Q: What is the purpose of being online?
I find that the more people you can communicate with, the more perspectives you have on life. Online, you can speak to people from all around the world. I have international friends as close as Canada and Mexico, as far away as Russia and Japan, and many places in between. And if I threw all my online friends into the same chatroom together, it would be a disaster. While taking in so many different opinions and ideas is a bit overwhelming, it’s also beautiful in a way, because only by listening to others do I learn more about what I’m missing. I think everyone I’ve interacted with has altered the course of my life in some way, even if the interaction didn’t go as I wanted.
Another benefit to being online is being able to socialize with people who understand me better. I have ADHD and autism, and was considered a “gifted kid” up until the end of high school. When I was pretty young, other kids didn’t even pretend they wanted to try to understand me, so I was left at disadvantage for getting along with anyone, aside from the other weirdos like me who I befriended occasionally over the years. That struggle is an experience that a lot of people share, and so all the weirdos of the world have flocked together online, making it easier to find each other. That’s a good thing and a bad thing at the same time, namely because there’s a lot of different kinds of weird and not all of them are healthy or compatible with each other.
Q: Which effect do you feel the Internet has had on you? And why
Been a mixed bag. On one hand, it’s given me a place where I don’t feel so weird and awkward; on the other, I’ve consistently run into more trouble online than in real life, and those have been things I needed to navigate socially and emotionally.
It’s a blessing and a curse that we have access to “a little bit of everything, all of the time”. On one hand, it can grant a great deal of of knowledge and access to new opportunities, but on the other, the information overload can really mess with anyone who gets it. On top of that, a lot of the time it’s hard to discern what people, content, and groups are going to actually be good for you until you’re in the thick of it.
Q: The story of how you made your account on 8/11/18 and why?
Once upon a time, I got really sick of Scratch. I was a teenager plagued with self-esteem issues, and being around a bunch of mostly younger kids who could easily turn toxic for all sorts of petty reasons wasn’t helping.
At the time, my dream was to be an indie game developer, so I had no idea where else I could post games, until one afternoon that I remember clearly. I was on a trip, sitting on a hotel bed and watching Markiplier. He mentioned Newgrounds offhandedly as the origin of one of the games he was playing (Spewer, to be specific), and I immediately knew that was my answer.
Because I also dabble in everything else under the sun, I thought I was going to have a social media account for every format of stuff I made - Wattpad for stories, DeviantArt for art, YouTube for animations and let’s plays and devlogs and whatever else, and NG for games. But Newgrounds has a space for 99% of those things. So I really haven’t needed accounts for a lot of other things, and over time I’ve branched out into every portal on this website! (I still have a very eclectic YouTube channel, though - go check it out.)
Q: The story of your username: Thetageist
First of all, everyone, it’s pronounced Theta-geist. Greek letter Theta, geist as in poltergeist. Not the-tag-ist. Lol.
Actually, shortly after I got Supporter for the first time, I made a post about wanting to change my username. I deleted that post later, but this is the gist: I felt like I’d outgrown my old username “EscapistProductions”. It was even starting to make me uncomfortable, because I had just started to realize how much I used escapism - daydreaming, over-immersion into fandom, etc - to avoid the problems that were facing me in the real world. I didn’t want to be creating productions for people who reject reality entirely, and that’s what that username sounded like to me at the time. (It also has twice as many syllables as Thetageist, so I’d say I’m much easier to mention now.)
The next problem facing me was what to change it to. I had seen the Beetlejuice musical recently, and that was the tipping point for finally accepting myself as someone who likes horror (an interest I’d invalidated myself for for several years), so I wanted something to reflect that. I also took inspiration from the character’s name alternately being spelled Betelgeuse, like the star, and decided to make a reference to a star to also include my enjoyment of sci-fi and space themes.
I initially looked for other star names in the constellation of Orion, such as Cursa, Rigel, and Saiph. Those were taken, and I didn’t know yet that I could steal usernames from dead accounts. I noticed that some stars in the constellation had no names and were just designated by a Greek letter - including θ (Theta) Orionis, which also became the full name of my space-ghost persona.
The reason my username isn’t just “Theta” is because it felt like something was missing and didn’t clearly refer to horror. I also wanted a syllable pattern similar to the inspiration - if someone says “Thetageist Thetageist Thetageist”, the reference is pretty clear (and they can also summon me >:D)
For a while, I also kept the “Cass Kingside” moniker I’d used as EscapistProductions, because Cass is a nice name and I’d been signing off all my posts and PMs that way for years. (No, I had no idea who Cassandra from Pico’s School was when I came up with that pseudonym - it was actually a chess pun on “castle kingside”.) The more people have called me Theta, the more I’ve been phasing it out, though.
Q: What is your Newgrounds profile picture?
Well, I changed it after starting to answer these questions, haha.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know what exactly the old Thetageist logo was. It was a modification of the EscapistProductions logo, which was meant to be a heavily stylized, sci-fi inspired luna moth. The shape was also intended to suggest a crescent moon and either a C (for Cass) or an E (for EscapistProductions). It’s still there as a signature on some of my older art.
When I changed my username, at first I was out of ideas for a new logo, so I just edited my old one. I got rid of the outer hexagon, rotated the moon shape to be vertical because I thought that’d look a bit more ghost-like, replaced the wing tails with a lowercase theta θ, and made it pale green and purple to suggest a spooky look. It really doesn’t mean anything, I just kinda never made a better one until now.
Q: Your experience with Halloween
I’m an October baby (my birthday is the 17th), so it’s been there from the beginning, I’d say. As a kid I dreamed of having fun, elaborate costume parties for Halloween, but instead, some of my birthday parties celebrated both, and my friends would show up in costume for it.
