I am flying direct from San Fran to Austin, Texas, where I am speaking at the South by Southwest festival. Although registration is required for most of the conference, my speech is FREE, so come on down if you are in the area! I will be speaking at 7:30PM on Friday, March 11th.

EXACT INFO:

"The SXSW Interactive Festival is hosting a FREE presentation from Alien Hominid developer Tom Fulp at 7:30 pm on Friday, March 11. This presentation occurs on the top floor of the annex of the Austin Convention Center. Enter at the 4th and Trinity corner of the building."

The SXSW Schedule is available on-line, as is more Information about the Game Developers Conference and the Independent Game Festival.

Remember, both events are FREE, so come say hi! I would especially like to see people in Austin who can come ask questions! I'll feel more comfortable if there are NG fans in the room.

At 3/3/05 04:20 PM, Dejected wrote: why does it not occur to you that Wade and/or Tom could have AGREED to letting the fuckers use the layout and get a CUT of the fucking money made....

you all should think of alll possibilities

Uh... No. They're fags.

We'll see who the master is at the Great American Beer Festival, hoser!

At 3/2/05 10:15 AM, Ben_Spurgin wrote: Besides you'd have to do a lot more than that to piss me off, Tom. Like shave off my eyebrows in my sleep or somthing..... wait you don't know where I live do you??

I know where you work, so I'll follow you home!

I just wanted to say that my removal of Stick Slayer from the front page this morning was pure coincidence and not done with malice for the front page bump. :)

Seriously, though... Coincidence!