Mike Rugnetta: 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site's significantly outdated unpatched software.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.
Clip: Oops.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Dr. Shelton: 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.
Hans Buetow: Dutchman's breeches. Now those? Those.
Right? Sorry.
Amy: Because
they look kind of like anemones
Hans Buetow: Oh, yeah.
Amy: These are Columbine coming up here.
Hans Buetow: Those are Columbine. Yeah. For sure. But
Those are are those
Amy: 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.
Hans Buetow: They do make yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Dutchman's breeches. Oh, gorgeous.
Amy: So cool.
Hans Buetow: So cool. And here's some more
of the lilies.
Oh, man. Those are pretty.
Amy: 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?
Hans Buetow: Or is it the
I can't tell.
Amy: We'll see another one. It's hard to tell.
Hans Buetow: Dicentra cucullaria.
Oh, Amy. Look at who's on my hand.
Amy: So this is actually a root.
Hans Buetow: Look who's on oh, flew away. That fly was wild
looking. Sorry. This is what?
Amy: That's actually in the rue family.
Hans Buetow: Oh.
Amy: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Amy: Right? Because we're still in the time of, like, no leaf
cover.
Hans Buetow: Yeah. Yeah. Hear the peepers.
Amy: So is that a cardinal?
Hans Buetow: Yeah. Yeah. You can tell by the long staccato. But
it's
Amy: it's, like,
two different sounds. It's can can we
Hans Buetow: can Yep. Yep. Yep.
Amy: Okay. Yeah. Good. I'm wondering at what point it gets
immersion.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Raven: Whole bunch of developers just got their start with Flash.
Tori Dominguez Peak: This is Raven. She's an admin for the
Flashpoint archive. They've been preserving games and animations
that were made using Flash Player.
Raven: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: That's Phil Salvador. He's the library
director at the Video Game History Foundation.
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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?
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: Phil has dedicated his career to
preserving video games, especially those that are being
lost.
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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?
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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?
Raven: My name is Raven, and I serve as one of the admins for
the Flashpoint archive.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Raven: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Raven: 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
Tori Dominguez Peak: Oh, yeah.
Raven: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: But Raven also says that Flash games were
more than playable advertisements for snack
companies and fair for children's websites.
Raven: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: Oh, wow. I didn't know that.
Raven: 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
Mike Rugnetta: Mhmm.
Raven: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: 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.
Phil Salvador: 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.
Tori Dominguez Peak: Yeah. He it's like a Library of
Alexandria sort of thing. Don't wanna, like, lose.
Phil Salvador: 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?
Tori Dominguez Peak: Personally, I hope that a hundred years from
now, historians are playing.
Hans Buetow: 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.
Amy: I have never seen a hawk in a body.
Hans Buetow: How they're spelled?
Mike Rugnetta: 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
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