PENGUINS-COMIC and Flash

It's not a secret that we no longer use a Flash-based internet. To all you Gen Alphas, or younger generations out there, who are unfamiliar with Adobe Flash, it was once the tool that made what the internet was before newer and more secure technologies took over. Flash helped internet users view websites, animated content, play games, and much more in a time when fast internet was only for the kids across the street who's dad had a hummer and definitley wasn't compensating for his failing marriage.

But technology improved, and now we live the era of streaming video, music, and just about everything else that happens to be digital and on the internet. And with the invention of smartphones and their continuing presence in our world, Flash slowly lost support in favor of mobile-friendly applications.

So why am I telling you all this? Why is it important that you know this. Well, it's not. I just want the people who don't know what Flash is to know what it was and it's history. It's not important. Moving on...

Seeing you're on this page, you're looking for Flash content! Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but as of right now, we don't have Ruffle support on this website just yet. Ruffle is what makes Flash go in our modern internet, and without it, we really can't do anything with Flash unless you want to download a player, install the files, and watch them yourself straight off your computer. If you're up to the challenge, go right ahead. We have a couple Flash's on our downloads page. Seriously, go do it. They're there for a reason!

Once we have Ruffle support here, we'll get straight to work making this page just as good as all the others! But in the meantime, feel free to check out the rest of the website. Read a comic, check out our forums, whatever.

QNA

Why Flash?

We use Flash for a variety of reasons. But the two biggest ones are file size and a weapon against generative AI.

Flash files are vector based, meaning the drawings of a Flash animation are made using math and not by rendering individual pixels. This makes Flash files remarkably small, which is important when you have limited storage. And since a lot of people with internet don't have to worry about Flash files taking forever and a day to load like they used to. Small file sizes? Short loading times? Sounds like a good deal to me.

Over the past two years, generative AI has become more of a threat than a useful tool, especially to artists, and even more to artists who use the internet as their sole platform. Generative AI models, for now, can steal any photo or video they find and use it to improve their own systems all willy-nilly. This is theft from artists, pure and simple. Not to mention these AI systems slurp up the powergrid more than a 4th grader slurps up Capri-Sun. This is also extremely bad for the environment because if we generate more electricity for this, the power plants have to work overtime to supply this electricity, which creates more CO2 gases that make the climate warmer, melting the ice caps, causing severe weather, you get the idea.

BUT! Since Flash lost support years before ChatGPT and other AI models even existed, developers haven't tapped into that well of art and animation (yet). And how would they anyway? Flash is propritary software and can't be viewed the same way a picture or YouTube video can. You have to have, in the words of Andy Hertzfeld, special tools. AI doesn't, and may never, have those tools, which completely prevents it from ever accessing that data to feed it's greedy, gaping, data hungry maw. It's both a way to support my fellow artists and give a middle finger to big-tech.

What's Ruffle?

Ruffle is a plugin web-developers can install on their websites to continue having Flash-based content on their sites since major web browsers no longer support Flash. It was made for the intention of keeping old pre-exisiting content on the web, but I see no reason why it can't work for modern Flash content.