The badly drawn wobbler

In the distant past of… 2016, young me decided that I was going to be a Youtuber! Whether that was a good idea or not is debatable, but I remember clearly that I wanted to have one of those cringe as hell gaming intros with what is equivalent to the average YouTube family content creator personality. I started my first channel, under the name of TNT MAN!!!. You can already see the 8 year old energy in that. That would evolve into TNT Man Inc and now it’s settled as A badly drawn wobbler. (switch to youtube family creator voice) But wait! Why a badly drawn wobbler? Why was I a MAN MADE OUT OF TNT IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! Why was this mysterious wobbler chosen above ALL ELSE!?

For the people who didn’t die reading the intro, heres the story.

The beginning

In the distant past of before lockdown, 11 year old me decided that my memory was not important, so I have forgotten a lot from this time period. All I remember that when I was 8 I started a YouTube channel. I had to decide a name on it, and out of all the names I could’ve chosen, it was TNT MAN!!!. This was because I really liked Minecraft (I still do), specifically the demolition part of it (I also still like this part, but less).

9 year old me decided “hmm, I kinda like making scuffed music. Maybe I can upload those to YouTube!” And so my first corporate rebrand started, under the name of TNT Man Inc. I still have the original songs on hand, but I’m not sure if I want to publish them online again. Maybe one day as a blog post in case I need to speedrun making one. I’ll just say that they were, scuffed.

11 was the time I started programming open source, so I needed a name for my github account. This was chosen by chance to be the cool, hip, and fresh name of… Suyashtnt. I do not remember why I chose this name, but it probably has to do that my email was also ”[email protected].”

12 Year old me… It’s a long story.

Lockdown strikes

Lockdown hit South Africa. 2 Months later, 12 Year old me (and my friend) decided it would be a cool idea mod Minecraft. We were both stuck at home, and I guess neither of us had anything better. I was working on Just Another Ruby Mod, but my friend had different ideas.

Presenting: The Sushal mod

My friend decided to start working on the next biggest mod in minecraft: The Sushal mod. This mod was basically an inside joke of my common nickname at the time: Sushi/Sushal. The mod added blocks of sushal which dropped sushi, soya oceans, and a whole Sushal dimension. It was going to be LEGENDARY.

We decided that using Java to create our mods would be too difficult, so we both decided to use MCreator. This choice was pretty good for both of us, and the first version of The Sushal mod was finished in about a day. It was the start of something great, but there was one major issue.

Sushal block texture

The main block of the Sushal dimension was the Sushal block. There were a few options for the texture at the time:

• My face (no)
• Literal sushi (boring)
• My discord profile picture (sure I guess; Why not?)

So, the first version of the mod had my discord profile as the texture. The issue was that my discord profile picture was Landfall’s TABS Emoji . This emoji is what’s known as a wobbler, the base humanoid-style unit in TABS. Me at the time thought “Wait since landfall owns this emoji they may not like it.” I asked my friend about that. This was the response:

Creation of the badly drawn wobbler

3 Minute speedpaint

2 hours and 25 minutes later, I started work on the wobbler. Since I didn’t want to use MS paint for some bizzare reason, I decided to use Paint 3D, Windows 10’s secondary builtin paint tool. I basically put in the emoji into paint 3D and then traced over it, using a mouse. One could call it quite badly drawn. 3 minutes of no blood, little sweat, and not even a tear later, this was produced:

As you can see, it was… scuffed. It was also too low resolution so curseforge didn’t accept it as the mod thumbnail, which we planned to do. Some refinement had to be done before continuing, but this was the beginning of basically the face of me online, quite literally.

"""Refinement"""

So, first things first: increase the resolution. It was bumped up by quite a bit, and it looked semi-decent. I then decided to add some sort of “chin”. Wether this was a good or bad decision… You can decide. I then upscaled it, using AI to smooth the edges. Fun fact: finding the tool and upscaling took longer than the creation of the first version of the wobbler.

The AI version looks quite cool, so I decided to keep it, even with its artifacts. The mod was uploaded to curseforge. That would be the end of the story, and this blog post wouldn’t exist, but this message came in:

And the rest is history.