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Signed-off-by: Xe <me@christine.website>

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+---
+title: 10 years of Barkley Pie's Slam Jam Slam Song
+date: 2022-10-15
+tags:
+ - youtube
+ - flash
+ - animation
+---
+
+Wow, time flies. Nearly 10 years ago I published one of my first Flash projects
+to YouTube, [Barkley Pie's Slam Jam Slam Song](https://youtu.be/pAEa3CGX62Y).
+The publication of this video has always felt like a turning point in my life,
+so I want to spend some time to talk about that video and how the events that
+lead up to its creation has left me irreperably changed for the better.
+
+Here is _my_ copy of that video:
+
+<xeblog-video path="blog/basketball_10yr"></xeblog-video>
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Mara" mood="hacker">If the embedded player isn't working for
+whatever reason, watch the one [on
+YouTube](https://youtu.be/pAEa3CGX62Y).</xeblog-conv>
+
+## Context
+
+10 years ago I was a vastly different person than who I am today. I had just
+gotten out of a high school experience that I don't look back on fondly. I was a
+ball of depression and I was sent out to college because that's what I was
+supposed to do. Needless to say, I ended up getting a PhD in dropping out.
+
+Depression is not something I usually like talking about on this blog. It's
+usually a very personal thing that I have been societally trained into not
+talking about out of the ideas of "austerity" or "being tough". I want to work
+on breaking those stigmas, and one of the ways that I feel I can do that is to
+talk about this openly. Depression sucks and if you are struggling with it
+please don't give up hope that things can get better. They can get better.
+
+I was very depressed in college and one of the few things that started to turn
+things around was stumbling across the show [My Little Pony: Friendship is
+Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony%3A_Friendship_Is_Magic) and
+the community of college aged and adult fans around it. Most of the online
+communities I had been in before the brony fandom had been places filled with
+hatred, toxicity, and ego. This was different. It was full of passionate, kind
+people that wanted to get away from the hate.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Numa" mood="delet">Fun fact: the brony fandom started on
+4chan, the site notorious for hate, venom, and being the reason why companies
+have stopped doing "name this thing" style competitions.</xeblog-conv>
+
+I wanted to give back, but the only skills I really had were using Flash 8 to do
+basic motion tweens. So I sat on things for a while and then something else came
+into my life: the [soundclown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_SoundCloud)
+community.
+
+### Soundclowns
+
+I have always been fascinated by the work of the [YouTube
+Poop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_poop) community. They have been a
+constant source of inspiration for how I edit and create media. Attempting to
+create some in high school is how I learned to get good enough at editing sound
+that I have sometimes made significant cuts to audio mid-sentence in my talk
+videos and nobody would have noticed it if I didn't point it out just now. Most
+of the work of YouTube Poop was vocal chopping, pitch bending and picking out
+samples from spoken dialogue and then transforming it into something new. It's a
+sort of kitboshing form of art that violates the conventional rules and uses the
+knowledge of that violation as a form of artistic dissonance.
+
+Soundclowns are a more mature version of this, but done with music. A lot of it
+has to do with taking the _aesthetics_ of songs and putting them all into a
+blender. This leads to absolute works of art like ReDoin:
+
+<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rjRV0G6qWgw" title="ReDoin" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
+
+This song is a mashup of the Daft Punk song Doin' it Right from their final
+album Random Access Memories, but combined with vocal chops and samples from the
+infamous Christmas in July sale ads from the failing big box store [H. H.
+Gregg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Gregg). It has never gotten out of my
+head.
+
+At the time I made the Slam Jam Slam Song PMV (Pony Music Video, a portmonteau
+of the term "Anime Music Video", or a video where you kitbosh anime clips into
+music), another common mashup trend was centered around the realization
+that the theme song from the movie [Space Jam](https://www.spacejam.com/1996/)
+(yes, _that_ Space Jam) has a generic enough BPM and lyrical progression that
+you can mash it up with just about anything and it will work. Way better than
+you can imagine. For example here's a mashup of the theme song from Space Jam
+and All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey:
+
+<center><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4xUar4TrmLY" title="All I Want For Christmas is a Space Jam" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="enby">This is never going to get out of your
+head. I'm not sorry.</xeblog-conv>
+
+One of the main constants with these mashups is the photoshopping of the head of
+basketball star [Charles Barkley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Barkley)
+onto the album art or a key visual of the thing you are mashing it up with. A
+friend made a mashup of a song from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
+(particularly the one where the more lackadaisical character Pinkie Pie is
+singing about her strategies for combatting depression) with the theme song from
+the movie Space Jam.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">I'm not sure why they picked Charles
+Barkley in particular. He doesn't even have a significant role in the movie
+Space Jam. Meme culture defies every attempt at explanation.</xeblog-conv>
+
+However, there was a space that I felt left room for innovation: none of the
+videos animated Charles Barkley's head over the lead singer in the music video.
+It was just a static frame. I had basic knowledge of Flash from nearly getting
+banned from using the computers in middle school, so there was an opportunity.
+
+So I set out to make my first contribution back to the brony fandom in the form
+of...a surreal philosophical document that takes like 3 pages of context in
+order to help people understand why such a thing would be created.
+
+## The creation process
+
+At the time I was mainly using Ubuntu on my gaming tower. So of course my first
+instinct was to use [Flash
+8](https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Flash_Professional_8) to
+animate this. It installed and ran under WINE perfectly. I then photoshopped
+Charles Barkley out of some stock photos and got to work.
