Hey what's up. You guys doing good? Been a few years since I made one of these, end of 2021 to be exact. Kinda missed reading these and even re-reading my own, so why not do this again? I'll try not to keep you too long. I'd say 2024 was an interesting year to put lightly. Actually probably one of the most significant years of my life. Lots of good, lots of bad, lots of fucking up, lots of learning. Here let's make some sort of timeline for ya shall we?

JAPAN TRIP

Back at the very end of December of last year, I finally started making plans to travel to Japan. This would be the first time going to Japan, and the first time travelling overseas like this all by myself. Well all by myself in terms of the whole airport thing, I actually did make all of these Japan trip plans with the one and only @magibauble and we met for the first time face to face in Haneda airport lol. The amount of time planning the trip was only about a month and we stayed in Japan for longer at around a month and a half which is kinda crazy but if we were going we wanted to make sure it lasted. But the nitty gritty, the Japan trip was genuinely amazing and an experience I'll never ever forget. Me and magi initially stayed in Tokyo for the first 2 weeks at the Airbnb hostel with insanely kind and welcoming owners. We got to have lots of conversations with them, practice our Japanese, and on Wednesday nights enjoy a social pot luck and just talk to all of these wonderful people. They even followed us on Instagram and still keep in contact. Here's a link to their site so you can crash with them if you ever do visit Tokyo

Other than that, being able to live out my weeb dreams in Japan was great lol. Visited Akihabara more times than I can count, played plenty of arcade/gacha games, tried sooo much cheap and tasty food, and attended many events that I had always wanted to go to. I wont go into detail about everything, but some cool shit we did or I did solo were things like going to the Pokémon cafe, the massive Shibuya Nintendo store, lots of karaoke, visiting Tokyo Sky tree, visiting Asakusa, going to a vtuber collab with an aquarium, going to a Bocchi the Rock collab with an aquarium, going to a concert where Bocchi the Rock took place, attending Holofes and HoloExpo, walking through the Fushimi Inari Taisha, going to the Toei Kyoto Studio Park and seeing the giant life sized statue of an Eva, visiting the Dotonbori river in Osaka, seeing the giant gundam statue in Odaiba and the moving one in Yokohama, visiting Enoshima island, the list goes on and on and on. Overall I am so grateful some people pushed me to just say fuck it and go now while I'm still young rather than go later in life ( nudge nude wink wink @phantomarcade )

(Dotonbori in Osaka)

(Letting my inner Jack Nicholson out on an unsuspecting ninja)

I actually also met @Tappa0410 too and she gave me a cool badge of my snailpirate character which was really kind of her, she made one of magibauble as well.

I made a lot of great memories, made some friends, and of course got to hang out with other friends and really get to know them so much more like @magibauble and a few others. I recorded so much footage that I'm still working my way through it all to upload as vlogs on my Youtube channel. I'll get through them all soon enough. It truly was an experience I'll never forget and it was a great start to the year.

(Caught in the act?)

PROJECTS

After saying my goodbyes and heading back home from Japan in mid March, I was feeling invigorated. I wanted to get back into doing new projects as soon as possible and I didn't waste too much time. Oh and I also had completed a big animation project before Japan at the beginning of the year, that being the fake Yotsuba&! trailer. Give that a watch. But anyways, I got into some projects pretty quickly. I pumped out 3 fan animations of Smiling Friends over the course of like a month and a half that garnered over a million views combined on Youtube which was really neat.

It was a great exercise to get close to the style of the show in terms of its art and animation and I definitely succeeded with plenty of comments telling me they couldn't tell they were fan animations at first. From the popularity of those animations, I even got contacted and commissioned to do a music video for a Youtube channel which was great and it felt good that I was getting work through the popularity of these animations. That project took a little while but I finished it early November and you can watch it here. Things were going pretty decent during the months of April-August I wanna say, just busy getting projects done and hopefully improving my craft along the way. Of course with the music video commission I had to put most of my time into that, so my other projects fell to the wayside for a while.

School and Real Life

In September I started a graduate program at the same school I graduated from with a bachelors in animation back in 2023. I initially didn't want to do the graduate program, but after lengthy talks with my parents I went ahead and started it. It's been decent so far, its sadly not an animation program but still close with it being a film/video program, so I'm still easily able to worm my animation skills in there. Overall, after having completed the first semester, it hasn't been too bad. There are some classes I like more than others but I can't complain. I did get into a makerspace class though and started doing more 3D modelling and sculpting along with 3D printing which has been a lot of fun. That was easily my favorite class.

(Device and puppet I 3D modelled and started putting together to make 3D zoetrope)

Into real life. A lot has happened. For one, I got too wrapped up in shit that I can't control and that doesn't matter to me, sorta election stuff but just a lot in general. I let certain things just eat way too much of my time and energy. It wasn't healthy and it was eating a lil at my mental but not too badly. However I had some other shit that did eat at my mental like a rabid dog on the verge of starvation. I don't feel comfortable giving all the details, but there was a complicated relationship with someone I've known for a while and really started becoming good friends with these past 2 years. A person that liked me when I was naive and thought I wasn't ready, and then I liked them when circumstances had changed and were not in my favor. End of November and a good chunk of December was probably the most depressed I've felt in my entire life. Actually not probably, it most certainly was. For reasons out of my control and hers, things played out how they did and I could never be with her that way. I've spent the last month doing a retrospective on myself and my life in general and the road I'm headed down. Am I going to keep being complacent? Am I going to stay where I am, inside my room, and never really grow into the type of person I want to and deserve to be? For all my life I've kind of just accepted things as they are, rarely pushing myself truly out of my comfort zones, and actually taking leaps of faith. The last month of introspection has helped me a lot, but I would be remiss to say that the woman I was talking about didn't help me every step of the way. In a sense, that sometimes made things feel worse for what I couldn't have, but in the end I've come to accept it and have gained a best friend for life instead. And with that, these last few weeks and hopefully from here on out I'm striving to do more. Not only to become the best artist/animator that I can be, but to also be the best man that I can be, both physically and mentally. Being a shy shut-in isn't flying anymore. Not putting myself out there isn't flying anymore. Not making real connections and not trying to socialize isn't flying anymore. While the last month has genuinely been difficult, it gave me some good life lessons to take away, and I've been applying and will be applying all of these hard taught lessons throughout this year and into the future. It was my canon event if you'd like to call it that.

A little bit of a personal look into snailpirate there huh, the good thing is I'm mostly feeling better now, still get a bit sad some days, but I'm working through it. As for any new years resolutions? I can't say I have anything necessarily definitive, but what I can say is I will make 2025 an amazing year for myself, through all the means available to me.

To end off my year in review, I'll post some screenshots of some work I'm trying to do. No promises on what projects and shenanigans I'll be up to in 2025, but when the time comes you'll know where to find me 🤙

(it looks a lil scuffed rn, I know lol)

Have a good year everyone, genuinely. 🫡