Albino Blacksheep

Ducky

Ernie's Rubber Ducky has moved on to a new roomate more laid back and not so serious about his rough personality. I don't think you'll be able to watch these episodes and look at a rubber ducky the same way again.

Here's the series page if you want to share all the episodes.

I feel like this is cheating on Ointment Duck.

Forever Alone

"Double Chin" is another stick animation derived from a pencil-drawn comic strip by pOpZ.

Not to be confused with the very popular Smoke Kills animation.

We No Speak Americano is a very popular and overplayed dance song. Sometimes a creative remix can bring new life to a song on its way out. The drum track has been completely removed and replaced by a table.

[I think this is by @ForeverOnline.]
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The next update or the one after that will feature ducks.

The Future

World's Fairs and Sci-Fi books, series or movies gave the public a glimpse into a possible future. The true futurists who made these predictions based their ideas on real scientific advancements, but science that was in its infancy and expected to grow and be perfected. All of the concepts were on the same road to the same end - a utopian and lazy day-to-day life. Think The Jetsons where food just appears on the table. Same concept in Back to the Future II. Although we all claim to want our lives made more simple, technology does the opposite. It gives us new frontiers to discover and build; new jobs and industries; and new toys to play with. Life since humanity began is creative and social; not automated.

The latest in the futurist videos is a prediction on 2014 by TAT Mobile. Advancements in system-on-a-chip, LED lights and e-paper technology will make certain you don't have to get out of bed, and that it's faster to type to friends than to talk to them.

Although much of the focus on change is on 2012, around 2015 is where futurists predict a new world. Maybe it takes three years to get out from the rubble caused by the apocalypse. A Flash animation titled EPIC 2015 was released in January 2015, which although is oblivious to touchscreen company acquisitions by major computer companies, is very aware of real-time micro-blogging and geotagging. It basically predicts Twitter, but also so much more that I'll revisit this video at least once a year.

Not surprisingly, it's listed under the Epic Flash section.

Not everyone is a techno-nerd, though. Some worldviews are purely cultural and political. Here's how the world is believed to end in a 2003 mindset.

No cigar

Everything is a Remix looks to be the start of a great online documentary. I'll keep an eye on its production. The younger generations are either completely oblivious or overly passive to the remix-without-attribution taking place on their favourite songs. Today on the radio I hear the Taio Cruz song Dynamite, "Saying AYO / Gotta let go". The same as Red Hot Chili Peppers' song Snow which goes, "Hey Oh / Listen what I say oh" released a few years back. Awareness of music origins (as well as film, books and other pieces of shared culture) will give people wider tastes, but also cultural and social awareness as much of the content that is remixed has roots from a specific era and/or location.

It becomes mesmerizing if you watch enough of these close calls. I've been viewing Internet video for a long time - over a decade, and you may not know this, but there are a lot of injuries caught on film, and I'm not talking about the "football in the groin" you see on America's Funniest Home Videos. It gets pretty nasty getting attachments from people who visit the darker corners of the Internet. In contrast, these close calls give the viewer a completely different sensation. Quite pleasant, actually.

Edit: Looks like the following two videos were removed from the net. You have to catch these postings while you can.

A very creative video from Twitter to promote the upcoming changes to their service. Also, they made the bird logo a little nicer. With so many unofficial "remixed" logos of the current Twitter bird, I am wondering if they made the bird a silhouette for the purpose of allowing users to continue their creativity. I'm @albinoblack on Twitter, by the way. I wonder if someone would like to do something creative with the Albino Blacksheep logo.

In bewteen updates I have actually added a few dozen Flash animations to this site (to be shown later). What I am doing is going through the dead archives and a pile of backup CDs from 2001 to 2003 to restore old and lost animations. Some were so obscure and poorly animated that they are lost for good, but most will be restored. Renaming submissions to the HTML page's title rather than leaving them as something like Movie01.swf is the key to making sure this never happens again. Also, I should never assume a free hosting service like Geocities or even a local ISP will last forever.

