Yes, I'm combining all four of those things into one journal entry. That's the only way to do it, you see.

Adult Swim County Fair Experience
First off, I wish to commend Adult Swim and William's Street on a great carnival. I had the privilege of experiencing Adult Swim's William Street County Fair and Expo "On Ice" during its visit to University of Texas in Arlington, which was utterly fantastic. That one day proved that going to UTA was the right choice. Everything at the fair was completely free; the only reason you couldn't just go at the claw machine constantly is because of the enormous lines. I got a bundle of free stuff, including a Meatwad squishball thing, a Harvey Birdman pen, a Bear (from Harvey Birdman) air freshener, a free T-Shirt, and... other... stuff. They had so many classic carnival games with Adult Swim themes (Whack-a-Chippy, Xavier's Tree of Infinite Sadness and Possibilities, a Family Guy pinball machine that was way too elaborate to have been made just for the fair, one of those "milk the cow" games in which the cow was MC Pee Pants), I only got to try most activities once. Possibly the most hilarious part was the "Heavy Petting Zoo Animal", which seems to be just a regular rabbit-suit person like you'd see at fairs and Chuck E. Cheese-type places, but behaves pretty much exactly like an animal suit character shouldn't. She pushed me out of the way when I walked in front of her. Once when someone was trying to putt the ball on the mini-golf course, she lay down on the course, completely blocking his putt. (If I were him, I would have just whacked the ball at her anyway.) Not to mention the fact that she often sat down somewhere, took the head off the costume, and picked at her teeth or did something equally unappealing.

Overall, it was the most fun I'd had in quite some time. Adult Swim is notable for not only being a great example of counterculture, but also a great example of counter-counterculture. Whereas the MTV Road Trip event that had visited school the previous day (and MTV in general) tried to seem as hip, cool, current, and urban as possible, Adult Swim went the complete opposite direction and put on an old fashioned county fair. To quote Master Shake, "That's not very urban."

Oh yes, and I had been wondering if they'd actually sculpt Chippy heads for the Whack-a-Chippy game. As it turned out, they were just the same bowling pin-shaped sculptures you'd find in any Whac-a-Mole [sic] game; they just recolored them to look like Chippy. Thus, Chippy was even more humorously distorted than usual. I loved it.

Fallen Angel Episode 1 Review
Like Valhalla Knights before it, I didn't expect a series to ever truly come of this Flash, despite all the time and effort already put into it. It had just been so long, and I've seen so many supposed "series" ostensibly abandoned. For example, what the crap happened to ALIAS: Sewer Mission? I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that Robbie Rob Robin Robert Robertson Roberts had finally finished the first episode. Was it worth the wait? If I had actually been waiting all this time, I'd probably have been disappointed, despite its high quality. However, as I had given up hope of expecting a continuation long ago, I was impressed.

Fallen Angel: Teaser was basically a plotless Mad Max ripoff (or homage, if you insist on being an apologist of derivative works) with terrific drawings and animation. Nothing original about it, but it was fast-paced, stylish, and elaborate. That alone put it way above most internet animation. I am not going to review this, as it's been so long since I first saw it, but I remember feeling quite inadequate about my own Flash skills after seeing it back in 2004. No, for now I will just be reviewing the three parts of the first "true" episode. Note that yes, I did really enjoy what I saw, despite all the flaws that popped out at me despite how much I wished they wouldn't.

Part 1 begins. The logos come up. Ooh, anticipatory feeling! Yay! That's quite positive. Jittery but consistently on-model frame-by-frame walk cycle. Yay again! Then... the opening monologue started. -_-;

"My name's Sarah. I'm 22 years old... and everyone I know is dead."
"I'm Mary. I'm walking down the street... and I have a friend named Donathan."

She continues "But it wasn't always like this." Well, of course it wasn't! If everyone you know is dead, that means they must have been alive at some point. There's a lot of redundant dialogue here, and practically every time Sarah spoke, it detracted from the otherwise sparkling footage I was seeing.

