@DrSaturn2 - @Aalasteir (Q) - Index

- SpongeBob Story

I feel like stories from my childhood are more interesting than anything from the past 10 years, which of course, would make sense, considering everything I do and feel today has its roots there.

I love talking about little creeps I had as a kid, so here's a little story about how Spongebob caused my fear of late at night loneliness. I was living in Spain in the late 2000's, and during that time, Spongebob finally got a Polish dub, so I could finally watch this series everyone in school was talking about. I used to wake up, sometimes at 4AM to catch a pair of episodes before school. That's me, at the age of 7, sitting on the couch, illuminated by nothing but Spongebob playing on a tiny TV, forcing myself to look at silly Season 1 episodes, distracting me from eerie shadows in the living room. And whenever the dreaded credits rolled, I would just be left alone in the dark with the aforementioned shadows, having to find my way back to my bedroom, with the haunting credits music playing under my skin (and also being a kid who was really scared of ghosts!!!). There are a lot of video essays covering that Spongebob credits song dread, so I'll spare the details, but I'm actually surprised that I've experienced that "generational trauma" and I'm not alone on that. I strongly believe that this is the reason why even to this day, staying in dark, uncanny rooms makes me uncomfortable, and hearing stuff that just rings in my head in the middle of the night. The biggest horrors are the ones that live in our head.

Q: What do you think about horror, and what’s your opinion on Halloween?

It's funny to me, because I have never considered myself a fan of horror, yet horror was always very much present in my works, whether through stories that I wrote or early animations of mine (my most viral video is a horror animation), and despite that, I have never been interested in any horror movies or games. Today, I'm more aware of the horror genre, and I enjoy it quite a lot, only just discovering what I've been sleeping on. Frankly, I don't really get scared by them, but it's still a fun world to explore.

As for Halloween, I don't really have that much of an opinion. It was never really that big in Poland and is annually declining in popularity. Sure, stores go crazy with the decorations, but the actual October 31 is kinda lame. I was probably living in the wrong neighbourhood, because I had only one group of kids trick or treating every year. That being said, it's still a fun month, one of my favourite vibes of the year actually. It's not about trick or treating, it's about the vibe, the spooky games and movies that come out, the oranges and purples. Halloween can be celebrated in plenty of different ways, especially on the internet, where no matter if Halloween in one's country is dope or lame, we can gather in a global environment and celebrate holidays in ways that we understand them. I myself try to keep a little of my Spooktober spirit in my artworks, even if it's just an OC in a silly outfit, contributing to the aura.

Q: What is it like living in Poland?

Despite having a bunch of nitpicks, mainly on economical levels, I think it's a great country to live in, which is something I came to realize as I grew older. The „grass is always greener” mindset is very common among Polish youth, who are often bashing the entire country only because they don't agree with some politician or there's some random inconvenience. In high school, I've met a lot of teens like this, who were often enchanted by the thought of living in countries like Germany, UK, Canada or even Japan (of course, lol). And I have to be brutally honest, I was one of those teens, romanticizing life abroad and painting Poland's picture as a sad conservative dystopia, until I grew up and learned to appreciate my country for what it is. I'm not a patriot by any means, but I just think Poland is neat, and I'm not gonna pretend it's not. It's a safe and rapidly developing country, which I wish had much more attention globally.

Q: How did you become obsessed with recording the flow of time and immortalizing random things?

I honestly don't know. I was, however, always fascinated by the very concept of archives and how important they are. I'm a very sentimental person. I think the point in my life that triggered this trait was the day I threw out all my childhood stories I used to write, because I thought they had absolutely no value. To this day, I still regret that decision, and I'm obsessed with keeping my stuff archived instead, to never make that mistake again. And naturally, this did not apply to artistic projects only; I keep old photos, screenshots and random snippets from the news only to discover them years later and feel nostalgic. One of my digital „time capsules” from early 2018 includes contemporary heads of governments, info about the Winter Olympics and... Ugandan Knuckles...

Q: Why do you write logs for your projects, and what do they look like?

As I said before, I love archiving stuff and monitoring changes made throughout the years. A prime example of such log is the update channel, a channel on my Discord server dedicated entirely to writing down updates, changes and additions to my passion project, which my inside friends are aware of. The entire channel features quite a lot of updates, written for 4 years, in the style of video game patch notes. Because of this, my friends and I can easily keep track of the many changes I have made to the project.

