Asandir's interviews with Newgrounds forum users

When did you find Newgrounds and why did you join? Why did you choose the username mwmike and why did you change it to EmmDubya?

EmmDubya: "I began visiting Newgrounds years upon years ago when I was back in primary school - I cannot remember the exact story however I have vague memories of clicking a link in a preloader of some game and being brought here. Initially, it took up a pretty small portion of my life, becoming one of the many 'games websites' that I frequented.

Eventually, in the opening months of 2008 (just two months after my eleventh birthday), I decided to sign up as I wished to create and submit Flashes in addition to reviewing others - about half a year later I went on to stumble upon the flash forums in the search of knowledge and began to spam up the flash reg lounge with my own inept posts. A few people (somehow) had patience and showed patience towards me, and from that I eventually became quite close to a few people on there - pretty much all of whom have since left. I considered myself close to Luis at the time and I still think he's a good guy, so if I was counting him then he'd be the only person whom is still active that I knew from back then, even if I rarely ever speak to him.

The names 'mwmike' and 'EmmDubya' are both different stages in the same evolution. When I first registered an email address I did so under the name 'millwallmike12' - looking back now I trace that account back to 2006. Millwall is the football team that I was, and still am, a fan of. I dropped the numbers, as they held no significance and the name without any numbers had not been taken on any site that I could find. The next logical stage of shortening it only actually happened when I finally signed up for Newgrounds - considering despite at the time watching them regularly I don't really consider myself a great football fan, and I felt that putting a team in my name gave an incorrect impression of my interests.

If you say the first two letters of 'mwmike' on their own phonetically you get the sound 'Emm Doubleyou, or Emm Dubya'. Even though I personally said it the first way, together it didn't have exactly the same ring to it. While in a rather strange state of mind and beginning a new Morrowind playthrough I ended up writing in 'Emm Dubyaaaaaa <3' or something along those lines, and from there I hassled the admins with another PM every month asking for a name change for several months, before giving up. Eventually I ended up just asking Luis for a change on Facebook and he granted it to me on the spot, which was certainly easier. The main reason I prefer this is because in real life very few people call me Mike, they just go with Michael most of the time and that's what I'm most used to, even if I like the sound of the word 'Mike' a lot. :3"

Do you think that you changed over the time you were here, as user, or also in real life?

EmmDubya: "I can say a very certain yes for this. When I joined, in real life I was a pre-teen boy whom was very quiet and, along with the natural mental and physical changes throughout the past three years the main thing that I think has changed through Newgrounds is my ability to put thoughts into words. It sounds rather strange, but at the time I simply thought things and rarely ever said much of it for fear of embarrassing myself as I had a big problem with converting my thoughts from simply that to spoken sentences (despite being a good writer even then). Actually, just now while reading through my old posts I found this one from citricsquid apparently shocked by my age, so it must not've been quite as apparent as I remember it being, even if my post quality was piss-poor as a whole.

On the site, initially my age was pretty clear from all of my posts that did not consist purely of excerpts of Actionscript taken from various tutorials I found across the portal - my spelling, grammar, maturity and post volume were both very lacking indeed, with posts full of insight such as the classic "Who are u talking ?", along with my other spamming in the same thread. I moved with the same habits over to the General forum a few months later, realising that I was a terrible flash artist and was beginning to annoy all of the regulars over at the Flash forum, and continued to go down the spammy path before making the decision to finally join the NGPD, which I managed to scrape in by the skin of my teeth and learning by example from all of the superior posters before I eventually began to become one of them.

Nowadays I'm glad that I'm a far superior poster than I used to be and prefer to only post when I actually have something to say. I think the root of most poor posting habits is people attempting to post even on threads regarding issues that they have no real opinions on, so I try and avoid doing so, although of course I'm not a robot and alongside that I'm still not one of the best posters on the site, but by trying to keep the majority of my posts in threads that I actually have an opinion on rather than attempting to get one or two in every thread on the first page of general as I used to. Now I tend to spend more time on the BBS (a few days ago I ended up spending 18 hours D:) and still make less posts than I once did in far less time, but I feel more satisfied after making the posts. Of course, sometimes I go against this, but I'm obviously not a robot - I'm very far from it. Generally on the days where I'm posting more I feel my standards for whether a post is worthy of making slip, as they have done a few times recently, but as a whole I've managed to keep quality rather on the upside.

I'm still younger than a lot of members, especially in the barracks and such, and although it's been about four years since my signup I still feel like there's a lot of change in store for me still in terms of Newgrounds, and I'm fairly confident that change will be for the better - at least, that's what I hope."

