I PROUDLY PRESENT the past fifteen-and-a-half months of my life. Everything you see was converted from flat image files of what the site should look like to actual HTML by lil’ old me. Everything else — from the art to the programming — was not. W00t!

And every single part of the site was coded in nothing more than a text editor. Double w00t.

A lien Hominid HD Photo thanks to Josh Barth
The Behemoth was released on Xbox Live Arcade last week, and it didn’t really hit me until a few days later that I’m credited as a level designer. So today I remembered to check out the credit screen and there I was, my name in lights (along with a few friends’ names).

I really didn’t play much of a part outside of designing levels for the PDA Games mini-game, but I did create about fifty of them. From what I understand not all of them were included in the initial game release and instead they’ll be made available as part of a downloadable pack published a little later.

Hopefully it won’t be the last time I’m listed as a contributor to a Behemoth game title, as there are talks of a PDA Games standalone version with revised gameplay and art that will give me plenty of other opportunities to create challenging puzzles to solve. If there’s one thing I learned while creating my first batch it’s that the only thing I like more than solving puzzles is designing them to make other people squirm.

I ’ve been trying to make up for all the mean things I said to those poor users on the site. I scour the NG Portal for submissions that don’t totally suck and write encouraging reviews to those artists. All others I vote a big, fat “0”. I’ve surprised myself by finding that a lot of these kids have great senses of humor even if their drawing skills need a lot of work, and it feels good to write nice things for a change. It also doesn’t hurt that I’m racking up Blam and Protect points by the dozens.

S ometimes working in unrestricted environments — the number one Flash portal site on the internet, for instance — has its drawbacks. One of these might be a tendency towards amateurish behavior. And one example of this just might possibly be that I relapsed into posting unsuitable comments on the internet, something I swore I’d never do again after posting about a former employer and a client of theirs (while I was working there… and using terms like “lazy” and “incompetent”… the story just gets worse and worse).

This time it wasn’t about some company that I wrote but poor defenseless animators that are kind enough to post their quality Flash creations to our site. And I didn’t write about them where they need never know how much I hated their submissions, but right our site for everyone to see. There was just no excuse for my actions, even if their stupid cartoons deserved it. And it was doubly heinous of me since I’m a member of the staff and should be setting an example.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, I’m even more of a douche bag after having sent the following email to two of my coworkers when they did the same thing a few months ago:

I may be setting myself up for ostracism here, but I happen to agree with this guy’s post in response to the racist thread in our forums:

[post not included here]

Now I realize you guys are just being extreme just for fun, but if we make our users adhere to a set of standards, we should too.

I get this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I read that now. (I even felt odd about it before because it sounds so high and mighty and makes me look like a pompous ass. More so than I really am, I mean.)

Anyway, I wrote a few scathing reviews that violated the Newgrounds Review Policy which were saved from deletion solely because of my moderator status. They would have been really big news once the site redesign launched and my user account — clearly labeled as a staff member — fell under new scrutiny by the users. As it was, Tom came across them while reading a review I wrote for a game he was posting on the front page. It went a little something like this:

“try playing your dumb ass game before uploading it, genius. oh, and rot in hell, c****ss”

The others, written over a period of four months, weren’t much better:

“why on earth wouldn’t you just use the arrow keys like a normal person? what’s to gain by using the letter keys, huh? die already”

“is it just me, or did you totally **** up the sound on this one? Thanks for ruining my morning”

“subtitles, f*****rd. could have been good”

Fortunately, Tom had a sense of humor about it, but it was a little humbling having everyone at the office laugh at me while Ross deleted my reviews. I’ve pledged never to write reviews again and stay behind the scenes working on the redesign where I belong.

I ’m afraid to read my post from last night. I wasn’t terribly drunk when I wrote it but I figure it probably has at least enough spelling errors to make me want to go back and make changes, which I want to avoid.

I did want to add that Tom played this gem of an entry for us (not too unsafe for work). He had front-paged it for a short time a month ago but watching it last night we fell in love all over again, and I see that it’s back up there again as a result of last night’s shenanigans.

To continue with the updates I checked my Newgrounds mail account and see that the voicemails are still rolling in. The thread that started it all is still towards the top, chronicling somewhat our adventures with voicemail, the moderator link colors (“pink is the new green”), and even the decision to repost that surprisingly hilarious entry to the main page. I do see that the pink is still in effect….

Lastly, here are some of the best, dealing with such topics as:

• Herpes
• Our Stolen PS2
• Jesus
• The Pink Mod Text
• Technology

Hilarious.