Can we discuss if we aren't in the class? I think this may well be the funniest blog entry that I have ever seen, on many, many, very deep levels.
You just made my day!

This Flash animation is a morality tale describing how rampant sexual imagery and the casual use of hallucinogenic drugs can lead to the abuse of harder drugs such as heroin.

And the creation of Flash animations.

Wow. That entry is hilarious on so many levels. But the question remains... the midterm for 467 or the graduate course? :-P

That flash animation is haunting in an absurd way... this is what happens when infinite loops mix with a creation that is right up there with "The song that never ends" in it's irritating but addictive nature. In it's lyrics and images it is a simple testament to the appeal of the absurd. I've had that animation up as a background noise on and off for hours since it became a net phenomena.

But I don't think it's a morality tale in quite the way Nick suggested. It's more a warning to young flash programmers about the dangers of having far too much time on one's hands... although some hallucinogenics must have been involved in the creation. Where else could that mushroom imagery come from, after all?

Personally I think his Kenya animation is superior. Lions and tigers, anyone? :-)

I think the Badger behind the grassy knoll shot JFK.

The point I was trying to babble around in class is that, for a supposedly absurdist work, Badgers is *pure fact*. Eleven badgers, two views of the mushroom, then it's a snake... accordingly, the lyrics go "badgers (x11), mushroom (x2), it's a snake." About the only editorializing is the cry of horror regarding the snake issue, and even that syncs with the lyrics... they say "AUGH," you see "AUGH."

Of course, this doesn't quite qualify as the "aesthetics of new media that accounts for the badgers" that you hinted at in class. But I think it somewhat pinpoints my personal delight in that animation.

Jess's reckoning has me wondering if there is not a connection between the formal systems and animations that loop.

There is a kind of perverse pleasure in mapping the pulsing mushroom onto the quest object, MU, and the snake with initial, MI, and the bagers as the various exemplary strings. The thematic connection may be merely contiguous. See the recent discussion (previous to the annimation loop mention) of the MI to MU exercise from the Hostadter:

http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000339.html

The analogous treatment of loops and formal systems is not so far fetched.
Once a viewer recognizes the animation is looping, the viewer can opt to stop the playback. A screen shot here and a screen shot there... A digital recording of the sound track, a bit of remixing... The viewer can create intertextual explorations of similar animations. Formalism has a perch.
(Imagine the whole animation redone with the snake, badgers and mushroom oriented in mirror symmetry to the original animation... )

Hofstadter in _Godel, Escher Bach_ writes "It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns."

I would like to add that intelligence is also about breaking out of patterns.

It is perhaps an old habit of reading that pays attention to the paratext. The badger animation doesn't quite loop -- if one were to count the "loading sequence" which intimates a speed up of the animation. The animation appears to mimic those songs that go faster and faster and faster until the singers break up in panting and giggles. And then the mimic effect itself breaks up as the viewer recognizes the changeless tempo.

The invitation to a game of vertigo mutates into a game of hypnotics.

The appeal of such a rhetorical move at the present may have roots in some wish arising out of the political unconscious: ramp up to cruize control.

Be interesting to compare blogsphere reactions to animation loops with the appeal of the "game of life" that crossed screens quite a while ago (genetic algorithms that depicted various predator-prey cycles and eventually led to entropic conditions).

This (and a page worth of MIs and MUs before I realized it was impossible) got me thinking... I'm not sure the badgers cartoon is a formal system in itself, but it does resemble the defining of objects and operations for a formal system. Basically, though there is no operation performed, the animation sets up the parameters of an imaginary system -- badgers and mushroom are defined as the normal condition and the snake as an anomaly (though eventually even that gets subsumed into the pattern). (The line that kept running through my head was "DEF badgers = badgers.")