Slowly but surely, I've been distancing myself from all social platforms that aren't Bluesky and Newgrounds. It seems I made the right decision, with Meta now explicitly allowing hate speech and misinformation on their sites, not that they cared before. I just requested data backups of my Instagram and Facebook accounts and will be deleting both once I receive them.

Google is next, though it will take a couple months to fully rid my life of them, unfortunately. Who would have thought an account spanning the last ten years of your life would contain many things you'd want to ensure are saved before you nuke the whole thing?

But hey, small steps. I've been away from Gmail and Windows for a while now (Linux Mint kicks ass btw) and I'm happy keeping Bluesky and Newgrounds, the latter of which is damn near perfect for creative people to share their passions. We're far away from data stealing corporations and other capitalist bullshit factories here, and that alone makes me happy.

My only suggestions as a musician are involve some changes to the the way this site handles audio. Like, visual artists can upload super high quality renders of their pieces but I can't upload lossless audio? Not to mention the lack of ability to organize our tracks and how they're displayed on our profile. It's just odd lol

There's always room for improvement, but I still love it here, and I hope Newgrounds continues being the best damn site on the internet.

Thanks, Tom.