 Hey, it's time for another PCP interview. It's been God knows how long since the last one. I don't remember. Like a year and a half, at least, right? Yeah, they were all done relatively within a reasonable timeframe of each other. And they're not ever again. And then I think Nate and Mumki had one. But now it's your turn. Yes. And you're a fucking who are you, motherfucker? I'm Tom Oliver, and I do 3D stuff mostly now. Tommy Oliver Says. On Twitter. Tommy Oliver Blogs. On The Tumblr. Tommy Oliver, what's your Instagram? Just a poll station or two. Yeah. And then YouTube is Tommy Oliver Says. C slash Tommy Oliver Says. Anything happening on Facebook? Not yet, but I'm definitely going to move there eventually. I consider you sort of like the reason that I think you're like a very underappreciated, invaluable asset to the PCP in a backroom sense that maybe even viewers wouldn't appreciate is that you know social media. Like you know what's big. You know what's hot. You know tech. Why? Why don't you know all this shit? I'm just really interested in it. I've just been interested in technology for my entire life. Like I remember being a little kid when I was like, I got a Game Boy for the first time. And I'm like, can I make this do anything else besides play games? Like I'm just really fascinated. Like I'm super addicted to cell phones, but I wanted a cell phone before cell phones existed. Like I was the kid in like seventh grade who had no like actual life, but got a PDA. Just thought it was cool to have a computer in my pocket. So everyone else like everyone else was listening to iPods and stuff. And I got a PDA and like got an SD card and put music on that. But also like could play little video games and could do like things. And I was like super interested in like the Dell pocket PCs that have like the little Wi-Fi dongle you could plug in and shit. Like this is so cool. Did you actually use your PDA to do like planer shit? Like did you actually keep schedule on it? Or was it mostly just a fuck around? I didn't have a schedule, but if I did I would have put it in there. Cause I never went for anything like that cause I am so bad at like, I love writing in a planner, but I never look back at it. You know what I mean? Like I love writing a list of what I'm gonna do today and then I never look at it. When I do it though, it's super effective. Oh my God, it can be. If you fucking, like if you have scheduled time for videos and stuff and you can like pre-produce them ahead of time, that's like a huge boost. My big thing, my hardest thing with production is that I can't start. As soon as I start I get in the rhythm and I'm fine. But I will like sit for like four hours and be like, should I do something? Oh yeah, that's the hardest. I mean once you're in it, the only thing that's gonna push you out is if like you feel like this particular section is really soulless and you wish it wasn't even in your video, you know? Like when you have those moments where you listen to a sentence and you're like, there is no way to make this creative and fun to watch that I am capable of. So I guess it's just gonna be 30 seconds of footage from whatever show is relevant. And that's when you wanna get up and take a break and go outside and you know. Not exist anymore. Exactly. That's me for the entire editing process start to finish. Cause as soon as I get to that point, like I've been doing the Y3D Anime Fail series. I did the first two. It's been written out since I wanna say maybe August of last year. I have like this huge document. You read it, you read the whole thing pretty much. I sent it to you like a year ago. Which document? The Y3D Anime Fails like for each. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That long ago? It was a long time ago. Oh fuck, I didn't feel like that long ago then. Yeah, and it just sits there cause I don't wanna edit it. Yeah, that video series. How hopeful were you that that was going to be like a huge hit? That one in particular, I didn't think it was gonna be huge. I thought it was gonna do way better than it did. Yeah, I thought so too. And I think that the only reason it didn't was like just didn't get spread around enough. And honestly like I kind of wished you had just made it one big video. I mean it probably just never would have gotten done if that had been the case. Yeah, I'd still be working on it. Originally it was gonna just be one big video. Yeah, but I think the issue is that because it's in smaller parts, people were interested but wanted to know more and then it took a long time before they learned any more. Here's the thing, I think there's three things. The first thing is that my channel is dead. So we just talked about how like only. You should discuss that. So explain this to me because this is something that YouTubers are always trying to keep track of the algorithmic changes. Matt Petz, the only person who seems to completely understand it, but he does not reveal all secrets. He has a whole consulting business around it so of course he's not gonna talk about it. Right, so he's not gonna just spill everything. There's a lot of things we all know and that we all copy. But there's a lot of things we don't know that we have to theorize about. Like my theory that my turntable channel won't get promoted to music channels because it's only watched by my fans. So like you told me about this part of the algorithm none of us knew about and it's apparently happening to your channel. I think it's happening to everybody's channel. It's just like there's a lot of people complaining like no one's seeing my video or whatever. And I found out, watching some videos, I've been doing a lot of research on Instagram because I mean I'm trying to use Instagram a lot now because I just like the platform. I think it suits my current work pretty well. But they have, everything now has an algorithm and how it kind of like filters content and stuff. And they were talking about how on Instagram, the algorithm on Instagram is that the most crucial window for your content on Instagram is the first hour. So depending on how well your content performs, how many likes it gets, how many comments it gets in the first 60 minutes is how it ranks for the rest of time. Because most people when they open Instagram just look at the first few things and then check off. So like if you get a bunch of like traffic on your posts in the first 60 minutes it goes to the explore page. And then it also can get ranked in the hashtags. So like every hashtag on Instagram it has the top nine posts for the day in the hashtag. So if you do really well you can get pushed to there and then everybody sees it. And there's constant chances right on like Reddit. But unlike Reddit it is self promotion and not you having to like weirdly, circuitously only promote other people's content. Another really interesting thing about Instagram is that the how big the account is that likes your photo affects your photo as well. So if you have like 500,000 followers and you like a photo and boost it because what it does is that there's also the explore page. So like it's kind of like the search function in Instagram but before you search for anything it just shows you a bunch of content it thinks you'll be interested in. And that's based on who you follow. So if you're an account that has 500,000 followers and you like my posts and I have like 500 like a portion of your 500,000 followers will see the posts you liked in their explore page. Oh shit, is that how the, that's how Twitter works too with the likes then right? I think it's similar to that. I think it has to do, I think on Twitter it has to do with how many interactions you've had with the person. Like if you interact with them a lot it shows you more of their likes or something or if I don't know if like, I don't know what the fuck the logic is. I just hate it. I haven't looked into Twitter's algorithm all that much. The only reason I even know about this YouTube thing is because they mentioned it in these Instagram videos but for YouTube it's not the first 60 minutes it's the first 24 hours and the first 24 hours only sends it out to 10% if you're following and depending on how well it does with that 10%, it'll either keep sending out to the rest of your audience or drop it off completely and no one else will see it. Clarify what does it mean your audience? So your subscribers. So like it's public and anybody who like searches for terms and stuff can still see it but it, you know how like cause but will it be different? Okay, so I get the sense that, okay, I've never like not seen a video in my feed with the exception of for some reason exclusively Super Bunny Hops channel and only this year like will not give me every video he does but everyone else always has but I think the reason is I only watch my subscriptions like I consistently have for years only watched my subscriptions and even when I leave my subscriptions to have most of what it recommends me is shit from channels I'm subscribed to. So I think maybe it just shows me. You're probably just cause you're a highly active subscriber on all the channels you follow. So it means you're gonna watch them. And like the only times I ever like for a very long time I've had people who will show up to my video and be like, huh, somehow missed this didn't show up in my feed but like it would be only a couple of comments and like most people seem to see it and all the people who are regular subscribers see it but like the people in my Discord for instance they are literally racing to see who can publish my video in the Discord first after it comes out. So YouTube obviously is just gonna recommend them everything in their feed but like I think if you have an account that's not like that maybe there's more of a chance that it's you know I mean they keep it all close to the chest obviously right cause someone like Nate Nate doesn't even watch subscriptions like he doesn't subscribe to channels he just goes to them occasionally when he wants to watch their videos weird. Why does he do that? He just doesn't like use YouTube like he doesn't like go there and go to the subscriptions tab and see what the new videos are like most people do he'll go to trending and do that or he'll go to like the homepage and just like watch some recommended stuff but he mostly just- I use the homepage a lot but I hate that I do it I hate, I get sucked by that. It just never recommends me anything I wanna watch so people have told me that if you do enough of the like I don't want to see this button it will eventually start to recommend you better stuff cause like it takes enough out of your pool of what it thinks you want but I'm scared that if I do that for some of the channels I'm subscribed to it'll just stop showing me that stuff in my subscription box so It's a total clusterfuck Yeah I think that's one of the reasons that the videos didn't do well is because of the 10% thing and my entire channel is just dead and because not that 10% not enough of them are anime fans that they were going to so they're not gonna click on it so it's not gonna get seen by anything else cause a lot of times cause the first I ran a Twitter poll trying to figure out what the fuck's up with it so the first poll I ran was do you know that I've been posting regularly for the past 60, like 6 months? 60% said no and Twitter is where I post on the daily so that's my most active people who know what I'm doing 60% of them didn't even know I had uploaded Dude I don't know if Twitter shows people all those YouTube links cause like I've noticed that if I have a video auto because Twitter has an algorithm now too like if you don't turn it off it does show best first instead of a chronological feed so it's the same exact thing I've noticed that like my videos cause I have all my channels set to just auto tweet the videos and they come out cause I make videos fucking constantly and I wanna fucking just have them do that but I've noticed that those never get very many likes or retweets unless like there's a freak incident where someone retweeted it maybe a few people will but if I like write out a tweet and put a link afterwards to the video way bigger chance that people are actually gonna interact with it It's probably because Twitter and Twitter I know Twitter actively doesn't like you going to other platforms especially Instagram I honestly think they're completely right to do that cause there's lots of people on Twitter who the only reason I don't follow them is too much shit is linked to their Twitter like back in the day when everyone's Tumblr was linked to their Twitter and you'd follow somebody and it would just be links to their Tumblr and I would unfollow those people I know I still follow some people who do that and it drives me insane the worst thing is like Tumblr has an image preview and you don't realize it's Tumblr so you just click on it and you want to see this picture and it loads up a page and I instantly back up cause I don't want to wait the fucking 10 years for this to load yeah but like I know Twitter actively hates Instagram because if you have an Instagram link it doesn't show an image preview at all because they don't want you going there so you have to like manually do all that shit but I know videos do really well on Twitter if like you post a preview of the video because Twitter is everyone's on the video kick right now so they want more video views on their platform so if you make if you take like a 30 second clip of your uh... your video and then you subtitle it so even if no one is cause it's gonna start auto-playing but it's not gonna have any sound so if you can have subtitles that go with it so they can see what they're doing yeah and then you have the link to YouTube to watch the rest of it that performs the best but that takes you know fucking effort yeah it takes a long time to make all those but it I mean that's how the fucking that's how the Facebookers took over I mean another something if I get back in a video hardcore I'm gonna do that and you can just go on Fiverr and for like five bucks just like do it well like pay people to do it for you or something I've been looking on Fiverr a lot I have so I have someone right now on Fiverr actually like managing my Instagram it's not working very well but but just I'm just experimenting with shit how do you like can you set up like recurring payments on Fiverr or are you just paying him every time he does whatever he does I paid him it was it was for it was a 15 bucks for a seven day gig and he was like only five it starts at five but it can go up to like hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what the services are but yeah it's it's I originally went in there because I wanted someone to edit my videos but nobody offers video edits like what I would need done like actually like you know you're not gonna go on there and find someone fucking Bangladesh and be like can you like edit in some footage from Hoseki no Kuni relevant in the narration talking about there like what do you what no you know just it's not gonna happen so oh I think I might move this table forward and bring a couple of chairs over here yeah you're dying uncomfortable as fuck what did you what did you back like breaking out yeah but I hunch all the time so this is kind of like normal like dealing with this pain so I'm kind of I sit in like a fucking expensive office chair all day well well fuck you and your money okay I can kind of deal with this we should I can sit up it's fucking this real painful I'm gonna get those chairs all right you should talk about tell me about your background in okay I'm just gonna skip to what I'm interested in and hopefully the audience will care too that's fine I want to know what everything about M dot strange okay because this guy was like a huge influence on massive yeah and especially now that you're doing 3D work yeah I think it's going to be something that maybe is more important to talk about than it was before for sure so first of all who the fuck is M dot strange trying to get these chairs sure so M dot strange is a he's a youtuber from like way back in the early days but he's been creating content for fucking ever like he you dig deep into his stuff he talks about like making short films and to edit them he busts out two vcrs like cuts from one back to the other back and forth like that's before that shit existed like he got an iMac and like flipped his shit because now he can do digital editing so so this was he's been making shit forever out of his fucking way but yeah he's a uh he's now he's a he's doing game design but when I got into him back in 2006 he was I was wondering what the hell he was actually doing now yeah he's um I kind of like like him less now just because like everybody does game design nobody makes like fucking movies by themselves so like I feel like especially not 3D movies less cool but whatever it's still good um I found him in 