On the plus side, it's quite nice that creative camera angles were actually consistently used (as they were in the teaser). Yes, a lot of the more stylish/artsy shots were directly taken from other things, but at least it has style. Despite the polygoniness of the 3D models and the wobbliness of the FBF character animation, it's still awesome for net animation. And, you know, that's what it is: net animation. So hooray.

Now, let's talk about Sarah's design renovation, or "redesign" if you will. You will? That's a commonly used term anyway? Perfect. I liked anime-style Sarah way better; though drawn quite well, I find the new Sarah to look comparatively unappealing. That's just a stylistic preference of mine, however. I know ol' Robbo mentioned that he wanted to deliberately change Sarah's appearance in post-teaser installments so it wasn't so mangaloid. Though I prefer the anime style over the new one, I don't fault Robby for his change, and I'm sure he's more satisfied with it, as should be the many people on Newgrounds who consider anime style to be derivative and overused.

My rating: 4.5/5.0. Rounded up to 5 when voting.

Part 2 didn't have any of the previous part's bad wordtalking. The emergency broadcast lady's voice was rather monotonous, but that's how it usually is in real life. Something else that bothers me pops up here, though: very inconsistent outline thickness. In the teaser and the first part of this episode, the outlines were all pretty consistent, at least within their respective shots. Here, you see Sarah's head with rather thin outlines and her body with chunky, less detailed outlines. That could have been a conscious stylistic choice, but I found it jarring. It seemed... I hate to say "lazy"... to draw the outlines thicker and less detailed... but it was unnecessary and almost certainly done to save time and effort.

The animation was, overall, still fantastic. Motion blurs, easing when tweens are used, and a great 3D car crash. Unfortunately, I also didn't find it very engaging. I give it great points for great animation and derivative (but still present, and that's a bonus) style.

My rating: 4.2/5.0. Rounded down to 4 when voting.

Part 3 starts off with a glaring inconsistency. The first time we see the surfboard, it's already out through the window and you can see that it only skimmed Sarah's head. In the subsequent external shot, you see it's still stuck halfway through the windshield and definitely would have gone through Sarah's face at that position.

Then there's the blatantly expository exposition about EMPs from two military guys with the same voice and whose proportions constantly shift. "What the hell is an EMP?" one of them asks. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THIS STUFF. Furthermore, EMPS DON'T WORK THAT WAY.

Overall, this part was much more engaging than the second one (the explosions and disentegration are animated fantastically, and the atmospheric burnup was very impressive), but still has some really distracting flaws. For example, certain deaths that are certainly supposed to be dramatic, or at least "cool", just came off as comical due to the cartooniness of their character designs.

The scene of Sarah with a gun in her hand next to the corpses of what appear to be the people who rescued her is a nice piece of "I wonder how that happened" that was surprisingly effective. Why did she shoot them? It's not explained (yet), and it piques my curiosity. That's a very good thing.

However.... eaauurrghh, it ends with Sarah looking with a sad, determined expression at a picture of her deceased family. That's pretty much the most overused, narmiest thing you could possibly do when trying to make a scene dramatic. That really brought it down for me. -___- Yes, there's a short scene after that, though, of Sarah driving off into the distance as dramatic music swells up, which is still quite overused, but not quite discredited.

My rating: Undecided/5. So much greatness, but so much to detract from it. I didn't vote.

Overall, terrific work for an internet animation, despite the fact that it wouldn't stand up nearly as well if it were, say, on television due to so many elements being used so many times in previous works that they've just lost all effectiveness. Since this is Newgrounds, however, and such elaborate, stylish, and serious cartoons are hardly ever seen, it really stands out among its crowd. And a big congratulations to Robbie for staying with this project for a period of over four years. Four years. Now THAT is an accomplishment. This gives me hope that some day, we'll see the rest of Merry Melony and Sonic X: Cosmic Chase (both of which the creators insist they're still working on ).

