I hate the phrase "pregnant pause" but I love the phrase "aborted gesture." tells you everything you need to know about MY politics
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.
(images sourced from The GUI Gallery)
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?
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.
(images sourced from The GUI Gallery)
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?
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.
(images sourced from The GUI Gallery)
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?
The American people have chosen to trust this man.
Harry du Bois would say this (derogatory)
Every actor should be this loud about their characters' homoerotic relationships with other men. Rip to the only real ally.
ALT
This is a hilarious mistranslation actually. I suspect it originally said something along the lines of “Impregnerad mot vatten”, i.e. “Water proof”.
Impregnering is the process of making a material resistant to water/heat. The swedish word for water (vatten) is similar to the word for goblin (vätten) so I guess there was a mixup.
I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales.
But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.
Oh some of you don't know about the squids. I talked about them in another thread that went kinda viral somewhere or other but one of the reasons you should not swim in the open ocean at night in many parts of the world is that the water starts teeming with these:
And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans!
But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators.
We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free.
In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)
There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:
And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:
There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered.
The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:
No for real:
Absolutely! Also, the Humboldt squid will hunt in packs, sometimes with one flashing brightly to draw attention while the others approach in near unseeable camoflage!
Beautiful footage of the nefarious sea demons also :)
Also because I can't reblog every addition together:
Okay where's the other 1199
I absolutely adore Humboldt squid. I saw a doc once where a scientist was cage diving to study them, and one of the squid squeezed it's entire massive body through the cage bars, bit the guy and squeezed right back out.
Why isnt this an animal that's already long gone viral like honey badgers once did. This is the animal that actually gives no fucks. People really are just that obsessed with bigger squids I guess? But the bigger ones frankly come across as big softies in comparison. One big sea monster can never be as intimidating as a thousand coordinated man sized sea monsters.
This is why I thought that if mermaids had a cultural equivalent to lycanthropy it'd be weresquids. Fun fact nocturnal marine life increases activity on the brightest nights ie the full moon.
