🆕 Never Post! A Remembrance of Things Flash

Netizens! Good Wednesay to you, and with it: a good, new Never Post!

In this episode, Dr. Martin Shelton tells us what Signal is, and how end-to-end-encryption works. Then: was this show always going to devolve into a poetry reading? Probably. Finally: contributing producer Tori Dominquez Peek wonders what happened to the COUNTLESS FLASH GAMES of the early aughts. Also: Wildflowers!

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• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

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Intro Links

• Suspected 4chan Hack Could Expose Longtime, Anonymous Admins
• Next steps for Privacy Sandbox and tracking protections in Chrome
• Google won’t kill third-party cookies after all
• Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive
• Congress approves a revenge porn bill backed by first lady Melania Trump
• Shein and Temu will cost more, thanks to massive tariffs going into effect
• Epic v. Apple Contempt order
• A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store

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What Is Signal?

• Dr. Martin Shelton at Freedom of the Press Foundation
• Signal, the secure messaging app: A guide for beginners

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Are You There, Chat? It’s Me, Mike.

• Because one once willed you…, Rilke
• Culture and Value, Wittgenstein

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A Remembrance of Things Flash

• Flashpoint Archive
• Video Game History Foundation
• Tori Dominguez Peek

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. This episodes contributing producer was Tori Dominguez Peek. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency

seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires

The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding

Excerpt of They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century
by Maureen N McLane

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure
and distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 05/06/2025 at 08:37AM eastern, and we have a jam packed show for you this week. First, in a new type of segment we're trying out, doctor Martin Shelton tells us what Signal, the messaging app, is and how end to end encryption works. Then was this show always eventually going to devolve into a poetry reading?

Probably. And finally, contributing producer Tori Dominguez Peek wonders what happened to the countless flash games of the early aughts since the software was decommissioned and encounters the world of video game preservation along the way. That's right. Three segments this week and also wildflowers. But first, we're gonna take a quick break.

You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're listening on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. A wild news segment appears. I have five stories for you this week. 4chan was hacked, though the rumors of its complete demise appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Interforum drama allegedly led to the site being temporarily taken down, replaced with a message reading simply, you got hacked x d. Wired reports that the likely vulnerability was the site's significantly outdated unpatched software. Hackers leaked a list of 4chan mods and so called janitors, including some email addresses and IPs. According to one janitor who spoke with TechCrunch, they have no reason to believe the leak is fake. Rumors quickly spread that the leak contained many dot e d u and .gov email addresses, but Jared Holt, senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said the claim was not legit and called the leak, and I'm quoting here, a real snoozer.

Many outlets claimed it seemed likely the site would be down for good, but as of writing, 4 chan Org loads without issue for better and probably worse. Google will not end support for third party cookies in Chrome. Seven years ago, the tech giant said it would begin to phase out support for cookies in its flagship browser. The technology is used amongst other purposes for tracking user activity across the Internet. On 04/22/2025, the privacy sandbox, as the initiative was so called, released a statement titled next steps for privacy sandbox and tracking protections in Chrome, in which VP of the sandbox Anthony Chavez writes of the last several years, quote, the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies has accelerated.

New opportunities to safeguard and secure people's browsing experiences with AI have emerged, and the regulatory landscape around the world has evolved considerably. Taking all of those factors into consideration, we've made the decision to maintain our current approach to offering users third party cookie choice in Chrome. Cybersecurity researcher Lucas Olanik has called the move, quote, more than just disappointing. It's deeply troubling. Wondering, could this be a broader sign of deterioration of data protection, security, and privacy, which goes well along the promoted views that intellectual protection, copyright protection, and privacy and data protection are no longer needed in times development because AI must be developed?

In other Google News, unexpected potential knock on effects of a judge finding Google holds a search monopoly, Fire Fox may be on the rocks. The DOJ has recommended Google be blocked from paying to be the default search engine in various browsers, including the Mozilla Foundation's privacy focused Firefox. Firefox. The wrinkle? Google's fees to Mozilla for their prime placement comprise about 90% of Mozilla's revenue.

Mozilla CFO Eric Mulheim testified that if the restriction went through, it may end up having the opposite of its intended effect, solidifying Chrome's singular position in the current iteration of the browser wars by removing funding from the only competitor not also owned by a huge tech company.