What is your opinion about the forums? Is there one forum that you prefer?

EmmDubya: "The forums as a whole are what turned Newgrounds from one of many flash sites to the place where I keep on visiting years later, and where the sentimental bond that makes me keep coming back to this place comes from. In the past I've been a member, even a rather prominent one, of many other forums however this was my first and not one other has given me the same feeling as I get when I open up the Newgrounds BBS, and after the closing of The Party, the only other forum that ever came close, I cannot imagine any other will.

As for specific forums over here, I've gone through many different stages. At first, as I previously mentioned, I spent more time on the Flash forums than any other before migrating to general and spending months spamming exclusively there. Later on, I came to have interests in the C&C forums - as I still do. The thing about the club threads is that as you're speaking to the same group of people more and more you tend to learn more and more about them and over time and through that you tend to begin to foster (as much as I usually dislike the term being used on the internet) friendships - and along with that the general crowd is more mature. At its peak I was one of the most active members of the NGPD and from the fact that I was pretty much constantly posting in there I faded away from general, and seeing the good work many of my fellow members, along with members of the Barracks, I started spending more and more time in the Where is/How to?, although being the first person to stumble upon a question seems to come pretty rarely.

At the moment, my posting really is a mix between them. I tend to constantly cycle between four: General, Wi/Ht, Video Games and C&C. General obviously is the most active and as such more posts generally come in, but as a whole I have less to say about the large majority, so I tend to just lurk there. I have a soft spot for Where is/How to, however I don't make too many posts there simply as very few threads that need answering that stay unanswered for long. The final two are probably the ones that I post the most on. C&C, as I said before, tends to harbour a lot of interesting people across its many threads and for most topics of conversation it seems to be the best place to go. I began to get interested in gaming again during one of my hiatuses from this site, and since then discussion of them's become pretty interesting for me - so the video games forum on this site has become a recent favourite of mine, moreso for lurking than anything else. I also lurk a bit on the politics forum, however admittedly my personal knowledge is lacking so I very rarely make any posts there, I just watch and wait."

Are there any other users that you like, and how do they affect you ?

EmmDubya: "There have been many, although a lot of them, including a few of the very closest have since left. If we simply are talking about liking, then I certainly have a positive opinion on many members, particularly fellow barracks members or those whom I see around the forums that I frequent the most. The people whom I have been closest to are likely those I remember being a fellow member of the NGPD in back in early '09, Lizzardis and Insanimation in particular standing out as those whom I remember competing with on the roster back then and getting very close to in terms of speaking, and TailsPrower being an incredible leader for that particular club through numerous tough times causes me to have a deep respect for him even if I've moved on from that club. Through The Party, a forum based on users recruited from Newgrounds I became friends with people like DA-Freakshow (whose account seems to have disappeared), KemCab (whom has had his 19k or so posts wiped by request), agustana (whom has had her posts wiped twice by request and made a hell of a lot since the most recent time), and Nacale (whom was never too active here in the first place) all of whom I have since kind of just stopped speaking to since that place shut down.

At the moment a few people stand out. Several days ago Jolly, a user whom I have vague memories a long time ago whom has since taken up a position of Elite Guard Barracksroster manager and developed great posting habits, sent me a nice personal message and reading it certainly made that evening far better (and satisfying my ever hungry ego ;D). Another barracks member, Decky, stands out to me as a great user likely because we're mutual members of several clubs and I just tend to see him around a lot, meaning I read more of his posts and they always seem to be relevant and he seems to be a really nice guy. After digressing from some icon related conversation a few days ago I had a nice conversation with Murray, whom I have always held in high regard but never really spoken to too much, and alongside you seems to be at the pinnacle of the icon modding team. And then there's you, who I didn't originally want to put in this list considering you're the one I'm sending this message to and it'd seem a bit weird, but I've said it before both in my December newspost and post in the BBS awards nomination thread."

Are there any users that you would consider enemies or that you just don't like?

EmmDubya: "I may have to break your rule as to no less than a few lines long, however I genuinely cannot think of a single person whom I really do not like on the forums. Occasionally I disagree with somebody's opinion on a certain subject, but at the end of the day I just see it as that - their opinion differing from mine, and in the majority of cases pushing that on somebody else and disliking them solely for that I'd just feel a little bit silly, especially via the internet. I honestly think I'm a bit too weak willed to get in a situation where I'd have a good reason not be keen at all about a particular person who I have met only through the BBS, even if I occasionally can find somebody annoying then usually by the time I've left that particular thread I've already stopped thinking about it and possibly forgotten the whole annoyance.

