PiXELWiT

A long long time ago on a Flash forum far far away… I was trying to grasp the full implications of the “text editor thingy” inside Flash. Supposedly, you could type magic words into it and Flash would obey your every command. Finally! My computer would do my bidding rather than it forcing me to press CTRL ALT DEL and string consecutive expletives together in new and exciting ways. Since FlashKit was the biggest resource dedicated to learning all things Flash it’s no surprise I could be found there frittering away my time browsing the many user-submitted files.

And then one day it happened, it took me by surprise. The ‘magic moment’ when I stumbled onto a peculiar little file. It was completely useless. It didn’t convey a message, it didn’t sell anything, it didn’t enhance my site navigation, it didn’t do much of anything. It was just “sluggy”. And I was fascinated by it!

In the land of tweened flat vectors Sluggy stood out with its sense of depth and shimmering fluid motion. Sure, there were plenty of cool SWF files around at the time but Sluggy was the first FLA file to lure me into the mind of a programmer. I spent the night running through various elements of Darrin Hurd's FLA file. Bouncing from one clip to another, trying to grasp how all the little bits coalesced to form something greater. I don't know if he felt a tremor in "The Force" or not, but to me, for that night, Darrin Hurd was godlike. Not only had he taken little chunks of words and graphics and turned them into something so wondrous, he was lifting the curtain to let anyone and everyone see how the magic was done. Such benevolence! 😉

I think I sent him an e-mail thanking him for his generosity, as I recall, it went something like, "Cool! Thanks! Cool! WOW! Awesome! Thanks!" and so on. I never heard anything back from him, I didn't expect to, he'd already done so much.

And so on I went, my new hunger leading me somewhere I'd not been before. Thanks for the inspiration Darrin Hurd, it's been fun.

What inspires you? Have you had a similar experience?

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