Oops.

The US congress has passed the controversial Take It Down Act, which we previously discussed in episode 30. The bill is nominally aimed at the removal of nonconsensual intimate imagery aka revenge porn and pornographic deepfakes, but provides broad leverage for the US government to censor online speech, including that of political opponents, which president Trump has all but promised he would do. For Tech Dirt Mike Masnik, who you will remember from our section two thirty segment writes, the bill is so bad that even the cyber civil rights initiative whose entire existence is based on representing the interests of victims of nonconsensual intimate imagery and passing bills similar to the takedown act has come out with a statement saying that while it supports laws to address such imagery, it cannot support this bill due to its many, many inherent problems, end quote. In defense of the bill, take it down supporter first lady Melania Trump said, through this critical legislation and our continued focus with be best, we are building a future where every child can thrive and achieve their full potential. The treats are officially more expensive.

They have come for them. NPR reports that as of this Friday, shoppers may be hit with duties of up to a 45% when shopping at online Chinese retailers, Xian and Tmall if the goods they are purchasing must cross an international border to arrive at their final destination in The United States. Previously, these individual shipments were the subject of de minimis exemptions. Purchases under $800 could be shipped duty free, but the Trump admin has ended this exemption and levied additional tariffs on top. This, they say, is to stem the tide of fentanyl entering The United States from China.

Fentanyl precursor chemicals often do enter The US from China hidden inside packages that look like small ecommerce packages. The Biden admin considered ending the de minimis exemption for this reason themselves among others. The precursor chemicals then make their way via various means to Mexico where they are rendered into the final drug and then brought back across the border to be sold in The US where the market for its purchase has grown to a point of being described in epidemic proportions. Wait. Where do we start?

Oh, right. So anyway, the $10 dress you buy from TEMU may now be $30 because of fentanyl, I guess. And finally, Apple can no longer charge a 27% fee on purchases made outside of their App Store. Yeah. You heard that right.

At the April, judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers ruled that Apple could no longer restrict how app developers indicate and link to places where people can make purchases outside of an app. Purchases made inside the app trigger a hefty 30% cut for ruling, Apple was levying an only slightly less hefty 27% fee for purchases made outside of but directed through an app downloaded via their app store. In the ruling, Rogers writes, quote, the evidence presented showed anti competitive effects and excessive operating margins under any normative measures. The lack of competition has resulted in decreased information, which also results in decreased innovation relative to the profits being made. The costs to developer are higher because competition is not driving the commission rate.

As described, the commission rate driving the excessive margins has not been justified, end quote. Rogers is also referring Apple to the US Attorney to find out whether they acted in contempt by not following a 2021 injunction. This, The Verge reports, could lead to criminal proceedings. Okay. That is the news I have for you this week.

Today in this episode, I ask chat, are you listening? Can you hear me? Then Tori Dominguez Peak wonders who is keeping Flash games alive and how, and in our interstitials, Hans visits the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary in Minneapolis, Minnesota to record for us the very essence of springtime. But first, a while back, we did a version of the news at the top of the show that you all responded really positively to. It was the one about net neutrality, what ending it means, and what position its absence puts the FCC and Internet service providers in.

A bunch of you reached out, and you let us know that you really liked having a nuts and bolts explainer from the ground up of a thing that you'd heard a lot about, but hadn't really had the time to dig into. So we're gonna do more of those in a potentially recurring segment we're provisionally calling terms and conditions. This is the first of those. And for it, we've asked doctor Martin Sheldon, the deputy director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to tell us about a piece of software that you've probably heard a lot about in the news lately, SIGNAL, and its underlying technology, end to end encryption. What are these things?

How do they work? And what are their shortcomings? Martin, take it away.

I'm doctor Martin Shelton. I'm the deputy director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation, and here to talk about Signal. Signal has been in the news a lot lately. We talk to journalists about Signal for our work. We are a digital security training team.

We support journalists in their digital security practice. And one of the tools that we talk about is part of a big series of tools that you might want to take advantage of as a journalist is Signal. Why is that? Most of the service providers that you use on the web, whether that's Google Meet, Zoom, a text message, or you're making a phone call. Most of the time when you are interacting with these services, what you're doing is you're sending a message basically to the service provider in a way that's legible to them.

