Flash Memory: Preserving Web Games For The Future

Description: A tombstone with a tuft of grass with the
symbol for the program Adobe Flash wedged in it at an angle.

Last year, Adobe announced that it was slowly phasing out support for its Flash player plugin, with support ending in 2 years. Most modern browsers are phrasing out support of Flash before then.

That also means that over 20 years of game and interactive animation history could vanish with it. Enter the Archive Team. Ben Latimore writes about the project in a Medium piece, saying:

"... Flash is arguably the largest treasure trove of unpreserved gaming history today... Spanning literal[ly] tens of thousands of games over a period of twenty years, the library of Flash games, breadth and depth, outlives any other game console on the market. 

When your browser no longer has the plugin to run those games, what happens to them?"

The answer the Archive Project has advanced is BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, which serves as the connection for preservation of Flash game collections. Latimore runs a discord server for the project here where you can download the current archive, make requests and discuss the project itself.

His Medium post about his effort to prevent thousands of games from disappearing is worth a read, so check out the whole article here.

DIY Steampunk Mouse Project

Description: A computer mouse with a light wood finish &
2 wooden buttons, with a cord trailing out of frame.

I've wanted to do something like this for years, ever since I saw hobbyists do complicated and expensive things like make brass typewriter-style keyboards and oak wood PC case mods.... figure out how to make a working wooden computer mouse. Thanks to this Maker guide, now you too can like your dream of making a wooden-case mouse like some sort of techno-druid, rustic log cabin hacker, or Steampunk enthusiast.

And it's all pretty simple and straightforward-- all you need is a cheapo USB mouse (for the electronics), a small block of wood, two tiny buttons and optionally, 2 wooden dowels. Read on to see how you can end up with a mouse like the above picture.

Kid Gets Secret Treasure Room For 4th Birthday

At ghghghgh, they detail how they turned an unused storage room adjacent to their 4 year old's room from a dusty, unused and unfurnished room into a space so wondrous that their son called it a "secret treasure room".

They hid the door to the storage room behind a kid-size dresser for two years, and when his fourth birthday drew near, the set to re-flooring the room, putting up and painting new walls, and stocking the room with furniture and drawing supplies and stickers and a world map that wouldn't have fit on the wall of his other room.



This is an awesome project, and pretty unique gift to give to a kid-- how many of us have daydreamed of dressers or bookshelves in a home leading to secret rooms? These folks worked together and gave him one. You can read how they did it, complete with pictures, here at Goer.org.