It turns out I didn't break the rule, even if I did have no good answer. :3"

I guess that you have an opinion about the moderators of Newgrounds. Do you think that they do a great job or not?

EmmDubya: "I, personally, have no complaints about the moderators. Perhaps with one exception, although I think not, I haven't been banned since September of 2008 and although I believe I had something like fifteen or so just in my early posting time and I got rather annoyed at a few of the moderators in hindsight I deserved each one and if anything now I'm thankful, as only from my mistakes of posting terribly and having to spend time away from the BBS (which, at the time, was intolerable) did I begin to want to improve my habits and in doing so avoid being further tenderised by the mighty banhammer. I believe that over a half of my bans back then were from Malachy, whom at the time I wasn't too keen on for that exact reason, but over time I've began to realise that if I was let off for my rulebreaking back then it only would've continued - as a result he received my nomination and vote for best mod over the past year in the annual BBS awards rather than the worst mod I sent in a nomination for in at least once in the past."

Would you like to become a moderator on Newgrounds? If so, what kind of moderator?

EmmDubya: "Considering I spend nearly all of my time on the site on the BBS, then I'd say the most fitting kind would likely be a BBS mod. Whether I'd actually like to become one isn't such a simple question. It's the kind of thing that, if offered a place as, I would almost certainly accept the offer, however it wouldn't be as big a deal for me as it would have in the past. When I was younger the thought of being a moderator on the forums would have really excited me, but in practice it'd be a position of responsibilities and although in the past the thought of having authority was a very positive one I have since stopped thinking of it as such a big deal, especially as now a few people whom I used to speak to in the past are now forum moderators I see that mods are regular users in all senses other than having the ability to lock and ban, which aren't even used particularly often.

On top of that, as a user whom is still pretty young being trusted with those aforementioned responsibilities doesn't ever seem to happen, and likely for good reason - the thought of posting on a forum run by people in their early to mid teen years isn't exactly a great one even for me, as somebody whom is still in their midteens myself - and usually age and maturity are very closely tied to each other; it's just logic from that point onwards that the more mature forum users tend to be the older ones, and immature mods (again) doesn't equate to a well run forum and I can imagine would lead to a lot of dissatisfaction from the other users. If I were several years older and found out that a fifteen year old had banned me from the forums I'd assume that'd feel worse than getting banned from somebody else."

You are an icon moderator. Do you like this activity or would you like to become also another kind of mod in the future?

EmmDubya: "I'm certainly glad to once again be an icon mod. Although the creation of icons itself can feel like a bit of a grind, after I'm done with a batch I feel like I've done something in order to aid Newgrounds, and even if my speed doesn't stand up to that of many other users, especially yours (I seriously question if you have a team of icon-trained robots in your garage looking at how many you get done), it feels like - to loosely quote Insanimation - steps in the right direction, even if those are baby feet. I want to get more involved in icon modding and to improve the amount I create soon, even if that means that I spend some more of my BBS time on doing so, getting a group of them done just gives me a sense of satisfaction. :3"

You are a member of the Elite Guard Barracks. What are you doing for the group and how did you become a member?

EmmDubya: "My position as a member of the barracks, like many other questions, goes back to the NGPD. Back when I was a member I used to always look up to the EGB but as it seemed more formal in comparison to the generally quite relaxed nature of the police thread at the time (in the time approaching the lockdown it was pretty much just a lounge thread littered with abusive flashes, which was likely the same reason the lockdown happened), and for that reason the thought of joining it - and thus leaving the NGPD - wasn't too attractive to me simply for the fact that I absolutely loved being a member of the police force. I eventually became Unit Ops there for a while, and after that settled in and retired from B/Ping about thirty points away from Private, doing my B/Ping on an alt in order to stop myself from ranking up.

After a while, I ended up going inactive from Newgrounds. During this period I ended up losing contact with all of the people I knew from the NGPD, bar from maybe one or two, After finally returning, this time being after the thread was temporarily locked and had come back, things didn't really feel the same but I continued hanging around there. Eventually, in one of my periods of fading in and out of activity, I realised that out of nowhere after Wade deleted a prominent spammer (cannot remember which one) I gained blam points for all of the 0-1 votes I had previously given him, bringing me up to Private and officially in the Barracks' range of B/P. Alongside me, funnily enough, SpiffyMasta, whom had succeeded me as Unit-Ops of the NGPD ranked up too and was no longer a member of that force.

