Tag Twinsanity

Yearly Wrap-Up 2020 (and the End of an Era)

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Howdy, folks.

It’s almost redundant to mention what a huge dumpster fire this year has been. I know that I’m not alone in saying that 2020 is one year that I’ll be glad to see in the rear view mirror. Yeah, 2020 suuuuuuuuuuuucked!!!!

Anyway, we’ve finally arrived at the tail end of 2020, and as usual, we’re going to our annual summation of the year in the review. But wait, there’s more! This year, our yearly wrap-up is going to be a little different because not only are we going to look back at Twinsanity 2020, but we’re also going to announce our plans going forward and announce some significant changes to this blog and discuss it’s future.

This is going to be a long one, so you might want to get some snacks…

Since both Damon and myself will be writing this, to avoid confusion as to who’s words you’ll be reading, we’ll once again be doing the colored text thing; Damon’s words will be typed in blue, while mine will be typed in purple.

I’m going to get right to the point here: not only is this our last blog post for the year, it’s also the last blog post for this site. Yes, Twinsanity the blog is done like dinner.

Damon and I have been doing this for at least eight years, and eight years is long time to be doing anything, and sadly, I have to say that this particular format just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I feel like I’ve done everything that I can do in this format and it’s been feeling increasingly limiting for me. Initially, I tried to shrug it off and continue as we have been, but trying to keep making text posts at this stage would be like pulling a car uphill with a rope and acting like it’s fine. I’m ready to move on and start doing some different things on this site, as I have been for some time now. Also, I’m really not sure if the blog format has been the best outlet for our particular approach as of late. Generally, we think of ourselves as cartoonists, writers and comedians. We’ve always tried to make our content just as entertaining as they are informative (if not more so). Whether or not we’ve actually succeeded in that depends on who you ask. And sometimes, I’m honestly not sure if some of the people who read our stuff know that it’s supposed to be funny. I mean, one of the most frequently visited posts as of late has been Damon’s “The Dumb Donald/Mushmouth Conundrum”, and some of the more recent responses to that post have left me baffled. There are people who have said “I’ve never seen Fat Albert and I don’t know anything about the show other than it existed.” But then you missed the entire point of that post. In order to recognize the humor in that post, it’s assumed that you are familiar with franchise and already know who the characters are and what their names are. If you possess zero knowledge of Fat Albert and don’t know any of the characters’ names, you’re going to miss the point of the thread entirely! “The Dumb Donald/Mushmouth Conundrum” is a humorous article, not a tutorial for newbies. Don’t read that post if your intention is to educate yourself about Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. That’s what show wikis are for. It was supposed to be funny! And I got no satisfaction by looking at the most frequently visited post and seeing that it’s the 2 Funny of the SNL sketch “Nadeen At Burger Castle”. We didn’t write that, we just embedded it from Hulu. Our site isn’t meant to be somewhere where folks can watch SNL sketches without having to sign in to Hulu. If you’re going to visit our site regularly, I’d rather it be so you read content that we actually made. Two of the main regrets that I have are: 1) I wish that I hadn’t typed that Unpopular Opinions on No New Animaniacs. At the time that I typed that post, the idea of an Animaniacs reboot had been discussed by fans, but at the time, I didn’t think that it was ever going to happen for real. Had I known that just a year or so later that Warner Brothers would actually greenlight a new A!, I wouldn’t have bothered writing that. 2) I wish that I hadn’t written that What The Funny for the Regular Show episode, “Free Cake”. Not because I thought that it was bad, but I don’t like to leave things unfinished. Originally, my plan was to eke out one more miniseries before moving on, but I couldn’t do that. There were supposed to be six entries in that miniseries, but I felt so stifled after typing the first one that I couldn’t make myself do the other five, and I always said to myself that as soon as doing this felt like work to me, that I would stop.

Despite how I’ve made it sound so far, I’d like to emphasize that Damon and I are NOT done with the internet, nor are we done with WordPress or this site. No, there won’t be any more text posts like this one here; save for the microblogs that we do on Tumblr. I don’t make a new one everyday, but I’ll at least try to make a microblog at least once a month. Generally speaking, though, we’ll be busy putting together the new format, which will hereinafter be referred to as Twinsanity 2.0.

We’re going to create a YouTube channel for ourselves (I’d like to use a different site than YouTube, but YT gets the most traffic, so we have to deal with them. I wish that Blip and/or VidMe were still around, but I digress). When we make a new video, we’ll embed it here, so you’ll have the option to watch the video on this site or on our YT channel. You’ll still be able post comments on both sites, but I will say that you’ll be more likely to get a response form us typed here rather than on YT.