2006 because this was back when uh when youtube wasn't a total clusterfuck and like the featured page actually had cool shit on it yeah like do you remember when they had like the featured videos like on the front page oh dude I mean back in the early days like youtube was like freddy w an epic meal time and like channels you watched because they were hilarious and cool and were doing something like of a caliber that stuff that was like made sense to be on youtube but was a caliber above what you expected from youtube you know like freddy w's like call of duty in real life videos it's like you can't make this with a professional film studio because like it's fucking copyright infringement and like and it's for gamers a very niche audience who's mostly on youtube you know but like it made sense there and he did it so much better than what you expect that it was like whoa yeah it's crazy and mdot strange I'm assuming was part of that sort of era because this stuff is unbelievably impressive so like the whole idea was because what mdot was at the time and why I got into him is he's a 3d filmmaker and he does independent 3d animated films he did a trilogy of them in like under 10 years probably but how long are they they're an hour and a half, two hours it's fucking crazy yeah and so they're full 3d and he does all of them by himself like he has voice actors and his second film he had someone do the music for him but other than that everything they look like if Tim Burton did reboot yeah like it's a good way of describing it they're fucking crazy out there visually just all over the place the first film was actually he didn't know enough about 3d to do a straight up 3d film so it's mixed media so there's stop motion puppetry 3d, 2d there's a bunch of clashing medias they just kind of like stitched together in in laughter effects better comparison it looks a little bit like a 3d version of the Madoka Magica witch sequences yeah especially we are the strange it's very very much like that but this was like years before that still but yeah he'd been making films like live action and like music and stuff for I think like the better part of two decades even before that even hit because he was like in his 30s when that started happening that's crazy and he's I love hearing about people who didn't make it till their 30s yeah I know I still have hope yeah so like but like he went through a bunch of crazy shit and like he had like a really messed up fucked up childhood and like questioned to believe because I've read like his books and stuff like maybe like sexual molestation and like crazy shit happened back in the day but he was doing like live action stuff and he would like dress up as like a robot and go out in San Jose and like just do chiptunes on the side of walk like as a guy named agent A203 you can still look up that stuff and like and just like had like a band just doing like this crazy stuff and then he would just like put out stuff on craigslist like we're I'm shooting a movie this weekend you want to be in it come show up and people would come just just make videos with random people and he like always had like this one homeless lady that he became friends with in all of his videos and she was like kind of crazy like he did this whole thing called the potato phone experiment with her he just carved the word phone into a potato and like put her in a public place and just pretend you're on the phone and like make a scene and you record it so she's like going to like restaurants just talking to a potato that's fucking hilarious it's amazing the guy's a fucking genius but then he did like these three feature films all by himself and I was glued to his production diaries because he just like was cranking it out and he just like yeah I bought like five computers is he rich or like no where did the money come from like he just like he just like got like the he just saved up like five grand and just like doing what I think when at that point I think he was doing like wedding photography or something like that or like making wedding videos or something so he had like professional cameras and shit you know I don't know because he doesn't talk at all about that side of his life at all like multiple times when he's done like Q and A things I've asked like how do you live that's what I'm interested in and he always never never never says anything I think that's the hugest difference between like the way millennial artists are willing to talk about themselves and like the previous generation because like people like just above our age don't like to talk about how much they make at all they don't like to talk about like you know who their influences are like because they want to like people used to say oh I try not to have influences I want to be original and now everyone's just like no my influences are why I make any money is that you know like nobody would have played fucking Undertale if you didn't tell people like oh it's like earthbound but you know it's good it's good for marking it's like earthbound and Homestuck combined yeah it's good stuff so well I guess Homestuck is already earthbound but whatever point being like that uh yeah it's it's it's it's just like a difference in perspective and like for our generation we grew up with YouTubers who will like tell us everything about like ever since Game Grumps you know I feel like it's been passe for YouTubers to talk about like yeah we make a career out of this and like here's how good of a living we can have and here we went to Disney World today on the back of the fucking Game Grumps one episode of Game Grumps you know yeah it's fucking crazy but yeah I mean the guy the guy's he's like open but like for some reason he's just like how he makes money I almost feel like it's probably because like he doesn't want to admit that like this doesn't make him a fuck ton of money almost even though it's painfully obvious I mean why would it like I think the most like it's weird the most disturbing aspect of my entire life creatively was like when I was like knee deep in like the pony stuff and I went to check on M.DOT and I realized I had more subs in him I like almost killed myself I was like this is not like the world is fucked and we're never gonna recover that was how I felt when I fucking passed any of the artists I liked like I remember passing like the band clipping I remember passing I passed like chance the rapper in his early days now he's huge but like like I mean not even early days like when acid rapid come out he was blowing up but I blew up a little faster on YouTube at least obviously not in like album sales or anything but yeah I was passing a bunch of my favorite artists and I was like really upset about it because I was like these people are way better than me like even at the time when I was making the pony content I did not consider it like great art I was just like this is just something I do because people are willing to pay me for something I want to do yeah it was just a fun little distraction that kind of turned into something yeah and like when it became like okay this is just a job now that was when it was like we need to consider ending this you know regardless of what it means for our careers which I mean god could we still we could still be making money if we were still pony people we could probably be making more because there's less there's less people there's less people to go around like you don't understand like there is still a core fervent amount of people knee deep in that like my buddy matt it's crazy he still does like art like porn art for that and his ych is like go for like you mean a db pony yeah yeah like $350 for like a ych and it's just like oh my god I mean that's why a lot of those people are in there is they can't leave it's too lucrative like it took my friend Fern a long time to like cause like fern had burned out on the show even before I did but was still like in the community because like when she posted original songs they just wouldn't get listened to you know like if it wasn't a poor song no one gave a fuck that's the whole thing that community was like lucrative but also insanely insular oh yeah like they don't they literally don't care about anything else like I would try to make videos when I you know first started making anime videos I was still making pony and I did like probably 10 anime videos and they all had like barely any views compared to the pony shit music videos nothing you know so they you you gotta you literally have to sell your soul like if you're still in pony I'm sorry that you've had to lose that part of your soul well I mean there are people who still genuinely love it like I know some people who do sure that's fair and I mean more power to you I guess like I have no no I can't mock you for cause I was there for like three years so yeah if you're still I mean if you like I think it's was hilarious when Jesse and hippo started up the whore the horsey whore what the fuck was the horse cast was the pony cast pony cast the pony cast was hilarious because they just kind of like like hey we got a new thing and it's just a podcast and it's got a patreon and they still made like a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars a month off of it or something and I was like how is this possible like back then we we thought there was a minimum level of quality control that we had to do in order for anyone to care right yeah and it turns out we were wrong we just needed to talk about my little yeah it was you know I mean not to knock that Jesse and Gibbon can do an entertaining podcast deserving of money but just the fact that like they couldn't have made that much talking about anything else yeah you know it's insane it's funny it's it was it was like a couple months where I was talking with Matt DB again about starting after I had like ended the last channel and I was like wanted to make easy money I was like what if I just made a whole new channel and uppitched my voice and just talked about the new scene coming out dude I've considered oh wow that wouldn't do with ponies but I've considered doing that plan like for other things yeah just like come back as a different guy my plan was like to uppitch my voice enough to make it sound like it was a woman to like double down on like getting more money oh boy that's fucked and then I would have you could do that easy but uh no I can't do it sane or minds prevailed the only reason I can't do stuff like that I one time wanted to make a manga review channel that was going to be me which a pitch with a pitch shifted voice and the reason is back when I was doing anime blogging I had gotten so known for like this particular style of like really abrasive and like incendiary dialogue that I wanted to like reset my identity and have people like because I had made like several other blogs but I just wanted people to not know it was me and make like a polite character so my manga blog was like very polite and serious and like no one knew it was me at all but also it had very few readers but like I would want to do that the funny thing is if I had done this pony channel the exact opposite would have happened I have no doubt that because the plan was was insidious and genius it would have been girl a pitch the voice so no one would know me girl would have been very agreeable and that's what everybody wants they want you to just suck the dick the show's dick and then the piece resistance would have been never can show my face because I was sexually abused and I don't want anyone to know who I am so you would have just fucking crushed on SJW money it would have been so good oh if you ever got found oh shit the camera stopped no one can know my crime these are thankfully when you have a microphone and it keeps cutting it's real easy to sink back up that's true yeah so well obviously neither of us went through those plans in my case I realized that the cadence of my voice is too recognizable like if I read off of a script I always read it the same way and like no amount of voice morphing can make it like not obviously me it's real sad but you might have better odds because your cadence is not as recognized another thing I could have just done is paid $5 so some girl read it on five that you could have done yeah so you know but that would be a total evil scheme and the best part is you could get away with it and just never tell anyone like you don't even have to tell us you could have actually done this yeah maybe I'm doing it right now who knows yeah I said that you wouldn't be quite as like you probably wouldn't be begging for money on Patreon I just gonna keep the character going that's fine okay so all right you were talking about M.strange yeah you actually you actually worked with them before right I have worked with them a little bit a couple times the first thing I I mean I didn't really work with them on this but like since ever I was glued to the production diaries on we are the strange she was like all right I'm gonna need a bunch of extras so like send me your photo and I'll like fuck it up and like make you look like a psychopath and you'll be in like a shot in this church scene so I was like okay and I'm in the church scene at the in the middle of the movie okay yeah that's neat can people find you like as if yeah yeah it's it's it's like it's a quick thing in the church scene but it's more like it's also in the end credits and it's pretty obvious so that's that's I guess what's kind of the scour the end credits for Tom Oliver and we are the strange um before podcasting and like stuff became a thing he did live streaming on something called blog talk radio I don't know if you've ever heard of that I've heard the name but I don't know what it was what it was was that instead of like just talking live you would you would do a live stream on the internet but instead of like having people call take your phone yeah my phone's going off someone's trying to fucking call me I'm trying to ignore it oh it's another spam call I made the mistake I bought polystation2.com and I didn't get the domain protection so every day I get thousands of spam calls and like tons of what the fuck things in my inbox saying do you need web service I'm like bitch I make websites don't don't get out of here but um that's something I'm going to ask you about in a bit but yeah so what was I even saying wasn't there something you worked on him with the head to do with mindless self indulgence yes I did I did all all the lip syncing for the characters in one of the mindless self indulgence videos he did because he did videos for mindless self indulgence and rabbit junk what songs because I've never seen the only one I've ever seen is animal from that's from if right I think so I don't even remember which fucking song that is it's an animal it's an animal it's an animal unbelievable okay that sounds familiar that might be from the oh you know what it's probably from the three heart album or the heart maybe the heart shape one I barely remember or less than three I did this during college so when I should have been doing home right that's probably the album that would have been coming out at the time like 2010 ish 2008 2009 ish probably okay that's yeah it's either from if or less than three I think it's if because less than three was like the short EP that came right after that and I wouldn't recognize the songs as well on that in any case so how do you think that like his style has influenced yours at all because yours doesn't really look like his your style is more like comic book yeah I wouldn't say he influenced my style in terms of like his artwork like I think I'm more interested as much as I love his movies I'm much more interested in him as a person and his work ethic because I just what I really liked about him back in the day and to this day is that he's like not afraid to like say things that are like fucking insane and like just like raw like he'll talk about like how much he hates like Hollywood and how much he hates like all this like shit because he just like is uncompromising and like because he could do like actual things that worked but he just doesn't give a fuck he's like he could be like he could be working on like Coraline or something yeah easily but he'd rather make his own like here's the thing like you don't he somehow through like some like fucking I think it just because it was unprecedented like he submitted We Are the Strange to the Sundance Film Festival and got accepted right so the movie showed there and he he while he was there like this is like him and he's still like not didn't know much about Hollywood and everything hated the entire experience because they like that he got an agent from there and they're like well we need to buy out the theater so we need to like have all the theater when we play has to be full of plants so everybody loves the movie they react crazily over the top so they can like get people to