As someone who doesn’t generally play with children’s toys, i still say the answer is never.

As Randall Munroe said way back in XKCD #150, we’re the grownups now, and we get to decide what that means. Life is too short not to spend as much of it as you can doing what you want. So long as it doesn’t interfere with others, go wild.

I don’t have unpopular UI opinions, but I do have opinions that I don’t see people echo much, yet.

One of the worst things about UI in 2025 is that almost everything most people use on a computer relies on it, more than ever, and yet it’s also at its worst point since the days before mouse driven interfaces. Companies used to be much stricter about their interfaces, how they worked and looked. Now there are tons of bespoke interfaces where everyone decides for themselves how they work, and assumptions made by one program work the opposite way in a different one.

Switches have become way to obvious to what “on” and “off” is. Even when they state something like an option is enabled or not in text, it often isn’t clear whether it’s saying this is what the state is now, or this is what it will be when clicked.

Icons have become way too vague and arbitrary as to what they mean. The Hamburger menu was bad enough, but some of the icons have gotten way too abstract. At least the floppy disk for saving was a convention.

Web pages likewise could use a lot more consistency and visibility. The new Digg, for instance, hides its user block function behind a light-gray three-dots button on a white background. The only options on that menu are to Report or Block that user! Why is it three dots, and why is it so hard to see?

Microsoft’s “Ribbon” interface remains a terrible idea. At least with menu bars you know all the functions are there, somewhere, all represented by text. With the Ribbon, everything’s a toolbar button, and with many of them being different sizes it’s harder to scan through them to find the option you’re looking for.

Do you know how hard it is to shop for bras when you’re a giant spider?

Thank you for your service!

Fox Mulder has his own candy.

So… to move to Texas, a New Yorker has to bring along another New Yorker?

I think it’s useful, when introducing people to Linux, not to just call it “Linux.” Because, thinking they’re all the same, they might go and install Arch or something.

Instead, tell them to try “Linux Mint.”

What I remember from Bible Geek (and/or Human Bible, another podcast he did) was that the earliest of the gospels actually dates to the 4th century CE, and that three of them are likely derivative works from an earlier book, lost to us, that scholars call “Q.” I think it was John that was the only gospel thought not to originate from it.

Addition: looking it up, here’s Q source on Wikipedia. It states that Matthew and Luke are thought to originate from Q, but not Mark or John.

By some reports it’s over 5%, statcounter may be undercounting Linux.

Going from memory here, I heard it years back. Robert M. Price’s podcast The Bible Geek covered the argument against a historical Jesus in an episode, noting that a major pillar in the argument is an obituary written by Josephus. Wikipedia has a page on Josephus’s account.

Price’s argument, such that I remember, has to do with the fact that Josephus’ account outright calls Jesus the Messiah, despite supposedly being written in the first century CE when this would have been a niche argument, suggesting that this account was not actually written when it purports to be. But I haven’t listened to Bible Geek in a long time, all of this could be a misrepresentation.

Black cats: bad luck

Orange cats: dumb luck

I mean, unless the question was, “What are Lays potato chips made of,” which answers itself so it wouldn’t be used. But if the question was “What are Lays chips made of,” I could see how someone might not answer potatoes. And who even asks that question in poll anyway? I feel like there’s a universe of context collapse here.

Wait, which study was this? The page says it was from 2021. What was the question? What was the context? Who were polled and how? I am dubious.

On the other hand… https://www.osnews.com/story/143376/dark-patterns-killed-my-wifes-windows-11-installation/

You might try setting Google’s Web subsearch as your main search engine, or else put your searches through https://udm14.com/, which does the same thing.

Katamari Damacy

EDIT: I could add a few more–

The original Legend of Zelda

Final Fantasy IV and VI; I was one of those people who bounced off of VII because of battle load times (I tried twice and both times that was what drove me from it)

A now-obscure Atari arcade game called Rampart

Another arcade game, an action RPG from Taito called Cadash, which could be played by four players on two linked cabinets (no emulation, even official ones, currently support this mode)

Demand? What?

You can just have a site that says things. You might just get a trickle of readers, and that’s okay. Not everything has to try to rule the world. You can contribute this little part of it, that might amuse or inform some people, and not pile up yet more value to a terrible corporation like Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or (while I’m ranting) Fandom.

Plain HTML doesn’t break. You don’t need to update frameworks. It won’t make the user’s browser consume a ton of their RAM. Even if your image hosting goes down, the text will still be there. The biggest problems with HTML are external. Google giving attention to Reddit over your site, or de-prioritizing it if it’s not “responsive to mobile,” and web browsers choosing not to reveal by default what terrible resource hogs big sites can be. Check about:processes (on Firefox at least) some time, I’ve seen Youtube, Facebook and Twitter consume over a gigabyte of memory by themselves, apiece. (Nota bene, Mastodon consumes a lot too.)

It’s okay to be small. That was what the World Wide Web was envisioned as, its motto: Let’s Share What We Know.

I’m an old E2 member!

Anyone remember Happy Puppy?

There used to be rotten.com, which posted extremely disturbing pictures and I don’t miss that part of it. But I do miss the Rotten Library, which used to be a bastion of suppressed literature.

My old stomping grounds, the indie gaming blog GameSetWatch.

Not consuming more than 10MB of RAM