Yukinu's Forum

Posted: **Tue Dec 26, 2023 3:45 am**

Hey there!

As opposed to everyone else, I don't even know what Lainchan is. I found your website by searching for hypertext connections to a friend's website via the Marginalia search engine.

I read through your website and most of the blog posts, the general aesthetic and everything really vibed with me, I tend to think, do and create the same things, haha.
I'll be on the forum as much as I can because once I found something, I usually don't let go, and I don't have other social media anyway so this is just what I'm going to spam-refresh instead. >:D

Posted: **Tue Dec 26, 2023 8:04 pm**

Hello Leva, glad you like the site and the overall aesthetic!

I wrote a bit about the design a while ago. Basically, I wanted the design of my site to convey the feeling of traveling to an distant, cozy location, and in many ways that is actually what is happening when connecting to it; My blog, forum, and all of my other web resources are self hosted on a single server, and as result there is a single location in world where the yukinu site actually exists. In contrast, many websites use a combination of separate servers, CDNs, managed services, and 3rd party resources, and so they exist in a nebulous "cloud" essentially, and don't have a similar feeling of locality. That's the way I like to look at it at least.

Leva wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 3:45 am As opposed to everyone else, I don't even know what Lainchan is. I found your website by searching for hypertext connections to a friend's website via the Marginalia search engine.

Marginalia search is great, I've often found myself spending hours surfing the web and navigating through link after link after just a couple of searches on Marginalia. At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post every day for a month with a new interesting site I found that day, many of which were from Marginalia searches.

Leva wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 3:45 am I'll be on the forum as much as I can because once I found something, I usually don't let go, and I don't have other social media anyway so this is just what I'm going to spam-refresh instead. >:D

If you find any more forums on the web, one useful way to keep up with them add their RSS feed to an RSS feed reader application. For example, my forum has a feed that updates when a new post is made (the feed is located at https://forum.yukinu.com/app.php/feed). The feed URL can be added to a feed reader such as QuiteRSS. Here's a few screenshots of adding my forum's feed to an RSS feed reader, the new posts show up as individual entries with links to the threads:

: quiterss-about.png (35.63 KiB) Viewed 2703 times

: quiterss-add-a-feed.png (19.34 KiB) Viewed 2703 times

: quiterss-forum-feed.png (125.19 KiB) Viewed 2703 times

Using an RSS feed reader is especially useful for forums with less frequent posts, since it reduces the friction from having to refresh often. Admittedly my forum can be a bit slow, but it gets a new post every now and then, and I try to reply to new posts when I see them.

Posted: **Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm**

Yukinu wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 8:04 pm Hello Leva, glad you like the site and the overall aesthetic!

It's actually quite similar to my own site I feel, at least when compared to the variety of site design philosophies out there these days in the web revival. :]
I also had a snow effect on my page for the longest time, but having that huge technically-not-valid-xhtml intransparent code block at the end of my page forever drove me up the walls, so I ended up removing it.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 8:04 pm I wrote a bit about the design a while ago. Basically, I wanted the design of my site to convey the feeling of traveling to an distant, cozy location, and in many ways that is actually what is happening when connecting to it; My blog, forum, and all of my other web resources are self hosted on a single server, and as result there is a single location in world where the yukinu site actually exists. In contrast, many websites use a combination of separate servers, CDNs, managed services, and 3rd party resources, and so they exist in a nebulous "cloud" essentially, and don't have a similar feeling of locality. That's the way I like to look at it at least.

I also had similar thoughts when setting up mine. I initially wanted it to be more than just a homepage, but instead be an interactive hypertext adventure that also doubled as my personal website. You'd start out in a town square, for example, and talk to NPCs who would direct you to further content like shrines, blogs, fanlistings and so on; or just walk around, find the webmaster's house, or go visit the local radio station to listen to my mixtapes, or go to the art gallery to look at my art, blah blah blah. All packed with secrets and explorable places and NPCs to talk to.