buy it and he was like get fucked so instead he just like went on Twitter and was like hey you want to come see the movie why would they think a guy like that would be they didn't they had no idea who they were dealing with like did they watch the movie yeah so what happened instead is that like they're just like normal people from the film vessel came in and then he had an army of people from Twitter who came in oh yeah that's what they do my buddy Ed went up there and like shit and went see it and like so everyone who was just there from the theater got up and left because they were disgusted by the movie everyone who poop brought there like fucking lost their shit and so but regardless he got like I think like 10 or 15 deals on the movie and turned them all down so like there was like big money on the table and he was just like get fucked and just published it himself instead didn't want to go through anymore bullshit yeah because he was just like he looked through the contracts like okay like I don't own my movie anymore like so fuck you yeah no you know and at this point I'm sure he's probably made more on Blu-ray and DVD sales you don't need to do that in today's world yeah but this is like 2007 and he's like you know like had the foresight just be like fuck that the curve for sure yeah he's like published like books like but that's the thing I think though a lot of I think a lot of the god I'm about to sound real fucking old and I'm accusing myself of this too but I think a lot of our generation of like content creators are spoiled because we knew it was possible like a lot of the people before us were like hoping it was possible or like had the like thought like well you know you guys might not want to buy my movie but I see the internet over there and I'll bet if I release it there people might like it but like we know that we know it's possible exactly as a result I think that's why a lot more people now are like just doing like YouTube du jour instead of like their unique ideas the generation before us and you know it wasn't possible for them so I understand the the the confusion but like the thing that really worked for M.Dot for me is that he made me realize that I wanted to be my own boss because before that like my plan was like my big influence before that was uh Joan Vasquez and so I was like oh I'll just like make a really cool comic and submit it to SLG very closely related another MSI have you ever been into MSI or do you just happen to like the artist I just happen I mean I've listened to a bit of mindless self-indulgence but it's like it's good but not like I'm a huge fan yeah so like it's weird how like it just worked like that because I watched his video he did for them too and I was like this is fucking dope but it wasn't animated and I was very disappointed because I wanted to be it's a fun video though and super cool but um yeah like so my plan before that was like I'm gonna publish with SLG or something like that because I was listening to a podcast called Indie Spinner Rack all throughout high school and just these two guys who just like knew everything about the Indie Comics scene and I ended up going to the Mocha Art Festival in New York and like met a bunch of people and like was like shopping shit around recommend me that podcast is it like is it good to get into if you don't know anything about Indie Comics I knew nothing about Indie Comics going into it they they name drop a lot and don't provide a lot of context but they give you things to Google the podcast is long defunct like it ended like five years ago but all the information on it's still pretty good yeah they recommend a lot like like like artists they recommend are like people like Indie yeah because they're older so it's like Indie to them is like not like web comics it's like they Xerox print books and like ship them out the hardest thing about getting into like Indie Comics is just that nobody talks about them yeah like these guys did a really good job and I just like started like learning like the names of the presses and like people and I was like I bought a bunch of books they did like a they did two anthologies and I bought both of those and the guys like they did they did work and so they went to both went to the Joe Kubert school to for comics yeah and I learned about where is that and what is that like a famous yeah Joe Kubert's like a famous like comic artists and like you go there and like you learn I think it's just you just go there to learn how to draw comics and then there was another school that opened oh my god was it the Center for Cartoon Studies and I learned about it through that podcast and I was like this is the college I'm going to and I was so fucking stoked and I was and because like this was like the talent of high school and my parents like you need to go to college I'm like I don't want I just want to draw and they're like not do it so I'm like I want to go to the don't go I want to go to CCS and I'm like we are not signing loans for you to go throw your life away little did they know I was going to throw my life away regardless yeah so what did you end up doing well after that I went to a bunch of art schools like quote unquote regular art schools how old are you in the in the city 17 okay 17 18 ish at that around that age like it's just you know it's your birthday November 8th okay so you would have turned 18 like towards the start of senior year yeah so this is like right before that so we're looking at colleges and stuff and so everyone I go to doesn't take me like I remember I went to the Art Institute of Boston and the guy sat me down and was just like I'm sick and tired of seeing portfolios that are just shit get out was it shit yeah okay I was a really bad artist and I and I knew it you would have improved a lot yeah no I'm definitely like way better than I was do you think you'd get accepted there now probably not just because like that there there it was a fine art school like I never had a chance in hell of getting to a school like that and that's kind of what I yeah this is why I wanted to go to CCS CCS yes okay because they're they're they would see your potential and think this is a totally right because your art style is real different and I want to ask you about that too like how the fuck did you develop this art style because I have literally never seen anyone with the style that even like resembles yours um I don't and yours has changed a lot too yeah because when you started doing my little pony art you were doing very show accurate stuff and your stuff on its own was a little bit more I don't know like you you're very into variable line widths yeah which I don't think most people even know what the fuck that means I only learned that term from you yeah but it's where the I mean it's as it sounds when you draw the outline of a character it like has curves and like it gets thicker and thinner as it goes a lot of it very hard to do thick thick thick line thicker lines are usually kind of used to highlight shadows or like places that are supposed to be darker it's done a lot I mean it's not done in animation basically ever because it's so hard to animate yeah because like if you're doing variable line width you have to keep that line width placement consistent from frame to frame which like which is why when people like watch like a oh one punch man sakuka scene they're like so fucking blown away you know since like how the fuck like you're insane um but yeah I'm super big into like line art and stuff like that I don't know I mean anime was the first big artistic influence for me I mean trying to draw anime but I never could really do it the only anime I can think of that has outlines as fucking thick with two C's as yours is DBZ but I mean you were into that yeah now I was huge into DBZ or power puff girls yeah I did I did like power puff girls a lot I don't know I just I just consumed a lot of different things I watched like everything that was on Toonami I really liked the original flow about Hukumas and that was airing I was obsessed with that I don't think that comes through much in your art style maybe you're writing but not so much the no I don't think artistically it's a lot of influence here I mean wasn't there a comic artist who was like your favorite who you used to list is like your biggest influence um let's see I I mean one guy who worked in like all black and white aren't you like a fan of bone I do love bone Jeff Smith's bone is fucking gorgeous because bone is a little bit like your art a little bit yeah it's it's way more detail that guy's like fucking super pro um I like uh wait am I thinking of is bone the one that's like a detective no all right wait what is is it all black and white it is they did a reprint um this classic did a color re reprint that's why I've seen a color version um but yeah I really like Dave Sim he did Sarabus which is another one that was like he did oh god fucking Dave Sim what a fucking winner I just I'd my favorite artists are them people who are just like everything fucking sucks do it anyway like that just gets me like rock hard it's so good like Dave Sim is just like like oh god he's such a cool guy so like he he he did all this like 300 issue comic by himself um uh like the tail end of it he had some guy do the backgrounds with him but he's just like an alcoholic guy who just draws comics and and and just like says fuck you like like he he had this book that came out because he started in the 70s I think and like he was quoted early in an early menu series when someone asked him like how long is Sarabus going to be because it was like blowing up at the time he's like 300 issues like just kind of just not thinking and then he's like fuck now I got to do 300 issues so like he finished it in like 2005 so like 30 years just grinding this shit out and like I remember because they were talking about on Indie Spinnerac and they interviewed him they were they one of their first gigs their first like gags on the show was called dialing Dave because this is like when the internet still doesn't exist so they would just look in phone books for people named Dave Sim then call them live on the phone be like are you Dave Sim who made Sarabus like some random guy be like who the fuck is that and be like click well that's not Dave Sim so like there's like episodes of episodes that and they eventually like found the actual Dave Sim I think like he contacted them or something but Dave Sim hates all technology doesn't own a computer doesn't have an email address or anything like that so he drew everything by hand and like cut out the Zippitone Dots and glued them down and like like fucking he cut wait he see so you know like the halftone dots but you don't mean like individually no no no he did screen toning the screen toning I mean isn't that normal in Japanese manga though the Japanese are insane all right over here in America where we where we take shortcuts where we have human rights yeah exactly we laugh that's not even that far from the truth so yeah he does this and and they I guess at the end of Sarab they spoiled the end of Sarab's for me because I still haven't finished it because it's like 300 issues so it's like it's at home he he he published because he he had his own publishing company called Ardvark Veraheim Press and he published everything himself because then this is 70s I'm like it's not internet and even now he's like internet is gay so he has some he's not wrong you know he's he has he has some guy run his website and everything but um so he had these big volumes that he called phone books because they were the size of phone books that had his comics in them um he kills Sarabas like Sarabas dies at the end of everything well now you spoiled Sarabas yeah so I mean if I have to suffer with knowing how it ends all of you do too I think actually like because I'm on his emails I think he started a new Sarabas series called there's only two ways you get into story right either the main character does or doesn't die like those are the two endings so that's a spoiler for you then who the fuck can't toss you know like so like I think he actually is doing a new Sarabas series I need to look for because I just got a message in my inbox like two days ago called Sarabas and hell issue issue two was out I'm like whoa whoa so but yeah whoa the character has gone to hell yeah like in the nature of the series to have um I mean or is that weird I'm not super far into it because I have the first three volumes which is a fuck ton of comics by itself but there's still like I think nine more that I have to get and they're hard to track down so but yeah at the so he dies I'm like they're talking to Dave Sim they're like I was really emotional like at the end of the series like like did you feel like because you have been with this character for 30 years and he's like how did you feel about like killing your character and he's like so glad the fucker's dead yeah I imagined like oh my god it's all he's been looking forward to for 30 years he's getting like halfway through Sarabas's run he came out with a book called the Sarabas Style Guide and he was just like look you gotta do a page a day uh-huh and what you need to do is you need to for a month you have to do a page a day and every day you don't fucking do it you have to reflect on why you would didn't get it done was it was it boy was it because was it because you were lazy you know was it your girlfriend you gotta choose the page or the girlfriend that's the power of of comics is that because it's a well established medium so we go in for 100 years like there's generally like a speed people have agreed upon like a page a day is healthy more than that is necessary if you're doing a shonen jump comic yeah you need to like but you need a team probably I can't imagine I can't like as much as I like making art I could never publish for shonen jump oh no no no no no but you well you have to be real dedicated to both a doing manga and b making money yeah because like to make it and shonen jump it's not about doing the manga that you're the most passionate about it's about doing the manga that is the best idea when I read bakuman I like literally like every every shonen anime I ever read dropped like two points across the board because I realized that they were all fake I mean I felt that way too but at the same time it made it more special when something is that good and you're like fuck they did like bakuman makes death note more enjoyable because they talk about the serious comedy thing and when you read about that and then you read death note and you see how they did that and that the anime left it out yeah and you're just like when manga was better you know like this is why I read eight volumes of this and why I did not finish the show even though I was interested you know but um but in any case so these uh comic book authors are big influences on you yeah mentality wise it sounds like you were you did the same thing I did which was brainwash yourself into believing that you can work from home and not have to answered anybody well the thing was is just that I've never ever ever ever been able to visualize myself in a professional environment yeah I just dude it's fucking impossible well the thing is it's just like my biggest thing is I I know that I'm going to die yeah and the fact of like even like like that's I hate being depressed because I spend half my time doing something I don't want to do ever do anything you don't want to do if you might get hit by a car tomorrow right you'll be like then do anything I wanted to do and that's and that's why I was told to do when we did the the the art apologies thing like that's why I hate that I haven't done any this shit yet so like my my thing right now is I'm doing this Polystation 2 thing and I'm like practicing my craft and getting better that doing like these fan art pieces but like if nothing big happens with it I'm just like fuck it I'm just going to do source or sloss I'm like if I have to live in a box so so be it all right heavy question would you say that that desire to like have completed things is what's keeping you alive yes because I got the sense that like because you've been you've been openly very suicidal for a long time sure yeah and but it seems as though like the reason that you've never been like gung ho about I'm gonna go die today is that like you haven't made a masterpiece yet I'm like I'm depressed and anxious at the same time and so it's just like I want like I definitely there are days I'm just like I'm just gonna like end my life like I feel like crap right scenario you create something that you legitimately believe is like a work of merit no one cares about it what happens nothing because I'm already operating under the assumption that that's what's going to happen like deep down in my mind I'm kind of convinced at this point like probably not gonna be a digi bro like that's