I need a Wacom. Ya know how animals like to drink from hoses?

Here's my original attempt that I wasn't gonna submit.

Here's a hungry fellow!

At 6/4/06 11:23 AM, Time_Traveler wrote: So since you've suddenly decided to update it with new interviews, are you planning any kind of updates graphically for the mag?

Yes, it will fit the new site layout we are developing.

At 6/4/06 11:20 AM, _Nick_ wrote: At LAST there's an update in the Ng Mag.

And does this better publishing thing involve the Flash Regs magazine? Because us lot over at Flash Regs have already written a fair few articles, and Glaiel said he'd spoke to you about it.

It will make it easier for you guys to contribute. The big problem with NGMag is that we had overhauled it a few years ago to make it more useable for contributors, but we never quite got there 100%. Plan to solve that once and for all.

We have two new interviews in NGMag!

Skitch has interviewed both The Super Flash Bros and Michael Swain, the creator of Blockhead. Check 'em out! If you have a favorite artist and fancy yourself a writer, you can contribute your own interviews to NGMag! Dig deep, and ask interesting questions!

We're planning to overhaul the NGMag publishing system over the summer, so that we can have much more regular updates in the future. NGMag will also be redesigned to match the new site design we are working on.

For your weekend dose of weird, check out Red and Black!

If you are on our panel of top users, you have until June 7th to vote for the best submissions from May! Log in and see if you are on the panel! If you don't know about the monthly contest, read this to learn more! Winners will each receive $250, an awards certificate and a t-shirt.

All ten winners will also receive the Dr. Shroud DVD, courtesy of Knight Entertainment!

Time is running out to enter the Stagknight Contest! You have ten days left to submit your own evil killing spree game!

Fans of Lemon Demon's music should check out the new Lemon Demon Store! Lemon Demon made the song for The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.

Dave is taking pre-orders for the new Retarded Animal Babies DVD! Go order a copy and see the bonus episodes!

Finally, go watch Blockhead: Episode 7 and Astronaut Cop. If you're in the mood for something weird on a Friday, watch Honey Circuit.

At 6/1/06 10:20 AM, BigGunsEntertainment wrote: Sometimes you gotta step back from a job or even a dream, to begin to understand why you love it so much. But that's the way I see things.

All good points. :) I definitely need to keep perspective on how great everything is going in general, despite the little things that go wrong.

It isn't as humid out now and I think we fixed the HVAC, but I still have a guy scheduled to come out next week and take a look. I wasn't able to get anyone to come out any sooner, all the HVAC places prioritize customers with service contracts.

In other news, I got a leaking toilet replaced today and the office apartment (Mindchamber's home away from Brooklyn) is now in the process of getting painted. Decided to hire a painter because the old wallpaper needed removal - I did that once and will never do it again. :)

At 5/30/06 01:15 PM, Hanshinboy wrote: I had a good week Thomas. Thank you for asking. Do you really care ?
You are now a game soft developer, making 6 figures.

I just like to make sure no one had more fun than me.

At 5/30/06 10:50 AM, SevenSeize wrote: There's a vitamin you can buy called 5 -HTP. It relaxes you and helps you sleep. If you're insomnia is stress related you may wanna pick some up. I did that same thing this weekend. Slept, drank, chilled out...repeat several times and not neccessarily in that order.

I'm always nervous that if I take pills like that, it will reduce my brain's natural ability to produce serotonin. Sounds tempting, though. :)

This weekend was the first weekend in a really long time where I completely decompressed from work. I had a Memorial Day party on Saturday and besides a few hours early Saturday morning, I didn't spend any time in the office for three whole days. I hate even referring to NG as work, but it can definitely take its toll.

I get an occasional bout of insomnia and can't sleep all night, which happened last night. It seems to happen even if I'm not thinking about the pressures of the next console game or work that needs to be done around the office. I simply can't sleep sometimes. So to top it all off, I come to the office this morning to find that air conditioning ducts are dripping condensation on the floor in two spots. Right now they are dripping into trashcans while I wait for a call-back from an HVAC company.

So much for my crappy morning... Did everyone else enjoy the three day weekend?

Happy Lock Day, everyone!

I've thrown together a Lock Day 2006 page which I will be updated. So far I still have some icons to make (pleeeease include icons with your submissions) and I intend to replace the title image. Expect to see a lot of Lock Legion submissions today!

