a game. if you can call it that.

NBF0

and now for something completely different: slight praise.

(1st world problems ahead, apologies.)

i got a used samsung chromebook pro at a great price. it is sort of amazing. unfortunately it is the older version w/out the backlit keyboard, but even so, it is impressive. when i use the stylus to do some basic drawing stuff, it doesn't suck the way all my 'mobile' devices did. i recently spent an extra zero more cash (even with a good discount on it) for a newer ipad and a knockoff 3rd party pencil. sure, the ipad drawing experience is now great, but for like 5x less this chromebook is the bees' knees. or is it the bee's knees? no idea.

 ha ha what a funny joke care of ios 16.1

(oh look, blogger still has a leading whitespace character every time i start a new post, even after all these years, how... impressive.)

(oh weird it also seems to do it when i have a couple blank lines and hit the backspace key, i end up on the previous blank line but with a whitespace there out of nowhere. utter insanity. how would you even be able to do this on purpose if you tried?)

(also, i love how the i guess css based formatting that blogger does somehow makes there be more vertical whitespace between paragraphs, yet there are no actual editable lines there. it makes moving the text caret around with cursor keys really really really confusing. again, what a living ux hell.)

all of which, unfortunately of course, segues perfectly into the complaint i am here to write about in the first place: the bug you just marked as low priority? that bug is part of all the techno-micro-aggressions that happen to users once every 30-60 seconds if they are "knowledge workers" using computers for their work on a daily basis. or even if they are just regular smart phone users, probably.

it is all kind of a living hell of nicks and scrapes, slings and arrows, that quickly go well past the jumping a shark breaking a camel's back level of frustration with everything remotely technological in life.

and there's lots of bad painful irony in the fact that anybody who claims to care about users or UI or UX should already know that stuff like, say, "accessibility" isn't just some esoteric thing to address 0.01% of the population.

(the kicker, of course, is when you then have bureaucracies of any ilk using technology.)

BUT, after all, WHADDAYA WANT FOR "FREE"? DAMNED MUMBLERS!

Another thing that has the potential to be one of those "oops I guess human error just launched all the nuclear missiles of the world" type UX bugs is that Firefox is a crashy pile of poo on my Linux machine and then it gives me the dialog box that lets me restart it, but then it restarts with the wrong Profile so then I am doing stuff as some other random/arbitrary user but I don't realize it because I blithely assumed it would have restarted with the same context. Impressive!

The internet, and just all technology, is not a series of tubes, it is a series of sewage pipes. From Firefox being a randomly but very crashy thing on Linux, to Android software keyboard hell, to PLEX's ui being a "oh look we're so hip we make our own very non-standard look and feel so you can't actually just see wtf is a tab or not, aren't we cool?!", to the 3 different levels of installer I had to go through only to find out Fortnite only works on *64* bit Win7, to the Ooyala PR news web page that has a "read more" button that then says, "you are not authorized to view this page" ("please do not press this button again," if you know what i mean), to usb ports that don't recognize the usb keyboard that is plugged into them during bios boot up, to ... everything else I could go on and on about.

It isn't so much that each individual thing is a blatantly stupid UX issue. It is that we daily face the aggregate onslaught of all these slaps in the face, these nicks and cuts, and it ends up killing our souls.

I mean, if you ask me.

The label popup menu in Gmail doesn't resize vertically to take advantage of the screen space. And of course the label I use most often ends up being the one immediately below the end of the window, so I almost always have to scroll down one. Pretty dumb. Pretty annoying.