Those who are familiar with me on here may have wondered where I went as I practically vanished from the forums on here for a few years (with the occasional popping in every now and then). Well truth be told my time on the Newgrounds forums left me emotionally burn out, both from cracks about myself and from seeing people get trolled on here a tad too often for my liking. It was like a zoo in there. Yeah, I basically reached my breaking point. So I took a break from the Newgrounds forums.

I eventually came across another website called TV Tropes and upon learning it actually had a forum games forum it more or less because my new main forum to use. I still used Newgrounds, but mainly just to play games and log experience. I was welcomed more warmly there than the early days of me on Newgrounds, seeing that those there were all nice folk that treat each other with an equal level of respect. In other words, following "treat others as you'd want yourself". Thanks to them I learned the existence of Discord and made new friends. So yeah, my time spend there basically healed me.

Thanks to my time spent on that forum I learned new skills and experience, feeling a bit more developed as a person. Now that's it been a few years and feeling better about myself I'm considering returning to the Newgrounds forums as my previous time I spent there is an old shame of mine and I seek to redeem myself. As for my biggest old shame, it's the User Icon Battle threads, in particular the first one. I see it as my fault it failed, the fact that the same factors that caused me to leave the NG forums for a few years were also present at the time of the thread didn't help as that's probably a contributing factor to my breakdown that ended the thread.

I'm not a fan of several of my old posts and news posts, but I'd rather keep them intact as a reminder, as those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Sure, that may come to bite me in the butt if someone were to dig up that stuff to spite me, but those who do that tend to be trash so their opinion is moot.

To redeem myself, I plan on using what I learning from my own failures on Newgrounds and the things I've learned during the time I was away from Newgrounds and apply that to new threads. As for my ultimate old shame, the User Icon Battle thread, I plan on one day bringing that back with my new experience. Among the several changes is that it's no longer going to be annual but a single continuous thread. I also plan on having it have a new set of rules and regulations and would like to have it be streamlined, however the fact that editing is temporary means that I can't edit the first post and put in new rules whenever a new problem arises (not a problem on TV Tropes posts as there is no time limit and thus can edit as many times as you want). So yeah, it's likely not going to be made anytime soon until I find a solution to the editing issue. Could have the rules be in a news post, but I'm used to posting the rules in the first post. Even then, it's still gonna take some time to get everything ready.

Anyways, that is all. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

EDIT: Just remembered I was crazy enough to make a big archive of the User Icon Battle.... including a news post about the rules. Methinks it's time to give it a fresh remodeling.... will put a link to the archive here once I'm done remodeling.

EDIT: And done. Here's the remodeled archive of.... the NG Clash of Avatars. I know it likely still has some kinks to work out but I think I've addressed most of them with the remodeling.