At that age, however, I was very easily scared, and so I did not cope well when I brushed with the scarier parts of the holiday. I have very clear memories of specific incidents that involved decorations with motion sensors and other disturbances. Over the years, that fear became fascination, and then genuine appreciation. I fell in love with horror in a controlled or academic environment, such as watching Youtubers play scary games or making creepy stuff myself. But I’ll tell you the truth: In real life, I still get irrationally anxious around decorations that I think are going to move if I step in front of them, and I sidestep around their line of sight like a coward.
Overall, what Halloween has always been to me is a celebration of creativity. Putting together costumes and decorating a house are just the minimum - some have even more elaborate traditions, such as turning their house into a haunted attraction for the night or making a scary home movie. The goal of creating something scary to spook the neighborhood kids brings out the creativity in so many people who wouldn’t otherwise think they have it. I myself haven’t worn a store-bought costume in years - usually I scope out pieces of clothing and accessories individually from thrift stores, costume shops, and the like. And that’s good, too, because do you know how expensive a licensed Beetlejuice costume is?!
Q: How did you decide on making art and music? Do you feel that the skill sets overlap?
Both of these hobbies have always been with me. My parents bought me sketchbooks when I was pretty young, and I learned the basics of music through some funny edutainment software.
Both of these creative endeavors have a similar question that always needs to be asked: that of the balance between self-expression and common practice. Ideally, the role of learning is to open the doors to even more effective expression by using common practice and techniques to improve attempts at communication.
However, we aren’t robots, and everyone has different factors that might impact the path they take to improvement. Sometimes I wonder if being an artist since childhood holds me back - I’ve gotten so entrenched in old art habits that I find it a lot harder to change my style or technique than someone who started as an adult might.
Q: Your experience of posting in the BBS?/What do you think about the community?
Every online community is going to have their own social standards and expectations. Some places are very laissez-faire with what their members discuss and do there; others are more vigilant, sometimes hypervigilant, about trying to keep people safe. Everyone has a sweet spot on that continuum, and mine is NG.
However, in every online community, even the most lawless places, community members are going to start to care about each other if they’ve stuck around enough to form those bonds.
That’s why I love it here; for the most part, we are all one community, not several communities that get into alliances and wars against each other (ahem, Twitter). There are some rifts that may happen, sure, but there is no tribalism, no in-group or out-group, nobody using the site who is actively shunned across the board. As far as I know, at least - you’d have to tell me if I’m wrong.
Q: Your advice on what makes a good community member
To be a good Newgrounds user, your main concern is rolling with the punches. People are always going to give you responses you don’t expect, so you need to learn to be resilient and bounce back from pretty much anything. This includes the really negative responses that some people will give for varying reasons. Learn to be at peace with them. Throwing a tantrum is just going to get you laughed out of the room, and getting super-anxious is going to wear you out.
Another important tenet is understanding that not everything you do is going to succeed, and building up anything positive is going to take time, especially honing a skill or gathering a following. NG’s activity is purely organic - there are no bots that automatically like all your posts. Sometimes you might not get as much engagement as you normally would, or any at all. Many times that’s just due to forces outside of your control, and other times it was that one bad idea we all have sometimes. That’s normal. Keep your head up.
There’s probably more I could think of, but these are probably the biggest things that allow someone to prosper here.
Q: Is art communication?
Most definitely. Even if the message is something as simple as “I really like this other thing, here’s how much I appreciate it,” it’s still saying something - a statement about the creator, a request to the audience, or some other reason why it was created. Hell, a lot of times, art, music, and storytelling - anything with a layer of fiction - is easier to communicate through than exact words.
The question that can be asked next, then, is whether every piece of media is art and/or communication. Part of me wants to say that “bad” messages or ones that are sent without much thought to them aren’t “real communication”. Is AI generated content communicating anything, for example? But if every piece of art has a reason why it was created, then these are communicating too, even if the messages are less meaningful or personal. (In the case of AI content, the LLM itself will accidentally communicate some of its own “beliefs” and biases too!)
I think it’s therefore important to think critically about what a creator is communicating with a piece, both intentionally and not. Some messages in media just don’t get widely challenged because audiences are too focused on power fantasy, sexual appeal, or some other flashy aspect that distracts them. Of course, we’re allowed to like media and characters that send questionable messages (I know I do), and we don’t have to always take everything extremely seriously or look at it through a critical eye. That gets tiring. But whenever we can, it’s good to just talk about what we’ve picked up from the media we consume, and assess whether they’re healthy for us and others.
I personally had a revelation about myself recently, about my formative years where I was surrounded by fiction and didn’t have a lot of positive social interactions. That life gave me a subconscious belief that there’s some kind of inherent hierarchy of people, based on how much good they have happening to them or how they otherwise resemble a “main character”. It fueled a lifelong habit of considering myself unimportant, and a bitter jealousy towards other people and even fictional characters who seemed to have it better. That was the real reason I developed such a hangup about attractive cartoon characters. I bet that’s true across the board. The people who care the most about fiction are the ones who didn’t get a chance at emotional fulfillment in real life.
Q: Are all choices fundamentally trade-offs?
Uuuuhhhhhhh. Wow, that’s deep.
I think I’m actually inclined to say no, because not all choices involve things of equal value being gained or lost. This is especially the case with taking ultimately necessary risks, such as separating yourself from toxic environments or just standing up for yourself in general. The benefit of staying in your comfort zone by doing nothing is not equal to the benefit you get by resolving an issue that has a significant impact on your life and health. Conversely, the temporary pain of getting into a fight with someone is not equal to the hell you may be living in thanks to them.
So if you need someone to tell you to get away from those friends who don’t really respect you, or apply for that new job and put in your two weeks’ notice at the old one, or start making plans to move out of that pit of despair you grew up in… do it for me.
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“Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” -Helen Keller