+
+This was mostly done with basic motion tweens and additional photoshops as
+things demanded. Someone's eyes were replaced with basketballs in one scene as I
+fel that would be amusing. That still frame ended up being used to make sure
+that the projector was evenly aligned for movie night on the CS dorm floor. I am
+not making this up.
+
+This wasn't particularly hard, but it was time-intensive. This took me about a
+month of work because I had to fit this around my homework and studying for
+tests. Animation is a very tedious craft.
+
+I also forgot to mention that while I was creating this video, I was giggling
+maniacally because this was even funnier than Pickle Rick to me at the time. I
+was this depressed kid that suddenly is animating a basketball star over a 
+cartoon horse and laughing like I was on drugs. This got me a drug test. I
+failed the drug test. My RA was _astounded_. I've always been kinda weird, but I
+didn't think it was enough to make people think I was on drugs. I get where he
+was coming from though.
+
+### My history with Flash 8
+
+At the time I started working with it, Macromedia Flash 8 was on its way out.
+Flash animation as a whole was a bit of a dying art as the Flash player was
+slowly being abandoned in favor of HTML5. I only really started working with
+Flash because I got access to it in the computer lab during lunch break in
+middle school. One of our pasttimes was to play flash games on the computers and
+constantly hop between sites as the web filter blocked them.
+
+This cat and mouse game obviously didn't sit well with the adults constantly
+fighting us kids as we found more and more obscure game sites. At some point I
+was starting to learn how to use ActionScript to try and make my own game (some
+kind of terrible clone of Space Invaders) and apparently this was _the line_
+that I had crossed.
+
+I was summoned into the principal's office one day and then they took
+screenshots of my development folder off of the school's NAS and said that I had
+been "downloading games to my student profile". One of my parents (forget which)
+had also been summoned there and argued that the mere act of _looking at
+anything_ on the internet consituted downloading the games to the student
+profile as a part of the technical nature of how the internet works. The
+principal asked me where I got "invaders_test.swf" from and I replied back that
+I had been working on it from scratch using the software that was installed on
+the school computers for its intended purpose. My parent then looked at the
+principal like they were an idiot. I got away from a meeting where they were
+threatening to ban me from the school computer system for my entire school
+career (this would certainly be a death sentence for my grades, even back then)
+without even a detention.
+
+Flash was removed from all the computers after that meeting. I still had
+something written down into my student planner though: their license key for
+Flash 8.
+
+The UX for animating simple things with Flash is something that I go back to
+sometimes to study. It is so direct and easy to do. I'm kind of sad that there's
+not a real analogous tool for this with modern HTML5 animation. Maybe this is
+just nostalgia talking though.
+
+### The export pipeline
+
+After the video was animated, I did some proof watchings of it in order to be
+sure that the faces were animated correctly. I narrowly avoided having to pee
+into another cup when the RA came around flabbergasted at what I had created.
+
+Then came export time. When you export something like this on windows, you use
+the native video encoder. This doesn't exist in WINE. Flash 8 did have a
+built-in fallback encoder, but it was optimized for sharing things over dialup.
+This was vastly insufficient for the kind of quality I wanted.
+
+There was another fallback option though: I could have Flash 8 export the
+animation as a series of png images. I would then have to combine that into a
+video somehow and syncronize the music manually. It was kinda ludicrous, but it
+could work.
+
+So that's exactly what I did. I had Flash export every frame of the video to my
+hard drive, used ffmpeg to stitch those frames into a video and then I used
+mkvmerge along with various offset values that I created through a combination
+of guesswork and lip syncing on the background ponies to create
+`basketball.mkv`. This is somehow one of the few files that I still have from
+that computer. I don't think I have the Flash project file for it anymore.
+
+But then I had it and I uploaded it to youtube where it currently has 56,072
+views over 10 years at an average of 5.6 thousand views per year. To this date
+it is somehow one of my most viewed videos on YouTube. Even over my conference
+talks.
+
+## The personal significance of `basketball.mkv`
+
+I think the creation and release of this video was a huge turning point in my
+life. It really marked the transition of me mainly consuming media to creating
+it as well. Making this really gave me the confidence to put myself out there
+and it landed.
+
+If I hadn't made this shitpost, I doubt that I would be writing this blog right
+now. Working on this really changed my perception of YouTube videos as these
+inscruitable magic bits of art to a science that I could understand, dissect and
+create for myself.
+
+Here are some randomly selected comments from that video:
+
+> I really don't see the point in humanity's continued existence, now. We will
+> clearly never do anything to surpass the magnificence of this single creation.
+
+> Everyone needs to stop making Slam Jam videos and just watch this and sit
+> down. We have a winner.
+
+> I LOVE THIS! I DIDN'T LIKE A BRONY VIDEO LIKE THIS SINCE AT LEAST ONE YEAR.
+> GOOD JOB, REALLY! YOU REALLY MADE ME SMILE.
+
+> this video... personifies the internet better than any other video I have ever
+> seen in my entire life.
+
+> the inventors of the internet could never have foreseen that there would be a
+> video like this
+
+> Oh. My. God. I shared this video like 4 years ago... but in dead chat so it
+> wasn't hard to find... Nostalgiaaaaaa :D
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">It is really weird to comprehend the
+fact that people have _nostalgia_ for things you've created. I don't know of a
+good way to describe how _surreal_ that is. If you are also an online content
+creator, you probably know what I'm getting at.</xeblog-conv>
+
+I hope this look back into the xe iaso dot net cinematic universe vault was
+interesting. Turning points like this are very interesting to look over from
+more analytical standpoints. I could easily see my life turning out a lot
+differently if I had never taken the time to make this. Hard to believe it's
+been 10 years.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">Time flies, eh?</xeblog-conv>