FINALLY! Episode Two of Pupper Paleolithic is released into the wild! Go and hook it to your veins! Or just watch it. That's probably safer.

This episode started production in April 2021, and although I took a month off here and there in the intervening year-and-almost-a-half, it still got finished and set a new record for my longest solo-animated video. Many, many thanks to my Patreon supporters during this time -- even the ones who didn't make it all the way to the end; I still appreciate the supportive gesture!

Another thing that motivated me to finish Episode 2 besides Patreon pledges was my eagerness to get Episode 3 underway. That one is going to be fun, but weird, but actually fun, and certainly shorter. It should be released, oh, let's say, *before* Season 3 of Primal.

Episode 1 is here.

Episode 2 is also available on my youtube channel if you prefer.

Enjoy the video, tell me what you think of it, and stay hydrated blahblah!

-Andrew / TmsT

Dragons! Treasure! Jumping on, over, and through things!

Are these the kinds of things you enjoy?

Then being a knight in shining armor may be the career for you!

But since it's 2022 and medieval feudalism isn't really a thing anymore - and dragonslaying was arguably never a thing - you can play as a knight in my new retro platformer, All Right on the Knight!

tl;dr = Here's the new short that I helped to animate! Also my hard drive died, boo hoo hoo

Long version:

It's been a year since the first episode of the Pupper Paleolithic series released, and Episode 2 is not far away, despite my recent unexpected hard drive failure. A combination of backups and careful HD-salvage meant that of my projects currently in development - including Pupper Paleolithic Ep2 - essentially all of them were recovered with minimal-to-no losses. The take-home message here is don't use the same hard drive for 9 years unless you like to live dangerously.

~ sad_violin_music.mp3 plays sarcastically ~

In the meantime, why not watch a new short film that I worked on? Mukpuddy's "Out Of Order" has been awaiting your eyeballs (and earballs ("earballs" is totally the correct word)) for even longer than a year, and now it's released here on Newgrounds! Go watch it!

- Andrew/TmsT

Pupper Paleolithic Episode 1 released today!

Well well well. After all these years of shamelessly satirising pop culture, appropriating memes, shipping video game characters, and making music videos for more talented musicians, look who's done something relatively original for once!

Yes, I've started adapting Pupper Paleolithic from a widely-enjoyed short film into an ongoing web series that I can only hope will also entertain other people as much as caveman capers generally entertain me.

My approach to making this episode was for it to never be unduly stressful - to work on it only when I wanted to, to spend as much time as I needed, and that if something wasn't fun to draw, animate, or musically perform, then I wouldn't do it at all - I'd find some other way of making that scene/soundtrack. It'll be an interesting experiment to see if your tastes align with mine, and if they don't, then maybe my enjoyment in creating it will influence your enjoyment of it as well.

So now that the first episode is ready, we have the results of two extreme scenarios: The 2-minute short film that was feverishly thrown together from scratch in 48 hours with no pre-planning, and the 7-minute Episode 1 that was lovingly fashioned under ideal conditions in just over 6 months, after much forethought and with minimal artistic compromise. Episode 2's production could fall anywhere in between, so I plan to pop out another (probably shorter) episode within 6 months.

In the meantime, I'll be drip-feeding my Pupper Paleolithic Patreon pals with small, spoiler-free snippets and outtakes from Episode 2 while that's under construction, and eventually they'll get to see the finished product 2 or 3 days early, with their names in the credits. Perhaps you'd like to join us?

But for now, grab your domesticated carnivore friends, pull up a mammoth-skin, and settle in between the stalagmites with a bowl of whatever grains you've gathered, and watch the moving cavepainting!

*satisfied grunting*,

-Andrew/TmsT

The award-winning animated short Pupper Paleolithic has come to Newgrounds!

But why now? Why not back in December, when I announced on Twitter that I would be making a sequel and possibly a series?

Because THIS version of it has something new: The first public release of a post-credits trailer for the upcoming episode!

Back in December there wasn't as much footage to cut into a trailer just yet. But now that the new episode is just a week away from completion, it's a great time to promote it.

And if you'd like to help, there's still time for you to join the "club" (heh heh) and have your name added to the credits. Head on over to patreon.com/TooMuchSpareTime to get in on that, or even just to follow me there for updates. I gotta say I'm pretty excited to be making animated cartoons that are 100% my own stuff and not fan-art or parody this time. It's somewhat unfamliar territory for an old bandwagon-hopping memelord like me, but that's all part of the fun. Who knows where this will take us?

-Andrew

Over halfway into the infamous current year of 2020, with the world in various stages of pandemic response (or lack thereof) among other notable disruptions, it's highly apparent that we're all in a multi-year period of change like no other. The "normal" to which things will someday return will be unrecognisable as normal to most of us right now. And that's okay.

