[thewebcount]

The visuals were a lot of fun, but I don’t understand why I, as a viewer/consumer/whatever of this sort of thing, would ever want these things:

> Unknown runtime

I like to know whether I’m going to have time to view all of something or not. I might want to set aside some time to watch something if it’s too long for the break I’m taking right now.

> No rewinding, no skipping ahead

Ugh. Just … no. If I saw something cool or missed something, I want to see it again without having to watch the preceding 20 minutes again. Also seems like the kind of thing that would eventually be used to try and force you to watch ads, which I don’t need in my life.

> Extremely dense patterns that would get destroyed by video compression

This I can understand! See also SVG.

> Moiré effects that change if you mess with the zoom setting on your browser

OK, if that’s your thing, go with it.

> Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle

So a friend might suggest I watch something, but then when I watch it, I might see something different if I just use a different player? That seems less than ideal.

Anyway, love the visuals, and we could use more stuff like that, but really dislike the above points.

[rickdicker]

I wouldn't say any of those bullet points are inherently better - just differences for you to contemplate. For all the downsides of these things, there are artistic uses of each that sadly are not an option on modern video platforms.

Example - mystery runtime, while inconvenient to someone in a hurry, is useful in keeping suspense or surprise. It's kind of hard to convince a reader that the hero is at risk of dying when there's obviously 2/3rds of a book left.

Do the pros outweigh the cons? Probably not. Should it at least be an option on modern video platforms? Maybe. But the important thing to me, is that we remember how such a thing changes the viewing experience before every film for the rest of time comes with a progress meter attached.

[chrisan]

Would you consider putting this on youtube or something? I grew up with flash (my first paid job was an as3 project for a medical teaching team) and was always interested in the artistic side of flash

I got to the point where you are talking with the older guy but wanted to get back to work and reference something. I noticed whenever I tabbed to something else the video/audio would stop, so I dragged the tab out of firefox create its own window and it continued playing for about 30 seconds then for some reason it stopped and when I looked it was back at the prompt from the start

[rickdicker]

That was the end!

[thaumasiotes]

> It's kind of hard to convince a reader that the hero is at risk of dying when there's obviously 2/3rds of a book left.

This is what George R. R. Martin wanted to do. He will kill the fake-out protagonist at any time.

This is supposed to mean that he is a great writer. But really it just means he's bad at storytelling - you'd tell a better story by just focusing on the actual protagonists instead of random redshirts. Focusing the correct characters has no effect on the plot.

[bccdee]

This is only true if you accept an extremely myopic view of storytelling.

A Song of Ice and Fire is about the illegitimacy of the Lannisters' reign, the choice to execute Ned Stark for discovering it, and the ensuing civil wars. Ned Stark isn't a "fake protagonist" because he dies. He's a protagonist and he dies, and then the story continues. Not every story needs to be a Save The Cat Hollywood screenplay to be "correct," and not every character arc needs to be satisfyingly resolved.

You not getting Boss Baby vibes from Martin's writing doesn't mean he's done anything wrong.

[onion2k]

I'm with you on this. Running Flash as a plugin in a browser is not something I want at all. Flash Player was awful.

But...

The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough. Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, and it enabled people to make fantastic games, sites, experiences, etc.

I suspect the lack of a really good animation and interaction design tool is one thing that's lead to the homogenization of the internet.

[boudin]

I still wonder what browsers would be today if adobe had open sourced flash player and worked on making SWF and action scripts standards to be natively integrated in browsers rather than letting the player die as an annoying badly maintained plugin.

[Closi]

Agree - the success of flash was that it was designer-first rather than developer-first (and I miss that!).

Things like theatre.js look great, but very quickly their documentation make it clear that you are expected to use javascript.

Flash expected you to just draw stuff, animate stuff, and if you like there is an optional scripting environment. The first few iterations of flash didn't really even have much of a scripting environment at all (AS1 was incredibly limited!).

I think that is part of the nostalgia of that period - things were so easy to make that you got some really creative and crazy stuff.

[fphhotchips]

I'm with you. I stopped watching not because of the visuals (which I hated - I immediately got eyestrain - but I can appreciate others might like them), but because I reached the point in the video where I wanted to know how much longer there was. I was interested enough for a couple more minutes, but for all I know, this doesn't get to the point until 10 minutes in. I just don't want that in my life.

Everything on the 'different' list is unambiguously bad to me except maybe the compression thing. I don't want effects that change with zoom settings - that just excludes people who need to be zoomed in to see stuff.

I'm not happy that Flash died. I spent a lot of time playing really fun games in Flash. I'm happy this can exist, but please let's keep doing video essays in videos. That said, now I know Newgrounds still exists I wonder if I can find the impossible quiz...

[smolder]

I don't think the author was implying all of those characteristics they enumerated were positives.

[dusted]

Keep in mind that flash is not simply a linear media to be played back like a movie or song, it's interactive.. What's the run-time in a strategy game ? What does rewind and fast-forward even mean in a story-driven one ?

[chris_armstrong]

You could take the perspective that this is art, and sometimes art sets constraints on how the viewer can experience it that be a limitation of the medium or something deliberate on the part of the artist.

I was happy enough to go with it, even though the flashing at first made me feel a bit uneasy. I'm glad people still find joy in this stuff - I remember building Flash animations in the early 2000s and quite enjoying learning about all this cool animation stuff and laying background music I'd ripped off a disc.

[nextaccountic]

> Unknown runtime

> No rewinding, no skipping ahead

Could this be manually inserted by a specific flash applet? Just like, you know, Youtube started as a flash applet and it had a (custom made) seekable progress bar

This should make animation only slightly harder (it would receive a parameter t instead of mutating things as the time goes forward, but that's best practice for animations anyway I think, at least in gamedev it is)

[nextaccountic]

> > Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle

> So a friend might suggest I watch something, but then when I watch it, I might see something different if I just use a different player? That seems less than ideal.

Sounds like a bug/limitation of Ruffle that might or might not be addressed by future versions, not an inherent thing with Flash