Mike who does Bridge Kids teaches some classes at SVA in New York, and he had me in last week to teach his first-year students about the wonders of Flash animation, before the other professors get the chance to infect them with the somewhat-pervasive industry wisdom that flash is not a "serious" tool for animation. I showed them a bunch of old Newgrounds stuff - not strictly the "famous" stuff like Salad Fingers or Badger Badger etc, but mainly stuff that influenced me personally, or uniquely flash-y stuff that I think made some contribution to the evolution of animation as an art form:

There's a bit of a focus on technical animation-nerd stuff, but I also touch on some of the common themes of cartoons on the early internet - the violence, the crude humor, and the lack-of-awareness of copyright law. I had never done something like this before, so it was a cool opportunity to pretend like I was giving a GDC talk or something, like I watched so many of when I was college-aged. I always thought that was something we needed more of in the indie animation scene - people reflecting on their work and the medium itself, so that the stuff we learn today can be passed down and preserved somehow. Maybe animation people are, on average, less analytical or maybe less verbal than game developer people, and so we don't have as many examples of people breaking down the craft, at least past beginner-tutorial level. But something like a GDC for animation might be cool to try and organize someday.

In other news, the artist formerly known as Aalasteir reached out to interview me for his show A100. The conversation went very long, so if two hours of me talking wasn't enough for you, here's two-and-a-half more:

^I woke up about five minutes before we hit record, so if I sound a little sleepy compared to my lecture, that's why. We talked about a bunch of stuff ranging from Flash and Newgrounds stuff to some general musings about art and technology. So if you aren't sick to death of people on the internet going on about "AI," now you can hear MY take! (I promise that's like 10 minutes max.)

If you listen to either of those and have questions for me about whatever, feel free to leave a comment here! I'm pretty good about reading all of them.

-Marty