man 10 year old me must have poured hundreds of hours in flipnote. This was an amazing network of incredible talented kids and a looooot of pre-historic shitposting, the first AMV I watched was likely on my DSi screen through this software. I remember working tremendously hard to make my flipnotes, I was an avant-gard flipnote artist I swear to god, everything I made was abstract as shit. I remember once I poured hours and hours into one specific flipnote and I recall my dad turned the ds off or something? I don't know, I don't really know how or why my dad would even turn it off, let alone if he knew how, but that's how my 10 year old self remembers it. I remember crying and throwing a tantrum on the couch in my living room, and refusing to go to dinner. Man, what an annoying little shit I was.

Didn't have this logged due to the fact that it's not technically a game per se but fuck it we ballin

I remember back in like 2009 I was a plucky kid on a camping trip with some other fellow plucky kids and one of them had a DSi. It was with that kid that I learned about the many features of the DSi, like the goofy sound and photo apps, the ability to use a rainbow pen in pictochat, and most importantly, the ability to make crude animations of stickmen getting brutally mutilated through a mysterious orange app called flipnote studio. After that camping trip, I knew that I had to start saving up for a DSi.

Flipnote Studio is a flipbook animation program. It's featureset is light enough to the point where anyone can figure out how to use it, yet still offers enough features for talented artists and animators to make their work shine. The game used to offer an online service where users could upload and share their own animations as well as view and download other users animations, and that combined with the apps free price tag essentially meant everyone with a DSi at the time had access to this entire online subculture of music videos, fan re-edits, stick fights, and more.

It was basically my first exposure to social media back in the day. I (thankfully) wasn't allowed to go on the greater parts of the internet or youtube back then outside of like randomly researching old video games, so through flipnote studio I was able to keep up with all sorts of internet inside jokes and memes, even if most of them were exclusive to the flipnote studio subculture. It was pretty much a mixture of youtube and newgrounds except mostly populated by kids and nintendo fans, shit was crazy.

I was certainly a stick figure guy, watching stuff like gizmos many goofy stick figure cartoons, or getting immersed in BosS' kingdom-hearts-ass shonen anime-core serial dramas, which I always adored the aesthetic of despite not really understanding their influences back in the day. And of course, let's not forget the legendary stick fight animation by 100%, that shit was copied and pasted NONSTOP with all sorts of fan edits and song changes throughout all the years I used hatena. Another noteworthy creator I followed was fred, whose smooth criminal music video is still saved on my DSi to this day. It was also cool to see the flipnote microcelebrities pay tribute back to the community with their own flair, especially since gizmo's harder better faster stronger boo video might as well be the poster animation for hatena as a whole. Boy, did hatena love to play that song everywhere. There are a lot of other flipnotes that shaped the platform, far more than I could detail.

The flipnote hatena service would eventually shut down in 2013, and with the 3DS version to succeed it getting stuck in developmental hell to the point where online support internationally was cancelled, it ostensibly marked an end of an era. A time period that you really had to be there for in order to have truly appreciated it. Or so you thought!!! Not only does the excellent flipnote archive that I've been using to grab old examples still exist making virtually every previous noteworthy flipnote and creator still accessible in the present day, but also there exists the sudomemo service, which restores online flipnote functionality on the original app with just a simple DNS change in your DS online settings. Sure, the community is a bit smaller now than what it once was, but there are still people making stuff, the flipnote dreams are still alive. The fact I was able to watch several undertale animations on the same old DSi I had as a kid just feels like a time paradox, but it is indeed real and possible.

It's crazy that I can write so much about a simple animation program, but I think this little app is so well loved for a reason. I feel like everyone has their own personal experiences with Flipnote Studio/Hatena, so I wanted to share my own. The one thing that I won't share, though, were the flipnotes that kid me made and uploaded to the service. Nobody needs to see those and they will remain between me and God for as long as I draw breath. Then again, maybe I should make something new and post it to sudomemo some day, just for old times's sake.