by Leva » Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm
Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am
Haha, same here. I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes choose a less-popular technology due to a bit of contrarianism.
*looks nervously at my diskman, portable cassette player, record player, pocket calculator, Nokia phone, ...*
*looks even more nervously at my character and species choices in every single video game ever made*
Couldn't be me. x)
Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am
That's a good point. From what I've heard, Second Life had a lot of enterprising going on, and too much emphasis on economics can detract from a virtual world and turn it more into a business rather than a place you actually want to spend time in.
Absolutely, yes. Second Life is insane actually. I never actively played it although I really wanted to, mostly because getting started was so daunting: learning how this virtual world really worked was basically a full time job, let alone the financial investment into getting off the ground.
But reading about it was always absolutely crazy. There are political parties within the world that bleed into real life elections, business advertisements (with real money transactions of course), actual real life businesses that operate solely inside Second Life such as an actual real world lawyer firm with a virtual office, famous musicians held concerts there. People make their entire real-life livelihoods by running a business in the game such as being a good 3D modeller and selling your work in an in-game boutique.
It's Ready Player One with ugly graphics and an enormous learning curve. I wish I could be part of it, especially since I no-lifed online roleplaying life simulations such as the old serious heavy roleplaying servers on older GTA games (not those terrible voice chat versions trending on Twitch, the literary style text-based ones), but honestly I think not all that shines is gold; it's probably pretty empty and lifeless unless you interact with the big cliques. And as in any niche online community, there will be a lot of creepy abusers and strange bigots.
But god damn it, I want to roleplay having a taxi company again and just spending hours driving around a virtual city as a sleazy taxi driver taking calls from real people chauffeuring them around and listening to whatever they're up to. "Follow that car!" happened two times and it was an adrenaline rush unlike any other game! Some of my best memories in video games were just walking around in slow-walk mode in a busy roleplaying city people-watching.
... God damn it.
Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am
Nice site! I like the overall design. The first thing I looked at was actually the recipe section, since I recently wrote a blog post with one of my basic noodle recipes. Also, just a few days ago I was exchanging a few emails with a friend from the web, and we briefly spoke about data formats for representing recipes. You may be interested in the h-recipe microformat (
https://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe). It's not quite as semantic as using proper <recipe></recipe> XML tags, since it's class-attribute based, but similar in scope.
Holy crap, that's super cool! I can't believe I was interested in the semantic web forever but completely passed by the microformats thing. That's just what we need to build a data-connecting web! Are you aware of any projects/communities actually using microformat data, like a search engine or an automated directory or something? I should contact the Marginalia guy to add support if it doesn't have it already.
I think I'll go through my entire site adding appropriate microformat information wherever it fits. There should be a webring for people using them. Damn.
... I will also add more recipes soon. It's just that I have so many WIP categories on my page it's hard to fill them all with content.
Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am
Also, One CSS trick, you can give pixel fonts crisper rendering by disabling font smoothing (code snippet below). Unfortunately it only really works on Webkit-based browsers these days, and results can vary considerably depending on the font and the size.
Code: Select all
* {
-webkit-font-smoothing: none;
-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
font-smooth: never;
}
Here's how it looks with and without smoothing on Midori (Webkit-based GTK browser):
Oh that's crazy! Thanks for the CSS snippet. I'll implement it ASAP. I only knew about how to turn off
image smoothing so that pixel art is actually crisp, had no idea how to fix the fonts. On my screens I don't see the smoothing since they're either high-res enough to not care or low-res enough for me to chalk it up to bad quality.
Yukinu wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am
I know what you mean, I can really appreciate older UI design. The limited hardware at the time necessitated very functional designs that are still difficult to surpass even to this day.
Yeah, and I also feel like it was more creative. These days, most desktop environments either model themselves entirely after Windows or after macOS with barely any innovation or crazy new ideas. KDE is basically Windows, elementaryOS' desktop is basically macOS, Xfce and LXQt are a bit more unique but in the end also follow the taskbar-bottom-desktop-icons mantra.
With less popular WMs and DEs such as Window Maker, you get cool features such as
dockapps that really are a unique way of controlling your desktop; not even to mention all of those snazzy 3D desktop environments that existed way back when, UI sound design (clicks and clacks and swooshes), radial menus, keyboard driven window managers and so on. Much more variety and risk taking.
Even the default designs these days try to imitate corporate minimalism. And the applications that ship with desktop environments are often not as expansive and crazy as they used to be either; I fondly remember KDE3 and its file-manager-and-web-browser combination Konqueror, its expansive personal identification management software, all the economic management programs, and the super specific applications! Nowadays it's all the same no matter what you install: Firefox or Chromium. Two boring browser genders you can choose from.
In general, I don't only like "industrial" UIUX design like Redmond97, I also like the opposite direction, super overdesigned stimulating design, like what you'd get in old video games. Even video games these days get super generic minimalist default-font background-shadow UIs. Does noone remember those old RPG interface designs that were totally themed, animated and full of SFX and GFX? I love those. When I work, I like my computers industrial and brutalist. When I am trying to have fun surfing or gaming, computing should be fun. I wish there were more totally overdesigned crazy themes for desktops like there were in the early 2000s. Vertical window decoration with dragons and fire? Why not!
[quote=Yukinu post_id=601 time=1703825291 user_id=2]
Haha, same here. I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometimes choose a less-popular technology due to a bit of contrarianism.