So they get a copy of your messages, they can listen in to what you're doing. Compare this to Signal. So Signal offers what's called end to end encryption. And basically, that's just a way of saying that the service provider doesn't get a copy of your messages, can't listen in to your calls. So only the people in conversation get a copy.

So Signal has a pretty good track record on resisting legal requests for user data. This is because they don't really collect much upfront. And you can actually see this in a website that they host at signal.org/bigbrother. And you go here, what you're going to see is the publicly disclosed grand jury subpoenas that they have published. And all of these grand jury subpoenas show the registration phone number for the signal user, the last login date, and the registration date.

And that's it. There's basically nothing that they have access to. So compare this to other major platforms out there, what they're going to have is all kinds of information about who you're talking to, when, how long. So they have basically nothing. There's lots of tools out there that provide end to end encryption, but signal has some really strong advantages.

And there's also a lot of really cool features that are built into this. You can set your signal to delete messages by default if you want to between five seconds and four weeks or a custom time of your choice, because we simply don't need everything to stay on our devices indefinitely. In security, there's this idea of what's called the attack surface. That is the number of different footholds that somebody can use to get into your information on your devices. Having fewer messages and signal for me is a way of trying to minimize my attack surface, minimize the number of things that can go wrong on my device.

Another feature that I really like is they have a feature called safety numbers. And safety numbers will allow you to compare the encryption across multiple devices. So if one person who you're meeting in person and you want to compare your safety numbers to verify that the encryption is working as intended, that they are who they say they are, and that this corresponds to what's happening in the app, then you can do that. It's really easy. You just look at the safety numbers and if they match, you're good to go.

Another feature that I really like is this username feature. Instead of handing out a phone number, you give this username. It's typically a string of text and a couple of numbers at the end. And this has all kinds of advantages because now you can post that username publicly, anybody can reach out publicly. This is something that we often encourage journalists to do instead of giving away a personal phone number.

You can post the username, say, in your social media bio and get tips that way. And likewise, you know, we're seeing a growing number of activists who are organizing this way that they don't necessarily want to give away their phone number to everybody and make it easy for somebody to identify other information tied to that phone number. We use our phone numbers for so many things. And so this is a really powerful feature if we want to rein in how much information is out there about your personal phone number and any other information that could be tied to that. There's also it is not a for profit entity.

This is run by a nonprofit, the Signal Foundation. So like us at Freedom of the Press Foundation, the intention behind the nonprofit entity is to support the public good. So we want to make sure that this technology is not making its money off of you as the user. They make money off of donations. And also it's open source, and so this means that the code is publicly available.

Anybody can look at it on the web and a lot of security experts have looked at it to verify that it does what it's saying that it's doing. We do get questions fairly often about, is this actually safe? And the answer to that is, it depends. So what are you trying to protect? And then how are you already protecting it?

So the app is secure by default because it's end to end encrypted. But the idea with end to end encryption is that the ends are the weak points. If you have malware on your device, then, you know, Signal won't be able to defend you against that. If somebody picks up your device and is reading the messages in plain text, in, you know, human readable text, right off the device, Signal can't protect against that. We recently saw this photo of Mike Waltz literally checking signal during a cabinet meeting.

And so if somebody is in the room with a camera right next to you and you're checking your messages, yeah, they might take a photo of them. It can protect you from the what we call the ends in end to end encryption. The information that's right on the device and visible to anybody standing around. Because of all these safety properties, this is a really great app for anybody who just cares about privacy. And and I would argue that everybody cares about privacy in various contexts, that we don't say the same things to everybody in all circumstances, that we really do value the ways that we try to present ourselves to one another.

You don't talk to your church buddies in the same way that you talk to the bar buddies. And so thinking about the different circumstances around our conversations, we really do want to control the different flows of information around us. And so this is a tool to help you to do that. But we also know that this is a really popular tool for people who work in journalism, human rights defenders, politicians increasingly, say, you're starting to see no shortage of stories about what's happening, in the White House around signals. So there's a lot of people who want to take advantage of these properties.

So if this sounds really interesting to you, feel free to check out signal.org. It's in all the major app stores. If you need any help getting started with Signal, I wrote a super detailed walkthrough. It's called Signal for Beginners. You can find it at Freedom.Press.