Unfortunately, after some time both the technical debt and the massive scope of the project made me feel like it was tedium more than substance; at some point I caught myself spending all my time fleshing out decorative locations and writing NPC dialogue, and not actually, you know, adding content to my website. The "interactive town that doubles as my personal website" ended as a half-realized pipe dream. I ended up remaking the site from scratch with a much better understanding of XHTML & CSS and a therefore cleaner code style and organization, and with a much smaller and more traditional scope so the content is actually up in front.
I still put little pixel art representations of the "places" you are in as you navigate the site on it, and I feel like it's pretty cozy.

All that considered I do definitely understand the appeal of making a site with the explicit intention of conveying the idea of traveling. That was the entire concept of mine, hence why I felt so at home here.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 8:04 pm Marginalia search is great, I've often found myself spending hours surfing the web and navigating through link after link after just a couple of searches on Marginalia. At the beginning of this year, I wrote a blog post every day for a month with a new interesting site I found that day, many of which were from Marginalia searches.

That's a good idea! I actually put Marginalia as my default search engine for my laptop. Of course when I want to look up something effectively, like a local restaurant or an error code or some other information, I manually go to a mainstream search engine, but having it as the default incentivizes me to just go for a websurf every once in a while when I want to look up something that I mainly want the actual experience of surfing with, and not just find information as fast as possible. For example, old video games, or various hobbies, tech or art. The sites I find on Marginalia are much more interesting than the mainstream search engines ever could find.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Tue Dec 26, 2023 8:04 pm If you find any more forums on the web, one useful way to keep up with them add their RSS feed to an RSS feed reader application. For example, my forum has a feed that updates when a new post is made (the feed is located at https://forum.yukinu.com/app.php/feed).

[...]

Using an RSS feed reader is especially useful for forums with less frequent posts, since it reduces the friction from having to refresh often. Admittedly my forum can be a bit slow, but it gets a new post every now and then, and I try to reply to new posts when I see them.

I never really felt like using an RSS reader, but you finally convinced me. I ended up choosing Liferea, and I am very happy with it so far. =3
Here's a screenshot:

I'll always be on top of the news >:D

Posted: **Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:39 am**

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm I also had a snow effect on my page for the longest time, but having that huge technically-not-valid-xhtml intransparent code block at the end of my page forever drove me up the walls, so I ended up removing it.

I know the feeling. I've thought about converting my site to XHTML in the past, but ended targeting HTML 4.0 and taking a few features of HTML 5.0 that could wrap within backward compatible components (I wrote about it a bit in this blog post: https://yukinu.com/blog/2022/05/15/supp ... ility.html). From a functional perspective I like this approach, but from the perspective of standards my HTML is certainly a bit of a mess.

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm I also had similar thoughts when setting up mine. I initially wanted it to be more than just a homepage, but instead be an interactive hypertext adventure that also doubled as my personal website. You'd start out in a town square, for example, and talk to NPCs who would direct you to further content like shrines, blogs, fanlistings and so on; or just walk around, find the webmaster's house, or go visit the local radio station to listen to my mixtapes, or go to the art gallery to look at my art, blah blah blah. All packed with secrets and explorable places and NPCs to talk to.

I really like this idea, an entire virtual world within a website! I've actually seen a similar concept applied before on the web in the form of avatar forums. For example, Gaia Online (https://www.gaiaonline.com/) was an avatar forum that connected the forums to a series of flash games, had a world map to visually display the different places in gaia, and had a currency system where you would get currency from posting on the forum and use it buy cosmetics for your avatar. It's a shame that the ideas around building these microcosms on the web are not as popular anymore.

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm Unfortunately, after some time both the technical debt and the massive scope of the project made me feel like it was tedium more than substance; at some point I caught myself spending all my time fleshing out decorative locations and writing NPC dialogue, and not actually, you know, adding content to my website. The "interactive town that doubles as my personal website" ended as a half-realized pipe dream. I ended up remaking the site from scratch with a much better understanding of XHTML & CSS and a therefore cleaner code style and organization, and with a much smaller and more traditional scope so the content is actually up in front.
I still put little pixel art representations of the "places" you are in as you navigate the site on it, and I feel like it's pretty cozy.