I knew this moment was coming, and now it’s finally arrived.

As craptacular was 2020 has been, it did teach me to prioritize and give me the final push that I needed. By now it’s become common knowledge that we’ve both grown weary of the blogging format; I began to feel like I hit a wall with text posts somewhere around 2016 or 2017. I blame a lot of that on myself; for a long time I felt like I had to post something almost everyday without a break or a cooldown period or else we’d become irrelevant, so I would just post whatever, regardless of whether I had any real ideas or even if the post was actually a product of our own work and minds, a move I quickly grew to regret. This, in case anyone was wondering, was why we stopped doing 2 Funny: people were coming here not to take in what we had posted or what was on our minds, but rather just to look at whatever miscellaneous video we chose to embed. I know this sounds egotistical, but Twinsanity was meant to be a showcase for us, our creativity, our work, our opinions, not just a place where people can go to look at pretty pictures or someone’s else videos for free. Not only have I felt for a long time that we’ve just been screaming into the void, but my plans, goals and ideas were increasingly beginning to get too big and elaborate to be summed up with a few lines of text and some still illustrations; it’s gotten to the point where nowadays I don’t even think in terms of text posts anymore, outside of short quick bites like the stuff we put on Tumblr.

Speaking of recognition, another reason I’ve been wanting to get away from the blog format is simply because I want us to be seen. To this day I think there are still people who believe that we’re just 1 person, and the only conclusive way to disprove this notion once and for all is for both of us to appear on camera together.

So yeah, this format was really starting to not work for me anymore, and creatively speaking, I was beginning to feel more and more liked a caged animal, pacing around and wanting to pounce. This was compounded further by colleagues like DBK (the artist formerly known as Whimsical Crank) and Mr. Coat, who previously were just bloggers like us but began branching out into making videos.

Then in March, the whole plague thing happened.

SIDE BAR: After this pandemic hit, non-creative types would keep saying things like, “Artists and writers should be happy this happened. Now that everything’s been shut down, they should be creating their asses off now that they have all this free time”. Um, yeah, about that: the reason most people aren’t producing the next Mona Lisa or Hamilton on a daily basis is because this is a PANDEMIC, not a VACATION. Unfortunately, for many people art and creativity are a hobby not an occupation, and most people need to have peace of mind and stability in order to create, and it’s hard to have those things when you’re consumed by the daily concerns about whether you or a loved is going to get sick (especially for those who have pre-existing conditions or compromised immune systems), plus worrying about how you’re going to get your bills paid, keep food on the table and a roof over their heads, not to mention creators who are parents now have the additional burden of having their kids home all day, which leaves them with even less time and space to create. So no, non-creative types, a pandemic is not party time for us. END SIDE BAR.

One good thing did come out of this plague, however, it gave us more time to reflect, think and plot about where we are with Twinsanity and where we want to take it going forward. This whole experience led to me thinking the ‘Big Thoughts’, which I usually try to avoid; not to get uncool and heavy, but I began to think about my own mortality, unrealized dreams, my lifetime goals, making my mark, etc. I don’t want to leave this planet with any regrets, so it was during this latest lull that I made my resolve: I wasn’t going to let another year go by without at least trying to make Twinsanity 2.0 a reality.

What’s that I pretend to hear you ask? What exactly is Twinsanity 2.0, and how is it different from Twinsanity the blog? Well, first there’s the obvious fact that Twinsanity 2.0 will be online videos instead of text posts. Obviously, some videos will take longer to make than others, but we’re going to try to produce about two videos each month (that’s the idea goal anyway).

Now, before we give a taste of what’s in store, first let’s break down what you shouldn’t expect from Twinsanity 2.0. Here’s what we don’t want to do as video content creators:

We don’t want to review movies or video games. Everybody and their Aunt Gertrude does movie reviews (plus we’re not really film buffs anyway) and we lack the skills and the knowledge to review the latter. There are already a number of YouTubers who reviews video games and they all do it 20 times better than we ever could; while we will have some game based content, ours will be more about video game aesthetics, our experiences with games, what we like about games, game tropes, game commercials, etc. (We’re those weirdos who enjoy watching games and the overall oeuvre of video games more than actually playing them.) In fact, I would hesitate to call what we do ‘reviews’ in the conventional sense. For a long time, every self-produced video was called a review because that’s the language that people used, but these days, thankfully, internet content has evolved beyond the standard review formula and expanded to include several various forms of communication.