And while you're at Freedom.Press, please do check out all the other work that we do to support journalists. We run a project called the SecureDrop project, an anonymous whistleblowing platform. So we also are building technologies to help support journalists in their digital security practice. We run something called the US Press Freedom Tracker. We are tracking press freedom violations across The US since 2017.

You see anything that you think should be contributed to that database? Submit it. It really helps us out. And then we also do all kinds of advocacy work around press freedom. So please do check that out as well.

Dutchman's breeches. Now those? Those. Right? Sorry.

Because

they look kind of like anemones

Oh, yeah.

These are Columbine coming up here.

Those are Columbine. Yeah. For sure. But Those are are those

I'm trying to remember the, the leaf that comes with those. Oh, it doesn't really show it on here very well, the leaf. Didn't think we think of bleeding hearts.

They do make yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Dutchman's breeches. Oh, gorgeous.

So cool.

So cool. And here's some more

of the lilies.

Oh, man. Those are pretty.

Yeah. I'm trying to tell, you know what, what leaf is attached to it. Like, does it look kinda like the columbine leaf behind it? Is that am I attaching the right one to it?

Or is it the

I can't tell.

We'll see another one. It's hard to tell.

Dicentra cucullaria.

Oh, Amy. Look at who's on my hand.

So this is actually a root.

Look who's on oh, flew away. That fly was wild looking. Sorry. This is what?

That's actually in the rue family.

Oh.

I think it called it said, like, Early Meadow Rue. Because once I looked at the flower, I'm like, that doesn't look right.

Hello. I'm gonna read a weird poem. Hans is talking to me, so I'm gonna I'm gonna talk to him and then I'm gonna read the weird poem. Are you there, chat? It's me, Mike.

Whereas once we went where people go, where it's expected one commune with some semblance of a superior sort, one that pervades and yet still for some such a reason has its own house, a particular locus. The locus is now about us. Though, of course, the power always was. Cathedrals for those with eyes to see? No.

A perfectly distributed diaphanous and indivisible house of worship in every home, every library, restaurant, and hotel in your pocket, in the taxi, in your fridge, on your bike. Nope. Not that bike, the other bike. On your TV, in your TV, in the doctor's office, the deli, the DMV, the dentist chat watches over us. We watch back.

Chat, is this real? Is this real, chat? What is logging on if not communing? What is the stream if not communion? Greet thy neighbor, greet thy neighbor, and watch.

What happens to belief in an age of chance mediated endlessly within systems built by men blue lit in their cubicles, one foot in the Pentagon? What they want, they're getting always in embarrassment of amounts and what we want, well, what is posting, if not prayer? Petitioning powers we cannot know, see, control, or comprehend for charity or at least a sign, something, something known, anything to be seen, to be read and read throughout, and read to be read and read throughout, to be liked and to be found in such a state, to feel feel feel feel alive though God is dead. He was killed. We killed him and replaced him.

Chat, are we cooked? Because one once willed you. I know that we too are allowed to want you. Even if we do not want. Chat ripens.

We spoil slowly under the sun that is an infinite scroll of always on text and whatnot, never not there. An arm reaches out of bed across the gap to the nightstand and with feeble tired hands in the dim light of morning, it hovers over an open flame just to see how hot exactly it is. Our legion of companions radiate a heat that warms and it cooks and who are we to not let them? We see and are seen passing the heat around in a fed back panopticon back and forth forwarding the same six streams until they take on the digitized patina of overused sandpaper and what has been worn so smooth through its use? Subscribe for part two.

It's baked, dried, dehydrated, desiccated, and strung on a garland. Granted audience proudly put forth. Chat is this is this chat. Chat is this riz? They, whoever they is, say, which I mean they probably don't.

Right? They, again whoever that is, probably wrote it down, that you can't step in the same stream twice. So I lay down in it and try not to drown, washed over and watched over by an abstracted and conglomerated concept of community, a machine with meats taped to its interface, which if I'm being honest, does pull off a fairly convincing impersonation. Oh, never mind. It was Heraclitus.

He probably did say it. But wait. No. That's not right. Not the attribution, but the machine and its impersonation of people, which it is in a sense in our kitchens and offices and living rooms and gamer chairs lit ever so subtly by the glow of our joma oma USB wireless mouse rechargeable light up mouse for laptop small cordless mice with quiet click LED rainbow lights for PC computer Chromebook Windows white pink I y k y k.