probably not gonna happen for me like becoming as big as I am because I don't intend to stay at this level right but like now I'm not even gonna reach that point I think I'm gonna be this weird awkward guy who's just gonna not I don't know it depends on well I think it depends on how legitimately good the projects you come out with are because like so far your narrative projects have never really come out yeah or except for the My Little Pony fan fiction yeah but like you can't recommend that to your friends uh too easily no no unfortunate what no but like I I just think that it's hard to say like one of the problems I've always had with with uh with trying to you know when you come to me for advice I'm like well the problem is that it's hard to say if you need to like like you're good enough that I'm like clearly this guy could do like an amazing series like a great he could write a great novel he could write a great comic he could write a great whatever but like it has it happened yet right and so it's hard for me to say like oh you're you know people just don't care about your art style as opposed to well if you gave them like a great story they they might and maybe the kinds of stories that you are best at telling can't be done in a short amount of time you know like because there are some people who can just like draw a picture in a in an hour and it somehow tells a story and people are like entranced by it and then there's other people who are like I can tell a way better story than that but you're gonna have to give me a year right well that's my I just I work insanely slowly and I don't know I don't know if it's because I just have a really shit work ethic or if I'm just like I think it's your I'm gonna go ahead and say I don't think that your work ethic is your biggest problem because I think that the work I've seen you do is unbelievably taxing the way you do it like back when you used to draw because you did a few art live streams and you were doing the tricksy comic do you want to explain that period of time what happened there actually we might have to cut off and upload footage and then read restart if this is going to be long because it's only like six minutes left of recording I could probably get through this in six minutes all right no well that was just I got I got big into vectoring during MLP because that's like how they did the show was with vector graphics the difference between doing vector graphics and the show versus what I was doing them because a vector graphic is just it's infinitely scalable so like it's all done with points and math instead of pixels but the way you do vector art like precisely is use the pen tool and so you base it's all done with Bezier curves so do you not do that anymore when you draw no I've moved I've moved I mean sometimes I still do because when you were doing that I watched some of those live streams and you would be like drawing a tree for three hours yeah and I was like this is what like you could you were doing commissions that you literally could charge somebody like $50 and you're you're only getting paid like a dollar an hour for the amount of work you did I'm running into that problem right now with 3d because like I'm doing I'm pricing it out like if I wanted to start commissions are you doing commissions or are you just planning planning on it but the problem is like to to charge minimum wage to do a commission it would start at like $300 and how long is the commission or just it's just a model or it's just like a model to do a model with like a turnaround in one pose would take probably like there's some people who would buy it but they're not in your YouTube audience no they're not like they're they're no they don't know them yet essentially all right the card is filled up so we'll take a short break to uh unfilled here we go so before we just took a little break you were talking about your influences and how you have a lot of clear influences on like your lifestyle and mentality but not so much on your actual aesthetic art style yeah I guess it's kind of that's a bit more nebulous to track my art style has changed a lot as time has gone by I can definitely recall like specific artists that I was trying to integrate into my style but my art really took off when I stopped trying to actively develop it Joan and Vasquez was huge back in the day I think everybody had a Joan and Vasquez phase who was into drawing comics or art in the mid-2000s like invaders in killed all of us yeah and then Johnny the homicide of maniac and squee and all that shit I remember distinctly I started getting into spawn like the original like spawn run from image and uh oh god what's the guy's name not Tard McFarlane I like I love his art too but like the guy specifically Steve no oh god I'm blanking but it was specific specific artists artists on spawn that I really fucking liked Dave Capullo he was fucking dope and like his art's the complete antithesis of what I do because it was like really thin lines tons of cross hatching and extraneous detail everywhere and like really soft painterly colors it was like he took like Todd's art style like pushed it further and I but I really liked him there was a whole phase during college where I was desperately trying to do that and failing miserably because I have no patience and at one point specifically I remember in illustration class I was like fuck it I'm not this so I did the exact opposite did really simple cartoony things and I think that's probably where my style like kind of became its own because I realized like I'm way too lazy to sit there and spend 10 hours on one drawing Is there anywhere that people can look at like your old fucking like super detailed shit? Is there any of that online? I mean I don't think any of it's online anymore Was it any good? No Okay That was the whole problem was like I didn't have the patience to be a Dave Capullo because like his art like you could zoom in You have to plan that shit like extensively to make it work It's just like I don't know how people sit there because like my whole thing is like I want to tell the story Yeah and the art Well you've always been way more of a narrativist than an esthetician I suppose which is kind of funny because you do mostly work in visual mediums or you've you've I like you've always considered like visual mediums to be at the forefront of your career except for the period where you were trying to be a novelist Yeah um how do you like reconcile that? Sure I think I really enjoy my favorite things like ever since I was a little kid like stories and like experiencing stories have been really thing I think one of the my very very very very first influences was Animorphs that scholastic book series like everybody laughs at them for the covers that book series was fucking crazy like people were killed You just re-read that a couple years ago I did I really I bought I bought the whole series again to re-check it out and like the writing is super basic but like it's about like high school kids being traumatized by war like that's what the entire thing is about and like the book ends super solemnly there's no happy ending they don't win shits bad Oh that's like they end up like spoilers for Animorphs I'll actually warn you this time they end up like repelling the aliens and everything but the book the last book is like 15 years later one of the characters has post-traumatic stress disorder nobody knows where he is he just dropped off face the planet the like ship that was through the entire book Cassie and Jake never happens they break up because Jake is like not able to like parse like not being in war so they can't work out and like it's just like super like just like how like soldiers they never recover yeah and so like the book ends with like Jake like going back into space to go on another mission and like that the book ends with them encountering some other aliens and like it's like do they live or die we don't know that's some heavy shit yeah like like the thing is like they like get stabbed and murdered and like severed and like like there's one point where like like one of them gets cut in half and they have to like de-morph back to human because when you your wounds recover when you go back to your regular form so like they almost die a bunch of times there's like torture and murder and like all this crazy shit that's not I never actually read any of those it's so good oh god I really wish they was like like an adult revision of this because the way it works is that there's these aliens called the yurks and like they're parasites they go into your ear and they take they wrap around your brain and take over your body and so there's like these aliens everywhere like parasites they're parasitic aliens and they have like these they've taken over tons and tons of worlds and now they're coming to earth because in this world earth is like or basically we breed like cattle so like there's like we're billions of people on earth that like doesn't happen like all these other planets there's a couple million of both species but here it's like a goldmine for this alien race I'm like we're super underdeveloped but our bodies are like really great for them so they're like trying to take over the planet and then there's other aliens called the andelites who are fighting them and so the way they fight them have this to basically for espionage is morphing so you can like acquire the DNA of an animal by touching it and then for two hours you can transform and become them but if you don't demorph in two hours you're trapped in that form forever so the characters don't have like a specific animal they morph into they just can morph into animals you can pull a bunch of different ones and once you acquire the DNA it's more like a beast boy power because essentially yeah but the interesting thing is when you transform into an animal the first time you have to fight its instincts because it can take over your mind and you just become oh shit does that ever happen to any characters it does it does temporarily like one of the scariest things is like when they they have to morph into ants and like ants are just like automata so for like 15 pages they're just like they find another ant colony and like they're they're describing what happens but they have no control of themselves they're like biting other ants and have it having a huge colony war and like halfway through it they realize what's going on and like they demorph in the middle like they burst through a wall and like fall out and it's like they're all traumatized and like like 20 30 books later they're like well it's never more from ants again ever no no no but one of the kids Tobias like he the very first book he gets stuck trapped in the form of a hawk so for like half the series he's just a hawk whoa and so he lives he lives in the woods he and like for the first like 20 or 30 books like people are like he'll like go to like Jake's house and like he'll like feed him like a hamburger or something because he has to just eat meat now because he's a bird and eventually he just like he's been in the hawk so long like he just succumbs to the the instinct and he starts hunting and like killing like they describe in great detail he finds a mouse rips it open it starts feasting on its intestines and he has like a fucking panic attack but eventually like his like subplot is like willing to just accept the fact that like this is who he is now narrates through this yeah this hawk and every every book changes narration it's first person narration but every single book it changes from one of the five one of the six man characters so this is one of his books where he just describes it like yeah I just ate this thing and it was fucking great so like he just starts doing that and like at the end in the last book in the series they're like because he never he's just a hawk so like they're just like we don't know what happened to Tobias like hawks only live for a few years he could be dead we don't know he just disappeared that's nuts it's it's it's so fucking good but like that's like that and Digimon are probably like my two big like super big influences in the beginning because those are like the only things that have like a continuous narrative that kept going on um so all right well I guess we kind of got to the heart of your uh your influences unless there's any other like are there any influences that aren't really like art related but are like way more than most people realize like affect your life you know I don't know I mean like I watched a lot of like like YouTube like I really like Gary V he's fucking dope never heard of him he does like business and like social media and personal brand development stuff he's super cool I'm about to read his new book what would you say your biggest influences as a YouTuber holy shit I don't know I really don't I mean it's just kind of an amalgam of like yeah it's just like I don't styles that have sort of sprung from the primordial ooze of the biggest one that we both had in the beginning was uh a sequelitis like that's where our whole format initially came from pretty much was just like trying I mean he took it from Mr. Plinkett so it's really he's like the forefather of this current style you know yeah um in terms of like I really liked just like tech YouTubers when I was doing Rebel Pixel it's a lot of MKBHD and like Austin Evans and and and like pocket now and like all the all the big ones you definitely had MKBHDs like attitude towards tech which is like these everything should be like kind of sleek and modern and like I mean it's unfortunate that you were filming it in a basement as compared to his fucking studio I mean not that he always had that but like you know you have you you branded it very strongly to look like that kind of channel like everything is like modern and cool and yeah I mean that's what I went to school for so yeah tell me more about that because again a lot of the things about you that fascinate me the most are the things that have nothing to do with YouTube at all such as your graphic design and website design history because you make good what how the fuck did you make the Sorceress Lost website the motion comic site a lot of work it was just like all I mean I still have the file you can look at it's all hand coded just like those aren't like GIFs or no they're uh bands or anything they were video files with no audio and then you there's an HTML5 they have like a video in bed like I don't even remember the word before it is at this point just like a option you can do in case anyone doesn't know what we're talking about go to the Sorceress Lost site it's still up unfortunately some of the fonts don't work anymore because like Dropbox I was hosting a bunch of stuff for it on Dropbox and then Dropbox changed the way their file system works so you can't link out to other files anymore so all the web fonts and stuff I was hosting all don't work so it's like in times New Roman it looks 10 times worse than it used to but yeah it's just uh and then I went into the player you can edit the properties of the player so I set it to autoplay and then to hide the controls so they look like GIFs they act like GIFs but their video files so like a tenth of the size of the GIF that would be but you can scroll over it and like yeah when you scroll over it the controllers they pop up right it's really sleek looking and I'd never seen anything presented that way but I assume that the bottom line is it is not worth the amount of effort to tell that story that way I mean now that I can do 3D it would be so much easier to do the same thing yeah do you still think you might take that direction with uh it's very sourceable I really to go back to the question that you initially asked was how do I reconcile wanting to do visuals but being a very narrative centric person the reason I started writing for a while is because like I came to the conclusion like all I really care about is telling a story yeah why not just do that and the problem not even the problem but like what I realized through doing that is that I really like visual storytelling I like being able to like move the camera around and like do things without just I hate description yeah like every time I gotta get to a book and like when they have to describe all this shit like like the Scootaloo book that I wrote it doesn't have the words said in there ever I never made sure an active decision to never have a said tag because I hate that so fucking much the word said yeah so every time instead of like saying like they said I'd be like you know that the opposite is what is preached is correct and right right right well the thing is because they say don't change said to like he replied or he did so what I did instead is I would use what's called an action tag so instead of being like saying like hey digi I said or something I'd be like I picked up the can off the table hey digi and then