We don’t want to be ‘Angry Reviewers’. We have no desire to be the Angry This or the Irate That. We really wish to avoid the typical Angry Reviewer/Angry Critic formula of show a clip of something, make a joke about it, show another clip, tell another joke, clip, joke, clip, joke, clip, joke, conclusion. That formula has been done A LOT by numerous online personalities, but as mentioned above, nowadays creators are able to expand to other forms of content. Of course, some producers still adhere to the Angry Critic formula, and more power to those who do it well, but that’s just not what we want to do. We want to do something wackier and more casual; I envision our main show as 2 jokers just kicking it and making a wise-guy talk/news/sketch/variety show where they talk (and crack jokes) about their favorite subjects, in our case animation, Saturday Morning TV, tech, video games, schlock consumer products, unique destinations and general geek culture. We both would rather celebrate (and goof on) the things that we like as opposed to ranting and complaining about the things we don’t like.

We don’t want to do essays or info-dumps. Again, not to disrespect the video essayists like Lindsay Ellis, Elisa Hansen or Kevin Perjurer of Defunctland, but that’s just not what we want to do. Essay videos require a lot of research and tend to be kind of long, and frankly we’re too lazy and easily bored to devote ourselves to the amount of time and research required to do those. Our style is more abridged and filled with jokes, quips, clips and cutaways, a la Black Nerd Comedy, Theme Snark and Some Jerk with a Camera. We consider ourselves entertainers first and foremost; we’d rather make people laugh and keep them entertained than drop an info-dump on them. You won’t be getting a documentary out of us is what I’m saying.

We don’t want to play fictional characters in our videos, least of all superhero-type characters. Once again, no disrespect meant towards the likes of The Blockbuster Buster and Linkara, but we have no desire or plans to play pan-galactic pop-culture superheroes entrusted with the task of beating down bad cartoons in order to protect the multiverse or whatever. On a related note, we also don’t plan to incorporate story lines, plots and ongoing sagas running along within our videos. Again, producers like the Nostalgia Critic have been gradually adding increasingly bigger and more elaborate plot lines into their videos and that’s fine, but we plan to go the opposite route, making our videos relatively short, wacky and fun. We don’t need to have stories going on alongside the videos; if we want to do scripted stories, then we’ll make separate videos for them.

Now, on to the content. The plan is for Twinsanity 2.0 to consist of a main show along with some smaller side segments. Right now, we’re calling our main show The Razzle Dazzle Show (some other names that we’ve considered are The Twinsanity Show, The Cartoon Show and The Big Show). The Razzle Dazzle Show is like a cross between the Escapist.com show The Escapist Show, Cartoon Network’s Cartoon Planet, Sifl & Olly, ESPN Classic’s Cheap Seats starring the Sklar Brothers (two of our role models), Fuel TV’s The Captain & Casey Show and Old School Wrestling.com (OSW). I like to think of Twinsanity as being for Saturday morning fans who grew up. It will still be as we originally envisioned it, “Where cartoons and comedy collide!”. Razzle Dazzle will be the show that we plan to do the most regularly.

As for the side segments, aside from the them being presented in the new format, they won’t be too different from what we’ve been blogging about. Some of them will remain unchanged, while some others may be altered accordingly. Talkin’ Nerdy, The Retro Bin, The Cartoon Couch, TV Special Showdown, Pop Dream, Nerdvana, Unpopular Opinions, Big Ideas and Brain Candy will stay pretty much the same. Cartoon Country will not be making the transition to videos, at least not entirely. Damon believes that CC too closely resembles a conventional review show, which we’re trying to steer away from. Meanwhile I’ve been concerned for some time now that Cartoon Country and my miniseries What The Funny are too similar to one another for them both to coexist as separate entities, but WTF is too popular and we both enjoy doing them, so there was never the thought of dropping that segment. I was going to bring CC back as something else, but I have no idea what that something else could be. If Cartoon Country were to continue, I think it would need to have some sort of specific theme (such as Tony Goldmark’s Escape From Vault Disney, Doug Walker’s Disneycember, Austin Hardgrave’s Zelda Month or Allison Pregler’s Baywatching) rather than just be a grab bag of cartoons in general, since that’s basically what our show is; having a mish-mash segment on our mish-mash show would be quite redundant. So for now I’m thinking that I’ll just absorb CC into What The Funny and carry on from there.

Vidiots will continue, but we’ll be giving it a new name: Ready Player Two*. And again, these won’t be video game reviews. Instead, it’ll just be us sharing our experiences with certain games and discussing game tropes and observances. Within this, there will be a new sub-segment that we’re calling Geeks On Games, where Damon and I (and sometimes a guest like our younger brother Chaz, aka Chazmosis of The Otaku Gamer Spot), watch a video game playthrough and make commentary on it.