I intended to continue defending the portal and once again get onto the B/Ping train, so I immediately made the decision to join the Barracks. Unfortunately, as previously stated, I was going in and out of one of my inactivity moments, and after life started picking up for me I ended up completely disappearing from Newgrounds and, by extension, the EGB. I didn't really feel like I was right for the EGB at the time, despite knowing a lot of members there from my past whom had passed through my own native club before joining up there. Finally, in the latter half of last month, I came back to Newgrounds and for once I didn't tell myself that I'd be returning properly, just dropping by and saying hey to a few people whom I had lost contact with since, but funnily enough it was this time that I ended up deciding to come back. After about a week, I had realised that this time I was here to stay and sent in an application on the first of December, I believe. By the second, Byte had swung by in order to accept my re-entrance, and I was once again a member.

This time I'm far happier as a member, I think in the past my allegiance to the NGPD was what had stopped me from getting into being a proper member and that combined with the pressure of life getting busy just made it difficult to be a proper member. In the brief time since I've rejoined I've stayed pretty active in the thread, usually making at least one post a day that and also improving my B/P rates - not to the inhuman rates of a certain member (*cough* 55 per day *cough*), but nonetheless far better than the big fat 0 I had previously been gaining. I'm personally loving being a member once again, and I'm proud to be part of one of the strongest and oldest active groups on the site."

In one of your newsposts, namely "What do I think about you?", you offered Newgrounds users to tell them what you think about them. How did you get the idea and would you consider to reactivate this offer for our users in the future?

EmmDubya: "Funnily enough, I was thinking about this the other day and whether I should catch up and then reopen the whole thing. There were two main reasons I decided against it. The first, primarily relating to the first thought of simply catching up with past posts, is that it was such a long time ago now that most of the people have forgotten about the whole thing and are often inactive, so dropping them a message saying "oh hey there, I finished that piece of writing you asked for two and a half years ago" would likely be met with a response of absolutely nothing. In the September of last year I tried starting it up again on the same thing - I believe I wrote out two more things on people and then disappeared again.

The reason I decided against making another one was simply that it'd likely get very few people commenting on it. Around that time I was far more well known on the site - my blog post before that has received 87 comments, and right now my most recent three (including one that was up for a month short of a year) have had only had six on each of them - I have a feeling that if I created a post like that again I'd end up just looking slightly silly with an empty newspost - I'd just look and feel like a failed attention whore. :3 Also, I'm trying to adhere to a monthly update system for newsposts (as shown by that huge wall of text on my page at the moment), and making irregular things like that would skew one of my pitiful attempts at organisation (something I've never excelled at)."

Judging from the newspost "MwMike's statwhoring quest, now with images.", you had high stat goals in the past. Somehow it seems like you stopped being a stat whore. Can you tell us the reasons, or can we expect that you will start to gather stats like there is no tomorrow?

EmmDubya: "I used to always describe myself as a statwhore, however my stats were never too impressive back then and to this day are far from anything special. I think the fact that I mainly spent time around the Wi/Ht and EG groups of users, many of whom are those most interested in competition regarding site statistics made me want to catch up with some of the far more seasoned members in terms of that sort of thing. The two main stats I focussed on both ended up being halted at different stages. My B/P, which had for a long time been higher than my postcount (both roughly 1000 or so for a while) ended when I decided that I didn't want to rank out of the NGPD, meaning that ended and after a while I ended up distancing myself from the BBS during mid 2009, when my posts per day dropped down from the 11 or so I had dragged it up to from its old rate of about 1.5 a day after nine months of having an account in the space of less than half a year. Last month it had fallen all the way down to three point nine something, and at my old rate I'd be comfortably into the 10k margin, however nowadays I'm not too fussed with postcount, although realising a few days ago that it's finally exceeding 4 per day brought a smile to my face.

Essentially, I had club allegiances that would end if I continued and then I went through an extremely long period of inactivity, only with brief spells of use in between them, usually filled with a few BBS posts but never getting back into the swing of things enough to begin getting back into collecting stats properly. Also, my flagging of reviews and whistle consciousness was stopped after I lost my prized gold whistle and it fell all the way down into an extremely, extremely deep pit of garbage - it took until this year to get out of that from it happening right at the end of 2008 when Rage's threadwas locked shortly after. Nowadays I hope to improve my deposit rate, maintain a good, strong B/P rate (I'm planning on stopping just before Corporal for this month, then attempting to average 40/day next month), and finally spending enough time on the forums to get a good number of posts without resorting to spamming in order to do so. I'm pretty much guaranteed all of those stat milestones in my most recent newspost, other than Silver Whistle (which isn't likely), and 15000 total stats (which will be possible, but difficult considering how little time is left)."

