Sadly, this was a thing even before the web, let alone social media. There’s always been people for whom the vacations didn’t even “happen” unless they get to go on incessantly about them when they come back, ideally subjecting you to two hours of photos that mean very little to you. They derive little enjoyment from actually being there, they take it from showing it others…

For some people life is not worth living without external validation. Sad.

How about, instead of spending millions on marketing and exercises or graphical virtuosity that do nothing in terms of playability, innovation and fun, focusing on what matters and do games where $70 still turns a huge profit?

At this stage, apart from my medication, I worry the most about my devices and chargers. Everything else, from toiletries to clothes I can buy if it turns out I forgot it and really need it. That lowered my stress with packing significantly (and I am not forgetting more things because of it).

Alan Dix’s book (aptly named “Human Computer Interaction”) is quite good, even if somewhat old by now. HCI is an actual academic discipline with, yes, tons of theoretical and empirical results that govern what a good UI should be. Many of which are indeed grounded in psychology, others in physiology, etc (what we call Human Factors). There is a whole special interest group of the ACM just about it: SIGCHI.

Do not confuse this with fashion/trends/taste. These change, resulting in widely different possible flavors of UI over the years. But the underlying principles are the same.

Another thing to remember is that the fact that Apple, Google, or someone else implemented an UI in a certain way doesn’t mean they are following best practices and guidelines. Novelty sells, even if at the end of the day it does a worse job of things…

Edit: added link to SIGCHI

This is actually a thing. When learning calligraphy, it was one of the exercises we did. If you have good enough control of your hand and pen, then all strokes should be the same length, slanted the same way, and separated by the same spacing. When you manage this apparent “unreadable” thing, it means you nailed it!

The example below comes from this site (not mine)

I wish that would work. My Epson was always on and the ink kept drying. After it clogged the print head once too many times and I could not fix that in less than 10min, I just gave up on the piece of crap. I now go to a print shop to print what I need which, admittedly, nowadays is just a couple of times a year.

A rifle scope that can see through walls.

Neat! I’ve always been a fan of roguelikes!

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That makes total sense. Still, it removes the pressure of choosing a server, since migration and use of several servers becomes seamless. As it is right now, there’s the resilience and future lifespan of an instance to consider, plus fragmentation of your identify as defined not by your username but by your actual “online persona” constructed from your posts, etc. (unless you’re really going for alts, of course). You can create other identities on other instances but they are separate, you “lose” your posts, etc. if something happens. if I understood correctly, that becomes less of an issue with nomadic identity?

IMO, this seems exactly what the fediverse needs to thrive. The whole “choose a server” thing is a big disincentive to adoption by most people.

While I’m not entirely sure wat it actually means, the message you get on that site right now might be the reason (some kind of experiment gone wrong artificially inflating the numbers):

I was creating an implementation for the activity pub instance service transfer, but it seems to have spread far. We are very sorry to those who have experienced inconvenience.

All temporarily used data has been removed and all data has been removed. The figures in the data will soon converge to zero.

I trawled unintentionally.

Is federated authentication being considered for the future? The federated model of the fediverse is great, but it runs into problems when instances “die”, you want to access different servers as they federate with different things, etc. leading to the need of having multiple accounts. If there were a decentralized network of auth servers, could use the same credentials everywhere.

The problem is that the concept of “user of a site” is still a thing. There should just be “fediverse users”. Everything gets federated, why not user credentials? Then it would not matter if you register on site X or Y. It would be the same. What we need is a federated identity service. It would still be completely decentralized, dependent on no single server, and much more resilient to server shutdown, defederation, etc.

Edit: typos

Went through this some years ago with my daughter. She was around 8 and came home from school all excited about Pokémon cards, as some colleagues started showing up with them. After getting her some, I realized that they liked to look at them, compare powers, do the odd trade and that was it…

Still, I feel it all got sorted out in the end. That fleeting interest planted the seed of interest in TCGs and now she’s 11 and we regularly play MTG against one another 🙂

The ones with the rabbits are pretty messed up as well!

This. Inform was the language/platform developed back in the day to author/interpret Z-code, the basis for Infocom’s text adventures. It went beyond just that in more recent versions, but it is designed from the ground up for text adventure creation.

I reluctantly started reading ebooks years ago for a very practical reason: owning some few thousand physical books, I pretty much ran out of room in the shelves in my small apartment. So nowadays I only buy physical art books and the like. Having said this, I actually easily grew to like ebooks, for their ubiquitous availability and, of course, not taking up precious shelf space.

Have to read them in an ereader for a proper experience, though. Tablet/smartphone displays tire my eyes a lot if I read for any meaningful period of time.

One more, then!

Ditto

That’s neat! I did some cross-stitch a while back and I’m envious I didn’t think of this back then (I’ve been doing crochet, more recently). Maybe it is time to go back? Thanks for the inspiration, looking forward to see the completed thing!