Windows 95 legitimately had better UI than that “Material” bullshit, via relief shading conveyed through four fucking colors. The hierarchy of elements is instantly visible. Buttons even popped in and out when clicked. There’s just no excuse for how minimalism fetishists have taken over user experience.

Dismissive dickwad behavior is good, actually - if you’re dismissing Nazis. Or anyone else who deserves a blunt rejection. It is fine and valid to deny people civility, when their rhetoric is inherently abusive. Respect and patience have limits.

Swearing at people absofuckinglutely has its place in online discourse. If not for the assholes themselves - then for the people they’re trying to fool.

Anyway.

Discworld has a few parallel threads. Release order starts with The Colour Of Magic, which is fun and short, but not exactly top-notch material. See explanatory flowchart. Those first few novels have a real Season One vibe.

The traditional introduction seems to be whichever book catches your eye. Or whichever you happened to find first, if you’d heard good things about the series. That’s how I wound up reading Ringworld by Larry Niven, because cultivating your interests in the 90s was a much fuzzier experience.

Apropos of little - how long ago did Sean Hannity say he’d get waterboarded?

And those are the only two options.

Good old ethical Microsoft.

Honestly I miss reddit circa 2015. Obviously before The Idiot and half the world lurching toward fascism - but also back when “fuck off, Nazi” was treated better than being a goddamn Nazi.

The proliferation of “civility” is poisonous to online discourse. It is always the wrong metric. Trolls love being polite monsters. r/Politics even went a step further and demanded all opinions be taken in good faith. Do those idiots know what trolling is? Do they not understand bad faith… as a concept? It only works because people mistake it for good faith. Demanding everyone do that is a gift to trolls.

Moderation requires common-sense identification of who’s being an asshole. It’s never about no-no words. If a script could handle the job, we would let it.

Lemmy has far too many communities with rules going ‘never be rude to anyone ever!!!’ and then zero enforcement when someone calls you a cunt for gently correcting their grammar. That is the worst of both worlds. Anyone sincerely trying is going to hold back from just dealing with assholes appropriately, like an adult, but those people are then left with no recourse against pointlessly toxic shitheads. I don’t want a screaming match. I want words to matter.

Also if you enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett has a similar deep snark. Discworld’s a whole mess of books but you can kinda jump in anywhere. I recommend Guards! Guards! or Going Postal. He did Good Omens with baby Neal Gaiman, and they’d write chapters separately, then throw out every joke they’d bought thought of.

It is a right bitch that the reason to leave is 100% the bastards in charge. The community was fine. (Okay, giant asterisks all over that, but you know what I mean. The community was not the cause for masses walking away with a sea of middle fingers lit by burning bridges.)

I’m not here because it’s better. I’m here because fuck Spez. And fuck enshittification. Fifteen years and these greedy incompetents made it impossible to come back without feeling like betrayal. The only reason I’m not deleting anything is that I don’t do that shit. Nothing any human being put effort into deserves to be lost forever.

Elmo did us the favor of turning his stolen harassment engine into an all-stick-no-carrot experience in a fucking hurry.

Googling around suggests it’s a global setting. Having recently used an Xfce version that didn’t want to super+arrow, maximize-vertical is an okay tool, but outside of super-duper-widescreen, it’s not what I’d ever want by default.

Possibly demonstrating ductility? Classier than chewing on the damn thing.

Microsoft marketing hasn’t gotten any better about song choices. A few years ago their ads had soft bleep-bloop tunes and “go baby, go baby, yeah we’re right behind you.”

The song is “Cherry Lips,” by Garbage. It’s the twink anthem.

And it’s still not as tone-deaf as whichever Bill Hicks target picked out “hey ho let’s go” from the god-damned “Blitzkrieg Bop.”

What’s the behavior when you double-click the title bar?

There’s only so many corners.

Oh no, the condemnation of a narcissistic felon.

Thoroughly familiar with it; don’t care. The global menu has always been goofy because of the invisible relation to some open window. Usually a small window floating out in middle of the desktop, because Mac OS took forever to adopt any concept of “maximize.” I’m still not sure they do it right.

God damn, do I want to live in the reality where bad press exists. Or have you not watched these exact assholes fail upwards for the last seven years?

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Seriously though, this is the first properly good UI for a desktop computer. Mac OS (or I guess Macintosh OS at the time) was okay, but reliant on the global menu and weird drop-downs. Windows kept everything self-contained. Even multi-window programs tended to use the “multiple document interface,” i.e., windows inside windows. Tabs weren’t really a thing yet.

It also crashed if you looked at it funny and had the antivirus capabilities of warm cheese. But there’s damn good reasons Windows 7 was the same experience, extended, rather than replaced. It’s more-or-less what I style Linux to look like. And in light of that I’m kinda pissed off any OS ever struggles to remain responsive, when this relic ran smoothly on one stick of RAM that’s smaller than my CPU’s cache.

All these criminals keep getting arrested… it must be a conspiracy!

Please learn to live in reality. Please start caring what words mean.

Thumbnail looks like he hired Bat Boy.

Kind of a shame it’s just weird lighting on a normal-looking dude, versus being the sign that this is all a fever dream you can wake up from. I say you because my coma delirium wouldn’t involve this many false starts. Comey’s gonna charge him, whoops, nevermind. Mueller’s gonna charge him, whoops, nevermind. We’re going to war with Iran, whoops, nevermind. We’re holding cops accountable, whoops, nevermind. The plague means UBI, whoops, nevermind. Roger Stone’s going to jail, whoops, nevermind. A mob invaded the capitol, whoops, nevermind. Russia’s seizing Ukraine, whoops, nevermind. Ukraine’s expelling Russia, whoops, nevermind. Wagner’s conquering Moscow, whoops, nevermind. The last seven years have been like a story told by a toddler. “And then… and then… but nuh-uh… and then…”

Seeing the figure of highest ridicule - whom I remember reading about in Bloom County collections when they were far from new - fail his way into the clumsiest autocracy imaginable, would not be followed up by this much inaction. Hallucinations don’t start with “Carrot Top became the Pope!” and then level out. He’s declaring a crusade on Gallagher, the Swiss Guard develop laser-pikes, and your childhood dog kills the emperor of Australia. So whichever one of you is having this nightmare, I want you to know your subconscious is fucking boring.

PC Gamer’s Coconut Monkey era.

Putting in appropriate effort for a job where the pay is exposure.