And y k, I know you do. What would it feel like to not have heard of Should we feel left alone in the dark? Where else but there do we find ourselves in its midst, the early morning or the late evening stroll? Wittgenstein asks, do we escape loneliness as does a child upon the simple realization that we are not ever actually alone? Loneliness is a lie perhaps, though this doesn't make its opposite any less of a curse.

I'm still in the stream washed over, less so in, more so am increasingly. I feel the same and the stream does too and maybe that's it. Maybe Heraclitus was full of it. The stream never washes over the same me. New again, always, but with the appearance of consistency.

Lonely because even myself departs regularly, alone but for the presence of chat. Ourselves a chance? If we can't? Chat be with you. And also with you.

Here comes everybody, they said. Except this time, I know who said it, and I know he wrote it down. But quick follow-up, where did they go? We arrived together. But it seems over the last umpteen years, all we've really done is depart alone.

Leaving bit by bit by bit by bit by bit, they're 64 bits now, as atoms sloughing off some aggregate hole to form the previously attested distributed locus. We were we, but now, what is there? Distantly. Chat. Pangaea like some impressive mass was blasted apart by forces seemingly geological, but which in fact were men blue lit.

They want you to think they're earth like in their immovability and for furthering such falsehoods, I would like to apologize, but the point remains, they enclosed open air and I, at least, dutifully occupied my corner. We would say that this IP or that IP were ways to gather groups inclined to collaborate in either sense, but blind, again, myself at least to the fact that we were gathering hostages, more or less. We were and built what would become chat. Sorry. Sorry?

Sorry, I think. But it was what I wanted and what I was told I wanted. And what is posting but desire and one occasionally shared, however misguided. Wittgenstein, again, our greatest stupidities may be very wise. For what without chat would we now have?

Community is a metaphor the way it's used. A genre designation for a type of mundane gathering versus something which represents the actual meaning intended by the word when used elsewhere, implying ethics of care or camaraderie, mutuality. Community here, chat, means all pointed in the same direction for a little while together, the end. Greet thy neighbor. Greet thy neighbor.

Watch. What stops chat from turning inward and away from their post? Abandoning it, say. What stops us from crawling out of the stream? The same.

Different. Nothing but technological infrastructure that insists we don't and rewards meagerly continued adherence to the idea that what has been arranged is the arrangement. Chat, show me the way. Here is the way. Here is the way.

Oh, man. I love a white oak.

Just the shape of it. Getting that sun and all

of a sudden

Yeah. Warms up a little.

Right? Because we're still in the time of, like, no leaf cover.

Yeah. Yeah. Hear the peepers.

So is that a cardinal?

Yeah. Yeah. You can tell by the long staccato. But it's

it's, like,

two different sounds. It's can can we

can Yep. Yep. Yep.

Okay. Yeah. Good. I'm wondering at what point it gets immersion.

Yeah. And you can see little patches of the marsh marigolds kinda hidden in there. Like, there's a whole bunch of patch in the marsh. Kinda see it over there. Here, if you step over step over this way, you see a little bit of yellow.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Like, on the other side of the marsh. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and there's something.

Okay. Oh, prickly ash. Okay. You can see it right there. There's something big and green coming up.

Oh, yeah. Big leaves.

Yeah. I know it's way too far away to tell what, but that's the biggest leaf I've seen so far.

We're living in a time where it seems like the Internet is actively downgrading. We've witnessed the fall of various social media platforms, the rise of slop, and the gradual erasure of a lot of the Internet's quirkier places. So to remind us of where we came from for just a few minutes, I wanna take you, dear listener, through a guided visualization exercise with me to the Internet of my childhood. Take a few deep breaths. Maybe close your eyes.

Unless you're driving, please do not close your eyes if you're driving. Everyone else, shut your peepers. Okay? It's 2,005. You just got back home from elementary school, and you make a beeline for the back of the house.

You pass the kitchen. You pass the hallway. You pass your brother. He is playing Prince of Persia, The Sands of Time on his Nintendo GameCube because, of course, he does. And you get to that little spare room in the back of the house.

And there lies the family computer. It's a PC with the CRT monitor. It has a fat backside. And underneath your desk is a bulky gray tower that sits on the carpet and a power button that glows light blue when you press it. You log on to the world wide web.

