Mipe. Finnish. Artist. Art blog at mipeltaja-art.tumblr.com I use the same handle on Dreamwidth, Twitter, Pillowfort and Bluesky, though I'm most active here. Feel free to DM me for pillowfort or bluesky invites.
someone added me on a bsky list of ppl who draw good goblins i never draw goblins, so i drew this for that one stranger
when dad’s fixing the car yelling at you to shine the flashlight better am i right guys? (i never did this lmao my dad’s a mechanic he can solo that shit)
One small but extremely annoying effect of Tech Modernization or w/e is how UI contrast is garbage anymore, especially just, like, application windows in general.
“Ooh our scrollbar expands when you mouse over it! Or does it? Only you can know by sitting there like an idiot for 3 seconds waiting for it to expand, only to move your cursor away just as it does so!” or Discord’s even more excellent “scrollbar is 2 shades off of the background color and is one (1) pixel wide” fuck OFF
I tried to move a system window around yesterday and had to click 3 times before I got the half of the upper bar that let me drag it. Why are there two separate bars with absolutely nothing to visually differentiate them on that.
“Well if you look closely-” I should not!! have to squint!!! at the screen for a minute straight to detect basic UI elements!! Not mention how ableist this shit is, and for what? ~✨Aesthetic✨~?
and then every website and app imitates this but in different ways so everything is consistently dogshit to try to use but not always in ways you can immediately grok it’s!!!! terrible!!!! just put lines on things again I’m begging you!!!!
I know I sound like a broken record when I praise Windows 95 UI, but holy fuck Microsoft figured this shit out already about 30 years ago. It’s all there, black and white, clear as christmas:
So much of modern UX woes stem from not knowing, or intentionally ignoring the genuine design study put forth into GUIs in the 90s.
3D elements are 3D in a specific way with lighting from a specific side to make it obvious where a window element begins and ends.
The gradient always should from from one side, and keep it consistent.
Make your color shading and shape of scroll bars consistently side and easy to press. I have a 4K display, don’t make me hunt for the magic activation pixel that makes your 3-pixel wide scroll bar appear.
It’s a desktop application, I’ve got the screen real estate to spare to have the actual GUI elements present on screen at all times (I know, heresy).
The moment aesthetic takes precedence over form and function, you’ve failed as a UI designer.
And any argument about “we don’t have the resolution” can go right out the window, we were having nice, clear and legible interface widgets on nine inch screens in 1984. We continued to have nice, clear and legible interfaces on machines vastly less powerful than today’s and on screens vastly less pixel-dense than today’s. We used to know what the hell we were doing. At least one of these examples even has on-screen instructions in case the widgets functionality isn’t immediately apparent.
since this has come back to my dashboard again i want to call attention to one more thing that these GUIs have that modern ones don’t even try to do.
RESIZE WIDGETS.
Do you tire of trying to grab and resize a window whose border is literally only 1 pixel wide?
Do you see how large the corner widgets are in those clips above? Those are at least 16x16 pixels. They’re almost as large as the Close buttons on a modern GUI. If you can see the bottom right corner of your window, resizing it is a snap. You can aim much more easily at a 16x16 widget than you can at a one-pixel-wide vertical line.
OK, maybe technically Windows’ borders are wider than 1 pixel. They’re technically 3 pixels. That is still just really goddamn tiny compared to 16 of them.
We used to be a society. Look at this. Look at this.
WINDOWS FUGGIN’ 95 HAD THE CORNER WIDGET. Why the hell can’t Windows 11?
dreamwidth makes me feel like a baby. did you guys use to blog like this
Yes!!!! And we liked it that way! You could make a post and it wasn’t vague! It was a full on rant about your roommate who you know follows you. But you had privacy filters on so only your fandom friends could read it and none of your IRL friends.
You never had to worry about a personal post blowing up. You posted your fandom stuff in communities and your random thoughts of the day we’re restricted to your own blog.
Comments! You could have a whole conversation that made sense. Do you know how long it took for us to get nested replies on here?
Community! Not just Communities as in the feature but a community! You would make a post and everyone would comment on it. Directly! It didn’t feel like a derail by having something to say and you didn’t have to hide things in the tags. And you could reply! And it went directly to them and not buried under 20 other reblogs of replying to other people. You could post fic and actually get comments and start a conversation. I legit think a lot of fandoms issues as a whole is because we don’t have a lot of platforms where having conversations like that exists anymore. It’s very much just us screaming into the void.
Tumblr was never supposed to become the fandom platform it did and it’s ill equipped to function as such. Which has resulted in a lot of fracturing and isolation.
I’m not saying it was perfect or with drama. Just that when the drama hit, it was always juicy and complex, instead of just two complete strangers screaming at each other because of a misunderstanding
Fun fact, on top of being staunchly against genAI, ellipsus literally has an Export To AO3 button. I do the majority of my writing in LibreOffice, but I’ve been moving all my GDocs over to ellipsus for a bit and I really love the interface. If you’re looking for an alternative to GDocs, this is The One.
