Clock day. It's happening again. Just like it does every year. This time, it's the 25th year. 25 years in celebration of the red capital B that spawned an entire movement and mythos. As always It's an honor to be able to be a part of it.

In contrast to the previous few years, I actually made a film this time for you to watch and enjoy, while neglecting to participate in this year's collab. What a switchup!! You can watch URSUSQUEST II: SIEGE VON BEAR right a-here:

Did you watch it yet? Yea? No? Do you want me to talk about it? Cause I was going to anyway. You know I love to yap your ear off.

Ever since StrawberryClock Punches A Goose In The Face II, The idea of making needlessly grandiose sequels to previous films that were otherwise one-day afterthoughts turned out to be something that I really liked doing. So I did that again. I suppose the novelty to just trying my best to push a concept as far as it can go no matter how shit excites me greatly and figured that making a sequel to Ursusquest would be interesting to take a crack at. So I planned this out a few weeks after I had finished the first ursusquest, but didn't really get to refine it until a few months ago and then scrambled it together in the last few weeks leading up to Clock Day. As is tradition.

Given my success at ambulating Phono's idealized forme in our previous collab, I opted to give it a try again here. I kind of completely overestimated my ability to keep the bastard in proportion but overall I would say I think I did a pretty okay job, especially since I kind of began to figure out what worked and what didn't as I drew him over and over again. Who woulda thunk it that repetition hones skill??? Did anyone else know this???

He's rather lovely and expressive and I'm very fond of him. Giving him and his freak of nature bug body another try for this film has been lucrative in getting a grasp on it and maybe even using it more in the future. And preferably without such a time crunch weighing on me.

Either way, film's alright I guess. I'm just happy to have actually made a proper film this year! Maybe I can even do that again :o what a crazy thought.

This year I desperately wanted it to be a double feature, given it's the 10th anniversary of my first Clock Day ever which was also a double feature, but I got carried away dismembering castle guards and flapping mandibles in sync with shitty text-to-speech to have any time to work on the second film I had planned. So I'm saving that for next month. Or next year. Probably next year. Yeah I'll see you next year.

Attack from Christmas: Santa's Revenge

This is the Clock Crew's collab for the year. I didn't participate this year because I've never partook (partaken?) in the Christmas collabs that serve as the sort-of kind-of prequels that lead in to it, so it felt a little undue of me if I were to intrude. Though, I suppose as I'm typing this I realize that there could've been a bit of comedy potential in that e.g. Phono getting kicked to the floor by a burly elf, shouting "what the fuck are you oppressing me for, I never even partooken in those collabs!?" but maybe that's just an excuse to type "burly elf" and store that at the back of my mind for later when I'm not typing my yearly news post.

Either way, you should check it out. Like all of our collabs, it is a delight and everyone's parts are gorgeous. 

Land of the Severed Sun.

In case you weren't around for February: I decided to undergo the Flash Flood again this year, which for those not initiated is a thing a few Clocks get together to do come February where they try to produce one movie per day for the entire month. I took a crack at it again after not doing so for a little while, and it blossomed into a series I called The Land Of The Severed Sun. 

It's a very sentimental thing to me. I made it in tribute to a place and friends that I still hold very dear, even if I don't really talk to them all that much anymore despite my best efforts to try.

I should really write an entire retrospective on it at some point I think I have a lot to say about the themes and the process of it all but, maybe that's for a different news post. For now I'll just say that I went into it trying to make an "anti-pinkroom" of sorts, to gravely contrast my Flash Flood entries from 2020, and I think I did a pretty good job and I'm actually quite proud of it. About as proud as I was when I had first completed The Pink Room Chronicles. I would even go so far as to regard it as some of my best work in ages. I highly recommend giving it a watch through if you're curious about what I can do on a single-day restriction.

Anyway that'll do it. I'll scurry back into my hole now I know we're all kind of just weird relics that show up from time to time. But even if we're kind of just a weird footnote in the site's history to most, I still think spam is very important. There's an artistry to it that goes really underappreciated and I'm glad Newgrounds still gives us the grace of this day to celebrate it even if our numbers have waned, and even if our sense of humour and our work is from a time when the zeitgeist of the internet was completely different. We're all getting older and eventually no one will remember us. Maybe that impermanence was what the Clock Crew was all about this whole time. Maybe that's what Golden was trying to teach me.

Were I a stronger, more sociable person, I'd probably want to do more to try and keep the Clock Crew in the modern Newgrounds consciousness outside of just Clock Day, but I wouldn't even really know where to begin with that. Besides, maybe it's funnier just showing up out of the blue on a tide of spam and confusing all of the new people every year on the same day for 25 years more. Maybe I'm just a sentimental old fool who cares too much about shitty cartoons made by punk teenagers in the mid 2000s and desperately want to share that joy with others even if it's a bit backwards in trying to explain as to why they mean so much to me as they do.

But no more delay. It's time to slink back to being the background actor in someone else's life. Until then, I shall go out and enjoy the weather. Maybe pay a visit to grandma. It's her birthday, after all.

I'll see you all later, hopefully.

The Clock Crew loves you. I love you. Please be safe. Happy Clock Day. Heres to 25 years of B, and to many, many more hereafter.

XOXO Phono <3