A while ago this forum was transformed into this dark looking spooky "we are sexy and cool" kinda atmosphere. I see it has been changed back now, or that is just my illusion here?
I mean it is almost back to what it was before; I still liked the old one better, it felt safe and sane. Layout and visual design - appearance - can have a huge impact on how people feel how they will respond to you. It can determine how safe people feel in sharing personal stuff and how likely other people will be to attack them or otherwise respect it.
The more "look how popular I am" comes into play, the more likely people are to do stuff in order to look cool which may include bashing other people, when they would not have done so if it would not have seemed to them to be earning credit with it. When you have to "be" a certain person, tough, or strict, or sensible, or fast, or cool, or ¨that guy that doesn't suck" or whatever, the more you are set to be a certain thing to be accepted by other people, the more you will abandon your own sensibility and be directed towards responses that are more crafted out of the atmosphere than anything else pertaining to your real person.
For example the modern design of websites that started with Dropbox and that you can now see as an abomination in e.g. opensuse.org -- the tablet only design -- clearly is some kind of make believe world where everything is about image and marketing and nothing is about the real you anymore or what is sane.
I am happy to see this forum transformed back to a point where I can still again recognise it from what it was before. The same safety is not there again though. I like the old-style PhpBB forums best. E.g. this is one of the rare forums that still have it: https://forums.linuxmint.com but SoSuave was better than that.
I was coming here to write about that dark theme and most of the other themes you could choose a while back. Perhaps it's simply that you have changed the default. I just cannot do well in that make believe world where what you appear to be to others is more important than what you really are, and where there is a sense of slickness over everything that can only resemble the Apple mindset, but really much worse than what Apple has ever done.
The Apple site has also been influenced by it, it's uglier than what it was before, and even has images that won't even fit onto my screen. How am I supposed to browse a site when it is showing images that I need to see in full, but that cannot be shown in full because they are too big for a 1440x900 screen? Do these people ever think? I don't think they do anymore.
I think thinking has deceased on this planet. People do not think anymore. They just do what others have told them is good.
It is some rare enclave in Sarajevo perhaps where people still think, if you know what I mean.
I'm sure you don't lol. And I don't even like the font I am writing in. It is too big. It's antialiased in a way that makes it seem fuzzy. The background is too white, etc. etc. Sure, if you are working on 1080p tablets the size of a fist, you will need large fonts and large elements and all that, but that is the whole problem. They call them high DPI displays and that in itself creates a lot of issues everywhere. Now stuff needs to scale, but many scaling is done bad. You know, how are you going to take account of everything, it's not sane.
I pledge for a return to sanity, but yeah.
On a sidenote, here is a speech from 1976 by a guy who was NOT boring ;-) even though the topic may *seem* to some people to be rather hippie like. https://archive.org/details/TheWorldCrisisAndTheWholenessOfLife_408
Funnily enough the place where I start the MP3 mentions "the latest gadgets" right away ;-). "only second-rate people solve problems. First-rate people don't have them to start with!" lol.
Best lecture I haven't heard in my life, haven't heard many though. It's not a "lecture" but he is lecturing alright ;-). Schumacher is his name. Never heard of him before.
Sanity people. Sanity. Not the madness we see today. We're living in a madhouse today, or at least much of it is bordering our own worlds that we try to keep at least a bit "workable". There was once a great man who write a small book in which there was a man who called himself Wonko the Sane.
He called himself Wonko the Sane because he considered the entire world mad and so had built an Asylum around it. The only way you can build an Asylum around the entire world is by taking a little place where you can escape from the madness and call that "the outside" so that is what he did. When you approached his settlement from the outside it appeared as though you were approaching the walls of a living room. On all sides, whenever you could approach it, you would get the sentiment that they were the interior walls of a living room, or house. This is because the world you were coming from was the inside of the Asylum. You had to go through the walls to reach the outside, which is where Wonko the Sane lived. He had just put the entire world into an Asylum by building a wall around it even if the wall was perhaps no longer than some 30 metres. When you reached the "outside" you would come to some nice beach where you'd see him fishing.
So from his side of the wall, the walls looked like the ordinary exterior of a building. Put some walls in your life is maybe what I am saying ;-). And make your living quarters where the nonsense can't reach you. But it's getting kinda hard in this world because the madness is all-pervasive and people have lost their grounds completely for a large part. When you live up in the clouds, you lose touch with reality. In that same book there was a story of robots outfitted with a cricket tenure who descended upon the world with the sound of a hundred thousand people saying "wop". From their spaceship they emerged outfitted with cricket apparel, a bat, balls, and also outfitted with jets in their feet that allowed them to fly and start killing people, which is what they did.
Turns out those robots were created with a civilisation where its leaders had opted to live high up in the cloud on flying cities or command ships where they were influenced by a hateful and disgruntled intelligence who had told them to live up in the cloud because they would be easier to influence that way. And the people on the ground had no clue what was happening and were actually really nice people. But they were, there planet was, actually trying to destroy the whole of existence.
Gotta figure out some way to keep your head cool, you know. It's not good if you lose your cool. Usually it isn't.
How much are we in touch with the technology that drives our lives today? I am a technology man and I am a programmer. And I can just tell you that sanity is lost from both the designers of those websites and the driving force behind it as well as the cloud technology that focuses on bigger and faster but it is so complex that an ordinary person not invested in that crap wouldn't have a single clue as to what they were talking about. Everything up in the cloud yes, see what happens then ;-).
And that was a book from around 1984. You know what I am talking about, probably.
That living-in-the-cloud-killing-everything story was contrived in or around 1980, probably. Likely.
Anyhow.
Stay sane and I hope that this forum will return to its former glory somehow, even if that may take decades, and even if the same is true for much for the rest of the world that goes with the new and shiny, these days.