*We came up with that name before author Ernest Cline announced that he’d be writing a sequel to his book/movie Ready Player One with this same title. No biggie, we’re not married to the name Ready Player Two, we can always give it a different name, like Player Two Start or something similar. We just don’t want to call the segment Videots anymore; that name has simply lost its’ sheen.

We haven’t done a new Beyond the Background in 3 years, so there’s no rush to bring that over, unless one of us gets struck with divine inspiration.

There will be a new segment that we’re calling Retroville. In which, we’ll be looking back at defunct restaurant and store chains, ad campaigns, TV program blocks, specialty themed cable channels, toy collectibles, theme park attractions and the like. It’s kind of like a cross between Restaurant Rewind and Defunctland, but with jokes. Since Retroville will occasionally look back at toys/collectibles, commercials, theme parks and theme park attractions, the blog segments Toon Adjacent and Ad Nausea will become part of Retroville.

We’ll still do Peeks every so often, provided that it’s a TV show or movie that’s of particular interest to us. However, we’re not going to preview every new show that comes down the pike.

-We can’t give you an exact date as to when our first video will be ready, but we’ll keep you posted on our progress and on upcoming events both here and on our Tumblr page. Speaking of, after the videos start rolling out on a regular basis and we’ve got a decent number of them under our belts (say more than 5) we’ll be doing something else we’ve been wanting to do for a while now: update the look of this site. We’ll soon be giving this place a makeover with new updated theme; we’ve been using the Shaan theme for a while and we’ll be switching to something more video-friendly, however the URL will not change; you’ll still be able to access this site at twinsanity.co, it will just look different, so don’t think you’ve come to the wrong place when you click here and don’t see the Shaan look anymore.

All of the blog posts that we’ve done will be archived so you can visit them whenever you want. There won’t be any new blog posts save for site updates, but the Animaniacs whatever thread will remained pinned, so if you have any news, articles or opinions you wish to share, just keep posting them there like you’ve been doing.

Well, that’s it. This new venture is going to be a little scary, but we’re both excited about this new chapter in our lives and this new direction that we’re taking Twinsanity in. We’re looking forward to Twinsanity 2.0, and we hope you’ll enjoy it too. For everyone who stuck with us all this time, big thanks for your support. We hope to see you on whatever new media we show up on.

Happy New Year, and we hope 2021 is a good year for you. Hey, it couldn’t get much worse than 2020, right?

State of Twinsanity – August 2019 and Beyond

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OK, we haven’t done this in a while, but it’s high time to address the elephant in the room.

elephant-vector-clip-art-3279552

“Word!”

Lately there’s been very little going on here and a lot going on behind the scenes, and it’s time to address that, and what shape Twinsanity is going to be taking in the months to come.

As you may have noticed, neither of us have put up any blog posts in July, and this is the first one either of us have done in August. After returning from a self-imposed vacation early in the year, I thought I could resume blogging until we were ready to start video production (this past week we began comparing prices for green screens and back lights, and I we have to upgrade from the ‘starter’ camera we have to a more high-end one, just to keep you guys abreast of where we are on that), but no, I find that the longer I stay away from blogging, the harder it is to get back into it. I never want production here to lapse (Jason and I usually try to put up at least 1 post a month) but at the same time, the desire to move on to a different medium is just getting too hard to ignore. Not only do I no longer possess the desire to blog as of late, but I don’t even think in terms of blog posts anymore. I can’t force myself to do something that I really don’t want to do; when your enthusiasm isn’t there, your work reflects it, and I just have to face facts and be honest with not just you guys, but with myself: I don’t want to blog anymore. The spark just isn’t there.

This is not the end of Twinsanity, not by a long shot, but Twinsanity’s days of being a blog are indeed numbered. I can’t even pretend to want to continue making stuff in the blog format anymore. We started Twinsanity back in 2010, so we’ve been at this for nearly a decade. I still want to express myself creatively and share my ideas and opinions with others online, but I can’t do it this way anymore. After 9 years, I really feel like I’ve done all I can do on a blog; the blog format just doesn’t accommodate my visions and ideas anymore.

Jason and I have discussed this numerous times, and we agree that one of our biggest regrets this year was starting the Regular Show What the Funny and the Animal Jam Pop Dream, and it’s not because they’re bad, but we like to finish what we start and there are/were 6 entries planned for each of them. Right now I can’t imagine doing 1 more full-blown blog entry, let alone 5. We want to continue doing both of these miniseries, just not in blog form.

