WEEK OF 2023/04/07: GOOD FRIDAY

hello everyone... welcome to the funkin blog for..... Friday!!! Actually posted on a damn friday!!! Yeehaw!!! Good handful of blogs... mostly written by me!!! bwahahah!!

fnf kickstarter / rewards roadmap

by ninja_muffin

back in 2021 I drafted up (and pretty much completed) a cute little trello page for all the FNF Kickstarter Rewards / Survey progress

it's easy to post updates to keep people informed, but as well as that it's also good to have a CENTRAL place where people can reference to each other, and point towards, as well as for US to reference and point towards!!!!

it's updated as of now, and alongside working on general updates and kickstarter things, we will keep this up to date as well and make sure to reference this in newsposts when we can!!!

the reason I didn't mention it before? i simply forgot!!! I whipped it up closer to the end of 2021, and things were getting damn hectic at that time. We were setting up company things, bank accounts, lawyer stuff, and kickstarter fulfillment fell to the wayside a bit unfortunately!

In any case, if you are a Kickstarter backer and want an easy to see visual roadmap of where things are at, take a peak here! There's details with each thing also!!!

Kickstarter Reward / Survey Progress

pin progress

by ninja_muffin

the pin / poster progress had to be halted for a week or two, but we're back on track now. The recent progress update is that we have "proofs" of the mass manufactured ones I believe!!! Before we've only had essentially "test pressings" type ones, but these ones are getting closer to the mass manufacturing!!

it does feel like damn inches away from being able to ship these and the posters... I do hope soon we are able to also begin shipping of posters which are produced domestically, opposed to the pins which are made in da big overseas factories!!! Hopefully by next progress update there's news on posters and such!!!

pet taxes

by Kawa

Buttertart (fluffy cat, she/her) and Winston (leggy dog, he/him) say hello from my girlfriend's family's house, even as I'm sneezing all the damn time!!!!

the dave and cam toronto report

by ninja_muffin

this week me and dave worked on some POLISH things for funzies, getting closer to the tail end of his visit to Canada, we are trying to get nice little routine together and working same times and whatnot. Not to sell him out too much, but he don't wake up til like 5PM! Bwah!!! That's okay though it gives me a bit of time in the afternoon to do lil errands and take time to MYSELF and whatnot. It's nice!!!

Making progress on things all the time, what we worked on this week was a bit of implementing things, and trying to get consistent work out of ourselves, and always on the grind to optimize our workflows and how we work. Lately I've been reading the book "Atomic Habits". There's a lotta self help books that either state the obvious, or give you some pseado bullshit that you don't care about or doesn't apply to you. So far this book is decent and good I will say!!! It's all about the tiny 1% improvements to things, that build up into large change as time goes on. And that feels like it's been the case over the past half year I'd say. Feels like the way we work slowly gets shifted via small changes, but comparing our work input/output from now vs. 6 months ago? Feels like different world! When I say WE I really do mean the whole crew around us. It's one thing to have talented people working on something, but it's another to be able to FULLY utilize them, and let them reach their potential as well. That's the showbiz with TEAM MANAGEMENT and shiiiiit. COLLABORATION. There's shit that's intuition, and shit that you gotta shove into your brain.

May sound like a broken record, but we really do try to keep an eye on how to improve our own workflows! Reading Atomic Habits is very reassuring and feels like we are on the right path of things.

As me and Dave are together in PERSON, and as we we pretty much the only people we talk to IRL for the past week or so, we've gotten our brains together on many topics especially relating to FNF and shiiiiit. It might not sound too meaningful, but making sure everyone is on the same damn page is VERY worthwhile. Often when you are working with friends it can come naturally, but as more complexities come into play, people start to see things differently, and if those things aren't kept in check, things get mismanaged and disorganized!!

the blog is for the team

by ninja_muffin

one of the thing with this blog is that IDEALLY there should be a wide variety of authorship going on in these blogs. Every once in a while Kawa or Eric or Shingi will post a blog about what they've been up to... but i want MORE.... I PERSONALLY want to see what their thoughts and opinions of their week of work, as well as just what topics interest them to write about. The first aspect of that is to have blogs be easily accessible to write which I think is checkmark emoji ✅

Another piece (which falls on me) is to get blogs posted consistently. It might be unpleasant to write a blog, only for it to be delayed for the planned weekly blog post!!! People like instant gratification!!! So getting blogs for the week out and released ON TIME I think is where I come into play. HOWEVER I think to kill two birds one stone, I think making it easy enough for ANYONE on the crew to essentially take the RESPONSIBILITY of the weekly blog. Maybe next week it can be Dave's turn to wrangle up everyone's posts! Maybe the week after, Eric can! And then each of them go through the PUBLISHING STEPS. In which case, I also need to make the PUBLISHING STEPS as easy and accessible as possible. Right now the workflow is:

• People write their blogs
• If they don't, I give a bit of a rollcall for blogs, IF anyone wants to write them
• On Friday, I get them all posted to the "queue" which is basically spitting the selected blogs from our discord channel into github via a discord bot (shoutouts discordeno)
• Close the github issues, so that it gets put into the ACTUAL queue.
• When the blog is ready, run the github action to post the blog!!!

