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[Frumple]

Too much effort, more like, when other means are technically viable. Their official updates on the matter and shite have been emphasizing "there's other shit to use that work more easily with mobile crap and we don't want to spend money on updating anymore kthxbai" more than anything about security.

[Iduno]

So, is there an actual reason Flash won't be supported anymore?

Too much of a security risk, I think. Flash is really good at accessing your computer through the internet.

And Adobe is shit at fixing bugs, or frequently feeling like they should have to fix bugs with their software. I think HTML5 was supposed to be able to do the same things without the security risks, but I know nothing about how it's working.

[Reelya]

Fite me!

The issue with the USSR is that it was extremely authoritarian.
(I mean, so was Cuba under Castro, but apparently he didn't suck that much.)

A social society/commune can only work with the will of the people. In fact, the USSR wasn't supposed to be dictatorial. Stalin was just a greedy hoe. It was meant to be run by soviet councils throughout the state.

Of course, I believe the state to be the issue but that's just not a realistic goal for my lifetime.

The main discord is that Marx's Historical Materialism "Communism" is entirely different in basis from the political-type Communism of the USSR and China. USSR-type systems are about imposing a system on people, by a decision, whereas Historical Materialism is about how systems supplant other systems because they just fit the current state of technology better. And it doesn't require people to like or want the new system. The new system pushes out the old, because it's a better fit. The same as CDs pushed out vinyl, regardless of people who liked vinyl better.

Marx's main point in Historical Materialism was that it (EDIT for clarity: Communism) would be at the point where productivity increases (i.e. automation) meant work was "life's prime want". i.e. there's so little to do that you're now living to find meaning in work rather than working to find meaning in life. Another way to look at this would be that we've moved a level up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is what is markedly different to the USSR-style communism. In USSR-style, everyone works, and everyone gets the same. Labor is everything. However, in the Historical Materialism model, Communism is what happens when labor and wages are obsolete concepts. So, of course we are going to move onto a new model then, because the old model no longer works.

So, real-life "true" communism isn't some sort of everyone-pull-together hippie love fest, it's just humanity freed from labor constraints, with whatever that entails. Money may become obsolete, not because we sat everyone down and decided to abolish money one day, but because the idea of money might not make any sense anymore.

A good analogy for Historical Materialism is music technology. You had tapes and records, then CDs came in. CDs didn't break the paradigm. However, then online sharing happened and this freaked out the record companies, they didn't know how to react, tried to use lawsuits (i.e politics) to force things to stay the same. This failed, but eventually the new "streaming" model reconciled the issue. The new paradigm is settled. So yeah, these types of things are inevitable paradigm shifts, an evolution, but you should definitely expect trouble to flare up as the benefactors of the status quo see their power base collapsing, similar to how the record companies overreacted to file sharing.

[Lord Shonus]

There's a lot of that going on in USSR-style "communism". Most famously, Marx's notion of religion as "the opiate of the masses" was nothing more than the simple statement that the proletariat turns to religion to soothe the pain of their inferior economic position. Marx predicted that the role of religion would thus diminish as we approached the new form of society (due to said inferior position becoming much less inferior), but defining it as an opiate was not necessarily a condemnation in an age where opiates were a readily available balm against pain and cough - and it certainly wasn't a "therefore you must destroy religion" dictum.

[Rolan7]

So, is there an actual reason Flash won't be supported anymore?

Too much of a security risk, I think. Flash is really good at accessing your computer through the internet.

There's no reason for it to be that way.  They just decided to add a ridiculous amount of extra options, and did so poorly.  And now they're dropping their ball and letting a couple decades of art die.

fuckers, but they're behind a corporation, whatever.

Better minds are preserving it, and keeping it safe and accessible via Flashpoint.

[Reelya]

I wouldn't be too concerned that two decades of art will "die". It's a fucking animation plug-in. People will find a way. It isn't rocket science to find a way to get flash content to play. They'll just sandbox it or something.

For example, Flash was made for a time when capabilities were a lot lower, so it made sense that you downloaded a player and a small(ish) file to to played. They could just run the thing server-side nowadays and send you an interactive video in real time. That's do-able: look at the rise of video-game streaming services.

Another thing that could be viable is converting the Flash games to run with a lightweight HTML5 based player that's sent along with the page. They could even look at what features each game needs and only send down the appropriate scripts. The 20MB Flash player has a ton of stuff that few if any games would actually use. You could probably get that down to a couple of MB worth of the stuff that any specific game actually needs.

