It Ends Tonight April 16, 2020

I’ve known about Flashpoint for a few years now. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an ongoing web game preservation effort. They find doomed games under a variety of technologies, Flash, Shockwave, 3D Groove GX, you name it, save all the files, use a proxy bit to get the games thinking it’s still 2003 and running on the correct domain, and then allow access through a giant, Electron-powered launcher.

Flashpoint interests me on a couple levels–as a preservationist, as someone truly in love with the old internet, and as a product of endless hours spent on Miniclip playing Skywire, Zed, Dynomite!, or the game I actually installed Flashpoint for, Milk Shake. For what they’ve done as far as data preservation goes, it’s huge. They’re phenomenal. A lot of really talented people behind it.

Back in October or so, shortly before Google randomly decided to blacklist searching for SWFs, I stumbled across someone’s cache of the first 140 episodes of a very old web cartoon I used to watch, Neurotically Yours. It’s…well, it’s “that show I used to watch in middle school”. I dunno how the fuck the guy behind it is at least 40 and still doing it, nor do I can I really stand to listen to it for long periods these days, but hey, nostalgic. And it hadn’t been curated yet!

My mission became clear: in my own weird, personal way, contribute a bunch of edgy cartoons from when I was 10 years old to Flashpoint so they may live forever. Should’ve been open and shut, right?

Here’s the sucky bit. Curation is tedious. Their process is perfectly fine for a single game, even one with a ton of assets. You arrange the files by domain, get a logo, get a screenshot, write a meta.txt, and you send it in their Discord. If you’re doing anything in batch, though, that process becomes frankly irritating. Even after I got around the weirdness of these originally being hosted in multiple places other than iLL WiLL PreSS itself, I still didn’t really feel like sorting all these individually into a weird, complex folder setup.

And really, not that anyone cares much, but I never quite got on with their Discord. I’ve tried a few times, as I do with many public servers, and never do I really find my place. Maybe it’s an ego thing, thinking I deserve to have some place in some server, but I dunno. I like not feeling superfluous. That’s why I really can’t do big servers–aside from the endless, droning chatter, when you’re just one in a few thousand, it kinda doesn’t matter if you’re there or not. That put me off it even more.

In any case, I would’ve left it back in November if it wasn’t for the fact I started archiving all those lovely cartoons, and you need to submit every curation in their Discord. I stuck around for a good five months, with these Foamy cartoons sitting idle on my desktop, wondering if I’d get around it before my hard drive supernovas. I finally felt like doing it tonight, so I got a good…95 cartoons out of the way, straight no chaser.

Somehow, I always find myself playing with metric shittons of files I have to sort through by hand. Maybe it’s a complex. Either way, done and dusted. Should all be up in the next edition of Flashpoint, if you’re actively following the project. Me, I’m staying on 7.1 Ultimate since they’ve just about archived everything I’d ever realistically want to play by this point. Either way, goodnight Flash, and Godspeed, Flashpoint.

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