Good day mortals.

I have for the last few months been trying to collect interesting interviews with random newground goers. Not the standard ones, ware you get to hear the current most popular artist talk about why he is so great and how they manage to get so popular.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I thought it would be fun to instead to take a look at the people involved in the newgrounds community you normally don't hear from. The person who has submitted the most blammed entries. Someone who seems to spend all their lives posting in the forums. The people with incredibly high experience levels....

Just the kind of people, who for better or worse make newgrounds what it is just as much if not more then the exceptionally popular artists.

So, until the newgrounds mag gets retooled, I will be every two weeks posting an interview here on this creepy newgrounds blog! Mostly because i'm really unorganized, and if I don't do something with them soon, I'm going to start losing them.

To start off, we have the most logical choice of interviews on people who make newgrounds newgrounds, Tom Fulp, who was gracious enough to grant this amazing interview. Taking time out of his busy scedual to let me bother him, and belive me, that's dangerous, i'm very anoying. The interview forman is simple, the interviewer just refers to themselves as Q. (Which stands for question. As they are interviewing it seems appropriate) and Tom is reffered to as A... becuase he's answering. Why not just call him Tom? i.... d... its to late to change it now! SHUT UP.... naw. i'll change it. Tom shall be called Tom. That makes more sense.

Q: Tom. In as brief a way as possible, so as not to overly bore the people who have seen and read it a million times, could you say what newgrounds is, and how it came about?

Tom: Newgrounds is the original and largest community of Flash artists on the web. It started in 1995 as my personal hobby while I was in high school, and I built a large audience with point and click web games such as Club a Seal and Assassin, the game where you kill celebrities. In 1998 I began to dabble with Flash, and made a lot of the early Flash games that spread around "virally". I always liked trying to prove Flash was more powerful than anyone realized, so I made stuff like side scrolling shooters and brawlers when most people were just using Flash to make interactive menus and website layouts. By 1999, Newgrounds was a top 600 website and I started showcasing Flash by other aspiring artists. Sorting through all the email submissions and building pages for them was becoming a full-time job, so I quit my job at Qwest, took a temporary leave from school, hired my friend Ross (programming whiz) and by 2000 we launched the automated Flash Portal. The rest is pretty much history.

Q: Thanks for the quick sum up. Now that everyone is caught up, on to bigger and better things.

In alot of ways it seems, along with many things on the Internet, the popularity of new grounds and how it turned into what it is today was mostly (if not completely) an accident. If you had it all to do over again, is there anything you would have done differently leading up to this point? (besides having a buzz saw arm attached in place of your normal weak human one)

Tom: I would be afraid to do anything differently because I might screw up the charm or history of NG, or change that one little thing that won over someone who is now important in the community. In retrospect, though, I wish I had been better focused on the right goals for NG, and not have been all over the place so much. We were always dabbling and experimenting with ideas, but in the end a lot of them haven't become part of the big picture of what NG is destined to be. Also, times really were different back then. Hardware was expensive and it couldn't handle as much traffic as it can today. Bandwidth was insanely expensive as well - our hosting costs in 2000 were more than double what they are today. My main goal was to just keep NG alive and hope better times were ahead. Thankfully, they were.

Q: Considering how things have changed so drastically in such a comparatively short period of time do you have any great fears for the future?

Tom: I think as long as we stay focused on our goals for NG, there will always be a healthy community around it. I do worry about a massive shift making NG completely obsolete, but we'll figure things out when the time comes.

Q: You spend alot of time on outside projects, in which you put an incredible amount of effort and love into. Though they are generally flash related, they are often not directly linked to the site. Could you see yourself in the far (or even near) future passing on newgrounds to someone else and focusing your efforts and time on these other projects?

Tom: Everything I've been doing with the Behemoth has been intended to be a direct relationship with NG - a gateway for Flash developers to see their work on consoles. It's been a long, hard, road, though. Ultimately, I never want to lose focus on Newgrounds. We will still make console games, but I don't want to be the programming bottleneck for those games. So really, the torch that will get passed will be to the next Flash programmer who gets to make a console game. Many years from now, I might be too old to be the "voice" of Newgrounds... At that time, I like to think I'll have picked a worthy successor from the community on the site.

Q: Hopefully whoever he or she is will be willing to face the fact that no matter what they do, you will always be remembered as the glorious perfect first. (like Washington!)

Now be honest. how often are you tempted to use your god like moderator power to crush the dreams of someone? I don't just mean good dreams necessarily, I also mean the dreams of people who seem to dream only of putting up animations of cats pooping on other cats. Do you ever dream of crushing their dreams?

Tom: Sometimes I do just want to delete a ton of people and smash the forums to pieces. But in the end everyone is just having fun in their own way, and we have to strike a balance with all of it. A lot of the troublemakers go on to make great stuff over the years, so you need to be patient with them while they figure that out.