[Rolan7]

I wouldn't be too concerned that two decades of art will "die". It's a fucking animation plug-in. People will find a way. It isn't rocket science to find a way to get flash content to play. They'll just sandbox it or something.

For example, Flash was made for a time when capabilities were a lot lower, so it made sense that you downloaded a player and a small(ish) file to to played. They could just run the thing server-side nowadays and send you an interactive video in real time. That's do-able: look at the rise of video-game streaming services.

Another thing that could be viable is converting the Flash games to run with a lightweight HTML5 based player that's sent along with the page. They could even look at what features each game needs and only send down the appropriate scripts. The 20MB Flash player has a ton of stuff that few if any games would actually use. You could probably get that down to a couple of MB worth of the stuff that any specific game actually needs.

They don't translate directly to HTML5, *obviously*, because it's more than "a fucking animation plug-in".

But yes, people will find a way to sandbox it.  In more ways than one.  Yes, we could rely on people to set up a full Windows... eh, XP...?  Or 7 virtual machine, to load the swfs.  But that's not enough, because these things weren't made with preservation in mind.

The files expect to be run from certain URLs - which to be fair isn't TECHNICALLY Adobe's fault, though they certain influenced the developer culture with their practices.

It's okay, though, more proactive minds who RECOGNIZE THE FUCKING PROBLEM made the Flashpoint system, which uses a local proxy to preserve nigh-countless works of art.  Your opinion doesn't matter, these shitty flash games will outlive both you and me.  As will certain gems which would otherwise be lost to time.

[Reelya]

I didn't say they were HTML5 compatible, the point was it's not like it would be overly difficult to write Javascript that takes the swf and spits out HTML5 as output. People write emulators in Javascript all the time. There are PSP emulators written in Javascript. Flash will be a cinch, if people are already putting out Javascript based emulators of hardware with 3D graphics acceleration.

You can bullshit to the swf that it's running on whatever URL you like: when it asks, you lie to it. It's sandboxed, it won't know the difference.

This stuff will advance rapidly if Flash plug-ins disappear. The only reason it hasn't already is that currently, there's no need. If the plug-ins go, then it won't just be Flashpoint, you'll have groups springing up left and right with different solutions to keep this stuff alive. It's not going anywhere. In fact, it might be the case that the average end-user doesn't really notice the changeover. Does it really seem likely that we're going to have the "flashpocalypse" when every single flash-enabled bit of content suddenly stops working, permanently? Or will people already be rolling out solutions from day 1? There's money riding on Flash-based systems, those vendors will fund the solutions if nobody else does.

[Frumple]

By and large they don't seem to be, though? Most former major flash sites have been phasing it out over the last few years, switching over to html5 (for video, mostly) or unity or somethin'. Adobe's dropping support in part because usage of flash based services have straight up fucking tanked over the last while. Vendors aren't going to fund a flash emulator or whatever, they're going to drop flash and migrate to something else. Most already have. Once official support stops that's almost certainly going to get worse, not see some kind of commerical scramble for something able to run .swfs.

[Rolan7]

First off I'd like to apologize for getting fired-up about this preservation issue.  I care about it a lot, and lashed out just a little bit.
it's also a bit late at night here

But that said, what?  You'd not only claim that it's not "overly difficult" to... to translate Flash to HTML5... you'd have it done in Javascript of all languages?  One of the shittiest of all scripting languages?

I'm prepared to be surprised, I am humble.  But I *expect* such translations to be for animations, possibly the simpler branching-path games.  Not for the intricate Flash games which were written for later Flash engines, and were much more than glorified frame-lists.

"This stuff will advance rapidly if Flash plug-ins disappear" I'm going to get offensive again: fuck that mindset.  Even if Flash-plugins hadn't already begun to disappear, which is reality, that's a naive point of view.  We were warned of the """death""" of Flash a long time ago, and people took real action.  Not me, so I have no high ground beyond saving a few hundred swf files which turned out to be thankfully redundant.  Better minds than I preserved the Flash scene.

"If" Flash plug-ins dissapear...  sorry, I get emotional about this, I hate Adobe and Google for this.  Not you.