80s on the 8th: a-ha

In 1984 Norwegian pop band a-ha [yes, lowercase as was the trend] recorded their most popular song Take On Me which topped the music charts by the Fall of 1985. The success of the song is not attributed to the music as much as it is to the music video; a blend of rotoscoped animation with live action. Two animators, Michael Patterson and Candace Reckinger, painstakingly redrew each live action frame with a pencil sketch style.

Fast forward to the 20th century where animator and videographer Dustin McLean starts a new trend based on the Take On Me music video. He replaced the lyrics with his own voice, re-singing the song in the same tone and style, but with lyrics that literally describe the actions of the video. No metaphors. No interpretations.

Dustin continued the trend and others followed, but with copyright laws on music recordings being strictly enforced online by record companies many had to be removed. This even included the original Take On Me: Literal Version for quite some time. A few remain.

Visitors here may remember Dustin McLean by his online handle - dustball. It's no surprise that the Take On Me music video has an impression on him. He is the author of the famous rotoscoped animation titled Play featured on Albino Blacksheep.

And now you know... the rest of the story.

Condescending

How about a good old fashioned Tube update to relax on Labour Day? I've been letting these pile up too long for an update.

I told Andrew Pants, "maybe I should post this on ABS", and then I didn't do it. Not cool of me. Here's a music video remix made completely with the program Avid. The remix MP3 by Andew Pants is a free download.

There are literally thousands of musicians recording themselves playing popular songs or video game songs on classical instruments. Teppei Okada is a little different. He plays along with the gameplay being sure not to miss any detail.

Not to be confused with F*ck Sh*t Piss.

I used to almost always post incoming emails on here, and now I am tempted to again. I posted a message on here that I am busy, and this is the response I got. Some kid with a hotmail address basically trying to dare people like me into giving out personal information, money or some other things scammy people need.

ha ha,

if you are so busy then I may not hear from you. let me know if you are interested in expanding your lovely work into Australia, or NOT.. don't wont to waste your time, money or satisfaction.

I have a huge market, not only for your simple talents, but the fact that we can finance any bloke, from wherever...

The ball is in your court

Mark R

That email from Mark Racovalis is what often passes as a "business proposal" these days because people actually fall for its tone. It's not a prince of Nigeria. It's not an email phishing scam. It's simply someone being condescending and talking down to another person in order to get attention. The technique works on the weakest, most insecure and inexperienced of all people. In other words, most people.

What is this? I don't even.

Sometimes animators new to Flash email me with a submission, and it's not good. Instead of rejecting them completely, I tell them to keep emailing me until I see that they get better. This is called "potential", and I believe Jordan has it.

A new prank call experiment from Booters. No one can beat the Waffle House Prank Call though. It's a wonder people would even bother.

So what's happening with ABS when updates are scattered? One thing is that I am paying more attention to offline real-life matters, and man this life thing is getting in the way, but I know I must take the time to appreciate it too.

This doesn't mean I ignore ABS completely. I have been speeding up this site and some of my clients' sites as well with a combination of server configuration, file minifying/compression, removing things, smushing things, combining things, creating subdomains, working around browser bugs and any other technique under the sun. It's better though that I consider these site optimizations upon a redesign, but it still doesn't hurt to speed up a few things for the time being with the current design. For example, it's been recently discovered that serving an additional IE-only stylesheet using IE conditionals blocks the ability for both those stylesheets to be downloaded at the same time in IE. Strange, considering this is the most-used and widely recommended technique. I hope my clients will appreciate that they won't fall into the same traps as their competitors and ABS visitors will appreciate this site loading faster.

Not to sound too technical, but it is ironic that the conditional CSS hacks that developers were warned might cause problems in the future are so-far nonexistent compared to the Microsoft-invented conditional comments workaround which ended up hurting the future (now current) Microsoft browsers.

tl;dr nerdy coding stuff.

I have to get cracking on adding new sections for some of the wonderful TOFA artists that joined ABS this year. It's the least I can do for them.