Matters Pertaining to Youtube Poop
Let's take a step way, way down from Fallen Angel to the most flagrantly stupid and derivative type of internet animation there is: Youtube Poop. I'm sure most people reading this by now are aware of the fact that NAveryW and WalrusGuy are the same person (which I've never tried to hide). Please note that I'm not criticizing YTP for being stupid and derivative; stupidity can be quite hilarious, and of course, since poops are parodies, they're intentionally derivative by nature. Nothing classy about them, but that's why I started making them: as a vent for all the silly, stupid, often more profane jokes that would be out of place in my more "legitimate" animations. Of course my intentions have evolved since I started, but I don't believe my videos' style has.

I have gotten a lot of talk over my time as a pooper that I have jumped the shark, my videos aren't funny anymore, my style has changed, etc. This started practically as soon as I became popular, and it continues to this day. I have, however, gotten a larger than usual number of PMs telling me that my videos after my suspension and subsequent return to YouTube just aren't the same as my older ones, and my style has changed for the worse.

To that I respond that sure, they're not my best, but I still find them funny. I don't put a joke in a video unless I find it funny, and I don't put a video up unless it has a good number of jokes. Comparing The Valley Place What Contains Some Dinosaurs to The Only Mama Luigi Poop Anyone Has Ever Made or Arthur's Massive, Throbbing Hit, of course they're not as good. But compare it to Crap Has a Shadow and Definitely a Good Season for Potato Chips and I think most people (with the possible exception of big Death Note fans) will consider the most recent one the best. At least... I do... =/

Anyway, I always have and always will have had people who think that I've jumped the shark and people who think that my poops are still funny. That is, of course, unless I really do stop caring.

Enthalpy. .yplahtnE
I remember being really satisfied with the animation quality of Of the Couch, McDarnold's and Raptor Lincoln when I finished each of them. Compared to what I've done so far of the first episode of Enthalpy, I'm quite dissatisfied with all of them. But, hey, I still think they're funny and they're still better than the huge majority of internet Flashes, plus they show me how far I've come. It is truthfully hard for me to picture things that are worse than what I can currently do as still being good, even if I would have considered them awesome three or four years ago. I really look back on Raptor Lincoln now and, while I like the concept and jokes in general, I fell all "Awww, they should have been moving around more! They're so unnaturally stiff! The backgrounds look way too much like they just used a few preset Photoshop filters (which they did)! Nooo, that joke was used in Futurama! Zut alooors, I should have had more inbetween frames here!" and so on.

Enthalpy is, of course, not as ambitious as Fallen Angel. After all, I hope to release at least three episodes each year starting with the release of the first one. I'm mainly focusing on trying to make the humor shine through as much as possible instead of making everything look as detailed as I possibly can and taking years to make a single one. Sure, I could animate every episode with the detail of a Brackenwood cartoon and probably not animate more than a couple before I get tired of them and don't even bother finishing. I've animated a couple of Brackenwood-style short shots in the past to see if I could, and I feel I succeeded pretty well (though I'm not saying I'm quite as good as Adam Phillips yet). They just take way too much time to be feasible for a comedy series in which the main focus is comedy and occasionally action and drama.

That's not to say it doesn't have a whole bunch of frame-by-frame animation. It does, and a lot of it is probably so smooth that most people will not recognize where it's FBF and where it's tweened. It also does have a lot of detail in certain places, but only where I find it important to lavish certain parts with detail. Since the main focus is to be funny, a lot of the time just having a character standing there with no movement but lip flap and head bobbing works for what I'm trying to achieve. It's not wow-dazzle stuff for the most part, but I hope that there at least enough segments that make people think "Wow, that's really good" to get at least a 4.10/5.00.

Oh yeah, and Enthalpy's main website should be up relatively soon. In the mean time, here's a shot from the beginning of the first episode. It's cropped for size, of course.