Steve Jobs at Half Three in the Morning
It was around half past three in the morning when Steve Jobs climbed into my bed. Completely real in the dream—warm, insistent, radiating the energy of someone who has already made all the decisions. He assumed the big-spoon position without asking and whispered into my ear: Marcel. Prepare yourself for the future.
I was about to scream for my mother when he produced an iPad and explained, with the patient certainty of a man who has already won every argument, that Flash was finished. That HTML5 was the future of the web. That this website needed to be updated immediately, or he would be forced to take measures he was too tasteful to name. Then he left on a flying iHorn, which is exactly the kind of exit you design for yourself when you’re Steve Jobs.
What he was actually right about—and he was right—is that the web was at a genuine turning point. Flash had powered a decade of internet creativity: streaming video before YouTube normalized it, browser games, animated portfolio sites, every weird interactive thing that made the early web feel handmade and strange. It was also a bloated, security-riddled, battery-draining disaster that crashed Safari twice a day and that Apple had quietly decided was incompatible with the future they were building. The iPhone didn’t support Flash. The iPad didn’t support Flash. And if the devices that were going to define the next decade didn’t support it, Flash was already dead—it just hadn’t been told yet.
Jobs published his "Thoughts on Flash" letter the following month. The industry spent a few years accepting the outcome, and Adobe finally killed Flash in 2020. The web that replaced it loads faster, crashes less, and is—if I’m honest—considerably less weird. That era of hand-crafted animations and elaborate interactive interfaces had a texture that clean, responsive HTML5 design has never fully replicated. Clunky and fragile and frequently catastrophic, but made by human hands.
Anyway. I rebuilt this entire site from scratch to run on HTML5. New templates, restructured code, all the bugs I’d been ignoring for months finally addressed. No visible difference to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at. But it’s there, underneath everything, and that’s enough.