I spent most of yesterday at my alma matter, Drexel University! Drexel has a growing program for game development, so I went to meet with the students, check out their projects and give a public talk. It was really impressive! When I was at Drexel just a few years ago, no one was making games. Now, there are labs full of students who eat, sleep and breath game development. I played a lot of great games, many made with Flash - hopefully we'll see some of them on NG some day! If you're in the Philadelphia area and want to pursue a career in game development, I would definitely look into Drexel's Digital Media program!

The Behemoth co-founder Brandon LaCava was on the team for a new game - Titan Quest! Go download the demo and play!

Also, go watch Le Petit Americain Ep. 3, it's crazy!!!!

I added Kingdumb Hearts to the video game spoofs collection.

Every morning I come to the office, sit down and update the front page showcase. I never actually SAY anything in the process, so today I thought I would.

Good morning everyone!

We get so many great submissions nowadays, too many of them never make front page. Just this morning I got a kick out of Monkey Pee and Bransen Does the Dew. If anyone has any recent favorite submissions that have failed to be noticed, feel free to share them here!

The NG team continues to quietly grow at the office. Last week we were joined by Mike Welsh, who despite a lack of many submissions, is an amazing programmer! You may have seen him around the Flash and Programming forums.

When we launch the new site design, we'll finally have an updated staff page, so you can see just who is hanging around and what we've all been up to. I'm hopingto have staff blogs, possibly mandatory ones to keep everyone in the loop.

I'm spending most of tomorrow at Drexel, giving talks to several classes as well as meeting with students in DU's video game program! Any Drexel students out there reading this?

At 5/24/06 03:19 AM, Matanoch wrote: Please excuse my randomness and possible ignorance but is there any fresh news on Pico2?

Sorry, no news on Pico 2.

At 5/22/06 04:07 PM, Greenskullkid wrote:

At 5/22/06 03:47 PM, TomFulp wrote:

Hey tom, how old is the age limit to getting in Comic-con?

I don't think there is an age limit!

At 5/22/06 10:41 AM, Zendra wrote: Tom, just a little question: since you're already telling people about the new ideas, why don't create a little page with detailed list of new features of NG's re-design?
Then people can go crazy and then it's also something to look forward to. Plus it's official for us as well. :)

It's a double-edged sword. I want to post about our ideas because 99% of the ideas people post about have already been in the works, in planning or under discussion for years now. It's annoying when we launch something we talked five years ago, only to have some user say "Hey, I posted that idea 6 months ago, gimme credit!"

The problem is, so many sites have stolen features from Newgrounds that I don't want to give them a head-start. So people will just have to wait and see what sort of stuff we are working on, as we finish it.

At 5/20/06 02:58 PM, Depredation wrote: Great to here that the site is getting a make over.

BUT WHEN ARE YOU MAKING THE SCREENSAVER PAGE

Reply pleases!

Yes, I still plan to make the screensaver page. I've been tempted to save it for the redesign, but since it will be a while I should make one sooner.

At 5/20/06 10:52 AM, Inglor wrote: I think you should revive the mag, it's pretty dead at the moment and that's a shame because it's a nice place.

That's in the plans for this summer!

Yeah, goths are the ORIGINAL Newgrounds fans... Shame to see them getting beat on in the name of Pico.

I finally finished prepping the prize packs for best of March, best of April and Pico Day! They will be shipping out on Monday!

Ever since we established the NG office, we've been working around the clock on all sorts of upcoming projects. It makes you realize that as your goals and dreams get bigger, so does the time it takes to implement them. Sometimes I miss the days when I could make a new game in a matter of days and a change to the site wasn't a big deal. There's endless excitement over all the projects we're working on, so it's just a matter of time before it all gets done. There's a new console game on the way, a total site redesign, some new web games and more new site features than we will ever have time to implement.

We'll be unveiling the latest demo of our new console game and hopefully the name at Comic-Con this July in San Diego!

The redesign will be a few more months, as we are trying to do the entire site all at once as well as add some new features! Expect to see PM before then, that's all I'll say. :)

Be sure to check out the Stagknight Contest going on this month!

At 5/18/06 04:27 PM, IBx1 wrote: Who's Bob?

Is he responsible for the header change? "Everything, by Everyone?" I say down with this...Bob.

Bob is purely implementing the new layout in CSS. We all talk about how the layout should work, Stamper handles the visualization and Bob handles the CSS implementation. It's part of the new assembly line process we have going on here!

At 5/18/06 04:38 PM, Evark wrote: Hope this doesn't mean you're going to beautify the mod tools though. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to look at the purty new layout all over the mod tools, but for the purpose of faster page-loads... not doing that would probably be better.