Your parents are pretty tech savvy, and they made a login for you with parental controls on the browser. You're only allowed to visit three websites. Number one, cartoon network dot com. Number two, nickelodeon dot com. And number three, Encyclopedia Britannica's website, britannica.com.

You pick the first. Cartoon Network site is bright with lots of primary colors. There's a bunch of icons all lined up, and they're full of games based on your favorite TV shows. Teen Titans, Ed Ed and Eddy, Camp Laszlo. The list goes on.

There's fighting games. Games that imitate arcade classics like breaker. And games that literally just depend on the click of a mouse. Like one of my favorites called Wee. In Wee, you play as Cheese.

He's a character from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. And the whole object of the game is that by clicking, you can prevent Cheese from screaming as he is pushed downhill. Trust me on this one. It's fun. You spend the next hour immersed in these games.

You try out different genres. You learn what it's like to compete with yourself, and you start to get into a flow state. You look up at the corner of your monitor, and you realize you've beaten your own personal high score. Look at you. You're getting better every day.

But soon enough, you hear your name echoing down the hallway. It's your mom. She's calling you for dinner. You exit out of the browser and turn off the computer. This was childhood for me in the February.

And those games I played were developed on a program called Adobe Flash. Flash made making games accessible. You didn't have to have any experience with coding to make a decent Flash game.

Whole bunch of developers just got their start with Flash.

This is Raven. She's an admin for the Flashpoint archive. They've been preserving games and animations that were made using Flash Player.

And then from there, they probably learned, like, an actual like, a a programming language and then, like, implemented that into, like, Unity or Unreal, and then now, today are, like, actually working on, like, triple a releases. Yeah. So it's just an important stepping stone in, like, the history of gaming.

Beyond flash games being a tool to hook people with the thrill of programming because they were so easy to build, companies started to see their value in hooking people with the thrill of buying things.

Early in the history of the game industry and in sort of, you know, these new section that would sprout up like web games, they were treated more disposably.

That's Phil Salvador. He's the library director at the Video Game History Foundation.

They were treated as toys. It wasn't something that you saw as a long term investment. It was a product you put out or a promotion you did.

So a ton of flash games were made. A lot of them appeared on websites aimed at children who had limited access to the web, like me. And they were used as interactive advertisements to those children as well. Companies like Bubble Yum and Popsicle made their own flash games promoting their products.

And it wasn't something that you thought, hey, Thirty years later, we're going to remonetize this and put out the deluxe version of, you know, Bubble Spinner, for instance.

But while a lot of Flash games were meant for temporary consumption or had simple gameplay, they held a real value for me. So I was an air force brat, meaning my dad was an officer, and military families tend to move around pretty often. And in the summer of o five, my family moved from Louisiana to the Washington DC area. I was actually homeschooled for the first year that we lived there, and the neighborhood we lived in was still being built. Families were just beginning to move in.

All that to say, I didn't really have friends. And so for months, I would spend hours a day playing flash games. They were my companions. Eventually, I started going to regular school again and made friends. And in 02/2006, the next year, the Nintendo Wii came out, and I got it for my eighth birthday.

Once I had the Wii, I largely stopped playing flash games. I mean, I got my hands on masterpieces like Wii Sports and The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. Time went on, and I almost forgot about Flash games entirely. But in 2017, Adobe announced that by 2021, it would discontinue Flash Player, which ran all of those old web games. Times have changed, and Apple, with its revolutionary impact on touchscreen devices, was a really big factor in Adobe's decision.

At this point in my life, I was in my late teens and early twenties, and it had been years since my last CartoonNetwork.com gaming session. But I felt a pang of sadness. A part of my childhood would just be gone. I mean, I kind of figured that in the years after Teen Titans and Ed and Eddy were canceled, their IP wouldn't be as culturally relevant anymore, and those games could be sunset off of Cartoon Network's website. But for all Flash games to be gone because of a technical phasing out, That had never crossed my mind.

And then a couple of years later, I was listening to NPR, and I heard this wild statistic from the Video Game History Foundation. Eighty seven percent of classic games released in The US were out of print. And by classic games, by the way, they mean games that came out before 2010. The stat reminded me of the removal of Flash Player. And it got me wondering, what does it mean for a game to disappear?