After our second or third year, we’ve wanted Twinsanity to be a visual experience, and now our desires have gotten too big for mere text with still pictures. I want to do stuff like this:

 

Or this:

 

Or this:

 

Or even this:

…And I just can’t do things like this on a blog. The format has become too confining and too limited.

The other reason we really want to move on from blogging is…

We want to be SEEN! From the get-go, Twinsanity has been manned by 2 people. It’s always been the 2 of us, Jason and myself. That’s why this site is called Twinsanity. From the day we first began posting stuff online, people have always suspected that we’re just one person; if they see us on-screen together, that’ll squash that notion once and for all. Going back to above videos I cited, Jason and I want to appear on screen together, we want to interact with one another, trade jokes, barbs, perform skits, etc., kind of like the Hudson Brothers (or the Lucas Brothers or the Sklar Brothers if you need a more modern reference), and again that just isn’t possible on a blog. On a blog it’s just the blogger talking to the readers. You can’t bounce lines and jokes off of another person on a blog. And as egotistical as it may sound, I want people to see me. I have a personality and a style that I’d like to share, and that just can’t be expressed with text on a page. I’m tired of being a faceless entity.

Finally, my desire to move to a more visual medium goes back to something we tried years ago. Back when we were still on Blogger, we had considered doing a fiction blog, but at the time we had nothing but the desire to do it. I have from time to time made some attempts at original fiction here, stuff like ‘Superhero City: A Visitor’s Guide’, ‘Hero: 108: Fast Forward’ and the Cyber City Nerdvanas,  and they can be seen as first attempts, but again, that’s something like, but not exactly like what I want to do on that front; I’d like to make original cartoons and artwork. In addition to writing, I also like to draw, though I’ve never posted any of my drawings online. As of right now, I don’t quite know how to post original artwork online or make digital drawings or art, but I’d like to learn. I no longer wish to just post random images on to the screen and force people to use their imaginations as to what they’re supposed to be looking at; I want to display my own artwork. At least now unlike before I have some ideas of what kind of stories and cartoons I could post. Over the past 2 years or so, Jason and I have been toying around with an idea for a cartoon show that’s been steadily growing over the past several months. I won’t go into huge detail, but the basic premise of the show is that it’s about these young twins who live with their family and their exotic talking pets on a tropical resort island in a fully automated mansion (did I mention that the family is crazy rich?), and adjacent to the mansion is this vast, savage untamed jungle land similar to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, only with Beastly Kingdom in it (’cause there are creatures like dinosaurs, dragons, unicorns, pegasi and sea monsters in it as well) that the kids sometimes play, explore and frolic in. Think The Loud House meets Lilo & Stitch meets Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse meets Johnny Test meets those early ’00’s Danimals ads meets Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs, if that makes any sense (and I know it doesn’t). If we do indeed opt to actually make a fiction blog/site, it’ll be its’ own separate site, as we don’t want this one to get too cluttered.

Long story short: don’t expect another full-blown blog post with a ton of embedded images and clips from either of us anytime soon; I don’t want to neglect this site, but I can’t continue doing what I’ve been doing, at least not this way, the spark just isn’t there. I’ll try to keep you guys up to date on our progress, most likely via micro-blogs on Tumblr and site updates here (I’m not a social media person; I got tired of the endless bric-a-brac on message boards and I don’t go anywhere near Twitter or Facebook for a number of reasons, the least of which being how toxic the atmosphere is on those sites), but I can’t just go back to making blog posts, not even as we begin the process of overhauling things here. Not only do I just not want to continue the blog format, but while we have a lot of things planned, they either don’t accommodate the blogging format or we simply don’t wish to waste our best material on blog posts. As I said, we’ll keep you posted on what happens as it happens; you’ll know we’re ready to roll when you come here and notice Twinsanity sporting a new look and a new theme; we’ll be upgrading the site once the new format  and new material are presentable. The blog posts we’ve already made will be archived for those who want to revisit them.

I know how annoying this roller coaster trip has been, but I assure you, it’s going to be worth it; when Twinsanity returns in its’ new format, it will be bigger and better than it’s ever been.

Yearly Wrap-Up 2018

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2019

Regular followers of Twinsanity know the drill here: this is the last blog post of the year, wherein we give a summation of what the year’s been like for us, and give you guys a brief update of what to expect from Twinsanity in the upcoming year. December 2nd is admittedly pretty early to be doing the annual wrap-up, but if you’ve been following us you know why this in all likelihood will be the final blog post we’re going to make in 2018, and possibly beyond aside from news and site updates (hey, like this one!).

