http://www.matazone.co.uk/animpages/chicke...ish-gopher.html

I'm scared.

Ah wow, front page on Newgrounds too! Wicked

That was... strange

But on a serious note, I really liked the effect of the blueprint style animals, They looked good.

I'm scarred but in a good way...a bit scared by the gophers to. Funkey mix and I'm not sure how they got there but surely they'll go on to save the world while we sleep.

Love those short funny and weird ones and THANK YOU Mata. The last thing I need at the moment is to be able to sit quitely on my own and recite the names of yet more animals 9porbably while rocking back and forth). Badg... no wont go there. Chicken! Tunafish! Gopher! la la la

Heh... It helps having friends in common with the guy who runs the place. Tom Fulp emailed me ages ago asking me to put the first Mittens on there. Randomly I then got to know Shok, a regular musician for my animations, who is a friends of Tom's. I showed Shok the loop because I was quite pleased with the music. He passed it on to Tom who said that if I uploaded it they'd give me a frontpage. The web is very networked on many levels!

Cheesemoose: most people have been uncertain about the graphical style, but as usual I wanted to try something different. I find the visuals on many web things quite boring because many of them use a similar style. I just get bored and like trying new things! I was particularly pleased with the combination of the graph-paper style and the 3D rendered fish tail.

It doesn't seem to have gone down to well with the NG voters . I like this loop and will defend it.

Thanks for your comment! There have been a few quite nasty comments, mainly aimed at 'this is a badger badger badger ripoff', but there have been some nice ones on there too.

It's par for the course on that site really. I often imagine 50% of Newgrounds viewers as being masses of dusty skin, with one eye, no mouth, and a single tentacle that they can type with, sitting by their computers in a blind rage, capable only of expressing their hatred of everything through badly typed prose. They can only be placated with visions of intense violence animated to music from the first Matrix film or heavy rock. When you have this image in mind, it's far easier to read the reviews as being quite generous by their standards.

That was weird, even for me. I'll run this by the guys next time they get drunk.

Yeah, I couldnt get it to work. I tried A few times but the ad kept getting in the way and it wouldnt fully load.. i dont have a clue why...

Try the steps at the top of your browser when you load this page:

http://www.matazone.co.uk/faq/faq.htm#12

I tried it that way. But it still doesnt work.

The real problem is that there is a big block of ads over the screen, so you wouldnt be able to the the animation even if it loaded.

It's probably my computer. I dont know...

Now, Mata, I don't think that's quite accurate.

It's considerably more than 50%.

Heh. Made me giggle.

My little sister sitting behind me called it "mesmerizing".

Are you trying to control minds with this one, Mata?

It's using exactly the same page layout as the other animations... I assume you can see them okay?

And yes, it is another attempt at mind control.

Yeah see...now thats the weird thing. All the other animations have worked fine and now this one doesnt. Nothing changed on my computer or anything. But just this animation decided not to work (Yes mata, i think your animations have a mind of there own)

But I am sure it was kick a** (just in case, i dont know what i can and cant say..so confused)

I mean, Mind control decvices and confusing everyone who watches it. Thats really cool!

OTA, does this appear okay for you? http://www.matazone.co.uk/animpages/chicke...fish-gopher.swf

Wooo, I dont know what you did, but your a genuis!


It worked perfectly this time.

It was..diffrent. Not in a bad way....just diffrent thought. Funny as heck.

Loved it.

thanks for helping me make it work.

I actually started headbanging when the music started.... Beautiful...

I'm trying to figure out why exactly this is so mesmerizing that I can stare at it for half an hour without realising it.....

My friend said last night that if that song were available for download, she'd do it, or maybe even buy a CD.

Awesome song. 999999999999.6 billion times better than "Badger badger badger."

I'm now quite amused by the people on Newgrounds saying ' I watched this for 45 minutes before I reaslied it was a loop' considering that I cahnged the description of the animation, to prevent precisely this complaint, to simply 'A loop with an experimental visual style and a very silly song'.

