Showing all posts about animation
If flip-phones can make a comeback, can Flash do the same?
7 March 2026
I don’t know where to start with this but yeah I’m making flash if flash was built in 2026. I’m making it compatible with Linux,Mac, and PC.
If you remember Flash, the animation/multimedia creation application, originally launched by a company called Macromedia, you were on, or near, the web in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.
I did little with Flash itself, but dabbled with the somewhat similar Director, also originally a Macromedia product. I used to burn (quite amateurish) presentations onto CD-ROMS. But this was before both were acquired by Adobe.
Flash was — once — the gold standard for creating animations for the web, or for building interactive websites. But Flash had limitations. For one, anything Flash could not be viewed natively in a browser, and needed a plugin to be operative.
Security concerns eventually resulted in support for Flash being withdrawn by Apple, and later many web browsers. Flash was fun, and useful, for a short while, but after a time I refused to visit websites that were Flash powered.
The question in 2026 though; is the world ready for a potential Flash renaissance? If Premo is building Flash for 2026, then who knows. Maybe.
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animation, technology, web design
Your time machine breaks down at the worst times in history
24 April 2025
Despite what you might think, the worst possible time for your time machine to breakdown is not 2025. Instead, in this Kurzgesagt imagining, you are variously trapped in three periods of time, some several million years after three separate mass extinction events.
The time machine taking you to the early Triassic Period (two-hundred-and fifty million years ago), the late Carboniferous Period (three-hundred-and_twenty million years ago), and finally, the early Devonian Period (four-hundred million years ago) is not so much broken down, as it acting with a mind of its own. Why else hone in on some of the worst times in the far distant past to visit?
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animation, education, history, science
Your fixed calorie budget stops weight loss through exercise
23 July 2024
This news, via Kurzgesagt, may not be what some people want to hear. Exercising is useful, necessary in fact, but not so much when it comes to trying to lose weight it seems.
Active people who work out regularly do burn more than inactive people. But only very little, often as low as 100 calories, the equivalent of a single apple. For some strange reason, the amount of calories you burn is pretty much unrelated to your lifestyle. Per kilo of body weight, your body has a fixed calorie budget it wants to burn per day.
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Reality is an illusion, we are the dream of a dead universe
14 September 2023
The latest Kurzgesagt video may — like a number of their recent offerings — still have an end of days theme, but at least the subject matter is a little more fanciful. Even if we’re talking about the eventual heat death of the universe, or as Kurzgesagt posits, the already happened heat death of the universe.
Bizarre right? But our (apparent) existence may in fact be a random manifestation of a dark, cold, universe. The night sky, the awesome images of the James Webb Space Telescope, and everything else that we seem to perceive and experience, is but a figment of our imagination. Life, the universe, and everything. It might as well be the name of science fiction book.
I guess then it was a waste of time booking a table at the restaurant at the end of the universe, being the title of late British author Douglas Adams’ 1980 novel. It would seem that event’s been and gone.
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A trailer for The Boy and the Heron, a new film by Hayao Miyazaki
7 September 2023
The Boy and the Heron, trailer, is the latest animated feature by Japanese filmmaker and manga artist, Hayao Miyazaki. Released in Japan under the name Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka, Miyazaki’s latest film is said to be partly autobiographical:
Through encounters with his friends and uncle, The Boy and the Heron follows a teenage boy’s psychological development. He enters a magical world with a talking grey heron after finding an abandoned tower in his new town.
Miyazaki’s previous titles include Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. There’s no word yet of an Australian cinematic run, but The Boy and the Heron is scheduled for release in the United States this December, so perhaps it will come our way then.
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animation, film, Hayao Miyazaki, trailer, video
How a nuclear war will start according to Kurzgesagt
26 August 2023
It’s alarming how close the world has come to nuclear conflict in the past, and on several occasions leaders with nuclear arsenals at their disposal have had their finger poised on the proverbial button. In just about every instance though, the threat of a nuclear exchange has been the result of a misunderstanding or miscommunication between nuclear armed nations.
But if one nuclear armed nation — for whatever reason — launches a strike on another, the target country has mere minutes to respond, as Kurzgesagt eloquently illustrates, in their latest video, How A Nuclear War Will Start. Doom and gloom sells I know, but Kurzgesagt have been on quite the gloomy doom-roll for a while now.
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The variola virus AKA smallpox, more enlightened darkness from Kurzgesagt
9 August 2023
What’s with the doom and gloom emanating from Kurzgesagt recently? In the last few months their videos have covered a range of grim topics including biological weapons of mass destruction, the difficulty in beating cancer, black holes that destroy galaxies, and tales of woe about marauding extra-terrestrials who have Earth in their sights.
Anyone hoping for a reprieve this month will be disappointed though: their latest video explains exactly how nasty the variola virus, better known as smallpox, was, and the suffering and death it unleashed. While smallpox has officially been eradicated, the story of the virus is a potent reminder of how deadly some diseases can be. Let’s be thankful a vaccine was developed.
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Kurzgesagt: the next pandemic could be made at home, scary hey?
4 July 2023
Advances in biotechnology are being made in leaps and bounds. On one hand what is being learnt is making the world safer, but on the other, there is a downside. While cures for deadly diseases are being developed, even nastier pathogens are being created at the same time. Or could be, as Kurzgesagt explains:
We are adding knowledge at unprecedented rates, while things get ever faster and cheaper to do. This speed means we can expect even more wonderful things for humanity. Lifesaving treatments, miracle crops and solutions to problems we can’t even imagine right now. But unfortunately progress cuts both ways. What can be used for good, can also be used for bad, by accident or on purpose. For all the good biotech will do for us, in the near future it also could easily kill many millions of people, in the worst case hundreds of millions. Worse than any nuclear bomb.
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animation, education, health, science, technology
Why is cancer so hard to beat? Kurzgesagt tells us why
21 June 2023
Kurzgesagt take on the difficult questions, and come back with easy to follow, and entertaining, answers. Some forms of cancer have proved seemingly impossible to treat, but the German animation studio feels confident that will change in the not too distant future. Let’s hope so.
An undead city under siege, soldiers and police ruthlessly shooting down waves of zombies that flood from infected streets, trying to escape and infect more cities. This is what happens when your body fights cancer, more exciting than any movie. How does this battle for survival unfold?
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Apollo 10 1/2, a film by Richard Linklater
10 March 2022
Talk about the trip of a lifetime. American space agency NASA accidently builds an Apollo Moon lander that’s too small for adult astronauts. So the investment doesn’t go to waste, a young boy is clandestinely recruited to take the vessel to the lunar surface, in Apollo 10 1/2, trailer, an animated feature directed by Richard Linklater.
The story of the first moon landing in the summer of 1969 from two interwoven perspectives. It both captures the astronaut and mission control view of the triumphant moment, and the lesser-seen bottom up perspective of what it was like from an excited kid’s perspective, living near NASA but mostly watching it on TV like hundreds of millions of others. It’s ultimately both an exacting re-creation of this special moment in history and a kid’s fantasy about being plucked from his average life in suburbia to secretly train for a covert mission to the moon.
Apollo ten and a half, this is Houston. Do you read?
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