Bob won't be touching the mod tools - just the text links that appear for mods when they are browsing public forum pages.

Bob has been working on the CSS redesign of Newgrounds, and since he needs to see the page layouts with mod tools included, we have set him up with mod priviledges. He won't actually be doing any moderating, he just needs to be able to implement the mod tools into the CSS layout.

At 5/16/06 10:48 AM, Inglor wrote:

At 5/16/06 09:57 AM, WadeFulp wrote: I'm not saying I want every single one of our 600,000+ daily users to go to the main portal page, but even if a small percent of them do it would be a big help.

call me crazy, but wouldn't mailing everyone make a better impact?

Most of the people who visit the site on any given day aren't people with user accounts, so they wouldn't be on our mailing list. People on our mailing list have hopefully noticed how the site works by now.

Do people consider that an action game or a puzzle game? I'm gonna file it under action. :)

I recently posted about Newgrounds making an appearance in an upcoming slasher comedy, Stagknight.

To show our continued appreciation, we are now hosting a one month Stagknight Game Contest!

The goal is to create a GORY and FUNNY game where you play the role of a knight in modern times, on a killing rampage (most likely in the woods). The best game will be featured on Stagknight.com and the winner will receive some fun movie memorabilia. Please read the official contest page for more info!

In other film news, my friend Pete's cousin (who happens to be an albino) has just released a short film spoof on The Da Vinci Code, called The Albino Code! It's a play on the albino assassin from The Da Vinci Code and brings to light some issues faced by those with albinism!

At 5/10/06 04:46 PM, -Mogly- wrote: haha that was cool. maybe a little slow though but was cool.

I didnt like the way the tank rolled in though.

Oh, and Tom if you're reading this, is it cool for us to use the PSP NG intro in our flashes?

Yes, it's definitely cool to use the PSP intro! We need to clean that up and make it available as an FLA.

At 5/10/06 09:26 AM, Time_Traveler wrote: Kind of a harsh trade-off, don't you think? I mean, it's E3...only happens once a year. Surley that intern could have worked on your projects instead?

Intern Tom has finished school and has pretty much wrapped up the internship. Even then, I have too many non-intern duties. :)

I was supposed to be at E3 right now, but I stayed home to work on all the 101 projects we have going on. On the downside, I didn't get to meet up with Shok in LA (see his post below - he just interviewed Ben Watkins of Juno Reactor fame last night!) but on the upside, I am here to post the winners for best of April!

The top five movies and top five games each win $250, an award certificate and a t-shirt!

They will also receive the Freestyle Fighting Championship XV DVD, courtesy of Knight Entertainment!

TOP FIVE MOVIES:

1. The People's Mario
2. Pico vs. Convict
3. Retarded Animal Babies 15
4. Your Horoscope for Today!
5. sex and the bedroom

TOP FIVE GAMES:

1. Pico's School remake
2. Newgrounds Museum 2
3. Resident Pico
4. Four Second Fury
5. Super Biology Adventure

NOTE... Because I am skipping myself for Resident Pico, the fifth prize goes to the closest runner-up!

6. P.I.C.O.

RUNNER UP MOVIES:

6. -Go Away-
7. Dumbass Mario
8. Her and Mine 1001 Wishes
9. SD 06: Death of P-Bot
10. Picoday-Penillian Battle
11. Freerun: Go-Man, Scene 1
12. T.V. Sex Pals Episode 5
13. CU-Easter Special
14. Supersonic
15. Thanks for all the fish!
16. (Homicidal)
17. President Beavis
18. Arfenhouse Teh Movie 4!!!
19. (2006) Trapper!
20. Newgroundsillaz 5

RUNNER UP GAMES:

7. Pico's Day To Die
8. Nene Interactive Suicide
9. ArmorPicross
10. R!SE
11. Cubrius
12. Bullet Bill
13. Battlegrounds 2
14. play with michelle
15. Quiz Challenge: NES
16. Condom Blocks
17. HAMU
18. Virtual Nipple Twist
19. The Rambo Bros. 08/15
20. Moroni's March

The $100 user of the month prize goes to FightingSeraph! Anyone who votes on submissions becomes part of the monthly raffle.

Congrats to this month's winners! I have the BEST OF MARCH prize packs ready to send out. I got them together so late that I decided to wait until BEST OF APRIL was announced. Between two monthly prizes AND Pico Day, we have several authors who won multiple awards, so I'll be consolidating everything into one set of prize packs that I send out all at once.