yeah so it was I don't put any saids in my stories usually either but I'll just like full paragraph break for dialogue yeah I mean write it like a script you know the thing that's how I usually start when I would write all those chapters like because the dialogues the part I love doing the most I just write the dialogue out and then like okay I guess what what I'm going to do while they're talking and then just go back through and like slowly piece a scene together yeah um that's interesting but that but doing all that like I loved writing the dialogue I loved coming it up with this story conceptually but I would get super bogged down and like trying to A writing like descriptions of things because like I'm like I could just draw this and then B like transitioning from scene to scene was also tricky I don't I don't know how to like I don't know if it's just that back in the old times when you had to read books I think people had a just more ability to imagine what those places looked like because when I read like a long descriptive part of a book I cannot picture it at all like I just come up with whatever I think it might but I'm just like this doesn't feel right the same way that just seeing a picture a picture whoever said pictures worth a thousand words underestimated the worth of a picture right like a thousand words ain't that much and you can tell a fucking big story with a picture like just show a picture of someone's room and you can tell me like a thousand things about that character you know so I totally agree that like with certain scopes of stories like a big fantasy story like it's real hard to be able to like write enough minute details without it bogging down like a lot of fantasy novels and shit I have a great example of this in Sorcerous Lost depth that of why like this is actually one scene in the beginning of SL that I don't think I'm going to use anymore but at the time in the first revision I was working on really made me like think fuck I don't really think I can work with books the way I want to because there's a shot that I had that in the beginning of the story Sarah was going to go to like the docks and meet somebody who was coming in for her mentor and pick up these scrolls that that he needed so I what I want to do she was going to sit down on like a bench wait for the ship to come in and then they're like we got sound like the ship's coming into dock she turn around and like it was the camera would zoom out and you see that not only is that ship coming to dock the islands like floating in the sky being suspended by magic so there's like this airship coming into dock not just a regular ship so it zooms out you have this big glory shot and I was like oh this is so cool but then I switched to a book I'm like how the fuck am I gonna do this scene there's no way to give the camera pants out and like it would sound so like but that's how I think you have the mind of a visual artist so I'm like I can't write it like it's exactly I can write the dialogue just fine but like in terms of like it's telling the story and just telling stories in general I'm thinking like a director and not often when I was trying to write the the book that I wrote back in 2010 for a nano-remo like it took me two years to get it to the stage of a novel because the initial idea I had was just of like a scene of someone firing a bullet and then like time stopping and the character like flicking it around and shooting it back or something like that but the only way it made sense in my head was visually it's like no one will understand how cool this power looks if I describe it in text because you don't see the bullet stop you know so it won't this story can't be told that way yeah eventually it just changed the story so that worked for me yeah I cut that scene out of the the written version it's up on tumblr you can read it it doesn't happen like that but like I don't I mean every time someone makes a youtube video about any adaptation of anything they're like oh mediums can't be crossed like it's new information but like you do kind of have to keep reminding people including yourself like hey some of your ideas just won't be yeah doable I mean to in defense of books something that's really easy to do with books that's harder to do with other visuals is engage even not even exposition thing I was gonna say is engage all the senses yeah you can describe easily how things smell how they feel without having to like like if you're gonna do that in a visual thing like you can either imply it with visuals or you're gonna be like hey it stinks in here you know you can't really like elegantly integrate senses like you can in a book I think the best thing about text is just that like a character can easily give their reactions to a situation yeah and I think that like a lot of the reason that adaptations from like books to film always end up so bad is that like the book the book is not focused on the visual element because it can't do that well right it's focused on the fucking thoughts in the character's head so like most books are more focused on character development well I think and like something that I was noticing while I was writing because I was trying to figure this out myself is that like any visual medium kind of always like has the issue of time yeah right because like most the most of a movie is done basically like each scene is in real time whereas in a book like in between two people talking like one sentence and another the character can have a thought that goes on for like 16 pages yeah exactly and like there's no way to you can't just like stop the frame like and then the character thinks right like it feels totally weird and what are you gonna show right you can't really do anything like you like like you'd have to like go into their head and like animate all this stuff but like it feels awkward because like nothing shot like that yeah and I mean obviously there's lots of books that like like House of Leaves there's no way to make not a book because like it's constant notations and active reader participation you could maybe make it a visual novel but not yeah not a book you know but um yeah so so Sorceress Lost is still in the works would you say for sure okay I just finished like a rewrite like a month and a change ago I have the first chapter be done so how like glued to this universe are you of Sorceress Lost I like really enjoy it and depending on how I mean my plan initially was like I would want to have like any future stories I do take place in Salon as well which is like the name of the world yeah I uh speaking as one former aspiring author who gave up on his world to another because for me the hardest thing about any project is I have an idea for the next project and so like it becomes I don't want to let this project take up too much of my time because I want to move on to the next one do you ever feel that way about Sorceress Lost like is there another project like underneath that waiting to get out or is it more like this is my thing and I want it to fucking happen the weird thing for me and like this almost undermines everything I've been saying so far is that I and like this is something I've been dealing with a lot recently and trying to figure out and I think I've kind of understood it is that because I have like all these self-esteem problems like my projects don't feel real or as special like I can't be as passionate about SL as like how I got I can't be as into SL as I was into like MLP or something like that just because like because it's from me it feels tainted almost yeah like intrinsically but like the way I'm trying to like get around that is I've found that some of my best work and the things I can get most hype about that I work on is when I'm working as a group because then the project transcends just me and it becomes bigger and more important Did you watch my Dear Artists video? I did because I you inspired that video I figured when I was like the first photo to come up as like artists struggling I was like I think I think I was watching did you recent like in the last week put out like a hyperbolic wine chamber or something? Yes because it was I was watching that and you were just talking about like the difficulties of marketing yourself and stuff and I just somehow the thought crossed my mind about Vocaloid or something and I was just like Tom should do that or something I don't know I was just like artists can team up and they can make it like take some of the burden off of yourself you know it doesn't have to be all you most I think that the YouTube sphere is very individualistic even though there's like tons of YouTube channels that are teams you know like especially a lot of the big ones have multiple persons behind them but like I think the romantic idea of the YouTuber is like guys like Casey Neistat who are just like I don't sleep and I make a video every day and it's always good and so we pressure ourselves to be like that and obviously you know the idea like ought to or artists and shit but like even a fucking you could look at Quentin Tarantino and be like oh he's my favorite director but it's like he would be nothing without the cinematographers who bring those fucking shots to life because his cinematographers are gods here so like you know I think not enough people some people responded to my video like isn't this all obvious this is one-on-one shit and other people were like thanks Digi revolutionized my life gonna implement this right now yeah I was looking through the comments because like I I was kind of like in both camps because it's like yeah this is like something I've been considering and at the same time other people were like I don't know so I guess it depends on where you are yeah I mean for some people they just never even think about how like marketing yourself is extremely difficult because first of all you have to recognize what about yourself is marketable and then you've got to figure out like who is gonna care and how do I find those people and show it to them well I think one of the things that like I've had issues with is that like I've always been afraid that the stuff I actually want to do has no market value right because like even with Polystation 2 right now I think like it's I'm doing fan art on Polystation 2 when like at my core like if you ask me what do I think of fan art I think it's stupid I think it's a waste of time yeah like it's not like it's obviously a great marketing tactic to use but I don't feel like I feel like it has inherently less artistic value than doing original work but ironically it is the only thing anybody cares about exactly unless unless well okay at the same time though I do feel like there's a little bit of anytime well okay you're gonna agree with me on this because you're really hard on yourself you would probably say that if you made a good enough story you would need to rely on fan art um I mean some people do that I mean I think if you get to a certain there's a certain like level that once you hit that like the work speaks for itself right most people aren't there everything that people are drawing fan art of is something that reached that level exactly you know like it had to be good enough that people it inspired fan art and you know it was I got a really interesting comment on that wine chamber I did someone said like it's like I've never really personally connected to your work because the most of the stuff you've been doing recently is fan art whereas I really connect to Ben because everything he's doing is his own work right I'm like that's an interesting I mean for me the difficulties with connecting with your work is mostly that I know how much you hate it and it's hard for me like especially the YouTube videos yeah I just I'm not like if I watch a YouTube video that I know you didn't want to make then I'm just like well he obviously like sometimes you just seem like you're having fun with it like you put out a vlog because you just wanted to rant about this thing and like that's why a lot of my videos exist they weren't made for an audience they were made because I had an idea and I thought eh 3000 people will click on this it's worth posting you know like someone might think this is quotable or funny or they've had the same thought but uh but when it's one that I can see that you like forced yourself to do I'm just like Tom you gotta get out of there like you gotta get out of there you gotta make the stuff you want to do you know yeah and that's like I'm the next couple months like I have my nest egg for moving which is gonna happen I guess in a few months so I quit my job before coming to rag Kong because I'm like I'm just gonna focus on getting back tell us about the job you've been doing I want people to understand the because you've talked about it briefly but the conditions of this job are terrible and it's because I guess the guy who hires you owns half the city yeah and can just do whatever he wants yeah um because we we actually when it got really bad we actually talked to one of the like officials for the town and he was like yeah it's fine but you can't do anything about it like don't try so I'm just like okay but yeah no I work for the last like two years I've worked as a quote unquote security guard at an abandoned building Draper Mill in the center of our tiny little town and it's an old old building it's like stripped to the bone there's just nothing in there but like asbestos probably and lead even though apparently they've done you know inspections and it's fine maybe but uh yeah and I just like do the graveyard shift so 11 p.m. to 7 in the morning and you just wander around an abandoned building just wander around the abandoned building just to what make sure homeless people don't sleep there I mean we don't even have homeless people in Hopeville but uh what did anything ever happen that would there were the only thing you having been there okay well the reason I'm tech they call you a security guard the reason I'm there is I'm babysitting the building because the entire building and like make sure the fire extinguishers are fine because there's the building isn't up to fire code and so legally this guy has to have someone in there to use the fire extinguishers in case the building catches on fire but we're neighbors with the head of the fire department and he said if you want to die do your job if you want to live get the fuck out of that building if it ever catches on fire well so you've been doing this incredible dangerous dirty job does it pay over the table yeah okay so but it's just a shit job that you that the guy pretty not be taken to task for it yeah and he just owns you were doing that for like over a year right like two years holy shit but you kindly quit yeah I figured whatever I mean not gonna have a house in a month anyway so okay so okay I need to understand exactly the plan because I kind of like the idea that you're just gonna try to live in your car and do art from there what do you what is the plan like where are you taking the car first well here's the thing the thing is I have a couple options apparently I have a friend who might want to move in with me but she's been very slow on the uptake on that so I'm not really relying on that but if I did that I have to like be a normal person and get another real job and like I don't really technically want to do that so that's like one of the options the second option would be to buy a tiny house are they cheap that cheap they can be okay some of them are because usually like a tiny house can be just like is a tiny house cheaper than a trailer so you can just get a trailer a trailer if you're gonna put yourself down yeah I mean I'm looking into options right now trailer is definitely one option tiny house is a lot of tiny houses are just like houses built on a trailer bed anyway so they're around the same size but just a bit nicer okay and then the other option is to convert a cargo van into a mini like apartment on wheels and drive are you aware of the YouTuber Noah called well Gervais have I told you about him you've not okay so this guy is a gaming YouTuber whose thing is that he does like two and a half hour long analysis videos of entire franchises like he'll he'll do like Dragon's Age and then he'll go through all the Dragon's Age games and talk about all the storylines and compare everything and say like here's what was good here's what was bad and uh his audio is dog shit he doesn't edit the audio at all so you can hear him like wrestling with papers and fucking up lines and um fucking stuttering he's got a very dry voice he barely edits the video it's usually just like long gameplay footage but just because of the fact that he talks about an entire game series all the way and talks about everything and because of the fact that it's all pc games that have like fervent cult followings he's got a huge patreon not not huge like mine but like you know big enough to