It means that there's no way to get the game from the rights holders anymore. And to be clear, that doesn't mean the game isn't playable anymore because there isn't a lot of preservation work happening.

Phil has dedicated his career to preserving video games, especially those that are being lost.

I've always been interested since I was a kid, but I don't think I have the same story as a lot of people do. There was a computer game that came out in the early nineties called The Lost Souls of Tongnao. It's this surreal artistic Japanese game that's sort of a a Zen parable that, it is surreal and bizarre, and it was one of the first computer games I ever played, and I spent really, the rest of my childhood and early adulthood trying to track down what this game was. I doubt it's ever going to get rereleased, but it is fascinating. An example of the kind of really interesting artistic kind of avant garde or, you know, outside the mainstream experiences that can get lost in the cracks when you are rereleasing video games and the stuff that actually makes money is, you know, Sonic the Hedgehog versus Eastern Mind of the Lost Souls of Tongue Now.

Games like Eastern Mind, the Lost Souls of Tongue Now aren't available from their original publisher, which means it's exactly what the Video Game History Foundation would call out of print.

Many of those games, there is no you can't get it on Nintendo Switch. You can't get it on Steam. Yeah. You can get the game. You can play the game.

You can often play it with a lot of quality of life improvements. It's just not sanctioned by the copyright holder.

So Eastern Mind is available to play on game preservation sites like myabandonware.com. But it doesn't seem like Sony is, you know, hankering to put it on the PlayStation network anytime soon. Remastering, remaking, or just making available the most popular classic games on modern consoles, which is called porting, is something that game publishers have done a lot of in the last decade. But the games that get this treatment and stay in print have the financial backing to do so in huge audiences. For example, one of my favorite video games as a kid was, surprise, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.

It's one of the most revered games to exist. It's been ported over to the Nintendo Switch's online service and previous Nintendo consoles. It even got a remake in 2013. But web based games like a lot of these flash games, which were often made by very small teams and seen as disposable. These games hung in the balance.

Publishers didn't invest in keeping them in print. And so when they're not in print, do they exist?

I think when you're telling the story of video games, it's very easy to fall into this very linear story of, you know, Atari existed, then Nintendo came along, and then Sega, and the console wars, and PlayStation. But video games mean so much more than that. There's things like, you know, promotional games, like games you would play on Neopets to get Neopoints from that were, like, tie ins to promote Shrek two or whatever they had up there. But there were also interesting, unique artistic experiences made with Flash. When you look at what Flash games as a category as a whole were, they represent this democratization not just of game development, but also of game publishing at an era before that really hit sort of the mainstream commercial industry.

If you cut the history out of video games, you're left with an incomplete picture of what that media means.

In the grand scheme of media things, video games are pretty new. But like all media, they reflect the times we live in and all the anxieties we have. I mean, kids who grew up during the war on terror made Call of Duty a huge hit. And during the pandemic, people played Animal Crossing New Horizons as a form of self soothing. And they've taken on a bigger share of the pop culture consciousness.

Some of this year's biggest TV and movie releases have been adaptations of video games, like The Last of Us and Minecraft. And while the Video Game History Foundation doesn't do a whole lot of web based game preservation, Phil knows some folks who do. Remember Raven from earlier?

My name is Raven, and I serve as one of the admins for the Flashpoint archive.

The Flashpoint archive is a project that preserves web based games and animations. It started in 2017 when Adobe first announced that by 2021, it would discontinue Flash Player, which ran these games. Times have changed, technology had progressed, and Apple's decision to not support Flash Player on touchscreen devices spelled the end for the program. The work is done by an online community who's passionate about preservation. They do it without pay.

I saw, like, a like, a Kotaku article on it, and I thought, that's interesting. And then I joined the the Discord server. So now, a couple years later, I was serving as the admin for that.

Flashpoint's library now includes over 200,000 games. And as a diligent journalist, I had to do my research. I headed to the Flashpoint archive site, and there they were. The bright colors, the funny animations, the horrible crunchy audio. Those were flash games.

And, of course, they had the ones I remembered. Suddenly, I was fighting off Slade's minions in the Teen Titans flash game and racing in go karts against SpongeBob SquarePants. I just, like, realized that I was smiling really big. It was just, like, this really great moment of, like, oh my god, I'm getting to play this thing I played on the family computer when I was six again. And I never thought I would be able to do that again.

