Please call this recession the Trump Slump.

We need to put Trump's name on this.

if ever anything I wrote were to ever go viral, let it be this. Let everyone talk about the Trump Slump. I want to hear this term in the news.

Fourth time now I've tried to propose to my wife and has gone horribly wrong first I put the engagement ring in the wine glass she drank that next time I tried putting it in the cake she ate that at the last point I decided to give it to the waiter to give to her she still ate him too like I've lost so much money but God what a woman

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?

Every Zhu Yilong stan knows - When you see this smile, start running.

No context for this but they’re happy together don’t talk to me

And bonus versions:

Xuendwich

We need more images like these i think

Telling mom about what you did at school today

Winter has arrived on Poob.

Start your 7 day free trial of Poob today, and watch smash hit Martin Scorcese's Goncharov.

My pareidolia is so strong I immediately saw a tall figure in a blue and white robe or gown BEFORE I scrolled to see that OP also had and drew it. Or are we not outliers and everybody else sees it.

At first glance I thought it was a sculpture. At second glance I thought it was a sculpture in a really weird place. I scrolled down and wondered why someone had drawn the sculpture of a figure as a figure, then I scrolled back up and realized 'debris'.

Say Hello back so he feel appreciated :)

ghost stories are alarmingly easy to spread tbh

when I was like ten I was walking back from the chip shop near my gran's house with a neighbour and we took a short cut down an alley which was enclosed by garages except for one part which was wire fenced and led to the electricity shack

and while I was walking I chucked a chip over the fence. the girl walking with me, C, reasonably asks why I did that

"oh, don't you know?" I say, as if I'm not equally out of my own loop

she shakes her head. the enclosed alleyway has no streetlights. it's after dark. the shack is isolated in the distance.

"a little girl who lived up on the court climbed the fence once on a dare. she went up to the shack and touched it, but there was a wire sticking out, and when she touched it, she got electrocuted and died, right there. if you come back in the daylight, you can still see the black mark."

[editor's note: the court was the smaller road off the side of the crescent, which was the one C's family and my gran lived on. the houses there were slightly more expensive and newer, almost all occupied by wealthy commuters to the city, where most of the crescent houses were occupied by retirees and locals who worked on the trading estate. naturally, crescent kids hated the court. houses there got bricked about once a month.]

"no she didn't," C says

I made up this story for absolutely no reason and with no plan, but I'm not gonna back down now. "sure she did. and if you go past on your way back from the shops and you don't leave her an offering, she'll follow you home through the streetlights. one flickers behind you, then the next, then the next, until you get home. and then the lights start to flicker inside the house. even if you turn out all the electrics before bed, it'll be too late. she's inside. and you'll wake up on the night and see her, and she'll be so awful to see it'll stop your heart."

[editor's note: the streetlights always flickered. this was because our neighbour monkey george kept setting the junction boxes on fire]

"I never did before and she never followed me home!"

"do you come down the alley after dark? or do you take the main road with the streetlights?" I knew she didn't use the shortcut, because I'd been the one to talk her into it that night. she was three years younger than me and scared of the dark.

C claims not to believe me, but she throws a chip over the fence too, and walks the rest of the way looking over her shoulder. I get to pride myself for the night on being good at scary stories, and don't think much more about it.

fast forward six or seven years. I'm back in town. I'm on my way back from the chip shop, taking the same shortcut home. ahead of me on the road are a couple of kids I vaguely recognise as old playmates' younger siblings.

they stop, and I watch one fish out three sweeties from the pack they're sharing. they take one each and throw them over the fence. they carry on walking.

I realise that this is probably my fault, as are any resulting pest control issues around the old electricity shack.

when I get to the fence, I throw a chip over.

I didn’t take many photos this weekend, but you can enjoy this one that made me laugh.

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