About as creepy as an old copy of Creepy,

March 20, 2001 8:52 PM

About as creepy as an old copy of Creepy, but much funnier and much more crude. Flash stuff in the old Mad magazine vein. And best of all, no banner ads and largely non-commercial.

So why aren't their more original, non-arty, non-techno-ey, non-animal-abusing, non-commercial Flash things like this?
posted by foist (2 comments total)

So why aren't their more original, non-arty, non-techno-ey, non-animal-abusing, non-commercial Flash things like this?

Because if you're really good, it can cost you an arm and a leg.

I started playing in Flash a couple years ago, and if I continued, all I'd be doing is animated comics for the hell of it. And like you, I'm surprised more people don't do it. But then I started playing with databases and one thing lead to a metafilter...
posted by mathowie at 8:57 PM on March 20, 2001

I made a few things in VRML way back - interactive dioramas, 3D storytelling, etc. - before even FutureSplash was making the rounds. That was so much fun, but it was such a tremendous amount of effort to do things well, and the resulting feedback was so backhanded. Things were crippled by VRML never taking off (and rarely working well anyhow), so I had chosen a bad medium to make my artwork. The last big thing I did was for a presentation at SIGGRAPH in Orlando. I nearly worked myself into a panic attack to get it complete in time.

In the end, I'm glad I did it, even though the time spent never translated into any monetary benefits (to tell the truth, it cost quite a bit of time and money), but it's a real uphill battle. Work hard at what you like, spend cash on it (like Matt's reference to NosePilot), feel good about it, but unless you have a bottomless pit of time and money, at some stage you'll likely get torn away by some more mundane, but paying, tasks.

As it stands, I have about 4 websites that I spend a good chunk of change on, plus God knows how many hours. Even though it's fun, I sometimes still step back and ask myself "why do you do this?" Sometimes I think I know, but usually I don't.
posted by kokogiak at 10:34 PM on March 20, 2001