I've gone back to putting up a new fence in for my side yard(to cover up my neighbor's ugly, rotting literally falling apart old wooden fence that they refuse to take care of) it's a little slow going since the plastic fence panels that I've been getting are $100 a piece though thanks to the fact that the IRS finally sent me my 2020 tax return(Not kidding either, I never got it back in 2020) I was able to buy a couple and make some real progress.

I also got a couple heavy duty solar powered street lights and set them up in my back yard using a long metal pipe that I cemented into the ground to make a parking lot style light.

I have something completed from January that I'm very excited to show but I can't just yet since the winners for the 2022 Pokemon Card Illustration contest haven't been announced yet(supposed to happen this month though so soon) other than that though I don't really have anything complete to show. I've had plenty of ideas, I've just been lacking the motivation(I could transfer some more work over from my Deviantart but that would be lazy)

I have have started a few things but finished even fewer so for the meantime here's a dump of my rough sketches and doodles from the past couple months.

Had part of the Meowth rastor, that I made a few months back, recorded so I threw together a short Speed Art video for my youtube(I hadn't uploaded anything in months)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLf0I09k5Ts

In my last post I showed a few pics of a cat that the neighbors had abandoned and after feeding her for a few weeks she was comfortable with me enough to let me pet her and slip a collar on her.

Well now she uses the pet door and comes and goes as she pleases and after a few nights of having a grey kitty sleeping in my bed, I think my prayers have been answered and I finally have a new cat 😄

I still don't actually have a new cat, there was an adoption event through a organization called "anna's Angels" that had shown my my mom a picture of a kitten then two weeks later when we went to the event to pick him up, refused to adopt it to her because of her age....so fuck anna's angels.

But I do have a cat that I've been leaving food out for a couple weeks now, she belonged to our next door neighbors but they up and vanished for some reason and after the house had been cleared out, it turned out that they had left their cat behind. well after leaving food out and trying to win her over she's finally warmed up to me a bit though I'm still trying to get her to come inside instead of sleeping out in the cold

I almost had a new cat finally, I found a kitten at the pet store that actually made me think it was meant for me as it was so loving and it seemed to genuinely want to come home with me but sadly you have fill in an application in order to adopt the cats and someone had filled out one before me so here I am...still looking for my new cat.

After my Dad's passing recently, I took his old handicap tag so I can have something from his car in mine but since it's not legal to hang it in my own car as is, I decided to Stickerbomb it (Stickerbombing things is what I do) so now I shouldn't have any issues hanging it in my car.

Lets see something new-something new...

Well I'm still working on my Rolling Start folder over on Redbubble and I'm working on more Stepfiles now that the Stepmania machine at my local Arcade has opened up to user submissions from the local DDR group, I'm currently on 3 with a 4th done I just need to make the art for it

I've got another one with the art done but I haven't charted it yet.

Other than that I'm not sure what else to say, one of my local Retro Game Stores had a outdoor sales for some of their excess loose disc games and some other merch, I had to wake up pretty early for it but I got a nice satack of games for dirt cheap including loose disc copies of Strikers 1945(PS1), Final Fantasy Anthology(PS1), Ridge Racer Type 4(PS1), Daytona USA(Saturn), Twisted Metal 3(PS1) Dark Cloud(PS2) for $1 each and while $10 for it was a bit much I also grabbed a Burgerking Gold Plated Poliwhirl card complete with the Pokeball display case which I'm very happy to have one of these again.

I stopped using tumblr for awhile and went back to Deviantart after the whole NSFW art ban even though my art is 99% safe for work since most of my friends left and what remained of tumblr was the stereotypical "tumblrites"

I'm checking back in and its sad to see most of the people I follow no longer post anything, (tumblr really f@%ked up) I've scoured many of their vlogs for links to other sites to find them but most seem to have stopped Arting for some reason and it's honestly depressed me.