Clearly, it's time to unshackle ourselves from deadweights of the past - loyalty to sunk costs and bad bets; duty to maintain borfins that shlump; fealty to everyday things that misuse nostalgia as a weapon to confine us to ways of life that are becoming infeasible, if not for all of us, then for more and more of us every day. It is time to individually and collectively launch ourselves toward a future built on solid yet flexible foundations, much like the shock-absorbing foundations beneath buildings that were recently rebuilt after major earthquakes in the city where I currently live proved the old designs to be infeasible.

What defines our future is what we choose to bring along with us.

Therefore, we must now decide what things we leave behind, lest they decide for us, possibly leaving us behind.

And so, as I advance in my journeys in animation and in game development, I need to make a call on an older project that I haven't touched since 2016, a sequel to Lamarr Is Going Home. I will not be building more in addition to the experimental first level that I made for this game, at least for the foreseeable future. Its place remains in the past.

But does that mean it's lost to history? A waste of effort that will never see the light of day, like Half-Life 3? Not at all! It means that you now get to play what was made before I hit the limits of the free version of Construct 2! (For more of the story behind Lamarr Is Going Home 2's production, see the lengthy postamble below the game itself.) So load it up and give this tiny morsel of game the send-off it deserves before you head out to the future with me.

Lamarr Is Going Home 2 (Demo)

So, that's a piece of my past from which I'm easily disengaging - what future am I launching myself into now? One that still includes Newgrounds, I would hope! Stay tuned for what comes next from TmsT, and may the rest of your 2020 be... - let's be real, here - survivable! :))

-TmsT.

Back during the Easter break, I decided to make an animation for Star Wars Day, May 4.

When it became clear that I wasn't going to hit that deadline, I decided to put in a lot more detail and let it take as long as it needed. So, one month later and here it is - not "Star Wars", but "Background Struggles", a glimpse into how living in the Star Wars universe affects the everyday BG characters who don't get to have such things as Jedi powers, or high-ranking positions in the Empire, or... names, apparently.

May the 4th this year was a more solemn affair than usual, with the recent passing of Peter Mayhew, the actor who'd consistently been live-action Chewbacca since the Original Trilogy. I was lucky enough to see him speak at a nerd convention in Auckland in 2002(?) and he seemed like a pretty awesome guy. Also I'd never been to a nerd con before so this was the first time I'd ever seen an actor from the OT in person and I was pretty stoked about that. Mayhew was great to listen to, and despite never having his actual face in the movies he seemed very happy with his career, so you couldn't feel bad for him always being the mysterious man behind the mask and not a famous "face" like his co-stars.

And now I think about it, that's kind of the thing about Background Struggles - the characters who don't get the same degree of fame and recognition as, say, Luke Skywalker, are still just as "real" and "valid" as the main story characters with whom they share a fictional universe, and hopefully my li'l animation does them justice. And with that connection, I can unofficially dedicate the animation to Peter Mayhew, can't I? Hey yeah, I can. I think I basically just did.

But will there be a sequel to this short? Well, if there is, it probably won't be the next thing I animate this year. I have something far more interesting cooking, but which also has classic movie aliens in it. But more about that later.

MTFBWY

-TmsT/Andrew.

Stephen Hawking: A Musical Tribute was originally released in March 2004. Nearly 14 years later, he has left the Earth. Let us remember Hawking for his achievements, insights, and contributions to cosmosology as well as other sciences, and let us also remember the Flash animations we made about him, of which there are so many that they got their own category on Newgrounds.

13 animators, each using their own unique art style and animation ability, will visually re-create sections from the ~3 minute "Steamed Hams" scene from the memorable and memeworthy 1996 episode of The Simpsons, "22 Short Films About Springfield". The final result will be a delightfully devilish tapestry of animation cromulence. The deadline is April 1, 2018, which should give you plenty of time to produce 13 seconds of footage. (If I didn't quite convey the concept in that pitch, check out this example!)

So, does this sound like something you'd like to be a part of?

Come and join the "Re-Steamed Haminations" Facebook group so you can read more about this project on the pinned post, and then claim your section of animation before there's none left! And if there are none left... it may not be too late -- see the pinned post for all the official details. Hope we see you there!

Happy 2015, folks! What am I up to these days?

I'm currently in the midst of quickly cranking out a spiritual successor to one of my more popular animations, "Spy & Pyro". Occasionally I post spoiler-free art previews on a Spy & Pyro blog.

There's a short trailer/teaser video for it on the Patreon campaign page for this upcoming video. Watch out for the full, finished product on Valentine's Day, all going to plan! Support the campaign and you'll get your name in the credits for all the world to see. (But that's not all that's there to sweeten the deal...)

After this is done, I'm off to join an animation studio instead of freelancing, so this could be the last TmsT animation for an even longer time than usual. Let's make it a good'un!

- TmsT (Preferred class: Pyro)