“Thunder”

Copy this link for a short URL

February 1, 2010 at 11:48pm

This is a blog post about Flash, but this isn’t like all those other Flash blog posts. No, this blog post about Flash is written by me and I offer a unique overweight, white, male geek perspective!

Every 2 years we get to have this great one-sided conversation. Usually Apple comes out with a product, it does something different and to their credit Apple is the most passive aggressive company on the planet on bold decisions. More passive aggressive than your Mom when she mails you 24 hour fitness coupons. 

So I’m going to do you a favor, as I’m in the business of favors, and give you a metric of expectation for every Flash article I’ve cared to read this week.

Also, do you know why this blog post is called Thunder? In WWII if you were in Normandy, an Allied soldier and you didn’t respond Flash you got fucking killed because you were a Nazi. I think it’s important we set the gravity of the stakes here.

GRUUUUUUUUUBE

The king.

The problem with attacking Jon Gruber is that the man is a statue, immovable. Like Glenn Beck convinces his tea parties that it’s a revolution for the people, so doth the Grube with the clickety-clack of his qwerty to the pseudo-implication of Apple, Inc.

Grube or El Gruberino has several articles on Flash: Blue Boxes, some commentary on porn, and my personal favorite.

Oh sorry, wrong link for that last one, you can find that here.

Reading Gruber is like reading the scene from Magnolia where Tom Cruise talks about “respecting” his nether regions. You can’t help think what beautifully crafted stubbornness with closers like “The problem for Flash is just like the problem for IE — the web has already moved on.” I can’t think of a man more deserving of back-handed compliment more.

Therefore I propose this, we must consider a unit of measure for this sort of odd Internet punditry. It is a plain-spoken, subjective near-propaganda-esque language. It is more confusing than that last sentence’s shoddy construction.

While the measurement of this sort of ideology in terms of the GRUUUUUUBE’s delivery can not be contained by your earth-sciences, a grube is my baseline measure for super-subjective opinion-fact and ruminations. If an article has a good amount of grubes you can be sure it’s entertaining, well-written, completely subjective, speaking-ideas-as-if-facts and ultimately weightless. 99% of articles found on this very site are at least 3-4 grubes.

So, with this out of the way let us march gently to the high-pitched whiny beating of the oddly syncopated Internet electric parade adjective drum. Chortle onward, blog-o-sphere.

ZeldMAN!

Article of Intrigue: Flash, iPad, Standards

Zeldman plays it safe with this article and almost omits himself from getting a grube ranking at all. However with classic lines like “Developers always should have done this, but some don’t” and without providing evidence stating “Apple’s decision to omit Flash from the iPad isn’t about revenge, it’s about delivering a stable platform” he earns himself one grube.

Next time, J-dog, maybe throw in a quip about Safari always crashing. You were just too nice to Adobe to be considered respectable.

Scoble

Article of Intrigue: Can Flash be saved?

Robert Scoble comes out of the gate like a kid faking ADD to get more test-time with that beautiful grube worthy title. I say grube worthy because the GRUUUUUUBE doesn’t ask f’n questions. The Grube just gives answers. Bitch.

So what sort of crazy, subjective bile can Scoble spill? “So, can Adobe save Flash? No. But Google can.”, “The web elite don’t have Nokia phones and don’t care about Nokia.”

It takes a rare kind of man to display this sort of definitive nothing-ness and cloud-reaching. You’re in such a cloud Scoble you’re Amazon S3. God I wish this was Twitter. I would #nerdjoke hash tag the crap out of that one-liner then sell it for Internet money. I still don’t know what Scoble contributes to our eco-system. Writing? Lame. Steve Jobs said nobody reads… hey… wait a minute.

This is a 3 grube post. Scoble, by his very nature and God bless ‘em he keeps trying, gets a 3.

Adobe Employee ID #3472078

Article of Intrigue: Some pictures of Porn

I’m terribly disappointed that there used to be a blurred picture of a porn site on an Apple iPad here and there is no longer one. This guy was awarded 4 grubes, but since he took away the porn-picture he’s down to none. I love that I got to write this sentence. I also love the irony of my arrogance mixed with this. Mmm… tasty, tasty arrogance.

I’m sorry, you’ll have to close down Safari before you can continue reading this blog post.

Surprisingly, the Adobe employee writes the least arrogant, fact-based post. Coincidentally, it’s the one where no one is writing much. Still, this charade of video sites, probably the least likely candidate to use your technology in the future, is a pretty stupid call.

I’m sorry, you’ll have to close Firefox before reading can continue. Cancel?

Jeff Croft

Article of Intrigue: On Flash

I got bored. Went back to that Flash blog porn picture. 1 grube.

Richard Leggett

Article of Intrigue: “The World is Moving to HTML 5” and Other Flights of Fancy

Dick loses some grubes for the pragmatism of his title, saved only because it gets a little condescending at its tail. Lines such as “It may be interesting to some people to scroll through a highly efficient search engine friendly static page to see this kind of thing, but it’s really very boring indeed for most people” are great overgeneralizations. Dick’s ability, however, to argue both sides of the coin and see a grey area is unwelcome here on the Internet. You don’t get any grubes. You don’t even get any fucking merlin-manns.

“Flash”

Internet, this week you really taught me something.