First, the unpleasant stuff: some unexpected life events from late 2017 (none of which relate directly to the site so I’d prefer to not disclose them here, hope you understand) spilled over into 2018, which made putting up content challenging, to put it mildly. I’m not going to lie, 2018 was not a very good year for me overall; things got so chaotic for us that we both felt it was necessary to take a temporary break from blogging until things chilled out for us in real life. It was an emotional roller coaster nightmare.

While we were on hiatus, one of the things that got me through this rough patch…

deadmau5-blue

Aside from my newfound love of Electronic Dance Music…

..was watching videos from my favorite content creators. Big ups to Phelan Porteous, Allison Pregler, Tony Goldmark, Andre Meadows, Trent Troop & Greg Sepelak, Charlie and Hailey Callahan, Bob Chipman, Doug and Rob Walker,  Lewis Lovhaug, James Rolfe, Chris Stuckmann and DigiValentine. You guys don’t know me, but you all helped me get through a difficult period in my life. Not only that, but you also helped to re-ignite my creative spirit. Thanks for that.

When things finally calmed down, we thought we could just go back to blogging and everything would be business as usual; we posted some blog posts, even started a new segment (Brain Candy) and started new What The Funny and Pop Dream segments, only to discover that we’d been bitten by the video bug and were no longer interested in continuing the standard text format. We had been planning to upgrade this site and its’ content for some time, and our lack of enthusiasm for blogging has only served to reinforce that notion. 2019 will the year that Twinsanity makes the jump from text to video.

I’m not going to elaborate on what we’re planning to do video-wise since we’ve already covered this in the last 2 posts. I will however, give you the latest news on how all that is going: the good news is that our brother Chaz, himself a YouTuber (his channel can be found here–please check him out, like, share, subscribe and all that good stuff) has graciously offered to assist us in our venture, showing us how to edit and so forth, and in return we’ll be helping him out, as he wants to put up more content and additional editors will definitely benefit him in that regard. The bad news is that with the ebb and flow of schedules and funds being what they are, compounded by these freaking holidays on top of that, you definitely won’t be seeing any of the new stuff until next year, but it’s not like we haven’t been doing any work during this period, we most certainly have; new Twinsanity material is coming, we promise. Just be patient.

As stated elsewhere previously, when Twinsanity returns and the videos start coming out, we’ll also be changing the theme (as in appearance, not content) of the site; it turns out that the theme we’re currently using (Shaan) has been retired, so it’s fortunate that we were planning to change the theme anyway.

To sum up, once again thank you to all who have stuck with us and our craziness. We really appreciate your viewership, patience, comments and input. My hope is for 2019 to be a much better, more stable and more productive year for us and the Twinsanity, and if all goes well, we’ll realize our dream of making Twinsanity bigger and better than it’s ever been before. So since we likely won’t be posting anything new until after January, we hope you all have a happy holiday season and a safe and prosperous new year.

Marshmello

Keep on groovin’.

What We’re Working On

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Howdy, y’all.

Just wanted to keep you guys abreast of where we are in the big Twinsanity makeover, and give you a little hint on what to expect when Twinsanity re-emerges as a vlog/video channel.

To start with, in our time off from blogging I’ve been starting to draw again (I used to draw a lot, but my time/life schedule hasn’t always been accommodating) and we have some non-Twinsanity related writing projects on the back burner which we’re starting to get done. That’s a good thing.

Scripts and concepts for the videos are currently being written and developed. Many of the stuff we have planned are some of the things we’ve previously done as blog posts but in video form (indeed, a lot of what we’ve published in the past few years were originally conceived as videos, but had to be modified to fit the text format; this is one reason for the change, we’re not thinking and conceiving concepts in the blog format anymore. Several of the blog posts that we’ve made will be remade as videos, as they were initially conceived), while others are things that we simply don’t want to do or can’t be done as text posts.

As Jason has noted previously, when we start producing videos regularly, we will also be upgrading the site’s look and theme, something I’ve been wanting to do for some time, however the site’s URL will remain the same; unlike before when we moved from Blogger to WordPress, you guys won’t have to memorize a new address. We’ll still be at twinsanity.co.

