Walky Talky: Raving

August 13, 2003

Raving

Right-oh, I've tidied up the Marching Boys pages somewhat and even added a couple of movie clips for 2002. Now I just have to rejig the main WalkyTalky layout to find somewhere for a permanent link.

So far I only have photos for half the outings, and some of those are pretty sparse, but I know there are a lot of pics around so at least some of the blanks should get filled as soon as I've canvassed some of the other boys. Naturally, if anyone out there has any photos they want to send along I'd be very happy to receive them.

Meanwhile, other business awaits.

Late last year I was involved in a frankly soul-destroying Flash game project for the BBC (see it here if you must). Now partly this was a miserable experience because it was very badly managed, with no upfront design or specification; and partly because it was not only commissioned by a hidebound bureaucracy with a strong territorial imperative, but based on an external production whose creators were pretty possessive about their baby as well, and consequently the project was beset on all sides by self-regarding media wankers who felt obliged to stick their oars in at every opportunity to justify their fucking expense accounts. (Ack, bitter! Will I ever work in this town again after that?)

As I say, it was partly because of these things. They certainly didn't help, but at the same time they're not exactly unheard-of in this business and shouldn't be a huge surprise.

However, the main reason the project was so soul-destroying was because it was done in Flash, which is by some margin the most wretched development environment I've ever used (quite an achievement when pitched up against, say, Microsoft Visual C++). The frustration of using it prompted the following rant at the time, and my feelings about it haven't changed one bit:

I *HATE* Flash. I have never in my whole life had the misfortune to use such a misbegotten, brain-dead, fucked-up piece of shit as this. I don't know what kind of grudge the motherfuckers who wrote it bear against the human race, but they've certainly done their damnedest to take a bitter revenge. It's the world's worst interface wrapped around the world's stupidest object model -- and its sole purpose is to produce the world's most toxic gobbets of steaming web pollution.

Every last moron associated with it should be dragged naked into a field full of broken glass and brambles on the coldest night of an arctic winter, there to be torn into bloody shreds with rusty cake forks by an army of giggling gnomes.

I can't tell you how much I hate it. I hate myself for using it, I hate my company for making me use it, I hate our clients for making them make me, but most of all I hate those stupid fucks at Macromedia for inflicting it on the world.

Come back Director, all is forgiven.

When the project was finished I vowed never to use Flash again as long as I lived. Ever. Under any circumstances. No way, José.

Well, guess what...
Posted by matt at August 13, 2003 07:07 PM

Comments

What a fantastic rant. I agree with every word of it.

I was just thinking the other day, (and it gave me a nice, warm feeling inside) that Flash seems to have rather disappeared from the web. (Or at least you don't see nearly as many of those hideous 'skip intro' wank-a-thons heralding some useless webpage).

Posted by: Eurodan at August 14, 2003 12:04 AM

Hear, hear! Flash was one of the major forces in the "style over content" movement earlier in the history of the web (not that design has no part to play, just that it's daft to let it supplant content and functionality, unless of course it *is* the content.)

I was forced to evaluate Flash early on in it's Web career, but rapidly consigned it to the bin for similar reasons. Ever since, I have managed to beat into submission any person who dared to suggest that flash was involved in a project I was working on.

As to the behaviour of the "self-regarding media wankers", in my experience this exists throughout all types of business and appears to relate to the peculiar ways that most humans behave when given power or the possibility of obtaining it.

Posted by: Shyboy at August 14, 2003 10:58 AM

Comments for this post are now closed, but feel free to email me if you have something interesting to say.