I know this feeling as well, it's the eternal struggle with personal websites. I've spent a lot of time building custom plugins for my site, when I should have been catching up on my backlog of blog post ideas. On the plus side, personal sites are long term projects that you can develop at your own pace, and one can learn a lot from the site engineering process itself.

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm All that considered I do definitely understand the appeal of making a site with the explicit intention of conveying the idea of traveling. That was the entire concept of mine, hence why I felt so at home here.

If you have a link to your site and are interested in sharing it, then I would definitely like to see what it looks like. No worries though if you want to keep it private.

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm That's a good idea! I actually put Marginalia as my default search engine for my laptop.

Depending on the browser, you may be able to hook up your search engines to keywords for quicker access to many search engines. For example, on the browser I use (Palemoon) I've hooked up Marginlia search to @n and DuckDuckGo to @d. When I need to search DuckDuckGo, I type @d my search query, and for Marginalia @n my search query. I've also hooked up Marginalia random search to a bookmark with the keyword /nr so that I can quickly find random results when I want to surf the web.

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm but having it as the default incentivizes me to just go for a websurf every once in a while when I want to look up something that I mainly want the actual experience of surfing with, and not just find information as fast as possible. For example, old video games, or various hobbies, tech or art. The sites I find on Marginalia are much more interesting than the mainstream search engines ever could find.

That's a good a idea and a good point. I should try switching to it as my default for a couple of days to encourage a bit more web surfing.

Leva wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 4:18 pm I never really felt like using an RSS reader, but you finally convinced me. I ended up choosing Liferea, and I am very happy with it so far. =3

I'm glad you gave it a shot! RSS is very versatile, and it's a great way to keep in touch with smaller websites and blogs. Larger, centralized websites tend to favor a constant stream of small bits of (often low quality) content from a single location, but the people who run small and personal websites often tend to favor longer, more thoughtful content, based around subjects that they are passionate about. RSS clients help reduce some of the friction from this type of decentralized web through a convenient aggregation mechanism.

Also, great system theme! Is it the Chicago95 theme? I've heard good things about Chicago95, and have seen screenshots where people have used that theme, and a theme for Palemoon to make it look like Netscape Navigator, for a more retro browsing experience.

Posted: **Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am**

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:39 amI know the feeling. I've thought about converting my site to XHTML in the past, but ended targeting HTML 4.0 and taking a few features of HTML 5.0 that could wrap within backward compatible components (I wrote about it a bit in this blog post: https://yukinu.com/blog/2022/05/15/supp ... ility.html). From a functional perspective I like this approach, but from the perspective of standards my HTML is certainly a bit of a mess.

It's a valid way to write websites honestly and miles ahead of the mainstream!
With the Frankensteinian behemoth that the World Wide Web has become on a technical level, I don't think anyone blames you. At least it's not "best viewed on Google Chrome"!
The backward compatible components sound similar to the principle of graceful degradation, something I try applying to my websites too. Whenever something breaks, it keeps the rest of the site functional and is replaced with a lower-tech representation of what it is; even if that ends up being "Sorry, the clock can't be displayed since your browser does not support Javascript". Or using alt text on images properly at all times.

I personally use XHTML not for any real functional reason today, but because I am still "nostalgic" for the vision of the semantic web, and one that is easily parseable as XML (as someone who hates how difficult the entry into web browser development has become). I miss when or more poignantly, I yearn for a world where websites are written in a way where the choice of code represents the elements' meaning (as in, putting articles in an <article> tag, and using a <table> for an actual tabular data representation and not for layout design!), so browser styles actually mattered again and all kinds of weird and wonderful browsers could exist that display websites completely differently based on semantics. Like a browser that displays news websites in the style of a print newspaper, where photos, headlines, subheadlines and so on are properly placed. Because if the browser knows which element is meant to be what, it can do a lot of cool stuff with it. An article headline is an article headline, whereas no browser can know what a "15pt bold center serif typeface div" really means for a news website.

And also I am a massive hipster who loves picking things that are unpopular for the sole reason that they are unpopular. Fight me.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:39 am I really like this idea, an entire virtual world within a website! I've actually seen a similar concept applied before on the web in the form of avatar forums. For example, Gaia Online (https://www.gaiaonline.com/) was an avatar forum that connected the forums to a series of flash games, had a world map to visually display the different places in gaia, and had a currency system where you would get currency from posting on the forum and use it buy cosmetics for your avatar. It's a shame that the ideas around building these microcosms on the web are not as popular anymore.