Here’s a brief run-through of what to expect from the core video segments. Keep in mind that everything is in an early stage right now, so names and things are still being decided; these concepts could undergo a dozen changes before reaching their final forms:

  • For some time now, we’ve wanted to do a video series reminiscent of Allison Pregler’s Movie Nights or Bob Chipman’s In Bob We Trust/The Big Picture or Brad Jones’ DVD-R Hell. This segment will most likely be Cartoon Country. The transitioning of Reviews on the Run (remember that?) to Cartoon Country was very similar to Allison’s revamping of Obscurus Lupa Presents to Movie Nights; like before, Cartoon Country will not be formal, scene-by-scene, blow-by-blow reviews, but rather more laid back and casual, like a couple of friends just kicking it and talking about their favorite cartoons. As before, Cartoon Country need not always be an overview of an entire series, it can just be about a single episode of a show or even just one scene from an episode.
  • The other animation-centric segments, such as Talkin’ Nerdy, Beyond the Background, The Retro Bin, The Cartoon Couch, TV Special Showdown, Unpopular Opinions et al, will remain basically the same, they’ll just be done in video format. Regarding TV Special Showdown: one thing in particular that we’d like to do with that is do more Saturday Morning preview specials. Kind of a tricky thing because few of them exist online, but nonetheless it’s something we’d like to do.
  • Regarding What The Funny, Pop Dream and Brain Candy: I regret pulling the latest installments of these out so early. Our original plan was that we were going to continue blogging through the remainder of the year, but in short order even that became questionable. If we had known that the Blog Burnout was going to occur so soon, we wouldn’t have busted out with these this year. I feel sorry for Brain Candy; it’s a good idea, but it had the unfortunate timing to be born at a time when the blog format was really starting to run dry. We have other Brain Candies in the works, and they will be presented, but all the subsequent Brain Candies will be done as videos rather than text posts. Same deal with the Regular Show What The Funny and the Animal Jam Pop Dream: we did the first installments of each in text form, and we do plan to continue each, but the remainders of those will be videos. Also, when Pop Dream and What The Funny make the transition to video form, we won’t be numbering them any longer.
  • No offense to Doug Walker (The Nostalgia Critic), Lewis Lovhaug (Linkara) or Eric Rodriguez (The Blockbuster Buster), but we won’t be incorporating stories, sagas or ongoing narratives in our “reviews” (I put this in quotes because I don’t consider what we do to be reviews in the conventional sense, what we do isn’t so much reviewing something as it’s just us goofing around, geeking out, nitpicking, cracking wise and making jokes, but we call them “reviews” because that’s the language people use; I don’t know if there is a proper term for what we do); those guys are good at what they do and it’s cool that they’re doing what they want, but our videos don’t need to be mini-movies nor do we need or want to be intergalactic superheroes saving the internet from the multiverse or whatever. If we want to do fiction or stories, we’ll do them as their own separate thing. Indeed, we considered doing original comedy sketches and miscellaneous skits, which would be the new format of 2 Funny.
  • We will also be continuing with Toon Adjacent, which was inspired by (and will be a sort of hybrid of) Phelan Porteous’ Bootleg Zone/Miraculous Merchandise Zone and Tony Goldmark’s Some Jerk with a Camera and State of the Parks. Like before, on Toon Adjacent we’ll be spotlighting toys, collectibles, merchandise, theme park attractions, stage shows etc. which are based on cartoons. Jason and I used to buy collectibles and action figures a lot, and have been thinking about starting up that hobby again, so why not make a video series out of it?
  • Videots will also be transitioned into video format. There may be some entries reminiscent of Ryan Molina’s Awesome Video Game Memories, but they will mainly be video versions of the later Videots installments focusing on video game aesthetics such as Favorite Stages, Favorite Levels, Favorite Power-Ups, Favorite Game Music, etc., as I’m particularly proud of those. One new video game theme segment we have planned was inspired by a pilot that Bob Chipman made called Game Watch; Bob (so far) uploaded 2 of these, and I don’t know if he has any plans to do more, but we like the idea and plan to do something similar. In it, we watch a playthrough of a game, during which we joke, comment and display trivial facts about said game and other stuff. We’re calling this segment Geeks on Games. A new (sort of) video game themed segment I have in the planning is something I’m calling Engrish Lit. Inspired a segment of the late series X-Play called Shocking! with Shad Grimgravy, on Engrish Lit I will be reading Engrish mis-translations of game cinemas, street signs etc. as though they were Shakespearean monologues. I want to emphasize that I am no way trying to make fun of Japanese people with this segment, I’m poking fun at the Engrish being lost in translation, the segment is not meant to be a knock against Asians. Engrish Lit will be short, filler videos to tide folks over while we work on the bigger stuff. Another possible filler segment I have planned is me reading Rufus quotes from Street Fighter 4, similar to the Videots I did years ago called The Wit an’ Wisdom o’ Rufus, but unlike that, I won’t be reading them all at once, as that would just get boring, instead I’ll read one quote per installment. (Ironically, that post was one of the first signs to me that maybe the blog format wasn’t the way for us to go; I never felt that came off properly as a text post.)
  • A new segment we’re working on is a riff segment, though it won’t be presented in the traditional MST3K style, with the film playing and our voices heard over it; ours would be done similar to the openings of Mike Jeavons’ Infomercialism: show a clip of something, cut to us making a joke about it, cut back to another clip, cut back to us joking, repeat. Right now we’re calling this segment Laff Riot. Like with Nerdvana, The subjects of Laff Riot can be anything: a cartoon short, an episode of a TV show, a short film, a commercial, anything. The only thing I’d like to avoid riffing on is 50’s educational films, because everybody riffs on those.
  • We’re also kicking around the prospect of doing a segment inspired by the YouTube channels Defunctland and Restaurant Rewind, in which we look at retail chains, stores and ad campaigns of the past. We don’t have a name for this segment yet.
  • Another new segment idea is inspired by some of Andre Meadows (Black Nerd)’s videos, in which we go on location to a particular spot or attraction and engage with said spot. We’re tentatively calling this segment The Sweet Spot. (The only other name we have for it is Coolopolis.)
  • Finally, we plan to have partially unscripted vlogs called Beware the Bros, in which we just ramble and talk about stuff of interest. These are inspired by the Walker Brothers’ Sibling Rivalry and Greg Sepelak and Trent Troop’s Under the Table.