Q: Now the stock answer for what your favorite website is would be newgrounds yes. But what is your secondary Internet home. Is there any other place on the web ware you spend far to much time? A mmorpg? A web forum? Another animation community ware you have to put a beard and unconvincing glasses onto your avatar so no one suspects and you can slowly plot in peace?

Tom: I rarely go anywhere other than Newgrounds anymore, because the web just annoys me too much. However, I do find frequent entertainment on sites like YTMND.com and... I hate to admit it... YouTube.

Q: Why do you hate to admit to visiting youtube? In alot of ways it's very similar to newgrounds. Only instead of moronic submissions, you get to see moronic people! Does it make you feel like a traitor? Like a traitor deep inside ware you feel rotten twisted and dead in that part of your soul that no longer feels emotion?

Tom: My distaste for YouTube is twofold:

1) I am jealous because we laid a lot of the groundwork for the user generated revolution, but rarely got the credit. People couldn't see past the "dark side" of NG, so we were neglected the mainstream praise. For years, we discussed expanding our platform to include video but didn't want to deal with issues of rampant video piracy, lawsuits and skyrocketing bandwidth costs. However, YouTube just waltzed in with enough money to weather the storm, and now they are billionaires and one of the most popular websites in the world. Newgrounds would have gone under if we had done video; it would have sent us into bankruptcy and would have alienated the thriving Flash scene we were founded on... But I'm still bitter that YouTube got all the glory, when its popularity came from pirated TV shows and not true user generated content. And much of the true user generated content on YouTube is crap, which leads me to...

2) We lost a lot of viewers to the crap on YouTube. You could see it on Alexa... When YouTube rocketed to fame, the traffic on ALL the traditional web entertainment sites plummeted. It created a massive shift, as all the web's innovative attempts to entertain the public were replaced by a fascination with watching teenage girls complain to their webcams. But in the end, I love YouTube as much as everyone else. People send me funny links there all the time. And there's a lot of stuff on YouTube that's funnier than a lot of the stuff on Newgrounds.

But Newgrounds will get funnier and maybe YouTube won't.

Q: We can only hope... so! As a well known person, there are of course large amounts of people who hate you just because. Do you ever find yourself doing searches to see just what it is people are saying about you?

Tom: When I'm in a bad mood and I just want to abuse myself, I search around to see what bad things people have to say about Newgrounds, much more than about me. And I get really pissed off when I find it on the forums of any number of soulless Newgrounds copycat sites. I feel like those people have been scammed, tricked into choosing the wrong side. But whatever, we're probably better off without idiots like that on the site.

Q: Right. We have plenty of or own loyal idiots! Now tom, It may come as a surprise, but people often wonder about you, yourself, as a person. Are there any things you think that people should know, to understand you? not of course that a creature as multi faceted and glorious as yourself (almost blinding) could be summed up quickly and easily.... but if you could sum yourself up quickly and easily how would you?

Tom: Ever watch that show Dexter on Showtime? That's sort of like me, only I'm just as passionate about NG as Dexter is about killing people.

Q: Can't you be both passionate about new grounds AND killing people?

Tom: I'm already spread too thin.

Q: Your site must generate huge amounts of fan, hate, and meh, mail. Directed at you, or just sent to you. Do you actually read and answer it all? Or do you have some kind of e-mail clown who does that sort of grunt work for you?

Tom: I do read ALL of my email. Everyone tells me I need to hire someone to do it, but I just can't do it... I feel like I would be too detached from "the pulse". I need to hear every bit of negative feedback, soak up every bit of good news and try to help everyone who deserves it. It really does take up too much of my time, though. More and more of my time revolves around running the business and dealing with email. It's not what I imagined my dream job being, but it's what I have to do to keep my dream job going. I really haven't figured out yet how I'm gonna make it all work for the long term but something will have to change.

Q: Lastly for now. What is the single most common question you get asked? And what is its answer? If by some freak coincidence its 'what is the single most common question you get asked' I do fear that causality might break... so if it's that. Don't tell me.

Tom: A lot of people still ask about Pico 2. I also get regular PMs asking why, if I run the site, I'm only a mid-level user in terms of experience points. I don't have good answers for either.

Q: I personally think you being a mid level user is one of the best parts of newgrounds. That's one of the things that makes newgrounds special. You set up a voting system. You set up a system ware people who vote more and write reviews and help people fix things and such, get a higher vote total. They matter more. What do you do? Do you set yourself at level 51 with a vote that counts as 50 votes?

No. You set yourself like any other user. When you vote you get experience just the same. I doubt anyone would bat any eye if you had done that thing, setting yourself up as way above everyone, with the power to make a submission or break it. But you didn't. I think that is commendable! Also. That's the last question (even though I answered it myself). So thanks for doing the interview, and have a good life.

*******

Now, if you think you, or someone you know, is the kind of person that would be worthy of interviewing to get a more indepth look at the inner workings of newgrounds and the people in it. Send me a PM or e-mail me at shiftingsodium@yahoo.com and let me know.

I love you all.