Today I’m celebrating a full decade on Newgrounds.com, a place that has given me a spate of friends I probably would never have met otherwise, in addition to a lot of listening, reading, and viewing pleasure over the years. Since that greasy-haired high school kid started using the platform to upload and comment on music, I’ve shared 88 songs, posted 3,855 reviews, contributed to some crazy multi-media collabs, and, somehow, attracted 509 fans! Shout-out to @ArramEggleston for being the 500th, btw. :)

So, in commemoration of these 10 years, I thought I’d share some fun NG memories and personal tidbits that some users might not know about me. 

Weird analogies in my reviews

It’s often been pointed out to me that I use some weird analogies to explain things while reviewing music on Newgrounds. Here are some of my favorites, one for each year:

• A couple of months ago, I told @SkyeWint one of her piece’s transitions sounded like “an overripe avocado thrown at a wall of sound.” And in context, that was supposed to be a good thing. :D
• Earlier this year, @LLAAPPSSEE’s piece captured that feeling when an “aspiring actor moves back to Ohio from Los Angeles.”
• In 2020, I commented that one of @xZiriusx’s guitar riffs “could convince me to leave my family and join a religious cult if it wanted to.” 
• Meanwhile, this 2019 piece by @MegaSphere unambiguously sounds like a “spiked ABBA song.” 
• In 2018, I told @LucidShadowDreamer that “I can't decide if the piece is so slow-paced because the protagonist is lying by the pool high out of his mind or because he's slowly bleeding out on the kitchen floor.”
• In 2017, this piece by @CANDYdisturber sounded like “I'm a curious kid who snuck behind the curtain in a circus, and the ringmaster started giving me a lecture.”
• In 2016, @Johnfn found out that “the staccato, echo-y harmonies also gave this piece a really frantic, fleeting character, like all my relationships with cute girls have been so far.” (Cringey, I know, but to be fair it was 6 years ago…and nothing has changed lol). 
• In 2015, I told @Chris354 that “the first 20 seconds of this piece sound like a baby organ that's taking its first steps while learning to walk.”
• Way back in 2014, I told @Step and @camoshark that “I can just perfectly picture a bunch of jungle animals doing jazz hands all the way to the river to get a drink of water” while listening to their piece.
• And finally, in 2013, I described one of @Lockyn’s transitions in this piece as “like I just walked from an NYC club to the Ritz hotel.” 

NGUAC “Stall Stories”

In the early days of the Newgrounds Underdogs’ Audio Contest, shortly before the results were posted, I would build anticipation for the results by concocting an elaborate fictional narrative in a series of posts explaining why the results and/or judges were in danger. Like many aspects of the NGUAC, these “stall stories” were inspired by some (tamer) jokes made by @Step and @Echo in the early days of the Newgrounds Audio Deathmatch. One of my favorite stall stories of all time was actually in anticipation of the final round results of the very first NGUAC in 2014. You can read that thread here.

Eventually, I discontinued the stall stories, in part because some contestants got very confused and even angry with me. A lot of the forum discussion about the NGUAC now takes place off of Newgrounds itself, especially on Discord.

iTunes

Believe it or not, I don’t use Spotify or Apple Music to listen to songs. I primarily use iTunes. A big reason for that is a lot of songs I download or buy from Newgrounds, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp aren’t available on “modern” streaming service platforms. Today, I conservatively estimate that 50% of the songs on my iTunes library (so, 540 or so in total) were downloaded directly from Newgrounds, and I would never have heard many of the others if it weren’t for Newgrounds. Newgrounders I started following that have gone on to produce professional releases I’ve bought elsewhere include @FinnMK, @FarOutOfficial, @SpitfyaUK, @Garlagan, and so many others. As of today, the most played song I downloaded from Newgrounds in my iTunes library is “Run Away” by @NutronicUK, and the most played overall is “The Ghost” by Nutronic, which I discovered after following Nutronic on other platforms. 

Xmillsa

I also owe a lot of my early interest in Newgrounds music to @millsa, better known for his YouTube channel. He widely shared songs by @F-777, @EnV, @Dimrain47, and others back in the day, and they consistently showed up in my suggested videos because I spent hours on end listening to Waterflame songs on YouTube back then, too. :D Later on, some of my personal friends on Newgrounds got featured on Xmillsa’s channel, including @Johnfn (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n0Isc-t8lw) and @SkyeWint (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1SCd_pGgRQ). Xmillsa’s channel is not too active anymore, but occasionally I take a stroll down memory lane and watch the absolutely dope visualizers he has for songs like “Amity” by @NIGHTkilla and @TIMarbury.   

Haikus

From 2014 to 2016, I posted a haiku almost every day on the forum page “A Haiku a Day.” Later, some of them even ended up in @TheTankTribune. Again, here are some of my personal favorites:

Silence seeps in like

toxic gas. Planes fall upward.

It's war out there, boys.

—----------------

Eyelashes wave like

flags half-staff on plastic skin.

Too much mascara.

—----------------

My dreams were shoved in

a pinhole of time. Few will

make it out alive.

—----------------

Life flows like rivers,

stretches out like plains, and bites

the sky like mountains.

—----------------

Voices chatter, glass

shatters, and water pours. The

stare is all I hear.

—----------------

Weave a path to this

light. Every step in the

dark is a wrong one.

—----------------

Locking memories

down, a cage of paper and

bars of ink. Wistful.

