Reading
Flash Is Responsible for the Internet’s Most Creative Era. A nod to a new book which …
… praises the use of Flash as a creative tool, rather than a bloated malware vessel, and laments the ways that visual convention, technical shifts, and walled gardens have started to rein in much of this unvarnished creativity.
I’m definitely interested in taking a look at that book; I do miss those glory days of Flash. As someone who actively chose to commit to Flash / ActionScript instead of Unity / C# (back in the very early days of Unity, when it was Unity3D, and me and Will Goldstone were tasked with teaching one or the other at Bournemouth Uni) I’m still upset by the whole demise of something that I was making a career out of, but c’est la vie. It put me in good stead for a range of other things, and it was fun while it lasted.
This thread on the dark pattern of trying to pressure users into making a booking by implying that there’s a scarcity of resources. You know, like you see on booking.com and all those other places that highlight that somehow there are 20 other people all just about to take that last hotel room in that obscure location on a random Tuesday date. It’s a con.
https://twitter.com/OphirHarpaz/status/1184486445039411201
About the end of Season 10 of Fortnite. I must confess a near complete ignorance about Fortnite (beyond knowing it has some dances or something in it?) so I didn’t know about The End happening last week, but it’s been interesting catching up.
There is no conventional “narrative” to Fortnite Battle Royale – Epic doesn’t provide an origin story for its endless 100-player wars, it doesn’t give us long cinematic scenes with characters explaining the world, the factions and the plot. Instead, Fortnite is split into a series of three-month-long seasons, each with a climactic event that suggests some kind of interdimensional struggle taking place over the future of the game’s isolated island locale.
The way the finale has been built up to and then handled sounds fascinating, and while I’m not going to start playing it (my reaction times are far too slow for multiplayer these days) my interest has certainly been piqued.
Watching
This short video on the design of the Juvenile – 400 Degreez album cover.
https://twitter.com/fakeshoredrive/status/1183948492701650949
The work is by the legendary and inimitable Pen & Pixel who are responsible for all sorts of classics for labels like No Limit, Cash Money, and Hypnotize Minds. You might also know them from their work with Louis Theroux but if you’re not familiar, it’s worth taking a look at their archive – there are plenty of places extolling their virtues.