I'm going to try and use tumblr again so if you'd like to follow me over there aswell, you can find me at " Skellart.tumblr.com though I'm not leaving Newgrounds by any means while I haven't garnered a huge following here or made any friends just yet, I'm happy here. I like Newgrounds.

finally got around to clearing out the weeds in one of the front yard flower beds and I'm slowly starting to take it back.

One of my local Retro Shops got Gauntlet in for their Arcade so thats pretty cool though now I got to actually get my friends together to go play it.

I've been getting less fuel mileage in my car and I noticed a lack of acceleration so I swapped out the spark plugs with some fresh new Bosch brands and it helped but I'm still noticing some performance issues, I know its a just under 3400lb car with just over 150hp but still it should be better than what its at currently (wish my car was lighter)

What else? The Xbox showcase happened and Ballan Wonderworld might actually be the first game in awhile that I actually buy full price as I swear I'm in love with it. BW gave me serious 5th/6th Gen Platformer vibes and beyond that there was just something special about it.(if you can't tell, I love N64 era platformers)

Psychonauts 2 is still coming and I'm still looking forward to it, The Phantasy Star Online 2 update looks beautiful, we're finally getting the Dragon Quest games on the Xbox(it's about damn time), The Gunk could be interesting, Ori is getting updated for the Series X to the surprise of nobody(still need to play Will of the Wisps though) Everwild could be ok but I wish Rareware would do something with Banjo like maybe get on that rumored remake.

I wish we could've gotten some actual gameplay footage of the next Forza instead of just that little snippet and I wish Microsoft would remember that they have other IPs that they could bring back, I mean honestly they have a line up to rival Sony and Nintendo in fact they have more than either of them but they just don't use them, even if they don't have games come out regularly atleast show off the characters by putting them in other games or kep their old games readily available on Xbox Live(like Ninty USED to do with the Virtual Console) SOMETHING just to show consumers that you have something and to show fans of those series that you actually give a shit!!!!!! (hoo getting a little too angry here) *sigh* they could have Blinx or Banjo be the Xbox mascot, or bring back the Midtown Madness series to be their Arcade counterpart to Forza and they own the rights to Hydro Thunder and while they DID make a new game for the series on the 360 which is indeed backwards compatible on the X1 they still haven't put the original Arcade/Dreamcast version on Xbox Live or atleast make the Midway Arcade Treasures disc that it's on be backwards compatible...

Latest video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEVlmg9TLwE&t=178s

Watched the PS5 reveal...it was ok, I don't think the design is horrible but the memes are funny

I'm still going with the Series X though. I prefer the Xbox ecosystem, it's going to launch with Halo, backwards compatibility is more than just an afterthought and Microsoft is doing more to get Japanese games on the platform now I don't know if it'll get to the point where we finally see Senran Kagura and Visual Novels on the Xbox but if they do come to the platform I know they won't have content cut like the Playstation versions have been seeing as of late.

As far as the games from the Playstation reveal go, Sack Boy: A Big Adventure looks genuinely fun,they took Little Big Planet and turned it into a 3D platformer that looks like it's taking cues from Super Mario 3D World

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Ratchet and Clank is one of my favorite Playstation series and seeing that it's getting a new game made me happy though that happiness was dampened when I learned that one of the writers they took on for it was the asshole responsible for a lot of the BS in Mass Effect Andromeda. R&C is a great series based upon ridiculous cartoon weapons, plenty of fodder to gun down with said cartoon weapons and cheesy tongue'n cheek dialogue packed with immature and sometimes below the belt humor and I just know that humor is probably going to be absent from this one.

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Then theres Gran Turismo which looks like a sequel to Gran Turismo 4 and it promises to be a standard Gran Turismo (Meaning no GT Sport online only bullshit)

I'll get the PS5 but it'll be after I get the Xbox(same as it was with my PS3 after my 360 and my PS4 after my One)

Latest video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIhyuY4D_M