"A stranger is being shown around a village that he has just become part of. He is shown a well and his guide says "On any day except Tuesday, you can shout any question down that well and you'll be told the answer." The man seems pretty impressed, and so he shouts down, "Why not on Tuesday?" A voice from in the well shouts back, "Because on Tuesday, it's your day in the well."
I'm brightobject/bo, 21 year-old Korean-American heading into my last semester at art school. Never been much of a competitive pokemon player, but was really involved in the art / creative scenes here on Smogon and Showdown for a while before moving into the social forums. Nowadays I mostly lurk onsite, spending the majority of my time shooting the shit in the GP discord, so it was pretty crazy to see that I'd won the voting for this well!
Growing up, my parents were adamant about not letting me own any video games or personal devices for the longest time-the first video game console I got was a Gamecube at like...11 or 12 years old? This meant I was THAT kid on the playground or at the afterschool program, begging the older kids to borrow the Gameboy just to mess around in Pokemon Emerald for half an hour. Looking back though, playing the game was never really the goal-it was all about just getting more of a peek into the world of Pokemon that I had fallen in love with from the show. I would read Nintendo Power in the school library obsessively to get info on the latest generations of Pokemon. The DPP Adventures comic and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Shinji's Rescue Team comics also played a huge role in really getting me to love Pokemon's characters as much as I did! I remember one of the hypest birthday gifts I ever got was a complete National Pokedex game guide to DPP, even though I owned none of the games--it was really just cool looking at the variety of designs.
Eventually I started looking for places where other people would post Pokemon fan content, and that got me involved in the deviantart Fakemon community. It was a lot more nascent then, and there was tons of weird cultish behavior and outlandish drama. Luckily I was too young and not internet-savvy enough to really get involved in the bad stuff--I made tons of really nice fakemon that I'm still pretty proud of today, and would like to think I held a kind of "respected outsider" position in the community rankings of fakemon artists on deviantart (though ultimately I was still pretty small-time, I rubbed shoulders with a lot of the most popular fakemon artists on deviantart at one point or another). Seeing how most of the successful fakemon creators operate on instagram and other sites now, and with deviantart itself having basically changed completely, I look back on this period of my life with a lot of nostalgia.
I don't remember exactly how but at some point I got into showdown--probably some random high school friends showing me how easy it was to play during computer class. I started looking into the chatrooms, and got involved in the Art Room, finding out about the Smog in the process. I got really excited about the idea of contributing and really grinded for it...not that the barrier to doing so was exactly high, but having my artwork be a part of a group project online was a big deal for me at the time. I ended up moving away from Showdown art room just bc the userbase was younger and I just did not have the sustained chill to deal with that energy, but I kept working hard at the Smog. I poured hours into making illustrations for the e-mag and various other community projects (some of which I still think hold up, by the way!)--I don't remember exactly how I felt when I got the Artist Badge but it definitely must have been one of the proudest moments of my life at the time. I don't have the time or energy around Pokemon fanart that I used to, which is why I'm no longer involved w the (amazing) work being done in Smeragle's / CAP / etc., but I look back on it really fondly-everyone was super supportive and it was awesome to exist in that space and more academic spaces in real life at the same time.
At some point I started checking out Firebot and tryharded to an embarassing degree there, using my artist gimmick to bypass my middling humor and curry favor-- and it worked lol. I remember being active in the irc late into its lifespan and watching discord take over just as I had gotten used to skype and irc (being a general latecomer to the internet). Firebot was an experience for sure--met some of the funniest and smartest people I know and also got savvy to the best / the worst the internet had to offer. After a long period of incredible memes and historical smogon moments (anyone remember Subjugator?) Firebot started to dry up a bit--I eventually became Firemod but in a forum built around having very few rules it wasn't a very demanding or active role compared to what I had already been doing, so I started gravitating towards Cong instead (especially as I started learning more in school about the topics that ppl discussed there). One day I woke up and Firebot was cancelled (I'll save you my thoughts on that whole fiasco) but I'd more or less stopped posting in Firebot by that point so it didn't end up changing too much for me.
Outside of Smogon / Pokemon, I am a manga / comics nut. A huge fan of One Piece (1k hype!) but love most kinds of sequential art and not just action / shounen stuff. Yusuke Murata, Ronald Wimberly, Michael DeForge, and Daniel Warren are some of my idols in the latter department though! I'm also in love with DDR. I'd actually never played it until I entered college. There was a machine they had set up in the freshman dorms that was free to play, and I'm pretty sure they ended up putting it in storage because I would play literally 4-5 hours a day. Any kind of funky / rhythm heavy music in general I am down for, and even though it's hard to access machines in the pandemic, dancing by myself is still a jam. Really though, I just gobble up any kind of visual media since it helps my brain come up with new ideas for drawings and characters. Some recent stuff I've been super into: just finished 100%'ing Hades on Steam, and watched Minari by Lee Isaac Chung. Two masterpieces!
As I mentioned earlier I'm in my senior year, studying for a BFA in Illustration, which really just means I can do whatever I want. I mostly work in a mix of traditional and digital nowadays, using digital editing to finish up and edit a base drawing. You can check out some of my art on instagram for reference: https://www.instagram.com/geathjerk/. As for where I might go after this, there's just so many options...I'm interested in teaching and/or comics, but I think there's still time to just live my life for a bit. College has been a rough ride for me but I've grown a LOT and I'm proud to say that I feel like I'm in a very stable place right now, in spite of the pandemic and everything else 2020 has wrought. Looking forward to a better 2021 (lol)!