sustain himself on and he even uh a pizza boy at the time but he had this he's like a huge into road novels like obsessed with road novels so he like refurbished a volkswagen van for like three years and now him and his wife like live out of the van and just travel the country do like he just uploads youtube videos from wherever yeah and like subsist off a patreon and like sort of him doing that was part of what inspired me to hit the road you know and be like oh shit we can do this from anywhere I gotta fucking the camera just stop but when you told me you were gonna be doing ps2 graphics out of the back of a car I was like hey it's Noah Coldwell Gervais doing it there's there's a whole making as much as he is there's a whole like culture of people doing that like I follow tons of youtubers right now who are just traveling just traveling doing that like the difference is that they do it because like they love living on the road I'm doing it because I hate having a life usually they have a house to go back to though Noah Coldwell Gervais was just dirt poor and he like just sold off the house and all of their belongings and went into the Volkswagen van like that is the life now there are people who do that they just like they live the van life like they've just decided so I could live the RV life I could not live the van life the like Volkswagen van where the bed is like your body went from the ceiling yeah it's pretty it's it's cramped as fuck dude but I mean I don't feel like I would be that much you don't take up much space except as being like six foot three yeah but like in terms of uh you know your your your range of activity yeah I mean I would only sleep in the thing yeah I've been planning on probably just like going to like coffee shops or whatever and get hanging out in net cafes and just I mean I can do my work there yeah so but like a tiny house would be kind of the same idea I just I don't like it said like I can't even imagine like getting up at like 6 a.m putting on like dress clothes going into a cubicle like I would either like get a gun and either kill myself for everyone around me second you walked through the door because I mean I've done that I did an internship for my dad at Hanscom Air Force Base for like a summer and a winter and it paid good money yeah I want to be clear you like you are like first of all how old are you 29 so you're 29 I think you're the as you were Ben the oldest Ben is the oldest by a couple months okay so you're sort of a battle-hardened veteran of many life trials I guess I don't feel like I feel like my life's in pretty easy which is I mean compared to let me put it a different way I was telling Munchie about how I got fucked over on my job and he was like flabbergasted but I'm just like I don't know well I mean it's that you have you've been to enough things that I wouldn't say that like you're when you're saying I can't even imagine myself at a normal job it's like you you've worked them you're not just saying that because like I know there's a lot of people like I like to say things like like I could never go back to work but like I didn't even really hate the one job I've ever had and like so I could probably do a normal job like I probably could not for long because I'd be constantly scheming to quit but like you know you are not just saying this out of nowhere you've worked a bunch of places and you worked at a Whole Foods I did that was probably my longest stint yeah was I did like that was I have like this curse like except for this job which was like to make it clear I was so bad even at this job that I probably should have been fired but there was nobody else there to fire me so it wasn't possible and nobody else would do that shift so like I when I put in my notice like a day before I came here the guy was like are you sure we can give you like two months off to like not be sick and dying anymore and I'm just like no dude I'm cool they were just gonna offer you months off yeah there's like we can give you two months off if you need to like recover and I'm just like I'm okay because they know how bad right because they know they know that no one's gonna take that spot before the winner even started but the winner was bad you to enjoy the summer okay to tell you how bad it was I can actually show you a photo after this to show you what the office ended up looking like if you want to laugh your ass off I kept it for legal reasons I figured if it was gonna go down I needed ammo yeah but um if anybody decides to class action this guy you jump into that shit so I think that's how that works the uh the building for almost the entirety of the summer had no for the entire the winter had no heat anymore the heat was broken so I hadn't even imagined that he would be involved yeah so like they showed me pictures of this place it's not even like walls there's like one little office where they kind of had heat but the heat stopped working yeah so it was just like and then the whole building leaks so every time it rains the office floods the entire building floods but like the building never completely dries so there's mold and mildew all through the whole place why are they keeping it up because they can't get rid of it the problem is like the town's water supply runs under this building so if they do anything to it the entire water supply is fucked oh boy and and they're just stuck with the shitty building yeah there's nothing it's it's just a relic of a lost age that can't be salvaged and can't be destroyed and this guy has to pay somebody to do this job yeah legally but he won't like take care of them because it's a worthless job exactly because there's no there's no money to do for legal reasons yeah he's just doing it to keep himself from getting sued actually funny enough though a lot of people out there have probably seen this building because if you've seen the movie the surrogates I have not okay it's the the movie Bruce was based on a comic an indie comic which was really good there's a scene where they go to the slums and this movie had a multi-million dollar budget they could have gone anywhere in the world to film the shithole of the movie and where were they for about three weeks and everyone was freaking out because Bruce Willows was in Hopedale, Massachusetts in the building I worked at so the slums of that movie is where I worked for two years look at the literal cyberpunk slum yeah that's a cyberpunk movie right sort of I mean it's it's not like so it's it's kind of more like a general your future sci-fi kind of yeah I guess I guess you could classify it as cyberpunk it doesn't play the aesthetic very very hard it looks very kind of normal still fucking hilarious that building every but that was the whole thing I was like stunned everyone's like oh my god Bruce Willows is here it's just so amazing I'm like we we're officially the shittiest place on the planet earth yeah like do you understand like like they could go anywhere they could have filmed us in Africa if they wanted to they came here how many years was it between you saying that and then working there oh god when did that movie come out at least five years it was a while that's nuts well yeah go check out Tom's building in surrogates yeah with Bruce Willows I'm sure they CGI'd up it a little bit but they didn't go that far let me tell you all right well so do you think that your life's going to be better or worse once you're out of your parents house better for sure so you think even though even though you're going to be in uh like living possibly living out of a car would you still say that was like better than nothing nothing material things don't interest me you know like like I'm the person that if like I made like a million dollars a year I wouldn't have a big house do you think that you are going to like in the the this you sort of talked about like being liberated by this yeah I think there's just a lot of like because like the interesting thing is like you have moved around your entire life yeah constantly I went to sixth grade right down the street from where I live right now I see my entire life has been this tiring tiny little fucking so you think that by escaping that you might open something up yeah definitely I like it's imagine it's weird when you drive to work and you pass by your high school yeah at 29 yeah a little like that's super fucking that's why like literally it's funny you say that because like you know I moved to my my girlfriend's town like with the intention of getting her out of there and like we pass all of her schools all the time and she's just like this is why we can't be here anymore because every time I see that high school I want to burn it down exactly you need to get me away from it so but yeah I do think that'll help obviously this just the fact that you are considering the possibility that would be even better of a lifestyle doesn't mean people should give you any less money or that you don't need help I mean I mentioned in the wine chamber that I want people I don't want people to give me money because they think like they're they're being a charity case I want to make work that people think is worth paying for so you you want to make sure that people know that like if patreon.com slash save me is not about Tom needs the money it's not even save me anymore I changed it to slash polystation too because I didn't I didn't want to be I think the joke kind of outlived itself at this point I think it's just the kind of meme that when you push it entirely yourself people aren't as receptive to it yeah like patreon.com slash ben saint took off I think more because other people were like like propping it up more than than him himself or not more so but like as much your meme was too forced unfortunately I'm not good at comedy I I don't think you're like bad at comedy I'm bad at like I can do like off the cuff reactionary comedy yeah but I can't like sit down and script a joke you're better at reacting to someone else's thing and piling on to it yeah I would say like on PCP that's your funniest shit is like quips like response quips that come out like you know exactly but uh we're at that point the interview quick draw word play and I'm trying to like remember what questions I need to ask you like what do I need to know about Tom or do people need to know about Tom okay so right now you consider yourself mostly a 3D graphic artist yeah I mean ever since I got I watched We Are the Strange like it's something it's always been in the back of my mind like this is kind of cool and I always thought conceptually it would be a good move to make because like the hardest thing for me to do with drawing is uh for shortening like like drawing anything in perspective is just like like that sort of shit it's just like yeah yeah that specifically that that pose exactly so so I've always been like well 3D like that's all done for you because that's like the entire nature of it like the extra the seed dimension it's not like that right well I mean it is essentially because you don't you make the model and then you the camera does all the foreshortening but you can't do like you can't do certain things that you think you can like that would be possible in 2D yeah I mean you can't like do like because like a lot of the crazy foreshortening stuff is like breaking perspective yeah you can you can like fudge it for sure and you can like change camera settings stuff to kind of get like a crazy dramatic kind of depth of field sort of thing but just in terms of just like if I wanted to draw a person from an angle even it's not like crazy foreshortening like it's difficult for me but like 3D you just do it so like it makes up for a weakness of mine like I think just doing the 3D that I've done like this is more how my brain thinks of like objects yeah because like you don't so much want to like uh draw the entire character every time you just want to put the character in the god damn environment basically and like pose them and like I think if you don't really need your care like you tend to draw your characters pretty consistently they're not like extremely expressive where they're going to be changing expressions wildly from page to page or anything like that like it's safe for them to just be models that could be posed enough especially in like a fantasy story where you know like the facial expressions are not driving the story yeah it's not like techs Avery cartoons or anything like that it's pretty restrained so it just it works out really well and like I've always loved that like low poly ps2 kind of look I grew up with it I mean I don't think I think I think doing low poly is probably going to limit the reach of anything I do because I think most people I think there's nostalgia for like 8-bit there's nostalgia for like that ps1 kind of thing it's coming that the ps2 because the thing is that you know you're 29 you're not old enough to be nostalgia baiting yet really I suppose it's possible I'm just too ahead of the curve right now okay because I did not grow up with any 8 or 16 big games so I have no nostalgia for that shit like for me my era of playing those games is mostly the fucking on steam like someone like Munchie that motherfucker was born in 2000 like his first console was probably the fucking Wii it was you know so like it's disgusting so for someone like him you know he'll be nostalgic for like Minecraft which I mean Minecraft looks dated anyways but he'll be nostalgic for it because that was the the zeitgeist of the time and I think that you know I mean obviously you got Hippo who's constantly talking about how like the ps2 was the best era for graphics you know like that's his whole fucking channel's identity it's like ps2 is the only graphics I ever want to see so when you come out with Polystation 2 it's like this there's your target audience I just need Hippo to give me like all this Patreon money and that'll be fine but uh do you have any concerns about the idea of trying to do a fantasy story in CG because I've always felt that like one of the biggest problems I have with the Berserk movies was that like I thought that the extremely like wispy fanciful art of the manga did not really translate to anime but since you're not really adapting this from a source material I think I mean I really like customize it more one one of one of I really like the the the the ps2 jrpg something like like a dragon quest 8 a little something you're a little fuzzy piece in this you get and now you didn't get it oh god where is it I don't know it's not very evident so it's hard to oh god we had a mirror we had a mirror what the fuck is wrong with it oh yeah a little herpaderb yeah um I think because it's not an adaptation like a building the aesthetic from the ground up I think it will probably be okay I'll definitely be like making sure that it doesn't become too ugly or anything how did you translate your drawing style into 3d because you've done your 3d art looks just like your 2d art um the only big concession I had to make was like making the eyes a little bit smaller and there were ways I could have gotten around that but uh the the thing is like I'm doing everything super low poly and like the eye socket in the model has 8 points to define it so when I stretch it to that big it looks basically like a really ugly like octagon and it doesn't look right but when you have a smaller sort of eye it kind of reads more smoothly I could have done it as a texture but I wanted to give it that flexibility because the way I do all the expression is something called shape keys so like you have the basis of the face just kind of neutral and then you make a new key and then you pull the point so it looks more like an expression and then you have a slider that kind of transitions between those two and that's how the face morphs from one expression to another okay so you can make the faces move in every yeah like in real time in your comic that's cool I don't know why I'm like impressed with that like that's not normal but I mean I don't know I was like whoa you can make their mouths move like in my mind that I was like reacting that strong I got like a a thing of FOSS like going through a couple of different expression loops on on instagram just came out pretty good so fuck I forgot how I wanted to phrase this yeah your art style is so particular how much of that is like you have to draw that way and how much of it is you want to draw that way you know it's interesting because now that I'm doing 3D and I feel so much more comfortable with it like a lot of that was just like this is just how it's coming out but like I'm doing a couple models right now that they're not like super different because like I did the thing the way the 3D like work throw works is that you work off a reference image so you get like a front and a side view and then you kind of model from both angles and it makes a 3D version of it and like the techniques I could apply to