Adobe Flash is Way, Way Too Hard

I've been put in my place, and boy does my place taste bitter. I feel - what's the word? - dumbful. The soundtrack in my head for the past three hours is a medley of the word "duh" blended with extended periods of "umm..." and the occasional "wait what now?"

I downloaded the free trial version of Adobe Flash. Dude. It's hard as all get-out.

Now, this is especially infuriating to me in particular as I was involved in the early development of the Apple Macintosh's GUI - oh, sorry, "graphical user interface". Sometimes I think I'm still talking to my fellow beta testers back in the late 80s. Yeah, we in Mrs. Willoughby's sixth-period Computers class were pretty cutting-edge, with yours truly leading the way. One concept I really grasped was "the mouse". So you can imagine my distress that I couldn't master the finer intricacies of Adobe Flash CS4.

Flash is the most popular software tool used for creating animation. It's award-winning and recognized as the standard-bearer in its class, but here's the problem - clearly, somewhere in the testing stage, Adobe, Inc. must have lost all its funding. So, they rushed it to market, and we're left with an end-user application that is figuratively impossible to figure out - literally.

Like I do in any foreign situation, I stared blankly and felt waves of panic. Flash is probably the kind of thing where, once you get it, it's like riding a bike. But I forgot that learning how to ride a bike was ridiculously hard and I fell often - it was Band-Aid central up in there. Today, as a professional genius, I take "getting stuff" for granted. I do not get Flash.

You'll see I mastered the "single-frame" concept. A pastiche of Dali, Rockwell, and my neighbor's daughter Becky, I found my voice and really explored the canvas. It's when it came time to animate that the insufferable dread began to hang over me like so many crushing waves in the middle of a stormy sea. Where is the "next frame" icon? Shouldn't there be a "GO" button? Move, damn you! Dance like no one's watching!

I had to step away from the situation. So I went down to the pub with me mates. Got a pint. Shot some billiards, or maybe snooker, I forget. At a distance, the answer became clear: "just give up!" And with that, I felt renewed! "Oy, blokes!" I told the blokes, in the blokiest tone I could muster. "Bollocks to that bloody programme!"

"Arse," I added.

It's a shame, though. Who knows what rich, multimedia masterpiece might have emerged from that picturesque setting? I bet three birds would have flown across the screen. The kind that are lower-case 'm's.

I leave you with some of my earlier works.

Hard-Angled Blue Reptile Guy with Cement Wall in Background (2009)

Green Trapezoid on Blue Rectangle, or, Where Goes God When the World Ends? (2009)

It's posterity's loss, really.