4 submissions from you can be found in the flash portal. Would you consider yourself a flash artist and is there a flash that you are most proud of?

EmmDubya: "I consider myself a past flash artist, however admittedly none of the work I have on Newgrounds is particularly pride-inducing. As I said about my posts in my early days, my age was very clear in those flashes that I did and if I stumbled upon any of them (other than the dropping egg collab) nowadays I'd more than likely vote to blam them, and I'm surprised they didn't suffer that fate at the time. I actually began work on a third instalment in the 'Button Finder' series, in which I worked pretty hard to make that simple concept into a half decent game, and I think I did pretty well on it. I started about six months after the last one in the series and took several months of observation of successful games and work, primarily on getting the UI nice and clean and adding countless levels, each one set into a particular theme totalling in a few hundred overall, each set to a difficulty that's well balanced and fair I honestly think it made a pretty good flash, even if not award material purely due to the overall concept being so weak. After that laptop was fried, I lost all of that work and didn't touch flash in a long time.

After all of this time, a few months ago I decided to give it another try and work on creating an interactive encyclopaedia including information about the lore of The Elder Scrolls video game series, after a friend of mine began to get extremely excited about the upcoming release of Skyrim, despite in the past slagging off the previous instalments, and all of a sudden he was actually quite interested in the world of Nirn and the history that encompasses it. It made me realise that with all the new people coming across the series that many would find interest in the details of it beyond the surface, and as it is in the past had been a personal interest of mine I began work on creating a far more compact flash based entity for those that found the thousands upon thousands of scattered UESP and Imperial Library pages cumbersome to extract important information from. I'm currently only about 2% of the way into it after having created only about nine pages, not even finished with the outline of each game in the series yet. My general lack and poor work ethic drove that project to the ground as it did many in the past, but I intend to eventually finish it off."

The redesign is rumored to happen within the next months, are you looking forward to it? What kind of changes do you want to see?

EmmDubya: "I'm certainly hotly anticipating the release of the redesign. Thus far we have pretty little information as to what it really looks like, which makes me nervous considering I love the current layout and right now there is no way of knowing how different it will be - I think we can trust in Bob's CSS prowess and the work of the rest of the team in order to deliver something that's really. I remember seeing a supposedly leaked image of the redesign frontpage showing a faded orange sunbeam background behind the main gray frame and I'm personally hoping that screenshot is not legitimate as I think all of that orange just looks a bit too strong on the eyes for my tastes. If that is, indeed, the update, then perhaps after some time when I get used to it I'll love it and wonder how I ever preferred the current design to it and it's just fear of change that's my problem. :3

My main hope is the supposedly confirmed literature portal, which definitely pleases me. Although my aforementioned poor work ethic causes me to have difficulties actually finishing pieces of work, I'm naturally a very good writer and in the extremely rare case that I finish a piece of work (or even start one, for that matter), I'd love to be able to share it with Newgrounds in a manner other than creating a post in the Lit forum, which just seems daunting for me for whatever reason.

Another hope that I see floating around in threads is that some kind of quote tracker is implemented, notifying you whenever one of your posts are quoted. I think that this would be a good idea seeing as if you have little time you would simply be able to log on, see if anybody have said something in response to your posts and thus would be expecting another response back, make any responses necessary and log off, in addition to meaning that people would be able to focus on things off of the forums (such as visits to the portal) and be able to check back when necessary. Somebody created a makeshift online application like this recently, but it's not ideal at the moment.

I also hope that if it contains new level icons, I'll at least be able to hit level twenty-three first. I've loved that axe for quite some time now, and it's what I used to want to retire on. Now it's coming pretty close (in two months or so) after my long absence of depositing, and I want to at least have it beside my name for a while before it's taken away from me forever."

What can we expect from you in the future, EmmDubya?

EmmDubya: "It's hard to speculate, but I expect more of the same. I hope to continue spending a lot of time on the BBS and over time begin to become a larger part of the community once again. I also wish to hone my writing skills somewhat in time for the literature portal, keep my B/P rate up and as a whole get back into my prime. It'll be difficult after all this time away, but I think I've made a decent start and things can only get better from here on out. Onwards and upwards!"