anything like I could get like you know anybody's art of a front and side view and I could reconstruct it right but I'm making sure like I'm doing like Bayonetta right now is like the next big model I'm working on I could just gotten like a you know from the design Bible for Bayonetta modeled off that but like I redrew it myself because I wanted it to be my proportions and my kind of art style so there's definitely like I'm doing that because I feel like that's my identity and I like it because I don't want to just like turn into like I don't want to become just technical of just like you know I could like recreate other people's stuff do you think that your like art style is going to radically shift as you continue with one of the big things that is coming right now is I'm going to start using way more color I've been super big into black and white forever yeah your aesthetic has always been very my big push now because like what I really love about 3D is I love that like that low poly like hand painted like World of Warcraft is so fucking gorgeous fucking great so I'm starting to like oh if you dude if you can create some like I your art style is pretty close to that like your Trixie pub is very World of Warcraft-ish yeah anybody who doesn't know we're talking about there is a Trixie comic we were talking about it before the camera died yeah that um that you had made this like towards the tail end of doing like basically you quit the pony YouTube shit and then we're like I'm going to do this comic and then you worked on it for a couple of months and then it switched over to Sorcerous Lost I guess because I was saying in the other video it's just like the I wanted I had like this autistic obsession with keeping all my fan content like yeah non-conflicting with canon and then like they shotgun ruined a bunch of ideas that were going to happen like the whole story of the Trixie arc was she was going to go into the every forest and find like like all this crazy shit then they like retcon like oh we're just in the everfree and we figured out all that shit and what it is I'm like well that whole story is just torpedoed so I was just like well all the passion died with that and then like the more stuff I did like the more I like kind of like we're sort of tweaking little things like I wanted to like Celestine Luna to be made way more like gods and stuff because like I thought that was like a cool idea from the first season that I totally fucked up after that so then I was like why don't I just make my own thing where like there are gods and they are gods and they do god shit yeah so like that's what it is like 13 big countries and they all ruled by a god and they all have different cultures and stuff okay and like so it just I just started running with it and like it became became way better yeah same technique that you use for the motion comic and Sorceress Lost but in the Trixie comic while it was a two-dimensional comic all the backgrounds were 3D environments you'd created yeah that so that you could just you know put a character against an environment from whatever angle and just shoot it easily again you're much more into just having the elements rather than having to draw them two thousand times differently but the pub is very world of warcraft looking now that you've mentioned it and I think if you could nail that like not just just one of warcraft but if you could nail an aesthetic like that I do think people would be really attracted to that well I found out well I knew about it but I learned how to start doing it like the Foss model like I did I pay all of that was painted directly on the model because there's a way of doing it usually like you unwrap a model like you put seams in and you flatten it out like a papercraft doll and then you like kind of like texture it on the flatten thing and then when you put it back here it wraps around but like blender has a thing where you can just take a brush and just draw right on the model on the screen oh yeah so you can get a lot more subtlety going on there because like you don't have to like kind of like think abstract like how will this look when it's wrapped back up you just like draw right on it and like I'm just painting I just painted the whole thing uh-huh and it looked really nice and like I've never really done much with color but I'm going to try experimenting more of that it's probably a lot faster than building a whole texture to wrap around right yeah I mean yeah it's more it's faster because it's more intuitive like you don't have to like think like okay like part of the foot's over there part of the arms up here how am I going to make them mesh together you just just draw it's much more natural so that's that's really exciting but I'm doing a lot of experiments with that like one of the first things I did actually I did like a 3D reconstruction of the first room from Undertale and Frisk and that was all hand painted too and that looked pretty cool so I'm just like yeah yeah it's gonna be dope all right let's take a short break because I got a piss and get another drink and we'll come right back I don't know dude all right Tom we've asked you about your influences your art your plans for the future do you would you say that you currently see yourself as having like are you living project to project or is there something like is or would you say that you're more focused on the big project in terms of like like art project wise like I find myself if I'm working on a big thing then it's like that's what I'm doing and like there's other things that come out but the big thing is the important thing and other times it's just like well it's a new week what am I gonna make next yeah well my problem is that I flip flop constantly between like should I run myself as a business or should I be an artist that's like destined to kill himself or something because because like so hard like business wise business wise I should be like just pumping out more fan art trying to get my name out there build a personal brand and like build an audience so like when I said oh I'm gonna start doing original work like I have like a thousand dollars a month based on my art like a huge following to actually support it but the artist in me is just like fuck that that stuff's never gonna take off because your passion isn't in there you should just like let your passion shine through on like something you're actually super fucking invested in even if it's like a smaller thing I mean I think that's the way to go but I mean I'm one to talk because I your passion happens to be insanely like marketable I you know not anymore because like I I found myself we can't control the audience that that props us up unfortunately yeah I mean it's just a simple matter of that I was more willing to not even that I'm more willing to but like less ambitious it's like the more ambitious you are the harder it's gonna be it's because if you want to communicate a really then you probably can't do that in a simplistic way right and I know like it's not you can't just sit down in front of a video and explain the entire plot of Sorceress Lost and have people care about Sorceress Lost right you know on some level they might be interested in it but because yeah I've done that before I've been like hey here's the plot of some novel I've got an idea for and people are like wow I'd love to see that you know but well you're not getting it because it's just an idea feel free to steal so you're just kind of bouncing between those two streams all the time it's complicated because like ideally in a perfect world like I wouldn't have financial obligations you know because it's even the problem is like even if I like drop off the face of the earth and live in a in a van I still have student debt so I'm gonna have to defer on all of that yeah to actually like make it work what does that do you basically just like I can get like a deferment so it's still gaining interest but you're not required to pay it back at that point uh-huh so you're just basically like owing more money so you don't have to pay it right now okay but in the future you will have to pay it right so you just gotta try to make a big the thing right now before you gotta pay the my only scheme but Trump Trump's America seems to be on its way to ruining it is that they have a thing right now where if you're poor for 15 years they'll forgive your federal loans I'm like halfway through that right now oh yeah and if Trump has his way that's gonna go away and then I'm gonna go fucking shoot up the White House because fuck you you ruined my long game here you dick so for what it's worth that was satire yeah yeah yeah I've heard that the Secret Service shows up at your house if you uh half the Secret Service would support me if I did that at this point yeah I don't know that's just I would like to just do that just like focus on that one thing because like I'm someone who's like really just unitask minded like I can't like I had a schedule for a while where I'd like on this day I'll do this project then on this day I'll do this project and I just end up doing nothing because my brain was too scattered like what I'm doing right now which is working a little bit better is that like I'm just gonna do this one thing until it's done and move on to the next thing until that's done yeah and I just I don't know simple simple just like doing this and it makes it better to get done um um let's say six months from now what do you think your content is going to look like like what can people expect because like for me um one of the harder things about following you as a content creator is that you've changed gear so many times I never know if you're planning to stay there right no it's it's bad like my personal brand's a mess yeah which is the name of that last wine chamber my personal brand's a mess but it's not pity yeah I need to just like really that's why I wanted to get take the get off work and take these next couple months like really just like hammer away a game plan like the the biggest like fucking breakthrough of like the last 10 years has been like I enjoy making art and not just the finest finished product which has never happened like it's it's like the fucking craziest making the goddamn shit because you were saying like oh you just like look for all these shortcuts the shortcuts were because I hated doing it yeah now that's I mean that's the thing is that if you try to work in a medium that you don't enjoy doing the thing then it's always gonna fail and the interesting thing is fucking sucks I've done it for so long that I thought it was just because I was lazy yeah but I'm not I mean I am lazy but well that's the hardest part is that like they're everybody everybody's lazy about doing shit they don't want to do right you know and like for me when I wanted to be an author or a filmmaker and all that stuff like I didn't realize that when I was a teenager like there was a solid year and a half I wanted to be a filmmaker and I never made any fucking films and at the end of that I had to go well clearly I'm not a fucking filmmaker because I had all the time and opportunities and like I just didn't do it so meanwhile like anime blogging was just happening naturally you know and I feel like if you can find something that you just enjoy doing it and there's any way it could be marketable it's worth exploring and if it's not marketable well you got a fun hobby making fucking ps2 exactly well that's like kind of why I want to take these couple months because like I have no I'll have no responsibility in this situation there's no way it's going to happen when other things are added on top if you can't bust your own so I mean but they always say that like having the rug pulled out from under you is a good way to hit the ground running I don't know if anybody's ever like premeditated that to the extent that this is though but I mean the whole thing is just like I just I can't it's really I fantasized about the things that's happening to you have happening to me back when I was a teenager like I wanted to run away and thought like oh if I like if I have to bust my ass I'll work yeah you know but I never did obviously but I'm real curious if it'll yeah I mean ideally like if I could get myself into one thing that I'm slowly like trying to do is like delegation and like trying to like I want to work with other people because like I said earlier like I bust my ass way harder like working for the PCP than I do for myself like I would not I would not sit down and make a hundred t-shirts for myself like I'll do it for PCP because it's a bigger thing that I believe in outside but if I like doing like Polystation 2 branded shirts I'm like just go on red bubble pay double I don't give a fuck yeah it also can be really it can be way easier to just riff off of someone else's thing you know like it's easier to come up with ideas if it's like someone has already set up the baseline and you're just like riffing off of that baseline it's not even like like the the idea part it's because I when I think of myself and my work it's just me and so like because I don't think too highly of myself yet I can't get too excited about it but like when I work with PCP or just with anybody else like I remember I did a project with my buddy like right after college and like we both busted our ass for a week because like and I worked hard because it's like this isn't just me like it's something bigger than me now I'm working towards something larger than just like my like you know artistic masturbation do you think you're okay with like a life where it was never like oh I did it all by myself well that was a that was something I'm letting go of I was super obsessed with that like I wouldn't want like I'd rather do this bad than myself than get it done right but now I'm just like it's been 10 years of that and nothing's been done so like now I'm just like I'd rather have something done than something not done right I'm at at the point now we're like I continually hire the DeVoo because even though I've been getting better as an editor so has he and it's like you know that's the kind of delegation where at the time that I hired him everyone in the PCP was terrified of hiring editors because we were all like oh I want to have I want it to all be my personal mark it has to be me me me it has to be like my perfect vision but then I just found a guy who kind of understood my vision but at the time I was writing stuff that's nowhere near as advanced as like what Jesse was doing where Jesse was like oh I can't hire an editor because like he won't understand my vision and I'm like well yeah you're doing like a really complicated thing which is more fun to edit anyways like ironically it's more fun to edit something that forces you to be creative and like think about it but uh because of the fact that Voo's been editing for me for so long that now if I do want to give him something more advanced that's like oh this is more of my personal vision thing like he can he can deliver on my vision better than I can right because I can just describe it to him and he'll show me something and I'll be like well that's way cooler than how I had imagined it you know yeah I mean that's that's like the advice they give you you want to hire people better than yourself and like that's what I want to do like it really starts with just being honest like I would love like my ideal situation I'd love to do something like like Ruby where like I'm like the creative director and I'm doing like I want to still be in the trenches like doing a lot of the modeling and like doing story Ruby right there is proof that that brand of PS2 model is popular because that's it's low poly as fuck right the newer ones have gotten better but the original ones they're like they were pretty rough and like I remember watching like the first because I just watched Ruby a little while ago and I was like oh my god this is this aesthetic is on point and then they changed to Maya I was like oh it looks so modern what happened I definitely can say I like your models more than the Ruby models well the Ruby models were like what like 10 years ago or something like that at this point just like shit okay well now I want to ask you some more philosophical questions I guess okay like you know how do you see the world how is the world right now how are things okay um like in terms of just society and how do you think is going things going in a direction that you that is good well okay I don't think the reaction things are going is like necessarily good for anybody but like have you felt yourself like burdened with the the foibles of modern society or are you more just like concerned about your shit um I'm kind of like torn on this because like there's there's I definitely feel like I think I brought this up on a pzp episode once where I was saying how like because of social media and like the internet and stuff like our our