[Rolan7]

I didn't say they were HTML5 compatible, the point was it's not like it would be overly difficult to write Javascript that takes the swf and spits out HTML5 as output. People write emulators in Javascript all the time. There are PSP emulators written in Javascript. Flash will be a cinch, if people are already putting out Javascript based emulators of hardware with 3D graphics acceleration.

You can bullshit to the swf that it's running on whatever URL you like: when it asks, you lie to it. It's sandboxed, it won't know the difference.

This stuff will advance rapidly if Flash plug-ins disappear. The only reason it hasn't already is that currently, there's no need. If the plug-ins go, then it won't just be Flashpoint, you'll have groups springing up left and right with different solutions to keep this stuff alive. It's not going anywhere. In fact, it might be the case that the average end-user doesn't really notice the changeover. Does it really seem likely that we're going to have the "flashpocalypse" when every single flash-enabled bit of content suddenly stops working, permanently? Or will people already be rolling out solutions from day 1? There's money riding on Flash-based systems, those vendors will fund the solutions if nobody else does.

Do you still not realize that people can't properly respond to your edits like this?  Nothing in your original post mentioned Flashpoint.  I'm not writing a new response to this, just pointing out that making fundamental edits to your posts is not the same as making corrections.

[Reelya]

I'm not talking about flashpoint. EDIT: I mentioned Flashpoint because it was mentioned on bay12 as some sort of only option of preserving these games. It's not. It's probably not going to be the main thing going forward, either.

There have to be dozens of projects to preserve Flash out there, using techniques similar to what I hypothesized about. It's not going anywhere.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/newgrounds-flash-animations-will-survive-flashs-death.html

EDIT: Newgrounds still has something like 60,000 Flash animation games or so, even though new stuff is mostly in HTML5. They and others are working on ways to keep it working.

[TamerVirus]

There’s a raccoon trapped in the bathroom...again
It fell through the skylight...again

Dammit it’s 4 in the morning...

Edit: Alright, raccoon got removed

[Kagus]

In further adventures of "Kagus charms the ladies", I was at a bar a while back and this gal sat next to me and then scooched closer. I introduced myself, we started talking... And kept talking... And kept talking...

I started flirting, fairly heavily. She didn't have anything against it, so I kept going. It got a bit crazy after a while with me damn near sitting on the same stool as her, but she still seemed a-okay with the situation.

We ended up moving to a booth to continue the chat, I moved closer, started playing with her hair and putting my arm around her. Again, all green. She asked me for my number, inquired if I had work in the morning, stuff like that.


Then after a total conversation time of about, ooh... Five hours or so, we decided to hit the road. After departing from the establishment, we walked a little ways down the street before I pulled her close, put my hand on her neck, gazed deeply into her eyes, and was about to go in for a smooch when...

"Can I give you a hug? I'mma give you a hug", and then she gave me a hug.

"I don't kiss people on a first meeting", she added helpfully.

So she went her way to check out one of the other bars for familiar faces, and I went home. But not before she gave me another hug and said that we should really grab a cup of coffee some time, "If you drink coffee". Fun night.


She had my number, so we kept in touch a bit after that... Chatted a fair deal, decided to eventually get that cup of coffee, cleared up that I'm not looking for a long-term relationship and I'm just looking for some fun, she said she was in the same boat, things went fairly well and after we said our goodbyes I threw out a risky and very obvious text that was actually quite well-received.

We went on another spontaneous date after that, and then a third after that... And absolutely nothing has happened. The last date we actually zipped in to the same bar as when we first met, and her favorite bartender came in so she had to go gaga over him a little bit while I was sitting there. So that's fun too.

Haven't really talked since then.


Then there was another chick who'd asked me out on a date, we grabbed coffee, we again both made it clear that neither of us is looking for something heavy. We part ways, I make a blunt offer, she responds favorably.

We meet up out on the town later on, she more or less ignores me the whole night and then laughs in my face when I suggest her sticking around.



I brought up some of this with a female friend of mine, and she advised me that I'm entirely too nice and likable to pick people up. What I apparently need to do, according to her; is to go out and be as cold and uninterested as possible, flirt a little bit with my target, flirt a lot with everyone else, ignore her for the rest of the night, and then towards the end just sorta walk past her. "That works", my friend assured me.

Fuck this shit.

[JoshuaFH]

So your female friend subscribes to pickup artist tactics??

I don't think badly of your social life Kagus, it's miles superior to my social life, which actually doesn't exist and is just an empty void that I tolerate.