I also love the idea of those, although in real life as far as I can remember they usually ended up being not enjoyable at all unless you're (1) part of an established clique and (2) put real money into your aesthetics. I mainly refer to games like Second Life or VRChat where if you really want to be considered an interesting person, you need to put six hundred quid into paying a 3D artist to model your character.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:39 amI know this feeling as well, it's the eternal struggle with personal websites. I've spent a lot of time building custom plugins for my site, when I should have been catching up on my backlog of blog post ideas. On the plus side, personal sites are long term projects that you can develop at your own pace, and one can learn a lot from the site engineering process itself.

Yeah, and a big plus for websites as compared to for instance unfinished programming projects is that a website is already there from day 1, it's functional and you can be proud of it, you gather feedback and you know that people look at it already. Any content is valuable, no matter how small. Almost all websites are in continuous development, so it's "okay" to have a WIP page, and unless you have a lot of dead links, there is nothing telling people that you still have plans to expand it.

Whereas a novel needs to be finished for you to get anything from it. A program needs to be at least in a beta state. Until then, all the work you do gathers no positive feedback. That's what keeps me motivated with my website: the continuous positive feedback, the fact that I can be proud of myself.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:39 am If you have a link to your site and are interested in sharing it, then I would definitely like to see what it looks like. No worries though if you want to keep it private.

Sure! Click.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 28, 2023 4:39 am Also, great system theme! Is it the Chicago95 theme? I've heard good things about Chicago95, and have seen screenshots where people have used that theme, and a theme for Palemoon to make it look like Netscape Navigator, for a more retro browsing experience.

It's Redmond97, close. It's one of the more "out of the box" default themes for Xfce that I use. It's not that I have a lot of nostalgia for Windows 95, it's just that I dislike modern UI design and prefer a much more industrial look; the Redmond97 themes are all finished and consistent and unobtrusive.

I have also curated other, wilder themes in the past:

Posted: **Fri Dec 29, 2023 4:48 am**

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am I personally use XHTML not for any real functional reason today, but because I am still "nostalgic" for the vision of the semantic web, and one that is easily parseable as XML (as someone who hates how difficult the entry into web browser development has become). I miss when or more poignantly, I yearn for a world where websites are written in a way where the choice of code represents the elements' meaning (as in, putting articles in an <article> tag, and using a <table> for an actual tabular data representation and not for layout design!), so browser styles actually mattered again and all kinds of weird and wonderful browsers could exist that display websites completely differently based on semantics. Like a browser that displays news websites in the style of a print newspaper, where photos, headlines, subheadlines and so on are properly placed. Because if the browser knows which element is meant to be what, it can do a lot of cool stuff with it. An article headline is an article headline, whereas no browser can know what a "15pt bold center serif typeface div" really means for a news website.

It's interesting, the closest implementation I've seen to this on the web was XUL, Mozilla technology for representing user interfaces via XML. There a few code snippets and examples of XUL in this old oreilly book. HTML tags similar to XUL for widgets, combined with proper use of semantic document elements, and an emphasis on web browsers to use native widgets and arrange them to best fit the platform, would have made the web much better on a technical level. Sadly, it went the opposite way; extremely complicated JavaScript stacks, massive CSS frameworks that attempt to overwrite any of the browser's native implementations, and <div> soups.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am And also I am a massive hipster who loves picking things that are unpopular for the sole reason that they are unpopular. Fight me.

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.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am I also love the idea of those, although in real life as far as I can remember they usually ended up being not enjoyable at all unless you're (1) part of an established clique and (2) put real money into your aesthetics. I mainly refer to games like Second Life or VRChat where if you really want to be considered an interesting person, you need to put six hundred quid into paying a 3D artist to model your character.

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.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am Sure! Click.

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.