When will these videos come out? I can’t say for certain, but ideally I’d like to for them to be ready for viewing by 2019, first quarter 2019 preferably.

How often will we be uploading videos? Again, can’t say for certain, but ideally I’d like to put up a minimum of 1 video a month or at least every 2 months. I realize that videos take longer to produce, as they have to be written, recorded, edited and uploaded, but I’m going to try to not get locked into the whole YouTube algorithm thing. I’ve even considered creating a Patreon account.

Bear with us, folks. I know it’s annoying just slogging through these text posts; I know you’re wondering “When are they going to post something entertaining, with visuals, jokes and stuff?”. When we upgrade the site, we plan to have a blog section, which we’ll use to archive all the stuff we’ve done up to now for those who wish to revisit those, but going forward the funny stuff with jokes and images and clips will be videos and vlogs, not text blog posts. Future blog posts will mainly just be stuff like this, site news and updates. This is where Twinsanity’s headed. It’s work, I know, but the blog format just isn’t doing it for us anymore. We both feel like we’ve hit a wall with the blog format; it’s become too limiting and restrictive for what we want to do creatively, and although we tried to bounce back after returning from our self-imposed hiatus, we can no longer escape the feeling that we want to express ourselves in a different, more vibrant way. Twinsanity as just a blog has run its’ course; neither of us wish to stop working on Twinsanity, we just want to continue doing it in a different medium.

If I tried to do an ‘old-style’ blog post now, it wouldn’t be very good ’cause I’m just not feeling it, the enthusiasm just isn’t there anymore, and I’m not going to phone in that kind of blog post just for the sake of putting something up here. We have to do what we want to do creatively. It’s like JG Quintel said, you have to make the stuff you want to see, not what you think other people want to see. It’s way too much work making something you’re not even into.

We’re Still Here

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Just wanted to pop in to let you guys know what’s been going on here as of late. Since neither of us are on social media (it’s basically here and email exclusively), communication isn’t always that easy. We want to assure you that new material is coming. I know these gaps between posts are annoying; we’re not happy about it either, but we’ve both been really busy and occupied with other things lately. So apologies about these delays, but we haven’t forgotten about you or this site. There will be new posts here soon; we have some in the works currently, and they’ll be typed and published as soon as they’re ready.

Among the things we’ve been busy doing this past month or so is we’ve been learning the ins and outs of video production. As many of you who’ve been following us here for the past few years already know, one of our long-term goals is to transform Twinsanity from a blog to a full-blown website, moving from text to videos, our ultimate plan is for Twinsanity to consist mainly of videos; there may still be the occasional blog post, but those will largely consist solely of text, the stuff with visuals, jokes, skits and cutaways (i.e. Cartoon Country, The Cartoon Couch, The Retro Bin, Toon Adjacent, etc.) will be presented as videos, in addition to some other totally new video material ideas that we’re currently kicking around, among them a revised 2 Funny in which the material will be made, written and performed by ourselves as opposed to just embedding someone else’s work. We’re currently in the process of picking out software programs and equipment, learning how shoot, film and edit, assembling props, costumes, writing up scripts, juggling ideas and everything else that comes with said transition, so if all goes according to plan, the next crop of blog posts with images and jokes and stuff which will be coming out within the next few months or so will be the last of their kind before we make the switch to video production.

To sum up, we apologize for the wait, and we thank you for bearing with us. The face of this site is going to change, but Twinsanity is far from over.