Yeah. That's, like, the the biggest, like, strong point of the archive. It's just like, there's just so much, especially of like the really, really popular stuff. Like, we have, like, you know, there's thousands of games and

Oh, yeah.

You probably remember a couple handful and you probably never expected to be able to play them again because a lot of the, like, reporting on Flash is, like, End of Viath was so, like, it's going away forever. You will never see it again. Yeah. And that just was not true at all. Like, you can absolutely still play those games in a multitude of ways, including just on, like, an old browser that still has Flash.

Like, Newgrounds and Armored Games and Congregate, they're all, like, they still have the games up.

But Raven also says that Flash games were more than playable advertisements for snack companies and fair for children's websites.

I mean, we got a bunch of indie games that came from Flash. Like, Meat Boy started as as Meat Boy on Newgrounds. We got that. We got the N series, which is, like, still is around today. We got so many, like, wonderful experiences.

Like, Binding of Isaac started out on here.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Like, so much of Flash is, like, reflective of what was going on in the world. Like, there's so many, like, works about, like, George Bush and, like, the two thousands, and it's, like Yeah. That's just so much interesting context of, like, the Internet's perception of things. And if, like, all the Flash were just disappear tomorrow, like, we would lose so much context of not only, like, events that happened, but also, like, the Internet's response to that. Like

Mhmm.

It's important that we have these. In the sense of, like, social media and, like, like, Twitter and Tumblr and, like, like, Facebook or and Reddit are just so important to, like, understanding the world.

We think we can find just about everything on the internet. And we also feel a sense of ownership of being able to find what we want, when we want, and preferably for free. Like, what do you mean that game is gone forever? Isn't there just an emulator somewhere that can run that? Yeah.

Usually there is, but that's not a given. It's thanks to an immense amount of work done by archivists who basically perform free labor because it's their passion. It's like walking into a lush, beautiful garden and wondering how so many delicate types of plants are still alive no matter the climate. In our garden of digital media, trust me here, we keep these gaming plants alive because archivists have been watering and pruning and tending to them.

Preservation is never something that happens in the past tense. It is always happening. That if you have a file, you know, there's no guarantee that the file is going to, you know, work in dozens of years. Maybe that hard drive is going to fail. Maybe, you know, the the file type that it's in is not going to be compatible in the future.

Even just doing digital preservation work now, you know, we have backups people made years ago, and they're in formats that there's no documentation for. Right? So even if you're trying to, you know, hey. We've preserved this thing. We have it in this format.

It's up here. It's available. There has to be this kind of ongoing custodianship of it to make sure it stays accessible, whether that is making sure we have emulators that still work today or even just making sure there's not just a single point of failure for this game, that if a website goes down or a hard drive breaks or a CD starts to rot, that we have some way to continue accessing it.

Yeah. He it's like a Library of Alexandria sort of thing. Don't wanna, like, lose.

Yeah. Everything

is always decaying, and that sounds bleak, but it just means that preservation is done by people. There's no solution where it's just like, hey, I put this thing in the blockchain. It's like, no. You have to make sure that there's always going to be people who know how to work with this stuff and make it available in a format people can actually use, rather than putting it assuming the problem is going to be taken care of, then you come back thirty years later and think, oh, I can't really do anything with this. It's not about will this be available tomorrow?

It's is can we build something that's going to persist and still map games available after we're dead? After all the hardware has failed, do we have some sustainable solutions for making sure people can still access this stuff in the long term future?

Personally, I hope that a hundred years from now, historians are playing.

Those are cowbirds. Amy. Cowbirds.

There's a little bit right there. And

those guys are woodpecker. And

then there's that,

which is maybe a hawk, maybe a turkey vulture. Two in the trees to see. And

nope. Wow.

I think it's a hawk.

And down. Oh, into the tree.

Yeah. That's a hawk.

I have never seen a hawk in a body.

How they're spelled?

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, May 21. The following is a list of books that you can get for $4 from abooks.com. Look what you can make with boxes Published by Boyd's Mills Press nineteen ninety eight. ISBN ten one five six three nine seven nine six zero eight.

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That's gotta be good.

Right? Gotta good. That's gotta be good.