—----------------

Her skyscrapers are

mountains, her neighbors trees. Warm

hugs in summer breeze.

—----------------

Lying awake. My

mind overflows thinking of

you. I wet the bed.

—----------------

Lay the feast out. Plug

me in like a vacuum. I'll

clean that up for you.

Audio Portal Popularity

The popularity of the Newgrounds Audio Portal, as measured by the number of monthly submissions, has changed enormously since I first joined the site. It was close to its trough for most of my first few years here, but Geometry Dash changed all that around 2014-2015. More widely, the Art Portal was helped by Tumblr’s ban on adult content in 2018, and of course Friday Night Funkin’ had a major sitewide impact on all portals in 2020. But when FNF dropped, the Newgrounds Audio Portal was already in the midst of a surge in popularity seemingly related to the COVID-19 lockdowns. 

Since I’m a giant dweeb, I’ve kept track of how many songs are posted to the NGAP each month since its inception in 2003. June 2021 was the month with the most Audio Portal submissions on record. The chart below is updated through July 2022, and I find it fascinating:  

Friends

I’d be remiss not to mention some of the good friends I’ve made over the last 10 years. People I really felt a human connection with on the site, whether through long PM conversations, hours spent trading reviews on each other’s songs, obsessing over the NGUAC and other NG music contests, or even hanging out in real life after an initial encounter on the Grounds. Fast, early, and often, I’ve gotten to know users like @ADR3-N, @Dylnmatrix, @Etherealwinds, @Everratic, @Johnfn, @Larrynachos, @Lockyn, @LunacyEcho, @LucidShadowDreamer, @midimachine, @SkyeWint, @SplatterDash, @Step, and @TeraVex. I’ve met @BlazingDragon, @Etherealwinds, @Everratic, @LucidShadowDreamer, @LunacyEcho in real life. My friends also include users who have since left the site, like @mistarogerz, @Oswald, and @hamedn, who first introduced me to Newgrounds in 2009, when we were in middle school together. Special shout-out to @Dylnmatrix for scouting me for the Audio Portal way back in December 2012.    

Name Change

In September 2014, I changed my original username of “TheDoor6” to “TaintedLogic.” I had long thought TheDoor6 was a pretty vanilla username, and I still do, but the name change had other, weirder reasons. For example, I wanted to start the names of some of my songs with “the,” but I thought that “The Storm by TheDoor6” sounded kind of stupid. The usernames originate from my teenage self’s attitudes towards change and life transitions (doors symbolize change, etc.) and the tension between rationality and creativity (both music and adolescent minds are illogical, in a way). Despite the philosophical origins of these usernames, I feel like “TaintedLogic” comes across as a bit too edgy sometimes. I’m not changing it now, though, mostly because of inertia (people recognize it, I’ve already invested so much time into creating associated logos and branding, etc.). 

Also, speaking of logos, the one I made for my new “TaintedLogic” name in 2014 purposely has a door embedded in the middle of it, something that’s hard to see when you’re viewing the thumbnail image on a forum post or something. :D  

Collabs

Most of the songs I’ve posted on Newgrounds over the years have been solo projects, but occasionally I’ve been able to collaborate with other users to produce something much better than I could alone. It’s one of the reasons why posting music on Newgrounds, as opposed to on a site like Soundcloud or YouTube, is especially valuable to me. On websites that have several (or several thousand) songs posted every second, there’s no way you could maintain the sense of community that you could on NG.

I’ve had several collabs over the years with @Everratic, and I learn so much every time! He always seems one step ahead of me, whether it’s with mixing, sound design quality, or composition. I highly suggest you check out his stuff. These are the pieces we’ve worked on together, often over school vacations and such:

In 2014, I worked with @Dylnmatrix on this piece. Parts of it sound a little dissonant (I blame myself for that entirely, haha), but the way it uses limiters and automation on the drum patterns was very influential to me at the time. Thanks for that, DM!

And last year, I got to be a part of much bigger collabs organized by @Ceevro. Graced with the production wizardry of @Step and @MetalRenard and the vocal talents of @Troisnyx and others, we covered tracks by Stan Rogers and Incubus. I used the opportunity to get out of my comfort zone, working a lot on vocal layering and harmonizing, as well as playing my cello and recorder on Newgrounds to an extent that I really hadn’t before. The results were awesome, as you can see here: 

The Next 10 Years

Going through all these memories - old forum posts, reviews, poetry, and songs - only makes me more excited about what the next 10 years will hold. I have another year of graduate school, after which I plan on securing a 9-5 job that will keep my evenings and weekends free. I’ll be keeping a keen eye on Newgrounds as it continues to grow and change, and I want to continue running the NGUAC for the foreseeable future too. 

I’m also getting back into the writing forums more actively with a submission or two to the 2nd edition of the Newgrounds Writing Anthology, which is currently in the editing phase. Ask @EKublai for details if you’re interested in participating yourself, but be aware that time to submit is short!

I’ve been rather less prolific with writing music since graduating from college, but I’m still optimistic that this is a temporary phenomenon. Since my summer internship ended last week, I have much more time now to focus on music until school starts on the 31st - in between NGUAC judging phases, at least. But then there’s always school breaks and whatnot. We’ll see…

—

Welp, I hope this news post was amusing, everyone! I remain open to collabs, commissions, review requests, or just having a chat via PM if you’re going through a tough time. Stay awesome, Newgrounds! ^_^

~TL