like scale on which we can judge our personal ability has like been expanded like a thousand fold oh it's you know that's kind of what I just at the start of that Dear Artist video is like there's so many people online who legitimately deserve to be famous and you're competing with all of them right like all of us if we were just like knew like the people in our city we'd all be like the 99th percentile of what we do but the problem is we're online and it's like I mean yeah there's a lot of you're in the biggest pond like I mean you can be within a sub pond of like oh I'm the biggest pony guy or I'm the biggest anime guy or whatever but like you know you're still a small fish in the YouTube pond of guys with millions of subscribers so I mean it's the same thing with art or anything else any niche like you're just you're competing on on like a global level and the problem is because all the cream rises to the crop the top one percent feels like normal and so when you're not the top one percent you feel inadequate when you really shouldn't be no I mean like yeah you're constantly looking at shit that's better than yours yeah like you can't help but like for me the way that I process that information is I have to get as good as that guy how do you feel when you see that stuff well it's interesting because up until I started doing 3d I would feel miserable but now I just get jazzed like yeah this is fucking dope and for so I get it's just like a mindset change of just like I feel like this medium is within my grasp like I could do that with enough application of effort whereas with drawing and stuff it never felt like I would get there yeah so it's definitely been like your projects could get done within a timely enough fashion that they will make sense and be like positive experiences to have worked on I mean I don't know the big mystery for me is always like the marketing aspect because I feel like despite all the best practices and stuff there's always a degree of luck like because that aspect you can't control it like I can't control people coming to me I can't control you liking what I do and I mean I think there's also a strong element though of like uh you can't you might not be able to make them drink but you can lead the horse to water at the very least by like just making people understand like I think when when people talk about having a personal narrative online and everything like this has been construed as like be a vlogger and be a fun online persona but I think the main thing people just want to know is like why do you care so much about this goddamn thing well there's a there's a great I think we had to talk about this I told you about Simon Sinek when he says people buy why you do things not what you do yeah it's so true it's it is definitely I mean especially for me like a lot of my audience is about the why of like and that's something about things the way I am I really kind of want to get more into on Polystation 2 which is kind of the reason why I kind of think maybe pivoting away from fan art because like if I I think that if I did an impassioned rant or something I mean like how why fan art sucks or like not even being that blunt about it but like why like the artistic integrity is important I think there's a group of people that would really resonate with that certainly I also think that you uh yeah if you did more original content it would just show more I think people want to know like what's the message you're trying to send like I know a lot of random things about source or a slosh but I don't know what the themes are you know so that's like kind of the problem is I don't think enough people know what you're trying to explore with your work you know like it were even if you know what you're trying to explore the work do you do you have like a strong sense of like what I mean the stories of the theme the theme of of the story is actually like I guess it's ironically kind of similar to what I've been doing is like there's there's there's another another way of do of accomplishing what you want to do because like the main thrust of it is that Sarah isn't a world of mages or a culture of mages and she can't do magic right and so like she wants to be like a great mage or whatever so she goes to all these other countries outside of hers and like each country has a different culture and there's different ways of doing magic and she kind of becomes like this amalgamation of all these different schools of thought and becomes like better and stronger that way and it's going to be like this cultural class between her and her brother who like is very traditionalist from her culture and like they play off of each other and things like that and like a lot of more more is going to happen and is this more like down to earth or does this expand in like story scope like does it is there a war you know I I distinctly wanted to make it not like a chosen one on the world in the brink of war kind of story the entire like culture is stable okay so it's just going to be exploring like these different cultures like being able to look at a fantasy world that's not like unstable and like just closer to like a my little pony tonality like yeah because I mean that's where it came from yeah at the end of the day it's just like a world where I still find that so refreshing like there's a lot of politics and magic and everything but it's not violent yeah I mean there can be violence like an isolated cases like there's a certain short story I want to tell like I want to like challenge like perceptions and stuff because like she comes from this culture where magic is like the be all end all and then like there's going to be cities like where like magic's looked down upon like there's going to be a whole like culture that's basically going to be kind of like steampunk where they're like like they're basically going to be like what atheists would be in a world where gods exist like fuck god I don't want to have anything to do with them so they reject magic because magic's like the power of the god so like just make technology and but the gods are literally real yes they they're the rulers of of each country so okay well that's interesting it's more than I've ever known about the long-term plot of Sorceress Lost yeah I mean that's because it just kind of got finalized a little while ago it was a lot different before but like the original one of the it was it's funny like it's the original plot was going to be like sometimes you just like have to like realize your limitations and I think a big problem is that because I don't believe that at all yeah and so like now you got that girl on the gun yeah so go beyond the impossible maybe impossible possible so I was just like it didn't resonate so I had to go back and scrap that and redo it and like this is and it's funny because like as I was developing the story like it happened with my own life because like 3D is I'm going to push these barriers that I couldn't do before so it's like huh yeah how badly do you wish you'd got into 3D art like four years ago or 10 years ago well you know that the the technology has advanced to a place where like it's definitely more feasible to do it now than it was then and also like there were a couple like key YouTube videos that like kind of unlocked a way of doing it that I kind of wrapped my brain around that if I hadn't decided to do it now I might not have stumbled across and I might not have been able to push to where I am at this point so I try like even with with like all these rewrites of SL and stuff like it's going to be so much better than it would have been if I just pushed through with it before so there is a part of me that's like grateful that it had extra time to incubate yeah I mean in a lot of ways people always say you have to get like your first story out there or you have to get you have to like like Munchy was saying in the podcast you and him did I don't know what the release order of any of this shit is going to be but you and Munchy did a podcast about do you know what that video is going to be called Art Pologees? Art Pologees yeah in the Art Pologees podcast Munchy was talking about how you need to get your early work out of the way because it's always going to be your worst and like you can keep making it better but then the paradox that the longer you work on it the better it gets but in a lot of ways you've just created multiple stories like by the time the the story I wrote as a as a novel like I said originally it was going to be a movie I spent like two years redeveloping it until it was a book and by that point it was yeah vastly better than the pre than what it would have been and if I made it again now it would be two but it would also just be another story like the same character is the same plot but it's not the same story you know right yeah I mean I've written other stuff so it's not like this is my first rodeo on writing a story right and it's also but I'm just saying that like even if none of this stuff has been published like silently in the background you're grinding the power level which used to be how it was like sure most people didn't crack the scene till they were of a certain power level now it's like all your old shit can be on your deviant art and some people try to cover that stuff up but I I'm one of those people yeah all my old deviant arts are gone you'll never see them what's the farthest back of your content that's viewable online well I actually just axed all my pony work off of deviant art a couple weeks ago so like two years ago it's the longest it goes back is that true on like all social media or the okay but to clarify the reason that I decided to to get rid of the pony stuff wasn't even because I was super embarrassed by it it was because I didn't want that metadata to fuck up marketing anything that's going forward because I still that's why I I didn't I didn't remove my pony videos out of embarrassment either it was just like for a while I'm like an anime channel that has like three rows of anime videos and then pages of pony videos and I was like these all need to go that was the thing because like I'm rebranding is like all those 3d stuff and then you go back and there's all this pony stuff and it doesn't make any sense and like because like all these things are driven by algorithms now traffic to that is going to fuck up yeah directing where you're supposed to go god they're ruining the internet it's really bad they're ruining the fucking internet it's really bad and the only reason that the only thing that's going to save it is that everyone knows they're doing it yeah and that's why we can all escape all right how long how far are we into this could I am running out of questions okay um well is there anything anything because I I don't want to ask you about any broad topic stuff because we talk about enough of that on the PCP right now is there anything else you want to share um I guess like going back to what we're saying about like how we feel about like society or whatever like how that shit goes I think there's a lot of negative that comes on with this whole internet shit but like we were saying before like you know the last generation couldn't do what we're doing like there's no way that like can you imagine like like like the ridiculousness of like oh like five friends are sitting around a table having a discussion and you get like almost a grand for it I mean like the this whole setup that we're currently in right now is exceedingly strange yeah it's kind of ridiculous renting a house to make like to fly six guys in and make youtube videos for 10 days like it's utterly nuts and definitely it couldn't have existed before yeah so this period I know I we all give social media a lot of shit but like I I'm also like really just grateful that like I'm I really I like being the age that I am because I'm like young enough to be able to take advantage of all this but old enough to understand like how important it is oh yeah how like to not take it for granted right yeah so but at the same time I feel as though we are just too old to understand certain like why things become trendy on social media for sure there's definitely a distinct like that's every once in a while I'll just like hear some new song that's like all over vine and I'm like why and like why this that this is just is not my generation I guess you know that's I definitely am terrified of growing old just because of like I'm terrified of death in general I gotta remember that like you know there's always people your age like people people act like if you I mean granted like teenagers are the most interested in art because they need it to like understand the world around them and they have tons of free time but like adults still consume it and they want shit for them I'm just terrified of dying yeah well that's pretty bad I mean we're all terrified of dying me I think just because I haven't done what I want to do yet like I think if I can get enough shit out of me I'd be like if I died tomorrow like it it takes a lot mostly on the table for me there's so much well that's a whole problems like there's there's I'm never my brain's never gonna turn off there's always gonna be another idea so like I'm gonna die unfulfilled I really want you to read um or maybe I sent this to you I don't even remember did you read a thing by this comic artist about like how he wasted 14 years or whatever drawing this comic that was only supposed to take five and like his tips on how to not do that um possibly was it youtube video no it's recent it's fairly recent it was a it was a blog post but it was a I saw a video kind of similar to that or no it was a youtube video I'm wrong it was a youtube video I think I watched that it was like it was like kind of like an edutainment video but it was a yeah yeah a guy who was a comic artist who had spent like an obscene amount of time over a decade drawing like this three volume comic and it was because he copied the style of like oh yeah because he did all that super insane matching and stuff yeah I did watch it that's fascinating but then he talks about like where you need to cut to like he's like you pick your battles like this shot was not important and didn't need to be shot in a location that had four layers of detail I will not do that next time but the most fascinating part was when he was talking about like so this took me this many years and that means that if I only do three more comics than that or if I if I keep doing comics at this rate I will only get three done before I die right and I have more than three ideas and uh do you ever find yourself like do you worry about that especially with like Sorcerous Lost all the fucking time that's like my number one thing like I remember yesterday when I was on my way here I was like do I really have a week to spare like should I just be working right now because I have like two models like that have just been in limbo I feel very similar because like two weeks for the last two weeks I have done nothing but read the Guilty Gear Wiki for this goddamn fucking lecture and I still have all of XR to get through for me it was the dick show like days and days and I was like sick of it and I was I was I was talking to my friend he's like why the fuck are you even doing this all fighting game stories are retarded I'm like I mean you're right but that's the fun of it said I do it Kingdom Hearts story is retarded it's got 150,000 views dude this lecture the first the first half an hour is 100 years before the first game because that's you need to know all of that it's really dope oh boy but uh yeah yeah I too was like at the at the like very beginning of like the project that is going to define my career for the next year and I'm like gotta not work on that yet let's go to Radcon but like it's been really frustrating because I'm just like I want to keep going on that right but you're you've been talking about you and Munchie inspiring each other to try to work here so yeah no it won't be a total I've those those two files have just been open for like the last two weeks just like be sure are you sure God that feeling of having it open and like or especially if you have something for a project on a tab in your fucking chrome yeah and it's there for days or like a half finished movie and you're just like I'm never gonna finish this movie it's the worst yeah all right well uh I think we're about done here because I am sick of sitting in this chair and I've run out of questions all right so that's the interview with Tom hope you all enjoyed interviews are not like back there's only like two that need to be done it was you and mage I think yeah and now this one's knocked out so uh hope you enjoyed it with video and look forward to more Radcon video because there's a thousand of them we've literally filmed like like probably over 20 vlogs today or 20 pieces of entertainment today yeah look forward to everything peace