[/quote]
*looks nervously at my diskman, portable cassette player, record player, pocket calculator, Nokia phone, ...*
*looks even more nervously at my character and species choices in every single video game ever made*
Couldn't be me. x)
[quote=Yukinu post_id=601 time=1703825291 user_id=2]
That's a good point. From what I've heard, Second Life had a lot of enterprising going on, and too much emphasis on economics can detract from a virtual world and turn it more into a business rather than a place you actually want to spend time in.
[/quote]
Absolutely, yes. Second Life is insane actually. I never actively played it although I really wanted to, mostly because getting started was so daunting: learning how this virtual world really worked was basically a full time job, let alone the financial investment into getting off the ground.
But reading about it was always absolutely crazy. There are political parties within the world that bleed into real life elections, business advertisements (with real money transactions of course), actual real life businesses that operate solely inside Second Life such as an actual real world lawyer firm with a virtual office, famous musicians held concerts there. People make their entire real-life livelihoods by running a business in the game such as being a good 3D modeller and selling your work in an in-game boutique.
It's Ready Player One with ugly graphics and an enormous learning curve. I wish I could be part of it, especially since I no-lifed online roleplaying life simulations such as the old serious heavy roleplaying servers on older GTA games (not those terrible voice chat versions trending on Twitch, the literary style text-based ones), but honestly I think not all that shines is gold; it's probably pretty empty and lifeless unless you interact with the big cliques. And as in any niche online community, there will be a lot of creepy abusers and strange bigots.
But god damn it, I want to roleplay having a taxi company again and just spending hours driving around a virtual city as a sleazy taxi driver taking calls from real people chauffeuring them around and listening to whatever they're up to. "Follow that car!" happened two times and it was an adrenaline rush unlike any other game! Some of my best memories in video games were just walking around in slow-walk mode in a busy roleplaying city people-watching.
... God damn it.
[quote=Yukinu post_id=601 time=1703825291 user_id=2]
Nice site! I like the overall design. The first thing I looked at was actually the recipe section, since I recently wrote a blog post with one of my basic noodle recipes. Also, just a few days ago I was exchanging a few emails with a friend from the web, and we briefly spoke about data formats for representing recipes. You may be interested in the h-recipe microformat (https://microformats.org/wiki/h-recipe). It's not quite as semantic as using proper <recipe></recipe> XML tags, since it's class-attribute based, but similar in scope.
[/quote]
Holy crap, that's super cool! I can't believe I was interested in the semantic web forever but completely passed by the microformats thing. That's just what we need to build a data-connecting web! Are you aware of any projects/communities actually using microformat data, like a search engine or an automated directory or something? I should contact the Marginalia guy to add support if it doesn't have it already.
I think I'll go through my entire site adding appropriate microformat information wherever it fits. There should be a webring for people using them. Damn.
... I will also add more recipes soon. It's just that I have so many WIP categories on my page it's hard to fill them all with content.
[quote=Yukinu post_id=601 time=1703825291 user_id=2]
Also, One CSS trick, you can give pixel fonts crisper rendering by disabling font smoothing (code snippet below). Unfortunately it only really works on Webkit-based browsers these days, and results can vary considerably depending on the font and the size.
[code]
* {
-webkit-font-smoothing: none;
-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;
font-smooth: never;
}
[/code]
Here's how it looks with and without smoothing on Midori (Webkit-based GTK browser):
[/quote]
Oh that's crazy! Thanks for the CSS snippet. I'll implement it ASAP. I only knew about how to turn off [i]image[/i] smoothing so that pixel art is actually crisp, had no idea how to fix the fonts. On my screens I don't see the smoothing since they're either high-res enough to not care or low-res enough for me to chalk it up to bad quality.
[quote=Yukinu post_id=601 time=1703825291 user_id=2]
I know what you mean, I can really appreciate older UI design. The limited hardware at the time necessitated very functional designs that are still difficult to surpass even to this day.
[/quote]
Yeah, and I also feel like it was more creative. These days, most desktop environments either model themselves entirely after Windows or after macOS with barely any innovation or crazy new ideas. KDE is basically Windows, elementaryOS' desktop is basically macOS, Xfce and LXQt are a bit more unique but in the end also follow the taskbar-bottom-desktop-icons mantra.
With less popular WMs and DEs such as Window Maker, you get cool features such as [url=https://www.dockapps.net/]dockapps[/url] that really are a unique way of controlling your desktop; not even to mention all of those snazzy 3D desktop environments that existed way back when, UI sound design (clicks and clacks and swooshes), radial menus, keyboard driven window managers and so on. Much more variety and risk taking.
Even the default designs these days try to imitate corporate minimalism. And the applications that ship with desktop environments are often not as expansive and crazy as they used to be either; I fondly remember KDE3 and its file-manager-and-web-browser combination Konqueror, its expansive personal identification management software, all the economic management programs, and the super specific applications! Nowadays it's all the same no matter what you install: Firefox or Chromium. Two boring browser genders you can choose from.
In general, I don't only like "industrial" UIUX design like Redmond97, I also like the opposite direction, super overdesigned stimulating design, like what you'd get in old video games. Even video games these days get super generic minimalist default-font background-shadow UIs. Does noone remember those old RPG interface designs that were totally themed, animated and full of SFX and GFX? I love those. When I work, I like my computers industrial and brutalist. When I am trying to have fun surfing or gaming, computing should be fun. I wish there were more totally overdesigned crazy themes for desktops like there were in the early 2000s. Vertical window decoration with dragons and fire? Why not!