If anyone's interested in the fun and games over there:

http://newgrounds.com/portal/view.php?id=244847

Reading through yuor reviews on NewGrounds and it's hilarious, especially your responses.

Appearently you should hire a new vocalist though.

And give the gopher a gun...

Yes... 'hire'... Because this is such a professional outfit that I'm running that I go around 'hiring' people...

Guns: yes, violence goes down well. Apparently my animations need plot, but many of the highest rated animations on there are senseless violence. Go figure.

I love the ones that say "Nice one, little more practice and you'll improve" or something similar.

I'm a little annoyed that people obviously don't click your profile and check out the site, but I'm in a way a little glad that these people don't join the forums. *shrug*

I don't know if you have much to worry about--I looked at the animations for three years before (in a lull of Mr. Snaffleburgers) checking out the forums.

In a non-spam light, I like it very much, especially the graph-paper style graphics. The song got me a little dizzy, and overall it's miles better than the Badger Badgers, which I've never been particularly fond of. Well done.

No THAT you should make an animation about! However, you seem to have forgotten the ear. How else are they gonna hear the music/slash special effects they so enjoy insulting?

As for stick figures murdering each other, I once saw a 16 minutes video of a massive stick figure kung-fu fight where this one stick-guy took down dozens of others, culminating in a matrix-like bullet-time effect. This being one of the earliest matrix-spoofs I'd seen I found it quite hillarious, rather than simply annoying. So yeah, even though stick-figure violence isn't the greatest form of entertainment, it can be fun sometimes........

There is sometimes great creativity put into stickmen fights, but I've seen so many of the things now that I've begun to find them extremely tedious.

From what I've seen, most of the people on Newgrounds are angsty, pubescent 12 year olds with anger problems and ADD. All they want is instant gratification. Big booms, people fighting, easy jokes, and bright, anime-style graphics....they don't really want anything new, but they don't want anything remotely near like what the things they've seen before, either. Just think about all the anime fanbois out there who start flame wars because "OMG that other show is so much cr@p it sux0rz teh big 1!!!111!!1!!11!", even though both shows are pretty much exactly the same.

And then there's the people who say "nice shorty, keep trying and you'll get better!" I'm pretty sure that they're idiot college students who are half-way through their Flash Programming classes who think that they know everything about Flash, but have only made animations to be submitted for grading.

Yeah, I don't think you were around the last time somebody came to the forums from Newgrounds. That was fun...

I was a little worried about a repeat of that, but the offer of getting on the front page of Newgrounds wasn't something to be lightly passed over.

Heh...well, I second my matazone comrads-- I thought it was a riot. But then again, we're peaceful, mature, and articulate, so what do we know?

You got a problem with twelve-year-olds?

I don't think that anyone (or most of the people) from newgrounds would last very long on here... but who knows? I may be wrong.

I tried looking up this site, All i found ws a bunch of fairly stupid games and an unnessarilly offensive board. Am I looking in the right spot?????

-some Newgrounds form of vegetation

I'm holding something explosive in. It might be rage or laughter.

DLCP: http://newgrounds.com/portal/view/244847

My favourite response had 22 spelling or grammatical mistakes in only 26 words (and that was ignoring the common lack of full-stops that should technically be used for 'W.T.F.', I wasn't being that picky!). I was later criticised in another review for lecturing the kid about his spelling, but I figured that that level of unutterably bad linguistic control really should be mentioned in the interests of the guy. He couldn't even spell 'tuna'. This in itself might have been forgivable if it weren't already written on the page at least twice already (he spelt it 'tunna' in case you're wondering). Again, it might have been okay if he was very young, but he was 15. I think most fifteen-year-olds are capable of copying four letters from one place on a page to another. If he has dsylexia severe enough to make that an impossible task then I doubt his words would have been continually so accurately 1337.

