09 / JUL / 2025
The E-Zine, the Madness, and Agora Road's Eight Crazy Nights
I've recently embarked on three impromptu side projects: an e-zine, a video essay for Madness Day, and my submission for the Agora Road 2025 Christmas Special.
As you all know, I have a horrible history of coming up with projects that never exit the womb (see also: CusServ, Wrong Guy, and Campus Siege), and a just-as-long history of starting projects that are never finished (浪人さまのチャレンジ, The Enigmas, YOMI HUSTLE: Campaign)... So, I'll be detailing these three side projects in my blog just in case they never take full form. I'll go from least likely to come to fruition to most likely, which conveniently happens to align with the timeframes by which I'd like to get each project done.
Firstly is an e-zine about works in progress; essentially, I would get various people online to contribute a page or two for whatever ongoing project they have as a behind-the-scenes status update. There would be two types of entries: Those for ongoing projects, and those for one-off projects.
In the former category, these would be projects like ongoing webcomics, video series, progress on a video game, etc. It would be sort of a chance for people to build a following for whatever big project they're making while showing off how things are done.
In the latter category, this would amount to a simple "here's the complete thing, and this is how I did it." Game jams, poems, illustrations, that sort of thing; projects that have behind-the-scenes information to be shared, but aren't ongoing in a way where people are checking back in to see how it's going.
I can't imagine this would be a terribly difficult project to get off the ground, but the fact of the matter is that I really have no idea how to make an e-zine. I experimented with making a .pdf in GIMP, which led to a very quick realization that GIMP is very, very bad for making .pdf files. That, on top of the fact that I would be making each page one-by-one as their own individual files, then having to tie them all together in one larger file, made me think that it would be a better idea to just work with some other software.
I know that I could just use Canva. I know that it's by far the most useful software to work with in this department... But I have a childish aversion to using any software developed by a big tech company. I've looked for other tools, but none of them seem to be very useful, so... I might just have to bite the bullet and make a Canva account.
My Madness Day video, meanwhile, is purely a work of passion that my hands have been making on their own. As a result, it's not very good. Regardless, it's something that I'd like to put out there, as it's my own analysis of what's been going on in the Madness Combat community since the release of Friday Night Funkin'.
The premise of the video is based on what was said at the end of Kryy's second video on the Madness Iceberg, particularly on the distinction between "Neo-Madness" and "Post-Madness."
The way I see it, Neo-Madness is the result of what the Friday Night Funkin' fandom did to the Madness Community. What happened was that a massive influx of people came in with a primary focus on FNF as their interest, with Madness being more of a secondary interest. As a result, there came a flood of Madness content that wasn't true to the spirit of Madness Combat. Because these people had an inherent FNF-shaped distance from Madness, they filtered it through that other interest and made simple memes that were only Madness-related on the surface. Simply put: Neo-Madness is superficial.
Post-Madness, on the other hand, was made both in spite of Neo-Madness and out of love for the spirit of Madness Combat. I point to the Rozpierdalation series as the prominent example of Post-Madness, it being rife with references to more obscure, older Madness Combat animations while also telling its own unique story divorced from the official Madness Combat lore. This, in tandem with the series' eagerness to take visual approches uncommon in other Madness fanimations, is more or less the blueprint for what can be considered or classified as Post-Madness.
There's also the concept of "Cinemadness," seen most prominently in Bridge Mankind Collapse, MADNESS: CASIMIR, and the aptly-titled Cinemadness: Subjugation. While not a necessary component of Post-Madness animations, this style has pulled Madness Combat away from its Tumblresque memes and towards something more akin to a genre than a series to simply be a fan of.
All told, the current state of Madness is thanks to the Post-Madness movement, which I truly believe a lot of today's animations owe their existence to. Without it, we would have nothing but Neo-madness's superficial memes and aesthetics with no substance besides external references.
Finally, there's my submission for the 2025 Agora Road Christmas Special. This one is simply a parody of "Bum Biddy" from Eight Crazy Nights with "Janny" instead of Whitey... and that's pretty much all I have to say on the matter.
Well, not entirely. I'll have to nag some users to sing their own parts, and hopefully get the other collab participants to sing the "bum biddy biddy biddy bum bum" part towards the end. And on top of that, there's the question of whether or not I do the visuals myself or pass them on to someone else.
In any case, I hope to have fun with it.
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