Q: How would you describe your experience of writing stories for 16 years, and what’s it like writing in Polish?

My writing adventure wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for my dad, to whom I dedicated my first ever fully written story. Since late 2008, I used to write all of my stories on a horizontal sheet of paper, with text being written on the left half of the page, while on the right side, there was the colorful illustration, more or less illustrating what happens in the provided chunk of text. I've produced probably way more of these sheets than I can think of, which they're all sadly gone now.

The first story I've ever written was Volcanic Monster, an illustrated superhero cartoony type story about an Italian guy named Peter who defeated a lava monster from Mount Vesuvius by carrying him to Antarctica and freezing him. Later episodes of the series (yeah, it ended up being a whole series of stories) revolved around Peter taming the lava monster, naming him Sylvester, and going on various adventures. Over the years, the series grew to universe levels, eventually spawning sequels, spin-offs for various characters and countless iterations. All these stories were later remastered and compiled into five volumes of homemade „books”, made by sewing sheet of papers together. All of those volumes are also lost forever. But anyway, the remasters of the Volcanic Monster saga inspired me to write new stories on smaller sheets and compiling them all into these funny „books”. This is the era in which I experimented with different genres, from crime (it was obviously comedically bad) to slice of life fantasy. The latter is the only handwritten book of mine to survive to this very day.

Obviously, I don't write my stories on paper anymore. My first exposure to computer writing was at the beginning of the last decade, where I discovered Polish forums, in which people my age would write their own relay stories. I fell in love with the forum and immediately saw it as a digital library, in which I could write my own stories in forum posts. I immediately digitalized a couple of my childhood favourites, and years later rewrote them on Wattpad. Sadly, the website with the forums had been shut down, but my friends and I have managed to save some relays we used to write. My very own stories, however, are still possible to access via Wattpad. However, I've never translated them. And that brings me to the second part of the question. The language barrier.

Every story of mine is written in Polish, because that's my language (duh), the language in which I used to read books. There were a couple of attempts made to translate my collection of digitalized stories, but it never happened, mainly because there was not enough interest for that, which I totally understand, these stories kinda suck. But even now, as I'm planning my biggest story ever, I am not gonna bother with translating any of it. Writing for me was always a very personal thing, not really meant for international audiences, but rather for inner circles.

That being said, nowadays I'm more of an artist rather than a writer, mainly because I spend a lot of time on foreign sites, and because as a non-native English speaker, it's much easier to present my ideas in a visual way, rather than through raw text. So in other words, I'm a writer in my own country and an artist everywhere else.

Q: Your experiences with the Internet

I've witnessed the Internet ever since I can remember. I was there when Yahoo was bigger than Google, funny videos were aired on television, Google Earth came on discs, and cartoon violence was all over the place. Looking back at early Internet, it was a magical place, which is just a modern day observation, we obviously didn't really think about it that much 20 years ago, and only started to notice it when the Internet culture has become progressively worse and more corporate.

Anyway, it's safe to say that I've been exposed to the Internet way earlier than I honestly should've. My earliest memories are those of random videos on Yahoo, flash games and, of course, writing forums! The Internet at first seemed pretty exciting, but in the 2010's, I was starting to get a bit overwhelmed by it, dare I say scared. At one point, it was considered to be a dangerous place, especially for children. I can totally see that. Luckily, I always knew my netiquette and spent the decade without any serious troubles. I created my Youtube channel in 2012, where I used to upload MS Paint animations, very much influenced by stuff I used to watch earlier. I can't describe it, it was such a fun time to be a creator.

Q: How did you discover NG, and why did you join?

My earliest memory of NG was, you guessed it, flash games, which is probably the most common answer. I used to play those in the late 2000's, not really caring about what „Newgrounds” is exacltly, I only knew it from the little tank man.

That being said, the whole website kinda went under my radar for the next decade, and I only joined as recently as 2020 (as DrSaturn), when I discovered that „Hold on, this is a website for art creators too? It's not just old flash games?” when I was browsing audio on the site. And then, I stayed. DrSaturn was my first account, which was doing pretty poorly, because I didn't really care about it. I deactivated it a year ago, and returned this year as DrSaturn2 (because the previous one was already taken, what a bummer!). I rejoined Newgrounds after having extremely bad experiences with sites like Instagram. Nowadays, I really appreciate this site, and I do everything I can to keep this account in great shape. I do art, and I love it. Thanks, NG.