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):

: with-smoothing.png (26.81 KiB) Viewed 2687 times

: without-smoothing.png (10.99 KiB) Viewed 2687 times

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am It's Redmond97, close. It's one of the more "out of the box" default themes for Xfce that I use.

Have not seen Redmond97 before, I'll have to look into it and test it out sometime.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 12:08 am It's not that I have a lot of nostalgia for Windows 95, it's just that I dislike modern UI design and prefer a much more industrial look; the Redmond97 themes are all finished and consistent and unobtrusive.

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.

Posted: **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!

Posted: **Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm**

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm 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.

Many years ago I used to play a lot of MMOs, and have seen quite a few of them go from vibrant communities to mostly idle powergamers that don't interact with anyone outside of a few other powergamers. I've thought about ways a developer may implement their game mechanics such that it encourages more interaction. For example, using logarithmic progression on each individual player, but a more linear progression among groups of players (as opposed to the single player exponential progression found in many MMOs) would encourage more community activity and community building.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm 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.

Some Wordpress sites have microformats embedded into them (I've primarily seen h-feed). Likely most of the adoption of microformats, outside of enthusiasts, has been through CMS plugins that include microformat capabilities out of the box.

I also had wrote a microformat specification for webrings called h-webring. The idea was that the spec would include all of the necessary information for webring traversal, such that a browser or browser extension could parse the webring from the page and provide a UI for traversal without the need of a central server managing the actual ring. A while ago, I had spoken to some of the microformats people on IRC to see if h-webring could be included on the microformats wiki, but I don't think there was anyone online at the time that was maintaining the wiki. I should try contacting them again and see what they think.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm 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.

Unfortunately disabling the smoothing is not as well supported anymore in most browsers, it's one of those things I wish more browsers still supported (never-the-less, still useful to add it for the WebKit users and people using older browsers). Every once in a while I'll disabling the font smoothing and antialiasing on my machine, since I like how pixelated and bitmapped fonts look in general.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm 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!

The Trinity Desktop team actually still maintains a KDE3 fork. It's installable on Ubuntu 10.04-23.10, Debian 6-12, Fedora, and presumably future versions of these OS's as well (assuming the teams continues the project). Here are a few screenshots of TDE:

: tde3-0.png (227.31 KiB) Viewed 2674 times

: tde3-1.jpg (201.5 KiB) Viewed 2674 times

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm Nowadays it's all the same no matter what you install: Firefox or Chromium. Two boring browser genders you can choose from.

It's unfortunate. Firefox used to have much more powerful extensions, but switched to the WebExtension format and it caused the extension ecosystem to stagnate. This is one of the reasons I use Palemoon to browse, since it still supports the old extensions, and for the most part I only use the browser for browsing hypertext documents. In cases when I need a web app, I either look for a native application or use a Firefox or Chromium fork temporarily.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Dec 29, 2023 8:10 pm 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!

Agree 100%, these days when I see desktop screenshots, it's usually a decorationless desktop with a few color changes, and an often generic looking background image. Where are all of the fun, crazy desktop themes that you used to see on Windows XP, GNOME 2, and KDE 3? I use GTK, and have been a bit concerned that themeing will no longer be supported in the future, given how themeing was broke with every GTK 3 update.

Posted: **Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm**

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm Many years ago I used to play a lot of MMOs, and have seen quite a few of them go from vibrant communities to mostly idle powergamers that don't interact with anyone outside of a few other powergamers. I've thought about ways a developer may implement their game mechanics such that it encourages more interaction. For example, using logarithmic progression on each individual player, but a more linear progression among groups of players (as opposed to the single player exponential progression found in many MMOs) would encourage more community activity and community building.

The best MMO-ish experiences I have had were in heavily manually moderated roleplaying environments where playing to win was explicitly against the rules, and where the "gameplay mechanics" were limited to a minimum in order to focus on realism. Everything was played out narratively. Winning or losing was not really a thing, because even getting kidnapped and beaten up or something was an interesting scene to roleplay and had effects on the overarching society - it might provoke an in-character response from the agencies and public services, from rival organizations, civilians, the news, ...

