I figure this isn't worth making a front page post about yet, but for those who don't know, I just wanted to provide some fair warning that I will be leaving behind the names JonBro and tehjonbro sometime in the future. I've gone by JonBro for about eight years now, both on the web and in real life, so it's hard to wrap my mind around the idea of going by a new online alias, but I believe it's for the best.
JonBro is a fairly childish and unofficial-sounding name. I remember when I first joined Newgrounds and I wasn't old enough to meet the supposed 'age requirement', someone reviewed an animation I posted and said, "From your name, I thought you were only like 11 years old, but this isn't that bad," when in reality, I was 12 and relieved that the guy hadn't guessed my age. I will be 19 at the end of this month, gradually creeping up on the days when I will no longer be a teenager, and I still have an Internet nickname clearly intended for a preteen. If I have plans to make animation or game design a career of mine, I'd rather refer people back to a polished-looking site with a semi-professional sounding name instead of something like "JonBro.com". Additionally, I think upgrading my name would give me more incentive to act like the adult I'm slowly becoming. I'll always be a child, but I need to be an inner-child who is mature and attentive enough to clean up his work and carry out his ambitions to the fullest.
It doesn't help that there already was a jonbro before me (his name is Jonathan Brodsky) before my website ever existed. Interestingly enough, he makes games, too. I can see us both doing big things in the future, but we will surely approach our work differently and take our own separate career paths. As funny as it would be, I don't foresee us becoming a development team called "The Jon Bros" and I feel it's only fair that he keep the 'jonbro' nickname, because it actually fits his real life name, and he was around before me. He periodically gets tweets and messages from people asking him how he made the Riddle School games, and he always has to redirect the viewers to one of my profiles. I feel bad about this, and I can't expect to completely get rid of the misconceptions, but I'm hoping that if we have separate names, I can at least shrink the confusion a little bit.
When the time comes, I'll launch a new website; I'll make new account names on Newgrounds, Twitter, and YouTube; I'll stop using my JonBro NG page; and I'll change my Twitter account. I'll probably still use my current YouTube channel for anything I make that I don't take very seriously, but since I can't change the 'tehjonbro' name, I'll more or less pretend the name doesn't exist and change the channel's public title instead.
For the record, I won't pretend the "era" of JonBro never existed. Far from it, in fact; my new site will still have all my old content, just categorized a little differently, and I'll continue to embrace it as a part of myself. It's just that I want there to be a dividing line, a jump, between the time I spent making Mario parodies and Flash browser games, and the time I will spend with a fresh creative mindset trying to make my way in the world.
The reason I'm not changing it right now is that I feel the transitional period from JonBro to the new moniker is important. It's kind of a big deal to say goodbye to the identity I've had for so long, and I want to do two things:
1) I want to be sure I've done everything I want to do under the name JonBro before I dismiss it. Can't say for sure what this will entail, but I have a couple of old animations I'm interested in finishing that would be best made under the name JonBro. I might finish one of them, or both, or neither--frankly, 'neither' is the most likely option--but I'd at least like to provide this account (and the associated tehjonbro accounts) with some kind of closure.
2) I want to be sure I've prepared my new identity well enough to solidly justify its creation. It's not enough to just say, "This is what I'm called now and my website looks different," because that would be practically meaningless. I want to find some way to prove the worth of a new outlook, a new persona, whatever you want to call it, by making something special for the occasion. I have no idea how long this might take or what it could be, but I want to find out as soon as I have time and inspiration enough to go through with it.
I seriously doubt the name change will happen anytime in the next several months, but it's something I'm thinking about, and from now until it actually happens, I will surely continue to think about it a lot. Just FYI.
Leopard.
* (I should add that I do already have a new name picked out, so suggestions aren't necessary)