I do keep an awareness in my mind that some people do have genuine reasons for lack of attempting correct use of the English language, such as dyslexia, but I somehow suspect that those people would actually do a better job at replicating correct words and sentence structure than this guy did. I was then told I was acting superior for telling the guy to write in correct English. Bah. They're supposed to be permitted to pick your work apart but you're not allowed to do the same back? Screw that. The guy had animated nothing and couldn't manage two words without at least one mistake, I feel fine about ripping his response to shreds.

El, there were a few comments like that. Apparently people don't realise it's a loop, despite the repetition every 48 seconds and my mentioning that it is a loop in the first line of my comments about the movie.

I think the people on there use this handy translator:
http://ssshotaru.homestead.com/files/aolertranslator.html

Point. Giggle. Snigger.... Gopher!!! Sorry that was my educated response to the animation. So funny and gigglesome. Yay Mata!!

Usually there is some higher point to my animations... But not with this one, I was just experimenting with music, visuals, and the technical capacity for sampling DVDs (which I found was very limited)... So I guess that it was a bit highbrow in an odd way, just not for the audience!

Love it, Mata-- Sooooooo incredibly addictive. Pity about the NG people, though. What am I saying? I never really had respect for them anyway.

Watched this again today. It made me hungry.

Dang I miss living in a state where gopher is a menu option.

*edit
Hmm...the sarcasm isn't anywhere near as aparent when I'm not totally exhausted. Interesting.

What does gopher taste like?

I've never tasted gopher myself, but I've been told by a friend that gopher tastes somewhat like rabbit, just tougher. Squirrel is, apparently, indescribeably good, while possum is indescribeably bad (you actually have to par-boil the things to get the fur off, like what you do to a chicken to get the feathers, and the taste is so bad that it isn't even worth it).

Knowing this all comes courtesy of having a good friend who's a complete and utter redneck whose father has a "you kill it, you eat it" policy (which, thankfully, doesn't stretch to include roadkill).

so... what happened?

I love the animation, I love the fact that it gets stuck in your head!

Newgrounds, while good for the purposes of promotion, does tend to have a culture where abusive behaviour is acceptable. It is considered perfectly fine to insult a person and their work, even if they have clearly tried very hard on it or if the ideas are good but not well executed. The phrase 'it's not my thing, but I can see that it's good' is not one that you'll see very often on there!

This attitude of disrespect for the feelings of others isn't one that I want to encourage, but the users of Newgrounds do seem to have a nasty habit of continuing that style of posting into the forums that they use, creating a vacuous and petty style of posting. All subjects tend to be reduced into a binary of either 'sux' or 'rawks', and any discussion as to why this opinion might be held is considered to be meaningless.

In some ways it is the ultimate in freedom of expression, because anyone can say what they want, but the irony is that everyone is bullied by the strongest people into saying what is expected and conforming to a shallow group-think. I can't help but find this both amusing and depressing at the same time.

My forum is a benevolent dictatorship. I am always happy to have feedback from people and prefer to ask people on here about decisions that will impact on their use of my site; however, there is no illusion that anything other than my word is the final say. I sometimes make mistakes, and people are welcome to question me within reason, and I will pay attention and occasionally change my mind, but eventually if they don't like my choices then they can go elsewhere. This attitude is regarded as unjustifiable censorship by some, but I see it as a way of enforcing as much impartiality as possible. By making sure that the buck does stop somewhere it means that people know that they are answerable for their actions and that there is a person who can eventually say 'go away'. I do not run a democracy, and this troubles some people, but I find that by encouraging respect for others (rather than 100% freedom of expression to offend whoever you choose) conversations are more insightful.

Oh, and I can't stand txt spk lyk dis: I get really bored when trying to read the stunted vocabulary that is generally used by people who only type words that can be expressed in a maximum of four letters!

EDIT: I would give you specific examples, but I tend to find annoying people incredibly dull. As a result, I can't actually remember any! I do remember that some of them have tried to act proud because they think they've annoyed me. In actuality they've bored me senseless. Arguments online are immensely tedious; give me a propder debate any day!

I like the animation because you have captured the true essence of insanity!

I like it because the surreality and bouncy tune make me chuckle.