Aight, buckle up. This about to be a text wall. I'll try to keep it interesting.
My name's Adrean. Some of you might better recognize me as the asshole who created the @TomFuIp account on her seventh birthday, started a Newgrounds shutdown hoax that lasted from 2002 to 2003, and went back to doing whatever else seven year old children have no business doing on the internet.
Newgrounds simulator by @Afro-Ninja was the tipping point before I got around to creating this one, Andrea364, Sep. 6, 2006. I chose 364 as it was easy to type; @Andrea already existed.
My first order of business was to spam general, try to join the EGB, get rejected immediately, and be told there were no girls on the internet. I eventually worked hard enough to scrape into the NGPD/EGB.
Looking back, I was a meme. A holiday observance by the Kitty Krew of "Andrea364 Day" was celebrated in my honor, which when googled returns with flash that now sadly bugs out in the Ruffle player. If you're wondering why, I was a spammy self-absorbed little shit.
By 2007 I was a longtime trawler of the audio portal, smitten with the usual X9, though I also distinctly remember @cheshyre, @Psybot, and @dj-ene. I regularly filled my 235 mb mp3 player with discographies of @Lashmush and a trove of other artists to sneak a listen on the school bus and at recess -- @cwn before their catalog mysteriously disappeared, @LaForge now @Ultramartyr, @bad-man-incorporated -- back when audio ratings were out of 10 and movies had three categories to score. These artists inspired me to start animating, which I was awful at. Others, to find a DAW and start posting my own music here.
Most of my old catalog is gone; I thought it would be a great idea to use punkomatic and other internet song generators to get a leg up. Can't sound like shit if the whole composition is premade (I'm looking at you, cymatics packs) right? Wrong. Not only was it terrible, like most of my early work, I remember at some point getting them unceremoniously yeeted before finally straightening up and... making music using only loops that was also removed.
In 2008, I posted an angsty teenage rock song to the wrong genre was called "Death and the Blue," which no longer exists. It received not only the most attention I think any of my songs has ever gotten, 50k plays, but also the appropriate amount of reviews flaming me for lying about playing any of the instruments involved and... interestingly attracted thousands of unique visits from China to the website Dad and I used to run, weirdly containing just a polaroid of my three year old self playing with a Commodore 64 and the mp3 itself, which had to be refreshed to play again.
That same year I got so mad at the people flaming me for cheating at music, I convinced my dad to buy me an even shittier version of the Squier strat, the Sams Club budget Starcaster, and made this piece of crap:
Angsty boi hours. Super depresso. Need an espresso.
This limbo state of low quality beatz lasted some time. Though I became less active, I never stopped working on music, cutting bootlegs of popular songs into my own mashups, inspired by an RL bandmate known as swooshycueb on Last.fm and a whole lot of music by t.a.t.u, which I still remix. I don't have the project files from that era after several computer explosions, but I remember them well enough that I might revisit some of those old ideas for nostalgia's sake.
From 2009 to 2014 I had all but disappeared from Newgrounds. Oh, and I forgot to mention so did my ex-boyfriends, who I found the time to date through the PM system. Wonder where they are today.
I came back in the middle of college as a cocky, flamboyantly trans music major, made more shitty music, oodles, until finally I got tired of running a trial version of my software. To submit a work, I had to take my projects and render all track output to wav, then cram it all on top of itself and pray it didn't sound like shit, render to wav, and render the wav to mp3 in audacity, all while enduring the "buy now" audio every fourth time I hit the play button. Fun times.
One day I decided to hack my software and made a tutorial on YT, which got me in hot water with the developers, but ended up with me scoring a free copy because they were actually really nice guys. That's when I made my big break.
Over the next years, Geometry Dash happened. I watched the portal I came to know and love flooded with stolen crap and trash memes. Initially I was interested in GD, as it seemed like a great way to get discovered as an indie artist, but I soon found the GD community wasn't interested in exploring our community. They wanted their Skrillex and OMFG - Hello, and they wanted it now.
So I started volunteering in the Audio Portal cleanup thread, writing flag guides, and supporting the efforts of prominent AP members at the time @RealFaction and @Troisnyx, my friends, to fight the deluge of threats to the portal and abuse of our rights as creators. Even @Xtrullor was onboard as the GD community became more combatant.
Through Troisnyx's petition and subsequent DMCAs, the game was temporarily taken down off Steam, which was enough to get RobTop's attention that something needed to be done -- implementing a whitelist on his end and fixing things on the backend with the GD API.
Over the course of all that, I was nominated to become an audio moderator, and I accepted. I'm far from the most active of the lot, but my specialty is foreign language thefts, particularly Russian and a little Spanish. Meantime I made friends with @LexRodent, rejoined the EGB maintained by @byteslinger, and have had numerous Politics forums spats about SOPA and PIPA, as well as judged competitions such as the NG Audio Deathmatch and Art Inspired Music on more than one occasion, making it a point to leave reviews on most if not all the tracks I encountered. Through that I was on and off through the forums, as college allowed.
My father passed May 14, 2016, a week after graduation. During this time, my music became my primary focus. I picked up new VSTs, and threw myself into figuring out what was what.
A year later, remember that first shitty rock song I made? I turned it into this.
It hit the front page. Blew my freaking mind.
Since then I've had my works featured in various playlists, series such as @RealFaction's Venturescape and @Jozarto's UDB, as well as @DextaGethood's Fashion Police, a few indie games not here on Newgrounds, and lots more I'm sure I've missed over the years. As far as I know NG doesn't notify you if someone hasn't added you to the project credits and has just sourced your song.
My primary genre has roved from metal, to EDM, to hiphop, to synthwave and now encompasses film score. Since joining the military and taking on foreign language, I now make music in Russian and English, which you can find on my YouTube, and I plan to step up my collab game at some point.
Long story short, I've been on and off for 15 years or so, and I got plans to stay. It's been a long ride, and I got love for all of you here.
Shoutout to @TailsPrower, @Peregrinus, @Fro, @LJCoffee for scouting me, @Rusecue, @SevenOnAStick, @Little-Rena, @SethScrotum, @The-Great-One for being a day older on NG years, @Sectus, @iscrulz, @BlueHippo, @kiwi -- I totally had a crush on you lmao, wondered where you went, @VicariousE, @Vestik -- Phoenix Wrong was lit, and last but not least @Ramagi.
Pepperidge farm remembers :)
