In a hypothetical just world, whoever came up with that one would be consigned to the special hell: free to leave; but forever liable to be jerkily yanked back into torment without warning or apparent cause. The anticipatory dread should make the periods outside almost as unbearable as those within.
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Eventually all the magnetic domains will decay and the rust will stop spinning, so there’s that to look forward to. The death by increasing entropy of the Flashiverse.
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The internet has ads? Oh, right, you must not be using an ad blocker.
Install Adblock plus. Add easyprivacy to the default easylist. Go to Settings → uncheck “allow acceptable ads”.
Friends don’t let friends go on the internet without adblocking and tracker blocking.
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I’m glad you said this. I have an incredibly soft spot in my heart for Flash because it coaxed me into coding and game/interactivity development. I took an animation class in college l where we use aftereffects primarily, but then dipped into flash. I’d always been on the cartoon side of drawing, and so it hit a sweet spot for me. I’d had it drilled into me, strangely, that I was an “art kid” not a “science/math kid” from various reductive adult sources, my mom chief among them, so it never occurred to me that I would have the capacity or interest in writing code.
That animation class introduced me to one thing: GotoFrame, and that cracked open an entire world. It was only a matter of years before I was writing full-on OOP programs in AS3. Having an easy-to-use IDE where every line of code translated into something interesting happening to my drawings and animation loops pulled me into code, finally understanding the value of trigonometry, and the value of sitting alone and grinding my brain into dust trying to make something work, and eventually into gainful employment. Someone once described Flash as Lego for adults, and though an imperfect analogy, I think there’s of interesting truth in that.
The Flash player killed Flash by being buggy and an infection vector, but also by biting off more than it could chew by trying to become the de facto video standard, which is just buying yourself deadly competition. I don’t mourn the loss of a hazard to internet security wrapped in a walled-garden, but I can’t hate Flash, not completely.
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Adobe was smart in recognizing that Flash’s long term strength was in animation, both on its own and as a learning tool. It’s a shame that the Flash player itself was such a security flaw and resource hog.
Maaaany years ago, I was the “multimedia director” (or some such thing) at a web design studio, and some of the new hires out of art school were gung-ho on Flash and were lobbying the company heads to move away from coded sites and start doing all-Flash for all of our corporate sites. The company flew me out to FlashForward, the Flash conference, and told me to come back to evangelize about Flash. What I heard from the developers from Macromedia (this was right before Adobe’s acquisition), however, was the opposite.
The Macromedia guys said that Flash was great for three things: animation, video, and mobile. They were extremely excited about “Flash Lite” for mobile phones and predicted it was the future of Flash, and told people repeatedly that Flash was a very poor tool to build websites in. When I returned from the conference, nobody wanted to hear that news. Fifteen years later, and I’m vindicated! 
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Oh, you were vindicated long before.
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I still think of “Nippon Q Queue” whenever someone types “que” or “queue” instead of “cue.”
Also helpful in my day to day internet life:
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Personally, I blame Barry Allen; it is almost always his fault.
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Watch your language, there’s no call for that kind of obscenity!
OK, that’s enough - both of you better go to your rooms before I wash your mouths out with soap!
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You made a Flash website using InDesign? That is possible?
That style of animation relies on clean, sharp lines. It’s something that comes across in the original homestar site, but youtube muddies it up.
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sadly it also breaks all the fun easter eggs and such.
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Absolutely.
That’s exactly what the professors were telling us to do for our portfolio websites in '08-'09… and yet simultaneously literally every single available piece of professional advice not coming from the isolation pod of academia was "for the love of god, don’t build your portfolio website in Flash."
I’m pretty glad that my education and career start neatly coincided with pretty much everyone acknowledging that Flash (for websites, at least… I did wind up building a banner ad or two) and QuarkXPress were effectively dead technologies not worth the effort of learning.
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A lot of that is how the video was transferred. The official YouTube channel is much sharper.
But you cannot pick up yon glass!
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In High School (Around 2005ish) we were taught how to make websites.
In Microsoft Word.
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