It's a bit more fussy and complicated than that, such as writing the BASE post / intro to the blog. I need to get things like that sorted.

In any case, I DO want EVERYONE on the team to write blogs, and it takes more than just willpower and team spirit to get people to do it. Can't shove a square peg into a round hole! I think we can get there though. If you are on the team reading this.... I look forward to your future blog posts!!!

Phantom Says: Chiggin Newdle Shoop... sluuuuuurrrrrppppp

by Phantom Arcade

Hello, one and all! Each and everyone of you, yup, even you!

It's hard to believe my time in Canada is almost over, though that's probably from how it's been broken up. Between visiting San Fran and then this past week, I suppose the time skip feeling makes sense. This past week was the most unfun, the most dreadful... bed ridden sick as fuck.

An unfortunate risk travelling a bunch in densely populated spots; dirty nasty stupid ass sickness stuck it's claws in my body and ravaged my anus. Basically, it sucked. It was one of those good ol' fashion classic sicknesses. Just pure agony, waking up for medicine only, and back to sleep. No games, no movies. Just a haze of pain and sleep. Been a damn minute since I been through that typa deal, a sobering refresher lol. Tho, sarcasm aside, I suppose it's not the worst price to pay for having had a very nice and blessed trip seeing so many Newgrounders.

That being said, unfortunately it's really accelerated Toronto trip since it pretty much straight up deleted a full week of life. I'm not too happy about how it's messed up me n Cam's flow of sleep times, and general focus honestly, but even if this trip serves as setting a foundation for understanding Toronto rather than being a hardcore grind... I can accept that.

All n all, I think in general traveling is just good for the brain, no two ways about it. Traveling pulls you away from your usual routines, and especially if you're staying with a friend, you get to live in the shoes of someone else. Honestly, even with the money to technically facilitate nicer traveling, I've still been opting to just stay with pals, no matter how cramped it is or how much agency it deprives me. One on hand, I'm too lazy to book hotels and figure out transportation, and on the other hand it really is just good to have that closeness to people. You really get to live when you have no option but to just BE with someone, have them show you around, travel w em. Almost form a small temporary new life just planning your days around what you and your host will do together. It can really open up new ways of looking at a lot of things you've probably never thought of.

I always really loathe having to travel, and usually put it off as much as I can... but when I finally bite the bullet (or am straight up forced lol) I always am super thankful, and usually don't want the trips to end. I'd really recommend to any artists reading this, especially if you're 19 or 20, try gathering up juuuuuust enough cash to visit a good friend you trust and see a new city. Rough it, spend frugally and enjoy the city together, or wilderness! Whereever!

The other fun part of travelling: limited games. It's a good opportunity to focus on select titles! Teeheehee.... This trip, what's the focus been? A last minute e-shop grab: Pushmo! Though I played Stretchmo years ago when it was new unaware it was the last in the trilogy, I'm returning to the origins now to complete Pushmo. And honestly, it's crazy how far the mechanics advanced between games. But, just as I felt like Pushmo was too simple, the late game has really been fucking my ass. By the veeeeeery end, you begin to miss the mid-challenge puzzles. The very very end game Pushmo puzzles are a good insight into how far you can push a mechanic in a game, they're fucking devious... one puzzle can take an hour or more if you get stuck... and the solutions sometimes come from an hour of pulling your hair out and moving a piece into a spot you only accidentally tried after nearly slamming the 3DS against the wall...

Though maybe playing that after work when Cam's asleep is contributing to mishmash work hours.... yaarrrhhggg!! -Dave

P.S. THE MARIO MOVIE FUCKING ROCKS!!!

closin thots fo week

by ninja_muffin

cute lil closing thoughts for the week.. hrm hummm.... i am glad this is finally being posted on a friday again... i don't want to jinx it bwah hahah!!! it's about 11PM friday night and me and dave are just chippin away at workin and last minute blogging!! looking forward to next week where we 100% will post exactly on friday right guys!

SONG OF THE WEEK