Written by: David Roocroft
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Net Week 13 - Flashy Flash

This week, let's take stock of some of 2002's finest Flash 6.0 moments - or at least the best ones your `hilarious' mates might have emailed you. Two notable sites that earned their creators TV slots are http://www.rathergood.com/independent_woman/ and http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/pie.htm. The latter is the Weebl and Bob animation site in which two ova shout "Want pie now!" at each other. As a result, MTV commissioned author Jonti Picking for some Weebl and Bob shows. The now infamous Joel Veitch rendering of a kitten band playing Elbow's cover of `Independent Women' found at rathergood.com earned him work for Channel 4's dismal music show Born Sloppy. It's frightening that this kind of Inbox clogging nonsense can attract such attention to a new artist, and the ramifications of this most democratised of distribution methods are both good and bad: on the one hand an artist's work can reach a large number of people through online word of mouth, but on the other hand it gives a platform to dull new media novelty acts that should never have left the creators' own desktops. Remember the way the dancing hamster thing invaded our lives? It's far easier for crap to get successful if it's online crap - where else would someone find watching a stickman doing kung fu acceptable? So next time you guffaw at an animated Yorkshire terrier miming to So Solid Crew, just think: the person responsible for that could be controller of BBC One this time next week.

One of the more interesting animation sites is http://strindbergandhelium.com/, which details the adventures of Swedish playwright and novelist August Strindberg, whose morbid musings on existence are counterbalanced by his companion Helium the cheery balloon. It all sounds profoundly daft, but the artwork is exquisitely gloomy and Strindberg's apocalyptic whingeing comes across perfectly in the voice acting. Also, entertaining in a my-head's-as-empty-as-my-diary sort of way is http://www.b3ta.com/namethatbeard/, as brought to you by er… Harold Shipman, apparently. As the URL suggests, you have to match the name of a celebrity (be it Brian Blessed or Jesus) to their disembodied facial hair. Suicidal Super Puppy at http://www.weebl.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/b3ta/puppy.html is a game in which you set the velocity and trajectory of a Labrador in order to gain the most distance. Student Direct's best score is 1680 - if you can beat that and supply photographic evidence, we'll send you a Kinder Egg.

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