I want to add a thought to my post, because today is the first day I learned of the "kill switch" in FP 32 (and maybe 31?) I archived my debug / non-debug FP versions (for Mac) back to FP 10, so if anyone needs one, get in touch.

But my thought was: This move by Adobe feels like someone setting fire to my house with all my paintings in it. I'm 40 years old. I started working in Flash around 1998 and was still building new things until around 2015. The large part of my creative output from my 20s and early 30s is in Actionscript.

It's one thing to retire the player. But I can go online and play Atari games from the 70s. I can play any Nintendo game that ever existed. Has a language ever been fully eradicated along with all of its art and culture before, in one day?

I know the douches wanted to kill flash forever, and make everything clean and easier to index and easier to commercialize, and we're living in a post-Jobs/Zuck world now. People have profiles, not websites. If you have a personal website, it's Wordpress or some other template. No one is designing new UIs from scratch for their personal site. No one is taking ThreeJS and PixiJS and building a radically new interface for an art site.

But it's not just the loss of that culture that I'm mourning, I'm realizing. It's the actual destruction of my life's work. It's one thing to see hardware and software retired. It's another to have the company who built the tool that I spent 90% of my creative career on, actively demolish everything I built. It feels like an attack on a whole generation and a whole way of thought.

I know that we coders are "writing in sand" as my older brother, an old Assembly / C coder, told me when he gave my his TRS-80. And it's always like that. But his code will live on. Mine won't.

If I take anything from the tens of thousands of hours I spent learning how to really leverage the AVM, delving into bytecode, writing platforms, I guess the one thing I find consolation in is that I learned how to navigate an opaque system and built a deep understanding -- for a scripter -- of how things worked under the surface. Which serves me well now using Typescript and other things. But the tons and tons of experiments... stretching all the way back... who will translate them? Who will remember them? We should be remembered, at least be able to say "hey look at this thing I did 15 years ago that relates to what you're doing". And be able to pull it up.

It's wrong, and I really hope in a couple years we have a full on JS-based emulator so I can bring my art back. AS3 always ran faster than JS, especially faster than Safari's crummy JS implementation, and Jobs' was a cynical business decision.

Okay. It's wrong to destroy our work. End of my rant.