And here I am now! Again--mostly a lurker lately, but appreciative of the smogoff love :-) Feel free to ask me anything and I'll do my best to answer!
I'm brightobject/bo, 21 year-old Korean-American heading into my last semester at art school. Never been much of a competitive pokemon player, but was really involved in the art / creative scenes here on Smogon and Showdown for a while before moving into the social forums. Nowadays I mostly lurk onsite, spending the majority of my time shooting the shit in the GP discord, so it was pretty crazy to see that I'd won the voting for this well!
Growing up, my parents were adamant about not letting me own any video games or personal devices for the longest time-the first video game console I got was a Gamecube at like...11 or 12 years old? This meant I was THAT kid on the playground or at the afterschool program, begging the older kids to borrow the Gameboy just to mess around in Pokemon Emerald for half an hour. Looking back though, playing the game was never really the goal-it was all about just getting more of a peek into the world of Pokemon that I had fallen in love with from the show. I would read Nintendo Power in the school library obsessively to get info on the latest generations of Pokemon. The DPP Adventures comic and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Shinji's Rescue Team comics also played a huge role in really getting me to love Pokemon's characters as much as I did! I remember one of the hypest birthday gifts I ever got was a complete National Pokedex game guide to DPP, even though I owned none of the games--it was really just cool looking at the variety of designs.
Eventually I started looking for places where other people would post Pokemon fan content, and that got me involved in the deviantart Fakemon community. It was a lot more nascent then, and there was tons of weird cultish behavior and outlandish drama. Luckily I was too young and not internet-savvy enough to really get involved in the bad stuff--I made tons of really nice fakemon that I'm still pretty proud of today, and would like to think I held a kind of "respected outsider" position in the community rankings of fakemon artists on deviantart (though ultimately I was still pretty small-time, I rubbed shoulders with a lot of the most popular fakemon artists on deviantart at one point or another). Seeing how most of the successful fakemon creators operate on instagram and other sites now, and with deviantart itself having basically changed completely, I look back on this period of my life with a lot of nostalgia.
I don't remember exactly how but at some point I got into showdown--probably some random high school friends showing me how easy it was to play during computer class. I started looking into the chatrooms, and got involved in the Art Room, finding out about the Smog in the process. I got really excited about the idea of contributing and really grinded for it...not that the barrier to doing so was exactly high, but having my artwork be a part of a group project online was a big deal for me at the time. I ended up moving away from Showdown art room just bc the userbase was younger and I just did not have the sustained chill to deal with that energy, but I kept working hard at the Smog. I poured hours into making illustrations for the e-mag and various other community projects (some of which I still think hold up, by the way!)--I don't remember exactly how I felt when I got the Artist Badge but it definitely must have been one of the proudest moments of my life at the time. I don't have the time or energy around Pokemon fanart that I used to, which is why I'm no longer involved w the (amazing) work being done in Smeragle's / CAP / etc., but I look back on it really fondly-everyone was super supportive and it was awesome to exist in that space and more academic spaces in real life at the same time.
At some point I started checking out Firebot and tryharded to an embarassing degree there, using my artist gimmick to bypass my middling humor and curry favor-- and it worked lol. I remember being active in the irc late into its lifespan and watching discord take over just as I had gotten used to skype and irc (being a general latecomer to the internet). Firebot was an experience for sure--met some of the funniest and smartest people I know and also got savvy to the best / the worst the internet had to offer. After a long period of incredible memes and historical smogon moments (anyone remember Subjugator?) Firebot started to dry up a bit--I eventually became Firemod but in a forum built around having very few rules it wasn't a very demanding or active role compared to what I had already been doing, so I started gravitating towards Cong instead (especially as I started learning more in school about the topics that ppl discussed there). One day I woke up and Firebot was cancelled (I'll save you my thoughts on that whole fiasco) but I'd more or less stopped posting in Firebot by that point so it didn't end up changing too much for me.
Outside of Smogon / Pokemon, I am a manga / comics nut. A huge fan of One Piece (1k hype!) but love most kinds of sequential art and not just action / shounen stuff. Yusuke Murata, Ronald Wimberly, Michael DeForge, and Daniel Warren are some of my idols in the latter department though! I'm also in love with DDR. I'd actually never played it until I entered college. There was a machine they had set up in the freshman dorms that was free to play, and I'm pretty sure they ended up putting it in storage because I would play literally 4-5 hours a day. Any kind of funky / rhythm heavy music in general I am down for, and even though it's hard to access machines in the pandemic, dancing by myself is still a jam. Really though, I just gobble up any kind of visual media since it helps my brain come up with new ideas for drawings and characters. Some recent stuff I've been super into: just finished 100%'ing Hades on Steam, and watched Minari by Lee Isaac Chung. Two masterpieces!
As I mentioned earlier I'm in my senior year, studying for a BFA in Illustration, which really just means I can do whatever I want. I mostly work in a mix of traditional and digital nowadays, using digital editing to finish up and edit a base drawing. You can check out some of my art on instagram for reference: https://www.instagram.com/geathjerk/. As for where I might go after this, there's just so many options...I'm interested in teaching and/or comics, but I think there's still time to just live my life for a bit. College has been a rough ride for me but I've grown a LOT and I'm proud to say that I feel like I'm in a very stable place right now, in spite of the pandemic and everything else 2020 has wrought. Looking forward to a better 2021 (lol)!
And here I am now! Again--mostly a lurker lately, but appreciative of the smogoff love :-) Feel free to ask me anything and I'll do my best to answer!
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