I remember being a realty owner and having to push down my prices on a sale I almost had pushed through because someone ended up having a gunfight in the neighborhood. Turns out it was the buyer conspiring with another guy specifically to drive down prices, and a news intern who drove by saw them exchange words on the way to the scene! So it was all over the tabloids the next day (of course, an actual news page existed for the project), and the police started a formal investigation (with a dozen players or so involved, some of who literally only played that game to do office work in a custom 3D modelled office interior... lol), and a neighbors' committee formed... and all of these people were real players, and that just felt like such a wow moment!

I feel like as soon as there is a tangible way to "win" or "lose" a game, to get more or less loot, to progress through levels, the fun in multiplayer games gets lost to an extent, no matter how good the algorithms for XP.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm The Trinity Desktop team actually still maintains a KDE3 fork. It's installable on Ubuntu 10.04-23.10, Debian 6-12, Fedora, and presumably future versions of these OS's as well (assuming the teams continues the project). Here are a few screenshots of TDE:

Hah! You're running in open doors. I'm a TDE contributor.
... I just admittedly don't use it in my day-to-day because there's still so... many... bugs. And no support for hi-dpi monitors.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm It's unfortunate. Firefox used to have much more powerful extensions, but switched to the WebExtension format and it caused the extension ecosystem to stagnate. This is one of the reasons I use Palemoon to browse, since it still supports the old extensions, and for the most part I only use the browser for browsing hypertext documents. In cases when I need a web app, I either look for a native application or use a Firefox or Chromium fork temporarily.

Yeah, I thought it was just me seeing all those cool expansions disappear practically overnight. I thought it was a design trend thing like the disappearance of web badges and banners.
I personally use Librewolf, because I value free software and I also sadly need to use web applications for university. Some academic programs are web-only... ugh. Let alone DRM for online scientific literature.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Sat Dec 30, 2023 8:43 pm Agree 100%, these days when I see desktop screenshots, it's usually a decorationless desktop with a few color changes, and an often generic looking background image. Where are all of the fun, crazy desktop themes that you used to see on Windows XP, GNOME 2, and KDE 3? I use GTK, and have been a bit concerned that themeing will no longer be supported in the future, given how themeing was broke with every GTK 3 update.

Absolutely, yeah!!!
One window manager you missed for crazy themes: Enlightenment. Those were always the coolest. Sadly the theming subculture died entirely. It's all just neon dark mode anime minimalism now.

Posted: **Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am**

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm Hah! You're running in open doors. I'm a TDE contributor.
... I just admittedly don't use it in my day-to-day because there's still so... many... bugs. And no support for hi-dpi monitors.

Nice, definitely a worthwhile project to contribute to! Maintaining both the DE, the version of Qt used to build it, and the applications seems like quite a monumental task.

Do you by any chance know what ever happened to the Ubuntu releases that were bundled with TDE? Recently Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have been accepted as official Ubuntu flavors, it makes me wonder if anyone has attempted to submit Ubuntu with TDE as a flavor, considering there were already downloadable Ubuntu ISOs. My guess is that there are already too many resource constraints as is.

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm I personally use Librewolf, because I value free software and I also sadly need to use web applications for university. Some academic programs are web-only... ugh. Let alone DRM for online scientific literature.

One solution for a bit of isolation is to use separate Librewolf profiles (in about:profiles), one with DRM plugins installed and the other without it.

Do we really need DRM for everything? There was a recent proposal for a "web integrity" API for chromium that would essentially enable a form of DRM on every single site, *sigh*.

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm Absolutely, yeah!!!
One window manager you missed for crazy themes: Enlightenment. Those were always the coolest.

Interesting, never really looked into Enlightenment. Only time I've used it was when I tested out Bhodi Linux in a VM a couple of years ago.

Leva wrote: ↑Sun Dec 31, 2023 7:14 pm Sadly the theming subculture died entirely. It's all just neon dark mode anime minimalism now.

It's quite difficult to find useful info and guides for creating desktop themes these days. I've gotten used to GTK themeing a bit, but it took a lot of greps, digging through source of other themes, using the GTK inspector, and a lot of trial and error to figure out the pieces. The amount of work to get into themeing is enough to deter most casual themers from making any changes to themes that are not provided through GUI options.

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