I mean it is almost back to what it was before; I still liked the old one better, it felt safe and sane. Layout and visual design - appearance - can have a huge impact on how people feel how they will respond to you. It can determine how safe people feel in sharing personal stuff and how likely other people will be to attack them or otherwise respect it.
The more "look how popular I am" comes into play, the more likely people are to do stuff in order to look cool which may include bashing other people, when they would not have done so if it would not have seemed to them to be earning credit with it. When you have to "be" a certain person, tough, or strict, or sensible, or fast, or cool, or ¨that guy that doesn't suck" or whatever, the more you are set to be a certain thing to be accepted by other people, the more you will abandon your own sensibility and be directed towards responses that are more crafted out of the atmosphere than anything else pertaining to your real person.
For example the modern design of websites that started with Dropbox and that you can now see as an abomination in e.g. opensuse.org -- the tablet only design -- clearly is some kind of make believe world where everything is about image and marketing and nothing is about the real you anymore or what is sane.
I am happy to see this forum transformed back to a point where I can still again recognise it from what it was before. The same safety is not there again though. I like the old-style PhpBB forums best. E.g. this is one of the rare forums that still have it: https://forums.linuxmint.com but SoSuave was better than that.
I was coming here to write about that dark theme and most of the other themes you could choose a while back. Perhaps it's simply that you have changed the default. I just cannot do well in that make believe world where what you appear to be to others is more important than what you really are, and where there is a sense of slickness over everything that can only resemble the Apple mindset, but really much worse than what Apple has ever done.
The Apple site has also been influenced by it, it's uglier than what it was before, and even has images that won't even fit onto my screen. How am I supposed to browse a site when it is showing images that I need to see in full, but that cannot be shown in full because they are too big for a 1440x900 screen? Do these people ever think? I don't think they do anymore.
I think thinking has deceased on this planet. People do not think anymore. They just do what others have told them is good.
It is some rare enclave in Sarajevo perhaps where people still think, if you know what I mean.
I'm sure you don't lol. And I don't even like the font I am writing in. It is too big. It's antialiased in a way that makes it seem fuzzy. The background is too white, etc. etc. Sure, if you are working on 1080p tablets the size of a fist, you will need large fonts and large elements and all that, but that is the whole problem. They call them high DPI displays and that in itself creates a lot of issues everywhere. Now stuff needs to scale, but many scaling is done bad. You know, how are you going to take account of everything, it's not sane.
I pledge for a return to sanity, but yeah.
On a sidenote, here is a speech from 1976 by a guy who was NOT boring ;-) even though the topic may *seem* to some people to be rather hippie like. https://archive.org/details/TheWorldCrisisAndTheWholenessOfLife_408
Funnily enough the place where I start the MP3 mentions "the latest gadgets" right away ;-). "only second-rate people solve problems. First-rate people don't have them to start with!" lol.
Best lecture I haven't heard in my life, haven't heard many though. It's not a "lecture" but he is lecturing alright ;-). Schumacher is his name. Never heard of him before.
Sanity people. Sanity. Not the madness we see today. We're living in a madhouse today, or at least much of it is bordering our own worlds that we try to keep at least a bit "workable". There was once a great man who write a small book in which there was a man who called himself Wonko the Sane.
He called himself Wonko the Sane because he considered the entire world mad and so had built an Asylum around it. The only way you can build an Asylum around the entire world is by taking a little place where you can escape from the madness and call that "the outside" so that is what he did. When you approached his settlement from the outside it appeared as though you were approaching the walls of a living room. On all sides, whenever you could approach it, you would get the sentiment that they were the interior walls of a living room, or house. This is because the world you were coming from was the inside of the Asylum. You had to go through the walls to reach the outside, which is where Wonko the Sane lived. He had just put the entire world into an Asylum by building a wall around it even if the wall was perhaps no longer than some 30 metres. When you reached the "outside" you would come to some nice beach where you'd see him fishing.
So from his side of the wall, the walls looked like the ordinary exterior of a building. Put some walls in your life is maybe what I am saying ;-). And make your living quarters where the nonsense can't reach you. But it's getting kinda hard in this world because the madness is all-pervasive and people have lost their grounds completely for a large part. When you live up in the clouds, you lose touch with reality. In that same book there was a story of robots outfitted with a cricket tenure who descended upon the world with the sound of a hundred thousand people saying "wop". From their spaceship they emerged outfitted with cricket apparel, a bat, balls, and also outfitted with jets in their feet that allowed them to fly and start killing people, which is what they did.
Turns out those robots were created with a civilisation where its leaders had opted to live high up in the cloud on flying cities or command ships where they were influenced by a hateful and disgruntled intelligence who had told them to live up in the cloud because they would be easier to influence that way. And the people on the ground had no clue what was happening and were actually really nice people. But they were, there planet was, actually trying to destroy the whole of existence.
Gotta figure out some way to keep your head cool, you know. It's not good if you lose your cool. Usually it isn't.
How much are we in touch with the technology that drives our lives today? I am a technology man and I am a programmer. And I can just tell you that sanity is lost from both the designers of those websites and the driving force behind it as well as the cloud technology that focuses on bigger and faster but it is so complex that an ordinary person not invested in that crap wouldn't have a single clue as to what they were talking about. Everything up in the cloud yes, see what happens then ;-).
And that was a book from around 1984. You know what I am talking about, probably.
That living-in-the-cloud-killing-everything story was contrived in or around 1980, probably. Likely.
Anyhow.
Stay sane and I hope that this forum will return to its former glory somehow, even if that may take decades, and even if the same is true for much for the rest of the world that goes with the new and shiny, these days.
