I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
When stick figures fought
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Re: When stick figures fought
#42> It was the era when a major company could brush off the bad PR that comes with copying a major online artist. Is it believable that no one involved in the Nike ads had seen Xiao Xiao? Not really — it was popular with young people worldwide. Yet Zhu was new media at a time when old media ruled. What could he do?
This doesn't make any sense. From earlier in the same article:
> Zhu didn’t invent violent stickman animations. In the ‘90s, the Western site Stick Figure Death Theatre hosted exactly what its name implied. But Xiao Xiao, and its mix of Jackie Chan with Jet Li with The Matrix, perfected the idea.
> Either way, it was Xiao Xiao that made “stick fights” massive online. Clones were rampant — even Stick Figure Death Theatre had them. As one paper reported in 2002:
>> The Web’s legions of part-time Flash animators have begun producing their own copies of Xiao Xiao — so many, in fact, that there’s a whole portal dedicated to them. Stick Figure Death Theatre ... has so many stick man knockoffs, you have to wonder why Zhu doesn’t just give up.
If we assume that people at Nike were familiar with Xiao Xiao... and that they were also familiar with the mountains of similar material, what are we saying they did wrong?
Re: When stick figures fought
#43I grew up learning Flash and started my love for programming due to ActionScript 2 then 3, is there anything like this today I am looking for something for my 10 year old daughter.
For games or animation?
Godot might be today's analogue for games.
Re: When stick figures fought
#44The first animation that made me love these was the old 'stickman vs door' gif,
Thanks for reminding me of that one
Re: When stick figures fought
#45Ah, XiaoXiao. Under the amazingly named `E:\Storage\Old\Fun\old\XiaoXiao` I have fight (xiaoxiao1).avi, XiaoXiao_City_Plaza.swf, and xiaoxiao2.swf - xiaoxiao9.swf
Send us a file listing for `fun' :)
Re: When stick figures fought
#46I was knee-deep in the flash animation scene through the late 90s early 00s, and I don't remember anyone calling anyone 'Flashers'. China-only I suppose. I did think Stick Death came out before Xiao Xiao?
Yeh stick death definitely was before Xiao Xiao. I remember all the lads at school sat around a computer in school binge watching them all.
Re: When stick figures fought
#47That's spooky, we were literally just talking about stickdeath in the office and then this shows up.
And most people weren’t talking about it, but it’s inevitable that some were, and I guess that’s you. Surely you’re not surprised about all the times when you’re not talking about something that then shows up on HN? You talk about stuff everyday, and stuff shows up on HN everyday, eventually they’ll coincide.
Oh my god do you think it was selection bias? No way, I’m certain it was spooky action at a distance! /s
Re: When stick figures fought
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some tools were certainly better, like Flash. Mobile made a lot of things complicated. Half the game dev tools still don't run properly for mobile. HTML5 was supposed to make things easier, and for a while it did, but it got rapidly more complicated afterwards. Some things are much better today, like Procreate.
I dont think HTML5 was supposed to make things easier. It is just that major players wanted to get rid of flash for own reason (some of them valid) and HTML5 was something they were able to point at. It was never easier or even half replacement, it was significantly more complicated and crappier experience for an average normal creator. It never even got some convincing demo. All those I have seen at the time were th…
There still aren't any convincing demos.
Re: When stick figures fought
#49Dude completely forgets StickDeath.com which came before all of this…
Re: When stick figures fought
#50I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval. Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
Yep, had Pivot on a disk. Countless hours lost making my own sprites, and I remember the joy of downloading other peoples sprites that were actually good