📯 From the World

Flash is Dead

It’s funny, I still find myself defending Flash against the lumbering and dreary HTML5 pipeline that proclaimed itself successor – even now, HTML5 gaming struggles to hold a candle to what Flash could do a decade ago with a lack of decent vector animation and inconsistent performance across browers.

I think that the Flash game scene circa 2006-2010 was a LOT more friendly to newcomers. The current mobile market is too noisy and everything goes through one gatekeeper. If mobile stores worked more like the Flash portals of that era, I think there would be a much more interesting and vibrant indie ecosystem on mobile.

I’ve heard from people that Apple helped kill of Flash by not supporting it on iPhone, but Adobe had years and years to adapt and constantly let the community down, and I wonder what the world of casual games would be like now if Flash was still a viable platform for developers to use. I have a suspicion that the democratisation of platform and development that was seen in the early flash days on web portals would mean a less stale corporate run culture around small free to play games these days. — Flash Game History

Aw the nostalgia. The web’s gone growned up. Hope someone puts together an archive and emulator collection, like can be found for old arcade games.

And there’s all the animation from before we had the bandwidth for video. Maybe it’s a horrible exploit, but there was something magic about Strongbad’s virus opening a new browser window on my machine. I’d say you can’t do that with an mpeg, but Windows Media Player was a a bit hacky back in the day.

💎 Rethinking

REMEMBER: Picking a president isn’t like picking a friend. You are choosing your adversary. All politicians must be held accountable by the people… but only some of them show willing to listen. — Amy Hoy

I’ve never heard this expressed so explicitly in non-partisan ways. It’s also a plea for active participation.

🔥 Alchemy of Creation

Is now the time to change the furniture? What if we changed everything? No no no. Too much… But, what is the space for? We can make it inviting.

📍 A Point on the Timeline

Apparently, I’m a virgo and act like it

Cyberpunk Red

Alex’s netrunning deck got hacked when we were defending the apartment from WorldSat. Apogee unplugged her, but we haven’t got it fixed yet. VR is kinda like netrunning; you’re jacked in somewhere. Whatever virus pwned Alex’s deck got her interface too. Brain Dance just got weird.

The sim profiled us for all our gear. Weapons, Cyberwear, netrunning gear. Alex tried this VR version out. But, she wasn’t hacking the sim, the interface was infecting the hardware. The game glitched out. It felt… pleasurable. Then it glitched out again. Where did these clowns come from?

We shoot down JoJo the clown, and one of the cops pop’s back in. I thought this sim was PG, why is there blood here now?

More glitching. D311B0i gets shot down. Another clown takes their place, Noodles. Noodles starts dragging the trainee’s corpse down the hallway. Why is there an elephant flying 40 stories up? Oh, it’s feeding time. Cops for breakfast.

We shoot down the last of the cops, and shortly after things return to normal. I think. We take a moment to catch our breath. We done? Elevator goes ping.