Thanks for the thoughtful reply. It must be sad for the people who dedicate their lives to slow-change to see everything get steamrolled by a quick-fix-salesman dictator. Do you have faith in this kind of approach or do you think it's more of a "better than nothing" longshot? Maybe it's the kind of thing where it can't really be done for big, politically "hot" issues, but for other, niche problems that are less visible to the news-watching layman, it's still an effective way of making change?
If enough people protest-vote then it isn't necessarily a vote for the winner - if the number of protest-voters is large enough to have changed the outcome had they all voted for the loser, then the losing party (if they are doing their job) has to take notice and listen to why this group isn't happy. If the protest-voters become a massive group of people (say 1/3 of the vote), they will probably become the focus of a lot of political debates and tv-news stories, and elected officials will have to start catering to them. But it all only works if lots of people can have the integrity to not blame "the system" for why they voted for the-crook-who-was-better-than-the-other-crook.
(FYI I'm aware this has very little to do with the point you were making. I mostly agree with that)
How do we fix that? Perhaps it can't be done democratically, and you just need someone to come into a high position of power who is willing to be dramatic and disruptive?
Just based on my own experience and knowledge of the animation industry, it seems to be more of a risk-aversion/lack-of-imagination problem. It is true that getting onto major streaming platforms requires insider knowledge/connections, but there sure are a lot of people using free platforms that anyone can upload to, like YouTube.
I don't think you ever have to have innovated or developed anything significant to take issue with a major consumer product losing some utility - I don't know if you used Twitter ten years ago, but it was pretty sad to see the site slowly downgrade year by year, every new feature making it less functional and more addictive, fueling toxicity, becoming a black hole of individuals' attention. It makes you wonder what would have happened if the people put up more of a fight whenever some new stupid feature was rolled out, or a useful feature taken away to make the whole thing just a little more like a slot machine. (Hmmm... maybe Elon Musk should buy Google, so people will finally start complaining en Masse.)
As a defender of the new LLM-thingies, do you think they're doing a reasonable job of promoting AI-output literacy? I think it's their job to do so when they are the ones generating the content, whereas general media-literacy was not really their problem when Google was just a directory for the web.
That is some seriously cool stuff! It's a shame nothing came of it - but I suppose shipping something good with cool new tech is bound to be harder than shipping something good that's been done a million times. Not because the tech is difficult, but because there's less of a roadmap to go off of, design-wise.
Thanks for sharing!
Wow no kidding! The Spumco web stuff was before my time, but Foster's started airing right around the time I picked up flash, when I was like nine (it was a favorite show of mine!) There were a lot more flash shows on TV back then, and most look pretty crappy by today's standards, but at least that one holds up pretty well.
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.
That's pretty much it - though it's been able to target other platforms since long before the "Animate" name change. I believe it still has a small-but-significant market share in the animation industry (mostly TV stuff) (hence the name!), but there's waning support for anything else.
That said, Ruffle ( https://ruffle.rs/ ) is keeping flash alive on the web, preserving the legacy of flash and enabling people to make new things like this! Newgrounds hosts a contest every year since the "death of flash" to see who can make the best new thing, (that's what this was made for, actually): https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1523958
On the final episode, something that kind of bothers me here is the generally antagonistic attitude towards the "get kids excited about reading" approach. The whole series focuses on the struggling students who were wronged by misguided one-size-fits-all teaching, and then the narrator goes on to assert that students don't need to be sold the joys of reading because, "look at these sound bites of kids learning to read - they sure seem excited to me!" Kind of annoying to see someone so dismissive of the notion after spending four hours talking about how not all kids pick things up through osmosis.