Q: The story of your username: DrSaturn2

Alright, this one is a fun one. I usually tell others that it's a „long story”, but I'm gonna share it anyway.

Dr Saturn is a character from my childhood story, a minor villain in the Volcanic Monster saga. His name comes from a permament helmet he used to have welded on his head in the shape of a ringed planet. I've been using this username on pretty much all social medias since the mid-2010's, from Youtube to Discord, and NG is no exception.

The reason I picked this random insignificant character was because he made a cameo appearance in one of my early Youtube animations, Spongebob & Patrick: Haunted Night 3, where he pretty much served as a self-insert. The character was received positively, eventually evolving into my channel's mascot, as well as becoming my channel's name itself.

And of course, I've mentioned this before, but the „2” just means that my original username was taken and this is my second account.

On my artworks, I sign myself as „Dr_Saturn” with an underscore, which is how I prefer my username to look. However, I don't think underscores are allowed on NG, so I had to settle on whatever I had.

Q: How can you tell if a text has issues with pull, formatting, presentation, or execution? What are the defining features, and how do you address those problems?

This is just a nitpick and it bothers me only from the perspective of a Polish reader. I'm aware that English language novel structure is different, for example, dialogues are written in quotations.

„I'd love to eat a pizza” said the character.

In Polish writing, it's a bit different. We use dashes instead.

-I'd love to eat a pizza. - said the character.

It's not really a mistake to use quotations in amateurish Polish writings, but Christ almighty, have you ever read a book? Poorly formatted text, with little to no paragraphs, dialogues all over the place and lack of proper punctuation just makes the text hard to read for me, not even as a purist, but as a self-respecting reader as well. I know I'm talking about literal children trying to share their first ever story, but it got real annoying in threads for relay stories, where you HAD to read through this absolute mess and comprehend it in order to keep writing.

I've never addressed this problem to anyone who has been writing like this, I know I'd just be a prick if I did, but it's something that really bothered me on a personal level.

Q: What do you like about creating art?

I'm an artist, I can draw anything I want! Isn't that a cool superpower?

Q: Art and writing advice

Let's start off with writing. As I mentioned earlier, text formatting is very important, if not more important than the actual content in the text. I don't care if your dish is delicious, if it looks like shit I'm not gonna eat it with apetite. First of all, read a book, please. Pay attention to how dialogues are laid out, how to convey a character's thoughts, learn to use proper punctuation, use paragraphs where needed, and please please please use full stops!!! Reading through an essay that is nothing but an endless chain of clauses divided by comas is very disorienting. Just keep that in mind, and I will happily read your text and judge it based on content.

As for art, I don't even know where to start, people have a lot of different troubles with that. So let me tackle two, with which I have some experience with.

First off, if you want to do art as a hobby, learn all the principles yourself at your own pace, there is absolutely no point in going to art school if you're not aiming to work in the industry professionally. From my own experience, art school was a tremendous waste of time and money. I used to enjoy drawing comics before signing up, and after graduation, I was left completely drained from imagination and creativity, having only drawn realistic still life every week for 4 years. If you have a cartoony artstyle that you're proud of, chances are that art school will discourage it, so learn what you wanna learn all by yourself, be your own teacher, be your own judge. If you wanna improve, learn it yourself and don't be afraid of it!

And lastly, this isn't really about the craft itself, but rather how art is being handled online. I've noticed that a lot of beginner Newgrounds artists are discouraged by the frontpage system and often feeling like giving up when their art doesn't get enough attention. Always remember that the little frontpage badge isn't by any means a fixed boundary between good and bad art, and you should never give up when numbers are low. This is not a good mindset. Instead, you should KEEP doing art until you earn what you're aiming for, with high hopes and a big smile with each posted artwork. Interact with the community, nobody gets exposure by doing nothing. Your art has little votes? Make an art thread! Join a collab! There's so many great ways of expanding your audience, often even overlooked. Rome wasn't built in a day. Thus you should never ever give up when things are doing poorly. If you fall on your face, get up and keep marching. That's what we do, as humans.

Well, that concludes my answers. Thank you so much for inviting me!