It has been a while since I started publishing my work on this website, and I think it's time to talk about my current meme-related blog project. I'm about to reveal something that was never shown to the public before, as it was stuck in the planning stages for quite a long time before I finally resumed work on it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you "Weegee's Journey," my upcoming blog series about an internet meme called “Weegee" and related characters (including some others as well).

Are you familiar with Weegee? For starters, Weegee is an internet meme that became popular through various edits and parodies colloquially known as "YouTube Poops" (or YTPs for short), which gained popularity during the late 2000s and early 2010s. The character eventually got its own dedicated community known as the “Weegee Fad,” which was influential in proliferating similar derivative characters like him. Still, it was pretty small compared to the wider YTP Fandom. This fad emerged in tandem with the broader YTP community of that time, encouraging people to do things similarly to what YTP makers did with video and audio remixes but by propagating multicoloured Weegee images instead. Soon, entirely new characters like “Malleo” (a distorted, Weegee-style Mario) appeared. Instead of relying on pre-existing character's templates like it was the case with most recolors. These were usually sourced from obscure media like bootleg games, weird box arts, and game sprites to fill the stories of imaginary meme universes after receiving "Weegee-inspired" names and designs, while others simply went from being recolors to become their own separate characters altogether. Individuals often created personalized sprites of Weegee with image editors such as Paint, GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Allowing them to shape him into any character they required.

Unquestionably, Weegee was the most popular character, followed by Malleo. Of course, there are many others, but for now we'll focus on a few I think are important to my own meme universe. Including the ones I've choosen (I only add characters that matter to the plot or that I've drawn myself).

Weegee's Journey, my upcoming textual blog series, originally began as an undeveloped Flash YTP project (a YTP-related subgenre with all sorts of special effects and 2D animations) intended for online episodic video release. Each episode was supposed to be centered around various "Weegee-related" characters interacting with each others (including Weegee himself, the basis of all these meme characters). The word "undeveloped" here doesn't mean the project has been completely canceled or that nothing will ever be done with it; rather, it means no tool currently available on the web was enough to satisfy my creative requirements for finishing it. Great ideas require great tools, and I'm still waiting for those tools to become viable so all conditions for creating my future video project will be met. I was thinking about using open-source video editing tools to finish my work with the video version of Weegee's Journey, but I have yet to find a good, freely available editor capable of making this parody project a reality. I also thought about adopting AI tools to improve productivity and speed up my workflow, but I still haven't found an effective way to make good use of them aside from a few limited tasks like special FX, prop, and environment generation; which don't require as much precision compared to other manual video-related tasks like sprite animation.

All the custom meme lore I created for the drawings I published on MediBang was meant to be an integral part of the vast universe where this series was supposed to take place. I actually wanted all spoken dialogues of each character in the text version to be exactly the same as they would appear in the animated video version of this project, with some tweaks to make it flow better under my own personal standards of what constitutes a good story (we all have our own, of course). As for myself, I have always had a strong desire to turn all these ideas I've encountered on the Internet into something more coherent (for me, at least). I never felt like any of these characters were used in any kind of meaningful way by anyone despite the potential for telling "cool" stories with them. Before I can even think about video editing, I'll keep using this version as a writing exercise to see how much I can experiment with it (I didn't want to do this for anything but fun). This meme series was also meant to ask a few specific meme-related questions I had in mind that I felt no one had really brought up before, like, for example...

Would anyone be interested in a third "Weegee-like" character named "Bushee" joining others like Walleo and Waweegee? Would that even the odds if they were to face off against Weegee, Malleo, and Yushee? Well, that's up to us to decide regardless of how we choose to write our stories. They won't appeal to everyone, but at least I'll give them a place to reside here in this blog.

The current situation regarding software tool availability or anything else I absolutely need to start working on the video version of my meme series right away isn't quite conducive to production by the time I was writing this article. I still have yet to find something that might help make that version of my project a reality. All work related to the video adaptation of Weegee's Journey shall be suspended in favor of the text version, which will continue exclusively as a written blog series until I find better ways to express these ideas. This current iteration of my web series will provide people the chance to read and appreciate it for what it is: a humorous meme story.