Me, Duh

My introduction to Weird Al.

Since I first touched a fat Mac desktop at age 6 to when I had my first PC handed down by my older brother the next year, and thankfully no nosy parents to snoop around my activity, I've always been a part of media virtually my whole life. I've grown up going to different websites just to play Flash animated games or watching Flash animated cartoons made by high schoolers and professionals alike in this same landscape of media presentation we call the internet. My goal in life is to create cartoons and I've realized throughout my whole high school life that it was growing up with music video parodies, goofy vectorized cartoons, and bad color choices and gradients with casts of badly drawn characters is what drove my innate passion to create life of my own that can loop the cycle of inspiring kids on their own computers and smartphones to make their own cartoons to show off on the platforms they so very much love as I have.

Coolest kid in the playground.

I remember when YouTube came out and it was the rage to have a channel of your own since it was highly customizable back then; uploading your own repeated backgrounds, having forum-like features such as being able to leave comments on other channels and inboxes, and overall feeling like a new-age MySpace. Since I grew up playing loads of video games thanks to my older brother working generic high school jobs and thus being able to afford games time to time or just renting them from Blockbuster or GameStop I would go on to GameFaqs.com to look up cheats or lengthy walkthroughs on how to beat Kingdom Hearts II and all that. Then I got my first phone in the seventh grade: the blue Ericsson flip phone complete with an app that you can basically make music with albeit only limited to the "instruments" it offers, but it was amazing nonetheless. I'm sure a lot of Gen Z kids growing up feels the same way about how media's kind of a presence that's always been there whether we acknowledge it or not, playing with actual toys instead of an iPad and then getting the new, hot trendy flip phone and then transitioning onward to smartphones at the same time using them for socializing is truly mind-boggling to say the least. It's absolutely incredible how people have lived through the age of talking through cord phones to using the cordless, touch-based smartphones that call our very own pockets and bags home. It's also incredible that the rise of more accessible ways of using computers and then being able to interact with people all around the world and creating communities through this new technology is infinitely fascinating and to see its evolution within the norm of checking updates and refreshing newsfeeds on apps while you're doing everyday things that have always been for hundreds of years like going to school or work; this one little addition to our lives was only normalized in just a decade. Wild.

As a visual artist that's switched from traditional to digital-based work and also working in a digital marketing agency for a couple years, the contemporary perspective of a creator is truly a rabbithole to fall through. I've learned that first and foremost, connections are probably your best bet in getting more people to recognize your work; it's the same sort of approach to networking. There have been more and more uses of the word "algorithm" when people talk about marketing or when discussing the systems and programming of the AI being used in popular platforms such as Spotify and YouTube and Instagram. These dissections of media platforms give the public audience more accessible knowledge of how they can just cheat the systems in so many different ways like using a ton of hashtags on posts to further your reach of audiences that search through that same hashtag, listening to similar artists so that the AI can pick out other similar artists for you so you don't have to dig around for new talent, etc. Knowing all this and also trying to show my work as a creative to more people, it's worked out okay. Instagram nowadays seems to have shot higher up in usage and popularity since it first came out, and it's now arguably the "it" app to use if you're trying to get any sort of online clout and the followers that newer celebrities and artists garner show just how effective Instagram has become as a tool for media makers. YouTube has also been proven that its algorithms are incredibly flawed and definitely does not support new creative talent as it once did, which is why creatives on YouTube plug their Patreons and their own merchandise as alternatives to making money from their work that YouTube cannot provide. I still have a YouTube channel to upload my new video work though since you don't have to pay to upload more videos unlike Vimeo which unfortunately is the best way to find new talent in media creativity. It's a weird ouroboros for creatives in digital media but adapting is what we do best.